Let me just say, I have no issue with anyone using any myths to understand the daimons (a word I use instead of 'demon' because I’m still 50% Neoplatonist) - be it Christian, pre-Christian, or even using horror fiction.
I just let them be whatever they want when they appear and try not to play mythic favorites too much. I did not plan this out intellectually, or ritualize it (like Anton La'Vey's and the Church of Satan's cringe Lovecraft rituals.)
But it turn out horror fiction is actually pretty useful because it lets you parse and interact with them - without taking their appearance overly literally- unlike modern pagans, Christians, and UFO cultists do. I think they show up this way because it is still 'free play space' before all the paranormal options get too clamped down by hard human expectations. That's my take.
(I hate it when they show up as a sprig of broccoli. That one time. Have you ever tried talking to a floating sprig of broccoli? It messes with your head. But point taken. They are not literally salad either. )
Left-hemisphere dominant people have a really hard time parsing any subject that Venns over two or more domains. So to them, the spirits are either totally demon ,or they are totally gods, (or totally UFOs, over in the Scifi-landia sub-universe) . This is not to say there are all the same class of beings. There are many of spirits who will answer to the same names.
To make it worse, the 'mental telepathy' contact crowd are mostly verbal, left-hemisphere dominant people, as far as I can tell, and that is the faculty most prone to delusions and talking to oneself.
Dr. Iain McGilchrist points out that the Left Hemisphere is the 'Talker.' It is the seat of the internal monologue. When it becomes disconnected from the Right Hemisphere's sense of the 'Whole,' it starts generating its own feedback loops. The 'other stuff' - the Daimonic - is the reality of the One Thing breaking through.
So I also feel like everybody keeps talking around the core issue. The Catholic side gets irritated that they are being 'pagan-splained' by people who have been here for not even five minutes. Meanwhile, the 'demons-are-literally-pagan-gods' camp rightly senses there is more to the story, but because they rely solely on Unverified Personal Gnosis they can’t back up what they’re saying - so all they can do is go on the attack. That will not convince anybody who is not already in agreement with the thesis.
We need better models. The 'mind vs. matter' debate is a dead end. The metal-evocation needs to understand magicians evoking spirits we are not "breaking reality" as Jason Miller has suggested. That is absurd. As is the whole idea we are punishing them using the names of God it taking it all a bit too literally again.
Jeffrey Kripal’s take on Dual-Aspect Monism is a breath of fresh air here . (Dr. Kripal is a professor and historian of religions at Rice University. GO red his stuff! ) It offers a way to heal the divorce between science and spirituality without having to ditch your brain or your soul at the door.
Mind and Matter are not two different 'things.' Instead, they are two different manifestations of the same underlying reality: The One Thing, sometimes called "God", in the olden days.
So imagine having an experience of a daimon, a fae, or a UFO:
One side is the physical world (matter, neurons, physics).
The other side is the mental world (consciousness, meaning, subjective experience).
The daimon / fae / crytpid, or UFO itself is part of a 'neutral' "stuff" that is neither purely mental nor purely physical, but the source of both.
Personally, I think this "field" has timing and layers of Sheldrakian morphic fields of sympathy, values, precedent, symbolism, and synchronicity. These can even be mapped using, in part, by traditional magic timings and other things.
Call them using the CE5 protocol and odds you'll get a UFO and not Asmodai - in part becasue your expecting to - to the "One Thing" rewrites reality for you - and part becasue that is just the sub-universe you're in at that time. In that sense CE5 protocols have power there, but not where I am. That "spot" is taken up by the Grimorium Verum, and i don't feel like switching my brand of cigarettes to one that tastes wrong to me.
