Should We Fight or Feed Our Demons? | A Christian Witch's Perspective

There are two approaches to every problem, y'know?

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Maybe it's because everyone's been giving me shit for it lately, or maybe it's because I've been in the Qliphoth frame of mind again, but my mind is stuck on demons. Like, a lot.

I'm here to elaborate a little bit more on the concept of feeding vs. fighting demons, and do a little compare/contrast of how we approach demons in our spirituality/cosmology. After all, Christians are told to fear, avoid, or even defeat demons, but then there's this fascinating concept called chöd in Tibetan Buddhism that insists that we should instead understand and even feed our demons, and that in doing so, we benefit. Originally I heard this in the context that it's a practice in building compassion, but looking into it further, it's more than that.

A lot more.

The Christian Approach to Demons

So, in Christianity, we have a lot of examples of issues with demons. Demons were thought to be the cause of illness or strange / unsocial behavior in Jewish and early Christian magic and medicine, so exorcists weren't just spiritually powerful people; they were also basically doctors. It's why you see those Jewish exorcists doing their thing in Acts (though they get their shit rocked when they try to invoke the name of Jesus for exorcism despite not believing in Jesus):

Some Jews who went around driving out evil spirits tried to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who were demon-possessed. They would say, “In the name of the Jesus whom Paul preaches, I command you to come out.” Seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, were doing this. One day the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know about, but who are you?” Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and overpowered them all. He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding.—Acts 19:13-16

It's also why you see Jesus healing all kinds of people of their "demons" when they clearly have issues like psychosis (the demoniac in the ruins with Legion) or epilepsy (the boy that would foam and convulse from "demons"). These issues were caused by unclean spirits, and therefore they needed to have those spirits removed in order to function again. The demons in this case were considered parasitic or harmful entities that had to be expelled, defeated, beaten, etc.; they were not considered able to co-exist with people.

However, there are other "evil spirits" in Jewish folklore that are just a fact of life in Jewish lore. These are called the mazzikim, and they can cause problems and generally be a pain in the ass, but they aren't necessarily out to oppress or harm (not all the time, anyway). Hey Alma puts it like this:

Up until the construction of Solomon’s Temple curbed their power, mazzikim ruled the world. Classified as invisible demons, they’re not as scary as other creatures in Jewish lore. On the flip side, these evil spirits are really fucking annoying and cause minor trouble in our daily lives. Superstitions and amulets might help fend them off, but it’s best to learn how to live with them.

There are also shedim, which are apparently what old gods became in Jewish lore, or are generally spirits haunting ruins and personifying chaos, disorder, decay, and trouble. The desert was considered the realm of demons, and it's why things like the scapegoat were sent out to the desert: because Azazel, the sin-eater, lives out there in the wild desert where civilization does not exist.

In Christianity, demons are ever present in stories beyond the Bible, too: St. Antony the Great was tormented constantly by them, even beaten nearly to death, and yet he still went back out to that desert where the demons rage and continued his hermit life unafraid. People who came to bring him his bread and salt even heard the wails and snarls of demons from where he was shut up, and he told them basically to not worry about it lol. But he, too, denied the demons' power and resisted them, and they eventually went away.

He also tried to get God to forgive demons and allow them into heaven because God obscured his spiritual senses and made him unable to tell they were demons. God did this to make a point, clearly: when Antony asks God to help the demons, God reveals the truth and tells Antony to tell the spirit that if it'll face (if I recall correctly) east and repent over and over for many, many years (but not a length of time an immortal demon would be unable to do), God'll let them in. Antony does, and the spirit laughs in his face at the idea of repenting anything and pisses off.

(So technically demons could be redeemed... if they were humble enough to admit their ways are not good. That's what I got out of that. But good luck getting a demon to be humble lol.)

St. Thomas Aquinas also wrote a lot about demons in his Summa Theologica, telling us that demons have a hierarchy just like angels have their three choirs, and this is likely where we get this concept of hierarchy in Goetic workings, too (the presidents and princes and dukes and kings and all that). He's also the one insisting that the job of the Devil, or his work or task, is not just to harm or cause issues like earlier unclean spirits, but to actively tempt people into being awful so that they fall into sin and lose their standing with God/their access to heaven.

