I have to say – looking at this tweet and the level of enthusiastic engagement it’s gotten …
“The Greatest Trick Certain Sorts Of Devils Would Appear To Be Pulling Is Convincing Credulous Souls On Twitter That They’re Functionally Corporeal And Vulnerable Accordingly.”
And thereby seeking to shift attention away from how one would actually deal to a Demonic adversary through to … well, Pic Related.
Now, in terms of where the human impulse here is coming from … I get it. People want to flex. They want to feel powerful.
They want to be the “If It Bleeds – We Can Kill It”. (Apparently, it would seem, rather ignorant of Raktabija … but I digress)
They have no experience – their effective paradigm for ‘combatting demonic forces’ is known as ‘Doom’. That is to say – shotguns are efficacious.
This has produced a situation of being, so to speak, ‘Wrong Genre Savvy’. That is – knowing the ‘conventions’ and ‘conditions’ of a particular genre of story and acting accordingly. (This is, in fact, how people tend to ‘navigate’ the world all up)
Which is great – up until it turns out that one is not, in fact in that genre of story. Something which can most certainly prove to be ‘weaponized’.
Effectively, if you can render something an ‘Out Of Context Problem’ by … changing / reducing / downright flattening the ‘Context’ , contextual reference-pools, etc. that people have to draw from – then it becomes a helluvalot more powerful as a result.
The thing this guy with the “somehow developed an immunity to a weapon it cannot even fathom” … is rrrrrrrrrreally not getting …
Well, there are two.
First up – this idea that ‘bullet’ is some sort of ‘thing [demon] cannot even fathom’ seems a bit curious. A bullet is, fundamentally, a metallic (i.e. ‘hard’) projectile which goes very fast.
This … is not a novel thing. Arrows, spears, and sling-heaved stones all are, fundamentally, hard things which move very fast. The difference between these and bullets, other than perhaps the metallic composition is not one of ‘kind’ but instead of degree.
Bullets may go faster, bullets may be more rapidly fired. They are not, in and of themselves, novel.
And what I would hasten to add is that in various traditional accounts which we have for ‘spears’, ‘arrows’, ‘stones’, ‘bricks’ (yes, bricks) being utilized for anti-demonic aktion – these are no ordinary weapons of their type. But we shall return to that in a moment (including the Bronze Age Orbital Bombardment option. I suspect that a properly imbued meteor may just go harder and faster than bullet. But I digress).
As applies this and that whole ‘out of context problem’ thing:
The “[thing] it cannot even fathom” … is these guys’ understanding (or total lack thereof) for “Demon”.
They cannot fathom such a thing and hence have reduced it to something else instead. A ‘known problem’ – a video-game adversary, an enemy clade of human, or perhaps a dangerous animal.
And this is not un-understandable – we do it all the time; in our endeavour to ‘reduce problems down to previously solved ones’. It’s a rather ‘efficient’ approach toward cognition in a seriously diverse world.
Demons, however, are not ‘new’ nor ‘unfathomable’ within the sum span of human experience – and more especially, human traditional understandings.
Quite the contrary.
Now it would seem to me … if I wanted to deal with what is, ultimately, a very traditional problem
- like … you know … demons –
then instead of an untried and novel approach (as the whole approach, at least), right off the bat …
- like, in this case, “bullets” –
I’d be looking toward a very traditional solution
One which has, you know … stood the test of time , perhaps been refined somewhat in operative utilization over the past 3-4 millennia , but ye.
These , of course, are weapons which the demon can ‘fathom’.
And have been around for – in Vedic utilization, yeah, three thousand years would be within the ballpark … hell, might be what ‘sealed’ the thing in in the first place.
And which said demon can not only ‘fathom’
But also very definitely – Fear.
Now this does not mean that there is no scoping whatsoever for the involvement of ‘modern thinking’ or ‘modern materials’ in the course of the combatting of the Demonic. Quite the contrary, in fact – however, it is, as ever, a case of ensuring ‘Ancient Essence’ even amidst ‘Modern Expressions’ or ‘Augmentations’ as to thereof.
I am personally aware of some rather ‘modern materials’ approaches to some axials of these scenarios which have, indeed, – provided they are approached & imbued with the archaic essence – proven quite viable, indeed.
I am also personally aware of successes experienced through the augmentation of ‘ancient approaches’ via the utilization of modern military thinking. But, again, these are cases of ‘both’ rather than ‘either’. And the risk inherent in propositions such as that in the twitter OP being responded to – is that it becomes ‘one’ rather than the other … and not the actually useful one, at that.
Because Modern Man likes to flatter himself the master of his self-appointed dominion – and makes little-to-no place for those things which might not just ‘challenge’ him … but prove over and above his ’eminent domain’ most completely. When approached from a slavishly modernistic and fundamentally materialistic paradigm, of course.
‘Different Context’, you understand.
Phrasing things much more straightforwardly:
‘Modern Problems’ may or may not require ‘Modern Solutions’.
‘Bronze Age Problems’ … may occasionally benefit from augmentations drawn from the sphere of ‘Modern Solutions’ –
And ‘Modern Problems’, from ‘Bronze Age Approaches’, likewise.
But ‘Timeless Problems’ … ‘Timeless Solutions’ seem a good bet.
And in that regard – although I do somewhat anticipate we may have different precise interpretations as to the term – one thing which I would indubitably agree with the OP about is that the appropriate response to these things is …
Firepower.
arya-akasha 