Gatekeeping, Shadow Work, and the Nature of Daemonolatry

A few weeks back I encountered a young practitioner who told me I was a gatekeeper, that I was doing Daemonolatry wrong because I wasn’t making it accessible enough, and was turning it into something dogmatic. I’ll admit I was confused, because my mantra has always been that books aren’t gospel. They’re collections of ideas, and people should experiment, take what works for them, and leave the rest. He had basically formed an opinion based on secondhand criticism rather than my actual work.  Sharing information about how practitioners in the community, myself included, practiced before there was a large online solitary community isn’t gatekeeping. It’s simply sharing knowledge, facts, and lineage.

The irony is that the people most concerned about gatekeeping are often the newest practitioners. They arrive eager, curious, and sometimes anxious about whether they’re doing things correctly, and that anxiety can turn into policing. Sometimes their own discomfort at being corrected about something makes them feel embarrassed or defensive, so they label the person who corrected them a gatekeeper. These reactions are common when someone is still learning the basics. It’s easy to cling to rigid interpretations or tout personal experiences as if they are universal truths. That isn’t gatekeeping the tradition. It’s gatekeeping their own insecurity. Add influencer culture to the mix and you end up with a lot of performative Daemonolatry.

Daemonolatry has never been a closed or restricted path. The only time anything is restricted is within covens, sects, or groups that have their own traditions. If you’re not part of a group, you may not have access to its inner workings, and that’s normal. Just because many groups/covens vet members and members vet groups, that’s not gatekeeping, it’s group dynamics. Having been here since the beginning of the modern Daemonolatry movement, I can say with confidence that the modern tradition grew from open sharing, community discussion, and a willingness to teach without fear‑based narratives like “Daemons are evil,” “You need to banish Daemons,” or my personal favorite, “If you give a Daemon blood they’ll want more until you unalive yourself.” It was my work that first began chipping away at the fear mongering. When I began writing about Daemonolatry in the late nineteen-nineties, my goal was to make the practice accessible and clear for anyone who felt called to the Daemonic, the Infernal, and the Divine. The early online communities were built on transparency and conversation. No one was standing at the door deciding who was allowed to practice. People learned by asking questions, experimenting, and engaging with others who were doing the same. That spirit hasn’t changed.

What has changed is the way spirituality is presented online. Many people want spiritual paths to feel safe, gentle, and supportive at all times. They want reassurance that nothing difficult will happen and that every experience will be validating. No authentic spiritual practice can promise that. Growth often requires friction. Transformation requires pressure and discomfort. Most people don’t grow spiritually by staying in their comfort zone. The Daemonic is supportive in the sense that it guides your evolution, but it doesn’t shield you from the parts of yourself you need to confront or the hard lessons you may need to learn. It reveals what you need to see, not what you wish were true.

This becomes especially clear when we talk about shadow work. Shadow work has become a popular term, but the way it’s often used strips it of its actual meaning. Real shadow work isn’t always a soothing balm to tend your wounds. It isn’t just a gentle journaling exercise designed to make you feel better about yourself. No, sometimes methods like this are incorrectly used to spiritually bypass the actual shadow work. Shadow work is the process of facing the parts of your identity you’ve avoided or denied. It asks you to open your infected wounds so they can heal, to acknowledge your patterns, fears, contradictions, and self‑deceptions. That process can be painful, confronting, and emotionally intense. If shadow work feels safe and gentle at all times, then it isn’t shadow work. It’s reflection. Reflection has value and may be used as a part of shadow work, but there’s more to it than that. Shadow work requires action and real-world confrontation.

The Daemonic generally won’t harm you, but it also won’t coddle you. It encourages honesty, clarity, and responsibility. It pushes you to grow. And each stretch of growth is an initiation.

When people insist that Daemonolatry must always feel safe and supportive, they unintentionally flatten the tradition. They remove its depth and its initiatory nature. They turn devotion into self‑help and avoid the very experiences that make the path transformative. Daemonolatry has room for gentleness, but it also has room for intensity and honesty. These are all part of the relationship with the Daemonic Divine and part of the work.

Gatekeeping isn’t the problem in Daemonolatry. Fear is. Misinformation is. Ego is. The tradition thrives when we teach clearly, share openly, and acknowledge the reality of the work. It’s perfectly acceptable to educate people on traditional correspondences and old‑school practices because the better informed a practitioner is, and the more they understand where things come from or why certain things are effective, the more sense the practice makes. With that understanding, they can break “rules” in meaningful ways. Daemonolatry thrives when we allow the practice to be what it is and allow each practitioner to find their own path without sanitizing it for comfort or diluting it for performative aesthetics on TikTok. Daemonolatry is a devotional and magickal path that invites you to grow, and growth is rarely gentle. Pointing this out isn’t gatekeeping, nor is it a warning, nor is it fear‑mongering. It’s honesty, and it’s an invitation.