Dabbling in Demonology
The Realm of Spirits
No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the sum of his knowledge. — Ayn Rand
How shall I begin to tell the story?
I suppose the first thing I should say is that all of us are constrained in some way by our logic and our language. So in the fullness of human history we have much that is unexplained and sometimes inexplicable. Nevertheless, we use our language and our logic to attempt to communicate those mysteries. Somehow we sense or intuit or react by evolutionary design (wherever it may lie at the moment) that these mysteries, or some fraction of them, are deeply significant to our purpose in life. We walk our paths to Damascus without knowing there was once a moment a man named Saul had. We spin ourselves dizzy as children in total ignorance of the dervish’s dance. We are innocent vessels of spirit. Until we aren’t. Then comes the confusion.
Because life gets in the way, we have to live it first and understand it secondarily if at all. We have to feel its pains and pleasures to know it’s real. You don’t know how important your femur is until you break it. Suddenly, you’re all into Netter’s, Moore’s and Gray’s. At some point in life the persistent silence of God goads you into making up stuff. Rarely is that the proper faith, but some people get the itch and scratch their souls forward, or pitch their attentions inward as the case may be.
On many occasions I have tried to make Matters of the Spirit a category of my writing but on the whole I cannot keep it forward in my thinking. I can recall so many abortive attempts and yet somehow it doesn’t pain me not to know. I’m OK with a universe that doesn’t care about my motives. I’m not the sort that needs everything to happen for a reason. It’s enough to know that it can happen, with some perspective on the odds that it might. I don’t need cosmic explanations or cosmic justice. I also don’t dismiss infinite paths. Perhaps I expect God to have infinite patience and in that Hindu way I expect us to have enough reincarnations to stumble our way forward. After all, infinity is way bigger than we have been trained to imagine. (You could start with Graham’s Number)
When in my retirement I find myself, like Gerard Van Der Luen, writing poetry instead of essays, and remembering songs rather than algorithms and conceptual frameworks, perhaps I’ll be better suited to engage this cavernous realm. For the moment I’m content to dabble.
In my dabbling, which actually has no consistent or evolving praxis, I am merely preparing myself to be unsurprised by the depth and variety of spiritual concerns. Strangely enough, it has been writers of the sort that know their zombies from their unseelie fae that I tend to reckon with. So yeah that would include Richard Kadrey, Jim Butcher, Charles Stross, HP Lovecraft, Gene Wolfe. Sadly Neil Gaiman doesn’t do it for me, but honestly I only gave him one chance. His Sandman on Netflix was interesting and good, weighed down as it was in the bizarre particulars of his various NPCs.
I think of Kadrey first and foremost because he made me like the sort of bedraggled punks I don’t find particularly cool in real life. Dive bar denizens, metal heads, goth girls, movie buffs who blather on like Tarantino himself. These are the sorts I have had the necessity to studiously avoid - I almost became a child star myself - growing up square in Los Angeles. He’s the first contemporary author I encountered who dared personify God in his books. Kadrey’s God could be depicted well by Wallace Shawn with a touch of sadness and regret. But Kadrey went beyond that simplicity and added a host of demons, angels and the king of Hell as well. Kadrey’s Sandman Slim is a complex troubled character who has made deals with both God and the Devil and must consequently deal with all manner of their agents as well as his mortal and magical friends during the accelerating degeneration of Los Angeles as the wars between Heaven and Hell lurch forward and various gangs and machers choose sides. The very nerve of Kadrey to put mankind between absolutes makes it clear how the actual Hollywood & entertainment industries are incapable of transcendence. For them, mankind demonstrates the ultimate good and evil possible.
The Secular Bookends
By making mortal men evil personified and righteousness personified, Hollywood makes their plots comprise the fullness of human experience. As they portray superhero and supervillian actions as the mechanisms by which humanity is damned or saved, they encourage audiences to think along similar lines. Even if such superheroes were sophisticated and could understand and manage the complex adaptive systems that actually run our world, the realms of the supernatural are left barren in our minds. So we are bereft, at least I am, of the old wives tales and superstitions that were sufficient to aid in the discipline of ancient wisdom. In this I am saying there are proper uses for mythology and narration that bring us asymptotic to the truth. Our lack of sophisticated understanding of such mythology leaves us pathetically vulnerable to a rogues gallery of trolls, authoritarians and con men.
