Are all demons evil?

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I’ve been exploring spiritual morality for some time now, assimilating the Swedenborgian perspective which holds that the universe issues forth from divine love and wisdom. Goodness is the love of all that is divine, particularly your neighbor. Evil is instead the love of self.

In this perspective, demons are defined by their evilness. That the only thing separating them from neutral or good spirits is their inner love for separation from God.

I personally have a hard time seeing either of these things as a good or bad thing. What is bad is actually causing harm to others, not in what is actually loved. When I play ping pong with my friends, there’s a lot of clever things we say to each other to cut each other down, and tactics don’t always have to operate on the ball, they can also be psychological. It’s just the context of the game though, no further consequences come out of it.

So what I propose is the separation of desire, what one wants to see and experience, from morality, whether one is good or bad. One can desire good things and yet be a bad person. And one can desire bad things yet still be a good person. This is part and parcel of Swedenborgianism, he says the only way you can see and experience and do good is through the Lord. If you desire evil, then through the Lord you can receive evil but it’s still good. If you desire good, then the Lord will keep it from being bad.

If you don’t go through the Lord, then bad things result from your actions. The Lord shields others from the consequences, so it’s you that has to face them. This is how you get to the horrors in Hell, where people are compelled to self-mutilate. It is not the Lord that does these things to these spirits, it’s the love these spirits have for hatred that invariably focuses on the self.

It is only in this realm, the physical one, where one’s actions can actually harm others. In the spiritual realm, all results from all actions gets filtered through the Lord. This isn’t to say that bad things don’t happen to good people, they do, it’s just that they happen according to the Lord, and so they have a higher purpose in the end. Angels can walk through the fires of hell unscathed, safe and secure in the Lord.

There are even more infinite shades of gray in the spiritual and heavenly realms than there are here. Exquisite pleasures and tortures abound, and spirits are constantly devising ever new ones.

To me, a demon is only interesting to the extent that they submit to the Lord. Love of self is ultimately boring. But the pleasures derived from pure self-sacrifice are similarly boring. To me what’s interesting is what happens when a person’s desires lead them down the garden path. The desires energize a world around them and something interesting is created.

A demon in this regime is someone who brings the ‘interesting’ part of the world, the consequences behind the desired actions. The protagonist wants to be a hero, the demon creates the little innocent children who get traumatised by the well-meaning heroism. And nurtures them to become heroes of their own, who then crusade against the monster who killed their parents.

Illusions abound in the spiritual world, far more prevalent than even here. A good demon, one interested in corruption, seduction, and vice, would be very, very good at making illusions, tricks of the mind that can visit horrors on good people without actually bringing them to any harm. The Lord can work with this, granting these creatures ever more power and delight while fastidiously avoiding any actual harm.

These are the kinds of friends I want in the spiritual realm.