How can i invoke the devil

Start earning points for buying books! Uplift Native American Stories. By Matt Staggs. Add to Bookshelf. Add to Cart. Subscribe Sign up for news about books, authors, and more from Penguin Random House. We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please try again later. Today's Top Books Want to know what people are actually reading right now?

Stay in Touch Sign up. Become a Member Start earning points for buying books! To redeem, copy and paste the code during the checkout process. See Account Overview. Your account has been created. Upload book purchases, access your personalized book recommendations, and more from here. Seductive and dangerous at the same time, in the eleventh and the twelfth centuries the Devil certainly represented a way to scare many people and accomplished its function of establishing the Catholic Church as a great benefactor and savior.

Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Catholicism faced the Reformation, the image of the Devil seemed scarier than ever. At that time, it acquired bat wings and dragon like features Delumeau, As protestants were in their period of consolidation, they also started using a frightening image of the Devil to persuade more and more people to follow them.

Delumeau affirms that since the sixteenth century protestants have seen the doctrine of justification by faith as the only theology able to assure that everybody is born as a sinner and will remain as such until death, and that belief in God is the unique salvation from every evil. Consequently, as Delumeau explains, believers would not have to worry about work as long as they believed in God and in its power to protect them from the Devil Delumeau, This speech was emotionally appealing and based in certain manuals that applied a resource called amplificatio that means exaggeration.

The image of the Devil by Neo-Pentecostal churches follows a pattern taken long ago by the Catholic and Protestant Churches during their periods of crises or consolidation due to the fact that those Churches used to terrify people to make them believe in their power of protection and salvation, as many of the Neo-Pentecostal Churches do nowadays.

The credibility that the Neo-Pentecostal Churches and the UCKG have gained in recent years is thanks to their strategies of persuasion, which are based on a speech that sounds dramatic in order to make people believe in it. The appeal of this speech is also supported by the presence of a leader who is supposed to know a great and divine truth capable of assisting people in their search for salvation.

For those believers, this alleged salvation could make someone adjust to the traditional and valued behaviors in society, such as: being heterosexual, economically successful, and not a drug user. Thus, when a Neo-Pentecostal church assumes that it has the power to take care of people and help them achieve special goals, they suggest at once a model of believer: docile and able to peacefully fit into neoliberal society standards.

These churches use a kind of power described by Hobbes[ 3 ] in the 17th century, and analyzed by Foucault in the s, which is called pastoral power. According to Foucault, pastoral power appeared in Christian institutions and was developed during the Middle Ages; it was also present in the 15th century, due to the Protestant Reformation.

He says that it consists of a technique of power in which one leader sacrifices himself in order to guide other individuals to salvation. The pastoral power is a way to take the individual towards salvation, which nowadays means the achievement of a good state of being. Foucault also affirms that this kind of power is not limited to religious contexts in modern societies Foucault, Although pastoral power is not limited to the field of religious institutions anymore, one can see that some churches still use it as one of their ways to persuade people to follow them, as the UCKG does.

It means that each person should watch their own attitudes and choices Ottaviani, et al. That is, as a leader, the pastor needs to show his followers that they have to behave according to the precepts of their Church and by doing so, they will reach the divine graces such as prosperity and good health.

Many of the followers can end up believing that they also ought to tithe as proof of obedience in order to receive the blessings for the Church and the pastor represent God, to whom they own that obedience. Then, the followers are supposed to believe that they must pay attention to the ways in which they behave in order to reach the blessings they wish. Their social conditions are never taken into consideration and they feel completely responsible for their success or failure, for being able to follow the pastor or not.

This premise of Christian control is also taken by the UCKG, because the believer who searches for this Church can be motivated to fulfil his wishes by tithing and following the model of behavior appreciated by the Church leaders. At the UCKG the believer confesses his sins not to a single clergyman, but to an audience that can watch and be aware of his mistakes in life, getting to know what not to do in order to keep on what they call the God path.

So, for the UCKG narrative, the believer who says he is being controlled by the Devil should not be seen as a miserable guilty person, but as a winner who is ready to be saved from evil.

He is in fact a good example to be followed by the other believers. Fear can be used by a leader to justify his power and the UCKG leaders use the image of the Devil to scare and persuade their believers to follow the Church. It is important to say that the image of the Devil or the fear that it can provoke are not the only resources used by the UCKG to attract more followers or even to keep them attached to this Church.

Before explaining more specifically how the UCKG uses the fear of the Devil as an instrument of power, it is worth mentioning some authors who worried about the use of fear as a way of power in the neoliberal societies.

They do so through multiple mechanisms of preservation of life such as health insurance, police organization, alarm systems, planned retirements and so on. The authors state that fear must be produced and shared by the individuals who take part in a society. As a consequence, this fear moves the market of security, which ensures order and safety, in order to make this society economically productive.

These authors also assert that the State, as any agent of control, would lose its meaning in a society, if they did not have the alleged function of protecting the individuals from dangers caused by violence and helplessness.

Then, the State would guarantee peace and order to make people produce goods and money. Bauman, who also studied the function of fear in social organizations, admits that a great part of the trading capital is accumulated due to the feeling of insecurity people have nowadays[ 4 ].

He quotes as examples the fears of terrorism, natural disasters, and urban violence. For the author, the existing fear in neoliberal societies causes a lot of insecurity and a permanent feeling of hopelessness in people who see themselves as unable to rule their own lives Bauman, The author even says that this kind of fear is scarier when it is diffused, as a kind of threat that can suddenly assault.

