Spiritual Warfare
Wiltshire, Whitehead and Griffin on
the Power of Malevolent Energies
"How should we assess Pentecostal deliverance ministries and the rites of exorcism within Roman Catholicism? Are we witnessing religious theatre, psychodrama, or genuine spiritual warfare?"
So asks Richard Wiltshire in a meditation featured on this page. He suggests we take seriously the presence of the demonic—understood as condensations of disintegrative energy that work against human flourishing, relationality, and communion.
Alfred North Whitehead, writing from a metaphysical rather than theological perspective, offers a philosophical framework that can support Wiltshire’s insight. In Process and Reality, Whitehead reflects on Milton’s portrayal of Satan’s journey through primordial Chaos—not to affirm or dismiss belief in personal demons or possession, but to recognize that disintegration, once enacted, leaves a mark. “The fact of Satan’s journey helped to evolve order,” he writes, “for he left a permanent track, useful for the devils and the damned.” In this way, Whitehead acknowledges that destructive energies can have enduring consequences. They leave imprints—patterns that persist in the unfolding of cosmic and historical process.
It is characteristic of many modern Western theologians to dismiss or ridicule such notions as relics of a pre-scientific worldview—even as countless people and cultures around the world continue to experience them as real and meaningful. What Whitehead and Wiltshire offer, in distinct but complementary ways, is a means of reclaiming the possibility—and perhaps the fact—that malevolent energies are part of the universe and that, as Wiltshire emphasizes, they can take hold of individuals and societies. And more than that, Wiltshire suggests they can be engaged, even transformed, through spiritual practices. As he writes: “Prayer, liturgy, ritual, and sacrament when practiced with sincerity and discernment may function as ways of recalibrating psycho-spiritual energy, interrupting toxic feedback loops, and re-orienting the self toward new patterns.”
In this light, what may appear to be religious theatre or psychodrama may in fact be serious spiritual labor—rituals of resistance and recalibration in the face of powers that, though often unnamed or unseen, are nonetheless deeply felt. I suggest that Whitehead offers a cosmology that can support Wiltshire's suggestion.
One more point is important, especially for process-oriented readers. In the world of process philosophy and theology, David Ray Griffin is the thinker who has done the most to take the demonic seriously. He, along with other process philosophers, think that the demonic has power independent of God, and that we must be honest about this fact, recognizing that the demonic can appear in foreign policies.
Griffin does not regard demonic evil as the work of an independent supernatural being—he explicitly rejects that dualistic model: “I have indicated, in rejecting the mythical idea of the demonic as a devil, that the demonic is not an individual being.” Instead, the demonic refers to destructive impulses and forms of chaos that arise when created entities act contrary to the divine aim of creativity, beauty, novelty, and harmony. These impulses are not caused by God, but emerge from the misuse of creaturely freedom.
Griffin extends the concept of demonic evil beyond individual moral failure to critique collective, political, and imperial dynamics. In The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic?, for instance, he argues that U.S. foreign policy has often reflected a trajectory “more demonic than divine”—marked by deception, violence, empire-building, and false-flag operations. In this expanded view, the demonic is not confined to ancient myth or individual possession but operates in systemic patterns of destruction and domination. And recognizing it, for Griffin as for Wiltshire, is the first step in resisting it.
- Jay McDaniel
So asks Richard Wiltshire in a meditation featured on this page. He suggests we take seriously the presence of the demonic—understood as condensations of disintegrative energy that work against human flourishing, relationality, and communion.
Alfred North Whitehead, writing from a metaphysical rather than theological perspective, offers a philosophical framework that can support Wiltshire’s insight. In Process and Reality, Whitehead reflects on Milton’s portrayal of Satan’s journey through primordial Chaos—not to affirm or dismiss belief in personal demons or possession, but to recognize that disintegration, once enacted, leaves a mark. “The fact of Satan’s journey helped to evolve order,” he writes, “for he left a permanent track, useful for the devils and the damned.” In this way, Whitehead acknowledges that destructive energies can have enduring consequences. They leave imprints—patterns that persist in the unfolding of cosmic and historical process.
