While on a recent bender in Spain, I woke up to a bizarre note jotted in my phone: “The roots of Western philosophy are demonic.”
My first reaction was: Jesus, I need to drink less. Then I noticed a tattered copy of The Apology of Socrates on my bedside table and recalled a dark revelation that had chilled my blood while reading it in a bar: Socrates, Father of the Western Mind, was balls-deep into necromancy.
From childhood onwards, Socrates heard voices in his head. In The Apology and The Republic, he confessed to Plato that the source of his uncanny wisdom was a daemon, Greek for “spirit” and the root of our word demon. The Gadfly of Athens credited his occult companion for his metaphysical and ethical insights—ideas that would become the bedrock of Western philosophy.
Socrates saw his daemon as benevolent, an angelic being who whispered divine teachings in his dreams and reveries. But I’m Catholic enough to know that nine times out of ten, any form of spirit communion is infernal. Hell-bent on misleading gullible souls, Satan’s minions show up in the guise of saints and angels, offering heavenly secrets. It’s a ruse as old as the serpent in Eden.
So—did a fiend poison the soul of old Socrates and, by extension, the wellspring of Western thought?
If we consider the man’s proclivities, it checks out: He was an avowed pederast, a flag as red as the devil’s dick for demonic sway. And if Socrates’ doctrines were Satanic, that would explain quite a bit about the West today.
Now, I’m a man who scoffs at the likes of astrology, palm reading, and “traditional medicine” as unadulterated bullshit. But I’m reluctant to dismiss spirit possession.
Why? Because every religion acknowledges it.
Just a few examples from the Abrahamic faiths: in the Torah, Saul visits the Witch of Endor to learn his fate, and she conjures the spirit of the prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 28:7). The Gospels repeatedly mention possession—most vividly in the story of the Gerasene Demoniac, where Jesus casts a legion of demons out of a man and into a herd of pigs (Mark 5:1–20). And the Quran brims with warnings about djinn—fire-borne beings that haunt the shadows of the desert; the genies of Arabian folklore.
That, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
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On a damp tropical night in a run-down neighborhood in São Paulo, I followed an alley to an unmarked gate that opened into a terreiro—one of the countless spirit-possession temples scattered across the Brazilian megalopolis. My friend, a Brazilian software engineer, visited this terreiro from time to time to commune with her deceased mother through a medium. Though a devout Catholic, she saw no contradiction between Mass and a little light necromancy.
She knew I had an interest in religious studies—and in weird shit generally—so she invited me to tag along to a séance.
“My son…” Seu José whispered, “What do you want to know?”
Like a guru, he sat before me calmly, his warm, old-man demeanor easing my discomfort. I unpacked the cares of my soul—the usual mix of financial, romantic, and family woes. He nodded sympathetically, pausing now and then to puff his cigar.
Seu José was a Guarany Indian from the hinterlands of southern Brazil. His Portuguese was formal and folksy—a manner of speech from a bygone era. His words were carefully measured, delivered with the cadence of an old soldier, weary yet resilient.
Peering through the haze of cigar smoke, I studied the face before me. It was not the leathery visage of an aged Indian, but the fresh face of a young Brazilian woman, no older than twenty and strikingly beautiful. Her eyes were rolled back in her skull, revealing only the whites. She was a medium, and Seu José—dead for more than a century—had taken up residence in her.
Spirit-possession religions in Brazil are legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. During the colonial era, the Catholic Church forbade enslaved Africans from worshiping orixás—the deities of their homelands—under pain of death. To evade persecution, the enslaved disguised their gods behind Catholic saints. Ogum, the Yoruba god of war and metal, became St. George. Iemanjá, the African Aphrodite and mother of waters, became the Virgin Mary. Over the centuries, the distinctions blurred. Today, Candomblé, Umbanda, and dozens of other syncretic religions flourish across Brazil.
Candomblé is a close cousin of Voodoo in Louisiana and Santería in Cuba. Interestingly, syncretism between African religions and Catholicism only occurred in the Catholic colonies of the New World. Protestant slaveholding societies like South Carolina or Virginia stamped out saint veneration as vehemently as orixá worship, leaving the African deities no place to hide.
I finished my conversation with Seu José, and he beckoned me to stand. Slowly, he circled me, exhaling cigar smoke around my body as if cleansing it. Then, he told me to close my eyes and think of God. I heard him murmur a prayer, then felt his hands rest gently on my forehead and temples.
