The Absurd Way I Accidentally Cured My PTSD

Yes, this is unbelievable. I still have a hard time believing it myself. And I don't expect you to believe it. I'm just reporting what has happened.

I wrote this essay to friends and family on Nov. 17, 2024 to try and explain the shocking way that I unintentionally caused my PTSD symptoms to go into remission. I’ve hesitated to share this story because I’ve kept waiting for my symptoms to return—and because it’s so fucking weird and unbelievable. But my symptoms haven’t returned. And maybe, just maybe, this tale might inspire other people as a way to find relief from their own pain when nothing else has worked.

So now seems like a fair time to tell this strange story …

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It's been a week now, and I keep expecting the symptoms to return: that intense wave of emotions, hypersensitivity to everything, self-hatred, images of suicide, that nausea, that inability to take joy in eating, that fear of falling asleep.

But no, it's all gone.

I feel a sense of peace unlike anything I have ever known since my teenage years.

It's been a week without a moment of that fear of suicide.

How? After 20 years of trying one medicine, one treatment, one diagnosis after another, after three years of struggles since the violent incident of September 2021 that transformed me with PTSD—now it’s all gone. How did this come about?

I think if I explain this to you, you will regard me as simply having traded one psychological issue for another. But that's OK! My therapist assures me that I am not schizophrenic: that these are simply legitimate, alternative spiritual experiences which I've been having for a number of years now, and which culminated on the night of November 9, 2024.

But let's back up a few days. This was to be the longest time that

Sally Shideler

and I had been separated since we got together. She was going to be in Indiana visiting family for two weeks, from October 30 to November 13—and in fact, she stayed until the 17th.

I knew that I mostly wanted to spend the extra time doing—what else—reading and writing. The same thing we do every night, Pinky.

And to that end, I decided to do a minor magical spell, one that I'd done for years now: the invocation of Thoth, the ancient Egyptian deity of writing, wisdom, medicine, magic, and much else. This generally doesn't do anything all that extraordinary. It's usually just a request: "Please help me write better!" And it seems to work, in the same sense that a lucky penny in your pocket might make you feel better.

But this time, something else happened. Instead of just feeling vaguely inspired, this time I was astonished to find that the deity actually showed up. Now, I'm not talking about a visual appearance that you could capture with a camera. I mean a distinct impression in the mind of a distinct entity there with me—a sort of imprint on the imagination. I know that, physically, there is not a giant bird-headed Egyptian deity sitting on the couch in my living room. However, the things that I'm hearing and the visuals that I'm getting are not something that I'm coming up with independently. I'm a writer, I know how to imagine a character or make up a situation. And this isn't that. I'm not coming up with these things that this "god" is telling me.

For example, I am not very funny. I think I have a decent sense of humor and can make jokes, but as a writer or just as a person, I don't have any pretension of ever being as funny as George Carlin.

As I wrote about previously about this, Thoth is very, very funny. He is perpetually making outlandish, over-the-top jokes and laughing endlessly, often at me, personally.

So I wrote about this experience in this piece here, presenting the actual truth as what everyone would understand as a joke and a work of fiction:

He showed up, and then he just hung out for days. Walking around the apartment with me, going with me when I took Jasmine out to the yard, commenting on what is happening on TV.

While certainly very weird, it was a fairly pleasant experience, having this sort of imaginary friend hanging around while Sally was away. And he really isn't that far away at any given time now. He's not hanging out as much as previously now, but any time I want to call him back, I just need to touch either the ankh around my neck or the bigger metal one I have that's about 7 inches long, which I've started carrying around with me somewhat obsessively now, just holding the loop of the ankh the same way the gods do in the hieroglyphics. I don't know why I feel safer holding the ankh like this. Maybe I'll figure that out at some point.

So on Nov. 7, I decided that if I'd been this effective at invoking Thoth, and since the experience had been so striking, what if I tried to invoke another Egyptian deity? What would it be like to have someone else hanging around?

