I am afraid I have no opinion on the subject either way.
I would read @crossing-sun’s posts and his new book on the subject. He is much more versed in such things.
Magister Officiorum is absolutely not a demonolatry book and neither are the rest of Ody’s writings unless you consider a relationship with Lucifer demonolatry (I definitely do not). He’s a Solomonic magician (albeit one who takes a more spirit-friendly approach) who incorporates his Obeah training into the grimoire tradition. That is a very, very different thing than worshiping demons. Spirit-friendly Solomonic magick should not be mistaken for demonolatry, they are very different practices.
As an aside, unless you’re quite experienced with goetic and Solomonic magick I would not recommend Magister Officiorum. It’s an excellent book but also one you can get in real trouble with if you don’t know what you’re doing.
I concede I know nothing about demons, worshipped or otherwise.
Well for not knowing, you certainly recommended an excellent author
I read a lot, but I don’t incorporate everything I read into my practice. I’d like to learn more about Solomonic magic, but I just haven’t the time.
Boy I feel you on not having the time to incorporate everything that interests you. There have been some pretty interesting books coming out lately that incorporate folk and/or indigenous traditions with Solomonic magick that might be up your alley.
Magister Officiorum definitely is one and Peterson’s Secrets of Solomon has really gripped some of my tradcraft friends lately (myself as well, it’s a really fascinating work). SoS in particular is really interesting because you see a lot of tech that’s instantly recognizable as folk magick but using Solomonic spirit catalogs. It’s a strange little beast.
Oh yes, I have that one. I also want that new one by Skinner ♡♡♡
Man me too! I have to put hard limits on often I can buy Skinner’s books or I go buckwild lol
Here is my perspective. I know of others that work well for people, like Lon Milo DuQuette’s belief that demons are essentially negative traits made manifest that you can control and use to your benefit. I know people who have had good results with this model. I have not.
I essentially see demons as just another classification of spirits, and a pretty poor descriptor. A casual examination of many grimoires (like the above mentioned Key of Solomon) finds many of the demons have the names of old pagan gods. This is literal demonization. So are the grimoires describing spirits that are inherently malevolent and simply share a name with these spirits? Is it simply a Christian perspective that sees all pagan gods as inherently evil? Or have these spirits always existed and the grimoires simply giving them a bad rap? I tend to lean towards the last explanation. My work with demons has shown me that they are just another spirit, some more powerful than others. Like any other spirits they have their own goals, motivations, and morality. These things may not align with yours. They are going to try and get what they can out of a relationship with a magician, just like the magician is trying to get something from them. So you should treat them with caution, but it need not be an adversarial relationship.
I’m not sure where this “most demons in grimoires are pagan gods” idea rolled around from but it’s nonsense. You can make the case (maybe) for Asteroth and Baal but that’s two examples and both rely on questionable etymology. What are the other ones? What is anyone’s evidence that they are pagan gods beyond “some names kinda sound like other names”? If your answer is “well, they told me so!” please take a moment to have a long think about why a spirit might lie to you and what benefits they gain from lying about their status as gods. Frankly, I think this is a comforting narrative people have come up with using the most tenuous evidence possible to justify not wanting to use the methodology of the grimoires and to justify worshiping them and honestly, it’s horseshit.
Where is the evidence to support this?
Where does it come from? One of the most respected living scholars on goetia, Jake Stratton-Kent.
Go ahead and check all of his numerous primary sources.
Not sure why you find the etymology questionable. Seems pretty solid. Let’s list some more.
Abraxas = Greco-Epyptian god, also revered by the gnostics.
Pazuzu = Mesopotamian god.
Moloch = Canaanite god. There are a lot of Canaanite gods as they were primary rivals of the Hebrews.
Paimon = A djinn, which were originally spirits of the earthly realm. Also, a lot of djinn on the list, including Asmodeus.
Amon = Carthegian god.
The fucking phoenix is on the list in several grimoires.
I can list more.
If you want to get technical about the whole Ba’al thing, Ba’al means lord, and it was used to address several gods. Many gods in the Near East were named Ba’al-XXX
About your tags. I happen to respect by fellow magicians. If they say they have success working with a particular approach, I tend to believe them. Didn’t work for me, but it worked for them.
Also, never said a word about physical manifestation. I don’t see where anyone on this post did. I don’t find it to absolutely necessary, but I have experienced it and do not discount it.