It is characteristic of many modern Western theologians to dismiss or ridicule such notions as relics of a pre-scientific worldview—even as countless people and cultures around the world continue to experience them as real and meaningful. What Whitehead and Wiltshire offer, in distinct but complementary ways, is a means of reclaiming the possibility—and perhaps the fact—that malevolent energies are part of the universe and that, as Wiltshire emphasizes, they can take hold of individuals and societies. And more than that, Wiltshire suggests they can be engaged, even transformed, through spiritual practices. As he writes: “Prayer, liturgy, ritual, and sacrament when practiced with sincerity and discernment may function as ways of recalibrating psycho-spiritual energy, interrupting toxic feedback loops, and re-orienting the self toward new patterns.”
In this light, what may appear to be religious theatre or psychodrama may in fact be serious spiritual labor—rituals of resistance and recalibration in the face of powers that, though often unnamed or unseen, are nonetheless deeply felt. I suggest that Whitehead offers a cosmology that can support Wiltshire's suggestion.
One more point is important, especially for process-oriented readers. In the world of process philosophy and theology, David Ray Griffin is the thinker who has done the most to take the demonic seriously. He, along with other process philosophers, think that the demonic has power independent of God, and that we must be honest about this fact, recognizing that the demonic can appear in foreign policies.
Griffin does not regard demonic evil as the work of an independent supernatural being—he explicitly rejects that dualistic model: “I have indicated, in rejecting the mythical idea of the demonic as a devil, that the demonic is not an individual being.” Instead, the demonic refers to destructive impulses and forms of chaos that arise when created entities act contrary to the divine aim of creativity, beauty, novelty, and harmony. These impulses are not caused by God, but emerge from the misuse of creaturely freedom.
Griffin extends the concept of demonic evil beyond individual moral failure to critique collective, political, and imperial dynamics. In The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic?, for instance, he argues that U.S. foreign policy has often reflected a trajectory “more demonic than divine”—marked by deception, violence, empire-building, and false-flag operations. In this expanded view, the demonic is not confined to ancient myth or individual possession but operates in systemic patterns of destruction and domination. And recognizing it, for Griffin as for Wiltshire, is the first step in resisting it.
- Jay McDaniel
The Energy of the Demonic
Richard Wiltshire *
The “supernatural” may in fact be a dimension of the natural world that escapes empirical control and conceptual domestication. It may be the surplus of being: the numinous, the energetic, the symbolic that flows through and beyond material forms, touching the deep structure of consciousness itself.
What we call “the demonic,” then, may be better understood as the condensation of chaotic, disintegrative energies that work against human flourishing, relationality, and communion. And it is not merely the individual psyche at stake here. Societies too can be possessed by ideologies, hatreds, addictions, and idols.
I want to reframe and reconsider the role of the demonic and the phenomenon of possession, not as primitive superstition or merely the domain of fringe religiosity, but as symbolic expressions of psycho-spiritual dynamics that challenge our modern frameworks of mind, self, and reality. These experiences, whether categorised as psychopathological episodes or encounters with malevolent spiritual entities, often resist reduction to the standard models of psychiatry or biology.
Across virtually every culture and religious tradition, we find some form of belief in spiritual entities - be they gods, spirits, demons, or ancestors. The uncanny consistency of these accounts should prompt us to pause. Are these merely archetypal projections of the human mind, cultural scripts for dealing with mental illness, or do they point toward something ontologically real despite being difficult to explain within current materialist frameworks?
This raises important questions for today’s Church. How should we assess Pentecostal deliverance ministries and the rites of exorcism within Roman Catholicism? Are we witnessing religious theatre, psychodrama, or genuine spiritual warfare? Or is this dichotomy itself inadequate?
Perhaps there is a third way that reframes the supernatural not as something opposed to the natural, but as its intensification. The “supernatural” may in fact be a dimension of the natural world that escapes empirical control and conceptual domestication. It may be the surplus of being: the numinous, the energetic, the symbolic that flows through and beyond material forms, touching the deep structure of consciousness itself.
If we take seriously the idea that consciousness is more than an epiphenomenon of brain activity, but a field of relational and energetic participation in reality, then we must also entertain the possibility that certain states of consciousness under conditions of trauma, fragmentation, or spiritual rupture can open a person to influences that feel alien, oppressive, or transpersonal. These “forces” may not be discrete entities in the cartoonish sense, but emergent patterns of malevolent energy within complex psychic, social, and spiritual systems. Like parasites, they attach themselves to inner wounds that echo violence, generational trauma and systemic evil taking on a quasi-personal character that mimics agency, intention, and voice.
