My father went to war with a demon bird

The night before my father drove three hours to Southern Illinois to do battle with a demon bird, he handed me a three-ring binder. Inside was a thick stack of arcane documents he’d compiled over several months: photocopied maps, handwritten notes, and reprinted articles; opposition research, if you will, dedicated to a creature called the Piasa Bird.

That is the name for a multiheaded monster whose crude visage had been lavishly painted hundreds of years ago across the limestone bluffs above the Mississippi River in present-day Alton, Illinois, by the Illini — the Algonquian-speaking Native Americans after whom my home state was named. It was the late 1990s, and my dad, John Mark, and a small group of men in his prayer group planned to drive I-55 from Springfield, IL, to the old river town, march to the bluffs, pray intensely over the site, and begin a rite of spiritual warfare.

I had trouble hiding my incredulity. I was in college at the time, studying journalism, and had already begun the long, self-conscious process of distancing myself from the faith I’d been raised in. I told him he was embarrassing himself. Are you seriously going to drive three hours to fight a mythological demon bird?

The Piasa Bird is a quirky, little-known piece of Southern Illinois lore. The bluffs painting was first documented by French explorer Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet during their famous Mississippi River expedition in 1673. (“They are as large as a calf, with head and horns like a goat, their eyes are red, beard like a tiger’s and a face like a man’s,” Marquette wrote in his diary.) And the bird returned to the page in 1836, when writer and Baptist minister John Russell published a newspaper story about it, a tall tale titled “The Bird That Devours Men.” In it, Russell describes a legend in which a brave Illini chief named Ouatoga helped his warriors kill the Piasa by using himself as bait. “Such is the Indian tradition. Of course, I cannot vouch for its truth,” Russell wrote.

Nearly 200 years later, my dad not only vouched for the story’s truth, but he’d tacked on a new supernatural element: he believed that the Piasa Bird was a demon, one that had cast a spell on the state of Illinois, binding it in a spiritual darkness that had yet to be broken. He pointed to a map, traced a finger along the bends of the Illinois River, and explained that our home state was shaped like a human heart and the rivers running through it were symbolic veins beating with the powerful blood of the Piasa. His goal: to bind the principality, thus freeing Illinois from Satanic power. He didn’t share my mortification about the preposterous quest to fight a demon. He traveled to Alton anyway. I never asked how it went.

I’ve been thinking about that night a lot since my mother, Janice, died last month — nearly a decade after my father passed. He died from a rare liver cancer in 2017, and my mom’s heart finally gave out in May after 20 years of assistance on a pacemaker. Between their deaths and the loss of my childhood home to bank foreclosure earlier this year, it feels like the final death of my past self and the strange and magical world of charismatic Christianity I was raised in.

What I realize now is that there was little difference between my father, who believed that devils and angels walked amongst us, and the Algonquian-speaking Native American tribes who, in Marquette and Joliet’s telling, averted their eyes in fear of the image of the Piasa Bird. For all their centuries and cultures apart, both the Illini and my parents shared an enchanted view of the world.

I had it once, too. It was a gift that I don’t want back. It also never let me go.

Christianity permeated everything in my early life. My mother, Janice, converted to Christianity in her mid-20s, not long after what my uncle described as a horrifically bad acid trip, in which she claimed to have seen the face of God, which wasn’t as uncommon as you’d think in the ’70s; the Jesus People movement of that time merged counter-cultural hippie aesthetics with fervent, Spirit-filled evangelical Christianity. My dad followed her, reluctantly at first, and gave up playing bass in a local cover band and recording jams in our marijuana-smoke-filled basement for Sunday morning hymns.

My family’s religion had a specific name, even if no one I knew used it: the neo-charismatic movement, or the Third Wave of the Holy Spirit. (We called it simply: “The Revival.”) Its most visible figure was John Wimber, the former Righteous Brothers keyboardist who founded the Vineyard Christian Fellowship and pioneered what he called “power evangelism” — the idea that conversion should be accompanied by signs and wonders, and that the miracles described in the New Testament had returned. Theologian C. Peter Wagner and his colleagues developed a related doctrine of “spiritual mapping” and “territorial spirits”: the idea that demonic powers were attached to specific geographic locations and could be…