History matters. Context matters. If the trend stopped at one or two that would be one thing, but several of the beings listed come from other mythological sources. Christians were also not the only people to participate in this practice. It is thoroughly documented.
Gods forgive me for I know this post will be a doozy.
First off I will post for the record…don’t trust spirits. Most reading this I assume don’t have the skills to properly experience a spirit as it truly is or to discern its nature by strong/developed mental and astral senses and knowing enough about ACTUAL occult aesthetics/correspondences to read it even if they did happen to have the developed senses. So, just as a catch all, don’t trust spirits until they have been tested and have proven themselves to be what they say. That is a whole other issue, but anyway.
To properly understand or for best results from what I am about to talk about best to shift into the energy model as well as an Animist model. May not be your favored model but it is where I am coming from in this discussion.
Also, if you are familiar with the Picatrix and Agrippa even better.
The spirits being called in many grimoires and the lesser key started out as the energetic consciousness of the decans. They were personified so they could be worked with. That is why the “work with the spirit at the right astrological time” is a thing. That time and alignment is what they are…originally (I will get back to that in a sec) So, when something is given birth to or started that moment has the imprint of the planetary, elemental and prana of the area. That first inhalation draws in the outside astral light. That is what astrology is all about and so that is what astrological based magicks rely on. All of those forces are conscious and that consciousness is also imprinted at that moment. When you do an evocation you are calling on an aspect of that energetic flow to work with. The ancients used the correspondences they had and built an image that could house that force and that is what the sigil/talisman/lamen is for, it gets an imprint from those forces called and gives birth to a physical space for that consciousness to “live in” Also why when you torture the spirit you use that sigil or bind that spirit you bind that sigil…and why another magician can call that same spirit with no issue, same consciousness different body. If you are familiar with the ancient Tibetian concept that gave birth to the insanity that is modern day “tulpa magic” this may be a bit easier to understand. So, the Dali Lama is a Tulpa or a rather a Sprul-Pa which is an emanation. The original spirit that keeps incarnating into many bodies but retaining it’s original consciousness (pop culture reference: like the Avatar in the last Airbender series. lol)
Next tricky discussion: Ranges of consciousness. So, know how in the grimoires every planet has an angel, a spirit and an intelligence? Those are the different ranges of consciousness within that planet or star. Just like you have a consciousness that ranges from lofty to a bit darker. Depending on the type of work being done you need to connect to the proper aspect. So, if you are in a situation with normal incarnated humans you would have varying “roles” you may play in trying to get them to do something for you. Asking your lover for something demands a different tact than asking a criminal court judge for one more shot (maybe). Same thing with these planetary forces.
Now imagine what the consciousness of a decan would be, a mixture of qualities of consciousness…so it would be impure. More “carnal” not necessarily evil mind you, but not as pure and direct as an angel. More like a beast. And often in the grimoires they had animal features to reflect this.
Now imagine what happens when these forces pass hands into another culture. From Sumer to Egypt maybe or from another more ancient culture which passed it on to those two and so one. Over time correspondences and descriptions get lost to myth and are seen as what that actual spirit is rather then the form made for the light of the decan to fill. At some point the sigils are passed along with a description and have crept out of the temples and into the hands of Goes and Gnostics of the early church. Then Catholic priests. Now us.
They have fallen, and some hope to return to the thrones from which they fell.
So, yes while a spirit like Asteroth was probably Astarte at some point when most use that sigil and wish to connect to the spirit that has been bound in THAT particular sigil you are not getting a Canaanite Goddess. If you are skilled, and focused you may catch the base consciousness that appears and follow that consciousness back up the chain to the goddess of Love, but most will be staring down a demon, if they can see it at all that is. Why even chance mixing the signals? If you want to summon Astarte go learn about her, prepare a shrine and pray to her with offerings to see if she find you worthy.
I have called Asteroth with expectation of Astarte, what came was not Astarte. It wore a mask of Astarte. As I inspected it, it asked to be invoked as a goddess, it deserved to be invoked. I was not hostile, I was just calm and direct, at no time did I threaten it. I expected Astarte. It was not Astarte.
What? Demons lie you say?
At higher levels it could lead to Astarte, if it skillfully reminded through right methods, but that path is a long road and probably not one you should seek to climb. The work that brought that sigil into your hands as been willed to bring something other than the ancient love goddess.
