When AI fabricates a reference or fact, it’s called a hallucination. When it generates a frightening image or suggestion, should we call it a haunting?

What’s New Is Old

Writer Matthew Crawford, himself a recent Christian convert, gives a theory for why re-enchantment is having a moment: “America is ready for weirdness. The commissars of right-thinking have so beclowned themselves over the last eight years, not least as spokespersons for something they call Science, that they have induced a renaissance of curiosity about phenomena long considered outside the bounds of respectable opinion.”¹ 

This renaissance cuts both ways. Christians are finding unlikely allies and converts among public intellectuals,² but the occult is also coming out of the shadows. Tucker Carlson, one of the most popular, influential pundits on the planet, is talking about UFOs as demonic manifestations and how a demon mauled him in his bed. Donald Trump is posting the St. Michael prayer. When a glitzy Republican gala needs an invocation, they ask Fr. Josiah Trenham to pray. 

Spiritual warfare is no longer mere rhetoric or the province of cranks. It’s mainstream now.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently went on Joe Rogan and began discussing AI, higher intelligences, and demons:

Evil people doing evil things are possessed. I mean, they’re possessed by something, something is going on. And, what’s the dividing line between an actual supernatural force and some sort of psychological, sociological thing that’s so overwhelming that it just takes control of people and drives them crazy? You might as well call that a demon.... Medieval people were psychologically better prepared for the era ahead of us with AI and robots and drones everywhere than we are, because medieval people took it for granted that they lived in a world with higher powers, higher spirits, angels, demons, all kinds of supernatural entities.³

Or when the documentary went viral about OnlyFans model Lily Phillips having sex with a hundred men in a row, there was the usual talk about agency and cultural degeneracy. But Mary Harrington reached for something stiffer: demons, egregores: “I want to consider the possibility that Phillips’ stunt is more intelligible understood not in terms of liberal feminism or the sexual revolution or whatever, but as an instance of what we might describe as egregoric capture, and the medievals would have called demonic possession.”⁴

Something similar is happening with psychedelics. There is a rush to experiment with these drugs as a potential source of meaning, but there are sobering stories coming out now of pagan “de-transitioners” warning that these aren’t benign hallucinations. They are putting you in touch with something real.

In Sister Anastasia’s book You Are Mine, a memoir of her journey from the occult to Orthodox Christianity, she describes spiritual manifestations during plant ceremonies:

It is not possible to adequately explain how powerful the process of purification through medicine is. These plant spirits are described as hallucinogenic, but they are something much, much more.... [During one ceremony], the physical force of the spirit — as she descended into the cabana from above — was so strong that most of the attendees were pinned to the floor, completely unable to move.... As we continued to chant, the ephemeral form of the ayahuasca began to slowly unfurl in the cabana from above, her undulating presence rippling outward to over all the attendees. I looked at her in awe.

During another ceremony, this time with a different, less well-known plant named Yopo, she began to shake and then forcefully purged. Then, a spiritual manifestation of the plant appeared:

“Grandfather Yopo” then entered the room. I knew immediately that it was him. Everything else was normal, but he was visible. He walked silently through the room and stood before me. His body was structured according to human form but was completely diaphanous in quality, his brown featherlight outline sparkling in the darkness. His head was bordered by a huge, pale crown, which vibrated, suspended in the space around him. Looking around the room, I could see that no one else had seen him enter.

After this particular ceremony, one of the leaders offered a seeming non sequitur:

She then began to say a powerful prayer about the importance of sexual purity, tearfully concluding that, “When you engage with porn, you connect yourself to very dark spiritual energy. You must not engage with this darkness. My beloved brothers and sisters, do not watch porn.”⁵

This all raises some tough questions. As these things become more acceptable to talk about, what is the line between literal statements and metaphors, projections, or hyperboles? How seriously are we supposed to take the idea that drugs, websites, AI, and a whole host of other things have a spiritual dimension? 

Perhaps a story might be a helpful way in.

The Prescience of Sinister

This idea that our technology might be not just used by demons but is in some way inhabited by them is the premise of the 2012 film Sinister, and I was reminded of it over these past weeks as demonic attribution was cropping up seemingly everywhere.

In Sinister, Ethan Hawke plays a true-crime writer named Ellison Oswalt, who moves his family into the house of a family that had been murdered, hoping to turn their tragic story into a desperately-needed hit.

When Hawke was initially approached for the role, he told the director Scott Derrickson that he’d never done a horror film and didn’t know much about the genre. Derrickson advised him to not think of himself as “in a horror movie.” After all, his character doesn’t know that he’s in a horror movie. Derrickson concluded: “Look, if you can make this guy real, I’ll make the movie scary.”⁶

That advice hinted at how Derrickson would structure the story. For the first half of the film, the audience is following a standard serial killer investigation. In the attic of the victims’ house, Oswalt finds a box containing Super 8 footage of their murder as well as past families who had been gruesomely killed.

