04-10-03 @ 6:59 pm EDT

Dunno if this will take off, but I thought it might be good to post about a random memory that pops into my head from time to time.

The memory of today is The Demon Names.

I was in college at NCMC, walking around the halls. The college had two levels and I was on the upper, carpeted level. I went walking down one of the main hallways past the bulletin boards and such on the walls when something tacked to the wall caught my eye and made me slow down. It was a little piece of paper with an odd symbol upon it.

I frowned. It looked familiar. I moved toward it and pulled it off the wall. I knew I had seen it before...the odd scribble resembled the symbol of a demon's name I'd seen in a book of mine, Raising Hell, a book about Satanic crime. Sometimes supposedly demonic symbols are drawn in an effort to contact or summon up different demons, and this was one such symbol...I happened to have the book with me and even verified my suspicions. How odd to find something like this on the college wall when I had that book with me. Synchronicity? Who knows.

I'm not sure if she was with me all along or joined me later on, but my mom appears in the memory now, and I continued walking down the hall, finding more symbols along the way. I think I found a total of maybe four or five or six. One or two were repeats. Just little photocopied images of these demon names. I identified a few from my book, but the others weren't included; I assumed they were along the same lines. Somebody had systematically gone down this hallway tacking up images of demon names. For what reason?

I located Pat Ranger, my anthropology teacher, near one of the offices on this level and for some reason Ma and I went to her to show her the odd symbols. I mentioned how I had found them all along the wall, and had taken them all down. She looked at them with some curiosity--she was just as puzzled as I was--but then made a point of saying that as a teacher, she herself had no right to remove the images. It would be interfering with the students' freedom of religion, or some such. As a student, it was perfectly fine for ME to remove the images. I hadn't done so as a way of stopping some kind of Satanic display; I had just been curious and had taken them all to peruse them for myself. Perhaps she felt I was doing some kind of service by removing them, or maybe she just misunderstood us; I DO think that us mentioning this to her came across as us worrying about Satanic influences in the college or something. Ma probably said I should tell her about it, even though I was not really worried...just curious. After all, demon worship and Satanism and such are valid religions, too.

To this day I wonder who stuck those up there, why they did, and I also wonder about the timing...me having my book with the symbols in it, AND recognizing them (they are very odd, abstract symbols, easy to forget), the very same day somebody decided to tack a bunch of them up, in the very hall I was wandering around in. Looking back this reads almost like a weird dream I would have had, and reminds me of a strange "secret" correspondence I carried on in high school...but that's for another entry if I ever remember. Very odd incident.

Well, that's pretty much it...no idea why my brain chose that memory for today, but tar...