The Writer's Tome

Two in a row! Anyway, last week was a writing week and another chapter or so of Living Theurgy is done. The MS is at just over 13,000 words and I’ve set out a very, very rough outline of a table of contents. At the moment we’re looking at least 13-15 chapters, and probably around 50,000 words. That, of course is subject to change as necessary. There will also be a number of illustrations in the book, pictures of different Demiurges, gods, spirits, etc. I’m currently planning to paint them in the Orthodox icon inspired style I’m using for the Neoplatonic Tarot (and there will be a chapter on Neoplatonic aesthetics which will, amongst other things, discuss the influence of Neoplatonism on Orthodox Christian iconography).

That’s most of what took up the week. I did send out about 30 e-mails to various university department heads, advertising the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition Conference, and now only time will tell how well this works out or if the conference will have to be canceled.

And . . . that’s about it. Writing non-fiction isn’t quite as sexy as writing contemporary fantasy, so, alas, I don’t have any fun-filled, action packed quotations for you. This current week doesn’t look good, either.

Let’s view this as an experiment, shall we? If you promise to read this, I promise to attempt to write it. Once a week we can talk about all the exciting things that happened to us. Okay, its my blog, so once a week I’ll write about all the probably-not-that-exciting-things that happened to me, you can respond and it’ll be like an actual conversation. It’ll be like we’re living in the future.

Or something.

Anyway. Last week saw the completion of the sketches for the Neoplatonism Tarot I’ve been working on for the last several months. You can find the drawings here: http://jeffreyskupperman.com/gallery/gallery2/. Surprisingly, I’m actually quite happy with most of these. I will likely add in some symbolism to the major arcana as I paint them, but otherwise, I like them. The deck will be painted on wood panels, with acrylic and gold leaf. As you can see, they are drawn in the style of Orthodox icons, and I will try to keep that going throughout the painting process. Each painting will likely be 10″x12″. I will likely write a book to go along with the deck, possibly writing each card as I paint them. Or maybe not. I don’t know yet.

Last week also saw the release of the official Call for Abstracts for the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition Conference 2012. You can find the CFA and information on the conference here: http://jwmt.org/jwmt12/. This will be held, assuming there are enough attendees and enough presenters, July 14-15 in Milwaukee, WI. If you’re interested in attending (or presenting) it would be great to meet you.

My Librarian and I spent Saturday at friends playing a Chaosium RPG set in Austro-Hungry in the 1890s. I’m playing a priest who sees visions of avenging angels and goes out to follow them. Which is to say he isn’t particularly useful unless God is giving him things to do. Also, he prays a lot. Still, it was great to get together with friends, something we don’t have a lot of opportunity to do these days.

Also, I have a cold. It is a baby cold, gifted to me by my 1 year old daughter. If you don’t spend a lot of time around small children you may not be aware that baby colds are evil. And vile. Far more evil and vile than grown-up colds. Consider yourself warned.

As dull as it may seem, that’s about it for the week. Each week I switch off on the various projects I’m working on. This weeks is writing chapters for my non-fiction book, tentatively entitled Living Theurgy. But we can talk about that next week.

Wherein I talk about that which is going on.

I will likely need to expand the website at some point, as I have gone beyond the current main purpose of promoting my fiction writing. All the Devils are Here, the first book of the Machiavel Cycle, is still out there being looked at by the fantastically awesome publishing world, and books 2 and 3 have both been started. The Urban Fantasy Writer’s Guide to Classical Demonology is still in the works, and a version of it will also appear in the next issue of the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition. I’m working on a number of other projects as well, however. Beyond the continued publishing of the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition I am in the midst of organizing the JWMT’s first conference, to be held in Milwaukee, WI in July of this year. Look for a Call for Abstracts in the hopefully near-ish future.

On a somewhat more painterly note, I have recently begun to “write” (i.e. paint) religious icons, both for my own entertainment and interest as well as on commission. Photos of icons I’ve written, as well as other some of my other artwork, can be found in the art gallery. Related to this is the Neoplatonism Tarot project. In this I am designing a tarot deck based on the ideology of, well, Neoplatonism, and executed in the style of Greek Orthodox icons. At this point sketches for all of the major arcana and court cards have been completed and can be viewed here. I have a general ideology, based on an Neoplatonic interpretation of Pythagoreanism, for the minor arcana, though I have not yet begun sketching those cards. Once all the sketches are complete each card will be painted in acrylic on wood panel, with gold leaf used for the glories. I will, of course, write a book to accompany the deck, as many of the cards are to be interpreted differently from what is now common. For instance, the elemental attributions to the four suits are quite secondary in this deck, whereas they are generally of great importance to most forms of today’s tarot.

