Demons and Spirits

The figures on the page Faces of the Adversary are the great ones: the serpent, the light-bearer, the accuser, the dragons. Around them stands a crowd. The grimoires list hundreds of spirits by name, rank, and office, and the goetic and devotional currents of the left-hand path work with many of them directly, as servants, as partners, or as gods.

This page describes where those names came from, the ways in which practitioners approach the beings that bear them, and the cautions that experienced practitioners themselves insist on. The Order's own texts contain no spirit work, and it takes no position on what spirits are. Its reasons for that position are given at the end.

The Word

The Greek daimon was not at first an evil being. It meant a spirit or a divine power, neither good nor bad, and sometimes the particular spirit attached to one person, guiding or troubling them through life. An Athenian philosopher spoke of an inner voice of this kind that warned him when he was about to go wrong. An old interpretation connected the word with knowing, so that a daimon was a being full of knowledge. Modern scholars more often connect it with dividing or allotting, so that a daimon was the power that assigns each person their fate. Neither derivation is certain.

Christian usage narrowed the word until every daimon was a fallen angel and an enemy. Practitioners who now speak of demons as divine intelligences are, knowingly or not, returning to the older sense.

Where the Names Come From

The names of the infernal court come from three main sources.

Gods of Neighboring Peoples

Some demons were once gods, renamed by those who rejected their worship. Baal, which means "lord," was the title of the storm god of the Canaanites, and the grimoires list a demon king named Bael. A god of one Philistine city appears in the Hebrew scriptures as Baal-zebub, "lord of flies," probably a mocking alteration of a title such as Baal-zebul, "exalted lord"; he became Beelzebub. Astarte, a great goddess of the eastern Mediterranean, became Astaroth, a male duke of hell. This is the source of the common claim that all demons are former gods. It is true of some names and not of most.

Figures of Scripture and Legend

Others come from the scriptures and the legends that grew around them. Belial is a Hebrew word meaning roughly "worthlessness," which later writers turned into a name. Leviathan is the great serpent of the sea. Azazel is named in an ancient rite of atonement, in which one goat was sent into the wilderness "for Azazel," and in a later legend he is among the leaders of the angels who descended and taught humanity forbidden arts. Samael appears in later Jewish legend as the angel of death and, in some texts, as the consort of Lilith. Asmodeus comes from a Persian demon of wrath, by way of a story of a demon who haunted a bride.

The Grimoires Themselves

The largest number have no known origin outside the books that list them. The catalogs of spirits arranged them by rank, as kings, princes, dukes, marquises, and presidents, each commanding a number of legions, each with a seal and a set of offices: teaching the sciences, finding treasure, causing love, telling past and future. The books were copied by hand for centuries, and names, seals, and offices drifted with every copy.

The drift continues. A spirit described in the old catalog as a king with three heads, who answers truly of things past and to come, is addressed in at least one modern devotional practice as a spirit of mastery and intellect. The meaning a spirit carries today often owes more to its modern devotees than to its first appearance in a book. A practitioner who wants to know what a name meant should read the old sources first. The page Study describes how.

The Four Princes

A schema widely used in modern rites assigns four crown princes of hell to the four quarters: Satan to the south and fire, Lucifer to the east and air, Belial to the north and earth, and Leviathan to the west and water. It was popularized by the best-known modern text of the carnal current, published in 1969, and it has since passed into the practice of currents that agree with that text about nothing else. Many rites open by calling the four in turn. The arrangement borrows its shape from the older ceremonial custom of calling powers at the four quarters, and it is a good deal younger than many of those who use it suppose.

Command, Bargain, and Relationship

Practitioners approach spirits in four broad ways. The same person may use more than one, and each has a characteristic risk. The Currents page names three of them; the fourth, the bargain, runs through all the others.

Command

The magician of the old grimoires stands within a protective circle, calls the spirit by the authority of divine names, binds it, questions it, gives it a task, and dismisses it. The spirit is compelled, not persuaded. Left-hand practitioners have long objected that this stance borrows its authority from the god it claims to oppose, and many treat it as a relic. Its risk is grandiosity: a practitioner who believes that powers obey them is a practitioner in the danger the sixth coil describes.

