But here is the paradox: even among Orthodox Christians in our time, unfortunately, there is the same (almost pagan) attitude to corruption as among peoples who did not know Christ or "successfully" forgot Him. Some believers, like modern pagans, are extremely afraid of spoilage and the evil eye, trying to blame anyone for all their troubles, but not themselves and not their sins. It is to such people, first of all, that the book that you are holding in your hands is addressed. It attempts to systematize knowledge about the possibility of magical influence on a person with the help of "heavenly spirits", that is, demons. The conditions and properties of human character that open the way for such an impact are analyzed, and methods of protection against it are indicated. After all, to defend means to fight. It is the necessity of this struggle that the Apostle Paul tells all of us: "Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil; for our wrestling (that is, war. – Author) is not against flesh and blood (here we mean people – Author), but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places" (Ephesians 6:11-12).

For many people, including Orthodox Christians, the panic fear of magical influence in the form of the evil eye and spoilage manifests itself as a painful phenomenon, as a consequence of their spiritual illness. In the book, we will try to analyze why this happens, to suggest how to cope with such conditions.

However, there is another extreme. Among the Orthodox, and well-educated people, the opposite, albeit rather superficial opinion is quite widespread, that there is no magical influence capable of causing harm (damage) to a person at all. This view is largely based on assumptions put forward in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by people who had no personal experience with the spirit world. In Russia, from the time of the secular, if not to say atheistic, reforms of Peter I, which continued under Anna Ioannovna and Catherine the Great, a completely Protestant view of the spiritual world was formed, in which there was no place for "spirits of evil in the heavenly places" at all. All those parts of the Holy Scriptures that spoke of possessed (demon-possessed) people were interpreted in a figurative sense, where demons were understood as either sinful passions or physiological diseases.

Such an attitude can hardly be called Orthodox. Both in the past centuries and especially in our days, we see the ever-increasing influence of demonic forces on man – the unprecedented rampant occultism, the growth of seemingly causeless crimes, distinguished by truly inhuman cruelty, the destruction of the moral foundations of many aspects of our life, the emergence of people who, from a very young age, can be called demon-possessed. All this creates the basis for speculation on the fear of an incomprehensible "dark influence" or damage, from which various "healers" have made a real scarecrow. All the troubles of modern man are explained by them exclusively by spoilage. A rare newspaper does not give dozens of ads with offers to "get rid of the curse and the evil eye forever."

So how should an Orthodox person relate to this spiritual phenomenon? Should we neglect it as a kind of superstition, or should we try to understand what the essence of the phenomenon is? It is difficult to understand its roots without analyzing the historical aspect of the problem, without understanding what witchcraft is and how one becomes a sorcerer (conscious or unconscious), without learning about the "mechanisms" of introducing demons into a person, about the reasons for the appearance of "superpowers", about the forms of today's demonization of society and about many other things that will be discussed in this book.

I hope that a detailed consideration and analysis (from the Orthodox point of view) of such an extraordinary and differently perceived phenomenon as spoilage will help readers to cope with false views on it, as well as to get rid of the fear of sorcerers and psychics, who successfully parasitize on the fear of spoilage.

"And I saw an angel coming down from heaven, having the key of the abyss, and a great chain in his hand. He took the dragon, the serpent of old, which is the devil and Satan, and bound it for a thousand years, and cast it into the abyss, and shut it up, and set a seal over it, that it should deceive the nations no more, until the thousand years were finished. and after this he must be released for a little time, and come out to deceive the nations..."

The Revelation of St. Ap. John the Theologian, 20, 1-3; 7

WHY DOES THIS FEAR APPEAR?

EVEN AMONG THE ORTHODOX?