Iain Atkinson

Dear posterity,

Dear children, grandchildren, descendants, godchildren, spiritual littluns, and whoever is willing to read as a child. I have good news for you: Pokémon is real!

For those living under a rock, Pokémon is an imaginary world of little monsters that live in balls and battle each other. Deemed demonic by some Christians, and thoroughly enjoyable by others, it is all of these things. The reality of Pokémon is that imaginary monsters do live in our balls, and we can battle them for endless enjoyment!

Pokémon took the world by storm when I was a child. I remember a legendary day in my primary school, in which I was given my first Pokémon card for free by a friend — some useless and weak one — and then traded and traded and took my free resource and leveled it up, via a Hitmonchan I recall, into a Shiny Dragonite, I think, if such a card ever existed! I had created a shiny something from nothing, what joy! My parents didn’t get it.

I enjoyed revisiting the gameboy games over the years. In my third year of university, my housemate’s impression of me was that I cheekily played Pokémon all day while casually passing my exams. I needed a mental relief from the stress of work and learning, an escape into the fantasy world of childhood. It was so enjoyable.

Pokémon achieved the remarkable feat of resurrecting itself in the 2010’s. As far as I had been aware, it had died the natural death of most kids’ crazes as its loyal fans endured puberty and all that is called “growing up”. But in 2016, Pokémon Go introduced the hundreds of little critters to a new generation. It turned the classic gameboy explorer game into an interactive smartphone app that overlayed your maps with pocketable animé. You could find Pikachu outside B&Q, or Charizard in your churchyard.

And with the popularity of Pokémon Go, the card trading, TV shows, and ubiquity of merchandize and of the phenomenon in general returned to schools and churches and public places. The young friends that Maggie and I made as soon as we joined the Tab church were big Pokémon fans, and I was inspired to write this post by a comment one made recently: he said his ambition when he grew up was to make Pokémon real! Hence my gospel!

I first encountered the reality of Pokémon when I had the first episode in my life which I was forced, more or less, to process as a spiritual attack. When we first moved to London, Maggie and I lived with wonderful friends in a house on Dove Row in Bethnal Green. One night I got drunk and caused a raucous that I won’t describe in more detail here, but which you can ask me about, or maybe I’ll write a separate piece about it one day. I caused such pain and offence to our housemates that Maggie and I were asked to move out. I had very little memory of all the drunked commotion I had caused. I felt stupid and guilty, but also misunderstood, mistreated, and even tormented.

One day, before we had moved out of Dove Row, in the very heat of this whole issue — while writing about which I now feel a heat up my spine — I tried to focus on the nature of the torment and unfairness I felt. As I prayed and meditated a picture of Meowth flashed before my mind! With it came a more enduring memory of his taunting voice. I realized that I felt taunted and ridiculed, and I was responding with the emotions of my inner child that had learnt about Meowth. The spirit of torment was attacking me, and briefly through the image of that Pokémon.

Not only had the spirit of torment briefly taken that image and form, but I saw that the reactive impulses of my inner body and emotional self – the impulses to react to taunting – had been trained in my young self in relation to such taunting voices as I had heard while watching Pokémon. I realized it was very true that demons spoke to young children through Pokémon.

In that moment of realization, I rebuked the taunting spirit and I immediately felt more peace. A few nights later, I wrestled with Satan like never before, and he was fully and finally driven from my heart. Again, maybe I’ll write a longer piece about the whole Dove Row episode. But for more on Satan’s role in human psychology, see my reflections throughout Meditating on Mark.

Anyway, to the good news: Meowth is real, and can be truly battled and fought! Why is this good news? Well because one may want to retreat into fantasy, but that fantasy is real! And my young friend wanted to make the world of Pokémon real, but it is real! The task of “being the very best”, and of “catching them all”, can be truly undertaken.

Is it not a scary thing that demons are real? It’s as scary as the fact that bacteria are real. The same goes for bacteria and for demons: they’re everywhere, and are often potentially harmful, but if you take some very simple precautions, you have nothing to worry about.

Not only that, but demons and spirits can be loved. Demons have territorial domain, and often have the authority to subject human beings to frustration until their power and authority is acknowledged. Their power is most greatly exercized over those who very little understand their existence and influence. In contrast, to those who understand and perceive their existence, demons can be perfectly amiable, and any misbehaviour can be exorcized. To the one who speaks and thinks the mind of Christ, the demons are all subject.

A demon is a spirit. Where are they? Under every rock, as the saying goes? Let’s learn from the Pokémon world: there are spirits of every different element. There are rock spirits, fire spirits, air spirits, psychic spirits, normal spirits, and so on and so on. There are certainly tormenting spirits, and deeply evil spirits, but there are also weaker or more neutral spirits. There are also holy spirits, angels, resurrected saints, and various other living beings that go here and there and do good for the Lord. Spirits are everywhere, in everything.

