Demonic Summoning: A How To

Once again, we look at a coin with two sides. We dance along the edge, that tin sliver with the grooves. Perhaps by seeing both sides of this thing, we can get a greater grasp of its essence. 

Also, disclaimer: we once more have a narrator that is meant to be disagreed with. This should be obvious by how I've crafted him, but I really, really don't want you taking what he says to heart. 

Transcript

Well, well, well. Look at what you have your hands on here. Is it all that you imagined? Of course not. You must have thought that I’d take my job a bit more seriously here. After all, demons are beings of incredible power and infinite malice, are they not? Shouldn’t we deal with such beings with poise and an equally infinite amount of caution? 

No. You are already in the wrong mindset. What caused you to pick up this tome? It was some variety of hunger. Curiosity? Greed? Hatred. All wants. Desires. Only by emptying yourself of those things that make you YOU would have prevented you from finding my words. And those things, those hungers, they are exactly what you need, what you must be, for it is the antithesis of demonkind. 

Yes. You are not entirely wrong. At least, you are not entirely wrong about demons. You do not underestimate their power, or what they can and will do. Assassinations are as easy to them as snapping their fingers. Writing that scientific paper you’ve been working on, that you desperately hope to win international acclaim for? Demons do not see the world from the same angle that we do. Their eyes are round, while ours are flat. What was they have have seen, and what they have seen they have not. 

Demons are not meant to be. Not in the flowery sense that their malice towards the beings that populate existence cannot end, but in the truest sense possible. Demons are not meant to be. They are perversions, twisting of the laws. They are the death of the world, the end of time, and the shattering of possibility. And yet… they are here. Not here, here. But close. Closer than they ought to be, than they possibly could be. So close that the immense power of that which cannot be can simply be grasped, if you are willing to reach beyond the mirror. 

A demon will claim your soul. That is certain. Oh, you don’t believe souls exist? Good for you. What are you doing summoning demons, then? I have met the fool materialist or two who proceeded to lie to themselves and others that their soul was simply a fiction, even after they signed it over to that rasping insect with eighteen eyes. What then did the strange creature want it for? Where did it come from, then? What was the ritual, if all was a farce?

A demon will not just claim your soul. They seek to torment it. Not eternally, but simply until they are able to rend apart all of creation by mechanisms even they do not understand. Only then will your torment cease, as all of everything, every possibility, ever story, every smile, every scream, vanishes into that which could never be. This, as you might know, is bad. How long do we have until the end of creation? How long until their victory? 

Presumably longer than our lifespans. Probably much longer than that. In my conversations with demonkind, I have wormed from them the possibility that they have interacted with several dozen species of sapient being over the course of their unholy crusade. Surely each of those species, each being in their flock, thought that their end would come soon. Shall we think the same thing?

So we must pass the first hurdle. We must not even consider summoning a demon unless we are assured of our own damnation. I knew it of myself long ago. I will not say why, of course, but it should be obvious if one turns an eye inward. None of this ‘oh, I was rude to that one significant other, I’m going to hell’ type nonsense. No. For the risk-reward equation to balance out, you must know yourself to be a monster. And you must relish in it. 

You must be hungry. You must be STARVING. You must have been thrust into this life to chew and eat your fill, no matter what that fill is, no matter who you trample upon, no matter how many spines you break, no matter how much you spy that delicious RED. You must, if only for your own sake. You know. I know. We know each other. If we were to stare each other in the eyes, we would have to see the reason why. That is as far as you must understand damnation. That, and no closer. 

Only then is it worth it, realistically speaking. If you are one of the myriad, the countless unimportant souls who barely leave an imprint in their chair, let alone the world, then summoning a demon to smite your ex-girlfriend is probably not the best prospect. Getting a hobby might be better. Might take more of your rage and time. You must understand the hunger. You must be the hunger. It. Is. 


You. Are. Here, and now. Even if redemption was possible, even if there was enough cleaning fluid in the world to scrub the stains from your soul, you would not. Why? Because of the hunger. Every heartbeat, every pulse. Hungry. More. Now.

I feel I have reasonably corralled my audience. The last thing the world order needs is an endless stream of bumpkins summoning demons to kill and curse their neighbors; the power of the demonic must be kept within the hands of people who care for things greater than themselves, or for things that are far less. That is what the hunger is. Being a different size creature, a different size mind, than the world decided to cram you into. We know who we are. You know who you are.

So we get to step one. This is not ingredient collection, pentagram drawing, or even chanting. Step one is to recognize the weakness of demonkind, and to twist it to your benefit. Aye, even the lowliest of imps is more powerful in aggregate than an entire platoon of soldiers. But are they omniscient? All seeing? No. No, or they would have resolved their crusade ages ago. They know that you and I are damned in the same way an outside, narrow-minded observer might know us to be. They might see the estate you’ve bled the world for, the car you drive, the rapes you commit, the people overseas you kill… they see that, and that alone. They do know at the outset what occurs behind the mirror of the mind. They can, but they do not. There are few demons out there skilled enough to infiltrate a mortal mind and read our thoughts, and such a fact is foundational to our enterprise. Step one: you must act like you are seeking redemption.

I know, I know. Boring. Thankfully, we don’t have to do this for too long. If there is still a spark of hope or kindness flitting about your heart, embrace it. Let it speak for you. Let it weep tears and prayers into your bed. Donate a tenth of your estate to charity the next day. Compliment people in non-superficial ways. Take workloads off of your subordinates. You know. All the stuff that renders those people who could never be great as nothing more than dust on the wind. That is the person you will pretend to be. 

