"It's like staring at demons"

Newly awakened psychological condition-- or ancient shamanic phenomenon?

“I tried to explain to my roommate what I was seeing, and he thought I was nuts. Then I went outside and all of the faces of people I saw were distorted and still are. It’s like staring at demons. Imagine waking up one morning and suddenly everybody in the world looks like a creature in a horror movie.”

Recently, The New York Times announced that it is officially the fallen state of journalism by literally pivoting from “The Deep State Doesn’t Exist” to “The Deep State Is Kind Of Awesome”:

Not to be outclassed, CNN decided to publish this eyebrow-raising humdinger entitled: “‘It’s like staring at demons’: Meet a man who lives with a disturbing condition.”

My initial reaction to seeing this headline:

This CNN article “It’s like staring at demons” details several, compelling individual stories and anecdotes seeming to “prove” the existence of a rare condition called prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO, in which parts of the faces of other people appear distorted in shape, texture, position or color. With PMO, objects and other parts of a person’s body typically remain undisturbed, leaving only the face to be super, duper weird and consistently described as ‘demonic’.

Now, I’m not a psychotherapist, psychologist or psychiatrist. I’m not a therapist or social worker. But I did study extreme, fringe mental disorders and paraphilia as a part of my Psychology of Criminality studies at Loyola University. And yes, I got a degree in this focus area, along with English Literature.

In the intervening years since, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone that has studied the strange and macabre psychological stuff more than me— particularly when a legitimate disorder may explain certain shamanic, psychic and spiritual phenomenon. And the same is true in the inverse: when a certain spiritual truth may otherwise correlate to (if not cause) something seen as purely psychological.

One example? That there really is something to the claim of many serial killers that they blacked out during their crimes, and that they sensed a “dark passenger” of sorts in their minds that took over just ahead of the murders. Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, called this force “Factor X”, and depicted it in drawings as a winged cartoon frog. Ted Bundy would sign letters in his grandfather/ father’s name when stressed and in a fugue state (yah, you read that right— Ted Bundy was the product of incest), and it’s believed this is the “abuser alter personality” that took over during his murders.

The HBO documentary series Crazy, Not Insane highlights the life’s work of Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, who asserts that serial killers essentially all suffer from dissociative identity disorder (DID) and that, as a result, should never be put to death given that they are technically, clinically insane.

And while I agree with her diagnosis completely (and did in college, for the record, often arguing with my professors about it), I can also accommodate an additional spiritual phenomenon alongside the DID: that of severe trauma not just shattering the consciousness of the individual in a clinical sense, but also making them incredibly vulnerable to negative entities latching on and parasitically taking up residence in their energy bodies.

Accommodating paradox and allowing for multiple layers of truth to be possible is kind of part of my job description, and my sincere curiosity on the topic pushes me to attack this subject matter with an unusual level of neurodivergent glee.

So, when I tell you that I’ve never, ever heard of prosopometamorphopsia or its symptoms being classified as a neurological or psychological disorder, please note: that is incredibly aberrant. Like, noteworthy levels of aberrant.

I think I would have noticed the “I see demons” disease.

More aberrant? Despite a quick Google search claiming that the term prosopometamorphopsia was introduced by a researcher named Critchley in1953, every article I can find on the subject seems to be super recent. As in, the last year or so recent.

So, why the sudden interest in humans spontaneously seeing demon faces?

Or is it that this condition is exploding among the population in recent years?

“This is fine.”

Another possibility

Now, I’m not going to rehash the meat of the CNN article here (link is embedded further above), but I did want to include this screenshot (immediately above) from a computer-generated 2D picture of what the sufferers of this condition see.

According to one study participant featured in the article: “What people don’t understand from a [generated] picture is that the distorted face is moving, contorting, talking to you, making facial gestures”.

So, for just a moment, imagine that thing pictured above contorting and moving and talking to you for the purposes of this thought exercise. What are the first words, feelings and impressions that come to mind? How would you feel? What would you think?

Now, I understand that in our secular, hyper-materialistic world, the impulse is always to go to a medical diagnosis. And, while I believe in secular, objective truths— logic, medicine, science, rationality and so on— I am also a shaman.

I know. I’m as shocked as you are. But here we are.

So, while I don’t believe every one of these poor people suffering from PMO are seeing actual demons, I do think some of them might be.

As I’ve said before and will likely say again a million times, I believe that demonic possession is historically incredibly rare and incredibly specific. I don’t think every spurt of bad luck or injury or scary dreams or even scary spiritual experiences are a symptom of demonic possession, and I regularly deescalate this concern with worried clients.

