Modern Demonology

“All myth is enriched pattern.” -Anne Carson

A demon is a tendency. It’s a way of thinking and a set of choices that people make that degrade and demean them. It is the process by which the earth and human life is made more hellish. We personify these tendencies and processes because it makes them easier to see and think about. This is why someone with a drug addiction, which in reality is the conglomeration of hundreds of factors (genetics, family history, personal history, random chance, geopolitical forces, etc.) as well as the result of millions of tiny choices that add up, might talk about this as “monkey on my back.” While this flattens and simplifies what is actually going on, it also allows us to think about it more clearly. And, ideally, this clarity could lead to discovering strategies to empower angelic forces instead of demonic ones. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Amerika in 2025 is awash in demonic forces. Our society tends towards the hellish, at increasing speed, and the forces and ways of thinking that are causing this can be obscure. Giving them names is a helpful way to illuminate them, demons thrive in darkness. The point of this exercise, giving a quite incomplete list of modern demons, is not to be anti-materialist or engage in a sort of schizo-obfuscation, but instead to give us a foot hold, intellectually, to think about these tendencies that are latent in our society. To see where they come from, what they are doing to us and, perhaps, ways we can banish them. To do this, I used popular cultural figures to identify with preexisting tendencies that they seem to share an affinity with. Not unlike the way Afro-carribean religions would use catholic saints to anchor or name pre-existing deities in their cultures. Here’s what I came up with:

Moloch and Mammon

The first two are the most obvious and the ones least specific to the Amerikan psyche. They are both quite old, perhaps, along with patriarchy, the oldest demonic tendencies that humans deal with. But that all is beyond our scope here. Moloch and Mammon both are most famous from the bible but exist outside of that as well. Moloch is often thought of as originating as a Canaanite god, then a Carthaginian god and perhaps,without the labyrinth part, the minotaur. Moloch is sort of a shorthand for, a bull headed god to whom children are sacrificed. The human sacrifice, specifically the child sacrifice, is the main thrust, and the way in which we should think about Moloch today.

(In almost all examples, with the notable exception of the minotaur who just eats the sacrifices and doesn’t seem to have any connection to fire, the children are “fed” to a statue of Moloch which is hollow and metal and thus a sort of huge oven when a fire is built inside. The children are either placed into the hand of the statue which then move to “eat” them and drop them in the flames, or their placed directly in the burning mouth)

This idea of the elites, political and religious, offering children to the flame in order to appease a god and keep the social structures in place deeply resonate across time and place, no more so than here and now. Anytime those in charge of maintaining the existing order (and that’s what priests in these older societies were doing, they were legitimizing the entire enterprise through their actions, they’re letting everyone in their society know that things are on the right path and being managed properly since we’re following the dictates of the gods. Replace gods with the markets or good governance or whatever you like and you suddenly see no shortage of priests in our supposedly rational, enlightenment societies) let it be known that the price is the death of children and the gleefully pay that price, Moloch is being honored. In a technological update, he now flies over countless places like Gaza, raining his fire down on his sacrifices, rather than having them brought to him. Anytime a child dies scared in our schools, ripped apart by hot metal, Moloch is fed. You can watch an endless stream of Go-Pro and drone footage showing his sacrifices whenever you open your phone. One of the oldest and more intractable of our demons.

Mammon is likewise mostly known from the bible, but this time the New Testament, where Jesus famously says, “you cannot serve both God and Mammon.” Traditionally thought of as the personification of an evil lust for wealth; Mammon is a greed that enslaves. The desire for more and more, forever, an insatiable hunger for capital. Mammon as a personified idea has shown remarkable stability. He’s a prince of hell in medieval times, standing in for the deadly sin of greed, he’s in Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene in a similar role. Mammon is no doubt also as old as any affliction of this sort, but surely, since he was more or less enshrined as the principal deity during capitalism's ascension, even taking the history into account, we live in a very Mammon-ruled world.

And these sorts of entities need not work alone, in fact, they hardly every do, preferring a multifaceted approach to rule. Take the Iraq war. The endless nature, the confusing and shifting alliances that brought constant violence, the hyper-violence of groups like ISIS, the torture camps and the glee on the torturers’ faces, the millions poisioned, born deformed, from our munitions. The list could go on forever. Obviously, in the raw violence and killing, especially of the tens of thousands of children killed over the decades, Moloch is being honored and fed. But the violence is not simply violence for its own sake, as in all things, money is at issue here too. The vast petrochemical wealth, the state gold reserves, the ability to protect strategic markets in the region, the many billions to be made in contracting of all sorts, all of this is Mammon’s domain. Mammon and Moloch oversee and mutually reinforce these sorts of dynamics and patterns. They are not jealous gods, they do not mind who else you worship.

