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In taking note that the Satan we're told to believe in doesn't actually exist in the Bible, that the Satan in the Bible refers to angels who tempt and prosecute man on God's behalf, that horned goat-like image of the devil was taken from nature gods in different mythologies, and that the gods of neighboring cultures were declared demons as a political plot (Ishtar and Ba'al for example), what is a demon? More specifically, are they more related to nature spirits than evil spirits?
In the basic historical sense, a demon is a spiritual intelligence which can be either good or evil or both depending on the context and mythos. The actual term used by the ancient Greeks was "daimon", though this can be spelled "daemon." In essence, a daimon is not a god, though sometimes gods can take on the role in the act of moving between worlds. Eros or Cupid is an example, as is Hermes or Mercury. While the word could refer to a nature spirit like a nymph or satyr, etc., in some mythologies, the tendencies of use referred to an entity that operated in the "middle realm" between man and the gods, or God. Such intelligences could be used by gods to serve their ends. An angel (from the Greek angelos = messenger), could be classified as a "daimon") in a categorical sense based on function.
The more modern usage of the word "demon" kind of acquired the more concrete characteristics of evil over broad time spans, referring to spirits of affliction and temptation. It's based on a type of moral stacking and cultural habit, though both occultists and academics, and even religious scholars have been known to use the word in a neutral sense, speaking in general terms about spiritual forces/intelligences.
In the surface sense of typical occult related/religious thinking, spirit classifications can seem pretty clear cut, but historically they tend to be more fluid depending on the culture. A "satan" as adversary of man, like in the Book of Job is ambiguous enough over time to become the adversary of God, thus "Satan" as monolithic entity as it merges with dualistic antagonistic notions that did not originally exist in the source of origin of the word. Religious cultures tend to cross-pollinate in history (for instance, Zoroastrianism into Judaism via Babylonian exile interaction), so you get functions from one set of beliefs influencing another, and these become so ingrained as to set the moral and ethical symbolic standards that just seem like givens in later times.
In taking note that the Satan we're told to believe in doesn't actually exist in the Bible, that the Satan in the Bible refers to angels who tempt and prosecute man on God's behalf, that horned goat-like image of the devil was taken from nature gods in different mythologies, and that the gods of neighboring cultures were declared demons as a political plot (Ishtar and Ba'al for example), what is a demon? More specifically, are they more related to nature spirits than evil spirits?
I believe in one true 3-letter God. You can understand that as a father and ruler, as a friend and brother, or as a supreme and sublime spirit, and it is all the same thing across times and cultures. Everything else is some aspect of created existence, including all forms of intelligence incarnate and otherwise.
All the Baals, Thor, Horus, all of it, represent God restricted to a particular form or attitude, and usually one specific to a human culture. But who is like God? Not them. So when we are inclined to worship these, setting our lives at their feet in service or looking to them for aid and counsel, it is harming ourselves by strengthening false ideas and false expectations. Maybe it's completely innocuous, but over time a civilization built on bad ideas produces bad things, even if those seem to be good ideas at first. The whole world is full of the result of these bad practices that have become institutional due to the influence of idol worship that persists everywhere.
So the "demons as evil spirits" argument does not require the demons to be scary or aggressive. Catch more flies with honey, but all of them ultimately lead to ruin through a variety of temptations toward evil. There is no evil so great as a person empowered to accomplish everything they believe is good.
Using traditional jargon: demons exist "above and below", meaning, these forces operate and exist on various levels, within multiple domains simultaneously: Within the individual, within the collective, and also beyond the collective within the realm of God ( or gods ).
There's a cozy kind of ignorance I see a lot of occultists indulging in, confidently calling demons imaginary or psychologically phrasing them as thought forms. It's human pride and egoism, but also an unconscious fear that we may NOT be the apex predators of existence.
Do you really think the universe is limited to our senses? That all that exists, we can perceive? If we had never evolved a nose, would smells still exist? Of course they would, we just wouldn't be aware of them! Our universe is largely not carbon-based, but inconceivably ancient, all of the things that propel us are electrical and intangible, but we do need a material shell for the rhythmic habitual fluctuations that we are to take place. Is this the only way for life to exist? Could not a cloud of plasma or electrical impulses, over a million years of random undulations, eventually become rhythmic and coherent, then reactive to the environment? We naturally occured to suit our environment, who's to say in total assurance that it hasn't happened under different conditions?
Now anyone who is willing to admit that we are not the center of the universe, that we're mammals that evolved to survive the conditions of Earth, would recognize that we are limited in our ability to comprehend things, that there are things OUTSIDE of our perceptions and understanding.