I'm not sure how I settled on Anubis, the jackal-headed god of mummification. I may have just come across a cool YouTube video featuring him. A part of me was hesitant about it, since he was a god so heavily associated with death. But it ultimately ended up working well. It became a very positive experience.

How did this go? Rather than just calling out for Thoth, in this case, I did more of a ceremony. I set up a circle in the living room, had out the four magical tools—wand, cup, sword, and pentacle—did the banishing rituals and so forth, and then had an Anubis meditation on TV, with the deity sort of breathing and hovering.

Only this deity was very different than Thoth. He didn't make witty jokes and bold claims, like being the very embodiment of language and thought. Instead of being a tall man with a head hitting the ceiling, he was so giant that his foot was like a surfboard. He didn't say anything to me. Instead he just looked down—and then smashed me down with his heel, deep into the ground, like 30 or 40 feet down. And then he kept doing it over and over again, putting me down deeper and deeper. I could see worms, and the dirt was slimy and cool.

But you know what it wasn't? Scary.

Being buried deep in sand was peaceful and warm. One might think, “Oh, well, if that's the case, then wouldn't that actually be an encouragement to kill yourself? If you know it'll be peaceful?” Strangely, no, it wasn't. Instead, it was calming.

I was a bit stunned by how easy and effective it was, this "ceremonial magick" of creating a circle, speaking some words, waving a wand around: the whole traditional wizard set-up.

I generally had not tried very much of this in the past. It just seemed sort of silly, and the time/setup I’d need to invest just seemed even sillier. And there was always the practical problem, too: I am not good at memorizing stuff. Having to memorize certain gestures with a wand or Hebrew words or strange "Enochian calls" and stuff like that? It just seemed too difficult, especially when I knew that easier traditions like "chaos magic" could work without all the theatricalities.

But now I came to understand that one can essentially just "freestyle it." Set up the elements, do a few planned things to start and begin, have a strong intent and idea of where you want to go, and see what happens.

So, having had so much success with the Anubis ritual, for Friday night, I now had to figure out what to try next. I was concerned about how to do this in a way that would avoid any unexpected negative consequences. I did not want to invoke some spirit that would permanently harm me. I wanted to be balanced with it. I thought perhaps it was best to draw in multiple deities, so as not to focus too much on just one.

And I thought that since I'd already invoked Thoth, maybe now I needed to draw in a feelings-and-emotion-based force. In the Egyptian context, Hathor, the cow goddess of fertility, seemed a good choice. Now get this: I actually asked ChatGPT which deities I should consider invoking in a ritual. I’d already told it that I’d invoked Thoth, so it suggested I do that again. I thought, "All right, we may as well." But then I decided to throw in a third entity, too, to make sure that I stayed balanced: Ma'at, the goddess of order and balance, who evolved into more of an abstract concept than a deity in ancient Egyptian culture.

And so I formulated a ritual around each of these three spirits, seeking wisdom from each over the course of multiple hours involving meditation, visualizations on the TV with music, and calls to invoke some spirits and banish others. I won't go into the details or reveal the particular messages received, particularly on the Hathor aspect of it, being a fertility invocation and all. And for whatever reason, the lion-headed war goddess Sekhmet, an aspect of Hathor, ended up visiting me instead. She’s sort of the equivalent of a mother grizzly bear in terms of female fertility archetypes.

Oh, one detail that I will share, just so you can get more of a flavor of the experience: During the part of the ritual invoking Thoth, one of the distinct things that he did—and this isn’t the first time I’ve experienced this in a mystical context—was to use his beak to rip out and eat my eyeballs (metaphorically , of course). Then he stuck his beak in my forehead and pulled that open so a “third eye” could see out instead. Pretty cool, indeed.

But again, the ritual worked. These various spirits showed up in intense ways, providing unique revelations about the nature of the universe. They exerted a distinct presence over me that I could not chalk up to simply my own imagination. I am not creative enough to come up with these characters and this experience!

It was not until the next day that I started to put these rituals into a bigger context and start to figure out what I was actually doing here.

