Satan, duh.
Gib - “Count”? Non capisco, mi dispiace. I get the feeling you’re talking about an angry girlfriend or something. No, this God has not revealed its name. I suppose, since I created it, that I might baptize it at one point.
Tyr - no, it’s not Satan. For one thing, the name Satan is already claimed. My God is not a rebel, he has no history of being restrained by another God. Satan is only cool because he’s the Jewish Gods naughty kid brother. He’s not original.
This has not been my experience (I would never enter my head to ask a God or other magical being for favors), but there are many Satanists, so maybe for some it’s true.
What has Satan done for you? I mean the stuff that’s fit to publish here…
Actually if we want to get complicated Fixed Cross we can trace the lineage of Satan to Set, Apep, or Enki.
So we’ve got a new found Satan and a new God.
Are you guys pulling our legs?
Sacrilege!
You are desecrating the church of eternal fire and brimstone!
LOL
Obviously Satan and God come in pairs … like tits ; like hot and cold, light and dark, up and down, right and wrong.
Don’t know about any angry girlfriends, but I think you should let him reveal his name to you–when he’s ready.
Read my latest post in the Satan thread. It’s more to do with why I view Satan as a high human ideal or archetype.
What material did you use to create it? Flower and water? 
No, just my fertile imagination.
In my mind is hall. On one side of the hall is a door with a sign above it that says “reality”. Opposite that door, on the other side of the hall, is a door with a sign above it that says “fantasy”. I encountered this daemon behind the door marked “fantasy”. I try to keep these doors separate.
ooooooooooooooo what does the daemon look like to you? What does it say to you? I’m interested.
Tyrannos
I would have thought that the path to Satan is quite the panoramic one and that his paths would be quite multitudinous too.
After all, denying a moral and ethical way is quite easy.
Why for you is it a narrow one?
I’m kind of embarrassed to talk about it–you’ll probably think I’m crazy (and you’d be right). Let me just say it’s complicated, but I’ll try to give you a rundown.
The daemon doesn’t look like anything really. He’s an incorporeal spirit. I wouldn’t even say he “says” anything to me–he more or less inserts little thoughts and insights into the back of my mind on occasion.
Oh, and all this depends very much on my drug habit… keep that in mind.
It started when I was 19 and started experimenting with drugs. It was a very beautiful and enlightening experience at first (involving falling in love with a girl) and soon became one of the most dark and horrific times of my life. “Demonic” has always been the closest word I could come up with to the describe the experiences. If I recall the experience correctly, I think the demon imagery came from being forced to face in myself all that was sick, psychopathic, and evil, and the idea of being possessed by a demon was a very fitting analogy. Over time, however, I began to take the idea of the demon within me more and more literally, not just metaphorically (drugs will do this to you).
Over the years, and through many-a-psychedelic session with myself, the demon started explaining his story to me–his history, why he chose me, what he was all about, and other weird and insane things. It’s things like this that forced me to separate my experiences into two different realities: the doors marked “reality” and “fantasy”. I think you’ll find this to be very common among drug users–I forget who it was but a semi-famous drug user (from the crowd of Huxley, Leary, McKenna ← those kinds of people) said “the idea of a singular reality makes no sense to me any more”. Your mind is kind of forced to adapt to experiences which simply cannot cohere together in a single reality by conceptualizing multiple realities–it is the only way it maintains some semblance of sanity (if you can call that sane).
Anyway, to this date, the demon’s story is that he’s not really a demon any more but a daemon–he says the a daemon is simply an ex-demon–that is, a redeemed demon, a spirit that has served its time in Hell and has been pardoned. Once redeemed in this way, they become fit to impart their wisdom to human beings and guide them through life (angels cannot do this as they have never tasted the evils of Hell–they have no experience of it–and only a spirit that has experienced both the good and the bad is fit to teach those of the Earthly realm as the Earth itself is midway between the absolute good and the absolute evil). He says that in his own case, however, he technically was never pardoned, not officially, but only escaped Hell. He targeted me in an attempt to possess me (occupying a human body is one way demons have learnt to escape Hell) but ultimately failed. He was caught almost right away. However, God took pity on him and told him he would be allowed to remain out of Hell so long as he taught and guided me rather than possessed me. He has mellowed down immensely over the years and I have to say that he has been doing a tremendous job of helping me improve myself and add a more meaningful, more healthy, spiritual depth to my life.
I know all this is just drug-induced delusions, and as I said I keep it all behind the door clearly marked “fantasy” in big bold font, and that’s the best I can do to avoiding succumbing to full blown paranoid schizophrenia.
So what do you think of me now, Arc?
gib–Have you ever read anything by psychologist Rollo May? He addresses the daemonic in his works. You might find his works helpful. He addresses some issues of addiction. His stuff might help put your experience in perspective if you are not already familiar with him and you wish to change your perspective.
I have not read Rollo May, but a quick glance at the wiki article on him seems interesting. I don’t think I want to change–I kind of like my alternate worlds. The addiction thing is something I will eventually have to address head on–and I will–I’m planning on taking a two month stint from all drugs and alcohol after the business Christmas party this year, and I will be starting a thread here to record my progress.
