ColossiansOne

speech · 2 claims

Compelled Divination

A slave girl in Acts follows Paul shouting true things, and the thing driven out of her is named after the serpent of Delphi.

The python spiritFortune-telling

Acts 16 describes a slave girl at Philippi with a 'spirit of python' — pneuma pythona — who brings her owners much gain by soothsaying, and who follows Paul for days calling out, accurately, that these men are servants of the most high God. Paul, annoyed, commands the spirit out, and her owners have him arrested because their income is gone.

Python is the serpent Apollo killed at Delphi, and the Pythia is the oracle who succeeded it there. So the word is a direct loan from Greek oracular religion into a Christian text, which makes this the one modern deliverance category with a genuinely specific ancient word behind it. The passage is also unusually pointed about who was profiting.

Oldest first

Who was blamed, and by which text?

Each card is one text making one attribution, in its own framing. Reading down the column is a transmission history rather than a set of independent witnesses — and where a claim carries a grading, that grading is about how well it is grounded in the passage it cites, nothing more.

A spirit of python

New Testament · c. 50–110 CE

Possesses a slave girl who brings her owners much gain by soothsaying, and who calls out true statements about Paul for many days.

What stops it
Paul commands it out in the name of Jesus Christ; it leaves the same hour.

Acts 16:16–19

The python spirit

Pigs in the Parlor: A Practical Guide to Deliverance · 1973

Taken as the spirit behind divination and occult practice generally, and behind a constricting oppression that squeezes out prayer.

Grading · Strong as a word. Luke's Greek names a specific oracular spirit; the constriction reading is a later extension from the snake's habits.

Countermeasures

What the texts say stops it

c. 50–110 CE

Paul commands it out in the name of Jesus Christ; it leaves the same hour.

Which texts make these claims?

Oldest first. The distance between the earliest and the latest is the thing worth looking at: a claim made in an incantation four thousand years ago and one made in a paperback in 1973 are different kinds of evidence about the same symptom.

All afflictions