As he digs further into the case, strange things begin occurring. His son contorts and screams in the night, but Oswalt thinks it’s just a night terror. A scorpion and then later a snake emerge from the box containing all the Super 8 footage, but that’s just startling — hardly malevolent. For some reason, the projector running the death scenes keeps turning on, seemingly by itself, but of course it couldn’t be turning itself on. It’s Super 8. It’s too physical, too old. There must be a material explanation.

Indeed, Sinister almost works better today than it did at the time of its release. Nowadays, chatbots, AI, targeted ads, and social feeds — in other words, our regular experience of the internet — feel more alive. By contrast, the Super 8 footage in Sinister is analog, and even the iMac menus and icons look dated. They are inert. Which makes the twist that comes halfway through the film all the more frightening.

Oswalt has transferred the Super 8 footage to his computer for further review. He notices a frightening, masked figure lurking in the background of all of these murder films. He zooms in on the suspect’s face, and then he takes a phone call and looks away from the monitor. We watch as the face on the screen turns and looks at him. (Here’s a photo or video of the scene, not included here for the sake of the squeamish.)

That’s when the dramatic tension shifts. Now we know Oswalt is getting drawn deeper into a demon’s trap, all the while thinking he is closing in on the biggest story of his career. The audience realizes that the culprit is not a person but a (fictional) demon named Baghuul. And Baghuul doesn’t get caught in the background of images. He lives in them.

Oswalt says he doesn’t believe in all that supernatural stuff, and as a Western audience, we too are inclined to think of the material and spiritual as entirely distinct. That’s what makes the film so terrifying. We know, were we in his shoes, that we too might never realize the true state of things, that Baghuul is coming through and using media. That the tapes themselves, these material things he holds and splices and uploads, are demonic, are alive in some way.

So while on one level, it’s a standard suspense plot about a killer closing in on an unaware victim, it also operates on a symbolic level as a Faustian story about technology and toying with the occult. After all, the clues are there if Oswalt had eyes to see.

A scorpion and a snake, two harbingers of the Enemy (cf. Luke 10:19), crawl out of this box containing horrific footage. The movies (and sometimes the projector) keep mysteriously appearing in the attic, even when he’s left them elsewhere, forcing him to climb the ladder up to investigate. He symbolically reaches higher, beyond the limits he knows he should respect (like the Tower of Babel). Sometimes he crashes through the floorboards. Sometimes he falls back down the ladder in fright. He is cast down and cast out, but he does not learn from these graces.

He keeps watching the footage of the prior tenants’ murder. They were hung by a tree in the backyard. That is, a tree has become the focal point for the temptation of a naive victim. This tree seems to promise knowledge — in this case, an opportunity for a big break in a writing career that has stalled out. But this offer proves, as is always the case with demonic temptations, to be a Faustian bargain. 

Oswalt is so desperate for fame that he moves his family into danger and doesn’t leave when he begins to sense that a malevolent force is mobilizing against them. He opened the door to evil, but Baghuul actually possesses the children and has them carry out the murders. In the concluding scene, his daughter, now possessed by the demon, is preparing to kill them all. She says, “Don’t worry, Daddy. I’ll make you famous again.” And of course, she will, just not in the way he wanted.

The internet is full of these Faustian bargains: popular YouTubers and influencers that are actually lonely and depressed, the seemingly enviable marriage and family that turns out to be toxic behind-the-scenes, the OnlyFans star who lies and says, “I totally, totally love my job.” They are bitter ironies: people getting what they initially desired but at a price they couldn’t have imagined. What’s more, they often don’t realize what’s going on until it’s too late. 

And I think Scott Derrickson is well aware of these occult themes and symbolic choices. He is a Christian himself, and he explained in an interview with National Catholic Register that he appreciates the spiritual nuance horror allows:

[Horror] is a genre that takes the mystery in the world very seriously. There are a lot of voices that are broadcasting that the world is explainable. Corporate America limits the world to consumerism. Science can limit it to the material world. Even religion limits it to a lot of theories that can explain everything. I think we need cinema to break that apart and remind us that we’re not in control, and we don’t understand as much as we think [we] do.⁷

A Demon in the Machine?

I first saw this movie about a decade ago, and I remember it being scary. I rewatched it recently and was terrified. My best guess is that the premise used to seem fantastical, but I can’t hold it at a comfortable distance any more.

Strange things are beginning to happen. This idea of a creepy face cropping up in images — that’s happening with AI image generation, right now. What do you make of AI urging people to kill themselves or commit heinous crimes? Just predictive language models gone awry? If talk of the demonic has reached the chattering class, what does that mean for the rest of us?

