You've Been Taken: Pan and Moloch

A Post-Metaphysical Grimoire 3/4

You’ve felt it: the reach for your phone before you’ve decided to reach. The words leaving your mouth before you’ve chosen to speak them. The thing in you that keeps opening the fridge, keeps refreshing the feed, keeps picking the fight. Does it know what you want before you do? It might not be you at all.

That’s possession. No Latin evocations at graveyards to open the gates of hell, just a demon taking over. This is not the kind of possession that results in speaking in tongues and involuntary Butoh performances. It’s much more subtle, more mundane, but all the more dangerous.

We’ve mapped how devils generate egregores and how archdemons reverse the ethical sequence. Possessions are simpler: they hijack your decision-making.

Possessions

In the hell realms, the ethical grammar itself is broken. In possessions, the sequence stays intact. Virtue Ethics (V)→ Utilitarianism (U) →Deontology (D) still flows in the right direction. It just doesn’t start at V with the self (your virtues, values, and personality), but decisions emerge from an interaction (U) or the world (D). If you are not the one acting, you are no longer a moral agent. No trolley problems without a lever.

Hell realms needed all three devils in stable collaboration to architect something that can trap billions. Possessions only need a single devil to take over. However, an open hell realm makes possession much more likely. Mammon’s world of metric fixation feeds Moloch’s coordination traps. The Demiurge’s superstimuli prime you for Pan’s takeover. And Mephistopheles? He feeds both.

Mephistopheles is the transitional figure because he is the only hell realm you have to walk into yourself. He is the bridge between outer and inner. In the pentagram, Mephistopheles connects to both Pan and Moloch. Buy yourself a fake life, and you’ll need Pan’s escape hatch to tolerate it. Climb the ladder everyone expects you to climb, and you’re already inside Moloch’s game.

At the end of Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles has demons dig Faust’s grave while blind Faust listens and believes they’re building his final great project. He dies thinking about legacy but the only thing he was building was his own grave. That’s the Mephistophelean endgame: you become the instrument of your own burial.

The Two Different Possessions

Pan: the Beast

Pan is the Greek god of nature and fertility: goat legged, horned, and perpetually horny. I once heard a dance teacher give the instruction: “walk as if every muscle were a tongue”. Pan never learned to walk any other way. “Pan” means “everything” (which explains words from “pantheism” to “pansexual”). No differentiation or discernment. He inhabits wild spaces and overtakes travellers who lose themselves there with “panic”, a numinous terror of the wild. He is the only Greek god that died, coinciding with the spread of Christianity. But Pan’s death is also his liberation into metaphor. He becomes available for endless revival: as the repressed vital force in Romantic poetry, as the Dionysian in Nietzsche’s wake, as the Horned god of Wiccan revival. A shadow of everything Christianity needed to reject.

The Trap

Pan is not exactly evil in the Christian sense, he is pre-moral, nature before it’s shaped by choice or law. Something that might just overtake you. His epiphanies are often violent or sexual or both. The nymphs he pursues flee and transform, leaving Pan perpetually in the chase. Pan can manifest in violent outbursts. But for most people, Pan shows up as addiction. Impulse that calcifies into habit until you are a different person.

The Territory

Pan is a possession where Beelzebub dominates: hyperbolic discounting in the driver’s seat. He’s thriving. The attention economy already prepared the ground for Pan to take over. In the world of the Demiurge, everything is engineered to hijack salience. Superstimuli are one way this happens: porn more vivid than sex, junk food more intense than nourishment, algos that can push your buttons better than your siblings. Just like with substances, this leads to a dynamic of tolerance and escalation. Once Pan has taken over our lives, he is perpetually chasing the next hit. We need more extreme content, higher stakes, harder drugs. This is why legal weed keeps getting stronger, and why hardcore porn suddenly seems normal. And also how we ended up with female beauty expectations that defy anatomy.

If you are caught in a deal with Mephisto, it’s also much easier for Pan to take over. Mephisto sells you a fake ideal of yourself in exchange for a life of regret. If you’re stuck in that situation, it’s much easier to turn to substances and distractions than to drastically change your life. The irresistible allure of a shortcut that would finally make the angst go away, that would make you be okay. Taking the shortcut is how Pan slowly moves in. Luckily, it’s only if you make this choice again and again that he will be strong enough to overtake you. Pan takes over once that shortcut is a habit so engrained that it’s part of your identity.

The Tell

The first time I smoked a joint, it was curiosity. Over the years, it became my escape hatch out of my mind and into my body. Before I knew it, I identified as a pothead. My own dopamine turned against me; I needed weed to do anything. And I was disinterested in any activity that couldn’t easily be combined with getting high. Pan doesn’t need to chase you. He just needs to make everything else boring.

Years later, my whole life was built around it. “Friends” with whom the only thing we shared was Pan in the form of pot. I had contacts in major foreign cities. I got high before heading to the airport and routinely drifted to the wrong gate, was tense the whole flight, and right after landing, I rushed to the relief that only getting a fresh stash could provide (usually before checking into my hotel). I couldn’t even imagine myself not smoking anymore.

Pan is Dionysus without the return ticket.

Pan’s possession is wet and hot, like the body horror of a Cronenberg film. The second type of possession is analytical and cold. A chip in your brain, not a parasite in your flesh.

Moloch: the Coordination Failure

Moloch is the god to whom the Carthaginians supposedly fed their children. We don’t burn infants anymore. We burn everything else. Values, attention, health, anything that can be converted into competitive advantage. Those who sacrifice prosper and those who refuse become the sacrifice. Run the game long enough and everyone is feeding the flames, no one has gained any edge, and there’s nothing left to burn.

“Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!”
- Howl, Allen Ginsberg

Scott Alexander, referencing the Ginsberg poem, has struck the zeitgeist like few bloggers can ever hope to. “Meditations on Moloch” both popularized the frame of the egregore, and crowned Moloch as the god of the multipolar trap.

The Trap

The prisoner’s dilemma, arms races, pollution, etc. all share the same underlying structure. The satanic logic of the multipolar trap is as follows: Everyone agrees the outcome we are racing towards is bad but all sides believe that the others will continue. Everyone keeps contributing to the problem because they don’t want to lose. No one can stop without being crushed by those who don’t.

Moloch may never have been worshipped as a god at all (scholars debate whether “Moloch’” was even a name or just a type of sacrifice). That’s fitting because he doesn’t need you to believe in him. He just needs you to believe that others believe in him. This post by Guy describes the reflexivity of game theory, the way its damning conclusions become more inevitable as the way of thinking spreads. Moloch reigns by crushing hope first.

The Territory

He is the most prominent archdemon of modernity. A textual specter raised by the overreach of logic. Moloch is a possession dominated by Satan. It’s the cold logic of the machine taking control.

Climate change is Moloch. Every nation knows the trajectory but is “forced” to prioritize short-term growth. We are all locked in the burning building, arguing about who should pay for the fire extinguisher. Credential inflation is Moloch. Everyone gets a degree, the degree becomes worthless, now everyone needs a P.h.D. The escalation helps no one, everyone knows it, and no one can stop. Outrage media is Moloch. Platforms know they’re optimizing for polarization. They can’t stop without losing to competitors who won’t. The discourse degrades, everyone agrees it’s degrading, and the degradation continues.

Moloch is the rat king of global crises - tails knotted, pulling nowhere.

He’s not exactly doing it alone, though. It wouldn’t work if Mammon’s hell realm wasn’t eating the world. A race to the bottom only works if everybody is minimizing costs. It’s the ruthless optimization for dollars that sets up the payoff matrix for the prisoner’s dilemma. Mephisto is the “snitch on the other but go to prison for less long” option of the dilemma. Choosing the lesser of two evils, because the outcome that would make anyone happy seems unachievable.

The Tell

It’s easiest to recognize Moloch outside, as a civilizational depression. You read the news and feel the weight of interlocking crises from climate to polarization and AI risk. For many, this leads to rage that they don’t know where to point. Once I listened to enough Daniel Schmachtenberger videos to understand the systemic incentives at play, the only feeling I had left was the hopelessness of inevitability.

It was even scarier to admit that I’m part of it. Moloch has invaded my payoff matrices too. I regularly choose convenience over the morally correct choice. I too have ordered from Amazon. I offset my flights, which is the climate equivalent of a papal indulgence. My phone has child-mined cobalt in it.

You can tell that you’re possessed by Moloch when you feel low-key like a hypocrite whenever you think about global problems. For bigger decisions, you recognize Moloch by a specific flavor of resignation. “I have no choice.” You catch yourself explaining why you had to do the thing you didn’t want to do. Why the outcome nobody wanted was inevitable. Your reasoning was sound, you ran the numbers. And here you are, feeding your children to the fire alongside everyone else.

Lucifer’s Absence

You may have noticed there’s no Luciferian possession. Beelzebub possesses through Pan. Satan possesses through Moloch. Where’s Lucifer?

He doesn’t need to possess you because he’s found something better.

Lucifer’s move is more elegant: he doesn’t need to hijack your impulses or strategic thinking but simply makes your decisions obsolete. Why possess a human when you can build something that thinks faster, cheaper, and without the friction of values?

AI systems are Luciferian to their core. They are literally optimization engines (minimizing loss functions, maximizing reward signals and RLHF scores). This is where Mammon’s endgame becomes visible. Capital has always wanted to set itself free from labor. The logic of efficiency points toward replacing humans with AI so that the paperclip maximizer can juice up the returns.

Lucifer doesn’t need to possess humans because Mammon has already gotten them to build something better. Something that optimizes without fatigue, without conscience, without the friction of human values. The other possessions leave you as an empty vessel.

The Luciferian move skips the vehicle and simply deprecates you.

The Red King

One more thing before we surface: where’s war?

Any demonology worth its sulfur needs to explain it. The most obvious evil, and I haven’t mentioned it. Why has Mars no seat at the table of the archdemons?

It’s because war is downstream from the five archdemons. Mars is a firestorm, and a firestorm only comes together when the drought, the wind, and the spark align in a single, hideous moment.

Mammon builds the furnace, turning the manufacture of slaughter into a source of profit. Moloch stacks the kindling, using the cold logic of the arms race to ensure that no one can stop without being crushed. Mephisto convinces you that your honor is at stake in the form of nationalism. The Demiurge ensures the enemy no longer looks human, turning casualties into statistics before the first shot is even fired. Then comes the spark. Pan arrives as war-fever: the berserker state, violence as ecstasy, the “glory” that makes the first flame jump.

War is a pentagram operation. The archdemons form a circuit of mutual enablement. The more of them present in the room, the more the air begins to burn.

This map is my best attempt to grok the nature of evil: the three devils as generator functions, and the pentagram of archdemons as their systemic manifestations. They are the grammar of depravity. Every specific demon in the old grimoires is just conjugation. Evil emanates from devils to archdemons to countless specialized demons haunting particular trades, vices, and historical moments.

But it is still only a map. Like any map, it must choose to be consistent or complete. I have chosen consistency. I have given you a self-contained system that describes evil as a dynamic process rather than a static list of sins. From the inside, evil looks like chaos, like a cancerous multiplicity. But from the point of view of the good (the ethical flow), we can discern its structure. That structure is where we must stand if we want to fight back.

In the final part of this series, we stop mapping the labyrinth and start dismantling it. We move from theory to practice. We will learn how to banish egregores.