[Side note: shame on the practitioners that plant this seed, telling their clients they’re possessed or seeing demons in a cynical ploy to sow fear and make money off of increasingly frequent and exponentially expensive sessions.]

What’s more: I’ve received my fair share of emails from people worried they’re possessed, and in every single case the prose in the note or syntax of verbal communication seemed to reveal to me, a non-expert, some very disordered thinking.

This, in turn, could be an indication of a larger mental health issue, such as schizophrenia. In these cases, I gently but firmly recommended that these individuals seek the assistance of a mental health professional, informing them that I was unable to assist them in any value-added way in my capacity as a shaman.

And no, that suggestion does not usually go over well, but it is the ethical thing to do.

All this said, I don't confuse the very rare and very scary phenomenon of demonic possession with other stuff, and I always air on the side of skeptical caution.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in it at all.

In fact— and as I wrote about HERE on Substack— it was an encounter with such a negative entity that pulled me out of my smug atheism and into a long period of questioning and exploring, ultimately resulting in TOTEM Readings and the very Substack you see before you now.

I also had a bit of an epic run-in with such an entity last year, which I outlined in some detail on Substack HERE. This recent experience was so pronounced and so upsetting that I briefly considered taking a break from client sessions and services.

One thing I didn’t share about last year’s experience?

The client that brought the MOTHER OF ALL ENTITIES into my work/ live space for what was supposed to be a rather banal tarot reading reported that she and her son had both started to see distorted, demonic faces in the place of the normal, human ones.

What she described to me in the front door of my house was exactly like what the sufferers of prosopometamorphopsia claim to see.

To. The. Letter.

And, in this one individual case, I can unequivocally assert that she wasn’t confused. In fact, I 100% believe that these visual disruptions were a symptom of true blue, old school, legit demonic possession. Not only did she think that and her family think that, but little old skeptical, rational me had to live with the not-so-chill aftermath of committing the “sin” of talking to her about it.

Longest week of my life.

And I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t still exhibiting a bit of hyper vigilance to this very day.

And hoarding a little bit of holy water in my bedside table.

I mean, when in Rome, right?

The Klippah

And, while I’ve never personally seen the type of distorted faces reported by this client or the sufferers of prosopometamorphopsia, I have twice seen what I believed to be physical evidence of potential demonic possession via a phenomenon called klippah in Kabbalah.

In Hebrew, the word klippah means "husk" or "shell", and is a reference to a film that obscures and obstructs the divine light from entering someone’s energy body. It’s believed that it acts a bit like plaque on our teeth or in our arteries, building up over time and with misguided, low-vibrational choices.

The first time I saw a klippah was on the eyes of a male client that came to see me for a tarot reading in my previous Chicago space. He showed up for his session very early and wearing a very strange suit for a Saturday afternoon non-work meeting. He even messaged me several times to see if I could see him sooner, pacing back and forth outside of my building’s main entrance.

When he sat down for his reading, he was utterly unconcerned with any of his tarot cards— a strange behavior for someone that spent $160 and traveled in from the suburbs. I mean, the parking in the West Loop alone is enough to make you really want to make that outing “worth it”, if you catch my drift.

During his reading, he didn't once even look at his cards sitting on the table.

Instead, he stared, unblinking, directly and intensely at me the entire time. Apropos of nothing, he robotically blurted out, “I used to have these dreams when I was a child. There was a lion in them. It was Aslan from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Did you ever have dreams like that?”

I looked at his eyes, seeing the light from my large windows catch something that looked like a smoldering ember set deep into his eye socket, muted a bit by something that appeared to be an oily cataracts.

I drew in a sharp breath.

You see, I had those dreams as a child. Almost nightly for several months in second grade, I traveled around with the lion Aslan from C.S. Lewis’ masterful Chronicles of Narnia book series. I never told anyone about these dreams. Ever. And it had been many, many decades since I last experienced them.

Of particular note here is the fact that Aslan is an obvious (though mystical) Christ figure in the stories, and here I was facing someone with an obvious spiritual parasite asking about it all.

Understanding that I wasn’t talking to a person that sat down for a reading— and was instead conversing with a demon talking to me through a person suit wearing a bad suit— I confidently shook my head, smiling calmly and said, “No. I never had those dreams. Do you want me to continue your reading?”

See: I grew up with malignant narcissism. I know how to not show my soft underbelly or give an entity what it wants when it counts!

He seemed caught off guard, and asked me a few more times if I was sure I never had those dreams. I kept denying and playing is super casual and super cool, finally standing up and inviting him to exit my building.

