What is a demon?

by Blake X

The earliest documented origin of ‘demon’ can be traced back to the ancient Greek δαίμων, or ‘daimōn.’ This term denoted a lesser divine power or tutelary spirit. From this root word we later got the Latin ‘daemon,’ which simply referred to a spirit. The darker implications of the word lay in the Septaguint translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, in which ‘daimones’ came to refer to “malignant spirits or devils,” and was used during the Byzantine era to condemn the Greco-Roman pantheons, likening the old gods and familiar spirits observed by the pagans to entities of malevolence and disrepute.

In truth, no single iteration of the word ‘demon’ is ubiquitously applicable when discussing the realm of the spiritual. Because the majority of modern Western society has come to associate the word with inhuman spirits, however, it is pragmatic to continue its usage in this way, both for the sake of brevity and to avoid unnecessary confusion. I use the term interchangeably with ‘dark intelligence’ and ‘dark spirit.’ 

To say that any rendition of any or all of these terms, however, is sufficient in the absolute sense, would be incorrect. There are intelligences that are as dark, threatening, and terrifying as they are helpful and empowering – Barsafael, a demon who can cause cerebral sickness and mental disquietude, was a strong example of this in my personal experience. There are also spirits who initially seem benevolent or harmless, only to later prove themselves tricksters or aggravators. Some manifestations that initially seem intelligent are nothing more than residual hauntings – erstwhile echoes of human beings who once were alive, and who are a mere shadow or aftereffect, no longer able to perceive the world or interact in any way with others. (I’ll go into greater detail on non-demonic spiritual activity in a later post.)

But let’s play materialist’s advocate for a moment and assume that these are all flights of fancy, delusions, examples of myth and folklore, or outright hoaxes; that demons who are able to manifest in our reality, vex and torment humankind, grant power and knowledge, perform great supernatural feats, and even possess human beings, are as fictional as the Iliad and the Odyssey; nothing more than the product of stories told by those with rudimentary, superstitious fears and archaic understandings of the world around them.

Certainly, there’s an abundance of material in popular culture with which to caricature the demonic as the stuff of horror films and ‘paranormal’ fraudulence, and there is an apparent dearth of evidence in the real world to make the case for the existence of the demonic – or the spiritual in any form. The cases of demonic encounters that have been touted as genuine are seemingly always circumstantial, subjective, and without hard physical proof. (I myself have seen more videos of hauntings, demonic presences, and outright possession than I can count, and have only ever seen two or three that I truly believe to be genuine.)

Any and all visual ‘proof’ can be written off as doctored, embellished, completely fabricated, or chalked up to tricks of the light, the presence of videographic artefacts, and in the case of ‘orbs’ (balls of energy or light commonly associated with spirits), a photographic phenomenon called backscatter. Any audial proof can also be dismissed. Supposed EVP (electronic voice phenomena) picked up on spiritboxes or other devices might be reduced to people’s penchant for apophenia, which is the tendency to perceive symbolic or significant connections between unrelated sounds. This can occur much in the same vein as pareidolia, which is the propensity for finding patterns or imposing meaning on images, shapes, or objects that are actually random and inconsequential.

These things must not only be considered, but accepted as true when cases of the alleged supernatural are successfully discredited, disproven, or otherwise explained within a material, non-spiritual context. There was a video circulating around the Internet in the early 2010s that supposedly depicted a man possessed by a demonic spirit – it was very compelling and unsettling, and yet it was later proven to be a project created by a film student. There are plenty of images of ‘orbs’ that under even the most amateur of photographic analyses are revealed to be a specular reflection from a mirror, creating the illusion that a ball of light has appeared. More often, a dust mote is revealed to have been captured in the photo, catching the flash of the camera as it drifted by.

If these errors in judgment and perception occur during attempts to document spiritual presence or activity – to say nothing of outright scams or hoaxes – then how is one to make the case for the existence of demons at all? The answer to this is twofold. 

First, and most simply, there is no argument or presentation of evidence you can possibly make to demonstrate the reality of the demonic to anyone who does not believe – or for that matter, to anyone who holds an agnostic view on the matter due to lack of personal spiritual experience. It’s my belief and understanding that this is by demonic design; that whether collectively or individually, these dark intelligences are capable of – and always successful in – evading witness, documentation, and confirmation of their existence, excepting only those whom they choose to appear to. They don’t seem to want humanity as a whole to believe in or perceive them, and as life forms of higher intelligence and power, they bolster this skepticism and disbelief with ease.

