Are World Leaders Possessed? The Ancient Technology of Demonic Transfer
The Vatican just declared a global emergency. Tucker Carlson called the President the Antichrist. A historian who infiltrated a UN-connected mystery school explains what you are watching unfold.
According to the oldest surviving mythology on earth,
kings did not rule alone. Each one had a demon assigned to him. The Sumerians called them Apkallu. They were
divine counselors, and they whispered in the ear of the ruler. I am a historian who studied inside a UN-connected mystery school. This is what I have spent a decade learning about what you are watching.
The word “museum” comes from the Greek
mouseion:
a temple where spirits entered the people who came seeking knowledge. Homer did not write the
Iliad. He asked a goddess to possess him and use his voice. The opening line is the request: “Sing, O goddess.”
Everyone is using the word
possessed lately. The more popular term, as of late, has been “Demonic Transfer Technology.” They say it like a metaphor. What if there is a pragmatic, even scientific, explanation for what appears to be the demonic possession of our global leaders?
This week, Tucker Carlson called the President of the United States the Antichrist on his podcast. The Vatican hosted the International Association of Exorcists, who warned Pope Leo XIV of a global surge in Satanism and formally requested a trained exorcist in every Catholic diocese on earth. Father Chad Ripperger, one of the most prominent demonologists in the modern Church, has been describing the specific mechanics of how demonic influence operates through institutions and individuals.
Is it possible that world leaders are operating under the influence of an ancient demonic force? I have spent over a decade researching exactly this. I wrote a book about it.
The answer is more disturbing than the question, because the ancient world did not merely describe possession. They built infrastructure for it. They named it. They classified its stages. They identified the methods of induction, the patterns of institutional spread, and the vulnerability of those closest to power.
This piece traces that infrastructure from the temples of Sumer to the Roman imperial court to the Vatican’s operational taxonomy of demonic influence, and into the halls of modern government. Along the way,
you will learn why the word “idea” describes something that owns you rather than something you own, and what the Catholic Church has quietly identified as an emergency in 2026.
Mesopotamian exorcism plaque showing the hierarchy of demonic forces and protective spirits. The ancients did not merely believe in demons. They mapped their ranks, cataloged their functions, and built institutional systems to manage them. From the book,
Evil Archaeology by Dr. Heather Lynn.
They
This is not confined to the ancient world. In a scene I documented in
Evil Archaeology, Mongolian government officials gathered in a hotel conference center to participate in a shamanic possession ritual. They were not there to stop it. They hoped it would work.
A 68-year-old female shaman and her two apprentices dressed in brightly colored fringed costumes as the room fell silent. The shaman began her drumming and chanting. An onlooker was overcome. He leaped into the arms of those restraining him. The dancers crowded around and continued beating their drums.
The goal was to summon an entity and ask for its help. A government official watched, unblinking, hoping the shaman had delivered on her promise.
The practice has never stopped. It has simply changed costumes. At the National Prayer Breakfast, held annually in Washington since 1953, sitting presidents, senators, and cabinet members bow their heads and invite the Holy Spirit to work through them. Pastors lay hands on elected officials and pray for divine guidance to enter them and direct their decisions. In charismatic Christian circles, this is celebrated as the presence of God. In technical terms, it is an invocation: a ritual request for a non-human intelligence to enter a human being and influence their actions. The vocabulary is different. The operation is identical. The only distinction
is whether the culture considers the possessing force benevolent.
Throughout the ancient world,
possession was not always the enemy. It was a tool. The question was never whether these forces existed, only who controlled them.
The God Gets
In the occult tradition, possession requires invitation. This is the origin of the vampire myth:
the creature cannot cross the threshold unless it is invited. The same principle operates in ritual magic. An invocation is a deliberate opening of the door.
The question most people never ask is whether the person opening it understands what they are letting in.
The English word “enthusiasm” comes from the Greek
entheos:
en, meaning “in,” and
theos, meaning “god.” To be enthusiastic was to have a god inside you. This was a clinical description.
The
mouseion was a temple of possession. The Muses were entities, not metaphors. If that was the framework for art and knowledge,
what was the framework for power?