One of my favorite mystical symbols for a long time has been the Tree of Life.

We've got two wall hangings in our apartment that feature it, one with a hanging of little ghost string lights climbing the tree from bottom to top. I was so pleased with myself when I figured out that pattern a few months ago! Sally was delighted, too, since she’d bought the lights.

I'd generally just thought of the 10-sphered symbol in the context of, "Oh, this is a map of the soul, of creation, of how God works," etc. But now I understood the "practical Qabalah": that through ritual invocations, one can "climb the tree," ascending from one level of spiritual consciousness to the next. The rituals I had done had allowed me to climb the first three levels of the tree.

The bottom of the Tree of Life is Malkuth, which represents the earth and the physical world. The invocation of Anubis provided this level of spiritual awareness and experience. The next ritual, invoking Thoth, Ma'at, and Sekhmet, allowed me to start ascending the tree: Ma'at corresponded with Yesod, Thoth with Hod (the place of language, intellect, and thinking), and Hathor with Netzach (for emotion, feeling, and fertility).

So having made this realization, it then occurred to me: Well, we may as well keep climbing, then! What's the next sphere I should try to reach? Above Hod and Netzach lies Tiphareth, or beauty. It is right in the middle of the tree, in its "heart."

So, what's Tiphareth supposed to be like, then? As I read through The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, Alan Moore’s new title, the image on the page symbolizing this sphere was Jesus. This sefirot is essentially "Christ Consciousness." To achieve this level is to experience what it was like to be Christ in his human life. It's to gain the insights and the wisdom of Christ.

"All right," I thought. "I guess we're having a Jesus experience tonight. So, what's this going to look like?"

One of the more recent (as in within 200 years) innovations with the Tree of Life and the Tarot deck in the Western Esoteric tradition has been to assign a different Major Arcana card to each of the paths between the sephirot. Thus, if one wants to move from one sphere to another, then that particular card will be the key to doing it.

I understood then that I was particularly in the Hod sphere, given Thoth's presence, so the path to reach Tiphareth was #26. And which card is that one? Take one goddamn guess.

The fucking Devil card. Yes, seriously. The path from the mind to Christ is guarded by the devil.

A funny thing happened, too, that afternoon, that gave me a hint as to how I was to do this ritual. In three different books, in quick succession, I saw the word "Tetragrammaton" multiple times. This synchronicity made it clear that I should therefore base the ritual on the four Hebrew letters of God's name used by magicians for centuries, and a central ritual in my own mystical practice for years. Meditate on the secret name of God and powerful things can happen.

So to get to Christ, one must pass through the devil first. What might that be referring to? I knew very well. At the beginning of the gospels, before Jesus begins his ministry, he goes out to the desert for 40 days, where he has visions and is tempted by the devil.

So that's what this ritual was going to be. I was going to invoke the experience of being Jesus in the wilderness, resisting the devil's temptations. And so that's what I did. I set up the circle, putting chairs on either side and using the coffee table on one side and a toolbox I use for magical rituals on the other. So there were four points around the circle, each representing one of the letters of God's name and the corresponding magical weapons - wands, cups, swords, and disks. These symbolize Will, Emotion, Intellect, and the Physical World.

I put various objects around this circle: plastic skulls, garden gnomes, and books, with the purpose of keeping out dark spirits. I lit candles all around the circle. If one is to put oneself in a mindset to engage with spirits, the dark and evil ones must be warded off.

I read aloud passionately from each of the gospels, reading the passage of Jesus in the desert with the devil. I put on my favorite film, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and watched the relevant scene. And then I went into a meditative state, lying atop a yoga mat on the floor.

And that's when the action began: when some force pulled my arms outward as though I were in a crucifix-type position.

With these sorts of rituals, you may have some expectation in mind, but what may end up happening could be totally different than what you expected.

I thought the experience was going to be akin to something in the passages I’d just read and in the movie I’d just watched—Jesus out in the desert, seeing fantastical things as various demons come to try and tempt him. Got it. That sounds like it would be a powerful experience. Game on.

