Demonic PhenomenaA Black Paper

I once watched two scientists discuss a thing they did not understand, and they did it with such lively curiosity, and such humility before what they did not know, that I became aware I was watching a spiritual act. One of them never explained the scientific method. But I saw in the way he held it that he treated it as a holy thing — a way of approaching truth without presuming to own it.

I have never understood something until I have seen another person love it. In their love I begin to grasp its value. And watching this man, I saw an image of the scientist as a priest, and of the method as the vessel he tended. He would not pretend those questions were closed. He held the discipline and the wonder at once, and neither loosened the other.

I got an image of him while he spoke, and it has not left me. I saw him kneeling before a tabernacle, dressed in the robes of a priest. He was, in his own way, worshipping truth. And the scientific method was the tabernacle itself — the vessel that guarded truth, contained it, and gave him his only honest access to it. I understood, watching him, why a scientist would hold this method with something close to reverence. And I understood it only because I saw him love it first. I could not reach the thing until I watched a man love it in front of me.

It is the same way a person can be disgusted by the Church — by its corruption, its evasions, its self-regard — and then meet, just once, a single holy priest, and be convicted on the spot: so this is what it was supposed to be. One honest man becomes a doorway to the thing the institution had hidden. The righteous scientist was that doorway for me. Through him I came, for the first time, to something like gratitude — for what the method has actually given us, once it is separated from the people who wear it as a costume.

And in his hands I finally saw what the method is, and what it is not. The scientific method is a cruel mistress. She is never satisfied. She says no, not good enough, come back tomorrow, and she says it again the next day, and the next. She does not care how badly you want the answer. But she is also a forgiving lover, and this is the part the materialist forgets. Her no is never final. She never says settled. She says settled to my standard, by my rules, for today — and try again tomorrow. She rules only ever in the present tense. She does not close the future; she cannot. The honest materialist takes her verdict for today and reports it as a verdict forever, and that single mistranslation is the whole of his error. There is another kind, and he is worse. He shapes from her the image of a god and thrusts this idol of his making above his head in triumph. But a god must speak in the language of forever, and she never has. The idol he raises has her face. It does not have her voice.

There is a painting in Rome, in a Capuchin church built above a crypt lined with the bones of thousands of friars. Guido Reni painted it in 1635. The Archangel Michael stands with one foot on the head of Satan, a sword raised over him.

The painting did not stay in Rome. Copies of it spread across the Catholic world, into churches, onto statues and, above all, onto prayer cards. It was often printed alongside the prayer to Saint Michael that Pope Leo XIII ordered to be said after Low Mass. Reni’s Michael became the Michael, the one most people see when they hear the name. It must be among the most widely reproduced religious images ever made. People have carried it in wallets and missals and pinned it above beds. I do not think they carried it as art. They carried it as hope, a small printed promise that the thing under his foot can be beaten. I have pondered this painting for a long time, and what it means that so many people have needed it.

It was my own body that first led me toward an answer. I have felt this phenomenon active within me, not as an idea but as something sensed, physically, in the flesh. And through my own experimentation with MDMA, I found that a molecule could reach the same place charismatic prayer reaches. If this thing can be felt in the body, and if a compound can open the door it passes through, then it is not only a religious object. It moves through the same flesh that science already knows how to read. Detection, at the very least, is conceivable.

Reni’s Saint Michael the Archangel is not a picture of Satan destroyed. It is a picture of him subdued: pinned, held still, the sword raised but not yet fallen. For most of history the only instruments we had for that were prayer and the rite. I came to believe there may now be another. The tools already exist. Psychedelic research now measures subjective experience with a seriousness that would have been unthinkable a generation ago: questionnaires that score the mystical, scans that follow the brain into states once only described by saints. In 2020, a team at Johns Hopkins surveyed 2,561 people about their single most memorable encounter with a seemingly autonomous being after taking DMT. About three-quarters said the entity existed in some real but different dimension of reality, or in that and ordinary reality together. Most described a guide or helper, but some named what they met a demon or a devil.¹

We are already studying this phenomenon. We have simply not recognised it as one thing. Psychedelic researchers call it an entity encounter. Sleep scientists call it the intruder that comes with paralysis. Psychiatry has given possession its own diagnosis. Each field holds a fragment, under its own name, in its own building. No one has yet laid the pieces side by side and asked whether they are the same object. If they are, it can be studied as one. What is studied can be understood. And what is understood can, perhaps, be subdued. And as I look on that painting now, I am drawn to one singular conclusion. Science is his sword.

I believe this phenomenon is the ground on which the two great pillars of Western civilisation might finally negotiate a peace. Humanity should invest heavily, and now, in the reconciliation of religious truth and scientific truth.

For so long, religious people have been afraid of the scientific method. I believe it was misrepresented to us. I am not afraid of it any longer.

I am possessed. I have scrambled in the dirt with one hand over my mouth and the other holding up my trousers, desperately trying to make it stop talking through my own mouth. Ten thousand experiments that return no evidence cannot unmake that. I am not searching for proof. Not yet. I am searching for the ten thousand and first, the one oddity in the data that makes us question everything we thought we understood about this phenomenon. We have a great deal of failure ahead of us. But I believe that if we turn every tool and technology we have on this phenomenon, it will give up its secrets.

I am not a scientist, and I am not Michael. If I tried to wield this sword myself I would do it clumsily and without knowledge. And by science I do not mean the academy. I mean the method: the tools, the protocols, the rigour. The sword does not belong to whoever holds it now. It answers to anyone willing to submit to its discipline. What I can do is point. My argument is a simple one: the sword must now be turned on the demonic phenomenon. There are two reasons.

First, the materialist explanation is satisfying only within its own frame. It is today’s verdict reported as a verdict forever, the same mistranslation I described above.

Second, materialism is a minority belief. Roughly three in four people alive identify with a religion, and many of the rest still hold some spiritual belief.² Its authority comes not from numbers but from the institutions it holds, and even there it is creaking under the weight of the psychedelic renaissance and its continuing failure to account for consciousness. How sad it would be to leave one of the great unexamined phenomena of our time uninvestigated out of deference to the worldview of so few.

I once met someone who later became a dear friend. They had a statue of the Virgin Mary that wept. I visited the grotto where it was kept, and my friend asked me, “Do you believe us?” “No,” I said, “I don’t. But I know you’re not lying.”

I can work with the disbelief of others. But you should know that those of us who have experienced this phenomenon are not lying.

This is not a scientific paper. It is a case: an argument, made in the open, for something I believe and cannot yet prove. It does not claim to have found anything. It claims that there is something to look for, and that nobody is looking.

Every quotation has a source, and the sources are in the notes. Where it argues, it says so. Where it bets, it calls it a bet.

It is a living document. It is not the end of an understanding but the beginning of one, and it will change as more is learned. There is a great deal still to learn.

So it is published as a first version, and it asks for help. Not belief. Help. If you are a clinician and have seen this in a patient, the description is yours to correct. If you work in one of the rooms in Part one, the retreat, the church, the ward, the window on it is yours to check against what you have seen. If you know one of its literatures better than I do, that window is yours to rewrite. If it has happened to you, there is a place to say so, and every account moves this from one man’s story towards a body of cases. And if you can help write down what would count as a case, that is the work that would turn a description into a field.

Corrections go to hello@metanoiaproject.ie. Each version is dated, and what changed between them is kept.

I have a stake in this. I have lived inside what this paper describes for years, and Case 1, whose account runs through the pages that follow, is me. That is why the question got asked. It is not a reason to believe the answer.