But consider this…
Here is another way of looking at it, we shift gears into more chaos magick theory. So, think egregores. Imagine if some Chaote gave the internet a sigil that connected them to an egregore of Luck. Now imagine some catastrophe knocks out civilization but…luckily… that sigil for the egregore sticks around and is written in some Chaotes notebook of sigils. Now play a game of telephone for a couple hundred or even a thousand years and whoops, somehow that Luck spirit is a Lurk spirit. Imagine how annoyed that spirit is that these new magicians haven’t even bothered to conjure it to clear up the mistake! They just cast it when they want to be super creepy and not be noticed. But they find it doesn’t work properly…hmmm maybe it is a darker spirit than they supposed…it does aid in Lurking…maybe a demon? Slowly they shape the mental and astral ideas around the sigil until a new consciousness arises from it. A real creeper of a spirit. Poor Luck egregore. Just a run of bad luck buddy.
The moral kids: Don’t trust spirits and make sure you know what the hell you are talking to.
Justin’s addressed a lot of the issues with viewing demons as deities much more eloquently than I could hope to but I would just like to address a couple points: I’m extremely familiar with Jake’s work and his conclusions are absolutely not that all or even most demons are pagan gods. He makes a case for Asteroth (though he connects her more with Hecate than Astarte) and a few others and some strange but interesting conjecture about the Goat of Mendes and Lucifer Rofocale but I genuinely do not know how you could read his corpus or listen to his interviews and conclude that he believes demons are largely gods. Even the most casual browsing of Pandemonium (his work extensively investigating the spirit catalogs) should make this immediately apparent. Is there a case for a few? Sure, maybe but if we’re being honest it’s largely conjecture. Assuming that two entities of different cultures separated by hundreds of years are the same merely because they share etymology is disingenuous at worst and naive at best.
I’d also like to point out that Abraxas is, depending on the source, an Archon or Aeon in the Gnostic tradition which is pretty decidedly not pagan. I also find citing Pazuzu of all things as evidence of the Christian demonization of pagan gods pretty asinine considering that view came from the Exorcist movies and I would sincerely hope we’re not considering movies as evidence.
@coyote-696 I think I understand our disconnect now, as we may be essentially on the same page.
There is a difference between knowing the history and actual practice and results. Yes, I still stand by that many demons in most grimoires are at least named after ancient spirits. I don’t think that’s debatable. Whether or not the spirits actually contacted by the writers of those grimoires, or any spirit a modern magician may contact are specifically those entities is debatable.
As @justinbthemagician said, more than likely, you are going to find what you go looking for.
But this history is important as I think it shows that the nature of spirits are changeable, open to interpretation, and depends on the magician.
What is a god? Can a spirit have once been a god and now something else? Maybe the confusion with the whole Ba’al thing is that some spirits are using the name as a classification? If the question is, what are you? Maybe the spirit answers, “I’m a Ba’al.” It could mean the spirit is saying they are a lord, or maybe it means something entirely different that we don’t understand. Maybe it’s saying “I am a Ba’al” like we would say, “I am a human.” Both of those statements are highly confusing without context.
I really see only three major classifications of spirits. Spirits of place, spirits of the dead, and alien spirits. Alien spirits includes gods, demons, and anything else that was never human and not tied to this planet. It’s those alien spirits that are the most difficult. They have no point of reference of what it means to be human and vice versa. Of course our communication with them would be exceedingly difficult. This may be because they are trying to confuse us, or we simply can’t understand each other.
So it was my mistake to imply that X Demon = X God or spirit. What any individual magician may encounter can be something entirely different.
The history matters because it does provide a frame of reference, but it is never going to be entirely accurate. It will never be a formula of X = X. It’s more like, someone in the past has contacted a certain spirit with these correspondences and this is what that spirit communicated to them. So maybe try working those correspondences some more and see what you get.
That’s my working theory, which may be wrong, but all I can do is keeping working with the spirits. And of course, all of this is experimental. It’s dangerous. Magick has no safety net. Know a system of self-defense.
BTW, the Pazazu thing, no I wasn’t thinking of the Exorcist when I named him, but ya know, they got that from somewhere. William Peter Blatty didn’t just make it up. It comes from archaeological evidence. A lot of writers do extensive research for their fiction. I know this from experience.