A historical bridge for speaking about “spirits” in the language of modernity—without reducing them to metaphors
Modernity’s reflex is to translate spirit into “hallucination,” “projection,” or “symbol,” and then congratulate itself for maturity. But that move is less enlightenment than evasion. It tries to solve the problem of agency by denying agency.
What we actually need is a historical bridge: a way to keep faith with what people report—being addressed, coerced, overruled—while also speaking in modern terms without reverting to superstition. The bridge is not a compromise between “belief” and “disbelief.” It is an account of how Western culture repeatedly re-names experienced agencies as its dominant metaphysics changes.
Jeffrey Burton Russell is blunt about what is being named: “the Devil” is the objectification of hostile forces perceived as external to consciousness—forces that feel beyond conscious control and evoke dread and horror. In other words: a culturally stabilized way of speaking about an experience of coercive otherness. Russell even reminds us that demon (from daimōn) originally did not mean “cartoon villain”: in Greek a daimōn could be benevolent or malevolent, a mediating power; only later does “demon” harden into “evil spirit.” Jeffrey Burton Russell – The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (1977).
That shift—mediating agency → hostile agency—is one of the central historical moves. And it matters for pharmakia.
The key historical fact is that the West has repeatedly treated hostile agencies as real in effect, even when it debated their ontology. Early Christian practice, for instance, distinguishes attacks “by obsession (from without)” and “by possession (entering into it).” These attacks are described as involuntary, even when they produce disease or madness; what they cannot do, strictly speaking, is force the will—temptation “assaults the will,” although they “cannot force it.” Jeffrey Burton Russell – Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (1981)
That distinction is already a proto-modern theory of agency: coercion can invade experience and body without automatically annulling responsibility—because responsibility is negotiated at the level of will, consent, and yielding. When modernity collapses everything into either “brain event” (no responsibility) or “choice” (full blame), it loses this older granularity.
Here is the non-metaphysical definition that actually works:
A “spirit” is an experienced agency not identical with the ego and not immediately subject to voluntary control, yet capable of demand, persuasion, compulsion, and reorganization of attention.
This is not theology. It is phenomenology with historical literacy. Russell’s own framing supports the move: “hostile forces… perceived as external to our consciousness… over which we appear to have no conscious control.” Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (1977).
Modernity does not require denial of spirits. It requires relocation: from an external cosmology to a modern account of agency, attention, desire, compulsion, and the binding power of obligation.
“Pharmakia” is not just “drugs” in the modern recreational/medical sense. Historically it sits in the unstable zone where remedy and poison, cure and curse, medicine and spell blur. (Even if we set aside etymology, the cultural function is stable: a substance that changes agency and meaning.)
What makes pharmakia distinctive is that it collapses symbolic distance. Images stop being “about” something and begin acting as something. This is exactly the territory where older cultures reach for the language of daimones and spirits, because ordinary voluntary self-description breaks down.
Some might still say, for example, that “drugs can conjure spirits,” the modern translation is not childish: it is structurally precise.
Psychoactive substances can function as summoning operations insofar as they expose the subject to autonomous agencies normally regulated by ego-boundaries, culture, and ritual containment.
This is not mysticism. It is a statement about what happens when boundaries fail and agency appears elsewhere.
One of the most important medieval inventions is pact—the conversion of a diffuse experience of hostile influence into a juridical and moral structure: oath, allegiance, signature, kiss of submission. Russell shows how the Theophilus legend popularized the idea: formal oath to Lucifer, formal contract handed over, demons come to claim the soul, and the contract becomes the decisive object that can be seized and destroyed. Russell – Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (1986).
Then Russell states the historical punchline: by the witch-craze, pact was taken as literal historical fact; alleged written pacts were brought into court; and the idea that witches worshiped Satan and had signed an explicit pact became “the heart of the witch craze.” Russell – Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (1986).
Why does this matter for addiction and pharmakia?
Because addiction is also a pact-like structure in lived time: a repetitive surrender of tomorrow to an agency that promises protection (relief) and then claims payment. Medieval culture externalized it into diabolic jurisprudence; modern culture internalizes it into neurochemistry and diagnosis. But the lived structure—the binding—is recognizably homologous.
Frances Yates is useful here because she refuses the naïve story that “witchcraft was just peasant superstition.” She explicitly raises the problem of how intellectual theory from above condemns ordinary village women: learned magistrates arrive at theoretical demonologies, and the “unfortunate women” suffer the consequences—suggesting that witch-hunting can be “manipulated and intensified from above.” The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979).
