Restoration of the Demon

Glitching towards Bethlehem.

Joshua Reynolds, The Death of Cardinal Beaufort. Note the demon.

This is the second installment in my occasional series “Seeing Things,” where I explore contemporary modes of human perception. The first installment considered the relationship between the aesthetic and the interpretive view. This one takes up the question of enchantment.

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The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be—
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.
—Robert Frost

Contemporary man’s faith in reality, in an objective world defined and limited by its material qualities, is breaking down. We’re seeing a rebellion against the constraints of materiality, one manifestation of which is an increasing openness to supernatural visions. I don’t mean the visions of the imagination. I mean visions of a spirit world that appear as real as or realer than perceptions of the physical world. People have always, of course, been open to such visions. Society’s post-Enlightenment disenchantment has been much exaggerated. What’s different now is that the supernatural is moving from the personal sphere, where it had been sequestered by science, back into the public sphere. Enchantment is fashionable.

You no doubt watched or read reports about the recent interview in which the media personality Tucker Carlson recounted being attacked by a demon. Sleeping one night in the bed he shares with his wife and four dogs, he awoke suddenly, in pain and gasping for breath, and discovered bloody scratches in his flesh. The culprit, he told the interviewer, was “a demon” that “left claw marks on my sides.”

Carlson’s interpretation of the event feels, to a rational mind, odd. A man in bed with four dogs wakes up to find scratches on his torso and immediately exclaims, “A demon ripped my flesh!” The rational mind wonders if the pundit fully explored other possible causes, mundane ones, canine ones, before reaching such an extravagant conclusion. But such skepticism doesn’t seem to have entered Carlson’s thinking, or that of other people he shared his story with. When, the next day, he told one of his assistants about the episode, she assured him, “That happens, people are attacked in their bed by demons.”

Commenting on Carlson’s story, the diarist Rod Dreher writes, “This happens. It really does.” Dreher has a new book out, called Living in Wonder, that contains stories of other persons who have been beset by demons. The book opens with a lawyer named Nino saying to Dreher, “The world is not what we think it is.” Nino goes on to describe his “descent into the bizarre reality just beneath the surface of things.” When he was out for a drive as a teenager, he saw a UFO hovering over a field. He felt, as he stared at the alien craft, that its occupants had “planted a seed inside me for later.”

Years passed. The seed germinated.

Nino was a law student in a major American city. One day, studying at his kitchen table, he saw the bare wall of his kitchen begin to swirl. “It was like a portal was opening,” he told me. “The best way to put it is that two humanoid-like beings glitched into reality. They were made of light, but it was like running water. There was a thickness to the air in the room, like if you touched it, it would have made ripples.”

The two demons have appeared to the young lawyer every year since. “What’s happening to Nino isn’t unusual,” Dreher writes. “Many who have seen or interacted with UFOs report paranormal experiences in the wake — including visits from beings like the ones that appear to Nino.”

Here, too, an alternative interpretation suggests itself. If it’s common for people who see UFOs in their youth to later also see demonic apparitions, one might suspect that the people are prone to hallucinations and, perhaps, other psychic disturbances. In Dreher’s telling, though, the earlier UFO sightings actually lend credibility to the later demon sightings. It’s the aliens who plant the demon seeds!

In an article in First Things, the theologian Peter Leithart comments on such visions and their vogue. Drawing on the work of the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, he draws a distinction between the “transcendent” culture of Christianity and the enchanted, or “immanent,” culture of tribal societies:

Immanent cultures don’t recognize any distinction between natural and supernatural, religion and the rest of life, nature and humanity. Transcendence, whether of God to creation or of man to the world, makes no sense. A thing that isn’t experienced isn’t at all: “Immanence is a quality of being. Being is being there.” Immanent cultures are empiricist to the core: Don’t try to convince a tribesman that something exists if he’s never seen, heard, or experienced it. But their empiricism is generous, because they see things we don’t.

Leithart welcomes the opening of perception to “the deeper-than-science truth of myths and fairy tales, the dazzling radiance of everyday things.” But it also makes him nervous. “To jaded moderns, an enchanted world sounds cozy, like living inside a bright fairy tale. Real enchanted societies are terrifying.”

