Demons

Sacred Magic

The aim of sacred magic, as we have said, is represented by the shield that the Empress holds in place of the book which the High Priestess holds. 

Sacred gnosis has as its aim the communicable expression (or "book") of mystical revelation, whilst the aim of sacred magic is liberating action, i.e. the restoration of freedom to beings who have partially or totally lost it. The eagle in flight depicted on the shield signifies this emblem of sacred magic, which could thus be formulated: "Give freedom to he who is enslaved." And this includes all the works mentioned by Luke:

Jesus cured many of diseases and plagues and evil spirits, and on many that were blind he bestowed sight. And he answered them: Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. (Luke vii, 21-22) 

This is the aim of sacred magic; it is nothing other than to give the freedom to see, to hear, to walk, to live, to follow an ideal and to be truly oneself —  i.e. to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, the ability to walk to the lame, life to the dead, good news or ideals to the poor and free will to those who are possessed by evil spirits. It never encroaches upon freedom, the restoration of which is its unique aim.

It is more than pure and simple healing which is the object of sacred magic; it is the restoration of freedom, including here freeing from the imprisonment of doubt, fear, hate, apathy and despair.

The "evil spirits" which deprive man of his freedom are not at all beings of the so-called "hierarchies of evil" or "fallen hierarchies". Neither Satan, nor Belial, nor Lucifer, nor Mephistopheles have ever deprived anyone of his freedom.

Temptation is their only weapon and this presupposes the freedom of he who is tempted. But possession by an "evil spirit" has nothing to do with temptation. It is invariably the same thing as with Frankenstein's monster. One engenders an elemental being and one subsequently becomes the slave of one's own creation.

The "demons" or "evil spirits" of the New Testament are called today in psychotherapy "neuroses of obsession", "neuroses or fear", "fixed ideas", etc. They have been discovered by contemporary psychiatrists and are recognized as real — i.e. as "parasitic psychic organisms" independent of the conscious human will and tending to subjugate it.

But the devil is not there to no avail — although not in the sense of direct participation. He observes the law — which protects human freedom and is the inviolable convention between the hierarchies of the "right" and those of the "left" — and never violates it, as stands out in the example of the story of Job.

One need not fear the devil, but rather the perverse tendencies in oneself!

For these perverse human tendencies can deprive us of our freedom and enslave us.

Worse still, they can avail themselves of our imagination and inventive faculties and lead us to creations which can become the scourge of mankind. The atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb are flagrant examples of this.

Man with the possible perversity of his warped imagination is far more dangerous than the devil and his legions.

For man is not bound by the convention concluded between heaven and hell;

he can go beyond the limits of the law and engender arbitrarily malicious forces whose nature and action are beyond the framework of the law...

such being the Molochs and other "gods" of Canaan, Phoenicia, Carthage, ancient Mexico

and other lands, which exacted human sacrifice.

One has to guard against accusing the beings of the hierarchies of evil to their detriment of having played the role of Molochs, these being only creatures of the perverse collective human will and imagination.

These are egregores, engendered by collective perversity, just as there exist the "demons" or "evil spirits" engendered by individuals.

But we have said enough about demons; the problem of "evil spirits" will be treated in a more detailed and profound way in the fifteenth Letter, dedicated to Arcanum XV.

The Devil

The theme of the fifteenth Arcanum of the Tarot is one of the generation of demons and of the power that they have over those who generate them. It is the Arcanum of the creation of artificial beings and of the slavery into which the creator can fall —becoming a slave of his own creation.

In order to be able to grasp this Arcanum, it is necessary firstly to take account of the fact that the world of evil consists not only of fallen entities of the celestial hierarchies (with the exception of Seraphim)

but also of entities of non-hierarchical origin,

i.e. entities who, in the manner of bacilli, microbes and viruses of infectious diseases in the domain of biology, owe their origin — to express it in the terms of Scholastic philosophy — neither to the primary cause, nor to secondary causes, but rather to tertiary causes, namely to arbitrary abuse on the part of autonomous creatures.

Thus, there are hierarchies who are "of the left" and who act within the framework of the law, executing a strictly just function in their capacity as accusers and "putters to the trial" — whilst on the other hand there are "microbes of evil" or entities artificially created by incarnated human beings.

These latter entities are demons whose soul is a special passion and whose body is the totality of "electromagnetic" vibrations produced by this passion.

These artificial demons can be engendered by human communities — such are many of the monstrous "gods" of the Phoenicians, Mexicans, and even Tibetans of the present day.

The Canaan Moloch who demanded the bloody sacrifice of the first born, mentioned so often in the Bible, is not a hierarchical entity — either of good or of evil  — but rather an evil egregore, i.e. a demon created artificially and collectively by human communities infatuated with the thrill of fear. The Mexican Quetzalcoatl is a similar instance of this. There, also, it was a matter of a demon created and worshiped collectively.

With respect to Tibet, we find there the singular phenomenon of the conscious — semi-"scientific"— practice of the creation and destruction of demons. It appears that in Tibet the Arcanum with which we are occupied is known, and it is practiced as one of the methods of occult training of the will and imagination. The training consists of three parts: the creation of tulpas (magical creatures) through concentrated and directed imagination, then their evocation and, lastly, the freeing of consciousness from their hold on it by an act of knowledge which destroys them — through which it is realized that they are only a creation of the imagination, and therefore illusory.