It is what Bauman calls the derived fear, a stable mental structure that produces in the individual a feeling of being constantly threatened and vulnerable not able to trust the available defenses. It is a continuous sensation of anxiety and alert, even though there is no real or present danger Bauman, 9. For the author, the derived fear is not really linked to a real and imminent danger, that is to say, people affected by it cannot understand it or connect it to any of the three kinds described above Bauman, For Gross, it is necessary to establish an enemy in contemporary societies where fear is applied as an instrument of control.

However, this enemy is not always identifiable, in fact, it is very often unknown as a suspect should be. An identified enemy would probably come from a foreign country and would be a cold and calculating deceiver of others, instead of the suspect, who would not be noted, and would act unpredictably. The suspect could even be a neighbor. Gross affirms that we live in a time of distrust, where anybody or anything can suddenly turn into an enemy Gross, Bauman says that at a time people have lost their faith in institutions and great ideals, the fear of a probable enemy becomes ubiquitous and justifies the existence of a State that can supposedly protect them and ensure conditions in which people can take care of their lives.

It is worth noting that the feeling of safety cannot be long-lasting in a neoliberal society, because fear must help drive consumption. Thus, in neoliberal societies, people always have to fear something, such as a terrorist, a hurricane, or a severe type of flu, so that the consumption of medicine and security systems is increased and they are able to generate profit.

For the author, in these societies, trust and attachment to others are dissolved, giving place to suspicion and fear Bauman, In other words, fear is what makes the market system thrive. The UCKG takes hold of a fearful image of the Devil in order to exercise its pastoral power and guarantee for itself the fame of an institution able to protect and save.

At the UCKG stages, the Devil is pictured as a recognizable foe, the incarnation of evil, whose actions can come from a variety of sources, such as music, TV programs, people or even animals. It means that the ideas of distrust and uncertainty centered around the suspect are rescued for this Devil, assumedly able to assault anybody at anytime or anywhere.

Since then, human-eating ogres have appeared in many works, including "Tom Thumb"; "Hansel and Gretel," where the witch is a type of ogre because she intends to eat the children; and "Little Red Riding Hood," where the wolf resembles an ogre. The Cyclops of myth and heroic literature who devours humans is also a form of ogre. One of the earliest things to be called " hell up on wheels " was a speedy steamboat. But the term's popularity dates from the s in reference to the vice-ridden temporary towns set up along the U.

The towns were essentially encampments of tents, but they became notorious for their lawlessness after the establishment of saloons, gambling houses, and brothels. As construction of the railroad moved westward so did the jerry-built towns, which people came to refer to as "Hell on Wheels. It's not clear how the lawlessness of these mobile towns led to the expression's use for any formidable person or thing causing fear, though a visit to Hell on Wheels would certainly inspire more dread than a ride on a steamboat.

Nevertheless, "hell on wheels" isn't exactly the thing everyday people want to run up against. His mom … calls him a superb athlete and says, "He's hell on wheels in basketball. A hard English poem is hell on wheels for a foreigner…. Blue as an adjective to describe someone in low spirits—as in "She didn't get the job and was feeling blue" or "The losing team looked blue"—goes back to the 15th century, and it more than likely developed in reference to livid skin due to reduced circulation or oxygenation of the blood.

In the earlyth century, the term blue devil was conjured up as the name for a demon that casts such melancholy. Alston, whose life hath been accounted evill, And therfore cal'de by many the blew devill, S[t]ruck with remorse of his ill gotten pelfe, Would in dispaire have made away himselfe. In time, people began applying the name of the demon to feelings of depression or melancholy, and both the blues and the blue devils have been used for over two hundred years as expressions for such emotional states.

In one of these fits, at Skelton Castle, in Yorkshire, he kept his chamber, talking of death and the east wind by synonimous terms, and could not be persuaded by his friends to mount his horse, and dissipate his blue devils by air and exercise.

Addison, Interesting Anecdotes , In the past, an imp in your garden would have been a welcome sight. In the 14th century, the word shifted from plants and began referring to children or offspring. By the 16th century, the word was often used specifically for a child of the Devil or from Hell. Or, you know, for any small demon or spirit found in the company of a witch.

It was this use that led people to apply the word to a mischievous child who behaves like a little devil. Given that friend and fiend differ by one letter and have conflicting meanings, you might wonder if the two are related in any way. Although they developed independently from similar old Germanic words, they were once alliteratively paired opposites. Like the modern friend , the Old English word referred to a person other than a lover or relative that one holds in affection or esteem.

In time, fiend came to specify an enemy of humankind or God, and then to the Devil himself. That use distanced fiend from friend , and eventually foe , also meaning "enemy," took the place of friend's counterpart. In the 17th century, fiend was applied to people thought to be devilishly mischievous or bothersome.

This led to the word's now-common senses referring to people who are devoted to something to a degree that may irk others, like "a golf fiend," and to people who use or consume something immoderately, like "a fiend for ice cream. Considering that the word hellion begins with hell and refers to a devilish person, one might assume that it is derived straight from hell. The Scottish word has been traced back to the late 18th century, but its exact origin remains a mystery.

In American English, hellion can refer to any person engaged in devilish behavior but is used especially of children. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!