further contributions to a demonology

Mary Harrington:

Anyone who spends a lot of time online will be familiar with the sense of witnessing a collective hive-mind in action. I linked this recently with a phenomenon of widespread re-enchantment, in which re-attunement to pattern recognition via digital reading has meshed with post-atomic physics to re-open cultural space for the uncanny. And while you can think perfectly well about egregores without agreeing with any of the above, or indeed without opening any old books, it’s also true that many longstanding traditions already exist for understanding egregores – including Christianity. For example we might recall the passage in the Gospel of Mark that describes Jesus casting out multiple demons possessing a man in terms that plausibly map onto what I’m calling egregoric desire: “My name is Legion”, says this collective, “because there are many of us inside this man.”

Many of those now exploring such ideas are ambivalent on the ontology of these non-material realities. But perhaps, if we want to be able to make sense of our moral intuitions concerning a phenomenon such as Lily Phillips, we should consider not re-inventing the wheel. Bluntly: I want to consider the possibility that Phillips’ stunt is more intelligible understood not in terms of liberal feminism or the sexual revolution or whatever, but as an instance of what we might describe as egregoric capture, and the medievals would have called demonic possession.

I would refer the interested reader to an essay I wrote three years ago:

I am myself a Christian, but I do not write here to issue an altar call, an invitation to be saved by Jesus. Rather, I merely wish you, dear reader, to consider the possibility that when a tweet provokes you to wrath, or an Instagram post makes you envious, or some online article sends you to another and yet another in an endless chain of what St. Augustine called curiositas — his favorite example is the gravitational pull on all passers-by of a dead body on the side of the road — you are dealing with powers greater than yours. Your small self and your puny will are overwhelmed by the Cosmic Rulers, the Principalities and Powers. They oppress or possess you, and they can neither be deflected nor, by the mere exercise of will, overcome. Any freedom from what torments us begins with a proper demonology. Later we may proceed to exorcism.