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Do Demons Have Free Will?
Just spotted an interesting line in a discussion thread on my forum, which I think offers a fun mental exercise and asks questions similar to those I’ve been running through tonight already. A reader was asking about using simple sigil magick to effect a goal (attracting a mate). Another forum member, “The Founder” offered the following advice (in part):
What you are proposing is both dangerous and potentially immoral (sigils are cometimes used to seal the free will of an entity and force it into slavery, for example the Goetia.)
I thought that was an interesting point about the Goetia and free will. If it’s true that (1) there are demons, and (2) that they have free will, then (3) is it immoral to violate their free will?
Though we can’t seem to objectively prove it at the moment, number (1) seems to be born out by the personal experience of various people throughout time. As for number (2), the Bible seems to indicate that demons do indeed ave free will. If Satan and the rebel angels didn’t have free will, then they couldn’t have rebelled - unless God wanted it that way, and just wanted to trick them into thinking they had free will and were doing it of their own accord. In which case, there is a good chance God is also similarly tricking us as well, that we do not have free will either, and that we would also be fulfilling his plan by enslaving these entities to do our bidding, thus rendering (3) a moot point.
However, (3) can also be called into question when we look at the chain of command in a control relationship (as explored somewhat in this post). On one level, we could say that when we control someone else, we get them to do what we want. But the fact that we have wants or desires in the first place in essence controls us. Thus we could say that wants and desires have a kind of immoral control over us, and that they in turn violate our free will.
It’s a very neat mental puzzle that can be jumped out of by negating definitions of component parts, like free will, morality, God, demons, etc. But you can “win” any game by knocking over all the pieces and throwing the board on the ground. Where’s the fun in that?
- Stitched together demon suits
- The demons of Yom Kippur
- My Name Is Legion…
- Did you know?
- What Is Free Will?
- Prev: Are We Just Fuel? For What?
- Next: On Buying What You Want
March 19th, 2006 at 10:35 am
This comment may be somewhat off-topic, but it has been on my mind and this seems as good a place as any to bring it up. Have you ever read the Pullman series, His Dark Materials? It’s a trilogy that purports to be a children’s story but is really a retelling of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The viewpoint is from the side of the rebelling angels. (The Wikipedia link has a quite detailed synopsis of the story.)
The phrase “His Dark Materials”, which comes from Milton’s poem, is also a reference to the “dark matter” of astrophysics, which plays a central role in the story. In the story “dark matter” is called “dust”, the particles of which [SPOILER ALERT] turn out to be fundamental units of consciousness. In the story, various devices are constructed to communicate with dust, ranging from very complex technologies appearing in the first and second books, to a quite simple device constructed by exigency in the third book. Angels are apparently highly structured organizations of dust.
So, if we accept the central idea that there is such a fundamental unit of consciousness, the “dust” particle, one could think of sigil magic as being a simple device to organize dust and/or communicate with existing dust structures. In fact we are all just complex organizations of dust (”… and to dust you shall return…”) and when we communicate with one another we are just effecting an interaction of dust particles. The techniques of magic are to dust as (perhaps) magnets, capacitors, and wires are to electrons: ways of moving particles around the universe. On the other hand, one could question the ethics of enslaving electrons to do our bidding.
Every time I communicate with you I am attempting to inform or change your opinion. That is, I’m affecting your free will. This comment is an example of my attempt to impinge upon your free will. So, one might also view sigil magic (or other forms of magic) as a means to persuade a discarnate consciousness structure to do something, i.e. no more or less manipulative than a typical human interaction. (Of course, in light of your questions about marketing, some of these can be quite coercive.)
March 19th, 2006 at 1:33 pm
I never understood the idea that you’re violating the free will of someone when you work with an entity (nonhuman). The nonhuman entity gets a quid pro quo so what’s the problem? Don’t you get paid to go to work too? Sure I hate work but we’re all prostitutes anyway so same as it ever was. Do I only have my free will respected when my needs are met but I don’t have to do anything for it?
March 19th, 2006 at 7:14 pm
The nonhuman entity gets a quid pro quo so what’s the problem?
What, exactly, does the entity get? This is a serious question.
March 19th, 2006 at 7:16 pm
(Slomo - I love His Dark Materials. I’ve read it twice, and want to read it a third time, but I lent my trilogy to someone and haven’t gotten it back. I especially want to read them again now that I’ve gotten into magic and divination. The bits about Lyra and her alethiometer, and the doctor and the I Ching interest me especially.)
March 19th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
it is odd I posted the comment about the sigils back in October. Reading the recent comment by the Founder in the forum has left me at unease. I’m still very much a novice when it comes to spiritual matters.