And I guess I'll have to amend my constant refrain of "the rebellion of angels is only from John Milton's Paradise Lost, because it seems St. Thomas Aquinas was the one also insisting, in the 1200s, that this is the case:

Lucifer who became Satan, leader of the fallen angels, wished to be as God. This prideful desire was not a wish to be equal to God, for Satan knew by his natural knowledge that equality of creature with creator is utterly impossible. Besides, no creature actually desires to destroy itself, even to become something greater. On this point man sometimes deceives himself by a trick of imagination; he imagines himself to be another and greater being, and yet it is himself that is somehow this other being. But an angel has no sense-faculty of imagination to abuse in this fashion. The angelic intellect, with its clear knowledge, makes such self-deception impossible. Lucifer knew that to be equal with God, he would have to be God, and he knew perfectly that this could not be. What he wanted was to be as God; he wished to be like God in a way not suited to his nature, such as to create things by his own power, or to achieve final beatitude without God’s help, or to have command over others in a way proper to God alone.

(But like... Tom... where the fuck did you get all this from? Because this is not true at all lmao Lucifer did not "become" what was Biblically a whole class of angels that work for God.)

Anyway, the point is: these spirits are no good in Christian cosmology, and as a result, they have to be resisted, battled, and defeated. Christ already defeated them overall with His death and resurrection, but as St. Paul says, we gotta put on that armor of God (Ephesians 6:10-18) and deny all evil and problematic nonsense. They are enemies, to be conquered and crushed; St. Paul also asks "what does Christ have to do with Belial?" in 2 Corinthians 6:15.

However, this is not how Tibetan Buddhsim looks at demons, and I find that while sometimes resisting and defending against our many issues and the evils that plague us can be helpful, there are also times where this Tibetan approach makes just as much sense.

The Tibetan Buddhist Practice of Chöd

So, first thing we gotta know about the concept of chöd is that it seems to have sprung up with the wisdom of a certain 11th century Tibetan Buddhist nun (yay, female yogini!) named Machig Labdrön. According to Tara Mandala:

Machig’s biography begins with her previous life in which she was an Indian prince turned monk, named Mönlam Drup. Having achieved great spiritual and scholarly accomplishments at an early age, Mönlam Drup was repeatedly told in visions to go to Tibet to help beings there. At twenty, he entered a cave where he left his body and merged his consciousness with a wrathful blue-black dakini, entering the womb of Machig’s mother in Tibet.

A dakini, according to Buddha Weekly, seems to be a kind of wisdom goddess:

The five wisdom Dakinis are the “wisdom” counterparts of the Five Dhyani Buddha, who represent “compassion.” As the Enlightened Path includes both wisdom and compassion, these are inseparable — which is why the metaphor used is “consort.” Whether wisdom is the consort of compassion, or the reverse, is not important. It would better, perhaps, in modern context to think of them as co-equal aspects of one Enlightened concept.

Wisdom and Compassion being held in tension like this reminds me of how in Jewish Kabbalah, God's Severity (Geburah) and Mercy (Chesed) are also held in tension. Nonetheless, this nun came up with the concept of chöd, which means something like "severing" or "cutting through" according to Tantra, and which has to do with identifying one's issues and approaching them with understanding and empathy rather than aggression. Machig says of demons, according to another page on Tantra's site:

Demons in the sense that we are using the word are not ghosts, goblins, or minions of Satan. When Machig Labdrön was directly asked by her son Tönyon Samdrup to define demons, she replied this way: “That which is called a demon is not some great black thing that petrifies whoever sees it. A demon is anything that obstructs the achievement of freedom…. There is no greater devil than this fixation to a self. So until this ego-fixation is cut off, all the demons wait with open mouths. For this reason, you need to exert yourself at a skillful method to sever the devil of ego-fixation.”

So whereas the Catholic church definitely and emphatically insists that the Devil and demons are not metaphorical or symbolic, but real beings, this type of Buddhism insists the opposite: that these things that deny us our freedom are demons, and that dealing with them actually requires us to visualize and personify them so that we can speak with them, learn from them, understand why they're here, and then transform them.

