An art center in Minneapolis, Minnesota is turning heads after hosting a “family friendly” pagan ritual geared towards summoning demons.
Titled “Lilit the Empathic Demon”, the event was billed as a “collective and playful demon summoning session” that will end with “a somatic movement meditation, designed to help you befriend your shadows,” according to a report from The Post Millennial.
Prior to the event, attendees were given instructions on “how to trap a demon” in another pagan-themed session. The description for that event claimed that demons “have a bad reputation” only because humanity is ” just not very good at getting to know them,” according to the description.
The demonic activities were part of the center’s “Plant Teachers” day. Other activities included a performance from Catharus, which is music that “explores relationships to land, other-than-human beings, memory, and identity,” The Post Millennial reported.
Featured artist, Tamar Ettun, previously hosted an exhibit on how to “trap” demons. One section of the exhibit instructs attendees to text a number written on the wall in order to “summon” and communicate with the “empathetic demon.”
A description for Ettun’s exhibit claims to be reviving ancient practices from “Sumerian, Akkadian, and Judaic mythology” that showed the demon, Lilit, appearing on “incantation bowls, a healing technology used to protect against demons.”
The exhibit also “parts with the historical gender binarism” and “builds on “the artist’s research into the insidious side of empathy, empathy fatigue, trauma-healing modalities, and astrology as storytelling.”
An article posted to Walker’s website further explains that Ettun came in contact with the entity “when she was at a residency, spending her days and nights in a haunted firehouse-turned-museum making knots and having just found out she was pregnant.”