To May a daemon is any natural function that takes control of a person. So, I suppose if addiction is related to dopamine production than by his definition it would itself be daemonic. Your demon imagery would be how you symbolize the addiction. That’s fairly close to how you have rationalized the expereince. What’s interesting is how you expereince this entity as if it were an autonomous agent. Psychologically it would seem to be a split off part of your self. Then the question is why would you do that? Sometimes it’s because one cannot accept that some behavior or urge or thought or expereince is part of one’s self. In self psychology they call that ego dystonic. Could that be what is going on?
It is highly tied up with my drug addiction, but I don’t think that’s what the demon symbolized. I’ve had the demon within me long before I first started experimenting with drugs. Just that before the drug, it was merely a part of my personality, not a dissociated creature with its own personality.
Almost at the same time as puberty hit, I remember being attracted to the thought of darkness and evil. I was bullied by almost everyone in school from grade 6 to grade 11–I had no friends, not even the nerds liked me–so it’s hard to say whether this fixation on darkness and evil stemmed from my anger and hatred of my peers or it would have flowered up regardless of what I went through.
But anyway, I eventual started self-diagnosing and came up with this image of myself as split into 5 personalities. I reasoned that the only thing preventing this from being an actual case of dissociative disorder was the fact that I was aware of them all (I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a fetish for twistedness and a sort of sick pride in thinking of myself in such ways). They were: the intellect (the part of me that’s likes coming up with theories and philosophies), the artist (the part of me that likes to draw and write poetry and fiction), the hopeless romantic (the part of me that’s a sucker for love and romance), the angel (the part of me that wants to do good for others), and the demon (the sick, twisted part of me that loves the macabre and gothic). I thought of the intellect as the dominant part of me that kept all the others in line, but the demon always had some special something about him that seemed to deserve special attention.
Then I started doing drugs and that’s when the shit hit the fan. Over the months, I started slowly losing touch with reality, getting confused about whether the demon was still just a part of my personality or an actual dissociated spirit that had either possessed me or haunted me. I started forgetting how the idea of the demon originated–that I had originally come up with it as a symbol of a side of my personality.
I can’t say that I ever literally experienced a demonic attack or an evil presence in my midst, but I have experienced thoughts that I could not control–thoughts that seemed to intrude into my mind that I could not shove out or deny–and these would often be extremely dark, paranoid, and terrifying thoughts. ← this is the way of drugs.
Just to be clear, I don’t experience it this way, I’ve just created a story in my mind, a narrative. I used to believe it, or at least I was very confused about how real it was, and of course when I was full-on tripping, I could very easily believe it was real, but when I was sober I was more confused than delusional. Now-a-days, however, I know it’s just a narrative I tell myself–it isn’t real for me anymore, even when I’m high.
Well, it continues to be a symbol of myself, or a side to myself.
Well, it’s definitely I kind ego dystonic but the question of why I do it is less clear–although I’ve come up with some interest bits of self-analysis to explain to myself why. I think for the longest time I used the demon imagery as a defense mechanism against something even more terrifying–namely, pure ungrounded fear. It was kind of interesting when I came up with this interpretation because it meant that the demon was actually protecting me rather than harming me. I actually held on to the demon to have some way of explaining or conceptualizing what was happening to me in the intoxicated moments of sheer terror–it may not have been rational but at least it was something. I think the mind needs some kind of explanation in order to feel just a bit more secure in moments of terror because a source of terror that is understood is more manageable than a source or terror that you just don’t understand.
Gib - Interesting story, yes such demons can become very real. I know what you’re talking about. I have to emphasize that this has nothing or little to do with a God.
A demon is something very personal, some thing attached to your person. It can be perceived by others in your behaviour, and sometimes as a form of (often dirty) energy by the psychic. But a God is more like a source of energy and of a certain consciousness, something into which other people can tap, and that does not need to attach itself to a human. Of course it does need to be fed in the beginning to come into being, but it does not take of its own volition.
I think you pretty much said it when you described the reason for you to have this demon - fear.
My God was created out of an abundance of power and happiness, I just felt I had much mor eto give than I could presently bestow on any living creature. So I created a divine, timeless being as a receptacle.
FC,
Do you believe there is a difference between the gods and other kinds of spirits (like demons, angels, muses, etc.) in terms of the kinds of beings they are (like different species) or merely a difference in stature or functional positions in their worlds. What the daemon has shown me as that the difference between a god and just some lowly spirit like himself is like the difference between the president of the United States and some common Joe Schmoe citizen–they’re both still human, and under the right circumstances, the one could one day take the place of the other. This is the way he painted the Abrahamic god for me: the Hebrew god was initially an angel just like all the others and with an organized band of other angels performed a coup-d’etat against the gods of the then-current religions that they superseded. My daemon describes him as a kind of “poser” pretending to the the “ultimate” god when really, he’s no more superior or special than the rest of the million-strong pantheon.
You mentioned one of the major differences between a demon (daemon?) and a god being the need to attach itself to a human being, and because of this attachment, it becomes very personal and inaccessible to others (if I interpreted you correctly). Is this the only difference in your eyes?
If I had continued to buy into my own story about how the demon was an autonomous personality, could I not have imagined it as potentially becoming independent of me and taking on a life of its own (maybe even becoming connectable to other people)?
You also mentioned that a god needs to be fed from a human mind at first. Does this mean that there is always a psychoanalytic interpretation to any god the imagination might invent? Do you think it continues to be subject to psychoanalytic interpretation throughout its entire lifespan?
One last question: you mentioned dirty energy by the psychic. Did you mean “psychic” or “psyche”?