The only way to explain or blame what has happened to our country without going mad is to do what our ancestors did and fight off the Devil.  Yes, he is what God says puts ideas of hatred and cruelty into the heads of humans. Only the ancients figured out how to get rid of him – besides Billion-dollar political campaigns.

One day we were united; the next, bitterly torn in half. We used to be nice to newcomers; now we hate them and run them down in the streets and in hearings. Senators used to be civil and polite, and now proudly lie and call people names.

The Gods aren’t coming to help us. We have to do what our forebears did; they understood the Devil and fought back. I guess we have to do the same thing. I respect Jesus, but there is no sign he is coming to save us. He’s busy politicking in Texas. I’m losing faith that politicians are the only answer.

The Democrats don’t seem united on anything, no matter what the elections are. It takes a different kind of power to spare us. We humans have been fending off the Devil for centuries. I’ve been looking it up. That means looking backward, not online.  Even AI software would be over its head.

The thing we call politics makes no sense any longer; it is a plague that has brought hatred, cruelty, and rage upon us. The ancients knew how to deal with it. Below are some ideas. It makes sense when you think about it.

Rather than being consumed by the political turmoil, I’ve decided to attribute all of the lying, stealing, and cruelty plaguing America to the oldest explanation for wicked people, known for thousands of years as the Devil. It’s the only way I can make sense of what I see on the news. The more I think about it, the more possible it seems; no one has a better explanation.

First, a bit of history. The story of the Devil really takes shape around the Second Temple of the Jews (c. 300 – 70 CE). Texts from that period describe rebel angels. There was Mastema, a chief of evil spirits. The Dead Sea Scrolls describe Belial leading “the sons of darkness” into a cosmic war. Hmmm.

My surprise is that throughout history, savvy witches and homeowners were able to chase the Devil away. Throughout history, he’s a bully and a coward, not a monster with big ears.

Scholars have found Persian influence from the period of Persian rule. When the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek, the word satan became diabolos, meaning slanderer. That word is the root of the term “devil.”

The New Testament inherits and refines this figure. Satan becomes the tempter of Jesus and the “ruler of this world.”

Revelation identifies the Devil with the ancient serpent and the dragon. Church writers such as Origen later connected him with “Lucifer” from Isaiah 14, which originally mocked a Babylonian king, and built out the story of his fall.

The familiar image of the Devil, with horns, hooves, and a pitchfork, is much later still, mostly medieval. It borrows partly from pagan figures like Pan. In most cases, the Devil is believed to take any form he wishes, and often chooses to be a politician or a king. They have the power to enrage minds and turn them evil.

Throughout history, the wise men understood one basic truth. Rage, spite, and cruelty were not local; they were not homegrown. This explains the sudden turn of our country into rage and cruelty – it came from outside, not from us. It is never our fault.

 They were invaders, slipping in through keyholes, chimneys, and unguarded windows at dusk (think iPhones and AI software). Our ancestors responded sensibly. They nailed iron over the door, hung St. John’s wort from the rafters, and, when things got really bad, loaded the village’s collective sins onto a goat and chased it into the desert. We do have sheep.

Housewives seemed to terrify him.

It worked well enough, or at least nobody could prove it didn’t. I don’t know anyone who can tell me how my country has been so affected by evil. Have we better ideas? We don’t realize that we have power here.

Today we have abandoned these precautions as superstition. We are too smart to look at the obvious. I blame our smartphones; that’s how the Devil enters our consciousness and turns our heads around.

The Devil has come and gotten into the heads of millions of us, as God warned he would. Sounds just like politics.

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The rowan branch is gone from the lintel. The witch bottle no longer sits beneath the hearth. In their place we have installed a small glowing rectangle that we carry to bed, consult before breakfast, and invite, dozens of times a day, to tell us whom we should be furious at.

The medieval peasant, who rang church bells to drive demons out of thunderclouds, would find this arrangement baffling. “You’ve let him in,” he would say. “You’ve given him a charger.” 

The goats, for their part, remain very busy.

Some successful tools for fighting the Devil:

In the old lore, witches were usually the ones accused of working with the Devil. The people doing the warding off were “cunning folk,” village healers, priests, and ordinary households.

Here’s the arsenal they used. We have countless “cunning folk”; go look on YouTube. They could help.

St. John’s Wort  had the medieval nickname fuga daemonum, “the flight of demons.” People hung it over doors on Midsummer’s Eve. It’s still sold today as a mood herb, which is a nice coincidence for a story about the Devil.

Vervain and dill show up in an old rhyme: “Vervain and hinder put the witches away.” Angelica was called “root of the holy ghost” and chewed as protection. People hung garlic and mugwort in doorways and sewed them into clothing.

I bet Maria could find some of these things and sew them into a wall hanging or even a quilt. It might be a hard sell; she doesn’t take orders about her fiber work.

I’ve suspected she has some witch blood in her. She talks to animals, which once got a lot of witches hanged.

But I think the witch bottle makes the most sense; I can’t find it on Amazon. A witch bottle was a household anti-curse device. It’s handy.

They were popular mainly in the 17th century, when people who believed they were victims of witchcraft buried these bottles to send the spell back to the witch. The bottle wasn’t meant to drive off the Devil directly. It was aimed at whoever you suspected of cursing you, which suits a piece about anger and hatred. The container was usually a stoneware “Bellarmine” jug.

Alexa would love it. She might actually be it.

A witch bottle was a household anti-curse device.  Maybe those kids online could open some new sites and share ways to chase the Devil away. It would be useful.  Everything is online now. But there is no reason to be so hateful. Instead of hating others, we can send spells right back to them and get on with our lives.

I was pleased and surprised to uncover common, routine, and inexpensive Devil repellents. In history, the Devil is never omnipotent; he can usually be bullied away.

Jews in my life decided that salt thrown over the left shoulder into the Devil’s eye worked; my grandmother and Aunt Fanny often spit in my direction if I said anything that sounded like danger or trouble. I rarely finished eating without spit on my shirt. Demonologists claimed that theDevil’ss feasts were always unsalted.

According to legend, St. Dunstan nailed a shoe onto theDevil’ss hoof and removed it only after the Devil promised him never to enter a house with a horseshoe over the door. The witch marks said to remove the Devil were daisy-wheel circles carved near doors and windows. The Devil supposedly gets lost and nauseous following an endless line.

If this worked for the ancients, it might work for us. At this point, we have little to lose.