The Devil You Name is the God You Forgot
If you see the devil in me, maybe it’s because he recognized God first.
That’s what terrifies you, isn’t it?
That I didn’t shrink when the power showed up. That I didn’t ask your pastor for permission before I started hearing things you couldn’t. That I walk through the world with something older than scripture and deeper than doctrine pulsing behind my eyes.
You don't know what to do with that kind of clarity. So you call it evil.
Because if a little Black girl can speak truth without your approval—if she can name things that haven’t been said out loud, deliver messages no one else could know, feel pain that doesn’t belong to her, and still stand in love—then where does that leave you?
Powerless? Or just exposed?
Let’s be honest: you didn’t name it the devil because it was dark. You named it the devil because it didn’t come through you.
The first time someone told me I was possessed, I hadn’t even started bleeding yet.
I was in church, surrounded by raised hands and bad breath and cheap perfume, and I had told a woman something I saw in her spirit.
She asked me who told me that. I said God did.
She clutched her Bible like it was a weapon and backed away like I had spat in tongues.
She said, "That’s the enemy. That’s divination. That’s witchcraft."
And I remember thinking, But isn’t that what y’all prayed for?
You want miracles, but only if they wear robes.
You want prophecy, but only if it comes from behind a pulpit.
You want deliverance, but only if it looks like suffering.
So when it shows up in me—unbothered, intuitive, wrapped in locs and incense and knowing—you panic.
You’re not afraid of darkness. You’re afraid of a woman who didn’t need your fear to find God.
You were taught that gifts like mine come from the devil, because God couldn’t possibly speak through someone like me.
Someone who doesn’t play church.
Someone who asks questions.
Someone who remembers a version of God untouched by colonization.
But make no mistake:
I didn’t stumble into this.
I was born chosen.
My dreams came coded. My body came wired. My prayers came full of names I hadn’t learned yet.
And when I started saying things out loud—things I wasn’t supposed to know, things people hadn’t told me—I didn’t feel evil. I felt seen.
I felt used by something holy.
I still do.
You keep trying to cast out what was never meant to be exorcised.
You keep trying to silence what was sent.
You call it demonic. But I’ve felt evil.
It felt like shame. It felt like silence.
It felt like being told to repent for a gift I didn’t ask for but was born carrying.
You were just never taught that a woman who sees is the altar itself.
But you’ve spent your whole life worshiping a God who doesn’t speak like me.
And now that I’m here—speaking, healing, naming, remembering—you don’t know whether to rebuke me or bow.
I’ll make it easy for you.
I don’t need either.
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They didn’t burn witches because they were evil—they burned them because they couldn’t be controlled.
They didn’t need fire for Black women. They had scripture. Slavery. Shame.
What they couldn’t colonize, they demonized.
What they couldn’t kill, they renamed wicked.
Our altars became threats. Our rituals, crimes.
Our spirits, devils.
Our generational, sacred gifts desecrated, renamed as sin.
This demonization was no accident—it was strategy.
The spiritual systems from the African continent—rich, complex, alive with cosmological science—did not vanish. They were carried in flesh, whispered through hymnals, and buried in breath. They terrified those who couldn’t touch their power.
In the Caribbean, enslaved Africans were tortured, hanged, and even executed for practicing Obeah—a living system of medicine, protection, and ancestral justice. The 1760 Jamaican Act to Remedy the Evils Arising from Irregular Assemblies of Slaves criminalized Obeah not because it was evil, but because it was effective—and afraid of rebellion.
“The fear of Obeah wasn’t about superstition—it was about the reality that power could exist outside the colonial system.”
—Dr. Faith A. Smith, Creole Recitations
And yet, still—we remixed oppression.
In Haiti, Vodou/Vodun became war’s drumbeat. The revolution’s root—leaders like Dutty Boukman summoned spirits before marching on oppressors, showing the world that the “demonic” can also birth liberation.
In Cuba, Santería—syncretized Yoruba tradition—kept its divine oracle alive: Oricha spoke through drums, divination, and dance, conjuring power through bodies.