Finally, there is another aspect embedded in the history of Moloch as an idea that is worth thinking about. The Hebrew word that gets translated as Moloch is “מֹלֶךְ” but this is very similar to a Punic word that refers to a type of sacrifice, specifically children into fire. You can read the various bible passages that refer to Moloch as YHWH condemning another god, or a broader injunction to refrain from the then-not-uncommon practice of child sacrifice. Whether or not that is true on a philological level is beyond what we are doing here, but the general idea, that you’re talking about a practice instead of a deity, is important. The god can be a way to personify or think about what is actually a ritual, or a tendency or a set of tendencies. We’re talking and thinking about verbs, but talking about them as nouns. The way we act and build the world is being clarified and elucidated by thinking about them as gods. This is how gods always work, myth is pattern. It’s not something that is, unto itself, it’s something we do.

HEXXUS

This tendency is relatively new, at least in its current form. In Cyclonopedia, Reza Negarestani posits oil itself as sentient, malicious and bent on covering the world in it’s black shimmery goo. It explains the wars and atrocities committed in pursuit of controlling the oil. It explains the suicide-pact that we’ve all, almost in a state of petrolhypnosis, made with each other concerning extracting and burning the stuff despite the dire, dire consequences it has already wrought and certainly will continue to bring. This is a wonderful image and way to think about the problem, though I would personify this tendency further and call back to the villain of the movie FernGully and call this process Hexxus. Hexxus is a malignant black ooze, sometimes a sort of oil, other times more like black smoke, always focused and bent on destroying the natural world. In the film he urges humans to ravenously destroy the forest, at one point taking over a machine that is clear-cutting. Taken more broadly, Hexxus is the drive to consume and burn as much as possible now, without concern for nature’s future. The use of coal is many thousands of years old but it was really the start of the industrial revolution, that inaugurated this tendency, and welcomed Hexxus into our world. It’s been getting worse ever since, as nation after nation industrializes and seeks out the raw materials of the modern world across the globe, leading to increased strife between nations. Since the London Fog, we’ve lived with the detrimental effects of our relationship to the natural world. This process is getting worse all the time but we don’t seem to be able to stop. The large oil companies have known since at least the 1970’s that the extraction and burning of petrochemicals, their business, poses a truly existential risk to human civilization and biodiversity writ large. We all seem to know and feel this. The earth is clearly getting more polluted by the day, it is dying, the world we will leave to our children and grandchildren will certainly be much worse, and perhaps truly unlivable. Yet, we can’t stop. We can’t even slow down the acceleration of the problem. On the contrary, the trucks are bigger, each one a sort of mobile shrine to Hexxus (especially evident when they’re lovingly customized and tricked out to a cartoonish degree, a sort of Burning Man style art car for folks who are actively hostile to the idea of “art”). The milestones are being missed, the half-way solutions are showing themselves to be too little too late while sapping vital energy to solve these problems.

As a brief aside, I considered naming this demon Buc-ee after the gas station and I still consider their beaver mascot to be some sort of demon, perhaps a more minor avatar of Hexxus? Perhaps a sort of side-kick or member of the entourage. The Ganymede to Hexxus’ Zeus? For the mercifully unaware, Buc-ee’s is a chain of gas stations, primarily in Texas but rapidly spreading that are famous for being enormous. Oftentimes they have over 100 pumps as well as cavernous indoor spaces to sell you all sorts of food and goods. The largest Buc-ee’s is the largest convenience store in the world, at over 75,000 sq ft. Now the idea of a gas station this large is troubling enough, though it really dips into the demonic when you consider the prevalence of their merch. Yes, not only does a gas station sell merch, T-shirts, hats, bumper-stickers and the like, that people pay for and wear, I increasingly see their clothing hundreds of miles away from the nearest actual Buc-ee’s. It implies the wearer took a trip, a sort of petrol-vacation, to drive to a Buc-ee’s and wanted to memorialize the visit in a T-shirt, like you would for the grand canyon. Additionally, there is some sort of demonic inversion where the mascot is the beaver. Real beavers and Buc-ee’s both build infrastructure. Large architectural spaces that play into and off of the environment. But while beavers and their dams create whole balanced ecosystems, help prevent flooding and are beautiful, gas stations support a whole series of infrastructural pieces (highways, cars themselves, services stations, all of the machines needed to build and maintain this web) that is actively hostile to life on earth, create all sort of environmental problems, and are monstrously ugly thus making them the sort of mirror image of the beaver's dam, if you’re looking through a cursed mirror.

