The demons of Concord

“Demonology” is an essay penned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American man of letters and founder of New England Transcendentalism. It's vintage Emerson: hard to read, even harder to understand, seemingly contradictory, and dealing with a dozen different subjects concurrently. One of the few subjects it doesn't deal with at any length is actual demonology! Thus, don't expect any sensational revelations about witches, warlocks or exorcists…

The essay is often said to anticipate Freud, due to Emerson's interest in the interpretation of dreams. I think this is unfair, both to Emerson and Freud, since the “sage of Concord” see dreams as, in some sense, supernatural. Dreams may contain genuine premonitions of the future and hence be prophetic, since every man is simply working out his “fate” (a Hindu or Buddhist would perhaps call it karma). Emerson does connect dreams to our deeper personalities, and in this resembles Freud, but I don't think the father of psychoanalysis would have approved of the black mud of occultism implied in Emerson's esoteric/Hermetic/Neo-Platonic perspective. Jung? Maybe.

But then, Emerson doesn't really approve of the muddier streams of spirituality either. To him, the cosmos is at bottom lawful and logical (or at least should be, to the disciplined mind of the spiritually enlightened). Mesmerism, séances or ghosts strike him as chaotic, with no real connection to anything else, and hence no real meaning. “Nature” (including its spiritual dimension) is sufficiently grand, and so is Man, so why bother with spiritist manifestations or animal magnetism? However, Emerson doesn't entirely rule out the existence of paranormal phenomena. He sees “the demonic” as Spirit's way of reminding humans of its existence. If you don't see the well ordered spiritual cosmos, you will be hit in the head by its chaotic shadow: “Demonology is the shadow of Theology”. This, too, sounds a bit like Freud – it's the repressed contents of the Id coming forth by night, but once again, Emerson connects it to a broader supernatural reality. He quotes Goethe on the “demonic”. And yes, Patrick Harpur's “Daemonic Reality” comes to mind...again!

Instead of seeing Ralph Waldo Emerson as anticipating Freud, perhaps we should see ol' Sigmund de-esotericizing German Romanticism?