The Dangers of Summoning Demons
Everything we don't understand is an abyss that goes down forever.
He is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by "powers" that are beyond his control. His god and demons have not disappeared at all; they have merely got new names. - Carl Jung
I don't want to believe in demons, but I've summoned one before.
It was the night before I started my new QA job, and I was drunk off whiskey sours and wine with my new girlfriend. I made a joke about not being a proper writer because I'd had a fifth of tequila sitting in my apartment for a month, untouched. I was twenty-one years old and finally free and flush with excitement. I wanted to become dangerous.
I used to write my ex letters in which I created our own mythology, full of demons that lived in walls and ate skin, and infinite rooms full of red velvet curtains. That night I taunted the demon to come out. My girlfriend responded by smashing a votive candle all over the floor and putting Sunn O))) on her record player. I still remembered the song. It was "Her Lips Were Wet With Venom."
I drank the rest of my beer and, laughing, threw it on the ground. It shattered. A chain started dragging across the floor. It wasn't the sound of an imprisoned hell beast, but the coffee shop owner below our apartment closing the store and pulling the sign inside before he locked up for the night. Yet it seemed to signify that the sunlight rules were gone, and we'd entered a dimension of night where anything was possible.
When I awoke the next morning my ex was curled up in bed with a bloody gash on her foot, and the bedsheets encrusted with dried blood.
I knew enough about rituals to understand that blood was always required.
The next night I had my first episode of sleep paralysis. A shadowed presence paced around the room as I lay in bed unable to move. I continued to get sleep paralysis and hallucinate the demon until I left that apartment.
My ex too, saw the demon. She'd stay up late at night, terrified, hours after I'd already gone to sleep. She carved "MINE" into the headboard with a pocket knife to try to get it to stay away.
I didn't believe in demons, and yet I'd brought one into existence. I never realized how easy it was to induce a fantasy of evil, to generate an idea designed to haunt me.
When I was a child my mother had some friends come over one night for dinner. They told me how they'd invited a demon into their home and had been possessed. How much trouble they had getting rid of it. Their pastor told them to throw away all their secular books and music. I was scared of monsters like a lot of little girls were, but it was a different kind of terror to have an adult tell you that the monsters you feared, in crevices of darkness and at the bottom of staircases, could be real.
I had trouble sleeping for years. I imagined the demons walking behind me in my blind spot. Whenever I crawled into bed and closed my eyes I would imagine figures staring at me from the foot of my bed. (This later became the inspiration for the demon I wrote about in Crystalmouth, although I’m not sure the years of nightmares were worth it.) I'd whisper frantic prayers underneath my breath, but it never seemed to help. I just imagined the demons laughing at me, leaping across the walls and pirouetting behind my ears. I had a framed print of The Guardian Angel above my bed, but from my vantage point any good spirit always seemed so far away.
But I grew up, and I stopped believing in demons, and for the most part the night terrors went away. Demons were just a product of guilt and sleep paralysis. They were a product of mechanical processes, breath and liquor and stress, and even if they did exist there was no soul for them to take. “Satanic” books and records could not contain the seed of a destroying evil. We hallucinated shapes in the darkness because the darkness contained all shapes, not because there was anything to find.
I thought that my rational brain could conquer the fantastical world of spirits. My prefrontal cortex could steer its way through thousands, if not millions, of years of fighting demonic forces that lived in the stitches of the subconscious.
I thought that by the sheer force of my intellect I would not become haunted.
Yet I summoned a demon, even though I didn’t believe in them, even though God had long stopped listening to me and was probably dead. I summoned a demon and gave myself lifelong sleep paralysis, so that thirteen years later I still get it if I sleep on my back.
And maybe I've been summoning demons my entire life, even though I didn't call them that or recognize them as such. Have you ever had a festering and compulsive thought that won't go away? Have you ever read something that made your life a little worse? Have you ever been compelled to do something self destructive? Have you been drawn to someone that you knew was bad for you?
If a demon is a bad idea that corrupts, an influence that takes us over and does nothing but make our life worse, then we're all surrounded by demons. On advertisements on the side of the highway, influencers on Instagram, message boards and Discord channels tucked into dark corners, the friend that always tears you down, little thoughts like pinches that tell us we're ugly or stupid. They don't need to have red horns and pitchforks and panting tongues that smoke when exposed to cold shadow in order to be demons.
We think our rational brain can protect us from the darkness, but we're consistently reminded that the small and meager light of rationality can be drowned within the abyss of everything we don't understand.
Maybe the people who burned forbidden books and painted their faces and tongues with salve to protect themselves from evil influence understood more about the world of surrounding darkness than we do.
They understand that you can't interact with anything in this world without it influencing you in some way. The world of fiction and the imagination influences reality, and vice-versa. A demon doesn't have to be "real" to hurt you. If you give a harmful idea space inside of you, then it can be just as dangerous as steel and claws.
We surf currents of hyperreality, without ever fully understanding their influence. We are surrounded by the spirits of transformation. Inside and out.
Our world of facts is a thin layer of pond scum on top of a deep and cold lake that goes on down forever.
The second edition of Girl Like A Bomb is now available for pre-order! Grab it either on Amazon or on the CLASH website.