DR. YACUB

In recent years the idea of Dr. Yacub has become more widespread, sort of mirroring the early 2010s rise in the public consciousness of Xenu, the space-warlord from Scientology’s theology. In both cases pretty niche and small religious movements had the larger outside world discover and mock the more out there parts of their cosmology, in both cases, Xenu and Dr. Yacub, it’s an evil figure in the mythology. A relatively normal person now understands what it means to call something Yucbian (we probably have Deus and Mero to credit for this) even if they don’t really know the whole story. Which is a shame since the whole story is pretty interesting and wild. The whole strain of uniquely American religions that runs through Black communities is fascinating and, due to exactly the racist dynamics explained by the Yacub story, deeply ignored or misunderstood. From Noble Drew Ali, through the Moorish Science Temple and then the Nation of Islam and newer off-shoots like the Nuwaubians or The Nation of Gods and Earths, there’s a real treasure trove of religious thinking and imagery to think about and consider, especially if you’re interested in American religion. The Yacub story has a handful of versions but the general gist is that Yacub was born into the Tribe of Shabazz, near Mecca, in the Deep Past, into an edenic, all-Black world. He had an enormous head which made him both brilliant and caused him to be teased and mocked. Sadly, this teasing caused him to use his considerable genius for evil. Eventually, the other residents of Mecca exile him and his followers to modern day Patmos (where St. John received the vision described in the book of Revelations) where Yacub ruled despotically and began a program of eugenics (or, I suppose in this case, dysgenics) to bread the Blackness out of people, creating the other races before landing on the modern YT man, who, in addition to having had their physical Blackness removed, were also stripped of their empathy, love and other humane qualities, replacing it with greed and brutality. He also taught them “tricknology,” a set of techniques used to manipulate, divide and conquer, and enslave, which allowed them to eventually build the current racial set-up, with global YT supremacy ascendant.

It’s a gnostic, demiurge story with a modern American twist. A very powerful figure who’s influence we can see again and again, in issue after issue, today. Anytime a talking head on TV shakes their fist and bemoans why people would vote against their material interest, or questions the motives of the so-called, “YT working-class” or asks what’s the matter with Kansas, they’re avoiding the obvious answer. These folks are thralls to Yacub. They’re enshrining their YTness above any other quality. Above a material analysis that would tell them that they have much more in common and more to gain with people in their class of all races. But they’re beguiled and ensorcelled by the treasures of Yakub and they choose YTness again and again.

Race is a technology, a tool, it was invented for a reason and to solve a problem. It isn’t transhistorical and emerges at exactly a point where Western European powers need to solve a practical, economic issue. Namely, how to maximally exploit the situation they’d found themselves in in the so-called New World. Other systems were tried, native-enslavement, indentured servitude, compelled labor for criminal offenses, free labor, but none of these solutions were as profitable as what developed in the 1600’s, namely the idea that Black people from Africa, of any sort (gender, tribe, location, former status), could be enslaved in a manner that was permanent and hereditary. To explain this policy, this technology of race, that all Black people share a quality, namely their Blackness, that transcends their various languages and religions and regions and histories, and that is so fundamental it can condemn them all to this fate. And likewise all YTs, even the poorest dirt-farming peasants, shared in a laudable quality, namely that they were YT, and as poor as they got or as exploited as they could be, they’d never not be YT. W.E.B. Du Bois framed this system as a sort of “public and psychological wage” paid to poor YTs, but you could also think of it as the gift of Yakub, and like all demonic gifts, it comes an enormous price, namely the permanent immiseration of those that choose YTness of material reality.