Bargain

The practitioner makes an offering and asks for a result. Nothing is free, and something is given in order that something may be received. This is the logic of the pact, discussed below. Its risk is dependency. A practitioner who has learned to trade for every outcome may stop doing the ordinary work that brings outcomes about, and may come to feel that they owe something they cannot name to something they cannot see.

Devotion

Devotional practitioners and demonolaters reverse the grimoire stance. They honor the same spirits as patrons or as gods, with prayer, offering, and praise, and many reject bargaining as well as command. The risk of devotion is the one the Order names for every figure: a being honored long enough can come to be obeyed.

Relationship

A newer approach rejects both command and devotion in favor of something slower: getting to know a spirit over years, learning what practitioners describe as its personality, keeping promises made to it, and treating time and attention as the real offering. Some of its practitioners treat the spirit as an intelligence unlike any human one, to be met without the prejudices of the old books and without the assumption that it wants what a human being would want. The risk of relationship is the one named for the spirit model on the page On Magic: handing one's judgment to a voice.

Familiars and Guardians

The trial records describe the witch's familiar, a spirit in the form of a small animal that served her. Ceremonial magic describes a long retreat at the end of which the magician comes to know a guardian angel. Some devotional practitioners speak of a guardian demon, a personal spirit assigned to them or chosen by them, whom they consult before making decisions and whose presence they feel as a prickling of the skin or a nudge.

A psychological reading of the guardian is available and does not require anyone to give up the other. On that reading the guardian is the part of the mind that knows more than it can say, given a face so that it can be consulted. On either reading, the Order would ask the same thing of it that it asks of any adviser: is its advice written down, and does the record show, over time, that the advice was good?

Pacts

In folklore the pact is written in blood and sold for wealth, love, skill, or knowledge, and the bill always comes due. Some practitioners do make formal pacts or dedications to spirits, and some read the pact as a contract with oneself, in which the spirit serves only as a witness to one's own accountability. That reading needs no position on whether the witness exists. The page Vows and Dedications considers the pact, and the making of promises in general, at more length.

Before You Blame a Spirit

Belief in curses, attacks, and spirit attachments is common, and it seems to come in waves. The practitioners who have spent longest in spirit work are often the most insistent that the ordinary must be ruled out first. Before concluding that anything spiritual is wrong, ask:

• Am I sleeping? Am I ill? When did I last see a doctor?
• Am I taking any medicine, drink, or drug, or have I stopped one recently?
• Am I anxious, depressed, grieving, or under unusual strain?
• Is there an ordinary conflict in my life that I would rather not look at?
• Have the people around me already named the cause, and have I declined to hear it?

Practitioners who have done this work for many years report cases in which an illness, or a deficiency in the diet, was taken for the work of a spirit, and found only by a doctor. Their rule is simple. If the spiritual remedy keeps failing, the problem is not spiritual.

The figure of the old hag who sits on the chest of a sleeper, so that they wake unable to move and sense a presence in the room, is known in folklore across the world. It is also a common and well-documented condition of sleep, called sleep paralysis, and a doctor can explain it. A practitioner who has experienced it may hold either reading, and should know both.

There are also people who profit from the belief. A very old trick is to tell someone that they are cursed and then to charge them for lifting it. Expectation alone can make a person feel unwell, which is why the trick works, and why no one should tell another person that they are cursed. A stranger who announces that a spirit attached to you wants you dead, and who offers to keep you with them for days while it is removed, is describing a danger, and the danger is the stranger. The page Working With Others lists the signs.

Where the Order Stands

The Order's texts contain no spirit work, and the Order takes no position on what spirits are: independent beings, powers of the mind, or something for which there is not yet a good word. It holds the same standards for this work as for any other. Every working is recorded. Observation is kept apart from interpretation. No being, real or imagined, is owed obedience, payment, blood, or harm to anyone.

If anything met in a working demands those things, or if something follows a practitioner out of a working and will not leave, the advice is the same as on the page Faces of the Adversary: close the working, write down what happened, and read the chapter When to Stop in First Workings. If the trouble continues after practice has stopped, it is a matter for a doctor, and there is no shame in that.