Finally, I am working on a non-fiction book tentatively titled Living Theurgy (with much indebtedness to Monseigneur Jordan Stratford’s Living Gnosticism). This is an exploration of the various Neoplatonic traditions, from Plotinus to Iamblichus and Proclus to Pseudo-Dionysius to Marsilio Ficino both in theory but in practice. The aim of the book is to provide a framework for Neoplatonic mysticism today, not only as individual practices of contemplation and theurgic ritual, but as a way to bring Neoplatonic philosophy into everyday life, making it a truly lived philosophy or way of living. I am also planning on writing, and possibly illuminating, a Neoplatonist’s Book of Hours.

Finally, for those interested in alchemy, I highly recommend picking up Jordan’s A Dictionary of Western Alchemy, if for no other reason because I wrote the forward.

Well, that’s it for the moment. I promise to try to post here more often about the various projects I’ve been working on. If you have been missing my regular company, please join me over on my facebook page or follow me on Twitter.

Really, they don’t. They don’t need to be an anti-hero, either. Protagonist doesn’t mean “good guy,” it means the main character, the lead, the person who does the most stuff. Greek words are nifty that way. Your main character doesn’t have to be likable, either. At least not in a “I’d be happy to sit down at dinner with that person, she seems swell” sort of way. They can’t irritate the reader so much as to be unreadable, but they can be a jerk, or evil, or both. Let’s face it, heroes have gotten boring and a little unbelievable. And in fantasy writing, loosing the audience’s suspension of disbelief is a bad thing. While there is perhaps a need for the better than us all sort of hero there is also a need for the just like me or worse protagonist who comes out in the end not to save the day but just to come out in the end.

I have both kinds of protagonists in my writing. On the one hand there is Dr. Ezekiel Jones, exorcist and all around good guy. He, like Harry Dresden, tries to do the right thing, even if it puts himself in harms way. On the other hand there is Marcus Faust, demonologist, sorcerer and assassin. He is officially not a good person. He does what is necessary to live to see the next day, and if he can kill off someone whose been harassing him in the process, so much the better. He’s rich, arrogant and powerful, and he knows it. He’s also a really fun character. Not that Ezekiel isn’t, but Marcus, due to a Grosse Point Blankian moral compass, is capable of doing things Ezekiel isn’t.

Because Ezekiel is a hero. Marcus is a villain.

Oh, if you haven’t done so already, check out my short story “Fortune’s Fool”. It is available in the short stories section of the website. A new one, “Withering on the Virgin Thorn”, will likely be available tomorrow. If you love them, or me, or like clicking buttons, be sure to hit the “like” button on the story’s page.

First: a lot of demonology found in the grimoire tradition comes out of Christianity. I’ll do grimoire-related demons later on, so let’s just pretend they don’t exist for now, okay?

There appear to be two kinds of demons in Christianity (ymmv; not all forms of Christianity do this). The first is the unclean spirit and the second the fallen angel.

There are about 20 mentions of “unclean spirits” (pneumata akatharta) in the New Testament, such as the one’s Jesus casts out into swine that then kill themselves. There are also the “air spirits” (aero tou pneumato) of Ephesians 2:2 Presumably those spirits are demons of some sort, but of what variety it’s hard to say; the term “daimon,” the source of the English word “demon,” isn’t used, nor are these described as fallen angels. The movement, Christianity, of the morally neutral term daimon into something evil has already been discussed in the etymology part of the Guide. It is perhaps noteworthy that daimon only shows up only about five times in the New Testament, as opposed to the 20 or so times pneumata akatharta appears.

It is interesting that there is no direct connection, Biblically speaking, between these spirits and fallen angels, fallen angels that show up in . . . a bunch of different places, actually. For instance there is 2 Peter 2:4 “For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of deepest darkness to be kept until the judgment” and Jude 6: “And the angels who did not keep their own position, but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains in deepest darkness for the judgment of the great day.”

The Apocalypse of St. John (aka Revelation) is another source for fallen angels. Importantly, the idea of the “War in heaven” comes from here, though it was likely heavily influenced by the apocryphal 3 Enoch, which describe a similar war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. This will also be connected to the vision of a star falling from heaven, to be discussed a little bit later. The war is first discussed in Revelation 12:7-9, where the angle Michael boots Dragon, identified with Satan, from heaven, along with Satan’s angels.

An earlier portion of Revelation, 9:1, will eventually be connected with the figure of Satan. Rev 9:1 describes a star fallen from heaven to the earth (just as Satan is cast to the earth by Michael in Rev 12) and who has the keys to the abyss (i.e. hell). Due to what is, in my opinion, a misreading of Isaiah 14:12, this fallen star will be given the name Lucifer, to be connected with Satan.

