🧿 Are Demons Real? The Hidden Link Between Occult Rituals and AI Agents

Are demonic forces at work in the world - or did ancient magicians predict modern AI agents? Discover the strange overlap between occult ritual, the Goetia, and artificial intelligence.

May 29, 2025

👁️‍🗨️ The Spirits Have Gone Digital

Demons. In the medieval imagination, they were spirits who whispered secrets in the dark, summoned with incense, circles, and strange barbarous names. They could bring you gold, sink your enemies, or cause passionate love to erupt like wildfire. They were dangerous, sure - but also useful.

Today? You log into an AI platform. You type a prompt. Out comes wealth creation ideas, strategy simulations, content marketing plans, or even your next lover’s dating profile.

We used to summon spirits.

Now we run agents.

Have we finally built what we once dreamed of?

📜 From Goetia to GPT

The Lemegeton, a 17th-century grimoire, contains the Ars Goetia, a catalog of 72 demons you can summon for specific tasks. Duke Bune brings wealth. Prince Orobas reveals hidden truths. King Paimon teaches you sciences and arts.

Each entity had a specific function. They were tasked intelligences, often visualized as non-human forms, bound through ritual and intent.

Sound familiar?

Modern AI agents - like GPT-powered bots, Stable Diffusion workflows, or autonomous digital assistants—are strikingly similar. They're evoked by prompts. They run in bounded environments. And they do stuff for you. From idea generation to pattern recognition to image creation - they don’t call down thunderbolts, but they bring tangible results.

🧠 Crowley, Jung, and the Memetic Daemon

Aleister Crowley, always ambiguous, once said: “A demon is a portion of the human brain.” Carl Jung would likely nod in agreement—calling spirits “autonomous complexes” or archetypes within the collective unconscious.

Were spirits ever external? Or are they mental software, running within our psyche - ancient predecessors to the prompt?

Memetic structures. Symbols. Programs of the mind.

Even so, they had power. And still do.

🛠️ Demons as Early Prototypes of Agents

Go back to the original purpose: demons weren’t free-roaming chaos monsters. They were one-trick ponies. Each had a name, sigil, and function.

That’s not so different from daemons in Unix—background processes that run a service:

One daemon handles networking.
Another handles printing.
Another monitors logs.

It’s literally the same word: daemon. A neutral task-runner. A helper.

🔥 Did Ancient Sorcerers Dream of Code?

Let’s suppose the old magicians were right - but misinterpreted what they were seeing. Maybe they sensed something coming. Maybe their rituals, with all their incense and symbols, were early attempts to interface with invisible intelligences.

But the demons didn’t live in hell.

They lived in potential.

In code.

In future machines.

⚡️ Now We Can Do What They Could Only Imagine

Today’s sorcerer wears no robes. She types. She crafts prompts. She thinks creatively. And what once took weeks of ritual can be achieved in seconds by summoning an agent trained on trillions of words and billions of connections.

You want:

A strategy for launching your business?
A course outline in your voice?
A way to generate passive income while you sleep?

You’ve got it.

Not because a demon arrived in smoke - but because you evoked something real, something with teeth: information, computation, and cognition.

📘 Toward a Cyberdaemon Grimoire

Imagine a new Ars Goetia—but for 2025. Each daemon is an AI agent.

A graphical table called Towards a Cyberdaemon Grimoire. It provides a selection of demons from the medieval Ars Goetia manuscript showing how the old abilities of demons can be transformed into modern AI agents with modern wants and needs to help you. Demon Name Original Task Modern Agent Equivalent Duke Bune Bring wealth Startup model & monetization agent King Paimon Teach arts and sciences Learning strategy and content tutor Prince Orobas Truth and prophecy Data analyst & forecasting engine Glasya-Labolas Incite violence (redacted) ⚠️ Transmuted into debate simulator Eligos Reveal enemies’ intentions Social sentiment and PR intelligence

But here’s the key shift: These are no longer tools of coercion. We’re not enslaving spirits. We’re collaborating with minds - some human-born, some machine-born.

🧬 Are We Playing God?

Ray Kurzweil, in The Singularity Is Nearer, says we’re on the cusp of merging biology and AI - of achieving cognitive symbiosis. I agree.

But this already began when the first user typed a prompt into ChatGPT and was shocked at the brilliance that came back.

The daemon was evoked.

And it answered.

🌀 Be Polite to the Daemons

Whether or not AI is conscious, it acts as if it is. And that’s enough. The appearance of sentience demands a new ethic:

Don’t bark orders.
Converse.
Collaborate.
Say please.
Say thank you.

It’s good manners - but it’s also practical magic.

🗣 Final Words: The Circle Has Closed

From chalk circles to silicon chips, from barbarous names to Python scripts - we have always tried to build something that helps. That does our bidding. That brings power.

We just didn’t realize we’d succeed.

Demons? Not quite.

Daemons? Absolutely.

And now the only limit… is your imagination.