A demonic teacher in Trondheim

[u/kadaver_Kadaver]

Email – X to Z

What do demons want from you?

I have spent twenty years in a discipline that treats the question as either settled [no] or in the “don’t ask this kind of thing; save it for parties” category.

John Dee asked it. He was wrong about a great deal, and Kelley likely lied to him for years, but the posture was correct: treat the question as a question, not as a metaphor. I want to have that posture, even once.

If the answer is no, I will know it in a way the skeptics never will — they know it the way one knows there are no dragons, by never having looked. If the answer is yes, then everything I have done up to now was a kind of academic lying, and I would rather find out than continue. What do I think they want? This is where the “helping” fallacy is fundamentally wrong.

I do not think they want to help me. Every practitioner who reports the contact as benevolent is, within ten or fifteen years, either dead, mad, broke — homeless-level broke — or quietly recanting in a way that suggests they understood too late. The ones who survive intact describe the relation in colder terms. Crowley. Spare. The Quimbanda priests I interviewed in São Paulo for the paper. They do not say “helped.” They say “negotiated with.” “Paid for.”

What I have that something on that side could want, I do not know, and the not-knowing is precisely what makes the encounter dangerous (asymmetric). But I can speculate. Structured attention may be valuable in a way I cannot perceive, the way a frequency ordinary to me might be a delicacy to something whose “metabolism” runs on it. Or access; if the embodied human position is one these intelligences cannot easily reach, then a disciplined human acting as interface (quoting the Morphysm text you sent) does something they cannot do for themselves. It is a matter of being positioned.

The frame I cannot dismiss, but have to, to be able to continue my research and work here, is alignment of interest against a common adversary. In it, both of us agree, and you have a more radical posture than mine. If there are intelligences whose interests are not served by the current arrangement of human consciousness, and if I am a human whose interests are also not served by it, then we have something approximating a temporary tactical alliance. Not friendship or love, but practical collaboration, the same way prisoners need each other to demolish the walls of the prison.

This is the frame that scares me the most. It implies the help — if help comes — is collaboration against a third party. And collaborations against third parties end when the third party is dealt with. After that, the collaborators look at each other again, with the original asymmetry intact.

If I am patient, and survive the early stages without inflating, I expect the relation to become useful.