When I (Ed Simon) reveal that I wrote a book about demonology, I’m invariably asked if I believe that demons are actually real. “Of course, I don’t think that demons are actually real,” is the expected response and the one that I give. “I’m a modern, secular, educated, liberal, agnostic man. I don’t believe in demons and devils, goblins and ghouls, imps, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, or poltergeists either.” Yet whenever giving the doxology of all of that which we’re not to have faith in, I’m mentally keeping my fingers crossed, because so much of that question depends on the definitions of the words “believe,” “demons,” “actually,” and “real.”
Since the Enlightenment, Western intelligentsia have been the inheritors to a rather anemic model of knowledge known as the correspondence theory of truth, whereby the validity of a statement is ascertained simply by whether or not it matches empirical reality. If I say, “The dog is in the yard,” that statement is either true or false depending on whether or not said dog is in said yard. Easy enough, but then what of statements like “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” “I think that I shall never see/a poem as lovely as a tree,” or “I wondered lonely as a cloud?”
A fundamentalist adherence to the correspondence theory of truth, trumpeted by logical positivists and other philosophical heretics, would consign John Keats, Joyce Kilmer, and William Wordsworth into a bin marked “meaningless” (even though I think we can all ascertain that there is meaning, even if it’s the “slant” truth that Emily Dickinson writes about). And so, you can imagine what is made of statements about divinity and diabology (though theology has, in my estimation, always just been a branch of poetics anyhow).
That the correspondence theory of truth doesn’t even match its own exacting prescriptions to what is legitimate or not is a bit of self-referential absurdity best passed over; concluding that as a model it’s clearly ineffectual in describing whole swaths of human experience is sufficient enough. You can see my difficulty with the question of whether or not I “actually” believe in demons—I reject the entire epistemological attitude in which the query is posed. If the question is asked in the spirit of ascertaining whether or not demons exist as tangibly as a dog in the yard, then obviously the answer is in the negative, and yet in those moments of sublime terror when approaching the core of the cracked numinous, I can’t help but know what I felt. That warped smile and those red eyes might not be staring back at me from the yard, but they’re staring back from somewhere. READ MORE...