When the spirit world becomes real, an inherent element of the earthly world, societies turn superstitious — and violent. The rational order, always tenuous, is overthrown by a mythologic one, with human beings, like other creatures, becoming sacrificial. Although Carlson and Dreher, like many of their fellow re-enchanters, are Christians, Leithart suggests they’re playing with fire. Christianity can be seen “as the original force of disenchantment,” he writes. “That’s a powerful reason to think twice about re-enchantment.” Or, as Alan Jacobs writes in his own article questioning the enchantment movement, “Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.”

I’m not competent to enter into a debate about the theology of the enchanted gaze. What interests me in its renewal is the light it sheds on the way perception shapes culture and culture shapes perception. Perception is a neurological phenomenon but also a social one. In seeing things, we mimic the way others see things. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the re-enchantment of sensory perception is happening just as people are habituating themselves to living in a technologically mediated world, a world constructed of images rather than things.

In 1984, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard was invited to Australia to deliver the inaugural Mari Kuttna Memorial Lecture on Film. The title of his lecture was “The Evil Demon of Images.” It began:

A propos the cinema and images in general (media images, technological images), I would like to conjure up the perversity of the relation between the image and its referent, the supposed real; the virtual and irreversible confusion of the sphere of images and the sphere of a reality whose nature we are less and less able to grasp. There are many modalities of this absorption, this confusion, this diabolical seduction of images. Above all, it is the reference principle of images which must be doubted, this strategy by means of which they always appear to refer to a real world, to real objects, and to reproduce something which is logically and chronologically anterior to themselves. None of this is true.

We viewed the information age as an age of reason, governed by the scientist and the mathematician. We’re now coming to realize it’s altogether different — an enchanted age, governed by the myth-maker and the mystic. To render the world as information is a process of de-materialization, and in de-materialization’s wake comes enchantment. In replacing objects with representations of objects, with information, we have slowly but inexorably dissolved reality. We have opened — “widened” might be the better word — a portal to the paranormal. Aberrations of vision spread through media as easily as aberrations of behavior do.

The demon is the perfect manifestation of the hyperreality in which we live today and of which Baudrillard was the prophet. The demon has no referent in the material world. The demon exists as an image, an “ideal confusion,” to borrow a term the philosopher uses later in his talk. It’s an image, moreover, with the surprising, seductive, emotionally stirring qualities that define viral content. Bloodied claws. Made of light. Glitched into reality. When everything’s mediated, when images take precedence over “a reality whose nature we are less and less able to grasp,” the hyperreality of the mythical and the mystical seems deeper, truer, than the tepid reality of the actual. The true reality is the “bizarre reality” that lurks behind material reality and that can, at any moment, pounce.

It is said that Henry Beaufort, the ambitious, conniving fifteenth-century English cardinal, was in attendance when the nineteen-year-old Joan of Arc was burned alive in France for heresy. It is said that he wept at the spectacle. When, some three centuries later, Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his famous portrait of Beaufort in agony on his deathbed, he included in the picture an image of a demon, bug-eyed and fanged, lurking in the shadows behind the cardinal’s head. Reynolds took his inspiration from Shakespeare’s description of the scene in the second part of Henry VI. King Henry, bearing witness to Beaufort’s suffering, declares:

Look with a gentle eye upon this wretch!
O, beat away the busy meddling fiend
That lays strong siege unto this wretch’s soul
And from his bosom purge this black despair.

Reynolds’s literal rendering of the demon provoked derisive criticism when the painting was unveiled in 1789. Enlightened minds found it laughable. “We rather apprehend that some Fiend had been laying siege to Sir Joshua’s taste,” snarked a reviewer in the Times of London.

Over the years, the figure of the demon faded from the canvas, as Reynolds’s pigments darkened and restorers added layers of protective varnish to the work. To contemporary viewers, the scene showed a man tormented by inner demons not outer ones. The cardinal’s agony had become psychological. Along with its physical transformation, the painting had undergone a metaphorical transformation, from pre-modern to modern.

The demon vanishes, temporarily.

At the end of 2023, after a meticulous restoration of the painting by the National Trust, The Death of Cardinal Beaufort reappeared at Petworth House in West Sussex with the fiend back in the frame, tormenting the cardinal once again. Is this not the story of our time: the restoration of the demon?