Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Please Help Me To Figure Out What Happened!

I would like to hear from people who have had any similar experience or know of such an experience, so that they might share with me what they think this all was that happened to me, because beyond my limited knowledge, I honestly don't know - besides Demon Possession

I Will Give 5SBD To The Person With The Best Account of What Happened To Me With This Devil Mask

From Part 1 to Part 4 - I truly want to know what other experiences like this people have had and what their processes are to recover from such an experience.

Please write your experiences below in the comments section. If I don't get a satisfactory explanation this time, I will make it into a real Steemit-Challenge, in the coming weeks.

After I Got The Tattoo:

After getting the image of the Devil Mask tattooed on my arm in February of 1993, I met a guy who looked alarmingly like the mask, in August of 1994. I remember thinking that when I first met him but I did not really think anything of it again until 6 years had passed and I was trying desperately to get him out of my life, when I looked down at my arm and realized that perhaps I needed to get the tattoo covered. I believe that God was talking to me and gave me that intuitive thought.

My First Experience With How Sigils Work

Although I did not realize this at the time, I see now how this Devil Tattoo was a Sigil which brought into my life all the spirit of that Demon had to offer me by being on my right arm where I could see it every day. I was telling my subconscious mind that I wanted that experience.

Dan My unKinda Soulmate

The guy I met was a soul-mate of sorts. i had a vision of him before I met him and I knew it was him when I met him, but he was not there in my life so that we could live happily ever after. Instead, he was a guy who was going to join me on a path to hell and back so that I would beg for God's Mercy and be willing to do anything to not have to live life as I had been living it up to that point. His name is Dan.

Dan is addicted to crack cocaine and I met him at Woodstock 94. Dan is still in and out of rehabs to this day - he has had periods off the dope, but just recently, he is in rehab yet again.

I fell madly in something I called love at that time, with him, at first sight.

After the first 2 weeks of knowing him, I drove to CT from NY to bail him out of jail. I was hooked. I began painting these giant canvases- about 8' tall all of them, to process the agony I went through over him.

Dan would be super sweet one minute and the next day he would not come home because he would hitchhike to CT to cop crack.

At some point, Dan's PO in CT sat me down and told me that this guy, that I was supposedly madly in love with was a charmer and a con man and that he was going to sign Dan over to my custody, so that he could leave CT and move to NY but, he said - he would not recommend it because he told me, this guy is a psychopath.

I didn't listen. I just kept painting. This painting is mixed media paper towels and paper mache covered with oil paint. Dan was in his first rehab that I know of when I did this one. Dan signed over his parental rights to his ex-wife so that he could be free of paying child-support so he could continue to use, and I was so under the spell, I did not blink an eye.

This painting contains the "visitor" stickers that I got when I went to visit him in rehab. He stayed there for about 6 months, so I got through a few paintings about this topic.

I did this painting when I was doing the family program with him in the rehab. I would come visit him and we would go out back in the woods and do the nasty while we were supposed to be in group. I should have known then that it was all a joke, but I was mezmerized.

When he got out of rehab, he went right back to his old habits. I was devastated.

On Sept 2, 1996 I painted this Star of David while there was an astrological phenomena of a Star of David in the sky, intuitively. It was not planned.

March of 1997, Dan went to rehab again, and I went to Mexico. I painted 3 paintings about this adventure.

I went Marlin fishing in Mexico and caught a Marlin which turned purple right before it died.

I gathered gold shells off the beach and glued them to this canvas and painted in silver and gold. I was in Mexico for 2 weeks.

Dan got out of rehab and went immediately back to using. I painted a painting of myself as the Justice Card with a prayer that Jesus went to Hell to get him, like Persephone.

Dan came back to me for a while. I painted a picture of us having sex - and later I saw a demon sitting behind us in the greenery. At this point I had gone with him to New York City with the drug dealers in the car to collect money from their crack whores. I was hanging around with the Bloods and the Cryps and risking my freedom and my life every day, just to be with Dan.

The Devil Painting

This was the last of the series. I was painting what I thought was a completely abstract painting one day and Dan came over to my house to ask me if he could hide his money there so he wouldn't use - he thought. I had been up for days painting and crying. I was a mess. It was 1999. He took one look at the painting, and he said "It's the DEVIL!" - I had not even seen it in the painting. I had painted it without even knowing.

The Bottom

This event knocked me into a state of shock and horror - I realized that I was on a suicide-mission and that I had better do something quickly, if I hoped to live.

I immediately made an appointment to get the Devil Mask on my arm covered. In the end I had a black butterfly tattooed on my arm. At first I tried to just transform the mask into a butterfly but I could still see the Devil through every attempt. Until we simply blacked it out, I could still see it. It took 3 tries. Now that laser tattoo-removal is available, I think I will get it removed once i start making a living as a tattoo artist.

After I got the tattoo covered, I broke and burned and buried all the devil remnants - all the drawings I had done, I carefully burned and buried the ashes in the ground. Other wooden devil masks I had bought, I smashed with a hammer burned and buried. The clay mask I had made, I smashed and soaked in water and then buried outside in the earth.

Immediately after that, I found a spiritual process in Natural Law which helped me to see the truth about Dan and most importantly about myself and what I had been avoiding in my life by being in this crazy relationship, such that I was able to ask him to leave and my life began to take a turn for the better. It was a slow process back to a level of life that I now have, better than the best I had ever known before.

I don't think about this story much, except that the other day, I got a text on Facebook from Dan's best friend, Ivan, saying that he has been living in Denver with his girlfriend from rehab and his 3 year-old daughter and he would like to get together with me and get tattooed...

I posted this drawing with reading about whether or not I should get together with him: https://steemit.com/artzone/@in2itiveart/dance-with-the-devil-revisited -

God told me that Ivan is just a hologram of Dan, and that I would be much better off if I stayed away and definitely refused to tattoo Ivan. I have evolved so far spiritually now that it was a no-brainer and quite easy to do, although it did dredge up this whole story for me to tell you.

The timing is also interesting, because at this time I am revisiting my own relationship with the principle of Receptivity vs. Taking as demonstrated in this video. https://www.chabad.org/multimedia/media_cdo/aid/3335300/jewish/Receive-More-and-Take-Less.htm ... At the time when I first met the Mask, back in 1983, I believe that I "TOOK" a shortcut to "freedom" which was actually to another level of imprisonment. The return of this story for me is for me to see how taking does not work, but receiving does. It's a subtle difference in attitude - one makes me feel like I am in control (taking) while the second guarantees that I will get what I want, but I will have to let go into free fall.