Did you sell your soul to a demon for a wish? You may have unconsciously done this. The thundering waves are calling me home, home to you. The pounding sea is calling me home, home to you. It must have been the Summer Solstice when I first gave my heart to You. The first day of a brand-new season, in a fevered passion for Your simple truth. It was the longest I had ever felt for anything and it gave my soul a song to sing. We left the music behind as the dance carried on, as we stole away to the seashore, we smelt the brine, felt the wind in our hair, and your sadness you paused. It must have been my adolescence that pulled me from my childlike faith, but what I thought to be maturity was just neglect that I tried to vindicate, and I went drifting on the wind like the autumn leaves. Suddenly I knew that you would have to go, your World was not mine, your eyes told me so. Yet, it was there I felt the crossroad’s demon of time, and I wondered why? When I fell, I landed on my knees, as we cast our gaze on the tumbling sea, a vision  of thundering hooves came over me, and beating wings in clouds above. So, can You throw Your arms around me and walk me to the house? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

 I have wandered off way too far for way too long and standing broken in this wilderness of shame I have found my only strength is in your name, God. Oh, Heavenly Father please can You undo what I have done and get me back to square one. I never saw that blizzard coming. Just woke up and ice was on the ground and there were times this beating heart of pride was so stubborn it refused to make a sound, but now I am feeling so out of my element, frozen in the Winter of my discontent. On a dark New Year’s night, on the West Coast of California, I heard your voice singing. Your eyes danced the song and your hands played the tune, there was a vison before me. As you turned to go, I heard you call my name. You were like a bird in a cage spreading it wings to fly. “The old ways are lost,” you sang as you flew and I wondered why? Crossroad’s demons are entities that make formal agreements or bargains with humans, granting any wish in exchange for claiming their life and soul at a fixed point in the future. Deals made with humans are sealed with a kiss, and contracts are written invisibly on the skin of the person. They tend to have red eyes. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

When the person dies either before his or her time, or is killed by a hellhound at the end of the appointed period, his or her soul is sent to Hell. Terms of the demonic contracts vary, but the person selling his or her soul is usually given ten years to live after the deal is made. A crossroad’s demon is typically summoned by burying a container of ritual items, including a photograph of the summoned, graveyard dirt, a black cat bone, and yarrow at the center of the crossroads. The contract is not usually held by the demon who negotiates the deal. According to Bella, a Crossroad’s demon, Lilith, Adam’s first wife claims to hold all deals. Adam was mistaken about her. Like many other men, he thought the signs of love for another were signs of love towards himself. For over 5,000 years, Lilith has wandered the Earth. Her dark origins lie in Babylonian demonology, where amulets and incantations were used to counter the sinister powers of this winged spirit. Lilith next migrated to the World of the ancient Hittites, Egyptians, Israelites and Greeks. She makes a solitary appearance in the Bible, as a wilderness demon shunned by the prophet Isaiah. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

 It is suggested that killing the demon who holds a soul will cancel the contract. However, the death of the demon who controls the soul only transfers the contract. In the Renaissance, Michelangelo portrayed Lilith as a half-woman, half-woman, half-serpent, coiled around the Tree of Knowledge. Later, her beauty would captivate the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. “Her enchanted hair,” he wrote, “was the first gold.” Modern feminists celebrate her bold struggle for independence from Adam. Her name appears as the title of a Jewish women’s magazine and a national literacy program. An annual music festival that donates its profits to battered women’s shelters and breast cancer research institutes is called the Lilith Fair. According to legend, Lilith dwells in desert lands and open country spaces and is especially dangers to pregnant women and infants. Her breast are filled with poison, not milk. And she is said to have the power of fire, much like Queen Akasha from the film Queen of the Damned. She is known for being beautiful, having wings (or the ability to fly), taloned feet and had long hair, tied up to look like a crown. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Dating from the seventh or eighth century B.C.E. is a limestone wall plaque, discovered in Arslan Tash, Syria, in 1933, which contains a horrific mention of Lilith. It reads, “O you who fly in the darkened rooms, be off with you this instant, this instant, Lilith. Thief, breaker of bones.” Robert Johnson (8 May 1911 – 16 August 1938) makes a deal in 1930 with a crossroad’s demon. He was a blues musician. He left home in 1930 and traveled the country, playing and singing at parties, juke joints, barrelhouses, and other venues. Robert Johnson went on to have a successful career, recording 29 blues songs, but a year later he was poisoned by a jealous husband. Six of his blues songs mention the devil or some form of the supernatural. It is a popular urban legend that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his talent. “Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, risin’, Sun goin’ down, I believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin’ down. You can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown.” Over time, people throughout the Near East became increasingly familiar with the myth of Lilith. In the Bible, she is mentioned only once, in Isaiah 34. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Throughout the Book of Isaiah, the prophet encourages God’s people to avoid entanglements with foreigners who worship alien deities. Lilith was known for her beauty, long hair, ability to fly and for being powerful. During the 130 year period between the death of Abel and their birth of Seth, a Talmudic reference claims that Lilith was a succubus, a demon who had the sex with men while they were sleeping (in a state of trance). Allegedly, a distraught Adam separates himself from Eve, and during this time he becomes the father of ghosts and male demons and female demons. And those who try to construct the Tower of Babel are tuned into apes, spirits, devils, and night-demons. Lilith’s image has been unearthed on numerous ceramic bowls known as incantation bowls for the Aramaic spells. And supposedly, Lilith left the Garden of Eden because she and Adam had a dispute. Though made of Earth, she is not Earthbound. The Almighty tells Adam that if Lilith fails to return, 100 of her children must die each day. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries. At this stage of the affair, the poor girl respectfully intimated that she was secretly engaged to that popular character whom the novelists and versifiers called Another, and that such a marriage would make Dust of her heart and Dust of her life. The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her own beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return. Apparently, Lilith is not only a child-murdering witch, but also an amazingly fertile mother. In this way, she helps maintain the World’s balance between Good and Evil. Her dramatic departure reestablished for a new generation Lilith’s supernatural character in the Queen of the Damned. Love is all a woman has to give, but it is the only thing which God permits us to carry beyond the grave between the Infinite and the finite World, and by its motion it creates aggregate of elements that build up the Cartesian vortexes, which are interpreted as the fundamentals of nature. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