Black women in the American South dared to dig roots, saying Psalm 23 over candles and bay leaves. Hoodoo—often twisted in Hollywood as macabre—was, in fact, ancestral medicine: dream decoding, energy healing, protective magics. Not religion—but survival technology.
You call it witchcraft. We call it memory.
It’s not that our spiritual systems were dark—it’s that they worked.
White missionaries couldn’t decode it—so they called it possession.
Plantation owners feared it—so they labeled it rebellion.
The Black church, craving acceptance, internalized the fear and taught theology instead of truth.
Even now, say “Obeah” in some Caribbean churches, and folks flinch like you said cancer.
But we were never the disease. We were the medicine.
“African-based traditions are not rooted in Satanism—they are rooted in a deep connection to nature, ancestors, and divine energy.”
—Dr. Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition
To see. To dream. To speak in tongues. To heal.
These are not tricks. These are our inheritance.
Throughout it all, the Oracle never went silent.
In Yoruba, in Vodun, in Santería, in Conjure across continents—the oracle was always present, calling the future, speaking ancestral secrets, naming divinity in flesh.
Yes, Christianity was used as a weapon. But we are not its victims.
We rewired it. We repurposed it.
The ring shout was ceremony and conjure.
The altar call? More than repentance—it was energetic invocation.
Prayer warriors weren’t just elders—they were seers, rootworkers, vessels.
Psalms became spells. Oil, medicine. The holy moan—a portal.
We conjured Christ into our cosmology, resurrecting liberation in the margins.
Yet… we’re still told that if it didn’t come in a suit—or through a man behind a mic—it must be demonic.
But here’s my truth: I don’t need a building to hold my gift.
I am the sanctuary.
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Before I ever stepped into a church, I knew how to pray.
Not because someone taught me—but because my body remembered.
Where to place my palms.
How to close my eyes without fear.
How to sit still long enough to listen.
I didn’t need stained glass to feel the sacred.
I didn’t need a sermon to hear the voice.
I didn’t need a collar to speak with authority.
The placement of my body in sacred space wasn’t learned. It was instinct.
Inherited. Remembered.
The first time I walked into a temple in Kemet, I slipped into a trance. I knew exactly where to kneel. I knew which direction to face. I knew which rooms to go. And when I came out of it, I didn’t question whether it was real—because it felt more real than most of the prayers I’d been told to perform.
I was the altar long before anyone recognized what I carried.
And that’s the part that rattles people.
That I didn’t need to be ordained to be chosen.
That the sacred didn’t wait for me to be righteous before it made a home inside me.
That I didn’t come through the front door—they keep trying to figure out how I got in.
But let me tell you something about the God I know:
She’s been sitting in my lineage since before I was born.
She was there in the pot of herbs boiling slow over a back burner.
She was in the hands that pressed oil into my scalp while prayer soaked into my skin.
She was in the humming beneath the surface of silence.
She was in the breath left behind after the candles blew out.
And the ones who taught me didn’t call themselves priestesses, but they moved like holy was stitched into their shadows.
They spoke to spirits like it was their first language.
They dreamed in full color and told you exactly what was coming.
They knew when someone was lying before their lips even parted.
They didn’t call it psychic.
They called it knowing.
You want to talk about holiness?
Holiness is the way the earth smells after a storm.
Holiness is the hands that laid on my fevered head with Wray & Nephew and prayer.
Holiness is the dream I had the night before my cousin died—where I saw her smiling and waving goodbye in the rain.
Holiness is not confined to steeples and stages.
Holiness has hips. Has salt. Has scent. Has teeth.
Holiness can braid hair and channel the dead in the same breath.
But the problem is—if holiness doesn’t come packaged in pain, people don’t believe it’s real.
They want their prophets broken.
They want their seers quiet.
They want their miracles to look like suffering.
So when someone like me shows up—whole, loud, anointed and unapologetic—they reach for their Bible instead of listening.
