Daemon

Daemon
Also called	the vampiric; the quiet ones; a hundred local names, none of them ours
Class	Other — immortal, ethereal, quasi-physical
Dwells	the liminal space between the Otherworld and human reality
Feeds on	the spiritual emanation of human suffering
Approach	patient, and by way of a wound that was already there
Earliest account	the Magi tablets, by inference only — no direct naming survives
Claimed by	Elder Cults, Gnostics, and by denial the CIA
Consensus among us Real, common, and the ordinary explanation for most of what Psychiatry calls illness. We are not agreed on whether that last clause is doctrine or wishful thinking, and the argument is old. contested inherited

Daemons are a class of immortal ethereal beings that are quasi-physical. They sit in a liminal space between the Otherworld and human reality. Lacking flesh and the ability to consume matter, they instead feast on the spiritual emanations put off by the suffering of human souls. inherited

These dark spirits are held, in this circle, to be the fundamental cause of much — if not all — mental illness suffered by human beings. contested

Understand what that sentence is doing before you repeat it. It is the oldest position we inherited and the one we can least defend, and a seeker who says it to an outsider will be correctly identified as a crank.

Varieties

Although all daemons are in a certain sense vampiric, this by no means makes them alike in their method of feeding. There are as many types of daemon as there are mental illnesses, and those daemons differ in temperament as much as a manic does from a non-verbal autistic. inherited

A melancholic sadist daemon is a solitary creature, slowly whispering poison into the ear of a vulnerable girl until she cuts herself. It has nothing in common, beyond appetite, with the rowdy swarms of schizophrenic daemons that infest a young man and shout abuse at him until he loses touch with reality and sinks into an existence defined by suffering. inherited

Nobody has produced a taxonomy of these that two cults agree on. The categories above are ours, they are borrowed, and they map suspiciously neatly onto a diagnostic manual written by people who do not believe in daemons at all. ⚠ warning

Competing accounts

The disagreement is not about whether daemons exist. It is about whether they cause the wound or arrive at one.

Nigel— personal correspondence, passed on with permission— 1998 firsthand

It did not put anything into me. I want that written down, because every account I have read since says that they put something in. It found a hole that was already open and it stayed in the doorway. The difference matters. If they made the hole, we are prey. If they only find them, we can close them.

Against it: He had been three weeks without sleep by the time he wrote this, and says so himself in the same letter.

unsigned— Elder Cult tome, quoted secondhand in two places that disagree on the wording inherited

The daemon is the author of the affliction and not its guest. Where it has fed, it has also cut. To say otherwise is to excuse it, and men who excuse it end by inviting it.

Against it: We have never seen this text. We have seen two people quote it, differently, and neither has seen it either.

a defector from the CIA programme, name withheld at their request— interview, three sessions— 2016 defector

Nobody in the programme used the word. The working assumption was that the phenomenon is real, that it is opportunistic rather than predatory, and that it can be induced by damaging the host first. That last part is what the budget was for.

Against it: A defector's account of an agency is shaped by the leaving. This one is unusually specific and unusually convenient for a wiki that already believed something like it.

If you are keeping score: two of the three say the wound comes first. The oldest source says otherwise, and the oldest source is the one we cannot examine.

Association with cults

Although many deny their existence, some of the gnostic mystery cults hidden in the shadowy underworld are rumoured to be headed by powerful Archdaemons, who have organised people much as a shepherd organises a flock — subsisting off the suffering of the many poor souls who have fallen under their sway. unverified

We have no account of an Archdaemon from anyone who claims to have met one. Every version of this reaches us at two removes or more, and the story is structurally identical each time, which is either corroboration or the signature of a story that travels well. contested

If you believe one has you

This section is practical and it is the reason the entry exists. ⚠ warning

• Do not attempt to name it. The naming rituals in circulation are inherited, unverified, and several of them are known to have preceded a collapse. Naming is a cult practice that assumes a taxonomy we do not have.
• Sleep, first and before anything else. Every firsthand account we hold, without exception, comes from someone who was badly short of it. That may be the door. It may also be why the account is unreliable. Both readings point the same way.
• Do not go alone and do not go quiet. Tell someone in this circle. A daemon is described everywhere as patient and solitary in its method; the one condition every source agrees is hostile to it is being watched by a second person.
• Consider Psychiatry seriously, and know what you are trading. Soma severs the connection. The hollowing described under Hylics is the price and we do not pretend otherwise. Some of us have paid it and are still here. That is a real option and this wiki will not shame you for taking it.

Nothing above is a cure. There is no account in our possession of a daemon being driven off, only of daemons that left.

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: Two Elder Cult tomes we have not seen directly, one defector interview across three sessions, roughly a decade of board archives, and one letter.

Compiled by: Assembled by Gershon from an earlier draft by an unnamed hand. The Varieties section is almost entirely inherited and reads like it.

Known weaknesses: The central claim — that daemons underlie mental illness generally — rests on inherited material and cannot be tested by us. The taxonomy mirrors a psychiatric one closely enough that it may simply be that manual, retold. The firsthand account is from a man who had not slept.

Wanted: Any account of a daemon that fed and then left of its own accord. Any sighting of the Elder Cult tome quoted above, in the original.