What is a demon, anyway, to a modern 21st century, university-educated, Internet-connected Christian? Is it a malevolent, conscious entity that schemes to possess our minds and bodies? Or is it an antiquated folk psychology metaphor for the breakdown of the internal processes of our brains?

I’m used to holding two world views in my head simultaneously when it comes to such concepts. There’s the traditional Christian world view I was brought up to believe, and still do, and there’s the world view of secular, scientific, consensus reality, which I was educated and socialized to believe, and still do. On many issues the two are not in any disagreement. Where they do disagree, I have synthesis work to do, or when they cannot be reconciled, I at least understand that the second world view has the only vocabulary I can use to communicate with everyone else: if I want to use the first, I have to lay down paragraphs of groundwork before I can begin speaking, like this one.

Demons, to me, were in the same category as black holes and dinosaurs: outrageous, extraordinary, definitely real, but something which I had never encountered, nor was likely to. I thought of them as sort of extinct, a breed of spiritual entity that used to be more dominant. There were all those stories in the Gospels, for example, of Jesus casting out demons from people, where the per capita demon population seemed to be a lot higher than it is now.

Some of those stories do appear to be about mental illnesses or brain disorders, and the people of that time would have labeled most behavior they didn’t understand as a demon. In the same way, we modern people label most behavior we don’t understand as “psycho”, by which we mean a broken-down mind or brain, with little interest in the specific way in which it broke down, thinking of it as a kind of manufacturing defect.

But between the idea of a sentient, malevolent takeover and the crumbling of an internal defect is the idea of a virus. A virus is a strange entity. Not even alive, not able to metabolize or reproduce on its own, it simply insinuates itself into the metabolic machinery of a cell, causing that cell to create more viruses, instead of more cells. The cell lyses (bursts and spills out viruses), and the cycle continues. But the viruses don’t move, or swarm, or “attack” in any real sense of the word; they just…hang out until they contact a cell.

The virus doesn’t have any malevolent plans, doesn’t organize, doesn’t even gain anything in its victory. Yet it does “take over” the cell, does make it do things it wouldn’t do otherwise, and does spread. In a spiritual ecosystem, doesn’t it make sense that viral demons are common?

A close cousin of this viral type of demon would be the meme, which is, for the uninitiated, like a piece of an idea. It can be something as simple as a tune which you can’t get out of your head. Our minds and spirits can play host to these entities in just the same way that our bodies can play hosts to biological viruses. Some are benign. Some are not.

Once my perspective shifted in this small way, I found myself reinterpreting many things that I have seen or read or that have happened to me. If you take the time to reflect on what goes on in your mind, you may be surprised at what drifts by that isn’t necessarily generated by you. You might be especially surprised at some decisions you end up making that aren’t, on examination, your own choices. It made me realize that I’ve had encounters with real demons after all.

My cosmology has room in it for all of these kinds of causes of psychological and spiritual illness. We can wear out or break down due to simple stress or some subtle defect; we can be unbalanced by too many or not enough of certain chemicals; we make our own bad decisions and reap the consequences—but sometimes, we cross paths with something which isn’t us, which wants to damage us, and will, if not resisted.