Demonic Influences

 In the Western Mystery Tradition, Demons are malefic, disembodied beings who essentially prey on humans. Remnants of a fallen universe, they are smarter than we are but have mentalities that don’t really make sense to us. People who sufficiently debase their consciousness or actively court them can enter into contact with these beings, who can perform acts of magic on behalf those who contact them. Typically, this doesn’t work out very well for the hapless sorcerer, although there are still plenty of practitioners of the magic arts who give it a try.

This description is a narrative that can be considered from many angles. One might be tempted to take it as a literal truth, but any mage who has spent some time diligently studying the type of magic that John Michael Greer teaches will have come across Dion Fortune’s comment about training the mind, not informing it. Nonetheless, the idea that there are negative spirits inimical to humanity in some sense is pervasive and has been present in most cultures with a magical tradition.

In my view, therefore, while stories of the demonic sublunar realm, the fall of man and ancient Lemuria are intriguing and are definitely good meditation fodder, they are unverifiable in any “scientific” sense. As narratives, they are symbolically useful, and point at a spiritual reality that is ultimately beyond expression or full comprehension.

As a mage, I have encountered what I can readily label as demonic forces in ritual and meditation. While these types of experiences may be regarded by rationalists as some kind of evolutionary tic or “bug” in the psyche of humanity, such a view seems incompatible to the worldview of the mage. Demons seem, in my view, to be an unpleasant feature of the map of reality of the operative mage, and therefore are spiritual forces that must be taken into consideration.

Another consideration for the operative mage is the presence, use, and indeed the sheer prevalence of malefic magic. Even a stone-cold rationalist who spent a few idle hours looking into magical communities would be unable to deny that people use malefica and evil magic all the time for various purposes, even if they think it is silly superstition. I live in a small, fairly conservative community and I’ve been the target of grubby workings several times by people in my personal sphere (to say nothing of the malefic works of mages who seem to have targeted the magical community in which I have chosen to participate). Many hurlers of malefica may very well be consciously or unconsciously in contact with demonic forces.

In a world where “rationalists” hold the levers of power and dictate what is or isn’t acceptable to include in our larger consensus reality, mages are in a bit of a bind when they see something that occurs that seems to potentially be influenced by evil spirits. When a good chunk of the population turns on a dime and starts behaving in unbalanced and irrational ways after several malefic astrological conjunctions occur, for example. Or when a group of mages and neopagans openly court demonic powers to sic them on their political opponents and suddenly the Western world as whole is locked down and weird plagues are running rampant.

Mass bindings and summoning of demonic forces were indeed a trendy thing during Donald Trump’s presidency, and a number of the people who participated admitted on their own public blogs that they continued to do workings designed to hurt, bind, and kill people who disagreed with their political opinions even after the publicity died down. This is all a matter of public record and can be found in books, blog posts, and even mainstream news coverage.

A lot of people think that sort of thing is nonsense, at least on the surface, and since Trump and his supporters were acceptable targets of hate, the mainstream didn’t seem to take it very seriously… but the people doing it certainly did, and there were a lot of them performing these rituals over and over.

Pointing this out and suggesting that maybe all of these thousands of spells may have actually had an effect, and that maybe when thousands of people went knocking on the gates of Hell something answered, so to speak, is really not that shocking. I mean, you don’t have to believe in spirits to be a mage, ask a chaos magician, but if you think magic is bunkus and none of this really means anything, why the hell are you LARPing as a magician anyway? It’s the opposite of cool to most people.

Even though I believe in negative spiritual energies that we might as well call demons, I literally never discuss that belief with anyone but my closest confidantes.  Even though I know I’ve been the target of evil magic (someone who did a work on me later admitted it and I’d recorded the effect of the work in my magical journal, though I didn’t know where the energy came from), I don’t spend a lot of time talking about or worrying about that either. When you’re a mage, it seems to go with the territory.

All that’s great, Ari, but what’s your point, you may very well be asking. If you are outside the Ecosophia community and stumbled on this by accident, it probably seems like mad gibberish, and if not, you probably already know most of this anyway.

This is a response to some recent criticism I’ve seen of my eclectic little online community and the man who founded it. I’m not entirely sure that it’s outside the pale for a spiritual teacher with many students to propose that maybe some stuff that sure looks like evil magic and demonic activity may actually be evil magic and demonic activity.

I’ve seen the suggestion that these sorts of speculations are irresponsible and risk “othering” people. If they are generalized too broadly, there may be some validity to that. I’m sure there are plenty of witches and mages with left-leaning politics who didn’t curse people or invoke demons, even during the heyday of anti-Trump hysteria. That said, there are lots of people in the Ecosophia community who are now being painted with an equally large brush, including the person who created the community to begin with.

In my opinion, if a spiritual teacher thought there may be demonic activity afoot, that teacher would be derelict in their role as educator if they didn’t alert their students and community to the possibility, even though there would be the risk that people in that community (and a whole bunch of pot stirring Anonymi) may run with it in potentially dangerous or counterproductive ways.

I don’t always agree with everyone in the community. I don’t always agree with JMG, and I’m dead certain he wouldn’t want everyone to agree with him all the time. He has advanced some hypotheses that are pretty controversial and extreme, and they will either be confirmed or disconfirmed in the fullness of time (well, the influence of demons, or not, may be pretty hard to verify; they probably won’t show up to take credit).

In the meantime, those of us who don’t know exactly what’s going on but know damn sure something is wrong with the coronavirus response and vaccines have a safe place to discuss ideas (and the Open Posts ARE host to a wide variety of perspectives, although I guess one could say a person skims what they want to read and disregards the rest), including ideas about the ways magic and disembodied intelligences may be a factor in current events. If that sounds outlandish, a couple billion people agree with that position by default; maybe it’s okay for the rest us of who think it isn't to have a little corner of the internet to explore that possibility.