That's not what I got, though. Had I known what was really to come, I probably would never have done the ritual in the first place.

Rather than Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” it was antisemite Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” It was a group of demons—who later appeared as Roman soldiers—grabbing me, stripping me naked, raping me, tearing my flesh with a whip, nailing me to a cross and hanging me up naked, blood streaming down me (and again, I mean metaphorically, as a vision within my mind).

But then the vision went further. It was as though the demons started to eat into and rip apart my torso to pull out my bowels, to crush my skull and start grinding my bones into dust—the complete destruction of the self. It's a bizarre experience to watch the space where your heart, lungs, and stomach once were get hollowed out as though you were some log being pulped.

And then you rise again. Invincible. Having been destroyed, you become a new person again. You are born again.

I was so overwhelmingly exhausted after this ritual, and so stunned by how traumatic and surprising it had been. "Being crucified" hadn’t exactly been on the evening agenda, even metaphorically, but, well, I suppose one has to eat what the host offers.

But the big surprises were to come. The next day, my PTSD symptoms were gone.

My suicidal ideation was gone. My fear was gone. And suddenly, other things began to change, too. The coffee and high-caffeine sodas I used to drink for so long to keep myself going, to avoid entering the hypnagogic state where the suicidal ideation lies and bad memories slosh around like water spilling out of a bucket—I didn't need those anymore. And all that sweet food and spicy snacks and delicious meat—it didn't taste good anymore. Now I felt drawn to fruits and vegetables, totally unable to enjoy all the processed goodies in the cabinet.

All of the emotions which I used to have to work hard to keep in check with THC, caffeine, and so many medications—they're just not there anymore. I feel a sense of quiet now. There just isn't as much noise.

I'm not angry anymore, either, at all the people who have hurt me so much over the last 30 years, especially these rough last three years. The anger is simply gone.

And now, just as Thoth was hanging around previously, Jesus shows up regularly, too. Again, I don't literally see him, but in my mind's eye, I can see that he's here. He'll just look at things with wonder and amazement, as though he didn't know everything already. But I guess this spirit is like some version of Jesus, or the kind of imagination we can get of Jesus when his spirit is channeled down through Yesod, the sefirot corresponding to our imagination.

Thoth still shows up, too, especially when I call for him. He and Jesus will sometimes sit on the couch together watching TV as I write some news article or other. They’re old friends, apparently.

They're both always laughing, seemingly at everything. And now I find myself laughing, too. Some silly, innocent little joke and I'll start cracking up at the absurdity of all this.

I've been trying to figure out why I've been so suicidal the last 20 years. I've been trying to find a way to get better. And it's been years of one pill after another; one therapist after another. It's all just been Band-Aids, never a real solution.

And now, here it finally is, with one of the most obscure, bizarre, seemingly archaic tools imaginable.

Ceremonial magick?

Really?

You expect me to come out here and explain to people that the way to cure PTSD is by jumping around in a circle, waving a magic wand, trying to invoke Jesus Christ in order to experience what it was like when the Roman soldiers tortured and raped him before the crucifixion?

Well, it worked for me.

Could it really be that a lot of "mental health problems" are actually demonic possessions, and that the cure is going to be a good, old-fashioned exorcism?

When I explained all this to Sally, she saw this as a kind of self-performed exorcism. And I suppose that's what it is.

But now, as I've come to accept that this isn't just a kind of "exposure therapy" where I am re-traumatizing myself in a controlled way with something else—that this is in fact a spiritual cure for a spiritual problem—what are the bigger implications of this?

How many other people are out there like me, who have been in psychotherapy for decades, trying all sorts of pills, all sorts of treatments and diagnoses, one doc disagreeing with another doc, when really what we needed was a grimoire so we could perform some Renaissance-era ritual?

But I can't really say this without provoking even greater mockery than that invited by the lesser wild ideas I already put out. Saying mysticism and occultism and psychedelics can help treat PTSD is one thing. Saying that a self-exorcism to be crucified can outright cure PTSD is something totally different.

