America’s Frontline Doctors
Snopes advises that a viral video was pulled by social media companies for pushing COVID-19 misinformation in July 2020. The video featured America’s Frontline Doctors (AFD) which appears to be a new group supported and promoted by the conservative political organization Tea Party Patriots Action (TPPatriots).
“A group that called itself ‘America’s Frontline Doctors’ (AFD) took to the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court on July 27, 2020, in a self-described ‘White Coat Summit’ to address a ‘massive disinformation campaign’ regarding COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by SARS-CoV-2.
A video recording of the 45-minute long event was promoted online … Less than 24 hours after being posted, the video was pulled from social media platforms for presenting misinformation lauding unproven treatments for COVID-19 … “
The Demon Seated by Mikhail Vrubel (1890), a symbolist painting inspired by the Russian romantic poem demon by Mikhail Lermontov.
MedPage Today advises that:
“The latest viral video promoting COVID-19 misinformation features a newly formed group called America’s Frontline Doctors. About 10 physicians, dressed in white coats with an embroidered America’s Frontline Doctors logo, spoke for 45 minutes in front of the Supreme Court on Monday on a range of COVID-19 talking points, from hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) being curative to the mental health effects of lockdown outweighing the toll of the virus itself.
But none of the most vocal members have practices that would place them on the actual front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some don’t currently practice at all.
Two of those appearing at the Monday event are ophthalmologists, one of whom is no longer licensed.”
It is ironic that none of the doctors who are part of “America’s Frontline Doctors” actually work on the front lines of the pandemic. Many thousands accepted their claims without any investigation whatsoever.
Dr Stella Immanuel
Without a doubt, the most interesting of the doctors from AFD, is Dr Stella Immanuel, who has “registered offices in both Houston and Katy, Texas. She attended medical school at the University of Calabar College of Medicine in Nigeria and reportedly specialized in malaria.”
“Immanuel, a pediatrician and a religious minister, has a history of making bizarre claims about medical topics and other issues. She has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.
She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, despite appearing in Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress on Monday, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by ‘reptilians’ and other aliens.”
Dr Stella Immanuel
Immanuel’s other claims include blaming medical conditions on dream sex with witches and demons:
“’They turn into a woman and then they sleep with the man and collect his sperm… then they turn into the man and they sleep with a man and deposit the sperm and reproduce more of themselves,’ she said during a sermon in 2013.
Another issue that Dr Immanuel targets is gay marriage, saying it can result in adults marrying children …”
Immanuel has “claimed that sex with ‘tormenting spirits’ is responsible for gynecological problems, miscarriages and impotence.
‘Many women suffer from astral sex regularly. Astral sex is the ability to project one’s spirit man into the victim’s body and have intercourse with it,’ she once claimed in a sermon.”
André Gagné, professor of theological studies at Concordia University in Montreal, states:
“Immanuel appears to be connected with African Pentecostal and charismatic church movements, where the spiritual world and the physical are closely connected.
What happens in the spiritual world affects the physical world in that belief system.
‘It could be sickness, it could be prosperity,’ he said about how the spiritual world might influence everyday life events. ‘It could be things around infertility. It could be anything. That world has an impact.’
And Immanuel likely sees no conflict between her training as a medical doctor, where she uses the tools of science to treat patients, and her work as a deliverance minister.
People who share her beliefs would understand what she’s talking about, said Gagné. When people outside the faith, with no context, hear or see what she said, things sound weird.”
Brandon W Hawk, associate professor of English at Rhode Island College, states:
“The Christian gospels are full of stories linking demons and illness, with Jesus and several of his early followers casting out demons who afflict their victims. In one of the most prominent stories told in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus encounters a man possessed by a group of demons who call themselves ‘Legion’ and sends them into a nearby herd of pigs who stampede off a cliff. …
It isn’t difficult to find other modern Christians who connect demons, sex and health issues. The conservative Christian magazine Charisma published a story claiming that sex with demons causes homosexuality. And researchers recently were able to show that belief in supernatural evil could predict negative attitudes toward abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, extramarital sex and pornography. …
If anything, the coronavirus pandemic has shown how many on the religious right continue to rely on faith over science. Studies have already emerged showing how the tension between faith and science has influenced many conservative Christians to resist the use of masks and other public health responses to the pandemic.”
