The Leisure of Daemons
Art by José Gabriel Alegria Sabogal, for Goêtic Atavisms, © Frater Acher 2023
The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. — Henry Miller
At the heart of most religious orthopraxia – the orthodox or correct way to practice – stands the aim of establishing conscious contact with a particular non-human entity. In Catholicism, this materialises as prayers to saints, Mother Mary or to Jesus himself. In Hindu and Buddhist Tantrism such contact takes the shape of identification with particular deity forms. And in classical Western magic – if we may call it a religious system – we encounter it as the ubiquitous invocation of daemons, angels, and gods. In a nutshell, we could say that the central sequence of most orthopraxies is one of aiming, calling, anchoring. The last term, anchoring, here refers to the process of binding together the human and the non-human person. Once contact has been established, a bond is formed between the two parties to affirm a mutually established interest. A promise is made to the saint, the seed mantra is animated by the deity, the statue is established as the dwelling of the daemon, or the pact between magician and demon is fixed in blood.
As different as the respective religious traditions may be, as culturally, historical, biographically imbued with the reality of their countries of origin and their original actors, their practices resemble each other in the essential sequence of aiming, calling, anchoring. What is essential is that all three concepts are actions initiated and directed from the side of the human actor. Man enters the church in search of the holy image of their choice, man sits down in the asana with the firm intention of finding the path to their deity, and man enters the magic circle armed for the encounter with the demonic entity of their choice.
Every spiritual practice is a journey. Some last seconds, others hours or days. In all of the examples given, the implicit assumption is that it is the human actor who holds the map in their hands, charting not only the terrain but also the paths of encounter along which daemonic contact is to take place. All of these journeys begin with the human determination to strive toward a particular goal. Aim, Call, Anchor is the ubiquitous motto of spiritual practice from the perspective of the radical Anthropocene: Humans step out into the spiritual vastness, and they determine when and whom to encounter. In all these systems, we find ourselves in a worldview that is unapologetically based on the implicit and unquestioned presumption of human supremacy. Even the suffering supplicant to their holy namesake is deeply rooted in this tradition: suffering and grief represent an intrusion into their human sovereignty – and now the restoration of their sovereignty, their physical and/or psychological integrity, is required, for which they seek spiritual assistance. The body of their practice is shaped along similar lines: spiritual beings are assistants, seemingly without agenda or purpose of their own, except to serve human concerns. They are called out of their slumbering existence into the wakefulness of prayer, meditation, invocation, whenever and wherever it suits the human actor to satisfy their own agenda.
The question arises: What do the gods do when we do not call upon them? What do daemons do when left to their own devices? What do the saints, the angels, the nagas, and the bhutas do when they have escaped the yoke of human task assignment? What, we should ask, do the play, the hunt, the talk, the sleep, the habitus of daemons and spirits look like when unburdened by human concerns? Most spiritual traditions know next to nothing about this. The silence in response to these questions runs like a crack through man-made religious traditions. Yet, this silence has nothing to do with the fact that there is nothing here to respond, explore, and understand. Rather, this silence stems from the fact that most people have simply not been interested in finding answers to it. Why ask questions that don’t serve yourself, let alone your own species? Why waste time exploring Otherness when you have your own field to plow, your own house to build, your own future to secure?
Our ancestors’ interest in the independent existence of non-human persons was mostly limited to the question: Why are some of them in places where they disturb the order we take for granted? The technical term for this is crisis response. Only in the case of spiritually caused illness, misfortune, or possession are religious orthopraxies interested in exploring the daemonic reality of life. For a brief moment, the human body becomes a map, one’s own biography a playground for daemonic forces. Then everything is done to find and seal the place where the wilderness has broken into order, the uncontrollable into the planned, the other into the known. Just as most people have little interest in the life of the virus once it has left their body, or in the direction of the storm once it has passed through their village, so our ancestors have left little written evidence of their genuine interest in daemonic realities, except where these invade, overlap and apparently distort the human domain.
As Western magicians, we currently have a dismal record when it comes to our spiritual interest in anything other than ourselves. This should be surprising, at least insofar as in other disciplines, such as biology, physics, mathematics, or even the humanities, humans have shown themselves to be quite competent and interested in exploring and understanding fundamental problems that at first glance promise little practical gain for their own species. The other here seems to exert an attraction to exploration beyond purely human utilitarian pursuits that we seem to lack in our spiritual tradition. Such interest is commonly called research; and although it is constantly moving in the web of economic interests, it has at least maintained the theoretical claim to act unguided by market interests. While research rarely succeeds in this, at least it aspires to shows itself to be committed to the ethos of gaining unbiased knowledge. Why then, we might ask, has such an approach to exploring reality beyond human interest not found its way into the spiritual traditions, let alone into Western magic?[1]
If indeed we define magic as a relational craft, then all nodes of its relational web must be given equal consideration. Since the human node represents only a tiny fraction, and the field of daemonic nodes constitutes the vast landscape of magical experience, the focus, emphasis, and goal of our magical exploration must not be on the side of human interests. We must free ourselves from the obsessions of human utility, security, and economy, and direct our attention to the Other. Now, I don’t suggest turning the question what can magic do for us into the subordinate question what can we do for magic. Instead, I propose to ask, What can magic teach us about reality beyond the boundaries of human interest? Only with such purpose do we begin to approach the craft of landscaping with daemons.
