Daemonic Versus Demonic Realities

The word 'daemon' comes from an ancient Greek belief that certain nature spirits and demigods (called 'daemons') served as intermediaries between the Gods and men.

Daemons were originally neither good nor evil. They often possessed both positive and negative traits, but they did tend to be tricksters with a darker than average sense of humor. They could become corporeal fleshy creatures or incorporeal spirits and phantasms at will.

People were most likely to encounter daemons when they themselves were faced with major life changes or transformative events. Such encounters were rarely without danger, but they gave life a depth and a degree of meaning that is utterly lacking when all is calm and under perfect control.

Change is rarely all-good or all-bad, but it is almost always frightening. Encountering a daemon almost was a sign that deep and major change was on the way, either personally, culturally, or both.

Christianity Demonizes Daemons

The Christian Church was the first to divide and separate the daemonic realm into a struggle between evil supernatural creatures versus good supernatural creatures with humans in the middle. This was a substantial departure from the original Greek concept of varied and naturally ambivalent creatures that mediated between people and the Gods.

Now, instead of the daemons standing between people and the divine, between the natural and the supernatural, people stood between good and evil daemonic forces that were themselves supernatural. Humans moved to center stage, the demons to either wing, and the Gods of antiquity were kicked out of the drama entirely.

The evil intermediaries came to be known as demons; the good ones were called angels. Angels supposedly carried messages from (the one True) God and did God's work when God was in the loo or at the grocery store or whatever.

Demons, by contrast, did the Devil's work and either tried to seduce human beings into evil by stealing their souls, or else tormented the good and the holy out of sheer resentment of their relentless goodness and holiness.

Discernment suddenly became a hot topic. Good demon or bad demon? How to decide, what to do, what to do?

Clergy stepped up to 'help', and thousands of people were burned alive and tortured to death to save their souls and cleanse them of unholy daemonic associations.

With the dawn of the Age of Reason, demons also came to be associated with ignorance, while angels were trivialized as fluffy tokens of a kind of naive trust in a benevolent higher power. This trivialization further exacerbated the Christian divide between good and bad demons that was already well underway, and also tended to discredit and belittle the daemonic realm in general.

Weirdly enough, during the transitional period between the Middle Ages and the Age of Enlightenment, many learned men of the Church practiced alchemy, science, and angelic/demonic magic side by side without feeling any conflict of interest whatsoever--but this eclecticism did not last.

By the end of the 17th century, magic, daemons, and even most forms of religious belief were pushed aside by science, which declared itself the one and only true way to know anything about anything.

Daemons and Demons

Over the course of modern history, the term 'daemonic' has been significantly altered and transformed into the term 'demonic'.

The complex, mercurial nature of the daemonic realm has been successfully reworked in the popular imagination into something terrifying and wholly bad.

This re-imagining of the daemonic is a serious perversion of its original and true nature.

The main difference between the daemonic and the demonic then is the pejorative taint attached to the latter term. Daemons have literally been demonized: first by the Church, and then by science.

Depth psychology (Carl Jung, James Hillman) preserved something of the original daemonic realm in the form of the Jungian archetypes and the concept of personal inner daemons that drive creativity (kind of like a muse, only more relentless).

Depth psychology instead made the polarization of the daemonic an inner/outer affair. Demons were neither good nor bad but they resided inside the personality: they were defined as psychological phenomena without physical substance. This too is a significant departure from the original meaning.

Are Daemons/Demons Real?

Yes. Yes they are. But you have to expand your understanding of reality in order to accommodate them, and you also have to let go of the need for total personal control, and embrace instead the notion that personal transformation is a major part of life, that tranformation is ongoing and unavoidable, and a that it is a worthy goal and one of the great joys and adventures of being a creature.

Until that happens on a grand cultural scale, the daemons/demons are likely to haunt and scare us, and scientists are likely to keep turning up their noses at them and laughing.

Shadow Science

The popular understanding of science always seems to be at least a couple of hundred years behind where science actually is at any given moment.

Today's science is far ahead of what most of us imagine, and our educational system is so lame that most of us aren't even capable of imagining it.

