What the Editors Hold

A statement of beliefs is owed to the serious reader. The editors are not anonymous in their convictions, and the work the site does proceeds from a set of standing positions that the reader has the right to know. This page is that statement. It is not a creed in the technical sense, and it does not try to settle disputes the editors are not authorised to settle. It states what the editorial office holds, on which the site is built.

The standing convictions

I. The reality of spiritual operations. The editors hold that the older protection-traditions, in their multiple confessional and folk lines of descent, named real categories. Not all attention is benign. Not all attraction is honest. Not every visitor at the door is who they claim to be. The reader who senses, in modern life, that something is operating beyond the explicit content of the operation is not imagining things. The site treats those perceptions seriously because the tradition treated them seriously.

II. The efficacy of the protections. The disciplines preserved across the global Christian protective inheritance — the Marian devotions, the prayers to the named angels, the carrying of blessed stones, the salt at the threshold, the forty-day fasts, the novena, the formal severing of unreleased bonds — are not metaphors. The reader who applies them is doing real work, with real effects, in continuity with two and a half millennia of observed practice. The site teaches them because they have stood the test of the centuries.

III. The catholic (small-c) breadth of the tradition. The protective tradition is broader than any single confession. No one church preserved all of it. The Roman canon preserved one part (the Marian devotions, the Tobit narrative, the discernment-of-spirits literature from Cassian to Ignatius to Amorth). The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon preserved part the Western Church lost for a millennium (the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, the Ethiopic Maccabean literature). The Eastern Orthodox preserved part (the broader Septuagint canon, the hesychast spiritual tradition, additional Marian feasts and devotions). The Syriac and Coptic Churches preserved part (the early ascetic literature, the older liturgies, distinct lapidary and protective traditions). The unbroken folk practice of Catholic Europe preserved part (the practical disciplines transmitted by household and ethnographer rather than by hierarchy). And the pre-Christian Mediterranean preserved part (Pliny, Marbodus, the older stone-lore, the discernment-of-eye tradition Elworthy catalogued). The editors read this as one tradition with many caretakers, and they refuse to ignore any of the caretakers’ deposits.

IV. The Catholic anchor. The editorial office holds the Catholic Magisterium in particular respect. The unbroken Catholic discernment-of-spirits discipline (discretio spirituum) running from John Cassian through Ignatius of Loyola through the present-day deliverance literature is the standing framework for the site’s diagnostic readings. The Marian devotions — especially the devotion to Mary Undoer of Knots that Pope Francis brought from Augsburg into the universal Church — are the standing companions of the severing work. The 1898 decree of the Holy Office against spiritualist practices, reaffirmed under successive pontiffs, is the standing editorial position on contact-with-the-dead in all its modern dresses. Where the site recommends a devotion, the devotion is in living Catholic use.

V. The Ethiopian preservation, and the Western recovery. The editors hold a specific theological reading of the canon question, and they state it here plainly. The Book of Enoch was preserved by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church for over a thousand years during which the Western Church effectively lost it. James Bruce’s 1773 recovery of the Ethiopic manuscript and R. H. Charles’s 1893 and 1912 critical translations returned the text to the wider Christian world. The editors read this preservation-and-return as the work of the Holy Spirit through the Ethiopian Church: the text was kept alive for the moment it was needed. The site therefore treats 1 Enoch with the seriousness the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has always given it, while remaining honest with Catholic readers that the text is not in the Roman canon, and honest with Protestant readers that it is not in the Protestant canon either. Honesty about canonical status does not require contempt for the preserved deposit.

VI. The line we draw. The line the editors draw is not between Catholic and Protestant. Not between East and West. Not between confessional Christians and non-confessional readers. The line is between those who serve the dignity of the human soul — preserving the protections, naming the operations honestly, defending the reader against compulsion and deception and the small theft of the marked hour — and those who exploit human vulnerability for advantage, whether that advantage is monetary, sexual, spiritual, or political. The site stands on the side of the soul. It seeks alliance with every tradition that stands on the same side.