Demonkind will sense this change in you. The more dramatic you are about it, the better. Demons, though intellectually brilliant, are socially defunct creatures. How else could they be, harboring nothing but hatred for existence in their chitinous skulls? They cannot love each other or be overwhelmed with the pain of their existence, so they spend their eternities plotting away in the sad little shells of their minds, never really noticing things like tone of voice, body language, etc., you know, all of those things that even if we are too sociopathic not to understand naturally, learn by long term exposure to such elements in school or socialization. We learn to act, to pretend in a way that they cannot even fathom. So pretend. Act. I know you have it in you. If I could, you can, too.

If your display is dramatic enough, you will only need to let it last a week. It is approximately at the one week mark where you ought to hear voices in your head. Yes, yes. Get the sarcasm out of your system now. You always hear voices in your head. They’re called thoughts. And some of them will be just that. Just your own thoughts. Your own disgust at what you’re doing, the sheer frivolity of your actions, the absolute nonsense all of this entails. Demons aren’t real, you tell yourself. You made a fool out of us by crying ourselves to sleep/giving money to that homeless man/telling our wife that we loved her. You know, those kinds of thoughts will be racing through your head regardless. 

Step two. Argue with those thoughts. I know, I know. That sounds like madness. It is. By every defintion of the word, you and I are both mad. But we both know who I am. We both know what I did. And it was by no earthly means, mind you. My wits were the smallest portion of the equation, with the guns being only slightly larger. Believe in my words. Follow in my steps. We are on the path to true, crystalline order. We know that.

Argue with your thoughts. Not all of them. If for some reason your brain decides to vocalize its desire to have a bowl of sugary cereal for breakfast instead of the bran trash you like squeezing down your gullet, that is a normal, regular thought, and arguing with it is going to do nothing but waste you energy. Now the other thoughts, however, the ones that doubt the virtue of your plans, that poke fun at your obsequiosness, at the money you lost… argue with them. Fight them. If they collapse limply into the void, then it was a regular thought. If the voice responds…

Fight. Pretend. Act. Even when they are inside your head, they do not see everything. Most of their mental energy is set to arguing with you. They will not notice the trickery if you refrain from putting it in plain English. Lie. Demons deem themselves masters of lies. That is a lie that they tell to themselves, but are too ill-educated to even see the falsehood. You are human. You know more than anyone else how best to lie to yourself, or a voice pretending to lie to itself. It says you cannot find redemption. Tell it over and over again, no. And act like it. I know you hate it. But continue. Continue.

It will be an exhausting time. I know. And it will be especially bad if you are still carrying around your other commitments. So those vacation days you’ve saved up? The prodigy you’ve been mentoring? Now is the time to cash in on those investments. Your goal is to become a nervous wreck. The board of directors do not need to see you as that weakling. They will, but by following tried and true methodology, this moment of weakness will remain just that: a moment. 

Eventually, the voice will cease. In its place you will find yourself accosted by strange happenings in your residence; things will go missing, pots and pans will clank together, and strange shadows will appear on the wall without any source. This is the demon setting up its power. It will not, and cannot, by its obligations, move to kill you. Nor will it endeavor to kill any members of your household, whether they are bound to you by blood or not. So do not worry about that. You will not need to be hiring any new servants anytime soon, unless their constitutions are so weak that a mock haunting causes them to have a heart attack.

Pay no mind to these problems. The demon will only carry these out for a single day in my experience, for this part of their scheme would do little to seduce a potential do-gooder over to the realm of sin. No, once the demon has assured you of their presence, they will finally visit you. In private. Completely alone, at a time when you feel most vulnerable. 

Snatch your will from your gullet. It is here. It is time. Straighten your back. Act as though you do not understand the beast that has appeared before you, but also seem as though you are unafraid. Remember at all times that you are in no danger of anything other than losing the demon’s aid. It will not kill you, for deaths claimed by their own hands yield no souls for the fields of hell. Why? Some arcane rule beyond our grasping. But it assures us that even as the beast stands there with talons that look like threshing sychtes, eyes that ooze hatred and molten magma, flesh so rough and harsh that were it to collide into the wall even the bricks would snap… it assures us that even as we stare down the beast of our nightmares wearing only our underwear, we are the ones in power. We are the one they have come groveling to. 

Pinch, poke, prod at them. At this point, the demon is outside of your head and can no longer hear any of your thoughts. If you have lied to it sufficiently in the past, it will be a no-brainer to get it to offer its services to you in the form of a contract.

And that’s it. Everything from thereon out is up to you and the demon with whom you’re conversing. Just remember that demons are beings with utterly no regard for the value of human life, whether it be the life of your rival’s or your own. A good amount of legal clarification will go a long way, but don’t be too paranoid; the demons of reality are far too committed to their cause of sinner collection to be as tricksy as the genies of myth. You can probably add your addendums to their contract in fifteen or so minutes and be perfectly fine, so there’s no need to go hiring an actual trained consultant for this task and risk blowing your cover. 

Well, that’s not it. I lied, of course. There are plentiful other ways to summon demons. The problem is, of course, that they’re all outdated. Sacrificing a child on a bed of obsidian and silk is all fine and good, and perfectly logistically feasible, it’s just that… the aftermath is not. Back in the old days where there weren’t any cameras and you could vanish from one town to another, it was perfectly possible to summon dozens of demons in one lifetime without much consequence. Your summoned demon will not immediately give you the power to take on the combination of your local law enforcement, journalists, and conspiracy theorists that a child sacrifice will inevitably levy on your head, so dealing with that will require your own wits and resources. Do you trust yourself to do that? Even among the depraved, humility is worth having; a wise man picks his battles judiciously. By my method, the only battle you must have is with yourself, and that is a battle you know you can win. So win it.

Win it all. Eat. We all want to. It is true. In the end, we are the apotheosis of humanity. So much more than they ever could be.