As an interesting tangent, the Charisma article referred to above, discussed Contessa Adams who for nearly two decades battled against:
“… the demonic violators of her body. She felt trapped in secrecy and shame and knew that the demons tormenting her wanted things to stay that way.
But God had another agenda for Adams when she found Christ in 1979. The former stripper has a ministry through which she exposes one of Satan’s darkest secrets—sexual demons.
These spiritual rapists, as Adams describes them in her book, Consequences, often prey on people by performing sexual acts through nightmares and erotic dreams. Some people become so dependent upon these demonic experiences that they actually look forward to them.
‘Anybody that has been attacked by them will tell you … they’re worried [that] they could not find that pleasure with mortal people,’ says Adams, who claims she was once possessed by sexual demons.
The two most identifiable sexual demons are the incubus, which is a male sexual demon that traditionally assaults women, and the succubus, which is a female sexual demon that assaults men. Sometimes they also lure people into homosexual behavior.”
On July 28, 2020, Mashable reported that on that day:
“America, really, truly, did wake up to ‘demon sperm’ trending [on Twitter].”
Dr Stella Immanuel then become popularly known as the “demon sperm doctor” as a Google Search will rapidly verify. Out of all the conspiratorial theories she was promulgating, it was the dream sex with demons which captured the imagination of social media users across America.
On August 7, 2020, Baptist News Global ran an informative article about Dr Stella Immanuel:
“She begins where most studies of demons begin, with the mysterious stories in the book of Genesis. In the days before the great flood, Genesis 6 speaks briefly of ‘Nephilim,’ powerful beings who seem to be the offspring of human women and the ‘sons of God.’ These sons of God, Immanuel argues, are actually the fallen angels of Revelation 12 …
These fallen angels know that God already has promised their destruction under the heel of woman’s offspring, so it becomes their mission in life to attempt to corrupt women and their offspring. The bodies of these Nephilim are then destroyed in the great flood, leaving their souls to wander the earth as demonic spirits.
What is less familiar to most, and therefore less compelling, is Immanuel’s coupling of demonic forces with the notion of spirit spouses. Spirit spouses are common in a number of indigenous religious traditions, and although the traditions vary widely, they are usually conceived of as positive or neutral forces who aid those to whom they are connected. Typically, an encounter with a spirit spouse involves a sexual dream or vision.
Part of the genius of indigenous African Pentecostalism, the Christian tradition to which Immanuel loosely belongs, is that it did not try to challenge the traditional African cosmologies it encountered. Unlike much of Western Christianity, which derided other gods and spiritual forces as pagan, impotent and worthy of destruction, African Pentecostalism found ways to incorporate spirit spouses and other spiritual powers into a new theological framework.
Spirit spouses thus lose their neutral or beneficial moral cast and become grafted onto Christian conceptions of demons. They no longer bring luck but misfortune, often related to the real family of their victim. And the accompanying sexual dreams become sources of sexual pollution. …
Medieval theology also featured demonic spirits that sound very similar to spirit spouses. Incubi and succubi were demons who seduced human beings with the goal of corrupting their souls.”
The sad thing here is that the practice of having a spirit spouse, which could be a very rich positive experience in traditional African practices became loathsome and evil with the advent of Christianity.
Psychological Explanation of Demon Sex in Dreams
Accounts of demon sex are well known, appearing in traditional folklore as well as works of art.