The pharaoh of Egypt was not a ruler who represented Horus. The pharaoh
was Horus. The falcon spirit descended into the body of the king at coronation. When the pharaoh died, that spirit transferred to the next vessel. This was state theology. The governmental apparatus of the most powerful civilization on earth was built on the premise that its ruler was a possessed man.
The Romans had a parallel concept. Every person had a
genius, a divine spirit attached to them from birth. The emperor’s genius was the genius of Rome itself. Refusing to honor the emperor’s genius was treason. A divine force operates through a human vessel, and the state enforces reverence for the force, not the man.
The Sumerians formalized this arrangement with a precision that should unsettle anyone paying attention. The Apkallu (Sumerian
abgal) were seven divine sages created by the god Enki, each assigned to a specific antediluvian king as counselor and priest. The Uruk List of Kings and Sages, a cuneiform tablet dating to 165 BCE,
explicitly pairs each sage with the king they served. One sage per king.
The sage mediates between the divine realm and the human ruler. The king governs. The Apkallu whispers in the ear of the leader.
In Akkadian scholarship, the Apkallu are described as demigod
jinn. T
he Arabic jinn, from janna meaning “to be hidden,” refers to concealed spiritual beings that can attach to, influence, or fully possess a human host. In Islamic scholarly tradition,
jinn can invade the part of the brain responsible for regulating neurotransmitters, altering mood and behavior without the host’s awareness.
The host functions, holds office,
but does not know what is steering.
While it is not clear that the Roman genius is etymologically related to the jinn, the functional architecture is identical. Genius, Muse, Jinn, Genia: all are non-human spiritual entities paired with an individual, operating through them, treated as sacred by the state. Three civilizations, three vocabularies, one pattern.
A non-human intelligence assigned to a human ruler, mediating divine power through a mortal vessel.
According to the oldest known mythology, that of the Sumerians who lived in what is now modern day Iraq, after the great flood the fully divine Apkallu were replaced by part-human advisors called
ummanu, scholars and craftsmen. Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk, was the first ruler recorded as having an entirely human advisor. The divine counselors were progressively replaced by human ones. The structure of the relationship persisted. The advisor whispers. The ruler acts. The question of who is actually steering was never resolved. It became the invisible hand.
When the God
The Roman emperor Caligula is remembered as a madman. He declared himself Jupiter incarnate. He held conversations with the god. He built a bridge between his palace and the Temple of Jupiter so he could visit his “brother.” He executed citizens on impulse, displayed sexual behavior that horrified even Roman sensibilities, and demanded worship as a living deity.
Nero followed the same trajectory. His early reign was competent, even praised. Then came a progressive dissolution of personal identity into the role. Murders. Grandiosity. Performance replacing governance. Rome burned. He sang.
The conventional explanation is insanity. The ancient explanation was more specific.
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst, had a term for this: psychic inflation. It describes what happens when the ego identifies with an archetypal energy so completely that the person
believes they are the force rather than channeling it. They become its instrument. They lose the ability to distinguish their own will from its momentum.
The personality is consumed. What remains looks human, holds office, gives speeches.
It is no longer steering.
Jung was not being metaphorical. He observed that the gods are personified psychic forces. This was a technical statement about the structure of consciousness. When one of these forces takes over a person, the symptoms are not limited to what Hollywood taught you to expect. No spinning heads vomiting pea soup and no levitation. The signs are subtler:
obsessive fixation on a single idea, inability to hear dissenting counsel, grandiosity mistaken for vision, and the progressive replacement of personal judgment with ideological compulsion.
Watch any press conference. You
will recognize the symptoms.
Ideas Have People
The Greek word idea comes from
idein, meaning “to see.” In the system of Plato, the Athenian philosopher writing in the fourth century BCE, Ideas (the Forms) are not things humans generate. They are autonomous realities that exist independently of any individual mind. A human does not produce an Idea. A human participates in one. The Idea is the primary reality. The human is the vessel.
Plato was describing possession in philosophical language.
We have been teaching it in universities for two thousand years without noticing.