The aim of this training is therefore to arrive at disbelief in demons after having created them through the force of imagination and having confronted their terrifying apparitions with intrepidity. This is what Alexandra David-Neel, who wrote with a deep knowledge of the subject, said about it:

I have questioned several lamas on this subject (of incredulity). "Incredulity comes sometimes," answered a geshes (graduate) from Derge (a town in Kham, Eastern Tibet). "Indeed, it is one of the ultimate objects of the mystic masters, but if the disciple reaches this state of mind before the proper time he misses something which these exercises are designed to develop, that is fearlessness. Moreover, the teachers do not approve of simple incredulity, they deem it contrary to truth. The disciple must understand that gods and demons do really exist for those who believe in their existence, and that they are possessed with the power of benefiting or harming those who worship or fear them. However, very few reach incredulity in the early part of their training. Most novices actually see frightful apparitions... I had the opportunity of talking with a gomchen of Ga (Eastern Tibet) called Kushog Wanchen about sudden deaths which occurred while calling up demons. This lama did not appear inclined towards superstition and I thought he would agree with my opinion on this matter. "Those who died were killed by fear. Their visions were the creations of their own imagination. He who does not believe in demons would never be killed by them." I was much astonished when the anchorites replied in a peculiar tone of voice: "According to that it must also follow that a man who does not believe in the existence of tigers may feel confident that none of them would ever hurt him even if he were confronted by such a beast.". . . and he continued: "Visualizing mental formations, either voluntarily or not, is a most mysterious process. What becomes of these creations? May it not be that like children born of our flesh, these children of our mind separate their lives from ours, escape our control, and play parts of their own? Must we not also consider that we are not the only ones capable of creating such formations? And if such entities (tulpas, magical creatures) exist in the world, are we not liable to come into touch with them, either by the will of their maker or from some other cause? Could one of these causes not be that, through our mind or through our material deeds, we bring about the conditions in which these entities are capable of manifesting some kind of activity?. . .One must know how to protect oneself against the tigers to which one has given birth, as well as against those that have been begotten by others." (Alexandra David-Neel, Magic and Mystery in Tibet, London, 1967, pp. 146-148) "

The art and method of "making idols", which is forbidden by the second of the ten commandments, is ancient and universal. It seems that at all times and everywhere demons have been engendered.

Both Eliphas Levi and the Tibetan masters are in agreement not only with respect to the subjective and psychological origin of demons but also with respect to their objective existence. Engendered subjectively, they become forces independent of the subjective consciousness which engendered them.

They are, in other words, magical creations, for magic is the objectification of that which takes its origin in subjective consciousness.

Demons that have not arrived at the stage of objectification, i.e. at that of an existence separate from the psychic life of their parents, have a semi-autonomous existence which is designated in modern psychology by the term "psychological complex".

C. G.Jung regarded these as parasitic entities, which are to the psychic organism what, for example, cancer is to the physical organism.

A psychopathological "complex" is therefore a demon, when it has not come from outside but is engendered by the patient himself.

In its state of gestation it is still not born, but it certainly has an almost autonomous life of its own, nourished by the psychic life of its parent. C. G. Jung said on this subject:

It appears as an autonomous formation intruding upon consciousness. . . It is just as if the complex were an autonomous being capable of interfering with the intentions of the ego. Complexes do indeed behave like secondary or partial personalities possessing a mental life of their own. (C. G.Jung, Psychology and Religion; trsl. R. F. C. Hull, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 11, London, 1958, pp. 13-14) 

Now, "an autonomous being capable of interfering with the intentions of the ego" and which "possesses a mental life of its own" is nothing other than what we understand by a "demon".

How are demons engendered? As with all generation, that of demons is the result of the cooperation of the male principle and the female principle, i.e. the will and the imagination, in the case of generation through the psychic life of an individual. A desire that is perverse or contrary to nature, followed by the corresponding imagination, together constitute the act of generation of a demon.

With respect to generation effected collectively, the demon — which in this case is known by the term egregore — is likewise the product of will and imagination, which in this case are collective. The birth of such an egregore in modern times is known to us:

"A spectre is haunting Europe —the spectre of communism"—such is the first phrase of the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels of 1848. The Communist Manifesto continues:

"All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar. Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police-spies." (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party; trsl. S. Moore, London, 1932, p. 8) 

What I am saying here concerning the generation of the most imposing modern egregore is in perfect accord with Marxist teaching itself. Because for Marxism there is no God or gods — there are only "demons" in the sense of creations of the human will and imagination.

This is the fundamental Marxist doctrine of the so-called "ideological superstructure". According to this doctrine it is the economic interest, i.e. the will, which creates, i.e. imagines, ideologies — religious, philosophical, social and political.

For Marxism all religions are, therefore, only such "ideological superstructures", i.e. formations due to the human will and imagination.

Marxism-Leninism itself is only an ideological superstructure, a product of intellectual imagination, on the basis of the will having arranged — or re-arranged — social, political and cultural things in a certain manner.

And this method of production of ideological superstructures on the basis of the will is precisely what we understand by the collective generation of a demon or egregore.

We who have had experience of the demon or egregore in question above, and of the demon engendered by a collective will infatuated with national ambitions and making use of an imagination drawn from the province of biology — the national-socialist demon or egregore — know from first-hand experience what terrible power resides in our will and imagination, and what responsibility it entails for those who unleash it into the world!

How true it is that he who "sows the wind, shall reap the whirlwind" (Hosea ix, 7)... and what a whirlwind!

We people of the twentieth century know that the "great pests" of our time are the egregores of "ideological superstructures", which have cost humanity more life and suffering than the great epidemics of the Middle Ages.

And having this knowledge, is it not time that we said to ourselves: let us be silent. Let us make our arbitrary will and imagination silent; let us impose on them the discipline of silence. Is this not one of the four traditional rules of Hermeticism: to dare, to will, to know, to be silent? To be silent is more than to keep things secret; it is more even than to guard oneself from profaning the holy things to which a respectful silence is owed. To be silent is, above all, the great magical commandment of not engendering demons through our arbitrary will and imagination; it is the task of silencing arbitrary will and imagination.

-- text from Meditations on the Tarot by Anonymous