How could breaking a demonic seal weaken a demon's power?

Question

The book of Genesis tells of how God created the earth in six days, as well as the first humans. He created Adam and Eve in his image as pure and uncorrupted beings. However, Lucifer seduced and slept with Eve within the garden, unbeknownst to her husband, infecting the human race with original sin. Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel, with the latter being the son of Adam and the former being the son of Satan. This led to God rejecting Cain and embracing Abel, leading to jealous rivalries between the two which would culminate in the first murder. Adam and Eve would go on to have another son named Seth, while Cain was branded a murderer and forced to walk the earth alone. Therefore, while the elves of the world stem from the seed of Seth as pure and uncorrupted, the human race would stem from the seed of Cain, tainted with the stain of original sin that he had passed down from his mother. This was all part of Satan's grand scheme to screw over God's divine plan by making humans susceptible to his manipulations.

Through the taint of original sin, Satan has created for himself a backdoor within humanity, allowing him to walk the earth once more. This taint has been passed down through the human race for thousands of years and would culminate with a mortal who would bear the anti-christ, Satan in human form. A team of exorcists working for the Inquisition has located the soon-to-be mother that the Devil has chosen and has taken them into custody. As the mortal goes into labor, the team would perform a sealing ritual which would postpone the birth of Satan into the mortal plane. This status quo has continued for years, with the devil attempting to break the seal binding him to his realm, and the exorcists performing the ritual. Through this method, the catholic church has continued to trap Satan in hell.

However, the method is taxing to the vessel, inflicting physical and mental stress. The years of this ritual being repeatedly performed has weakend the mortal, ultimately leading to their death. This proved to be a mistake, as it caused Satan to manifest in physical form. It turned out that Satan was able to cross over into the mortal world regardless of whether the vessel survived or not. However, while the anti-christ was able to achieve his goal, he is only at half strength. The breaking of the seal by those other than himself has somehow weakened him, preventing him from manifesting his true power. How would this be the case?

Answer 1

The years of this ritual being repeatedly performed has weakend the mortal, ultimately leading to their death.

How so? It is, after all, always a different mortal.

We can imagine that, after the first vessel's mother has had the equivalent of an abortion and has been sterilized (according to Psalm 137: Blessed He, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against a stone), Satan has been forced to recourse to less and less suitable vessels.

The infernal breeding program was to culminate in one ideal vessel; the exorcising-sealing program, stemming as it did from Man's free will, was not foreseeable by Satan. And Satan had no backup plan to rapidly produce a new vessel. Now, less suitable vessels are produced by hurriedly pairing together members of earlier stages of the breeding program, in a race with the priests that locate them as fast as they can.

These less suitable vessels, unfortunately for all involved, allow a differently "shaped" penetration of Satan into the mortal world, and the reaction with the banishment ritual results in more and more damage to the host.

We're now at the stage when merely initiating the banishment ritual kills the mother.

This has yet another unintended and unforeseen consequence: the banishment ritual has now become a human sacrifice -- of a host that is already a willing mother of the Antichrist - thereby, in a way, shorting a circuit with Hell.

This allows (or, from a certain point of view, forces) Satan, who already willingly submitted to the translation protocol with the aim of inhabiting the newborn child, to subsume part of the dying mother's and child's matter-world interfaces - what the ancient Egyptians would have called their "s'h" or "Sah" - and build a body capable of hosting, imperfectly, Satan's spirit, his Skhm, even while their Khts die.

The end result is similar to a demonic homunculus, too strong for an ordinary exorcist to banish, yet in almost every way inferior to the Prince of Darkness's full strength.

Answer 2

His vessel fights back.

Satan needs a vessel. He was hoping for the custom job but then that one was no longer available. When he showed up, he grabbed the strongest vessel in the room. It is more than he bargained for. This high level sorcerer / exorcist, enhanced by technomagical augmentation is strong stuff indeed. This individual is able to exert influence on occult spirits outside his own body. Inside his body he is stronger, and is able to suppress and control even the spirit of Satan.

Incompletely. The result is a negotiated truce. Satan uses his energy to maintain the mortal body against his own corrupting power and he can have awareness and limited interaction with the world. The vessel mostly stays in control but must work hard to do so, and his body is both sickened and strengthened by the unholy power within.

Satan is not pleased. But he has always been about the long game, and he is content to wait. In the meantime, the vessel is going to play the hand he was dealt.

Answer 3

The anti-christ vessel comes fom a carefully planned lineage meant to both allow Satan spirit to enter our dimension and to host it.

With human vessel death there is no focal point for the banning ritual, so Satan spirit could enter, but it has no suitable host.

