What are demons?

What are demons? Are they the fallen angels described cryptically in the Bible which had aligned with Lucifer in an attempt to overthrow God and were thus plunged into Hell awaiting their eternal judgment? Are they the gods of ancient cultures that while falling into obscurity are nonetheless present in the aether world waiting to be evoked? Are they ghosts, the spirits of humans that were dramatically transformed due to some trauma at their death? Or are they something else entirely, like some archetypal themes in our subconscious which represent features of the ego we prefer not to focus on, as Mathers, Crowley, and others felt? Some of the earliest mentions of demons, or spirits that we could refer to as demons, or daimons, comes from a word meaning divider, or provider. For Socrates/Plato, the daimonion, or spirit, was merely an entity that dwelled between the earth and heaven. For “spirits, you know, are halfway between god and man. (Diotima asks) ‘What powers have they, then?’ (Socrates responds)They are the envoys and interpreters that ply between heaven and earth, flying upward with our worship and our prayers, and descending with the heavenly answers and commandments, and since they are between the two estates they weld both sides together and merge them into one great whole. They form the medium of the prophetic arts, of the priestly rites of sacrifice, initiation, and incantation, of divination and of sorcery, for the divine will not mingle directly with the human, and it is only through the mediation of the spirit world that man can have any intercourse, whether waking or sleeping, with the gods. And the man who is versed in such matters is said to have spiritual powers, as opposed to the mechanical powers of the man who is expert in the more mundane arts. There are many spirits, and many kinds of spirits, too, and Love is one of them.’” This is in contrast to the biblical perspective, particularly New Testament doctrine, of fallen angels. The Old Testament, and particularly Jewish traditions, have very little regard for demons, having the Se'irim and the Shedim, the former being the he-goats of Assyrian myth and the latter simply other gods from other cultures. Arabic and muslim traditions have the jinn and teh shaitan, the latter being more obviously malevolent than the former. However, in antiquity, demons, were depicted more in line with the Socratic/Platonic view of beings that exist between this world and the other; intermediary beings in other words. And so, we have to consider whether demons are absolutely malevolent, as Christian/biblical traditions teach, classes of malevolent and benign entities, such as the jinn and shaitan of islam, beings that are either mythological, symbolic, or representations of other gods as taught by Judaism, or they are beings that exist between the higher and lower realms of reality (or even the conscious Mind of an idealistic, Jungian, Platonic universe). And so, there are a variety of possibilities that these beings could be. Not one perspective is absolutely true nor provable. And yet, I have had encounters with what I think are these beings (which these experiences could be simply my imagination, an experience of archetypal themes, actual entities that are malevolent, good, or neutral). I won’t be so dogmatic to make a statement on what they are. But THAT they exist in some form seems plausible given my own experiences. I also think that the experiences of religious figures in history, magicians, occult practitioners, etc., also help legitimize their objective existence in some form. But again, what they are is not something one can absolutely claim, in spite of religious texts, grimoires, etc., that offer more ambitious and absolutist claims to the contrary. Se'irim, Shedim, Jinn, Shaitan to name a few examples of demonic personal features found in thw world of experience.