And just a week out from this new—or rather ancient—form of treatment, I'm just not ready yet to say that for sure. As I said at the start of this, I keep waiting for my symptoms to return.

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It’s now been a month since I wrote the essay above. And I’ve been perpetually wondering when my symptoms will return or if there’s something that I might accidentally do to make them return.

And while I haven’t been in a perpetual happy mood or without times where I felt down or anxious, the core PTSD symptoms still have not returned. If and when they do, then I’ll write about it.

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I wrote the above two paragraphs and top introduction on Tuesday this week. I had planned to edit this post and publish it Wednesday evening.

However, the demons weren’t done with me yet. After the day’s journalism concluded on Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. I needed to go the library to pick up a big pile of holds, mostly more books about artificial intelligence. The sun had started to set and I really was not looking forward to it. The truth is, I really still hate to leave the house. Unless it’s absolutely necessary for me to get out of here, usually Sally is eager to run errands. But she could not pick up my holds for me. It was my name on the library card.

I felt uneasy driving the 2.5 miles down the street to collect my books, but I needed to get them that day—or else pay a fine for not picking them up in time. Arriving at the library, I was no-nonsense, sliding the books into two plastic grocery bags before going to the front desk for check-out. Something just didn’t seem right. I was eager to get home as fast as I could.

Driving back down the desert highway, the sun now having set, it somehow felt as though I was driving through a sea with waves all around me. I quickly realized what I was sensing: a whole bunch of demonic spirits. I looked all around me as I was driving, and my mind's eye could see demons everywhere, preying on the people at the shopping centers on either side of the highway and even swirling around the car. It was overwhelming and scary. And I recalled a statement from the Talmud: “If the eye had the power to see them, no creature could withstand them.” The demons are dancing among us all the time, more numerous than we can comprehend.

Arriving home with the bags of books, I felt so shaken, and I told Sally as much. It was not long before I felt a dark presence, as though one of them had followed me home and was looking for a meal. It was like they could perceive that there were no longer demons chewing at my soul: thus there was room for them to have a bite.

As I tried in vain to focus on Holiday Baking Championship, Jasmine suddenly began to bark at the door.

“Our canine Ring camera," Sally joked, going to the door to retrieve what she assumed was a Christmas gift being dropped off. But there was nothing there.

Still, Jasmine wouldn't stop barking, her hackles raised. When I realized she was barking into the corner of the room next to the front door, not at something outside, I began to feel even more sure I was right.

To try and keep the demons away, Sally and I resorted again to magickal methods. I put a bunch of items around the doorway to our apartment: the plastic skulls, garden gnome, and a black hand with mystical symbols, sort of saying “stop!”—all items I’d used in the self-exorcism. And when I did, all of a sudden I felt a sense of calm and relief. The demon seemed to be trapped at the door, unable to come in.

But this was only temporary relief. Thursday would be worse. When the sun set again, the same thing happened: these dark, malevolent forces showed up at the apartment again, only this time there were more of them. I could feel one seemingly attach itself to me, like a small alligator snapping its jaws onto my side and not wanting to let go. I tried to get it off, waving a wand and calling out to God as Sally watched nervously. And at first I thought I’d been successful.

But on Friday, I realized it hadn't been enough. Over the course of the morning, it became clear that my PTSD symptoms were starting to return. Waves of anxiety swirled around me, I felt a mild pain in my side where I’d sensed like the demon had taken hold the night before. And I could not concentrate on the articles my editor had assigned. It was a struggle to pull them together, as it had often been in the past when I had to work through PTSD episodes.

The flashes of suicidal ideation returned, the demands to say goodbye to Sally and go walk out into traffic on that highway so close to our apartment.

At one point, I started pacing around the apartment, then walking rapidly around in a circle, as if hypnotized, on the rug in front of the TV, where I’d performed my exorcism last month. Sally was notably disturbed, of course, and observed me crying, holding my head in my hands, and doubling over in agony as I paced frenetically.