We do not know patron saints of virtues and their battles against the manifest demons of vice. Well, I don’t. I know John Wick. I know Jason Bourne. I know Harry Potter. Yes and I know a few tragic characters of the ancients and the classics. My two favorites were Alceste and Antigone. (Remind me if I ever get two cats.) But that’s about it. Very few of the characters we know consort with ethereal beings. We are vessels of spirit but we have been filled to the brim with the thin gruel of political rhetoric and thirsty ideology. Am I sounding familiar? Isn’t this a better way to describe how I think the Humanities have failed us in contemporary America?
For me, music fills the gap, and we can go there another time. But I’m also a Californian and I douse my doubts with the old ‘work hard, play hard’ ethos. I’m suffering in this emptiness with all of us. Kadrey makes use of a denuded desert called the Tenebrae. I think that’s where we are. We occupy a realm of shadows and we are chased by minions of doom. Like within a starless fog bound midnight in a great cacophonous railyard we are lost and deafened following tracks where massive engines could crush us at any moment.
Named Darkness
In my journey towards Stoicism I investigated the dark path and was intrigued by goetia. It wasn’t an investigative kind of intrigue, rather it was like a light fascination with the fact that there were names for all these demons. For the time I was something of a polytheist it was cool to know loa and spirits and the attributes of Hindu gods. What actually does it mean to swing a dead chicken overhead? I seem to remember the quote that ‘Religion was our first education’ and that resonated with the lush mythic richness of the Neveryon Series by Samuel R Delany which I read through in the early 90s. It wasn’t until somewhere around 2010 that I even bothered to read Lovecraft and Butcher. Now these spirits had lives and names and their purposes came alive in the literature. In Gaiman’s American Gods, they seemed too close the author’s need to have them materialize, like an attempted summoning by the desperate and the mad - somewhere in a Pasadena mansion with an audience of Howard Hughes.
That seemed a bridge too far. The very idea that the wealthy and powerful sought to exert some control over supernatural forces evoked a clichéd hubris I could not entertain. Yet that’s Hollywood movie magic. That’s about as far as our popular culture goes, except once again we have embodied the entire scope of mythology in something entirely too simplistic, something incapable of engendering any notion of transcendence. Yet what became clear to me in the heroes of these writers was a kind of fatalistic (if not Stoic) acceptance and understanding that humans were subject to greater struggles than they could cognize and put into words. In that way we are all idiots without knowing what we are useful for or whom we are useful to. Yet we all want to change the world. Is wanting to change the world a viral infection, an evangelical quest or a demonic possession? Why do we not want to change ourselves instead?
These are my first words in this investigation in the paucity of spirit we suffer. I know something is missing but I haven’t developed the vocabulary. What I don’t want is a peer-reviewed paper for inclusion in the next DSM canon. I guess I want theatre, literature, liturgy and praxis that are all accessible such that naming the darkness is consonant with mythology and science. Or perhaps I should simply read all of Augustine and Spinoza at long last and the Lemegeton itself. There are others to discover. I am dissatisfied with ‘sin’, ‘crime’ and ‘madness’. This is not descriptive enough. We only know how to punish what is distasteful and revolting. I’m opening this door to a deeper understanding. God help me.
Extra Credit:
So over at The Abbey of Misrule I responded completely spontaneously.
It seems to me in the wholeness of things that we have names for things we don't know but feel. They echo within and we never know when we vibrate in synch. Is our resonance thought or possession? We claim to go with our gut unaware of that microbial soup which aids in our consumption, as it shares none of our DNA. Myths persist as certainly as cosmic rays slice through our brains and make our minds blink, whether these entities have names or not, they have effects. How do we, basilisk blind, walking the cavernous darkness of concrete and steel feel the corners and curves of our lives? What grit gathers at the vertex of origin our roundy fingers cannot probe? We live in square space, in our false comfort and hate ourselves for it. So we look to the universe on occasion to remind us of our nothingness invoking Ras Al Ghul to burn it all down. Sniffing our fingers on the trip out.
If God created death, why doesn't he respect his own creation and die? Maybe he did and our job is to follow. Create more death and die. Godlike. Decree a thunderdome. Or if we are not godlike but wormlike consume the shitloop. Chew what fits in the mouth. Mouth full by moonlight and speak not lest we summon.