Many who still do not believe in them will declare that this is circular logic, and that it represents the fallacy of argument from incredulity. They will say that it circuitously evades the empirical method for acquiring proof, and in a manner that conveniently justifies the believer’s argument. This is where the second part of the twofold answer comes in: The only way to genuinely know the demonic is through personal experience. It isn’t something you can record and demonstrate to others, it’s something that only occurs in a deeply personal way in the presence of one person, or sometimes a group, and which will be so vividly and palpably empowering and intoxicating that you will no longer have a single lingering doubt as to the legitimacy of spiritual existence. You won’t question if it was a delusion, a psychotic episode, or a shared hallucination, because there is something inexplicably outside the realm of our nomenclature that lends indisputable, self-affirming definition to the entity itself, something that will spiritually shift and psychically transform the witness.

As a side note, it’s even possible that a demon manifesting itself to a single person does so in a way that only that person’s brain and eyes can record. If you believe this to be wildly ridiculous, you should know that there are confirmed real-world applications for directional sound that only penetrates the brain of a single person – no one else can hear it. In 2003, a man named Woody Harris developed and registered a patent for HyperSonic Sound, which can control the directionality of sound waves in order to send music, voices, and any other forms of audio directly into the brain of the person who stands within the narrow energy beam it projects. Since then, other companies have patented similar technologies, and the military itself is currently actively using the technology in some capacity. If you were to tell someone 50 or 60 years ago, however, that this was possible, it would have been met with skepticism and dismissal. I’ve come to believe it highly likely that as beings of energy, when the demonic leave the acausal to appear in our reality through a konduit, they manipulate the electromagnetic spectrum and in this way, create a narrow pathway, within which the spirit and the person can exclusively commune. (I’ll go into the relationship between spirits and the electromagnetic spectrum much more deeply in future posts, including how spirits are more likely to be observed and influence our physical reality at a frequency of 18.98 hz).

After all of the above, a reader could very well highlight what they see as the inherent irony in this blog post: that right after I stated that one simply cannot effectively make the case for the demonic’s existence to those who don’t – and won’t – believe, I’ve contradicted this claim by going to such lengths to make that very case in the paragraphs that followed. But these explanations are not meant to make a believer out of a skeptic – they are an attempt to explain the nature of the demonic and how, in my understanding, they interplay with this reality; those who are initiated and want to delve more deeply into what the demonic truly are and how they interact with us will hopefully benefit from this writing. I sincerely doubt that those reading this who don’t find validity in what I say, will think anything more of this than an interesting and entertaining bit of writing, and I accept that. If a fellow Satanist or anyone involved in The Black Work does read the details I’ve outlined here, and it enriches and better informs their own experiences with such spirits, I would consider that an instance of myself taking the knowledge and understanding I have gained and paying it forward.

In conclusion, demons are advanced intelligences bound neither by time nor physicality, and who evade our perception unless or until they reveal themselves to us – and even then, we bear witness to only a fraction of their totality, the rest of which lay in a dimension that is simply beyond us. They are above and beyond the nature and very structure of our reality, deity-like in their transcendance of it, and as such, they can manipulate its elements at their will. 

It’s surprising how much compartmentalization of foreign or alien beings occurs when people discuss such a subject – such as the fact that there is rarely – if ever – much overlap between beliefs in extraterrestrials and demons; the former is relegated to fringe science and conspiracy theory, while the latter is more often spoken of in religious or paranormal circles. Rarely is it ever underscored that the demonic are, by their very nature, alien. When it comes to those who say that “aliens” would be so advanced that their methods of travel and existence would be nearly unfathomable to us, never does it occur to them that demons – and spirits recorded throughout ancient history that predated that term – are the very embodiment of that hypothetical they are discussing.

It's an astonishing case of not seeing the forest for the trees. Because people operate within such strict, self-imposed parameters (science, religion, parapsychology, paranormal, etc.), they are unable to draw parallels where they exist, and the scope with which they view the issue is thus far too myopic. The demonic are entities far above us in intelligence and power, and what their purpose in indulging our invocations and evocations is – if there even is a singular purpose – will perhaps never be known. What we do know is that they are effective in empowering us, enhancing our understanding and perception of the universe, opening the konduits to allow us access to the acausal, and rendering our rituals successful. In The Black Work, the demonic are our gateway to greater enlightenment – through darkness.