Jung arrived at the same conclusion through clinical observation. He wrote that people do not have complexes. Complexes have people. A complex is an autonomous psychic content that seizes an individual and operates through them. The person believes their thoughts are their own. The complex is thinking for them.
In the occult tradition, this process has a name. It is called an
egregore: a collective thought-form generated by the sustained focused attention of a group. When a political movement, a corporation, or a religious institution concentrates enough emotional and intellectual energy around a shared symbol or ideology, that concentration generates something that functions like an autonomous entity. It feeds on belief. It grows stronger with intensity. It begins to act back on the people feeding it, shaping their perceptions, narrowing their thoughts, homogenizing their language.
The Sound of Possession
Father Chad Ripperger on Tucker Carlson's podcast, April 2026. Ripperger describes the clinical mechanics of demonic possession.
The parallels to modern political and cultural behavior are ones he notices too.
Father Chad Ripperger, one of the most active exorcists in the United States, has spent eighteen years observing how demons manifest through the human body. He describes a phenomenon he calls morphing: the face changes, the complexion shifts to colors no human skin naturally produces, and the voice assumes characteristics proper to the demon’s own nature rather than the person’s. He says morphing accounts for roughly ninety percent of what exorcists observe in session. The person you were speaking to is no longer behind the eyes.
Something else is using the instrument.
Ripperger also describes how demons besiege the imagination and emotions to such a degree that the person cannot think outside the perceptual box that has colonized them. He calls this obsession in the clinical, theological sense.
The person is not fully possessed. They function. They hold jobs. They make decisions.
They simply cannot perceive anything outside the boundaries the besieging force has constructed around them. He has observed, publicly, that this pattern is identical to the psychology of ideological movements. He has said
that when you strip the veneer away, communism and diabolic psychology operate on the same structural logic.
Now consider a
different kind of morphing.
Watch a college freshman arrive at an elite university in September. Watch them again in June. The vocal fry has set in. The upswing at the end of declarative sentences, turning statements into questions. The flattened affect. The identical vocabulary deployed across thousands of individuals who believe themselves to be independent thinkers.
They did not choose this. It overtook them.
By the time they reach Silicon Valley, the morphing is complete. They speak as one voice. They believe they arrived at their opinions independently. Listen to the way Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, speaks.
The measured cadence. The pauses calibrated to signal thoughtfulness. The vocal register that never rises and never breaks. It is the voice of a system, not a person.
Listen to how many in Generation Z now pronounce the word ‘women.’ The shift is uniform. It is not regional. It did not emerge from any dialect. Millions of people began mispronouncing the same word in the same way at the same time, and no one can identify the point of origin. Linguists call it a speech trend. The ancient world would have called it something else.
When millions of people begin speaking in the same cadence, using the same contractions, the same tonal shifts, the same moral vocabulary, at the same time, that is not culture. That is memetic synchronization. The ancient world had a name for it. The modern world calls it a meme and treats it as a joke. The word “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, as a deliberate parallel to “gene”: a unit of cultural transmission that replicates, mutates, and colonizes minds. Dawkins meant it as a scientific metaphor. The ancients
would have recognized it as a description of exactly what they were warning about.
As I discussed in my recent piece,
Money, Sex, and Sorcery, the word “glamour” comes from the Scots English alteration of “grammar,” which itself derives from “grimoire,”
a book of spells. A glamour, in its original meaning, is a spell cast through language. It is the manipulation of perception through words. It makes the enchanted person see something other than what is actually there.
Ripperger describes the same dynamic from the exorcism room: demons, he says,
put a perspective on your imagination.
They alter how you perceive a person, a situation, a reality. The thing itself has not changed. Your perception of it has been replaced. He says
this is how demons destroy marriages, careers, and institutions. They do not change the facts. They change how the possessed person sees the facts.
Court advisors, spiritual counselors, media strategists, and algorithmic feed designers are all performing the same function.
They construct the reality the leader inhabits. The leader operates from within that constructed reality.
From the outside, it looks like possession. From the inside, it feels like conviction.