So, now we are committed to the perception of a landscape as it presents itself from a daemonic perspective. What does the world show us then when we step out of the shell of human will and desire? Not enlightenment and transcendence, but radical non-human immanence is the goal of such a view and participation in the world.
In abbreviated form, we give here the essential pillars on which the goês relies in their craft of landscaping with daemons.[2]
A Relational Craft: It would be basic goêtic common sense that their work, above all else, is a relational craft. A goês would operate off the simple foundation that to be a knower of something, that something also needs to acquire knowledge of them. A goês would have known, from painful first-hand experience, that there is no space in creation that allows man to stand outside of the ecology they are woven into. The goês’ presence affects everything, and everything affects the goês’ presence in response. Spirit-work, therefore, cannot be performed in absolute categories, but reveals itself to the dividual as a synthetic truth.
Silence as Foundation: It would be basic goêtic common sense that their work can be perfectly accomplished — both from the spirit and human sides — without the use of human words. A goês would have understood, that language can be afforded as an experiential category of relatedness. A goês would always invert the exegetical sequence of text — ritual — experience. They do not need to begin their spirit-path on ossified foundations; they can work from the foundation of the present moment in all its richness.
Attention on Tides: It would be basic goêtic common sense that the ability to use and direct our attention is our greatest asset in spirit-work. A goês would have known that they can switch their attention’s focus between objects and events. The latter is what they would have used in their spirit-practice mainly: Such attention seeks to perceive not discrete and stable objects, but the dynamic tides and movements that happen in relation to one another. A goês would have asked themselves: Do I see a tree, or do I see the wind brushing through its branches? Do I see the plants in the clearing, or do I see the patterns of light wandering over them? What is moving towards me in this moment, and what is moving away from me? And the goês would have known: Just as change occurs in relationships, so personality is only revealed in movement.
Tools as Aids of Perceiving: It would be basic goêtic common sense that many tools in magic are simply aids to perceiving. From stories and myths to sleeping out on the land, from holding a wand or drinking from a chalice to staring into black waters. All these experiences would have been meant to facilitate sensing. They do not hold knowledge in themselves, but they aim to awaken the senses of the goês to an ambience they otherwise would be unconscious of.
Fluid Personhoods: It would be basic goêtic common sense that spirit-personhood is not stable. Rather, it would have been learned to be fluid and emergent. Such relational concept of personhood – or better: of the dividual – would have been considered to be true not only for humans, but also for non human persons, i.e. spirits. Just like weather-patterns or ocean-tides never exist independent of time and context, so also spirits only constitute themselves in the moment of affording one another relatedness.
So, if we are seeking spiritual contact that is not dominated by human motives, these are some of the crucial qualities. In the pursuit of these qualities, while perceiving our environment in a completely new way, the terrain of the current daemonic landscape emerges, in which we experience ourselves as deeply interwoven.
Silence – especially the silence of the constantly chattering human mind and heart – as the basis for such an exploration has been explained in detail. The opening of all our senses, our whole body to the non-human, erotic and at the same time frightening ambient landscape is also a prerequisite. Then we direct our sensory perception away from the boundaries of fixed objects and toward everything that is in motion: currents, tides, rhythms as they are happening around us at every moment.
Any tool we use for this purpose has no sacredness in itself, but serves to expand or sharpen the perception of non-human reality. Finally, we also give space to our fear, allowing it to participate in the experience when nothing is fixed and predetermined, but even our own personality dissolves into strands of daemonic tissue. Silently, observing as a multitude, expanding into the moment with our senses, we experience the fluidity of the daemonic landscape. We can now see, that we will never meet the same person twice. That all existence is unique. Magnificent and broken, ancient and newborn, ephemeral and yet, in its capacity to flow, indelible and constant. This is how we experience the daemonic landscape as an encounter with a Radical Otherness that bows to no concern and to no boundaries of fixed form.
This is the work that readies us to explore the question we posed earlier: What do the daemons do when we do not call upon them? It prepares us to encounter a world that extends beyond the human vista.
[1] Alan Moore, in his incendiary and deliberately polemical 2002 essay Fossil Angels, has cogently argued why magic inherently disqualifies itself from being recognised as a science. Essentially, he sees the reason in its dependence on the consciousness of the actors involved, and thus its rootedness in a territory that will always elude the objective standards of the natural sciences. At the same time, Moore describes how, at least in the last three hundred years, the constant, futile effort to be included in the canon of respectable science - or at least to satisfy its criteria according to the opinion of its own counter-culture - has contributed to the complete ossification and erosion of living magical creation. When Moore then joins the proposal to define magic entirely within the framework of the liberal arts and to assign it its productive place in the human community, this is, in my eyes, only a marginal improvement of the desolate situation of the black arts. Religions, sciences, and arts, at least in the form in which we mostly encounter them in the 21st century, are explicitly man-made concepts that essentially serve the pursuit, satisfaction, and expansion of human needs. Although, as shown above, we would do well to adopt individual aspects or techniques of their approaches, none of these three systems is, in my opinion, suitable for satisfactorily integrating magic.
[2] For an in depth exploration of these, please see my free booklet Goêtic Common Sense.
