Tag Archives: demons

What are Demons?

Demons are fallen angels. They know more than angels because they have experienced Hell as well as Heaven. They also walk the earth, swim in the seas, dance in the fire and fly the skies.

Demons go everywhere, see everything, embrace all experiences. They are travelers between realms. 

Demons are liminal and mixed. They blend divine and infernal, human and animal, male and female traits. 

Demons are threatening because their very beings cross lines and break taboos. 

Demons are hungry, thirsty, lusty, greedy, curious. They are beings of desire, craving sustenance, sensation, adventure, knowledge. They have the nature of fire, and thus they need to consume. In that way, they are no different than we are. 

Demons are to be feared, but not because they lie. They are to be feared because they tell the truth. Not only that, but they won’t shut up. They won’t go away. They won’t leave you alone. Like desires, needs, longings, and burning questions, they won’t leave you alone until they are satisfied, and they will not be satisfied until you are satisfied. 

Demons are beautiful and terrifying, sublime and disgusting, sacred and profane. They are creatures of opposites and extremes. They are avatars of non-dual duality because they contain all of every binary within each of them. In this way, also, they are just like us. 

Demons are our mirrors. People who run from demons often hate their own reflections. Demons reveal everything within us that is hidden, secret and rejected, and then they show us how holy our shadows are. 

Demons will turn your world upside down, bring you your own personal apocalypse, and set you free in a new world of endless possibilities– only to do it all to you again, as often as necessary, again and again. 

Angels know the you that God wanted to create, the you that your parents wanted to raise, the you that your teachers wanted to know. But demons know the real you, and they fucking love it. 

Get to know and love a Demon, and somebody you will realize that you have come to know and love yourself. 

Ethical Possession

Or, “How to Channel Demons without Going Off the Deep End and Making a Weird Fucked-Up Cult.”

I never expected channeling to be part of my life and spiritual practice. I was raised “spiritual not religious” in California, which means I spent a lot of time around New Age bullshit. For a time, those experiences drove me to become a hardcore atheist, until other experiences changed my mind and showed me that there are ways to believe without going crazy and spending fifty thousand dollars on crystals, consciousness-raising workshops, fake Tantra gurus and psychic healers.

Still, even after my conversion to Satanism, even after I began practicing magick, channeling made me uneasy. And for good reason– many an abusive cult has begun with a leader claiming the exclusive power to channel otherworldly entities.

And then an awkward thing happened. I met, and fell in love with, an absurdly talented channeler.

Initially I had extreme reservations. I feared I was being conned, that he would try to use his claimed ability to control me or others, or maybe that he was just plain crazy. Over time, however, it became clear that none of those things were happening. I became about ninety percent convinced that the channeling was real, but also one hundred percent convinced that, real or not, it was not merely harmless, but in fact spiritually and emotionally beneficial.

So reader, I married him.

Since then, channeling has become a regular part of Church of the Morningstar services. So far, we haven’t become a weird cult about it. That’s because we have a certain philosophy about channeling, and certain guardrails in place, which prevent channeling from becoming a power play or a source of unhealthy delusion.

Below, I have attempted to lay those safeguards, and this mindset.

This post is not about technique, so I will not be going into the nitty-gritty of how to channel, how to banish, how to ward, or otherwise giving any other magical instruction. This post is primarily about keeping the social consequences of channeling in check.

ONE: Spiritual Safety

I’ll start by saying that channeling demons– that is, becoming voluntarily possessed– is not nearly as dangerous as it sounds, provided you practice basic magical sanitation.

Before you channel, you should have warded your space so that only invited entities can enter. You should have cast a circle. You should have a good number of banishing rituals and techniques in your back pocket, just in case shit goes south.

But I will be honest with you. Shit will rarely go south. For most people, the hard part about channeling isn’t getting the entities to go away– it’s getting them to come in.

And, of course, making sure nobody gets weird about it.

TWO: Maintain Skepticism

Channeling/possession is a spectrum. In my experience, it is rare for a person to be so overwhelmed by an entity’s presence that they lose all control over themselves, black out, and fail to remember any of the experience. Usually, at least part of you will remain home while you channel. You will likely be conscious for the experience. There will just be someone else there doing the talking for you, and you may be surprised by the words coming out of your mouth and the actions performed by your body.