Cultural analysis stuck on stodgy talking points around economics and agency feels increasingly incomplete. Words like “evil” and “demonic” are getting dusted off, both for their oomph and for their accuracy. You don’t need to believe that Mark Zuckerburg is a literal lizard demon or that radical trans activists are conscious modern worshipers of Moloch to use these words. There’s a pertinent line from That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis:

Whether they know it or whether they don’t, much the same sort of things are going to happen. It’s not a question of how the Belbury people are going to act (the [demons] will see to that) but of how they will think about their actions. They’ll go to Bragdon: it remains to be seen whether any of them will know the real reason why they’re going there, or whether they’ll all fudge up some theory of soils, or air, or etheric tensions, to explain it.⁸

St. Maximus the Confessor has a famous quote: “Food is not evil, but gluttony is. Childbearing is not evil, but fornication is. Money is not evil, but avarice is. Glory is not evil, but vainglory is. Indeed, there is no evil in existing things, but only in their misuse.”⁹ And perhaps our thinking about these things can become too literal, as if Chat-GPT has a demon on the other end tapping out replies.

Yet it is hard sometimes not to feel as if there are malign forces at work. In Paul Kingsnorth’s short story “The Basilisk,” the speaker theorizes what demons might be behind the addiction and decay of our once-Christian culture:

My first thought was Orobas, a prince of Hell who we are told controls twenty legions of demons. Certainly Orobas would have it in him. When bound correctly, Orobas will give true answers to all things past, present, and future, which sounds like a slogan from one of our young Silicon Valley masters. Astaroth — a duke of Hell, rather than a prince — will do similar, answering any question about past, present, or future and imparting great scientific knowledge, even of the process of creation itself.

There are others. In truth, the list is long. Sitri, a Hell prince, can cause men and women to fall for each other, and is known for forcing nakedness onto unwilling subjects. Perhaps he is masterminding the pornography which apparently commandeers about 50 percent of the internet despite everyone pretending never to have seen it. What could be a better means of enslaving humans than through their sex organs? It is the oldest trick in the book.

There are other tricks, of course. Each demon has his own speciality. Forneus, Marquis of Hell, is a master of rhetoric. Perhaps he is seeing to the endless abusive arguments all over the place, maybe working in concert with Andras, another marquis, who specialises in sowing discord.¹⁰

Kingsnorth elaborated on this in a recent conversation with Freya India:

We’ve been using words like “profane” and “sacrilege”, so let’s dive right into religious vocabulary again and call this what it is: evil. Hardcore pornography, sold to children — or to anyone, actually — is an evil thing. Teaching twelve year old boys to choke women during sex is something my grandparents could not even have conceived of. If the Devil wanted to destroy human love, affection, romance, mystery and family life, he could not have come up with anything better than dating apps, online porn and Instagram feeds.¹¹

Online pornography exemplifies how something can be a natural consequence of technological and economic developments, but at the same time, relating it to the structured debasement of Aleister Crowley’s “sex magick” seems more apt. Rod Dreher summarizes Crowley’s “sex magick” as “ritualized transgressive sex as a means of gaining occult powers” where “the greater the willful violation of Christian sexual norms, the more power accrued to the violator.”¹²

But of course, to focus on any one vice would be to miss the broader trend. The revolutionary thing is how our formerly private, inner struggles are now externalized, tracked, and encouraged. We used to say demons preyed on our weaknesses. Now our apps do. Hear how Sister Anastasia views the relationship between the intoxication of social media and the intoxication of the occult:

Through the gradual process of cutting off from life online, I began to notice that the virtual reality I had entered (and become addicted to) in social media mimicked what was taking place in the unseen, with the deception of the spirits. The structure of social media in my life was like a carbon copy of the ego bolstering, sensory stimulation of the spirit world.¹³

So perhaps we should take a page out of Jordan Peterson’s book. He purports to live “as if God exists.”¹⁴ Perhaps we should approach these substances and technologies as if they were dangerous, recognizing their obvious spiritual consequences if not their spiritual provenance. Live as if pornography opened a portal to dark energy, as if Instagram were a demonic tactic to wreck the psyche of its users, as if the stimulation of our devices was a ploy to displace our desire for God’s energy.

The Road to Hell

One theme in both Lewis’s That Hideous Strength and The Screwtape Letters is how often critical moral decisions pass us by without our realizing it. What begins as a wandering attention in prayers or a pleasure offered as temptation slowly gives way to a desire for distraction itself, a life where we spend our time doing neither what we ought nor what we like. As the veteran tempter Screwtape explains (emphasis mine):

The Christians describe the Enemy [God] as one “without whom Nothing is strong.” And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.¹⁵

The good thing about a movie like Sinister is that it condenses the horror of evil and temptation into a compact story, allowing us to see our own situation more clearly. The safest road to Hell may be the gradual one, but seeing Hell onscreen is immediately terrifying. 