What we call “the demonic,” then, may be better understood as the condensation of chaotic, disintegrative energies that work against human flourishing, relationality, and communion. And it is not merely the individual psyche at stake here. Societies too can be possessed by ideologies, hatreds, addictions, and idols.
Prayer, liturgy, ritual, and sacrament when practiced with sincerity and discernment may function as ways of recalibrating psycho-spiritual energy, interrupting toxic feedback loops, and re-orienting the self toward new patterns. These are not just psychological tricks or placebo effects, but openings to sacred disruptions of the powers that bind and blind. Deliverance, then, becomes not just the casting out of a demon, but the re-integration of the self into experiences of love and truth. Healing is not simply catharsis, it is communion.
Still, caution is warranted. An unhealthy obsession with the demonic can lead to fear-based spirituality, scapegoating, and a retreat from personal responsibility. But an outright dismissal of these phenomena risks ignoring the experiential testimonies of countless individuals whose lives have been transformed either for good or for ill by encounters that cannot be fully explained within conventional paradigms.
What is needed is a deeper theology of possession. Not one based in sensationalism or reductionism, but rooted in a spiritually expansive anthropology. One that sees the human as a porous, participatory being, capable of profound union with both healthy and destructive forces.
In an increasingly fractured world, perhaps the language of deliverance still speaks. Not as an antiquated rite, but as a symbolic and actual enactment of the human yearning to be free from that which binds, distorts, and isolates us from our true humanity.
* Chaplain at The Salvation Army Australia: studied at UWE Bristol: lives in Perth, Western Australia; from Thornbury, Gloucestershire. This essay is reposted from Richard Wiltshire's Facebook page, with his permission,
Across virtually every culture and religious tradition, we find some form of belief in spiritual entities - be they gods, spirits, demons, or ancestors. The uncanny consistency of these accounts should prompt us to pause. Are these merely archetypal projections of the human mind, cultural scripts for dealing with mental illness, or do they point toward something ontologically real despite being difficult to explain within current materialist frameworks?
This raises important questions for today’s Church. How should we assess Pentecostal deliverance ministries and the rites of exorcism within Roman Catholicism? Are we witnessing religious theatre, psychodrama, or genuine spiritual warfare? Or is this dichotomy itself inadequate?
Perhaps there is a third way that reframes the supernatural not as something opposed to the natural, but as its intensification. The “supernatural” may in fact be a dimension of the natural world that escapes empirical control and conceptual domestication. It may be the surplus of being: the numinous, the energetic, the symbolic that flows through and beyond material forms, touching the deep structure of consciousness itself.
If we take seriously the idea that consciousness is more than an epiphenomenon of brain activity, but a field of relational and energetic participation in reality, then we must also entertain the possibility that certain states of consciousness under conditions of trauma, fragmentation, or spiritual rupture can open a person to influences that feel alien, oppressive, or transpersonal. These “forces” may not be discrete entities in the cartoonish sense, but emergent patterns of malevolent energy within complex psychic, social, and spiritual systems. Like parasites, they attach themselves to inner wounds that echo violence, generational trauma and systemic evil taking on a quasi-personal character that mimics agency, intention, and voice.
What we call “the demonic,” then, may be better understood as the condensation of chaotic, disintegrative energies that work against human flourishing, relationality, and communion. And it is not merely the individual psyche at stake here. Societies too can be possessed by ideologies, hatreds, addictions, and idols.
Prayer, liturgy, ritual, and sacrament when practiced with sincerity and discernment may function as ways of recalibrating psycho-spiritual energy, interrupting toxic feedback loops, and re-orienting the self toward new patterns. These are not just psychological tricks or placebo effects, but openings to sacred disruptions of the powers that bind and blind. Deliverance, then, becomes not just the casting out of a demon, but the re-integration of the self into experiences of love and truth. Healing is not simply catharsis, it is communion.
Still, caution is warranted. An unhealthy obsession with the demonic can lead to fear-based spirituality, scapegoating, and a retreat from personal responsibility. But an outright dismissal of these phenomena risks ignoring the experiential testimonies of countless individuals whose lives have been transformed either for good or for ill by encounters that cannot be fully explained within conventional paradigms.
What is needed is a deeper theology of possession. Not one based in sensationalism or reductionism, but rooted in a spiritually expansive anthropology. One that sees the human as a porous, participatory being, capable of profound union with both healthy and destructive forces.