It will feel weird. You will wonder if you are crazy or somehow subconsciously making it up.

And you know what? It’s good to wonder that!

The “crazy” part is surprisingly easy to get out of the way– mental illness is only diagnosed if it causes distress or impairs function. So as long as your channeling experiences are pleasant, beneficial, only happening when you want them to, and not fucking up your life, it technically does not matter if it’s a delusion. It’s still benign.

As far as subconsciously making it up– this is a distinct possibility. My attitude towards it has become “so what?” If it’s all secretly just psychodrama, that doesn’t really matter to me. I still get great advice from demons. I still learn and grow through these experiences. I still get answers from them that I did not know, at least not with my conscious mind. In other words, for me, it’s useful.

The definition of magic in the modern era is pretty much “stuff that seems to work but we can’t prove it in an empirical setting and we aren’t really sure why.” If you are an intellectually honest person and have been practicing for any length of time, you already know that you’ll never be one hundred percent sure. But you keep doing this stuff anyway because it seems to work and it helps you. Channeling and possession are no different.

THREE: Anyone Can Channel

Channeling is a skill. As with any skill, some people also seem to have a natural talent for it. But practice can close the gap between the “naturally” gifted and those who struggled at first.

If anyone tells you that they have a unique magical ability of any kind that nobody else can access, laugh in their face and unsubscribe from their newsletter. If anyone tells you that they have a unique magical ability that they can teach you if you pay them thousands of dollars, that person is a scammer. If somebody tells you that they and they alone have been chosen as a conduit for Satan to speak through, that person is trying to control you by seeming to wield a greater authority. Run away.

You, yes you, can learn to do this. You don’t need to depend on anyone else for your connection to the infernal.

FOUR: Just Because Someone Says They Are Channeling Doesn’t Mean They Are Channeling

Hopefully this needs no explanation. They may say they are channeling, but they may be wrong, or lying. They may be channeling, but accidentally channeling a different entity than the one they meant to channel.

FIVE: The Content Matters More than the Source

The only reason to listen to a “channeled” entity is if it is saying things worth hearing anyway, so let that be your guide. Sometimes the answers you need in your life come from a demon speaking through a possessed human being. Sometimes those answers come from reading a book, or searching your own soul, or overhearing a conversation between strangers in the supermarket. Sometimes the right answer might even come to you by accident from a huckster who is trying to con you. Life is weird like that.

Take what is useful to you and leave the rest, because…

SIX: DEMONS ARE NOT THE BOSS OF YOU

Demons aren’t the boss of you. Satan is not the boss of you. You, yes you, are a living God, and you are not anyone’s servant to command. That includes the Devil, and in my experience, he is always the first to say so.

Just because someone was supposedly channeling Satan doesn’t mean you have to follow their instructions or take their advice. And if the “Satan” they are channeling insists that you must, then that’s not the Devil I know.

SEVEN: The Channeler is Responsible

Channeling is not an excuse for bad behavior. At the end of the day, the channeler is accountable for anything that the channeled entity says or does while borrowing their body.

This is crucial, even if it doesn’t seem fair. In cases of real, total possession, obviously it may be possible that the channeler is completely absent and not at all in control. But the rest of us only have the word of the channeler that this is what happened.

If some fucked up shit happens while somebody is channeling, I encourage you to consider that conduit an unsafe person. In some cases, it may also be wise to consider the alleged entity an unsafe entity. You should perhaps stop hanging out with either of them.

More May Be Revealed

These guidelines are neither foolproof nor perfect. They are a work in progress and just represent the best practices we have figured out so far. But I do feel comfortable saying that if you implement these practices, you are well on the way to making sure channeling cannot be used for authoritarian purposes, and ensuring that nobody goes off the deep end based on channeled content.

Beelzebub Gnosis Confirmed

Have you ever seen the acronyms UPG, SPG, or VPG? They stand for “unverified personal gnosis,” “shared personal gnosis,” or “verified personal gnosis.” They are popular in the pagan/magic community.

