Dealing with Ziz: Spirit of Forgetting

by Anne Hamilton

A companion volume to Dealing with Spirit of Constriction . The most significant of the threshold points of life is the doorway into God's unique calling for us. He invites us through covenant to fulfil the destiny and purpose for which we were born. However, many of us fall at the threshold, rather than pass over it. We experience unremitting constriction, wasting, retaliation and forgetting--to such a degree that it's easy to doubt the promises of God. This pioneering work examines the spiritual implications of forgetting in relation to thresholds and covenants. Because the opposite of remembering is dismembering--dismembering of truth--the spirit of forgetting is able to bar the way into our calling. But there is an answer.  

244 pages, Paperback

Published March 9, 2018

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

For twenty years, I was the coordinator of an annual camp for children based around The Chronicles of Narnia. That experience shaped a lot of my thinking about how readers enjoy fantasy.

Like CS Lewis, my fantasy story Many-Coloured Realm began with a picture in my mind's eye: a boy without arms floating in a field of stars and faced with an impossible choice.

My non-fiction series beginning with God's Poetry can be traced back to the observation that Lewis comes from the Welsh word for lion. The discovery of name covenants led to the discovery of threshold covenants, as well as many other long-forgotten aspects of our Judeo-Christian heritage.

I love exploring words, mathematics and names. All of these combine in my books, whether they are fiction or non-fiction, or whether they're for adults or children, whether they're academic in tone or primarily devotional. I hope my readers always come away from my books with a renewed delight for the world around us and a child-like wonder for its awesome aspects.

Reviews

[Nola Lorraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you haven't read the first book in this series--Dealing with Python: Spirit of Constriction--it's probably best to start with that one as the two go together. As with all of Hamilton's books, this one involves a strong spiritual foundation and a deep dive into the meaning, poetry and associations of words. I'm not sure I understand all of the connections, and the author sometimes prefaces her comments by saying a particular point is a theory, but there are plenty of sections that really resonated with me on a personal level.

The basic premise is that when you're about to cross the threshold into the calling God has given you, it's not surprising that you would experience attack from the enemy who doesn't want you to fulfil your God-given destiny. The spirit of Ziz entices us to forget what God has done for us and what He’s called us to. The opposite of remembering is actually dismembering—a tearing apart of truth. I can see many examples in my own life where that has happened. There’s a lot more to it than that, and Hamilton builds up her case from scripture.

Some of the material in this book is new to me and I’m still getting my head around some of it. But I also found a number of keys to issues I’ve faced. It also sheds a different light on some of the spiritual warfare tactics that have become popular in some Christian circles, but actually go against scripture (such as dishonouring certain spirits or binding spirits when we don’t have authority over them). Again, this is fleshed out much more in the book. For example, Jude 1:9 says: “But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said, “The Lord rebuke you”’.

The book also has some helpful appendices and footnotes, including a summary of the main points and other helpful resources.

Recommended for anyone who has felt a blockage to entering their calling and would like some food for thought and strategies for dealing with it.

[Ruth Bonetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

A new release film about Mary Magdalen makes this book even more topical, and in her later chapters Anne Hamilton gives fascinating insights into the life of this often maligned and dismissed woman. She links Old Testament parallels to show Christ's healing and restoration of millennia-long rifts.
Drawing on her extensive knowledge of Hebrew, Greek and other languages, Hamilton illumines aspects of history, faith and life that forge into exciting new territory. Like previous books, it's challenging and needs time to absorb the depths. But as always, there are nuggets of pure gold.

[Mazzy Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anne Hamilton’s books explore and unfold depths of wisdom and understanding that are both challenging and liberating and this one is no exception.

[Anne Hamilton]

I have not rated this book because I am the author.

This book was the one that took me the shortest time to write. The first draft was finished in just over six weeks.

I started to have some disparate insights on what I thought were non-related topics and, as I did, I said to myself, "I'd better write that down before I forget it." Once I had half a dozen of these long notes to myself, I realised they were all connected and were about the spirit of forgetting.

Until that time, I thought that what I knew about the spirit of forgetting could be written on a postage stamp. But when I started to dig into the meaning of some Scriptural words the most significant of them in relation to forgetting turned out to be truth. The Greek word for truth means not forget. Complicity with the spirit of forgetting is an agreement with the spirit of falsehood and even, at times, false accusation.

When I finished the first draft, I asked the Holy Spirit to tell me what I'd forgotten - because, surely, in a book about forgetting I'd have forgotten to include something important. The Holy Spirit said to ask my mum about the details of the story about a rosella, a wild bird she'd once nursed back to health. Now that was dredging the deepest recesses of my memory and I wasn't sure how it related. But fortunately her memory was prodigious and, once she'd typed out the story, it was clear how important it was.

Over the years following, she was amazed and delighted by the number of people who were helped to gain a true perspective on their life situation by that particular episode about a beautiful pale-headed rosella.

[Dorothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I struggled with following the logic in this book on Ziz a little more than the others on Leviathan and Python. But just because it was sometimes a stretch didn't mean any of it was irrelevant. I accidentally stumbled on some keys mentioned in this book during ministry by asking questions of the Lord and doing a little research, and I found the passage by the rabbi that Anne quotes near the beginning. At that time I drew on inferences based on Arthur Burk's treatment of Leviathan; where he invites God as the Ancient of Days into the situation, I felt led to invite the God as the Father of Lights in Ziz's case. I am not sure anything quite like this is mentioned in Anne Hamilton's approach either, so YMMV. But there was a lot more I had no idea about. The nature of forgetting (dis-membering) and remembering itself is huge. Once again, I found applications for this teaching almost immediately.

I did not see the connection with what people call 'the Jezebel spirit' coming, but based on what I have heard of the actions of that spirit, it makes a lot of sense and I think Anne's warning about the dishonor of women in calling them this demeaning name should be considered thoroughly and taken very seriously.