We sat again. He gestured toward the notebook and pen I had brought.
“Write your name,” he said, “and the names of your loved ones.”
I handed him the page. He examined each name and blew cigar smoke over the paper. Smiling, he told me he had sent them blessings of safety and peace.
Then he asked if I had any enemies.
At the time, a landlord had fucked me out of a large sum of money, and the memory festered like an infected boil. I wrote his name on a separate sheet. Seu José studied the name, then pressed the lit end of his cigar to the page, burning a hole through it. He smeared the ash, defacing the name completely.
I tensed up, understanding that a curse had just been performed. I hated him, sure—but I hadn’t wished him anything worse than a good thrashing. But it was done.
Seu José said his work was finished. Before I left the terreiro, I was to buy an herbal infusion—a foul-smelling tea of rotten plants, bottled in a plastic two-liter soda jug—and pour it over my body before sleep, a kind of spiritual bath.
There was one final errand. I had to make an offering to Exu, the orixá of roads and doors, who would expiate any lingering bad juju.
Following Seu José’s instructions, I went to a deserted intersection in São Paulo at midnight, a bottle of cachaça in hand. In the darkness, I poured the liquor onto the asphalt, slowly tracing a cross at the heart of the crossroads. An image of Robert Johnson, the bluesman who sold his soul at a crossroads, rushed through my mind like a flashing alarm—but curiosity got the better of me. I prayed to Exu, asking for auspicious paths to open. Then, feeling blasphemous, I recited the Hail Mary and the Lord’s Prayer as I walked home.
Did new paths open?
I don’t know. That was over a decade ago, and the years since have been fraught with ups and downs. But I remember having terrifyingly beautiful dreams that night in São Paulo.
Years later, I found myself deep in the Amazon Rainforest, near the tri-border of Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela. I had spent weeks traveling aboard cargo-passenger ships to reach the Upper Amazon, eventually disembarking in a region so remote that the locals spoke a Portuguese as broken as my own. Looking back, I can’t quite say why I went—why I subjected myself to skin parasites, diarrhea, and fever. Probably fatal curiosity, yet again.
At a bar near a jungle military outpost, I met a man named Elizio—one of the darkest, most indelible figures ever to cross my path. He hailed from an Indigenous tribe in the Colombian Amazon and had once worked in cocaine refineries deep in the forest. Cartel violence had forced him out of his homeland, and he fled down the Rio Negro to Brazil.
Elizio was an archetypical shaman, a poetic drunk with a constitution hardy enough to brave headlong the tempestuous waters of the psychedelic states. Like all true shamans, he was more comfortable in solitude than in society. As a boy, he spent months in the wilderness by himself, surviving by collecting rainwater, hunting rodents, and foraging for edible plants.
I spent several days on the reservation where Elizio lived, helping him dig an irrigation ditch, drinking rot-gut cachaça, and hunting monkeys. His dwelling, far removed from the reservation’s ramshackle village, was a lean-to—a dirt floor with a cooking fire beneath a tattered blue tarp. He tended a garden of chili peppers, herbs, and the two plants used to brew ayahuasca.
Before making the ten-day trek from the Upper Amazon back to Manaus, I gave Elizio some money and promised to raise funds for a motorboat for his community. Villagers from the region often solicited Elizio’s blessings, asking him to cure their ailments or protect their infants from the specter of childhood disease.
I asked if he would perform a blessing for me before I departed, and he agreed.
I sat cross-legged on his earthen floor, and he asked me to close my eyes. He placed his hands on my scalp and softly chanted a prayer in one of the Indigenous languages he spoke. The chant continued for about twenty minutes, and I began to feel guilty for taking up so much of his time. When he finished chanting, he pulled out the collar of my T-shirt and exhaled—like blowing out birthday candles.
I left the reservation and followed a military convoy road to a river port, where I would catch a cargo ship back to Manaus.
Lying in my hammock watching the jungle float by, I felt light-hearted and blessed. The sunshine felt sweeter on my skin, the sky looked bluer, and my mood was carefree. I think something shifted in my soul—but who knows.
This fucking kid is CRAZY but he can tell a story like a madman. Keep it coming
I stumbled across your newsletter through Rob and Rambull. My god who are you? Your writing is gorgeous. These are some crazy adventures