The original motion is the Infinite, however, is not a mechanical motion but a kind of Leibnizian conatus, a motive force in nature that corresponds to will in human minds. In the first point, there is a corresponding tendency, which transmits itself to the subsequent aggregates in the great chain of being. This cosmology was a theory that could combine these scientific hypotheses with Christianity in the seventeenth century. Many other people posthumously published treatises on the animal kingdom. “Humans are animals, brute creatures,” explains Queen Akasha in the Queen of the Damned. The main problem where was the relationship between the soul and the body. So, in physiological research Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a scientist and Biblical scholar, mystic, starts the study of the blood, which in its relation to the organization of the human body corresponds in some important ways to the role of the mathematical point as a nexus between the spiritual and the physical World. RandolphHarris 8 of 13

 Emanuel Swedenborg distinguished several degrees of purity in the blood, with the highest degree corresponding to the Cartesian spirituous fluid. It is not wind or air, but has a liquid consistency as spirit wine. It is generated from blood in the brain and diffused by the nerves. This fluid functions both as a concrete communication line between soul and body and as abstract principle, a formative force of the body (vis formatrix). As I hinted at in previous essays, Emanuel Swedenborg’s system is called the doctrine of series and degrees of lifeforce and it is a teleological system. The degrees are distinct links in the Universal chain and form connected series of several kinds. Three of these series—the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, and the animal kingdom—belong to Earth. In these great series, there are also subordinate series, down to the lowest elements. Each series has its first substance, which is dependent on the first series of nature. The first series of nature is an organic development of the concept of the mathematical point. This is very close to the conception of a World soul. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

This hierarchy or organisms is a decisive influence in the structuring of this gigantic system, in which Emanuel Swedenborg has arranged all series and degrees in a fixed order that determines all their interrelations. There exists nothing in nature that does not belong to such a series. In the Oeconomia the human series consists of four degrees, the soul (anima), the reason (mens rationalis), the vegetative soul (animus), and the corresponding sense organs of the body, but in the theosophic writings after 1745, the series is reduced to three degrees with the animus subordinated to the mens rationalis. The china of the series extends up to God, who Himself becomes the highest series. It is believed that all a priori of knowledge is in the anima, but after the Fall of man, the soul (anima) was separated from the body; this synthetic source of knowledge—was thereby closed for ordinary humans. If we could returned to Adam’s integrity before the Fall, it would be opened up anew. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

This is an attempt to illustrate how linguistic terms may be used with three different meanings—the natural, the spiritual, and the divine. The doctrine of correspondence is an attempt to describe and explain the relationships between the spiritual World and our material World and our material Universe by means of linguistic analogies. There is no motion without the conatus (an innate inclination of a things to continue to exist and enhance itself. This thing maybe the mind, matter or a combination of both). However, there is no conatus without motion. For is all conatus were to break out into open motion the World would perish, since there would be no equilibrium. There is no action without will, but there is no will without action. If all will were to break out into open action humans would perish, since there would be no rational balance or moderating reason. There is no divine operation without providence, but there is indeed a providence not operative or effective. If all providence were operative and effective, human society would not be able to subsist such as it now is, since there would be no true exercise of human liberty. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

The notions of conatus, will, and providence correspond; so do World, humans, and human society. By such means, the principles of philosophy of nature are given a wider field of application, so that they reveal Heavenly and divine secrets. Some of this information was derived from Christian Wolff’s Psychologia Empirica (1732) where the famous German rationalist discusses the information interpreted from Egyptian and their mystic signification, according to which God functions in conformity with an eternal order (l’ordre immutable). This is a profound spiritual experience of the interpretation of Scripture according to the doctrine of correspondence. It gives vivid descriptions of the Spiritual World. The spirits have lived in cities where they have a social life with social functions (even marriage) corresponding to Earthly conditions. The relegations of spirits to Heaven or Hell from the intervening spiritual World depends on the spirits themselves, since their utmost desire (amor regnans) leads them into suitable company. Christ and the doctrine of atonement play a very insignificant role in Emanuel Swedenborg’s theology.  #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

Christ is the Divinum Humanum, a manifestation in time of God himself . This theory is extremely intellectual and totally dependent on the interpretation of the divine word as a mediating link between the Creator and man. In the course of time decadent churches have destroyed the original meaning of this word, and Emanuel Swedenborg saw his mission as the restoration of its primary sense. “How much more your Father who is in Heaven give good things to those who ask Him!” (Matthew 7.11)  Jesus Christ urges us to keep our minds filled with the concepts of God’s control over everything, which means that a disciple must maintain an attitude of perfect trust and an eagerness to ask and to seek. Fill your mind with the thought that God is there. God is my Father, He loves me, and I will never think of anything that He will forget, so why should I worry? There are only rare times when a human’s soul can see Nature. So long as any passion holds its revel there, the eyes are holden that they should not see her.  #RandolphHarris 13 of 13