The Court Sorcerer
Powerful rulers do not govern alone. Throughout recorded history, the throne has had a shadow beside it: the spiritual advisor whose function is to shape the ruler’s perception of reality. The pharaoh had his priests. Solomon had his ring and his demons. Elizabeth I had John Dee, the mathematician-magician who designed England’s imperial expansion through a combination of navigation, espionage, and angelic communication.
Dee believed he was receiving strategic intelligence from entities he contacted through a scryer named Edward Kelley.
Spiritual advisors operate in the halls of modern power today.
Consider the role of figures like Paula White, the prosperity gospel pastor who served as spiritual advisor to a sitting president.
White did not merely pray with the president. She conducted spiritual warfare sessions in the Oval Office, led prayer circles among senior staff, and publicly declared divine mandates for specific political actions. She framed policy decisions in terms of cosmic spiritual conflict. Whether one believes in the theology or not, the function is identical to the court sorcerer in recorded history: the advisor constructs a theological reality, the leader operates inside it, and the leader’s decisions appear rational from within that architecture.
The advisor does not control the ruler through force.
The advisor controls the ruler through perception.
They build the world the ruler sees. Once the ruler is operating inside that constructed world, the possession is invisible to the possessed, because the possessed person believes they are seeing clearly for the first time.
In magical texts such as the
Key of Solomon and the
Lesser Key of Solomon, demons are not inherently evil by choice. They are discarnate intelligences. Forces. Tools. These grimoires, dating between the 14th and 17th centuries, treated supernatural entities as powers that could be beneficial or destructive depending on how they were approached. The danger was never the entity itself. The danger was approaching it without mastery. You must be a magus before you command a daemon.
Otherwise, the daemon commands you.
{Knowledge protects}
The Church
The Catholic Church maintains the most detailed institutional taxonomy of demonic influence
ever developed. It is not theoretical. The word “theory” itself traces to the Greek
theoria, from
theos: to see the divine. Theology is, at its root, the study of how divine forces interact with the human world. The Church has defined these interactions in practical, operational terms.
You may ask why the Catholic taxonomy matters when there are deliverance ministries, charismatic healers, and countless others who claim to work with the diabolical. This is a practical question with a practical answer. The Catholic Church has been around for two millennia.
It has observed, documented, named, and structuralized these phenomena across centuries, across continents, across cultures. Its taxonomy is the product of institutional memory
on a scale no other organization can match. The taxonomy distinguishes between:
Obsession: the persistent external assault on a person’s thoughts by a demonic force. The person is not yet controlled, but they are besieged. Their thinking narrows. Their fixations intensify.
Infestation: the attachment of a demonic presence to a location, an object, or an institution. The force operates through the environment rather than through a single individual.
Oppression: physical, emotional, or psychological affliction caused by a demonic force. The person suffers. Their health deteriorates. Their relationships collapse. Their judgment erodes.
Possession: the full occupation of a person by a demonic entity. The entity speaks through the person. Acts through the person. The original personality is submerged.
Most people imagine possession as the final stage. The Church understands
that the first three stages are far more common and far more dangerous because they are invisible. A person under obsession still goes to work. Still chairs meetings. Still signs legislation.
They simply cannot think outside the structure that has colonized them.
Pope Francis formally recognized the International Association of Exorcists and their 250 priests in 30 countries. This month, that same organization met with Pope Leo XIV and warned of an emergency. The Church is scaling up its infrastructure for spiritual warfare in 2026.
They have not explained why they believe the emergency is now.
I wrote about this institutional history in
Evil Archaeology. At the time, I noted how extraordinary it was for a modernizing Church to endorse the operational reality of demonic possession.
The question I could not answer then was why. The question I am asking now
is whether the Church has identified something that secular institutions refuse to name.
Why We Lost the Vocabulary
For most of human history, civilizations across the earth possessed a detailed vocabulary for the phenomenon of non-material forces influencing human behavior. The Egyptians had it. The Greeks had it. The Romans had it. The Sumerians had it. The Jewish mystical tradition had it. The Christian Church still has it. Indigenous traditions worldwide maintain it.
