Alright y'all. The demonic is a quality of experience like the religious and like the scientific that is subject to its own qualitative controls. It is one way of interpreting experience through our shared universes of discourse such that it has enriched meaning. (1/n)

So, when we call something "sinful" or the like, we're operating in the same universe of discourse that allows us to talk about something as "demonic" insofar as our experience of the thing is so good that it must transgress some moral, cultural, or social norm. (2/n)

Or, more precisely, the pleasure is so intense that it must have a (culturally) supernatural origin and one that we might class as negative. That is, the thing is SO good that we'd risk damnation or moral transgression to have more of that pleasure. (3/n)

Ironically, this quality of experience is also shared with things called "divine" or with experiences we call "religious," insofar as we have these experiences beyond the confines of an organized religious establishment. A piece of music can do this, for example. (4/n)

That is, the pleasure or sense of unity and oneness achieved through the experience is such that it approaches the experience of the religious as described through the universe of discourse of religion, which is one we (unfortunately) always fall back on in these cases. (5/n)

So, sex can be experienced as either "demonic" or "religious" depending on the quality of the experience of having sex; food becomes either divine or demonic depending on the quality of the experience of the food; music becomes... and you get where I'm going with this. (6/n)

All of this is to say that the demonic/divine nature of an experience depends totally on the situated context of the person having the experience and the universe of discourse they occupy which supplies them with the means to make clear their experience. (7/n)

And, given the moralization of language (ex: demonic sex is often associated with moral or other such danger due to its pleasure, which is a whole fucked up thing), we need to take care to consider the total effects of describing something as demonic. (8/n)

Finally, NEVER would I have thought I'd make a thread on "demonic" as a quality of experience, but this is the kind of year that 2020 has become so... I guess this is on brand for the demonic nature of this timeline. (9/n)

If you want to know more about "the religious" as a quality of experience, Dewey does a lot of work on this in A Common Faith where he seeks to situate "the religious" as an experience independent of "religion" and one that is possible to have in other areas of experience. (fin)