The Intensifying Incursion of the Demonic

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Pazuzu, Mesopotamian demon

I feel we need to take the demonic more seriously. But we can’t do that until we have a more serious, sophisticated understanding of what the demonic signifies. I feel most of us can sense that the world has become significantly more demonic over the last decade or two. But if you are a secular, non-religious person, how can you discuss this realm of the demonic — let alone demonic possession or the possible existence of “super-sensible” entities that interact with human consciousness — without getting curtly dismissed, ridiculed, and marginalized?

I think about the demonic a lot as it relates to Elon Musk, Donald Trump, MAGA, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and so on. I find a peculiar dissociated, not-quite-there quality to many of Trump’s Cabinet people, whether Pam Bondi, RFK, Kash Patel, or Karoline Leavitt. Musk sometimes looks completely out of his body — as if something else is operating the Musk physical vehicle. For instance, the infamous video of him spacing out bizarrely during the inauguration.

I’ve noted that we can analyze Trump’s victory through the theory of Internal Family Systems (IFS), which proposes there are separate, compartmentalized parts of the individual Psyche. Trump summoned up the barely-suppressed “bad parts” of the Psyche — the racist, misogynist, power-hungry, psychopathic, greedy, corrupt elements within all of us. These parts are always with us. But modern civilization over the last few hundred years built defenses to them, slowly and painstakingly forcing the more primitive, hate-based forces a bit down below the threshold of consciousness, most of the time, for most people. Trump — a malignant occult practitioner — called these barely suppressed forces back up to the surface level. We shouldn’t have been so surprised that so many were waiting and ready to hear that call.

Carl Jung saw Fascism as the willing submersion back under the “dark waters” of the unconscious: A surrendering and giving into the seductive pull of archaic hatred, evil, and cruelty. There is always a part of all of us that wants to give up — to sink into the whirlpool¹. I personally believe it is realistic to discuss the U.S. as having fallen into a collective possession trance. It is a bit ironic, as — of course — fanatic Christians accuse secular liberals of the same.

I often write about “monistic” or “analytic” idealism: This is how I understand the nature of reality. According to philosopher and computer scientist Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism as well as physicist Amit Goswami’s quantum-inspired monistic idealism, consciousness, not matter, is the ontological primary. Idealism conceives of the universe as fundamentally constructed out of consciousness — “primordial awareness” or “mind stuff” — rather than anything physical or material. Of course, this meshes with our own personal, subjective perspective: We are unable to have any experience at all, outside of consciousness. We also know, from our dream life, that a seemingly real, convincingly physical world can be constructed from mental activity.

The existence of a physical, material world separate from consciousness was always an inference. Quantum physics has revealed that the universe is “not locally real,” as well as establishing other principles such as quantum entanglement and non-locality. Quantum mechanics makes perfect sense if the universe is a projection of an underlying field of consciousness.

Analytic or monistic idealism also does away with the “hard problem” of consciousness, because it understands everything as a projection of consciousness. There is still the question of how our physical brains work as individuated receivers and transducers of consciousness. This allows for developing and testing hypotheses such as the theory that we experience consciousness due to “quantum microtubules” within our neurons, as Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff explore.

Kastrup argues that the universe is one “cosmic mind” that has spontaneously “dissociated” into many alters, each with its own private point of view. (I feel that Kastrup needs to change his language here and, as Jude Currivan proposed during our recent Future of Consciousness seminar, substitute differentiated for dissociated, because dissociated has problematic connotations). For Kastrup, our personal subjectivity is one kind of “alter,” but there could be many other kinds of alters.

Instead of supernatural beings existing in a separate realm or dimension, demons (as well as angels) could be understood as configurations of consciousness itself—persistent, self-organizing patterns within the universal mind that manifest particular qualities. They are not "somewhere else” in some mystical other world. They are aspects of the same fundamental reality: the primordial awareness that constitutes everything. Since all human minds are ultimately expressions of the underlying field of consciousness, such patterns (demonic/angelic) influence human thought and behavior through resonance and entrainment. We can reframe the traditional notion of "possession" as the aligning or resonating of an individual consciousness with a particular configuration or pattern held in the universal field of mentation.

