The Dead Horse Guide to Dybbukism
PLUS: How to get rid of the damned thing!
Illustration: Dybbuk by Ephraim Moses Lilien.
For hundreds of years, Jews and their pet legal scholars (called rabbi in Hebrew) have known of a condition called dybbukism (Yiddish דיבוק, from the Hebrew root meaning “to cling”). A dybbuk is a soul parasite. Often contracted after a traumatic experience, such as the death of a loved one, the clinging soul is a personification of the host’s grief, which can be pried from them through some combination of persuasion and talk therapy.
The titular dybbuk in Ansky’s famous 1920 play, The Dybbuk, is the soul of a bride’s lost love. Though it is commonly held that the fame of this play dissuaded future spirits from attempting to become dybbuks, this is inaccurate. Dybbukism is all around you. In the grocery store, on the bus, and in your home, everyone is carrying a secret grief. Perhaps you are, too.
Is one of your loved ones unpredictable in their mood swings? Do they seem like one person one hour, and a different the next? That may well be the case. The nasty side of them is the dybbuk, clinging to the person you love and puppeteering them to an early grave.
Not to fear. We at Dead Horse Press have compiled some of the most common causes of dybbukism in the 21st century, conveniently presented in listicle format. Simply read on. Be sure to put yourself in the shoes of each role (the Lonely Child is first), and if you recognize the person described, well – you know more about dybbukism than you realize.
The Lonely Child
Create an imaginary friend. Ideally, this friend will love you like nobody else, not leaving the swings when you approach nor ignoring you when you ask for help. Everyone else has forgotten you. If not for their patience, you might be totally alone in this world, doomed to forever guess if someone wants to hear your voice.
Grow up in this trenchant inner world.
Grow up.
Grow up.
Find that, no matter how old you get, everyone can tell you don’t belong in this world. There’s something… wrong with you. There are jokes only you get, memories only you have, games you’ve only played with yourself. It doesn’t matter how you protest that there’s another like you. No one can see them, and all you’re admitting is that you don’t belong here, among the living, but with your imaginary friend.
But that’s not such a problem, is it? What good council they make. Who needs a second friend, when your first is perfect, protecting your body when it needs protected, pushing away outsiders when they get too close? Besides, you’re just fine like this.
You’re just fine like this.
The Survivor
Observe, through the TV screen or window pane, someone evil. Think to yourself, “I could do that.”
I could be beautiful and powerful and dangerous and vain. I could stop it ever happening again.
Bad things don’t happen to the beautiful and the dangerous. Your adjectives protect you. People won’t fuck with you if you’re unpredictable, and react with great force to small slights. They won’t even want to, if you’re beautiful enough.
But those aren’t your only lines of defense. So is your anger, your distrust, your eerily precise knowledge of who will and won’t hurt you. Even if others don’t understand why you’re acting like this, or what you’re afraid of, it’s not your fault they’re so stupid. You don’t need to endanger yourself for their little concerns. Those don’t matter at all.
Wake up.
Realize you’ve done it to someone else.
The Down-and-Out
Well, it’s a dandelion-in-the-sidewalk situation, isn’t it?
You see, you weren’t allowed to piss inside on account of the piss smell you got from not being allowed to piss inside. Not even able to pee, sleeping with a roof over your head is too much to hope for.
People stomp pavement until it cracks. Someone else grows out of it.
And, well – it’s not a dandelion. A Venus flytrap, maybe, but more accurately, one of those Little Shop of Horrors motherfuckers. Those Jumanji motherfuckers, those man-eating plants that no one in their right mind fucks with.
You could shave your beard. You could smile at passersby, taking rainwater showers to keep yourself presentable. But nothing is so valuable as looking scary. If you’re too scary to go inside, you must also become too scary to mess with.
Otherwise, you’ll never survive.
So you let your worst instincts take the wheel. Your anger, your fearsome violence. These are the things keeping you alive, not the old self your mother loved. A type of suicide keeps the body alive.
If you have a dybbuk, don’t worry. The worst that can happen is that you’ll die a monster your family doesn’t recognize, your face worn by your trauma the last weeks of your life like a costume on Halloween. Such things happen every day.
The best that can happen, of course, is that you live.
A dybbuk can be removed. In the modern day, era of miracles, it doesn’t even require a rabbi, who likely can’t do it, anyhow. Simply remove yourself from the situation that caused the dybbukism, find a therapist that both believes you and takes your insurance, and end up spending thousands out of pocket anyway in your quest.
If not?
Well, there are plenty of therapeutic experiences you can have outside of therapy. Humans, after all, seem to have been managing just fine in the 200,000 years before Freud. Make art. Attend services to gods you’ve never heard of. Notice the difference between yourself and the dybbuk, and begin to push back against it. Through these, you can escape your fate.
Two Fossils
Long ago, a nautilus lived with few consequences, bobbing through the blackness of the world current, large and ever-drifting. One day it settled on the floor of an eternal ocean, barely stiller there than it had been in life. Its shell, once painted in such vibrant branching mandalas, turned brown and hard with sand.