Because what does it mean when God starts using the people you were taught to fear?
And still—despite the fear, despite the exile, despite the silence—I kept speaking.
Kept dreaming.
Kept showing up with messages in my mouth and heat in my hands.
I stopped waiting to be invited in.
I built the damn altar myself.
Because the truth is—we’ve always known how to make holy ground.
In hush harbors. In front rooms. In fields and kitchens and basements and breath.
We sanctified spaces with rhythm and prayer and scent and spit.
We called things down.
We are the reason church even exists.
And now—now the gifts are returning. Fast. Loud. Fierce.
Dreams are waking people up.
Hands are tingling.
People who never believed are suddenly remembering.
Because this generation? We came coded.
We came to break chains.
We came with the memory already installed.
We are the echo of the ones who were burned.
We are the prophecy with a pulse.
So when I say I am an oracle, I say it from the center of my ribcage.
From the memories carved into my DNA.
From the voices I hear when I close my eyes.
From the fire I carry in my hands.
And if that makes you uncomfortable,
You should ask yourself why a God who spoke from a burning bush couldn’t also speak through me.
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I’ve been called witch, heretic, blasphemous, delusional.
I’ve been told to be careful who I talk to.
To be careful who I let in.
To be careful what doors I open.
But no one ever warned me how dangerous it is to stay closed.
Nobody tells you how suffocating it is to pretend you don’t know what you know.
To play small when your very breath is a summons.
To betray your own power in the name of someone else’s comfort.
You think I do this because it’s easy?
No.
I do this because it’s true.
Because even after they tried to scare me out of my own gift,
Even after they tried to drown me in holy water and wrapped scripture around my neck like a noose,
Even after they called my name in rooms they didn’t invite me into—
I still hear God clearer than the ones holding the mic.
I don’t do this for validation.
I do it because the message is louder than the shame they tried to bury me with.
I do it because people are walking around haunted by wounds that aren’t theirs,
Dreaming of things they don’t understand,
Feeling the presence of ancestors they’ve been taught to fear.
And if I can say it—if I can name it—then maybe they’ll stop thinking they’re broken.
Maybe they’ll realize they’re gifted.
Maybe they’ll remember.
Because that’s what this is: remembrance.
Of the diviner who didn’t need to read to see.
Of the healer whose hands pulsed with heat and truth.
Of the seer who spoke in riddles and left the elders shaking.
Of the conjurer who walked barefoot through the woods with honey on her tongue and storm in her mouth.
We are not new.
We are not strange.
We are not demonic.
We are the continuation.
You don’t need to understand me.
You don’t need to like me.
You don’t need to bow.
You don’t need to accept me to know who sent me.
Because everything I touch carries instructions.
Because the air shifts when I speak.
Because your body reacts before your mind catches up.
Because deep down, you remember this frequency.
You remember us.
We were there when your grandmother whispered over the stew pot.
When your great-uncle slipped salt into his shoes before walking into court.
When your mother swayed in the kitchen and hummed to no music at all.
This isn’t rebellion.
This is return.
You called it rebellion because you forgot your own altar.
Because you bowed to a God who only looked holy in white.
Because they taught you fear and called it faith.
Because you’ve mistaken obedience for devotion.
And control for protection.
But I’m done shrinking for structures I was born to redesign.
Done letting the uninspired name what is divine.
Done begging for space in temples that couldn’t hold my fire.
So here’s my prayer:
May your discernment be louder than their doctrine.
May your spirit recognize what your mind forgot.
May you feel the heat of your own gift rising again.
May you return to your knowing.
May you unlearn the shame.
And if this is the devil’s work—
then maybe it’s time to ask who taught you his name.
One love, ESS xo
If you’re ready to stop fearing your gift and start reclaiming it— come sit with someone who remembers.
Book a session with me here.
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References
Chireau, Yvonne. Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition
Smith, Faith. Creole Recitations: John Jacob Thomas and Colonial Formation in the Late Nineteenth-Century Caribbean