Recently, Kastrup has taken aspects of neuroscientist Guilio Tonini’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which seeks to offer a materialist thesis on consciousness, and meshed it with analytic idealism. IIT approaches consciousness as an intrinsic property of certain physical systems, rather than a mere function they perform. At its core, IIT proposes that consciousness emerges from complex systems that integrate information in a specific way. The theory proposes a mathematical measure called phi (Φ), which quantifies the amount of integrated information in a system. The higher the phi value, the higher the level of consciousness. For Kastrup, IIT's mathematical formalism can provide scientific legitimacy to his philosophical position that consciousness is fundamental to reality, rather than an emergent property of physical systems.

Using IIT, Kastrup has started to develop a formal model of what he calls “dissociation” (differentiation) to explain how distinct centers of experience can emerge, persist, and sometimes merge or overlap. “A more formal, conceptual, explicit account of the process of dissociation—What is it, precisely? How does it work?—will be the main focus of my personal work,” he writes. Kastrup writes that his own creative life has been guided by what he calls a daimon, “the irresistible movements of the impersonal within me, which set the direction of my life and couch it in meaning.” A daimon (a kind of neutral or positive version of a demon) could be defined as a discrete packet of universal mentation whose phenomenal states reach into ours when the ordinary boundary conditions—stable ego structure, sober neurophysiology—get loosened up, whether by psychedelics, neurosis, or trance-inducing ritual practice.

Through analytic idealism, what we traditionally call demons (as well as daimons and even angels) can be understood as autonomous psychic complexes—not merely archetypes or symbolic constructs, but actual structures of volitional intent that exist within the field of the universal field consciousness or what Aldous Huxley called “Mind-at-Large”.

The complexes we call “demonic” get amputated from the central conscious field of the human experiencing them. Such autonomic complexes can emerge through many different pathways. When a human psyche undergoes fragmentation due to abuse, addiction, or exposure to prolonged suffering, certain complexes may become autonomous. If not reintegrated, they can attract, magnetize, or resonate with destructive mental patterns already latent within the universal field. This matches older esoteric ideas of "possession," where a weakened psyche becomes a portal for these forces. We know, for instance, with Trump and Musk, they are the narcissistic projections of narcissist fathers, acutely made to feel a lack of self-worth since early childhood. Perhaps we can also think of the hazing rituals at the Skull and Bones secret society at Yale, which include confessing sexual secrets and swearing an oath on the skull of Geronimo, probably while inebriated. The idea is to force a connection between a demonic “entity” or autonomous psychic cluster and the newly indoctrinated subject — and this can happen outside of conscious awareness or knowledge.

Collective psychic residues may offer another pathway for such contact. War, genocide, slavery, and systematic violence generate massive concentrations of fear, hatred, and despair. These energies may crystallize into “demonic” complexes in the same way stagnant water breeds bacteria—only here, they are not biological but intangible structures persisting within the collective unconscious or field of shared mind. Today, we confront a kind of unconscious, archaic pull toward re-experiencing this level of collective suffering at a time when we could use our advanced tools and knowledge base to resolve our archaic conflicts and enmities: It feels like a force that rises out of the ground of the collective being, the unconscious, itself, which is difficult to resist. It call for a kind of mass sacrifice or regeneration through violence (where we could have, instead, regeneration through radical love).

The increasing informational density of our technological world creates feedback loops of outrage and frustration that intensify parasitic and predatory energies — emergent autonomous complexes that arise from and feed on attention, desire, distraction, and despair. What we call "demons" are not necessarily evil in some ontological sense: They can be seen as misaligned or maladaptive attractors of consciousness, like early childhood coping mechanisms gone totally wrong. Automatically seeking to preserve and strengthen themselves, they behave in parasitic or predatory ways, draining our vitality or coherence, or locking us into self-reinforcing loops of suffering, projection, fear, and control.

Conversely, we can think of “angels” as harmonizing, integrative attractors within the greater field of Mind-at-Large. They represent coherent, luminous complexes of intention, meaning, and love. They impel us toward unity, service, integration, and healthy individuation. We encounter these angelic presences in states of moral clarity and gratitude, through selfless acts or contemplation. Such autonomous complexes resonate with the deeper structure or underlying Logos of the universe itself — as subtler frequencies, they are more difficult to access and easier to loss, as we have all probably experienced through our own personal journeys (I know I have).

According to Rudolf Steiner's very particular spiritual cosmology, angels (Angeloi) occupy a precise position in the cosmic hierarchy as beings who stand one evolutionary stage above humanity.

