Translating Possession into the Language of Modernity
Modernity prides itself on having abolished spirits. Drugs, we are told, do not summon daemons; they merely alter neurochemistry. Visions are hallucinations, voices are symptoms, agency dissolves into mechanism. And yet the lived experience of intoxication—especially in its extreme or chronic forms—stubbornly refuses this demystification. Users do not merely report altered perception; they report being addressed, commanded, overridden. They speak of something that “took over,” something that “wanted more,” something that was not identical with themselves. Historically, such experiences were named without hesitation: spirits were present.
The task of modern thought is not to regress to superstition nor to dismiss these experiences as primitive error, but to translate their referent without dissolving their force. If we provisionally assume—methodologically, not metaphysically—that drugs can conjure spirits, what would that mean in modern terms?
From antiquity, pharmakon named a substance that was simultaneously remedy, poison, and charm. Its defining feature was not its chemistry but its capacity to alter agency. Pharmaka changed not only what one perceived, but who seemed to be acting. This ambiguity persisted until late modernity, when pharmacology reduced substances to biochemical levers and psychology reduced their effects to internal malfunction.
Yet reduction comes at a cost. It explains how substances act on the brain but not why their effects are experienced as intrusive, autonomous, and coercive. The language of mechanism fails precisely where the experience becomes most decisive: at the level of agency.
Here Jung’s work—particularly as interpreted by Liz Greene—remains indispensable. Jung consistently refused to treat imaginal figures as passive byproducts of cognition. In active imagination, figures appear that speak, resist, argue, and demand. As Jung writes, these images are “not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors” (Jung, Collected Works, vol. 4, ¶764). Greene demonstrates that Jung understood this phenomenon through the lineage of ancient theurgy, especially Iamblichus, in which daimons were not metaphors but mediating agencies encountered under conditions of receptivity (epitedeiotes) rather than egoic control (Greene 2018, chs. 3–4) Greene – Jung’s Studies in Astrology: Prophecy, Magic, and the Qualities of Time.
Drugs, in this sense, function as unstructured theurgic technologies. They weaken ego-boundaries and symbolic distance, allowing imaginal agencies to operate directly rather than representationally. What emerges is not fantasy but experienced otherness.
To translate “spirit” into modern language without trivializing it, we can define it phenomenologically:
A spirit is an experienced agency that is not identical with the ego, not subject to voluntary control, yet capable of intention, persuasion, and compulsion.
This definition does not assert the independent metaphysical existence of spirits. It asserts something far more modest—and far more difficult to dismiss: people experience agencies that act upon them.
Modern psychology has terms for fragments of this phenomenon—complexes, dissociation, compulsions—but it resists naming the agency itself. “Hallucination” denies intention. “Neurochemical event” denies meaning. “Symptom” denies responsibility. The ancient term spirit persists not because it is primitive, but because modern language has not replaced it at the level of experience.
Nowhere is this clearer than in addiction. Addicted persons do not describe themselves as merely dysregulated. They describe being driven. Desire becomes alien. Attention is hijacked. Promises are overridden. The will is no longer sovereign.
In premodern language, this was possession. In modern language, it is disease.
Here Thomas Szasz becomes indispensable. Szasz argued that what modern psychiatry calls “mental illness” often functions as amoral and political symbol, not a medical discovery. Psychiatric diagnoses relocate conflicts of responsibility, intention, and social control into the language of pathology, thereby legitimating coercion while obscuring agency (Szasz 1987, pp. ix–xv, 45–47, 133–170) Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1987.
Szasz did not deny suffering. He denied that suffering required medicalization to be real. In this light, addiction appears not as a disease in the strict biological sense, but as a relationship to an autonomous agency that modernity refuses to name. Where earlier cultures spoke of spirits and demanded ritual containment, modernity speaks of illness and demands compliance.
Both languages attempt to manage the same phenomenon. One names agency too vividly; the other denies it too completely.
Traditional cultures that worked with spirits did so rarely, ritually, and with communal containment. Modernity mass-produces pharmaka, strips ritual of legitimacy, and leaves individuals alone with the agencies they unleash. The result is not enlightenment but exposure.
Thus addiction can be described, without mysticism, as:
sustained exposure to an autonomous agency that reorganizes desire, attention, and obligation while presenting itself as relief.
This formulation preserves the experiential truth of possession while remaining intelligible to modern thought. It explains why addiction feels moral without being chosen, coercive without an external jailer, intimate without being voluntary.
Drugs do not conjure spirits because the world is enchanted. They conjure spirits because agency is not exhausted by the ego, and certain substances dissolve the structures that normally keep that fact at bay. Premodern cultures named this honestly. Modernity, uneasy with agency it cannot master, renamed it illness.
The question is not whether spirits exist, but whether modern language is adequate to experiences that still command, seduce, and destroy. Until it is, spirits will continue to appear—not as beliefs, but as lived realities—precisely where modern explanations insist they cannot.
References
- Greene, Liz. Jung’s Studies in Astrology: Prophecy, Magic, and the Qualities of Time. London & New York: Routledge, 2018. Chapters 3–4 (“Active Imagination and Theurgy”; “Summoning the Daimon”).
- Jung, C. G. Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Vol. 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961. ¶764.
- Szasz, Thomas. Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1987. Especially Introduction; Part III (“Mental Illness as Metaphor,” “Intentionality,” “Responsibility”).
Brenton L. Delp
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