That is a critical bridge to modernity: spirit-language is never merely descriptive. It is also an instrument—of governance, scapegoating, elimination, and moral sorting.
Yates also describes an educated world where conjuration, angels, demons, exorcism controversies, and court politics coexist with early scientific rationality. John Dee can be both mathematician and “conjuror of angels.” And the era’s religious struggles generate staged possession/exorcism claims and exposés—evidence that “demonic” language is entangled with institutional conflict, not just private experience. The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979).
So we should say it plainly:
- Spirit-language can name real experience of agency.
- Spirit-language can also be used to weaponize that naming socially.
Our project lives exactly at this edge.
Szasz belongs in this bridge because he shows a modern replacement ritual: the transfer of conflict and coercion from theological courts into medical institutions. In Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences, he defines coercion plainly as the use (or threat) of force to secure compliance and argues that psychiatry’s distinctive paternalism becomes formally coercive through commitment and treatment against will. Szasz – Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences (1980).
Even if one disagrees with Szasz’s larger polemic, the structural point is indispensable for this essay: modernity often changes the vocabulary while leaving the power-structure intact. The older world says “possession” and negotiates responsibility through confession, exorcism, and communal meaning. The modern world says “illness,” and responsibility becomes either erased or enforced inconsistently—while coercion persists under new legitimacy.
That is exactly why “just call it hallucination” is not neutral. It is not only reduction; it is also a political move that silently reassigns authority.
Now we can name the bridge directly.
- Daimōn names a mediating agency that can shape life, fate, and perception—sometimes helpful, sometimes dangerous. In Russell’s account, the term’s semantic range narrows historically until “demon” becomes a hostile spirit. Russell – The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (1977).
- Demonology (especially Christian) refines agency into categories: obsession vs possession; involuntary attack vs temptation; assault on body vs assault on will. Russell – Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (1981).
- Pact juridicizes agency: the hostile power becomes a contract partner; surrender becomes legible to courts; the social order can now prosecute the relationship as treason against God and society. Russell – Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (1986).
- Occult philosophy and witch-hunting reveal the class and institutional dimension: elite theories can “manipulate and intensify from above” and hide political elimination inside “diabolic propaganda.” Yates – The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979).
- Psychiatry re-names the domain and often moves coercion into medical form, where it can be rationalized as care. Szasz – Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences (1980).
- Dopamine (as shorthand for modern reward/learning circuitry) becomes a dominant explanatory idiom for compulsion. It is valuable—but it is also incomplete if it becomes an ontology that erases the lived autonomy of the agency-experience.
So the correct modern sentence is not “spirits are dopamine.”
It is this:
Dopamine-language explains part of the mechanism by which agency is reallocated, compulsions are reinforced, and attention is captured—but it does not eliminate the phenomenological fact that many people experience this capture as an Other with intention. Historically, cultures called that Other a spirit; modernity calls it craving, compulsion, disorder, circuitry. The object has shifted; the experience of agency has not.
If we keep the bridge intact, addiction can be stated cleanly without mysticism:
Addiction is prolonged exposure to an autonomous agency of relief that reorganizes desire, attention, and obligation, while demanding repeated submission and exacting payment.
Medieval culture mapped that structure as pact with demons. Modern culture maps it as neurochemical reinforcement plus diagnosis. But the lived truth—the binding, the loss of command, the sense of being “led,” the internal adversary—remains close to the earlier descriptions of obsession/temptation and possession-like invasion. Russell – Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (1981).
And this is where our “pharmakia” emphasis cuts deeper than pop-spirituality: traditional societies that dealt in spirits did so with containment—rare summoning, ritual limits, communal interpretation. Modernity mass-produces pharmaka while stripping containment, leaving the individual alone with unmediated agency-invasion. That is not progress; it is exposure without language.
Modern addiction is not “belief in spirits.”
It is spirit-contact without a sanctioned vocabulary—and therefore without limit, mediation, or intelligible negotiation.
And that is why our first rule stands: do not reduce spirits to metaphors. Reduction doesn’t end the agencies; it merely blinds the subject to what is happening and hands authority to whichever institution gets to name the experience next.
References
- Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (1977).
- Jeffrey Burton Russell, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (1981).
- Jeffrey Burton Russell, Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (1986).
- Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979).
- Thomas S. Szasz, Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences (1980).
Brenton L. Delp MFT
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