Modernity’s reflex response to experiences traditionally described as encounters with spirits is to dissolve them into metaphor. Spirits, we are told, are merely hallucinations, projections, or symbolic representations of unconscious material. This move appears sophisticated, but it fails both historically and clinically. It explains nothing about the autonomy of such experiences, nothing about their coercive force, nothing about their remarkable consistency across cultures and epochs, and nothing about their capacity to act against the subject’s will. To say “it is only a hallucination” is to redescribe the phenomenon while leaving its central feature—experienced agency—untouched.
C. G. Jung warned explicitly against this reduction. In his work on active imagination and theurgy, imaginal figures do not behave as inert psychic contents but as agencies that resist, demand, and confront the ego. They argue, contradict, seduce, threaten, and instruct. They are encountered, not fabricated. As Jung wrote, such imaginal contents are “not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors” (Jung, Collected Works, vol. 4, ¶764). Liz Greene has demonstrated that Jung consciously situated this phenomenon within the lineage of late-antique theurgy, where imaginal presences were understood as autonomous intermediaries rather than symbolic fictions (Greene, Jung’s Studies in Astrology, 2018).
For this reason, a stricter formulation is required.
In modern language, a spirit may be defined as an autonomous agency of experience: an experienced presence that is not identical with the ego and not immediately subject to voluntary control, yet capable of intention, demand, persuasion, and compulsion. This definition is phenomenological rather than metaphysical. It describes experience as it is lived without making ontological claims about the ultimate nature of such agencies. It is also non-reductive, in that it does not dismiss agency by translating it prematurely into mechanism. Crucially, modernity does not require us to deny spirits; it requires us to relocate them—from cosmology to agency.
When approached from this perspective, the effects of psychoactive substances become historically intelligible. Across cultures and epochs, drugs reliably perform three functions.
First, they disinhibit imaginal autonomy. Psychoactive substances weaken ego-boundary enforcement. What was previously latent, marginal, or symbolically mediated gains voice and initiative. Background psychic material ceases to remain background. Jung’s observation regarding the potency of imaginal contents applies with particular force here, and Greene’s analysis of Jung’s inner cosmology confirms that these figures were understood as agents encountered under altered conditions of receptivity rather than as products of voluntary fantasy (Greene 2018).
Second, drugs alter the experience of agency itself. Users do not merely see images or feel sensations; they experience themselves as being addressed, commanded, accompanied, and at times overridden. Hence the striking regularity of first-person testimony: “It wasn’t me,” “Something took over,” “I was led.” Historically, that “something” was named without embarrassment. It was called a spirit.
Third, psychoactive substances collapse symbolic distance. Images stop being about things and begin acting as things. Representation gives way to presence. This collapse of mediation is the technical heart of pharmakia: the substance as agent that abolishes symbolic separation and exposes the subject directly to operative forces.
At this point, the persistence of the word spirit becomes intelligible. In late antiquity and theurgic philosophy—particularly in Iamblichus—a daimōn was not a ghostly apparition but a mediating intelligence, a force that connected levels of reality and operated through receptivity (epitedeiotes) rather than through conscious will. Such agencies could not be commanded at will; they could only be encountered under specific conditions. Greene shows that Jung explicitly recognized this lineage when he treated imaginal figures as encountered presences rather than psychological inventions (Greene 2018).
Modern psychology lacks an adequate replacement term. “Neurochemical event” explains mechanism but evacuates meaning. “Hallucination” denies agency. “Archetype” is too abstract to account for lived coercion. The term spirit therefore persists not because modernity is primitive, but because modernity has not replaced it at the level of experience. We retain the word while stripping it of superstition, not of seriousness.
From this perspective, drugs may be described precisely as summoning technologies. Psychoactive substances function as non-symbolic techniques that expose the subject to autonomous agencies normally regulated by ego structure, cultural containment, and ritual mediation. This claim is not mystical. Structurally, it is identical to hypnosis, dissociation, possession states, and compulsive addiction. What differentiates drug-induced summoning from traditional forms is not the presence of agency, but the absence of containment.
It is here that addiction must be rethought. Traditional cultures summoned spirits rarely, did so within strict ritual limits, and interpreted possession as dangerous but meaningful. Modernity, by contrast, mass-produces pharmaka, strips away ritual and cosmology, and leaves the individual alone with agency invasion. In modern terms, addiction can therefore be described as a long-term captivity to an autonomous agency that reorganizes desire, attention, and obligation while presenting itself as relief. This is a spirit-description translated into modern language, not a romantic revival of premodern belief.
The failure of psychiatry to engage this phenomenon was already diagnosed by Thomas Szasz. Szasz argued that psychiatry systematically replaces moral–symbolic language with medical coercion while leaving relations of power intact (Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences, 1987). In older frameworks, possession implied negotiated responsibility. In modern frameworks, illness either erases responsibility or enforces it inconsistently. Neither approach directly confronts the problem of agency introduced by drugs.
A clean modern formulation therefore becomes possible without mysticism: drugs do not merely change brain chemistry; they alter the structure of agency. They allow forces normally held in symbolic or imaginal form to act directly upon attention, desire, and will. Historically, such forces were called spirits. Modernity lacks a better term not because it is more advanced, but because it refuses to name agency where agency is experienced.
The final diagnostic line follows inevitably. Modern addiction is not belief in spirits. It is exposure to them without language, ritual, or limit.
Brenton L. Delp MFT
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