Demonic entities would simply be non-tangible life forms that are predatory and possibly intelligent enough to have a sentient, selfish agenda, much like greedy little billionaire humans who just want power and capital. They could be composed of plasma, "anti-matter", "dark-matter", or simply something so subtle and alien and outside the realm of materiality that we haven't discovered it scientifically.
I'm not saying they DO exist, but if they're out there than they'd be hyperdimensional entities that we can only interface with through intangible means like thoughts and emotions. I've had experiences outside the realm of the material that were completely intangible and awe-inspiring, I can't prove or give you my evidence because it's based off personal experience, but I can say with confidence that there are other modes of conscious existence beyond the physical, places that other conscious beings and "animals" call home. Not all of them are friendly, or have your best monkey-interests at heart, some of them would dare to be as self-centered as you.
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In the context of the question what kind of "spirits" they are (from my understanding the word spirit has just become an infantilized and non-critical way of referring to a being who's non-material) I find the question to be a little too simple. Just applying a little bit of insight, "Evil" doesn't exactly exist, and all things that exist are of "nature", there's self-serving and altruistic beings at all levels when self-awareness is a factor, just as there's Ghandi and Jeff Bezos here, there's "Satan" and "Michael" up there, though those probably aren't actually their names, just what we've named them. When non-self-aware beings are concerned, even when they devour you like a cougar, the word "evil" still doesn't feel appropriate, more like... bestial or manipulative. In this context, demonic entities would be more "self-serving" and interested in satisfying their own urges which would be destructive and harmful to us, sort of like how a bully takes pleasure in kicking over sandcastles.
It bothers me that people are more interested in mythological characters rather than the actual reality of what's around us. It doesn't matter who the 100 AD equivalent of Darth Vader was, and who bastardized who's theologies, that's just narrative and petty human power-plays that's become an absolute cluster f*** over the last few thousand years, what really matters (to anyone interested in critical thinking over blind dogma) is what's actually out and around us. You'll learn more of the universe looking around you than you would from the heavily revised and translated scriptures.
I've always wondered if the most "malignant" of the demons are the ones that teach philosophy, rhetoric and especially ethics. So sly and subtle, perhaps this is how they eat my brain.
Certainly the Athenian mob must have thought so when it came to adverse gadfly entities. I'm still puzzling over one that told me to look into Democritus. It could have been a wicked hylic maneuver, but I am intrigued.
Perhaps the OP's use of the term "exactly" in regards to essentially ambiguous forms is like stirring the fire with iron? Time will tell.
Lots of ideologies that result in the deaths of large groups of people certainly have demonic-smelling philosophies. The Sophists also sounded like a really infuriating group of people to debate with philosophically. Socrates called his philosophical mind his "Daimon", I believe.
In Buddhism philosophy is considered madness, webs of ideas that cocoon people, the demonic representation of Maya, Mara, would absolutely be a well educated philosopher.
I've always wondered if the most "malignant" of the demons are the ones that teach philosophy, rhetoric and especially ethics. So sly and subtle, perhaps this is how they eat my brain.
Certainly the Athenian mob must have thought so when it came to adverse gadfly entities. I'm still puzzling over one that told me to look into Democritus. It could have been a wicked hylic maneuver, but I am intrigued.
Perhaps the OP's use of the term "exactly" in regards to essentially ambiguous forms is like stirring the fire with iron? Time will tell.
To be more clear about my word choice, if they're not malignant, then the word demon would be inappropriate. Specifically one who is "all about healing", without qualification, would be an angel. And. The word malignant is pejorative based on context. It's good to malign the opposition. It's good to burrow in and fester when fighting against a tyrant or a corrupt institution. ( or, sometimes, just for survival )
But, if you've ever met someone who is afflicted with "demons", in the stereotypical way, it's clear that their condition is malignant. It cycles, like a computer virus, a malignant daemon. Demons, in this context, are in the same category, but their malignancy is being harnessed, for a price.
There's a cozy kind of ignorance I see a lot of occultists indulging in, confidently calling demons imaginary or psychologically phrasing them as thought forms. It's human pride and egoism, but also an unconscious fear that we may NOT be the apex predators of existence.
I would argue that the rejection of psychological phenomena as imaginary and associated with not "really" real reveals how deeply we've been unconsciously conditioned by materialist assumptions (the product of the era we happen to live in) that privilege physical reality over psychic reality, despite Jung's insight that the psyche operates according to its own laws and possesses a reality as concrete and consequential as anything in the "this" world.
