I have found that the best place to begin talking about the supernatural is to start at the beginning. I don’t mean at the big bang, or the foundational beginning of time, space and matter. I mean at the beginning of written history, which contains backgrounds in oral traditions. Even if we travel back to some amazing time in ancient Sumer and watch the Apkallu teach the native peoples who called themselves the Sag-gig-ga, or Black-Headed Ones, how to perform agriculture, we still would be asking the question, “Where is this supernatural world?” Material scientists will argue it is not testable, and therefore it does not exist. As if something untestable concludes its non-existence. We know this world beyond our senses must exist, and we find document after document of culture after culture trying to parse what it is and how it operates. The British Museum contains 1000 stone tablets recovered from the Ashurbanipal library dealing with medical records. Of these, 660 deal with exorcism in medicinal treatment.

Since we began with ancient Sumer, let’s tease this out a little bit more. In stone tablets written in cuneiform, we have some rather interesting tales regarding how they saw this life and all beyond it. These ancients’ viewed giving someone the “Evil Eye” on par with murder or other serious criminal offense that would end in the offender’s death. What is the “Evil Eye,”1, and why does it spring up in these ancient documents? These are great questions, and it comes down to the reality that the Sumerians viewed magic just as real as planting seeds in a field for a crop. Magic and the mundane existed in the minds of these people as coexisting.² For the Sumerians, the existence of gods and supernatural forces were just as part of life as the reality of their sexagesimal mathematics, also known as base 60.

This leads us to acknowledge these ancient peoples had developed a worldview of both the seen and unseen realms. Besides a list of deities and sages, the Sumerians had classifications of occult entities which prowled about causing mayhem and mischief. For example, Lamashtu, a demoness according to modernity, had a murderous pathology that sought out the lives of infants. There was a developed ritual and idolatry associated with keeping babies safe from the harm of this malicious supernatural creature. Therefore, the Sumerian parent of a baby would put up a statue of Pazuzu, the once husband to Lamashtu. The ritual would scare off Lamashtu and prevent her from harming their baby. In his demonic grotesqueness, this once spouse would chase away the potential harm that could end in the loss of life of the infant.

We have surveyed some of the Sumerian beliefs in a supernatural unseen realm to showcase ancient cultures’ historical evidence and practice some form of demonology and exorcism. This series will continue to shape and explain why a healthy view of the unseen realm is tantamount to spiritual development, and dare I say, spiritual warfare. Especially during these days rife with technological, psychological, and scientific observations that might, in fact, demonstrate that not only is there an unseen realm that exists, but it is also aware of us too.

This view of a world invisible to our eyes is not isolated to one culture; indeed, it is a historical fact that cultures worldwide hold to a supernatural worldview in which entities exist outside of this three-dimensional space. From the cultures that make up the Asian people to the European, Middle Eastern and the Americas, they have a deep history where things we cannot see are very much part of their reality. Therefore it should be of no surprise that we will find it in the Torah, the Writings and the Prophets of the people of Israel and their history to modern-day followers of a first-century Galilean prophet who is God and man.

In the Second Temple Period, we will camp and investigate the realm of the unseen. We will examine and recover the Biblical worldview in the entities that make up the Heavenly Host. This is where texts found at Qumran in the late 1940s, the Pseudepigrapha, the Deuterocanon, and the Holy Bible itself will bear witness and historians that the Time of Jesus the Christ and the early Church understood there is more to this world than we can see.