My rainy day craft box

At work today I came across a book called Prayers that Route Demons by John Eckhardt. It is, as you'd imagine, an evangelical Christian prayerbook formulated to smite the forces of darkness in the name of our Lord.

Okay, before I get into this let me say right now that I believe in God and I also believe in demons; and I believe both can and do interact with our world and influence human lives. My belief in this is not something that's up for debate in the context of this post. But I believe it, it's there, and I'm throwing it out there in the interest of full disclosure so that no one gets the wrong idea of why I'm going out of my way to discus this book.

I spent a good amount of time thumbing through this slim book and for being small, it is comprehensive. Eckhardt has protective prayers against everything from demons who merely befoul rivers, valleys, and deserts with their presence, to the ones behind things like disease and terrorism. The prayers themselves are often loose phrasings of Bible verses, but always with the relevant scriptural passage in parentheses. Of course anyone who knows the Bible knows that demons and other supernatural beings appear infrequently at best. But apparently a passage about a given Israelite hero defeating a human enemy will give you similar power to defeat a supernatural foe. I'm not saying this is untrue, but I am saying that this book does a terrible job of providing context for the verses it offers up. A Christian not well-versed in the Bible could get the impression from this book that the Bible is nothing but wall-to-wall demon thrashing from cover to cover. It isn't.

I'm not one to condemn a book for its cover but I've got to condemn this one. It is marketing based on fear. The edition we stock is slightly different than the one pictured at the link above. I couldn't find any pictures of the edition we have, but it's plain brown leather. The scary-looking title font is still the same, as is the circular medallion. Except the medallion is embossed on the cover in such a way that the jewels shine a menacing blood red.

That's right. It looks like a leather-bound grimoire, or like something a Puritan witch hunter would carry. The people this book is marketed toward are the kind likely to forcibly submit their child to an exorcism if they caught them reading Harry Potter or playing Dungeons & Dragons.... yet what they have here is their own book of magic spells! The "prayers" culled from scripture are served up as simple one-sentence incantations you need merely utter to ward off evil. It's even got counter-spells in it. There's an entire section devoted to prayers that local "witches and warlocks" will repent and that their "cauldrons" will be broken and their contents spilled out!

I was taught that Christ is triumphant over sin and darkness; that where He is there should be joy and comfort. I actually don't have a problem with a book of holy spells. in my fantasy games I'm always playing priests and paladins: I think it's a beautiful mythic trope. But this book is bound and presented in such a way as to make sure you stay afraid of the Devil. And I guess I have a problem with that.

To make matters worse, it's not even accurate on some very basic things. It's bad enough that John Eckhardt thinks there are covens of "witches and warlocks" working evil in "cauldrons" behind every tree. But he goes further. In addition to mentioning such Biblical fiends as Leviathan, Beelzebub, and Belial, (with, I might add, absolutely no context or history regarding them,) he goes so far as to name Jezebel as a demonic principality. In case you don't know, Jezebel was the wife of the wicked Biblical king Ahab. She was downright evil, but completely human. Depending on who you talk to, (and assuming you believe in any kind of afterlife at all,) she is either asleep in Sheol awaiting judgment like all other dead, or she is awake and experiencing Hell. But she is not a demon.

I have to wonder why Eckhardt, clearly a scholar of scripture, would make a glaring error like that? He specifically calls Jezebel a "female" principality. Is his point that there are girl demons too? Then why not use an actual girl demon like Lilith or Naamah, or that notorious nuisance to Old Testament prophets Asherah? Probably because their names don't immediately ping on the radar of Protestant Evangelicals the way that of the notorious harlot Jezebel does.

Again, a book like this in the hands of people full of spiritual zeal but lacking spiritual education is dangerous. And that's exactly who it's marketed toward.