Christ the Bridegroom and the Demonic Monster

Metropolitan Athanasios giving confession next to the icon of the Bridegroom

 By Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol

I remember something that took place in Cyprus. When I first came to Cyprus from Mount Athos, in the first years, a teacher of transcendental meditation and yoga came to me. As a yoga teacher he was initiated into all these delusions of Satan along with Sophiology and Islam. He was in England, traveled around, and was a student of great gurus and various other delusional teachers of that time.

After a meeting with Elder Sophrony in Essex, his whole being was shaken. He was a Cypriot. He came to Cyprus with his wife and they confessed and laid the foundations of a spiritual life. But he had many demonic energies within him. Satan fought against him hard, with many thoughts and with a hardness of heart. This is because meditation - or "devilization" as Elder Paisios jokingly called it - is based on human egoism, arrogance, selfish ambition. So he cultivated arrogance inside him for years. He was a teacher, he had his own school with hundreds of students where he taught them meditation, esoteric philosophy and more. So there was a battle in his reasoning, in his thoughts and he could not allow his heart to be crushed to repent. He came to the monastery, he confessed, but he was fighting. As I was confessing, I had next to me an icon of the Bridegroom Christ, this modern icon which is the Bridegroom Christ with the red cloak and the rod in his hand. I found the icon in the monastery, would light a candle before it, and people would confess.

Saint Paisios the Athonite on Deluders and the Deluded

"While evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deluding and being deluded."(1)

Regarding the Delusion of the Pentecostals

- Elder, the things that are said by those who go over to the Pentecostals – that is, about seeing visions, speaking in tongues etc. – are those things from their own imagination, or from demonic influences?

- They are energies of demonic influences; because when they go over to the Pentecostals and are re-baptized, they are actually disregarding, denying Holy Baptism: “I confess one Baptism for the remission of sins” as the Creed declares – in which case, they un-baptize themselves and become susceptible to demonic influences and then they jabber-jabber, supposedly in tongues. “It is the Holy Spirit of Pentecost talking” they tell us. But it is not the Holy Spirit; it is a whole mess of unclean spirits. What tongues? They are merely uttering gibberish, which not even they can comprehend. They even record that gibberish and then produce statistics and reach conclusions: “That tongue has so many ‘hallelujahs’ in it, and there are so many in the other tongue.” Well, it’s to be expected, among so much jabber-jabber, you will surely hear something that resembles the word ‘hallelujah’ in one of the languages of the world! And so you can see, while it is something demonic, they actually believe that demonism to be the energy of the Holy Spirit, and that they are supposedly experiencing what the Apostles had experienced on the day of the Pentecost! Blasphemies are the things they believe, which is why they become demon-possessed.