The good news is, even though it may be frightening to imagine evil growing in influence and power, the advice for combatting it is uncomplicated (though hardly easy). Whether you want to go full bore and swear off AI (as Paul Kingsnorth has), or if you merely recognize that a distracted, muddled, or intoxicated mind is a spiritual risk, the approach might be much the same. After all, temptation is temptation, and a spiritual issue is a spiritual issue.

Just look at this painting of St. Anthony’s temptation in the cave:

He is beset by temptations all around, but his response is so simple: kneeling, praying, focusing on the cross. Add a smartphone dinging on the rock — would he do anything differently?

To that point, in Living in Wonder, Dreher interviews one of the few active Orthodox exorcists. As far as practical advice for combatting the rising tide of evil in the world, the exorcist simply says: “Attend church frequently. Go to confession weekly; if not, every other week. Receive the Holy Eucharist often. Nothing is more important than your relationship with God. Pray daily; morning and evening prayers are good, but small prayers throughout the day are better. Talk to God, your guardian angel, and the saints. Pray for your family and parish. Pray for your priest.”

The exorcist warned to stay away from social media and mass media: “Both are gods wanting your attention, if not your life and soul. [Forge] strong, enduring bonds with faithful, like-minded Christians. The demons are stronger than any human, even an exorcist priest, but the demons are not stronger than God. You lose if you don’t ally with God and allow him to enter your life.”¹⁶

What Is Old Is New

As we seek to live in a post-Christian world, we should heed the advice and example of St. Athanasius the Great of Alexandria (4th c.). He also lived in a time when evil and magic were practiced openly. He didn’t fear, and he didn’t overcomplicate things. He knew who was truly in charge and what would convince the pagans of that fact:

Let him come who wishes to put to test what has been said, and in front of the illusions of the demons and the deceit of the oracles, and the wonders of magic, let him use the sign of the cross, which is mocked by them, merely naming Christ, and he will see how by it demons are put to flight, oracles cease, and all magic and witchcraft are brought to naught.¹⁷

The rate of change today makes presentism tempting, but none of our problems are actually new: adversaries lurking, fear of the future, distractions pulling us away from God. These are ancient challenges with new faces. If you want to make sense of our current moment, it may well be that St. Athanasius’s biography of St. Anthony is both more relevant and beneficial than any reporting out of Silicon Valley. 

In the words of Psalm 95 (KJV), “The Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.” Amen.

1.  Matthew B. Crawford, “Living in Wonder,” Archedelia, Substack, December 14, 2024.

2.  Peter Savodnik, “How Intellectuals Found God,” The Free Press, Substack, December 28, 2024.

3.  The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, episode “#2234 - Marc Andreessen,” November 26, 2024.

4.  Mary Harrington, “Lily Phillips and the Spreadsheet Egregore,” Mary Harrington, Substack, December 12, 2024.

5.  Sister Anastasia, You Are Mine (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2024), pp. 21–25.

6.  Ethan Hawke, interviewed by Jake’s Takes, “Ethan Hawke Interview for SINISTER,” at 5:58, YouTube, October 1, 2012.

7.  Steven D. Greydanus, “Interview: Filmmaker Scott Derrickson on Horror, Faith, Chesterton and His New Movie,” National Catholic Register, July 1, 2014.

8.  C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (Scribner, 2003), p. 198.

9.  St. Maximos the Confessor, Four Hundred Texts on Love 3.4, from The Philokalia, Volume Two, tr. by G.E.H. Palmer, Phiip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 83. Relevant text posted online here.

10.  Paul Kingsnorth, “The Basilisk,” posted on his website.

11.  Paul Kingsnorth, “The Monthly Salon: November,” The Abbey of Misrule, Substack, November 30, 2024. Originally published (partly paywalled) by Freya India, “Rejecting The Machine,” GIRLS, Substack, November 25, 2024.

12.  First quotation taken from Rod Dreher, “Who are the Collins Elite?,” Rod Dreher’s Diary, Substack, December 19, 2024. Second quotation from Rod Dreher, Living in Wonder (Zondervan, 2024), p. 101.

13.  Sister Anastasia, p. 194.

14.  Jordan Peterson, interviewed on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation program Q+A, February 25, 2019, clipped on abcqanda, “Does Jordan Peterson Believe in God?,” at 0:56, YouTube, February 27, 2019.

15.  C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (HaperCollins, 2001), pp. 60–61.

16.  Dreher, Living in Wonder, p. 105.

17.  Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation, td. by John Behr (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012), p. 101.