I did do the sigil thing as best as I could around Halloween or so. I ended out meeting a girl back in January and we have a very strong relationship. But I have had a lot of negative things happen recently. I have become unexplically sick constant headaches, numbness and nausea . I had to be rushed to the emergency room after stroke like symptoms. I spent several days in the hospital, they ran a battery of tests and were at a loss of what it could be. Also my girlfriend was away two weekends ago/ when I went out and returned to my appartment during the weekend my bedroom windows were open and my papers were thrown all around my floor. It happended twice. I live on the 7th floor there is no way it could be burglars, nothing was apparently stolen. And lastly I have been having hallucinations, kind of peculiar hallucinations of floating west highland white terrier heads. What to make of this? Also I am having a recurring dream where the Jesus on my crucifix is missing and I feel a terrible presence in my closet. Anyways, I’m sort of startled by all of this and did not know what to make of it. Maybe I shouldn’t have used the sigil. I don’t know what to do. I wasn’t asking for any particular spirits help. Any advice would be much appreciated.
March 20th, 2006 at 1:38 am
It’s past my bedtime, but lemme comment, this is more my matter than marketing.
SRM, quit the drugs for a while and take up banishing practice. You might even consider working with the headache as an “Other” entity…
First, I have not worked with the Goeta. I have worked with entities that float around or that I “made,” and I have bumped into many of them quite unitentionally. You tend to treat them in two ways: like someone who’s on probation and you’re going to turn them in if you don’t get what you ask for, or, like Max said, quid pro quo. What do they get? you put up their sigil, you perform some unusal task, you “sacrifice a male child,” etc. I don’t see free will of anyone being compromised.
Second, in my experience sigils operate so much like entities that they may as well be the same thing, just on a less continous order. From my dreams, I also surmise that many “demons” are so half-formed, kind of like how a sigil lacks much existence beyond fetching results, that they have so much less “free” and “will” than us that it’s the equivalent of taking a dog for a walk. Are you infringing your dog’s will by walking it? What about playing with it? If it misbehaves and you punish it? Does the dog even realize you have control over it? Sometimes the dog nags you, and you do things the dog wants. Did it infringe upon your will?
We have to define “demon.” NLP frequently treats bad feelings and events in exactly the manner that a ceremonial magickian treats a demon, as a thing outside of oneself to be bargained & argued with. Not surprisingly, many people using these NLP techniques to magnify trauma and negative feelings into demonic proportions often describe the images/feelings they get in a manner very similar to some medieval pictures of the goetic demons–there’s a particular book I saw plates from that made them look less like horned people and more like shoggoths, which is what I’m getting at here. In my experience, you don’t get an entity appearing in the smoke before you so much as you get an altered state of cognition with a strong “other” component. This suggest to me that the “demonic” bears as strong internal component…
Which sounds like the Scientology Body Thetan theory. Which is fine, I’m chasing after Chornonzon here. Scientology works, just not the way the practioners expect or need. But I think there’s a truth there, and I think that it’s very revealing:
If you believe that people are composed of or influenced by disparate forces and entities, you can very easily begin a path that justifies Anarchofascistic impingement of their will, just like L. Ron Hubbard and probably Heinlein would have loved. I think Crowley tended towards this as well–passages form Liber Al are awful, but at the same time, Liber Oz is a paeon to freedom–although he focused so much on the Augoeides that he frequently reigned in these things. I suspect the Augoeidges might be a synthesis of “thetans” “demons” etc., or a synthesis of something new and other that reigns in these multiplicitious urges, feelings, and thought-forms that pull the human in so many directions; the cinnamon of tipareth unifies suffering and glory and drives the neutral demons into good, etc., etc.
Hopefully this illuminates something.
March 20th, 2006 at 1:50 am
Yeah, that definitely illuminates all kinds of stuff. Tons of great material there, Channel. Thanks!
May 29th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
[…] One of the frequent complaints about the use of entities revolves around the degree to which so much of the Western Tradition has a tendency of "binding" and bullying entities around. Klintron recently covered it here, Kylark has written about it, and Tim Boucher brought it up on his site a while ago. In the classic text on evocation, The Lesser Key of Solomon or Goetia, lists seventy-two evil spirits and their uses when bullied into submission through the invocation of the Divine. I wonder the degree to which sorcerers throughout history ever took this approach–it seems far easier to offer blood and semen ("Ov" for you TOPY'rs) to these spirits than it does to bully them, and the human brain, particularly in its modern form, understands metaphors of trade as being more pleasant than bullying and domination. The Goetia closes with details of the means by which King Solomon bound the demons in vessels of brass. […]