In an increasingly fractured world, perhaps the language of deliverance still speaks. Not as an antiquated rite, but as a symbolic and actual enactment of the human yearning to be free from that which binds, distorts, and isolates us from our true humanity.
* Chaplain at The Salvation Army Australia: studied at UWE Bristol: lives in Perth, Western Australia; from Thornbury, Gloucestershire. This essay is reposted from Richard Wiltshire's Facebook page, with his permission,
Whitehead’s Satan
A Permanent Track in the Abyss
“The fact of Satan’s journey helped to evolve order; for he left a permanent track, useful for the devils and the damned.”
—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
In the history of Western literature John Milton’s depiction of Satan in Paradise Lost is compelling—so much so that, in some ways, Satan emerges as the most interesting character in the epic. Proud, defiant, eloquent, and relentless, he is a figure of tragic grandeur. Even as he rebels against divine authority, readers often find themselves drawn into his charisma and complexity.
Whitehead takes this literary fascination a step further, reinterpreting Satan’s journey not only as a dramatic narrative but as a metaphysical episode within the unfolding of the universe. A metaphorical episode, but also a metaphysical episode. In Process and Reality, Whitehead briefly notes, almost as an aside, that Satan’s passage through Chaos is a moment of cosmic significance—a mythic act that illustrates how novelty and even rebellion can contribute to the formation of a new cosmic order.
The larger context of Whitehead’s reflection is a discussion of social order and cosmic epochs, drawing inspiration from Plato’s recognition in The Timaeus that the universe unfolds through multiple such epochs. In Whitehead’s vision, the universe advances through a succession of cosmic epochs, each marked by its own characteristic patterns of order, relationality, and social organization. These epochs are not preordained or eternal; they emerge from the creative processes of becoming. While some epochs may arise out of harmony and integration, others begin in rupture and conflict. New orders are sometimes born not from peace, but from disruption—from paths carved through chaos by acts of resistance or rebellion.
Enter Satan.
In Paradise Lost, after being cast out from Heaven, Satan hurls himself into Chaos:
“The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost…”
Chaos here is not simply disorder. It is metaphysical indeterminacy—the primal potential from which cosmos might emerge. And Satan, in traversing this boundless ocean, creates a path. In Whitehead’s metaphysical interpretation, this is no minor act. Satan’s journey is a moment of world-making. Though born of defiance, it leaves behind a “permanent track”—a new structure within the field of possibility. It becomes useful, not only to the damned, but to the unfolding of a new cosmic order.
This inversion of expectations is typical of Whitehead’s metaphysics. Creativity is not the exclusive domain of the good or the divine. God, says Whitehead, is the primordial expression of creativity, but not the only expression. We can well imagine God brooding over the waters at the dawn of creation, as Genesis attests. But other spirits may have been brooding, too - perhaps born from predecessor epochs, and Satan may have been one of them, Even rebellion can be generative. Satan, intending to oppose the divine order, nevertheless becomes an unwitting agent of cosmic evolution. His path through Chaos marks the beginning of a new social space—dark, distorted, but patterned. A new epoch takes shape, seeded by opposition.
In this vision, cosmic evolution includes the tragic, the deviant, and the defiant. Whitehead’s universe is not morally sanitized; it is dynamically creative. Each cosmic epoch, with its own form of order, may be preceded by disarray. But through acts of traversal—through movement, decision, and risk—something new becomes possible. Even Satan plays a role in this ongoing process.
Thus, the mythic becomes metaphysical: Satan’s journey across Chaos is a symbol of the deeper truth that even in the darkest acts, the universe finds ways to evolve. Rebellion leaves its trace. And that trace, however unintended, becomes part of the architecture of becoming.
Dangerous Charisma
All of this speculative interest, spurred by Milton’s Satan and elevated through metaphysical reflection, can easily neglect the fact that the very image of Satan has itself evolved through the ages. The Satan of Paradise Lost is not identical with the Satan of early Christian texts, Jewish apocalyptic literature, or medieval demonologies. Milton’s Satan is, in many ways, a literary and theological composite—infused with Renaissance humanism, Protestant individualism, and classical tragic tropes. He is as much a product of Milton’s imagination as of inherited doctrine.
