Demons?
Hermes’ Web is all about play – a more and more forgotten art and pastime. Blame it on cellphones, or over-workers in various professions, or parents hellbent on getting their stressed-out children into the best schools at any cost. Study, study: work, work! Bring on the Zanax and anti-depressants!
Play is a skill, a skill that brings people together, engages them in a task outside themselves, teaches them how to problem solve, and also brings personal and communal satisfaction. Playing “games” on your phone by yourself just isn’t the same. Sure, there’s satisfaction in FORTNITE or in the myriad of elaborate games with incredible visuals that you need a powerful game console for. It’s fascinating, entertaining and amazing but it’s not the kind of play I’m thinking about in terms of Hermes’ Web and our menagerie of toys.
Play is the way to the soul. It doesn’t happen that much in therapy because it tends to take therapists out of their comfort zone. It’s more common in education and in some spiritual settings. And in terms of these toys on the Hermes’ Web website, it’s like taking on the demons – a toy to embody the demon, to elicit its stories, to let the client, the student not be fully identified with, or possessed by, the demon, and to let them articulate what they’ve learned about the demon in order to free themselves from its grip and the chains of shame that come with it. Play changes things, gets things that are stuck moving, brings imagination into areas where there appears to be brain death! It’s significantly more than a distraction!
Our toys work best passed around in a group and put in a client’s or student’s hands so they can get the feel for it, examine it up close. We play with the toy and give the toy a voice, bring out understandings and experiences, make it come alive so that it’s experienced with awareness for the first time.
When I worked at Stillwater Prison, I had a weekly group where we watched a film each week in the afternoon, while in the morning I laid out the psychological background for it. After watching the film ,the guys got a worksheet to work on in the interim. They were well-known films, exciting films that some of them had seen multiple times before. The surprise was that over time, more and more guys came up to me to tell me they had really only now seen the film for the first time, got the message in the background, didn’t realize how little they’d grokked before when they only watched it for the kick, the jolt – to be entertained! The eye of the soul had been opened, and they were no longer third eye blind!
This reminds me of the Navajo’s beliefs about stories. Each of our toys has stories attached and playing with the toy can bring out those stories and the teachings woven inside of them! The Navaho, according to ethnologist Barre Tolkien, see four levels to a story:
1-Entertainment: “are you entertained” as the Gladiator asked! Surface enjoyment with focus on the cars, the women, the men, the power, the killings, the intrigue. Wow – what a ride – let’s do it again! Nothing learned. A story around the campfire!
2-Moral: each story contains a moral, like Aesop’s fables (what an archaic reference!)! There’s a lesson to be learned, a message to take in, a principle to live by, but it doesn’t necessary go too deep or address underlying issues.
3-Healing/Medicinal: to take in the story and its meaning, integrate it, absorb into your life the depths of a story, let it rearrange who you are, have a healing effect. A powerful healing story can make the demon loosen its grip and allow you to start to evolve again, rejoin the community, step away from the destruction of self and others.
4-Witchcraft: If one ignores or refuses the essential message of the story, especially a story that addresses what plagues your soul, then that story turns against you – the demon feasts on your soul and you live a cursed life.
So, welcome to our catalog of demons and monsters available for the work of de-demonizing the world – and let me emphasize, the need is intense!