VII. The seeking of unity. The editors seek the readership of all Christians of good will — Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox (Coptic, Ethiopian, Syriac, Armenian, Indian), Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist, evangelical — and of readers from any tradition who hold the soul to be real and worth defending. The protective inheritance preserved here has served readers of many backgrounds for centuries. The editors do not require conversion to apply the protections; they ask only that the reader receive them in their proper provenance, which is the global Christian protective tradition the site preserves.

VIII. The respect owed to the reader’s tradition. Where the reader brings a tradition of their own — Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, traditional African, indigenous American, or any other — the editors do not propose to displace it. The site is what it is: a custody of the Christian and pre-Christian protective tradition in particular. A reader from another tradition who finds the diagnostic frames useful is welcome to apply them within their own protective inheritance, and the editors will not be offended if the reader prefers their own devotions to the ones the site recommends. The editors also do not pronounce on the comparative truth of religions. That work is above this office’s pay grade and outside its brief.

What the editors do not assert

Equally important to what the editors hold is what the editors do not undertake to settle. The site’s brief is the protection of the soul against named operations of harm. On subjects beyond that brief, the editors defer to the reader’s own tradition and to the proper authorities within it. The editors therefore make no pronouncement, in either direction, on:

• The procession of the Holy Spirit (the filioque dispute between East and West);
• The validity of Anglican, Lutheran, or other Protestant orders;
• The doctrinal definitions of papal infallibility, the Immaculate Conception, and the Assumption beyond the form in which they are received in the Marian devotions the site cites;
• Contemporary disputes within the Catholic Church on liturgy, ordination, contraception, or other matters where the laity stands at a respectful distance from the Magisterium’s ongoing work;
• The salvation, in particular, of any individual or group;
• Eschatological timelines (millennialism, dispensationalism, etc.);
• The political application of the protections to specific contemporary partisan disputes;
• The character of any specific living public figure (no editorial named-attacks, no endorsements).

None of this is theological cowardice. It is the editorial office’s recognition that the site does one thing — the custody of the protective tradition — and that doing one thing well requires not pretending to do all things. Where the reader needs theology beyond the site’s competence, the editors direct the reader to their own bishop, priest, pastor, or qualified teacher.

The standing devotions

The editorial office observes a set of standing devotions in the conduct of the work. These are the devotions the reader will encounter most often on the site, and they reflect what the editors actually hold in living practice:

• The Leonine prayer to St Michael the Archangel (Pope Leo XIII, 1886) — the standing protection across every cluster, said by the editors at the opening and closing of the work.
• The devotion to Mary Undoer of Knots (Augsburg c. 1700, popularised globally by Pope Francis) — the standing anchor of the severing work, the loosing of bonds tied amiss.
• The prayer to St Raphael (Book of Tobit) — the patron of the encounter, the binder of the spirit before the chamber, the angel of after. The standing devotion of the dating-discernment cluster.
• The four named archangels — Michael the defender, Gabriel the messenger, Raphael the healer, Uriel the light-bearer — under whose patronage the editorial work proceeds.
• The discernment-of-spirits tradition — the standing methodology, drawn from Cassian, Ignatius, and the modern Catholic deliverance literature, for telling the operations of God, of self, and of malicious spirit apart in interior experience.

How to receive the site

The serious reader will hold what the editors hold up to scrutiny. The editors welcome this. The site is built to survive that scrutiny: the Sources page names every primary text the editorial work draws on; the About page names the editorial office’s method and limits; and this page names the standing convictions on which both rest. Take what is useful. Test what is uncertain. Leave what does not fit your own tradition; take what does. The editors stand by the work and the reader, and trust both to do honest reading.

For the wellbeing of those who are awake, in every tradition that holds the soul to be real and worth defending.
— The Editors