Midnight Centurion

Catholics are often asked why they pray to Mary and other saints, if it's not in the Bible? We are regularly labeled as pagans or idolaters and are not considered Christian by some individuals, even though Christians were Catholic for 1500 years before the Reformation, and the Church is older than any American Evangelical Church denomination. These kinds of questions are loaded. I could just as easily ask similar ones, such as, "Where does the Bible say to only follow the Bible (Sola Scriptura)?" or "Where does it say to have altar calls?" or "Where does it say that speaking in tongues is required for salvation?" or "Where does it say that the Rapture is a thing?" or "Where does it say that during the Rapture that your dental fillings and polka-dotted boxers will be strewn all over the place?" Not everything we practice or believe in is verbatim in the Bible, and Protestants are just as guilty of this. While we follow 2,000 years of...

When people think of ghosts, they imagine cartoonish bedsheets or vaporous green blobs of slime or apparitions of rotting corpses. At least one of these is somewhat historically accurate, in that the image of floating sheets comes from the image of a corpse wrapped in a burial shroud. Collectively, we've forgotten this explanation because pop culture and several genres, such as Casper the Friendly Ghost, Ghostbusters, and the Poltergeist films, among many other horror franchises, shape our collective consciousness of what a ghost looks like or actually is.  The word "ghost" means "spirit," so "ghost" can refer to the Holy Spirit, known in older translations of the Bible and older prayer books as the Holy Ghost, the Third Divine Person of the Holy Trinity. "Ghost" can mean angels, demons, or human spirits, such as saints, Poor Souls, or damned souls. The Poor Souls, as they are known in Catholicism, are the souls in Purgatory—in essence, purga...

The formidable and ferocious cockatrice of D&D fame isn't just a finger-licking good tabletop RPG nemesis. In fact, the fabled cockatrice is found not only in the imaginations of dungeon masters but also within the pages of the Bible, in at least two verses and one translation. The beloved, though anti-Catholic, and infamously Trumpish, King James Version (KJV) uses this interpretation, where other translations describe the creature as an adder or viper, or as a basilisk in the Douay-Rheims Version (DRV). Before people had access to modern-day chiropractors, the English Royal Family used to draw and quarter their Catholic subjects for such "crimes" as possessing a Catholic Bible, such as the Douay-Rheims Version. This translation, although outlawed, influenced the translators of the KJV. Today, in all seriousness, most Christians, including Catholics, have a fondness for the Elizabethan English of the KJV, but many have migrated to the Douay-Rheims Version (DRV). The ...

In this entry, I am focusing on beasts in the Bible, and by beasts, I mean kaiju-like gigantic creatures of possible prehistoric origin. I will not be discussing in depth the various beasts of the Apocalypse of St. John, otherwise known as the Book of Revelation, since it is generally believed these monsters are allegories for people or empires that have existed or will someday exist. I will also not be extensively covering unicorns, as tempting as that may be, because they are generally believed to be the extinct aurochs, which is a type of wild ox. Others speculate that the unicorn may be a reference to the rhinoceros and not a horse with a horn growing from its head. Nonetheless, I have included hyperlinks to the scripture verses on unicorns, and you can switch around translations for your own entertainment. The Revised Standard Version will reference unicorns as wild oxen, the Douay-Rheims Version will reference them as rhinoceros, and the King James Version as unicorns.  Numbe...

The history of vampires begins in Mesopotamia before the Torah or the Bible, and the Book of Genesis was ever written. That's not to say the contents of the Bible are untrue, just that the inspired word had not yet been penned. The Book of Genesis is believed by some scholars to be a Hebrew apologetic work in response to Mesopotamian religions and the Epic of Gilgamesh. The first vampire was not the fictional Carmila or Dracula but the mythological Lilith. The myth of Lilith was, in part, based on Mesopotamian demonology, and some scholars believe she is loosely connected to the demon Lamashtu. Lamashtu was depicted as a female deity with the head of a lion or owl. This is interesting as Satan is described as a ravenous lion that roams the Earth searching for souls to devour  1 Peter 5 8 and the  Terror by Night Psalm 91:5 was not only associated with owls but other nocturnal birds of prey representing Lilith. Others identify Lilith with the Babylonian goddess In...

Even a man who is pure in heart, And says his prayers by night, May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms, And the moon is full and bright. Curt Siodmak There are many different legends of bestial wolf-men and werewolves throughout history. Lycanthropy appears as early as the second century BC when the Greek geographer Pausanias recounts the legend of Lycaon. According to legend, Lycaon ritually murdered a child and then offered the flesh to Zeus, who, in his anger, turned Lycaon into a wolf. The Greeks have other legends concerning werewolves; they believed a person could become a Vrykolakas by having been killed or dying after living a sacrilegious life, being excommunicated, being buried in unconsecrated land, or eating the meat of sheep wounded by a wolf or werewolf. After death, the Vrykolakas would rise from the dead as a werewolf, and if killed again, the Vrykolakas could become a powerful vampire, retaining the sharp fangs and hairy palms of a wolf. This played into the novel ...