Having completed their own "human" development during the Old Moon planetary phase, they now function as intermediaries between the divine and terrestrial realms. Their advancement grants them a unique capacity to guide human destiny without compromising our freedom. Steiner describes a guardian angel assigned to each person, working intimately with our biographical unfolding while connecting us to higher spiritual purposes. These beings operate "behind" our conscious thoughts during waking hours and imprint moral imaginations into our astral bodies during sleep. They serve as both personal guardians and architects of evolution, working largely unnoticed to gradually manifest the divine human archetype as an ethical force in earthly life.

With the rise of Trumpism, we are just now starting to see the re-emergence of moral clarity — a kind of transpersonal angelic authority — in certain media and political figures. We start to sense a new tonality, something that has been lacking in American life for many years. This new thing expresses itself even through Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chris Murphy, Stacey Abrams, Rachel Maddow, and many others. To cross this threshold, the individual must reckon with the question of what would they are willing not only to live for, but also to die for. That kind of moral clarity and courage contradicts the basis of this materialist society, a “mega-machine” that conceives of nothing as sacrosanct beside one’s personal continuity, using fear of death and punishment as its ultimate weapon of social control.

Acccording to the analytic idealist framework, demons and angels, as autonomous psychic complexes, are not imposed from the outside but invited from within ourselves, as resonances, attractors, or complexes of meaning and intention. We can access their influence more directly through altered states of consciousness, symbolic systems, and acts of choice and attention, which align our minds with various fields of intentionality. Humans are constant "battlegrounds" for these entities not in a dualistic cosmology, but because we are porous beings—nodes where multiple layers or strata of consciousness and the unconscious intersect, such as instinct, ego, culture, myth, and spirit.

Why is the Demonic Incursion Intensifying Now?

In books including Coming Into Being and The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, cultural critic William Irwin Thompson developed a wonderfully nuanced, mythopoetic understanding of history, culture, and consciousness. His reflections on the "demonic" emerged from a deep perception of how mythic, psychic, and technological forces interrupt and sometimes unmoor the psyche from healthy stability. Writing back in the 1990s, Thompson saw psychedelic drugs and electronic media as amplifiers or accelerants of latent forces within the collective unconscious. These forces include what could be described as the demonic: configurations of consciousness that are disintegrative, parasitic, mimetic, and profoundly destabilizing. Rather than metaphors, these are ontological realities within the larger field of mind.

For Thompson, the electronic media environment "exteriorizes the unconscious" in a way that was once the province of shamanic or esoteric practices. Television, video, digital media, and psychedelic drugs create a condition where symbols no longer mediate: They possess us more directly.

For Thompson, today’s electronic media environment is not neutral—it functions as an initiatory container or indoctrination system. We enter into it without proper guidance, shared purpose or any implicit telos. Psychedelic drugs were used traditionally within sacred containers to help initiates navigate the numinous and the terrifying, guided by elders or psychopomps. Lacking those containers, psychedelics today are revealing a clear tendency to unleash what should have remained under wraps. This is not because the substances are inherently bad, but because the modern psyche, unprepared, easily becomes fragmented or colonized by archetypes and energies it doesn’t know how to metabolize. As Thompson notes, the materialist belief system of technological hyper-rationalists like Musk provide the perfect cover for demons to enter into our world without being identified or recognized as such. This is why, I think, we need to re-concieve the demonic through the sensible construct of analytic idealism, which does not counteract scientific theories but augments it.

The psychotherapeutic and scientific contexts, as well as the self-optimization and hedonic contexts, which we developed around psychedelics during the last two decades of the psychedelic renaissance do not encompass the initiatory, occult voltage of these experiences. Repeat psychedelic use will lead those lacking an esoteric and traditional grounding deeper into an abyss, and abandon them there. They may even experience this as a kind of false enlightenment (expressed as the “simulation hypothesis”). This is what I believe we see, today, with Musk, who is unconsciously propagating the demonic into our reality — along with many other of the Burning Man tech elite, whose hubris has proved to be their undoing.

In a 1990 essay, Thompson explored how psychedelic drugs, electronic music, and video games form a feedback loop with the unconscious. If there is no mythos, no narrative container, then what emerges is not gnosis but possession. According to Thompson, the ego becomes a plaything of archetypal forces it mistakes for its own volition. I would say this sums up where we are now. In future essays, I hope to explore how we might get ourselves out of our demon-soaked pickle.

1. I find Trump’s often reported incontinence perfectly symbolic of this condition of will-less collapse.