Lucifer is a somewhat difficult but important subject, especially as he is connected to Satan. It seems clear that the part of the Hebrew Bible (Isaiah 14:12) where Christianity gets Lucifer from isn’t talking about an angel, fallen or otherwise. Rather the text is talking about the king of Babylon, who is given the title Day or Morning Star and is described as eventually falling from heaven (yeah, it’s a metaphor). But eventually this will get translated into Greek and from the Greek, Latin, where in some readings the title is turned into a proper name, something that is retained in the King James Bible today.

Finally, at least a few demons are described. Abaddon, for instance. Originally, Abaddon meant “place of destruction” and was associated with Sheol (an afterlife realm) in Jewish writings. In Revelation Abaddon becomes a king of hell and may even be associated with (or as) the Anti-Christ. Revelation also mentions “demonic spirits” that go out and perform miracles. Again, just what demons are is questionable. Another is the Dragon, identified with Satan, with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns and who probably represents the Roman Empire.

Specifically, we’ll look at demons in what has become mainstream Judaism. That means the funky, Zoroastrianism-influenced Enoch material will have to wait. It’s somewhat relevant, but much of it was subsumed into early Christianity and rejected by Rabbinic Judaism, so we’ll get to the general gist of it when we look at early Christian demonology.

There is a generic word for “demon” in Hebrew: shed (pl. shedim). The term covers a lot of ground. The Hebrew Bible, and later Talmud and then kabbalistic texts such as the Zohar also uses different terms to refer to specific kinds of demons. Generally speaking, Jewish demons included satyr-like creatures, evil spirits, the children of Lilith and the like. Eventually we’ll see beings more like what will become normative in Medieval and Renaissance occultism, though the differences, even if subtle, are significant. We wont see fallen angle-type demons outside of the Enoch material.

For simplicity, we’ll divide our demons into the following categories:

1. Nasty nature spirits
2. The Children of Lilith
3. “Demons”

The nasty nature spirits are typically described a satyrs, varying in power and prestige. Perhaps the most famous of these, which will eventually become as close to a fallen angel as we find in Judaism, is Azazel. During the Temple Period an “Azazel sacrifice” used to be made. Originally this referred to a mountainous region where a scape goat-like sacrifice offering was made. The region was eventually connected to a local demon, or possible pagan deity. We’ll then see in various texts the idea that the sacrifice was made to appease the demon.

A lot of us are at least vaguely familiar with Lilith, or with the popular stories that one will find about her in the internet; most of which lack a basic foundation in research . . . but that’s another post. Lilith is not in the Bible. She appears in Talmud and various commentaries on the Bible and eventually in Jewish mystical material. The short version is that Lilith was Adam’s first wife. Nastiness ensued (depending on which web site you read, you’ll get a different version of this) and Lilith leaves Eden. Out in the real world she goes demonic, cohabits with bodiless spirits and produces her own demonic offspring. They’re known for suffocating babies in their sleep. Historically, it seems likely that Lilith was originally not an individual demon but a class of spirits, appearing in ancient Akkadian mythology.

The generic demon is an interesting category. On the one hand we find beings like Samael, who is the accuser, tempter, angel of death, the Evil Inclination and a host of other nasties. However Samael cannot act without permission from God, so there is no notion of rebellion here. Ashmedai (aka Asmodeus) was the king of demons, and a child of Lilith, but apparently not of the really nasty variety. It’s said that Ashmedai studies Torah and keeps the commandments. This is part of what makes this kind of demon so difficult. Many Jewish demons are not necessarily evil, just unpleasant. A whole class of them are actually human souls that weren’t given bodies before the beginning of the seventh day of creation. They became jealous of their embodied cousins (i.e. us) and so started being mean to us. That being said, they are also frequently described as being good Jews, going to synagogue and being in charge of punishing people who violate commandments or abuse prayer books. Eventually, though influenced by Greek and Christian thought, we’ll see the idea that each demon has an angelic counterpart that can make the demon obey a magician. Similar ideas are found in Medieval and Renaissance occultism and may have been influenced by Neoplatonism (as much of Medieval and Renaissance occultism have been as well).

Ah, demons.

You know you love ‘em.

But what exactly is a demon? Where do they come from and what do they want? Considering that both my main characters, Ezekiel and Marcus, deal with demons on an all too regular basis, this is a in which subject I have some interest. So, in order to elucidate on the wacky world of demonology, and to give me a chance to get my PhD on, I’m going to use this space to to write about exactly that; demons.