He can either remain as "pure spirit" and thus with indirect and diminished control over his surroundings or He can "posses" a somewhat "inappropriate" vessel being very uncomfortable in it (think "tight shoes").

Result is he would "inhabit" someone when absolutely needed for His plans, but with a fairly short "survival time", no aqualung, just apnea diving.

Answer 4

He possessed the strongest seed of Seth

Just as he cultivated the bloodline of Cain to make a supreme bloodline, the bloodline of Seth was cultivated by angels loyal to God to make supreme angelic hosts. However, these hosts were optimized for powers useful to angels. Powers of mass destruction are locked to heavenly artifacts which are locked in heaven.

So long as he was willing to restrict himself to summoning heavenly light of hope, mass healing, singing divinely good songs, offering inspiring advice to guide people to good results, forgiving sins, and speaking foreign languages their powers would actually be several times more powerful, but for most of their desired actions their host's powers are poorly optimized.

Answer 5

The Exorcists put in an addendum when exorcising the vessel.

Basically the addendum, an addition to the exorcism incantation, makes it so that if the vessel (person) dies there's a kind of backlash against the demon entering our world via that method. Its something that destroys it. The Priests weren't stupid. They thought of this possibility.

I'm thinking of the exorcism itself as if it were a kind of magical spell that is cast over the vessel to protect it from hellish intrusion. So in addition to the regular exorcism, they also put in a few extra lines of incantation.

"Daemones res aliquae sunt pessimi! Daemones res aliquae sunt pessimi"

Ordinarily any regular ol' demon would just be killed by this, or at least sent right back to where he came from. But in this case, since its the Devil himself, he's powerful enough to make it through, except in the weakened state you're looking for.

Answer 6

Science would have you looking at the genetics of the would be host's parents, but it is the youth of that host which is the critical contributor to the strength of the resulting demon/human hybrid. The possessing spirit can only manifest the percentage of their arcane power equal to the potency of original sin present in the host at the moment of possession.

A newly delivered baby is pure in every way, including in the pure undiluted potency of its original sin. Notice the selfish, entitled wail with which it expels its first breath. Raging against the loss of warmth and security that was its mother's womb, the infant announces its arrival with rage and hunger, crystal clear reflections of its inherent original sin.

Moments later when it's mother first sees her child, it performs its first act of kindness, bringing joy, relief and contentment to another human soul, simply by existing. With that first kind act, the purity of the child's original sin begins to diminish, and every subsequent gurgling smile, peaceful slumber or spontaneous laugh further dilutes it. Within short weeks, that sin is so diminished that a few drops of water from a baptismal font can wash it away entirely.

So what is special about the would be antichrist is not its genetics, nor any arcane/non-genetic aspect of its bloodline. That child is special because the circumstances of its conception allow the demon spirit to enter the child at the moment that it leaves the womb, when its original sin is strongest, and before its mere existence lessens that evil by bringing happiness to the world.

The criteria for a pure-evil birth are simple, but appropriately brutal. The child must be born of parents who have never been touched by holy water or stepped on holy ground. Neither of these criteria iseasy to pull off in the modern world since the Catholic Church has consecrated all of their real estate holdings. By insinuating a chapel into every hospital, cruise-ship, school and military base, they have even consecrated buildings that they do not own. They have also purchased controlling interests in almost all of the bottled water companies on Earth and have been secretly consecrating every bottle for decades. The Church also contributed heavily to the recent anti-virus vaccines and you guessed it, blessed every syringe.

Despite public opinion concerning the obvious fall of morality in recent years, the Church has succeeded in eliminating nearly every antichrist-capable breeding pairs alive.

Which leads to the issue of the seal. Ole Nick has found himself one of the last remaining breeding pairs and through infernal machinations, gotten the biological ball rolling. Then along come some inquisitors who seal up his entryway, and thus torture both mother and child for years in the name of righteousness. When their victims finally die, the inquisitors have the audacity to perform last rights on their corpses, liberating both mother and child from the incarnate world. Those tortured souls immediately depart, taking their original sins with them, leaving Ole Nick locked in a soon to be rotting baby corpse with no original sin to act as a force multiplier for the evil one's malignancy. That he is able to manifest half of his power under these conditions is a sign of just how powerful the first fallen one truly is...

and a sign that the antichrist's birthday, no matter how belated, is a really bad day to be an exorcist.

Answer 7

He (Metaphysically) Tripped

Satan was using all his strength to break the seal, and wasn't prepared for the host's death to break it for him. This shattered and scattered all of the power he was using against it, and he hasn't recovered it yet. In slapstick terms, he was straining against a door that gave way all at once, dumping him on the ground. So instead of entering in all his power and majesty, he did the metaphysical equivalent of falling flat on his face.