Demons

Morgans St. Knight has a rather extensive offering at the Witches’ Voice on demons, their existence, and how to deal with them. He’s very thorough, and I’m not sure that I can really comment too much to follow up his work. So I’ll relate an anecdote.

I’ve always tended to regard demons as psychological constructs. Having worked with the Golden Dawn system, I was used to thinking of the whole concept of demonic evocation as a kind of psychological reckoning of divine proportions, that straitened out the mind and spirit of the magus, allowing for an unimpeded connection to the divine.  As I fell deeper into polytheism, I came to acknowledge that there were many different kinds of entities, some elemental, some other, and several of these might be regarded as “demonic” by someone who didn’t know what they were looking at. Such entities might appear evil or negative, but just represented something we may not be too comfortable with.

Then, one night, I was at a friend’s house. Her toddler was having trouble sleeping through the night, and we decided to see if there may be something that was causing a problem.

And we found a demon.

Demonic is the only way I can describe it. It was dark, but not like elemental darkness. It was rife with  putrefication and decay. And most interestingly, it appeared to be a “runner” branching off from a similar entity in a house across the street, coming in through a window and establishing a foothold in a dark spot in the basement.

I found where it was and blasted it with light and wind, and it went away.

Holyra!

Following this we buffed the wards on the house, and there have been no further problems.

So, sure, this is partly an excuse to tell a(n abbreviated version of) a fun story, but there is a point to this. Demons are real, and you may encounter them in a manner that you are not expecting, and which may be slightly outside of your preferred metamodel. Keep in mind how they are appearing and acting will work wonders for determining how to deal with them.

The original article: read the whole thing.