On December 18, 2017, Live Science ran an article titled “The Demon Attacks at Night: Explaining the Incubus Phenomenon”
“If you’ve ever woken up in the middle of the night feeling as though you’re being crushed by a demonic being, you may have just experienced what’s called the incubus phenomenon: an ‘attack’ by a male demon. (Its female counterpart, the succubus, usually attacks men.) …
Now, a new meta-analysis from the Netherlands suggests that this frightening phenomenon may be more common than previously thought — and that it should be taken more seriously by psychiatrists and psychologists who hear such accounts from their patients.
The so-called attack usually occurs during an episode of sleep paralysis, a condition that’s even more common than the incubus phenomenon, according to the meta-analysis.
Sleep paralysis is a result of the dissociation of sleep phases, said senior author Dr. Jan Dirk Blom, a professor of clinical psychopathology at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. The condition happens when a person is falling asleep or waking up. During sleep paralysis, two aspects of REM sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep, occur when a person is conscious.
During REM sleep, which is the period when a person typically dreams, the body’s muscles are relaxed to the level of paralysis, presumably to prevent the sleeper from acting out his or her dreams, Blom said. But when sleep paralysis takes place, the person’s mind wakes up — however, the person is still dreaming, and the body is still paralyzed.
‘Lying in bed in such a state of paralysis, the brain’s threat-activated vigilance system kicks in and helps to create a compound hallucination of a creature sitting on the chest,’ Blom told Live Science.
What the afflicted person sees is a combination of their actual surroundings and a nightmare, which is projected onto the real world. The experience feels exceptionally real, Blom said.
In the meta-analysis, which was published in November [2017] in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, the researchers looked at 13 studies of the incubus phenomenon that included nearly 1,800 people. The different studies came from various countries, including Canada, the United States, China, Japan, Italy and Mexico.
The researchers found that over 1 in 10 people, or 11 percent of the general population, will experience the incubus phenomenon in their lifetimes …
But in certain groups, the odds of ‘encountering’ an incubus are higher. Among people with psychiatric disorders, as well as among refugees and — somewhat surprisingly — students, the odds of experiencing the incubus phenomenon are as high as 41 percent, Blom said.
The analysis also found that people sleeping on their backs are more likely to experience the phenomenon. Alcohol consumption and irregular sleeping patterns also make an incubus visit more probable, Blom said.
Though the frightening experience gets frequently dismissed as ‘just a bad dream,’ Blom noted that the incubus phenomenon can lead to additional problems, including anxiety, difficulty sleeping due to fear and even delusional disorder, a mental illness akin to schizophrenia.”
In May 2018, the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine ran an article titled “Incubus Syndrome: A Case Series and Review of Literature”:
“Incubus syndrome, characterized by delusional belief in female patients of being sexually approached by an unforeseen person, is rarely described in literature and description has been limited to isolated case reports. We describe four patients with schizophrenia, who reported the phenomenon of incubus and responded well to treatment with antipsychotics. A review of literature yielded five reports (describing six cases), most of which were described in the context of schizophrenia.”
The Industrial Psychiatry Journal, in their 2018 Jan-Jun edition ran article titled “Unusual cases of succubus: A cultural phenomenon manifesting as part of psychopathology”
“Succubus is also known as demon female lover who approaches males in their dreams to have sex. This is the phenomenon which is rarely described in psychiatric literature. It is more identified as a cultural belief in different religions. We report the two cases diagnosed with schizophrenia, who reported this rare phenomenon of succubus as part of their psychopathology and discuss the phenomenon of succubus.”
The first article quoted blamed the phenomenon on sleep paralysis combined with hallucinations which could lead to delusional disorder, a mental illness akin to schizophrenia. The following two articles dealing with Incubus and Succubus cases concluded that the dreamers experiencing them were diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Many people will be satisfied by such an explanation. However, I will be writing a separate blog on dream sex with spirit entities drawing on ancient beliefs.
Tony Mierzwicki
Author of Hellenismos: Practicing Greek Polytheism Today and Graeco-Egyptian Magick: Everyday Empowerment.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In