The modern West threw it away.
The process was deliberate. The rise of scientific materialism in the 17th and 18th centuries, accelerated by the work of the Royal Society (itself an outgrowth of the Invisible College, a network of natural philosophers with documented Rosicrucian connections), systematically redefined the boundaries of acceptable inquiry. Anything that could not be measured, weighed, or replicated in a laboratory was excluded from the domain of knowledge.
The category of “spirit” was reassigned from a real force to a metaphor. The category of “possession” was reassigned from a diagnosis to a delusion.
This did not make the phenomenon disappear.
It made the phenomenon invisible. A population that has no vocabulary for a thing cannot resist that thing.
They cannot even see it.
You see it. You have been seeing it. Every time you watch a leader speak and sense something behind the eyes that is not the person you once knew. Every time you notice the language flattening, the cadence synchronizing, the individual dissolving into the role. Every time you say, half-joking, “they’re possessed,” you are reaching for a word your ancestors used with precision and you have been trained to use as hyperbole. Yet, it is the oldest diagnosis in human civilization. The ancients understood how it was induced, how it spread, and how it could be stopped.
Your body is a temple. Someone or something is inside it. I have told you what possession is. I have not yet told you
how it is done.
There are documented methods that are older than any government on earth,
and they are in active use.
The ancient grimoires describe them. The Catholic Church cataloged them. Satanic ritual traditions refined them.
I know this because I have spent years studying the primary sources and teaching on the topic. I also know it because I was inside one of the organizations that practices them, an organization which maintains a formal consultative relationship with the United Nations. I was a student in their mystery school. I learned how world leaders invoke using a ritual text recited in meditation rooms at the United Nations headquarters. I have the documentation. I have the internal materials. I have not spoken publicly about this until now.
What I will show you on Saturday is a system designed to invoke non-human intelligences into positions of institutional power, taught to initiates in an organization with a mailing address and a seat at the United Nations.
That piece is for paid subscribers.
Bibliography and Further Suggested Reading
Blatty, William Peter.
The Exorcist. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Bondzhev, A. “Enki’s Seven Sages (Adapa/Oannes and the Apkallu): Humanity’s Cosmic Guardians.”
Open Journal for Studies in History 7, no. 1 (2024): 31-44.
Craffert, Pieter F.
The Life of a Galilean Shaman: Jesus of Nazareth in Anthropological-Historical Perspective. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008.
Davis, James Allan, Tom W. Smith, and Peter V. Marsden.
General Social Surveys, 1972-2006: Cumulative Codebook. Chicago: National Opinion Research Center, 2006.
Dawkins, Richard.
The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Hall, Manly P.
The Lost Keys of Freemasonry. New York: Macoy Publishing, 1923.
Homer.
The Iliad. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
Jung, Carl G.
Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.
Jung, Carl G.
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part I. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.
Kvanvig, Helge S.
Primeval History: Babylonian, Biblical, and Enochic. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
Lenzi, Alan. “The Uruk List of Kings and Sages and Late Mesopotamian Scholarship.”
Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 8, no. 2 (2008): 137-169.
Lynn, Heather.
Evil Archaeology: Demons, Possessions, and Sinister Relics. New York: Disinformation Books, 2019.
Mathers, S. L. MacGregor, trans.
The Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis). London: George Redway, 1889.
Peterson, Joseph H., ed.
The Lesser Key of Solomon: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis. York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 2001.
Pike, Albert.
Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. Charleston, SC: Supreme Council of the Southern Jurisdiction, 1871.
Plato.
Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992.
Solomon and C. C. McCown, eds.
The Testament of Solomon. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1915.
Suetonius.
The Twelve Caesars. Translated by Robert Graves. London: Penguin Classics, 1957.
Waite, Arthur Edward.
Devil-Worship in France: Or, The Question of Lucifer. London: George Redway, 1896.
Wiggermann, F. A. M. “Mesopotamian Protective Spirits: The Ritual Texts.”
Cuneiform Monographs 1. Groningen: Styx Publications, 1992.
drheatherlynn.substack.com