Still, for us today, Milton’s Satan has relevance—particularly when we are confronted with forces of defiance, transgression, and boundary-breaking in our own world. He becomes a symbol not only of rebellion against unjust power, but also of the dangerous charisma that can accompany self-assertion untethered from moral grounding. In this light, Milton’s Satan is both fascinating and cautionary—an emblem of creative ambition and existential overreach. And when interpreted through Whitehead’s metaphysical lens, he becomes something more: a figure who, despite his intentions, participates in the evolution of novelty, leaving behind a trace that helps structure the chaos he traverses.
Theodicy
This image of Satan also helps us deal with theodicy—the perennial question of how to reconcile the existence of evil with the presence of a good and creative God. In Whitehead’s metaphysics, God is not an omnipotent ruler who controls all outcomes, but a persuasive presence who lures the world toward greater richness of experience. Within this framework, evil is not authored by God, but emerges from the misuse of creativity, from the tragic or destructive potential inherent in the freedom of actual entities.
Milton’s Satan, when viewed through this lens, embodies the ambiguity of that freedom. His journey across Chaos is not simply evil in a moral sense, but a moment of ontological possibility—a turning point where disorder gives way to a new, albeit dark, kind of order. This does not excuse or sanctify evil, but it shows how the cosmos can weave even rebellion into the larger context of becoming. In this way, the image of Satan becomes part of a metaphysical response to theodicy: not a justification of suffering, but a recognition that the creative process of the universe includes rupture as well as harmony, failure as well as fulfillment. And that, so Whitehead will add, this rupture and failure is neither controlled nor destined by the God of love.
Satan’s role in cosmic evolution, then, is a reminder that freedom and creativity are dangerous as well as divine. They open the door not only to beauty and novelty, but also to distortion and pain. And yet, from a process perspective, even the darkest paths can leave trails that others may follow—not toward damnation, necessarily, but toward new forms of understanding, resilience, and renewal.
Is Satan Real?
It is a question that moves between theology, metaphysics, and moral psychology—and one that process philosophy does not dismiss lightly. Within Whitehead’s cosmology, it is possible and imaginable that there exists, somewhere in the extensive continuum, an actual entity—a concrescing subject of experience—whose will is fundamentally to disobey God. Such a being would not be an eternal principle of evil, but a finite creature exercising its freedom toward destruction, deception, or disorder. Like all actual entities, it would have emerged through process, shaped by its prehensions of the past and its subjective aim toward some perverse form of intensity or self-realization.
Yet even if one does not affirm the ontological reality of such a being, it remains true that forces of destruction, deception, and distortion have real power in the world. These forces—whether embodied in institutions, ideologies, habits, or individuals—act with their own momentum. They lure, corrupt, fragment, and wound. In process terms, they are patterns of feeling and action that perpetuate themselves across time, affecting the becoming of others.
Thus, the reality of Satan need not hinge on the existence of a singular metaphysical agent. What matters is the recognition of evil as a real presence in the world—not as a metaphysical necessity, but as a tragic byproduct of freedom, agency, and relational complexity. Satan, in this light, becomes not just a figure in a poem or a subject of speculation, but a symbol of those very forces that resist the divine lure toward beauty, peace, and relational harmony.
In the end, to ask if Satan is real is also to ask how deeply we acknowledge the ways in which destructive patterns gain foothold—in history, in society, in the self. Whether or not Satan exists as a discrete actual entity, the struggle against chaos, deception, and violence is real. And so too is the call to creative transformation that Whitehead sees at the heart of the universe.
God and Satan
This call for creative transformation is rooted in love—a love Satan lacks. In Whitehead’s metaphysical vision, the divine lure is always toward richer intensity of experience, but also toward harmony, beauty, and peace—toward the flourishing of all beings in relationship. This lure is not coercive; it is persuasive, invitational, and rooted in care for the other. Satan, whether imagined as an actual subject or a symbolic force, embodies a refusal of relational love—a turning inward that seeks power over communion, dominance over mutual becoming.
The tragedy of Satan, then, is not merely his rebellion, but his rejection of love as the pinnacle of value. In contrast to the God of process thought, who lovingly absorbs all suffering and weaves it into a wider harmony, Satan isolates, fragments, and distorts. His creativity, if it can be called that, is unmoored from empathy and oriented toward disconnection.
To choose the path of creative transformation is to resist this isolation. It is to align with the divine eros of the universe, which moves not only through novelty but through compassion. Even amid rupture and loss, this divine movement seeks the healing of the world. In this sense, the question of Satan’s reality matters less than our response to the real powers of harm and healing in the world around us—and within us.