The Devil in the Red Rocks
A personal story of temptation, fear, and God's love
The devil has two ways of ensnaring us: through temptation and through fear. Sometimes, he will combine both to get what he wants. When he tempts you, he will play on your greatest desire. When he uses fear, he will literally try to scare you “out of your mind.”
I discovered that first-hand when I lived in Sedona, AZ, more than 20 years ago. (Warning: This story is not for the faint of heart.)
I was a passionate New Ager and working as a Tarot reader at Spirit Central [name changed], a hub for all things New Age in the middle of town. The owner rented out small rooms to 12–15 psychic readers and took a cut of their fees.
Near the front entrance was a lectern with a thick binder that contained all the headshots, bios, and “job descriptions”/specialties of the readers so that visitors could pick who to get a reading from. My room was on the second floor, next to the room of L., a middle-aged, witchy-looking woman with a pretty snippy demeanor. I got along great with most of my fellow readers, but L. didn’t seem to be a fan of mine. Frankly, she scared me a little.
“You’re right to be scared,” said R., one of my colleagues, a stocky Navajo with a cute smile and pearly little teeth. He was married to C., a tall blonde beauty and also a reader at Spirit Central. Everybody loved R. because he was so mild-mannered and sweet.
“L. is a witch, and a pretty dark one at that, so be careful when you’re dealing with her,” he warned. He said she was jealous that I, the new kid on the block, was obviously popular with clients and got more readings than she did.
R. recommended I should smudge my room with sage every day and visualize a pillar of white light around myself—two methods of spiritual protection every practicing New Ager knows and uses.*
I gratefully nodded. What a good friend he was, to look out for me like that.
By the way, by “practicing” New Ager, I mean someone actively engaged in New Age practices like channeling, automatic writing, mediumship, Ouija boards; divination like Tarot, palm, and psychic readings; spiritual exercises to “raise your vibration” or to develop your psychic powers, like Silva Mind Control; Reiki healing; astral travel; and many, many other things.
The whole point of all of this was to go beyond… beyond your mere physicality and plain humanity, beyond your five senses, beyond ordinary paths to knowledge and wisdom. The goal was to elevate yourself, to “ascend” to your rightful place as the godlike spiritual being you were meant to be.
We were taught that the astral plane—the unseen dimension separated from ours only by a thin “veil”—was filled with spirits of every kind, so as you opened yourself up, you’d necessarily encounter negative entities, and when that happened, you just had to deal with it, in a “You win some, you lose some” kind of deal. Of course, the truth was that 100% of those spirit contacts were of the demonic kind—angels won’t talk to you, there’s no such thing as “ascended masters,” and the dead are inaccessible. What New Agers consider “good spirits” are just the smart demons who are better at pretending.
But I digress; back to the story. Every passing week, the situation with L. seemed to get worse and I got more afraid. One time, R. told me he’d seen her wave her hands in strange gestures over my picture in the binder outside. He was convinced she was trying to put a curse on me.
Now, this may sound ludicrous to you if you’re, say, an HR manager sitting in a corporate office on the East Coast, but for us in the New Age community (and especially in Sedona), things like ghosts, spirits, fairies, UFOs, past-life memories, OBEs, manifestation, etc. were as natural as breathing. Nobody doubted the existence of true magick and witchcraft; in fact, I knew quite a few practitioners.
Needless to say, with all that hostility directed at me, my anxiety level went through the roof. I had trouble sleeping and was trying to avoid L. at all costs, a move that R. approved of. He seemed really worried about me.
“You need to protect yourself,” he urged me repeatedly. One day, he looked at me thoughtfully and added, “You know, if you want me to, I can take care of this for you.”
I shuddered. What did he mean? It sounded dangerous; I wasn’t comfortable with that. “No thanks,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
It was a custom among my colleagues and me to give each other readings to pass the time when business was slow at Spirit Central. I’d had readings from most of the others, but not from R. So when he one day offered me one of his Native American “spirit animal readings,” I happily agreed.
We sat down together on one of the small balconies in the rear of the building. R. was just telling me that my spirit was that of a deer when something happened.
As I was steadily looking at him, his face changed. It was as if his face was erased and replaced or overlaid by another, glowing face. His voice changed too, becoming smoother and softer.
“There is a commitment to be made,” purred the entity. “It’s a very small commitment, but if you agree, you can have anything you want.”
I gasped. YOU CAN HAVE ANYTHING YOU WANT. Thanks to my Christian upbringing, I knew that line. It was what Satan** had said to Jesus during his temptation in the desert. To this day, I tell New Agers and Christians alike, “If you ever hear anyone say this to you, I don’t care who it is, turn and run.”
And that’s what I did. Shaking, I used a flimsy excuse to hightail it out of there.
In the hallway, I passed the readers’ mail slots and saw there was something in mine. It was a prayer card, Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” This was significant because Psalm 23 was my “family psalm,” the one that each member of my German family, including myself, traditionally memorized and recited for their confirmation. It was like a reminder from God saying, “Don’t worry, little one, I will protect you.” (Interestingly, when I asked around who had put the card there, everyone denied that they had.)
I went home and feverishly prayed for the New Age equivalent of discernment… and the Holy Spirit mercifully responded. All of a sudden, it hit me that L. “the witch” had actually never done anything to me… all I had to go on was R.’s stories about her evil intentions and what she was going to do to me.
It was as if scales fell from my eyes. I finally realized the truth: R. was the evil one, and if I—in my fear and confusion that he himself kept stoking—had taken him up on his “generous” offer to hurt L. on my behalf, I would have basically sold my soul to the devil. (I guess the direct offer during the reading came because I seemed reluctant to fall into that trap.)
The next day, I visited L. in her room and struck up a neighborly conversation. I made a real effort getting to know her and found that—though we never became close friends—she was not so bad after all. At the same time, I went out of my way to stay away from R.; I was friendly to him but otherwise avoided him like the plague. A few months later, life moved on and I was out of Spirit Central—problem solved.
Regarding R., in a dark twist, I later heard through the grapevine (and there was evidence) that he may have been a Navajo witch. There’s another name for them that you may recognize, but I don’t want to mention it here; look it up.
This was actually the second attempt of the Dark Side to make me one of theirs. I might write about the other one sometime soon.
But for me, the greatest thing about this experience is that it proves how much God loves us. Even when we’re going astray, even when we’re aimlessly “wandering through the valley of death,” even when we’re too bone-headed to listen to Him, he relentlessly pursues His lost sheep, always hoping to bring us back to the flock. I got myself into more perilous situations than I can count, but He always shielded me from the worst. How great is our God!