A spiritually mature person can appreciate this, can enjoy the diversity of God’s creation, encompassing all the good and the bad. A spiritually mature person can know that even if they encounter a deeply evil spirit, there can be a joy in the battle. Christ has already won a victory over all spirits. We get the joy of a life encountering the spiritual world, developing our spiritual Pokédex, battling demons and growing in power and wisdom.

So how to perceive demons? I joked at the top of this piece that they live in our balls. I mean that quite literally. Spirits are encountered in the very depths of our sense of self, in our most intimate sexual and sensual desires, in our thoughts and in the depths of our hearts. The more we perceive the weirdness of the depths of the self, the more we sense our createdness. Our createdness implies that in every respect, we are dependent on another. It implies that in every respect, we are linked to the wider whole.

The psychological structure of the personal self, the “ego”, depends on the contrasting subtle lie of a secret place of self which is not made, or is not dependent on another thing, but is a very hidden mover of all things. Indeed there is a “secret place”, as Jesus taught, but there I find the Father on whom I depend. Even the Father that you are is sacrificed to all things materially in the crucifixion of Jesus. God, the independent, has made himself very material dependence.

Anyway, to the more relatable and concrete: I can recall many dreams in which demons have been subject to me. I’ve cut up snakes, tamed dogs, and stamped a small black creature off my foot when I once had Covid. While facing frustrations of many kinds throughout the day, I periodically rebuke Satan in Jesus’ words to Peter, or tell spirits to stand down or move aside. I don’t always see or understand these spirits — indeed I want their sight and thought to leave me in peace.

But the Holy Spirit is prompting me right now to describe them in more detail, especially in relation to Pokémon somehow. Ah, here we go: what are spirit animals? One of mine is a black panther. This essentially came from Bageera in the Jungle Book film, a favourite of my childhood. Understand that I enjoyed it as I identified with Mogli, and I respected and loved Bageera. He was to me an image of all that is good and protective. Through that image, I learnt who the Lord is.

Realizing this later, I came to often find that when I prayed for protection or inner peace, I quickly remembered this panther. I would naturally and quickly imagine a panther walking beside me. Spending time meditating on this, the black panther became a shining jaguar, and particularly associated with the Lord’s name Jehovah. So it is that in my imaginal space this image frequently appears. And this is my claim: this is truly an angel who protects me. It’s one of my collection.

I told a drug-ridden homeless woman about this angel once. She asked what kind of protection it gave. I’d never thought to ask that question before. It’s as if she wanted to know what its top moves were on its Pokémon card. I looked into the sky and intuitively replied simply “it protects from demons”. But it was an interesting question. What is this angel? I see now it’s a form of my guardian angel. The guardian angel is effectively a “higher self”. I appreciate there’s no conceptual architecture written here within which to locate such a concept. The direct idea I’m trying to convey is this: this angel is an image of the mirrored surface at which God and I meet. In Pokémon terms, its main attack is “I am” and its secondary move is “poise”, the latter being everything the jaguar represents to me, and that I represent to jaguars by the grace of the Lord!

Now the natural terminus of this letter would be a direct comparison between a Pokémon and a demon. Or, as with my Meowth story above, an explicit demonic inhabitation of the Pokémon world. A little prayer and meditation reveals the following.

The estate agent Stirling Ackroyd is frequently represented on red billboards in this part of Shoreditch. Its logo is a griffin. This particular griffin image has little direct connection to London, its significance is wider. It’s an air-type Pokémon, a spirit that is not particularly connected to the land or to this territory. Its presence here connotes the fact that Shoreditch is a place for high-flyers, a place launching out of the locality of London into the online world.

The griffin is an eagle with a lion’s body. The eagle is the electronic internet space, the lion is the British empire, its bestial form, its form of organization, bureaucracy, and administration. Considering its import now, my spirit is lifted high in the sky above the U.K. As I glance out the window, I see some graffiti – a graffito – of a vague dark face, and I easily brush the demon aside, the evil spirit within myself, within self, with the world. I set my mind on the question of this griffin, of what it is and why it’s here so much. Why did this estate agent choose it? What is its connotation? What is its actual meaning and spiritual reality?

It represents the airwaves of the territorial spirit of the former British Empire. It represents the empire now of airwaves, the informational empire of the English language and globalized world. It represents the beast that is transfigured into an angel on this last day. It is even this angel writing now, putting flight to the final redemption of the British empire achieved in this prophet’s heart.

The griffin is a legendary Pokémon, a fighting and flying type, of course. To catch it is to transcend the identity of the British empire into the kingdom identity that can nevertheless incorporate Britishness and its empire – the globalized world – into a kingdom reality. Put it this way – most Brits hate being British deep down. It’s our famous self-deprecation, rooted in a deep guilt about colonialism. It’s a shame only Christ can cancel. So to catch the griffin and add it to your Pokédex is to love Britain’s role again in world history and economy, and with this love to command this airwave again in the postcolonial freedom movement that is the kingdom of God. The griffin’s first move is “see”, its second “command!”. This is my command: let there be more griffin graffiti!