Most scientists would still agree that science is a way of knowing the world that is based on reason and logic. Science is a methodology grounded in doubt.

Scientists must test their ideas through experimentation, and these experiments must be replicated by other scientists. Even then, science departments at major universities  hammer at facts and theories just to see if they will break.

That kind of constant challenge is a good thing: It is meant to keep theories and information accurate, to keep inquiry democratic, and to keep researchers on their toes.

The attack on science by today's political right is disturbing on many levels, but perhaps the most disturbing thing about such attacks is that they misunderstand what science is and then offer up something even worse: bad religion.

This is often the case with New Age critiques of science too. Just because you can't understand quantuum physics that doesn't mean you are free to make it all up in your spare time and use it as evidence that your daily conversations with alien superbeings are 'real'--whatever 'real' means.

That approach is just so wrong on so many levels that it would take a separate essay to list them all.

Science is neither as bad nor as good as its press. It's a tool, period, and if you want to learn to use it effectively you must be trained in the craft. Used well, science is a really powerful tool. But it isn't always the right tool and it can't account for all phenomena.

Science always comes up in discussions of the paranormal in this way, as if it were the only portal into any examination of the unknown, as in, "Is there any scientific evidence for it?" or "Can it be proved by science?"

The right answer is often, "Who cares?"

Most paranormal phenomena lie outside the realm of science, in the shadows science wants to avoid--in traditions of magic and imagination, in methods of concealment and deception, in defunct inner disciplines of transformation, in embodied narratives like myth and folklore that see information in emotion, pattern, and dreams.

Science competed fiercely with traditions of alchemy and magic in the 17th and 18th centuries and won. But science went too far in declaring victory. Science was a sore winner.

The fact that today we hear the word 'imagination' as nearly synonymous with 'falsehood' shows how far the mark was overshot. The degradation of imagination is a distortion, and a serious one. It does real violence to the human race and is as limiting in its own way as any religious dogma.

Part of scientific overkill was grounded in political rebellion against the Church, which in that era was usually the same entity as the State in most parts of the world, and which had become crushing, unjust, and damaging to the human spirit.

But another part of the overkill was a kind of covering over of basic legitimacy in the older traditions. If you want to be the new boss, you have to make the old boss look bad--even the parts of his performance that aren't bad at all, even the parts that are valuable.

Something valuable was definitely lost in transition, and now science seems always to be nervously looking over its shoulder, always waiting for something to jump out of the shadows and shout "Boo!"

Modern Western culture is the ONLY culture in mankind's history that has no respected tradition that includes spirits, energies, big stories, magic, and other paranormal phenomena. Not only do we not have such a tradition, science feels the need to make fun of people who seek to resurrect one.

Why the defensiveness?

A recent batch of scientific experiments revealed that when people had to make decisions based on logic alone, they were soon crippled with confusion. They could not function at all. Subjects would spend hours, days, deciding what to eat for lunch.

It turns out emotion precedes logic and guides it.

Emotion contains real information, necessary information that grounds us and embeds us functionally in our surroundings. The notion of the detached, rational observer (an 18th century notion, by the way), is a fiction, a conceit that makes certain kinds of experimentation easier--and yet it is still widely touted as both possible and superior and, worst of all, the only legitimate way to relate to matter, the only sensible way to be in and of the world. Detached. Separate. Examining.

I submit that science was never big enough, good enough or true enough to be a guiding philosophical principle. Trying to make it so is like declaring your blender is God. Declare that function all you like. It's still putting an awfully heavy burden on your blender. Why not just use the thing to make smoothies, which is what it was designed to do? Why not let science just be science: an epistemological tool among many--good for some tasks, bad for others.

Deepak Chopra was on TV last night promoting his book about the Shadow of each individual human personality--about how the part of us we push away, deny, and repress actually enriches each of us and makes us who were are, makes us whole people with unique contributions--if we can only acknowledge and embrace it.

The same could be said culturally. The Shadow of science is not a garbage can. It's worth exploring in a serious, thoughtful fashion. That doesn't mean every weird idea that comes down the pike is as valid as the next. But it does mean that, as Shakespeare said in the play Hamlet,

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."