I’m imagining several parts here. The first will likely tackle the tricky question of “just what is a demon, anyway?” I’ll look primarily at the more or less mainstream Abrahamic traditions but also a bit of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, as I include some of that in my books. I’ll also take a look at what other authors have done, to get a good overview of the subject.

Second I’ll take a look at the Solomonic magical tradition, which has its roots in Jewish scripture and Arabic magical lore. Magic ascribed to King Solomon will flourish in the Middle Ages and Renaissance as well.

Third will be a look at the world of daemons, which may or may not be demons, depending on who exactly is doing the writing.

Finally a brief look at the Gnostic Archons, who aren’t exactly demons, but may as well be.

Will there be more? We won’t know until I start writing, will we?

peace
-Jeffrey (Demonologist extraordinaire)

So, you want demons in your story. Of course you do, who wouldn’t? Demons are bad ass. But demons aren’t just really big monsters. Yes, I know you’re the author so demons are whatever you damn well want them to be, but you do have an audience, and the word demon means something in particular to them. So, to get your demons seeming like demons, let’s try to figure them out.

Unfortunately, though “demon” might mean something in particular to reader X, to reader Y it might mean something else. The word is used a lot, to mean a wide variety of semi-related things. To look at this we’ll set the way back machine to ancient Greece and look at from where the English word “demon” comes. The word in question here is daimon.

In ancient Greek a daimon was a non-physical being, typically beneath the gods but above humans in the hierarchy of creation. A daimon can be either good or evil, specific or generic. For instance the Neoplatonists, in the 3rd century CE, talked about an individual’s guiding daimon. According to this you have your very own daimon (several, actually), who is trying to lead you towards the gods and the development of the soul to possibly god-like proportions. There are also daimons of fire that will try to trick and kill you. Different kinds of daimons, but all still daimons.

With the spread of Christianity, where daimons, such as the unclean sprits in the Gospels (though the term pneuma akatharton is also used, in Mark this becomes exchangeable with daimonion), daimons more or less become bad things for most people. This will be combined with the war in heaven from Revelations and the popular idea of demon as fallen angel is formed. Sure the contemporary Neoplatonists were still going on with a more traditional use of the term, but times change. The English word “demon” comes from the Latinized form of daimon, daemon. And so the evil demon is born. At least in English.

But this only tells us where the word comes from. Unfortunately it doesn’t tell us how it’s being used now. For instance when I think demon I rarely think “fallen angel.” Part of the difficulty is that English is not a particularly good language for dealing with such things. So while we have our demons, Judaism has lots of different demons, each with their own category, all of which we commonly translates as “demon.” That’s convenient, but not very helpful.

The language lesson is over, next we’ll look at demons in Judaism and then Christianity.

It was a dark and stormy . . . er, never mind.

Alrighty, where are we then? Not existentially, of course, that’s a different blog. In the world of Ezekiel Jones . . . well, let’s not talk about that now. There may, or may not, be news on that in the future. Maybe.

Marcus Faust, then. I have one last set of edits to go through on The Machiavel. It should only take a few days. So far I’ve knocked 500 words off of the book, about 3500 fewer than Ezekiel I, even though I ran them both through the same editing process. Practice does make perfect-ish.

What does this mean? It means I’m getting close to needing some beta readers.

What’s a beta reader you ask? They’re like alpha readers, but get a more polished version of the manuscript. The alphas get to see it in a sorry state, after some rough editing but little else. They get to hack and slash their way through the jungle of my mind, helping me cut out the utterly useless clutter that’s hiding in the corners.

Beta readers, on the other hand, get something a bit nicer, even if their job is essentially the same. A beta reader still looks for the things I’ve missed (spelling, punctuation, crappy grammar, etc.) and is also looking for things like plot holes, continuity errors, etc. Stuff the alphas have looked for but might have missed while wading through the rest of the debris. In theory a beta reader’s job is easier, I should have caught most of the stuff already. So why is beta reading necessary? Because I and the alphas can’t catch everything. Its like reading your own work; you already know what it says, so in your head it makes sense, even if it doesn’t to anyone else.

What is the awesome reward of being a beta (or alpha) reader? There is, of course, the knowledge that you’ve helped your fellow human, but mostly its your name in the acknowledgments. There might be a signed book in the offing, but that’s assuming I sell the bloody thing and I get more than one copy for myself . . . we’ll have to see.

So, that being said, I’m hunting for beta readers. Let’s go with five, because its a nice number, very pentagonal. If you’re insane enough to be interested (i.e. you’re seeing the fnords), please reply here. You know, so I can keep the awe inspiring numbers of fanatical legions all in one place.