As mentioned in the FAQ, Demonkind rejects the idea that Demons come from “Satan” or that they necessarily have anything to do with “evil”. Most often people use the word evil to mean sinful, blasphemous, socially unacceptable, disobedient, or wicked. Each of those terms comes originally from the desire of religious men to exert power over people, to control their beliefs, and to punish dissent and deviation. We rebuke that entire system. Our disobedience will look like “evil” in the eyes of slave-masters and their faithfully credulous servants; while their systematic abuse of anyone they can intimidate seems a bit awful to us.
Apart from disobedience, you might define “evil” as the conscious intention to harm someone else for one’s own benefit. Most would probably call serial killers, brutal military despots, and child molesters “evil”, and justly so. In large part this means they have denied someone else their humanity, their worth as a person, their right to not get killed or molested. The evil one just doesn’t care how many bodies they break, because to them those bodies have no meaning beyond a moment of pleasure, a grim compulsion, or a political necessity.
But even this fairly agreeable definition, discerning between intentional and unintentional harm, has problems of clarity. When cops shoot unarmed Black men they always say they “feared for their life” so they had to do it as a forgivable act of self defense. In this case the evil comes from the overall social order in which we live, where again some bodies get denied any human value, and this evil just finds a momentary expression through the individual cop. Of course some police really do enjoy that expression. The one cop in the moment might have had no prior intention to kill the person they just shot, but the system they serve and enforce actually did have the prior intention to devastate and diminish the inconveniently-growing second class population. See the Twitter feeds of @prisonculture and @breenewsome for an endless flow of supporting evidence.
What about the violent thoughts we all have now and then? And the thrill of being wicked? Darkness lives inside every one of us, and makes up an essential part of life as a whole being. Merely having those urges does not signify evil; the only thing that really matters is what we do with them. If you deny such urges, you end up with bottled up rage, frustration, and a ripped-apart feeling inside. Trying to “cleanse” or “expel” those thoughts is just denial. So the path to healing requires us to actively engage with our darkness, to own it, to consider it from multiple angles, and to keep it in balance by working hard to build our positive side as well.
Considering all the iniquities and inequities of life, it cannot surprise us that so many people grow bitter and vengeful, turning entirely to “the dark side”. This can take the form of spiritual rebellion such as adhering to the Left Hand Path, which encompasses a range of occult practices like Satanism, that deifies the individual ego; or it can take the more common forms of misanthropy, misogyny, self-hatred, nihilism, and trolling. Regrettably many on the LHP have historically also embraced those toxic mindsets. Those types take offense to “do-gooders”, “SJWs”, and occultists who proclaim they only use Right Hand Path “white magic”.
Demonkind argues that nearly everyone has two hands, at least metaphorically. To focus only on one side makes a person imbalanced and incomplete. Imagine someone who has full capability in both arms, learning to type or lift weights using only one hand, and refusing to develop the other hand! No matter how avidly they practice, they will never achieve their full potential, and they may in fact cripple themselves eventually. Imagine that same person applying their willful one-handedness to everything in their life, both emotional and physical. How absurd! Yet we see that behavior every day in the realms of spirituality and the occult.
The larger masses of people, and their faiths, claim to cleave only to good, rejecting evil. Yet those same groups enact genocide, systemic denigration of others, denial of value to those who do not conform, and bizarre hypocrisies against their proclaimed beliefs. Routinely, homophobic preachers and politicians get caught in gay sex acts; and the ones that wail about trans people in public restrooms turn out to have a history of abusing children themselves. These same “leaders”, pretending to uphold the moral high ground, rapaciously rob their constituents of money, security, and opportunity.
People typically pursue the Left Hand Path in reaction to that hypocrisy of the mainstream faithful. Satan represents the individual will, the One who will not bow. The LHP venerates and centers this individualist ideal. Demonkind shares that spirit of rebellion, and we enjoy choosing to seem wicked, as a refutation of passivity or obedience. We also support other darksiders in general as the minority population that does not reject their inherent dark aspects. We travel on this path but we do not limit ourselves by it.
If those on the dark path reject the idea of mutual support, clinging to the purity of their individualist ideal, they turn into something grotesque like a body builder who skipped leg day for their entire lives. This also calls to mind the agnostic potential of a knife or any other tool: some on the LHP act as though they only know how to use tools as weapons. We differ, choosing instead to acknowledge and address our natural wicked or selfish aspects without willfully dismissing other people’s well-being as a matter of principle.
We encourage you to master all the tools in your toolbox, including forceful disobedience and other outward signs that challenge the sleepy faithful, appearing “evil” to them. Yet we also call out to our brethren on all dark paths to avoid the larger, more toxic evil of intentionally harming or diminishing more vulnerable people, or using individualism as a cheap mask for negligence and cowardice. True power comes from balanced work.