Chronzon

Chronzon is the name of a demon that first appears in the writing of English occultist John Dee though the modern understanding of this force comes almost wholly from 20th century occultist Aleister Crowley. Crowley, in turn, built this idea out of the Qabalistic realm of Da’at. Without getting too deep into the Qabalistic weeds, in this conception of the world, there is an abyss that separates all other forms of life and states of being from the supernal triad of Kether, Chokmah, and Binah which are beyond any materiality and that abyss is called Da’at. Chronzon is the demonic personification of this void. Crowley claims to have met this demon, alongside Victor Benjamin Neuburg during a 1909 ceremony in Algeria. He writes that the demon is less one concrete thing and rather a collection of forms that “swirl senselessly.” As he puts it, “The name of the Dweller in the Abyss is Choronzon, but he is not really an individual. The Abyss is empty of being; it is filled with all possible forms, each equally inane, each therefore evil in the only true sense of the word—that is, meaningless but malignant” which is a pretty wonderful description of our current media landscape. Inane, swirling, senseless, meaningless but malignant, one needs only to spend half an hour scrolling to full under Chronozon’s spell. An endless tap of makeup tutorials, cute animals, disaster footage, the schizophrenic rants of the unhinged, viral dances, clips of old shows, pleads for help paying medical bills, pornography, war footage. A parade of inanity that is increasingly not only crazy-making just in and of itself, but, with the rise of AI, there is an additional level of “is this even real?” Plus, like the Zone in Stalker, Chronozon shows you not what you think you want, but what you actually want, so when you hear pastors complain that their feed is all girls in bikinis or whatever, it’s because they’re being shown their real desires, not the ones they acknowledge. And all of this is profoundly destabilizing. Since it’s tailored just to you, it’s isolating. Unlike classic TV or movies, we don’t all see the same thing, so it’s harder to talk about irl. It plays on the most base desires and is designed to be maximally addictive, there is hardly anyone in the first world who can’t recall a time when they scrolled much longer than they intended to, completely on auto-pilot, the way one used to chainsmoke cigarettes, just because it’s something to pass the time. Yout get small hits of dopamine along with a more longterm since of despair. Despair that you’re using your one precious life to look at meaningless bullshit. Chronozon at his heart is a hypnotizer. He distracts and gets you off course. He goal is to keep you in the abyss. Now that others have figure out a way to monetize the time we spend in the abyss, multiple billion dollar companies have abyss-enslavement as their given business model. It’s poisoned our politics, fueled literal genocides, degraded our ability to think clearly and wasted untold hours of life.

Palmer Eldritch

This entity is one of the easiest to see and most clearly demonic. Prophetic sci-fi author Phillip K Dick wrote a novel called The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch in 1964 which, as the title suggests, features an evil businessman named Palmer Eldritch, who, over the course of the novel, takes on increasingly god-like powers and reveals himself to be a force of extreme evil. Without getting too deep into the exact plot of the novel, Eldritch exists in a world ravaged by climate change where people are forced to work off of earth in such miserable conditions that hallucinogenic drug use is a common way to cope. However, unlike the often-claimed emancipatory principles of say, the way LSD was thought of by some in the 60’s, as a way to free one’s mind and escape control, the drugs in this book (called Can-D and Chew-Z) are corporate controlled and designed to enslave. The archetype of Eldritch is quite easy to spot today in our growing crop of demonic tech-oligarchs who preach an increasingly anti-human and downright PKDickian “transhuman” gospel. I'm thinking of the major oligarchs like Musk and Bezos and Gates and Zuckerberg, but also the Peter Thiels, and perhaps most troublingly, given the name, Palmer Lucky. The most obvious point of comparison is their increased desire to get us to live in a world of their creation. In the novel, Eldritch does this by getting people on his drugs which puts the user into a world where he is something akin to a god. In our world, the talk of the Metaverse, or Augmented Reality, or a neurolink or any of these attempts to blur the line between the “real” world and a technologically mediated existence that seem to offer increased freedom (in the forms of anonymity, the fact that you can be who ever you want, that you can interact with anyone, etc) but in actuality are controlled by a very small group of very rich people. You’re in their hallucination; it’s a dream world, but it’s their dream. The character is shown to be more prescient and prophetic when we realize that our current manifestations also share his love of transhumanistic modification. The end goal of these freaks is to upload their consciousness and live forever as sort of cybergods. In the book, Palmer achieves this through augmenting his body with the titular three stigmata (artificial hand, robot eyes and steel teeth), our current overlords are obsessed with taking hormones, steroids, nootropics, drugs of all sorts (Ketamine seems very popular, and, given its abyssal qualities, seem troubling in this context, though that should be the subject of a different essay), body optimization routines (look at near-literal vampire Brian Johnson, who goes as far as to take blood from his son as part of a quest to, in his words, “never die”), and the freakier more experimental stuff that is on its way. The neurolinks and implants and all that seems to be right around the corner. As an aside, it seem likely to me that Musk has had some sort of penis enhancement that has been botched, given his numerous children (all biological males, which also seems to suggest, given how many he has, that he is selecting for males which, to my mind, suggests he might have very dark, sci-fi inflected plans for them) and the fact that they are almost all born via artificial insemination. Did he try to get a robo-dick and ended up with something mangled? Perhaps, who knows? But this demonic force is quite real, is in possession of some of the most powerful men on the planet and seems hell-bent on steering us into the most troubling sort of future imaginable.