My circle has long had an SPG that summoning Beelzebub tends to cause an insect infestation and thus is best done outdoors. One of my friends warned me about this after experiencing a massive swarm of flies in his house after I working. I tried to follow his advice but still ended up with a huge ant invasion on the day I planned to enter Harab Zereq, Beelzebub’s Klipa. Other friends and acquaintances of mine have also experienced lots of bugs turning up with Beelzebub.

But today I learned that somebody else had the same experience.

Who?

ALEISTER FUCKING CROWLEY.

From his autohagiography:

We had resumed Magical work, in a desultory way, on finding that Mathers was attacking us. He succeeded in killing most of the dogs. (At this time I kept a pack of bloodhounds and went man-hunting over the moors.) The servants too were constantly being made ill, one in one way, and one in another. We therefore employed the appropriate talismans from The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin against him, evoking Beelzebub and his forty-nine servitors…. As to this perfume of The Book of the Law, “let it be laid before me, and kept thick with perfumes of your orison: it shall become full of beetles as it were and creeping things sacred unto me.” One day, to my amazement, having gone into the bathroom to bathe, I discovered a beetle. As I have said, I take no interest in natural history and know nothing of it. But this beetle attracted my attention at once. I had never seen anything like it before. It was about an inch and a half long and had a single horn nearly as long as itself. The horn ended in a small sphere suggestive of an eye. From the moment, for about a fortnight, there was an absolute plague of these beetles. They were not merely in the house, they were on the rocks, in the gardens, by the sacred spring, everywhere! But I never saw one outside the estate. I sent a specimen to London by the experts were unable to identify the species.”

I think we can call that SPG verified now.

I had never read this passage before today. It was crazy to see.

The Goetia Will Meddle with You

So I wanna tell a little story.
 
One time at a Thelemic lodge I was introduced to a man who was, I was told, an EXPERT on Goetia.
 
It turns out he had done one (1) working involving a demon. He did it more or less traditional Solomonic style, with the circle and the triangle and the threats and everything. Basically kidnapping the dang demon and trying to force them to do your will using Yahweh as a whip.
 
He had to recite that “fear is the mindkiller” mantra from Dune for several hours before the working to get up the stones to do it.
 
He considering the working successful because apparently the demon DID manifest.
 
I asked if the demon did what he asked. He snorted.
 
“No,” he said, “demons lie.”
 
Meanwhile, I am the holder of two active pacts. One of them, with King Paimon, was to get me into grad school and help me pay for it. The other is with Lucifer and the details thereof are more personal. Both pacts are, so far, roaring successes. I have zero complaints. I have experienced zero spooky phenomena or negative consequences and I have been doing this for a couple of years.
 
Also, every time I chant Na’amah’s enn and light incense for her, she reliably comes through to help me get the money I need. That’s all it fucking takes. A lot of demons, if you give them something nice, they will give you something nice in return.
 
That’s the difference between being a Left Hand Path magician of the Devil’s party who loves and trusts the fallen angels, and being a RHP magician who labors under the mistaken impression that you can use GOD to enslave and coerce a bunch of metaphysical guerilla rebels.
 
A few more thoughts:
 
1. Solomonic magick is based on slavery. The 72 Goetic demons are literally supposed to be the demons Solomon kidnapped and brutally forced into constructing a temple to their oppressor. If you don’t think slavery or prison labor are good things– and hopefully you don’t– you shouldn’t fucking use Solomonic summoning. It’s ideologically and therefore spiritually fucked.
 
2. If you are allegedly “middle path” but trust angels over demons, then you have chosen a side; and also you should probably read the Bible because angels are canonically terrifying, genocidal war machines who, at best, strike you dumb for daring to ask a simple question (Luke 1:18-20) and at worst burn whole cities (Genesis 19) and slaughter hundreds of thousands of infants (Exodus 11) without batting any of their many eyes.
 
3. If you consider yourself sympathetic to Lucifer, as Crowley was, then you should probably fucking stop trying to kidnap and enslave his comrades. Those are the angels who fell with him. Those are his war buddies. They fought the tyrant alongside him. They deserve as much respect as he does. He didn’t rebel alone!