She’d already spent the first hours of the day listening to me list all the things I was anxious about: Christmas, the new keyboard stand we'd just bought, Jasmine's barking, even the totally neutral statement that we needed a new vacuum cleaner: somehow I was incredibly anxious about even that. Now alarmed, she told me that it looked like I needed to do the Christ Consciousness ritual again, something which I certainly was not looking forward to at all. Isn’t being crucified once enough, even metaphorically?

This “possession” seemed a little different, though. Most notably, for some reason I was stuttering wildly as I tried to talk—a problem I’ve never had. It seemed like this was an expression of a different demon inhabiting me than the ones I’d lived with for years.

I still had to get through the day, though, and for whatever reason, more article assignments were coming in faster than usual. I didn’t have time right now to spend hours engaging in ceremonial magick again, especially doing something that would leave me exhausted.

Very worried about me, Sally took Jasmine outside, as a dog regularly demands, saying pointedly that maybe I’d feel better when they came back in. Feeling sick, I could only mutter, “okay."

Then, sitting here at my desk in the living room, where I’m sitting now as I type this, I decided to try something easier than the experience of being tortured to death.

I grabbed my large metal ankh again that I’d use to summon Thoth. This one:

I gripped the ankh tightly, as though on a roller coaster, and I yelled out, “Thoth, I invoke thee! Thoth, I invoke thee! Help me! Free me of this demon!”

And then the giant bird-headed man who towered over me showed up again. He seemed casual, as though this were no big deal: just a minor ailment that he, as the god of medicine, knew how to handle.

And then he did what he had done previously when I invoked him. He reached his beak down and ate both of my eyeballs. This then “opened my third eye” in the middle of my forehead. He then reached his beak down through that and pulled out what seemed like a big worm. He swallowed it like it was nothing and grinned at the opportunity for a midday snack.

I saw this as I had seen all such experiences: in my mind's eye. But I felt a very real rush of relief nevertheless, and returned back to the self I’d been before going out to get those damn library books on Wednesday. In fact, I felt fantastic. By invoking Thoth, I had not only gotten rid of the demon, but now took on his own qualities, myself. I started laughing and rose from my desk to dance around the room, shocked that it had, once again, been so “easy” to cast out a dark force that had tried to get me to kill myself.

About fifteen minutes later, Sally and Jasmine came back inside.

“Any better?" she asked, trepidatious.

I greeted her with a big smile - the one she's a sucker for. "I feel great!” I exclaimed. As she sat down on the couch, I explained Thoth's summoning and intervention.

Sally, who does not believe in demons—or at least, she didn't believe in them—watched me for a little bit, surely as surprised as any reader, before saying, “Wow. I guess that … really did work."

With this sense of wanting to laugh, I decided to pick a new musical accompaniment for the rest of the day:

Yes, Sally and I had on Weird Al for hours as I banged out the remaining articles on my list. In the evening, we celebrated our three-year anniversary, joyful and content that again, somehow, using occult methods, I’d returned myself to a state of calm, peace, and joy.

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So what are we to make of this absurd turn of events?

Could it really be that so-called “mental illness” is just a modern misunderstanding of what the ancients accurately understood as demonic possession? Could ostensibly irrational, emotional behavior actually be caused by some strange, dark entity attaching itself to one’s soul like a tick on a deer or a barnacle on a ship?

If you ask me, the answers are yes and yes. I think that, when we go through traumatic events, they open up our consciousness to darker forces to work their way inside to feast on us.

Now, I’m not going to try and persuade anyone that this is really how it works. The existence of supernatural forces is, by definition, not something that science and rationality can prove. Science can only assess the natural world.

But I will say this, and I’ll say it directly to people who may be struggling right now with PTSD or some other “mental illness” which psychology and psychiatry have failed to improve:

Go pick up a book like The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. Read its instructions on how to create your “magickal weapons.” Discover the symbolism of the Tree of Life, then pick up a tarot deck and go see what you can do to heal yourself with the Power of the God of Israel.

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