Article Evil can be a spiritual experience, too?

[C C]

Demonic force
https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/demonic-force

EXCERPT: What is violence for? Still trying to answer the question, I recall the words of another child killer, Myra Hindley of the U.K., who, with her lover, raped and murdered five children whom they buried in Saddleworth Moors. Hindley, who was a lapsed Catholic, is said to have remarked to someone who visited her in prison, “Evil can be a spiritual experience too.” The words are perhaps fatuous, but to me they are also imaginatively powerful.

Because they evoke what I’ve felt in some of my terrible dreams, what I called the “inhuman mechanism.” They also suggest a sordid version of what I imagined the Comanche felt: an alignment with a force of destruction that briefly exalts those who become its conduit. Such “exaltation” in the form of crude power might be intoxicating to a woman like Baniszewski; indeed such “exaltation” could have something like demonic force... (MORE - details)
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But hardly a new discernment. In addition to ancient pagans, religions of the New World practiced barbaric rituals that might retrospectively be deemed "dark spirituality".

It might be the underlying addiction of violent video games, even, as well as scary films and literature. That there's a fine line between the sublime and horror/torture/destruction/slaying. Marquis de Sade and many various monsters throughout history were probably insane or mentally ill in some respect. Experiencing all kinds of demented, hallucinogenic euphoria.

[Magical Realist]

I had to struggle with this one. Am I willing to include under spirituality evil forms of it? Thinking more about it I realized there are such forms. Black magic is one in which harm is sought thru liaisons with evil entities. Nazism in its roots was a kind of evil spirituality too. It elevated the ideal of the white race as godlike while despising other races as mere mongrels to be eliminated. I suppose you could even include extreme forms of fundamentalist religion as well, both Christian and Islamic forms, which really do thrive on a sort of exclusivity and grandiosity of divine favoritism while dehumanizing non-believers as demon-possessed automatons to be burned in hell forever. The case of Lori Vallow was just such a case resulting in the indifferent murder of her own children.

[C C]

I had to struggle with this one. Am I willing to include under spirituality evil forms of it? Thinking more about it I realized there are such forms. Black magic is one in which harm is sought thru liaisons with evil entities. Nazism in its roots was a kind of evil spirituality too. It elevated the ideal of the white race as godlike while despising other races as mere mongrels to be eliminated. I suppose you could even include extreme forms of fundamentalist religion as well, both Christian and Islamic forms, which really do thrive on a sort of exclusivity and grandiosity of divine favoritism while dehumanizing non-believers as demon-possessed automatons to be burned in hell forever. The case of Lori Vallow was just such a case resulting in the indifferent murder of her own children.

I guess it actually is a sort of revelation after all, at least to us -- the contemporary audience -- who have maybe gotten accustomed to a narrowed, post-hippie view of "spirituality" sharing the same bed with peace, love, and mystical enlightenment slash bliss. "Spiritual apprehension" covers more range and is a more complex beast than reflexively thought. Like matter, it at least has an antimatter counterpart, if not burgeoning with a dysphoria of all kinds of species and genders as part of its nature. "Now that you two exiles have been kicked out of the naïve simplicity of Eden, welcome to the noisy, multifarious version of spirituality in the outside world."

[Magical Realist]

"Spiritual apprehension" covers more range and is a more complex beast than reflexively thought. Like matter, it at least has an antimatter counterpart, if not burgeoning with a dysphoria of all kinds of species and genders as part of its nature.

And lest we forget, there is the evil of cults and brainwashing such as we saw with the Jim Jones mass suicide, the Branch Davidian Waco deaths, and the Heaven's Gate suicides. Evil here as surrendering your freewill and your thinking to the dictates of an often megalomaniacal if not psychopathic leader.