The second time I saw a klippah was a few years later.

I was standing at the meat counter of my old neighborhood’s Whole Foods to get some short ribs. Out of nowhere, every fiber in my body tensed and came to attention. I looked around and, just to my right, noticed a man staring unblinkingly at me.

And then I saw those damn smoldering coal-like embers set deep in his eyes behind a strange and oily film.

The signature of the klippah.

The scene was surreal: the butcher was increasingly raising his voice, trying to get the man’s attention while holding out a wrapped bit of meat, obviously confused about why this man was completely ignoring him and not taking his order.

The man had a wife or girlfriend with him, and she leaned across him and the counter to take the meat from the butcher and place it in their grocery cart, all the while talking to a partner that, for all intents and purposes, didn’t seem to acknowledge her existence.

Psychically, I could feel a tug on my consciousness. I would liken it to a cell signal trying to ping off of my psychic cell tower. I was managing, somehow, to prevent it from latching on.

“You in trouble, girl,” I thought to myself, as I dialed my psychic friend, Roger, and began whispering to him about the possessed man seemingly very interested in me.

I kept Roger on the phone with me (as though that was going to do anything to save me from a demon) and made my way to the check out line. I looked back, seeing the man approach down an aisle with his other half pushing the cart and talking to him.

I was struck by the fact that she didn’t seem to notice he was totally ignoring her. He was just staring, unblinking, right at me with an incredible degree of focus.

Now, as a married woman, I can tell you: if I’ve been talking for the last several minutes and my husband doesn’t acknowledge that I’m making any mouth sounds, I’m going to confront the situation.

But she didn’t. And that part of it was almost more strange than his inhumane movements, glowing eye things or strange fixation on me. Had the demon managed to bespell her, too? Create a kind of alternate reality in which she was carrying on a perfectly pleasant conversation with her other half?

Fuck. Right?

I managed to scurry out of the Whole Foods with my groceries in tow, talking to poor Roger the whole way home. I never saw the strange man again, but I did keep my head on a swivel at Whole Foods from then on.

So, what’s really going on?

So, what’s really going on here?

The short answer? I don’t know.

I’m just asking some questions.

The modern tendency to pathologize and marginalize the potential lived experiences of a spiritual nature as mental or medical disorders is inherently interesting to me. And, I think, worth having a dialogue about.

After all: most people have had some kind of a spiritual experience. They’ve had a prophetic dream, felt the presence of a departed loved one, or lived in a “haunted house” as a child. These experiences are so ubiquitous and generally accepted as true that I’m always a bit puzzled by why we don’t take more of this stuff at face value.

I mean, I used to do the mental gymnastics to explain away psychic phenomenon, too, and the best answer I can come up with is that it’s kind of like being in a cult. A secular cult, yes. But a cult nonetheless.

And when I saw the CNN article about “demon face-seeing syndrome”, it immediately conjured the famous lines from Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 in my mind:

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Said another way?

“You’re not seeing demons. You’re not seeing the very things described the very way of nearly every single ancient culture across continents and epochs.

You’re just sick. Deranged. Confused.

The things you’re seeing and hearing and experiencing are little more than the distorted projections of some deeper malady, likely the result of having an emotionally-distant mother. Or a severed neural pathway. Or an imbalance in the chemicals that manage the function in your brain.”

Or something.

Now, I’m not saying I know anything with any certainty. But, as a thought exercise, it’s pretty illuminating to consider which of these two possibilities seems more straightforward: demon face-seeing syndrome or just seeing demons.

You know, like the very scientific and very logical Occam's razor might suggest: if you have two competing ideas to explain the same phenomenon, you should prefer the simpler one.

Personally, I’ve done a major 180 on all things spiritual and skeptical in my life. I used to think the primitive cultures talking and writing of angels and demons and omens and portents were just uneducated, superstitious troglodytes.

Now, I see it a bit differently. In fact, I see it a lot differently. I now think many ancient cultures simply wrote and talked about what they actually experienced, perhaps lacking the language to describe advanced technologies or other species outside of the awe and wonder of what we would consider “magic”.

But, as I’ve said many times, magic is just technology we don’t understand yet.

My new concern? That the very recent increase in mainstream news stories exploring the condition known as prosopometamorphopsia is a side effect of a growing phenomenon— one that they feel is big or significant enough to address on the landing page of CNN.

Which then begs the question: why are more people seeing demon faces all of a sudden?

Buckle up.

If the mainstream news headlines are any indication of where things are going, it really feels like it’s going to be a year for the record books.

-Rachel