The deeper arrogance isn't dismissing demons as psychological, but believing we possess such perfect self-awareness that we can cleanly separate "objective reality" (whatever that is) from our personal psychological lens, as if our subconscious biases, personal conditioning, and archetypal influences were so completely transparent to us that we could achieve unmediated perception of what exists "out there" versus what exists "in here."
The insistence that demons, angels, gods, whatever must exist as completely objective, external beings is ultimately a psychological cope - it can be a terrifying possibility that we ourselves might be the primary source of both the divine and demonic forces in our lives is so unbearable that we'd rather populate the universe with independent entities than face the full weight of our own psychological depths.
Is there some sort of objective correspondence (whatever that is) to these things? Maybe, but anyone who has even scratched the surface of their own unconscious knows it contains entire universes, having seemingly infinite depth and ability to shape our experienced reality that the question of external entities becomes almost secondary. Dreaming alone demonstrate the subconsious capacity to generate entire worlds populated with seemingly autonomous beings with complexity and influence over us. Not to mention other psychic phenomena such as revelations, visions, etc.
The spirit Buer was once known as Apollo, who was much more than just a "sun god." He was also a bringer of plagues, a warrior who would indiscriminately slaughter people, and the chief patron of arts, music, and literature for more than a thousand years in several Mediterranean cultures. So he was a complex character whose presence in their world was heavily connected to magic, divination, and attempts to reach into the otherworld.
During the decline of Rome, all those elements of culture became the exclusive province of a system of gatekeepers. It made some of them very wealthy, forced a lot of creative people to submit to the prevailing trends, and kept science and industry right where the Roman economy wanted them. Apollo might seem like a good-guy god in a lot of ways, supporting good things, but the system was suppressive and did more to benefit its managers than regular people who were mostly left displaced, out of work, and effectively homeless. When St. Benedict finally dismantled the last of the cult in the 6th century, he was able to renovate that system of arts and culture and transform it into the monastic system in which many of those issues were addressed.
So you can't just look at the job title and say, "Well he's a sun god who likes poetry, what's wrong with that?" There's a depth to the influence of the spirits. Human society can't just have arts and culture and let people enjoy them, it doesn't work like that. Our decisions are constantly bombarded by pop-up ads from Satan, so that when we end up turning possibly good things into obviously evil things. If you think that healing sick people is a good thing from which no evil can possibly come, go anywhere on the internet and discuss the healthcare industry.
The spirit Buer was once known as Apollo, who was much more than just a "sun god." He was also a bringer of plagues, a warrior who would indiscriminately slaughter people, and the chief patron of arts, music, and literature for more than a thousand years in several Mediterranean cultures. So he was a complex character whose presence in their world was heavily connected to magic, divination, and attempts to reach into the otherworld.
During the decline of Rome, all those elements of culture became the exclusive province of a system of gatekeepers. It made some of them very wealthy, forced a lot of creative people to submit to the prevailing trends, and kept science and industry right where the Roman economy wanted them. Apollo might seem like a good-guy god in a lot of ways, supporting good things, but the system was suppressive and did more to benefit its managers than regular people who were mostly left displaced, out of work, and effectively homeless. When St. Benedict finally dismantled the last of the cult in the 6th century, he was able to renovate that system of arts and culture and transform it into the monastic system in which many of those issues were addressed.
So you can't just look at the job title and say, "Well he's a sun god who likes poetry, what's wrong with that?" There's a depth to the influence of the spirits. Human society can't just have arts and culture and let people enjoy them, it doesn't work like that. Our decisions are constantly bombarded by pop-up ads from Satan, so that when we end up turning possibly good things into obviously evil things. If you think that healing sick people is a good thing from which no evil can possibly come, go anywhere on the internet and discuss the healthcare industry.
I agree, there's a flip side to anything no matter the title or appearance. But that goes especially for the Abrahamic God, who himself, in his own sacred text, has brought his own fair share of death, destruction, and deception to both his own followers, and those of other nations. The only difference is that he somehow rebranded himself to be more family friendly. Despite his followers being just as despotic, fanatic, and overall control oriented as any other civilization of human history. Yet, they have the nerve to accuse anything outside their sphere of control as "Of the devil", which is a Christian invention to vilify anything that belongs to any other religion and spirituality.
If any mods wanna disable comments for this thread, I won't stop you. I'm sorry for bringing about this feud.
In taking note that the Satan we're told to believe in doesn't actually exist in the Bible, that the Satan in the Bible refers to angels who tempt and prosecute man on God's behalf, that horned goat-like image of the devil was taken from nature gods in different mythologies, and that the gods of neighboring cultures were declared demons as a political plot (Ishtar and Ba'al for example), what is a demon? More specifically, are they more related to nature spirits than evil spirits?