Yes, transform. This is actually what it means to "feed our demons" here: we aren't growing the demons into stronger demons. Rather, we are hearing them, seeing them, acknowledging their desires, and giving them the nurture and care they need to stop acting in destructive ways and instead become our allies instead of our enemies. We see this in the five steps of "feeding demons" as listed by this practice:

1. Find the Demon

2. Personify the Demon

3. Become the Demon

4. Feed the Demon and Meet the Ally

5. Rest

In that second step are three important questions to ask the demon that you visualize coming from whatever energy, wound, or presence is around: what do you want? what do you need? how will you feel if you get what you need? These questions identify the outward behavior of the demon (the want), the inner issue of the demon (the need), and how to resolve the issue (how they'll feel). According to Tantra, this happens to one practitioner in the third step, who was carrying around feelings of worthlessness from being blamed by her mother for her mother's problems:

Before he answers, she changes places with him, occupying the chair opposite her own, and takes a moment to become the demon, to live in his skin. She pauses a moment to share what he is feeling before answering the question. Inhabiting his body she realizes that he’s incredibly bitter, and he feels threatened and battered himself. To the question, “What do you want?” he replies, “I want you to suffer, because you are so worthless and stupid.”To the question, “What do you really need?” he answers, “I need you to be with me, and to stop trying to escape from me. I need you to accept me and love me.”To the question, “How will you feel if you get what you need?” he answers: “I’ll be able to relax. I’ll feel love.”

"Becoming the Demon" in this case, according to the Tibetan Buddhist Encyclopedia, means to literally change places with the demon; it even insists in this step you should get up, with your eyes still closed, and sit on the opposite side of yourself, as if you are literally stepping into the demon's place, so you can better see things from its point of view. To do this is to see more than just the surface level of the demon's behavior; it's to go deeper, to actually feel what the demon feels, and discover the core wound causing the behavior.

After all, think about kids who act out or cause problems for other kids. They don't do that just because they're like that. They usually do that because there's something going on that they don't know how to handle. I had a situation like this happen once in daycare: there was an annoying ass kid who would always try to destroy what we built, who would yell and scream and not leave us alone, who would step all over stuff we were setting up and just generally be a menace. Nobody liked this kid. I also thought he was a dick. This was when I was somewhere between 4 and 6, I think.

As an adult, I can look back and understand that there was probably something going on at home. Maybe he was neglected and would act out to get attention, as that's all he knew how to do. I remember also getting in trouble for telling him about vampires; for some reason his mom wasn't happy when he came home talking about it, and I got told to stop talking about it lol.

But note there: I started talking to the kid. (I honestly don't know how; I think I was just a space cadet of a kid who, even if someone annoyed me, could not avoid talking to them if they were genuinely talking to me. Virgo Sun and Mercury really do be getting me in weirder situations than the Sagittarius Rising and Moon sometimes.)

Whatever the case, he ended up following me around a bit, and by talking to him and doing a few things with him, like catching bugs in these little spherical clamps the daycare had for observing bugs, he actually ended up mellowing out and being not so bad to hang out with—definitely less destructive, too. I remember him smiling more. All he really wanted, it seemed, was someone to talk to.

This is the same thing in this Buddhist practice: when we actually see, hear, and empathize with our demons (which can be our own vices or issue), we actually pull these things out of their toxicity and create allies of them instead. These evil spirits or problematic issues are healed, or unburdened, and we see that maybe our vices were things that were trying to protect us from something, and how we might get them to transform into something that still protects without the downsides.

Working with actual Goetic demons, honestly, I've had the same experience. Yes, they can show up in scary ways at first—usually to test if you're brave enough to stand in their presence, or if you'll run screaming like every other person in that more Christian view—but after that, even if their words are sharp, and their methods unorthodox and downright cruel sometimes, you discover that there is a method to the madness, and there is a wound, a hurt, or just a grave disappointment, fueling their course of action. What I've come to understand is that demons are demons because they don't have any hope in humanity, nor any faith in God's plan; angels are ones who have faith in God's plan first, and therefore no choice but to try and hope in humanity's ability to perform according to it. Demons try every day to prove their view right, and angels defend us to prove God's view right.

But demons aren't necessarily unhappy to be proven wrong, is the thing. Deep down, I think they kind of want to be. At least, that's the sense I've gotten.

So what do you think? How do you deal with your "demons," or demons in general? And what do you think of these two opposing methods of dealing with them? ♥

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Sara Raztresen is a Slovene-American writer, screenwriter, and Christian witch. Her fantasy works draw heavily on the wisdom she gathers from her own personal and spiritual experience, and her spiritual practice borrows much of the whimsy and wonder that modern society has relegated to fairy-and-folktale. Her goal is to help people regain their spiritual footing and discover God through a new (yet old) lens of mysticism.

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