Possession

A Phenomenology of Hypomania

Since my bipolar II diagnosis earlier this year, I have written at length trying to capture the interior experience of the condition. I’ve written about the horrible cost of the illness, detailed the otherworldly hell of depressive episodes, and chronicled the day-to-day difficulties, including living with persistent suicidal ideation.

But all these accounts focus primarily on the lows. What of the highs?

Hypomania means “below mania”, and it is as the name suggests: briefer in duration and less catastrophic in severity than full-blown mania. This is the primary difference between Bipolar Types I and II, and thank God. Full-blown mania is the stuff of nightmares. In contrast, from the outside, hypomania often presents as heightened productivity and an exceptionally good mood. As such, I have often overlooked it in my own narrative, because the terrifying, depressive lows so overshadow it. It is only in the wake of my Bipolar II diagnosis this year that I’ve begun to examine the unique qualities of hypomania.

Before we carry on, though, I should note that this article includes a frank discussion of hypersexuality. If that is gross to you or isn’t your cup of tea right, consider skipping this article.

Glittering Images

The first indication that I am transitioning from normal consciousness into hypomania is the appearance of transcendent, surreal, and sublimely beautiful moving images within my inner imaginative space. These images are accompanied by feelings of euphoria, and grandiosity. I feel the effects of these images physically, as if they were drugs injected directly into my veins; as if they were visual cocaine. They come without context and of their own volition like living, breathing entities.

I went on a late-night quest on YouTube to try to find something I could share that resembles these drug images. The opening sequence of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is the best example I’ve found so far. This sequence captures the beauty, detail, and surreality of these images.

There is also this music video by Kanye West, which perfectly encapsulates the high of a manic episode: the surreality, the beauty, the dangerous grandiosity.

Other times, the images are of otherworldly beings. These beings are often beautiful, sometimes frightening, and seem symbolic in some mysterious way — laden with meaning and story that I recognize but can’t quite comprehend. They are like the archetypes from Tarot cards, stirring something deep in my imagination, beautifully detailed, lifelike, and in motion. Here is a (failed) attempt to recreate an image using AI:

Of course, what none of these videos or images can impart is the feeling that accompanies them, which is the same rush you have in the middle of amazing sex, or when you have achieved something truly magnificent, or when you witness something uncommonly beautiful and moving. It’s a tightening and throbbing of the vascular system, a flutter in the diaphragm, and a flush that envelopes the whole body. Most of all, it is a feeling of raw power.

These images first started to emerge from the ground of my psyche when I was in high school, right about the same time the demon of depression showed up, too. They were so powerful, beautiful, and wondrous that I feared they were the product of demon possession.

Growing up, there was nothing more commonplace than the demonic. My father was — and still is — a Protestant exorcist. He travels the world administering his frightening, holy magic on the afflicted. As a child, I accompanied my father to some of these sessions. I saw frightening things — frothing at the mouth; guttural, animal noises; convulsing, and wailing. When I hit my teens and my mental health started to crack, I could only assume that the demons had finally come for me, too.

I still consider myself a mystic, but I no longer believe in demons, at least not in the way I used to. Despite this, spirit possession is still the best description I have for the phenomenology of mental illness, even as it falls flat as a medical explanation. If depression, anxiety, and OCD are demon possession, hypomania is possession of an entirely different kind. There are other entities in the Mundus Imaginalis, and they are just as capable of gripping your mind and body.

I’ve developed enough mindfulness as a meditator, now, to know that when these glittering images start popping up in my brain like hallucinogenic mushrooms, I am about to step into a different world. “Uh oh,” I think, “here we go.”

Channeling the Daimon

After the glittering images have set in, a welcome, if unnerving, guest arrives: the daimon.

“The word “daimon” has several possible meanings,” writes

Matt Cardin

on his website Teeming Brain, “but in relation to possession and exorcism it refers to a particular type of autonomous or autonomous-feeling force in the psyche that influences or, in some cases, dominates a person’s thoughts, actions, and feelings.”

Writing is work. It’s lonely, laborious, and dry. But, when the daimon takes possession of me, it becomes light as a feather, and the words write themselves. Entire sentences, and even paragraphs, appear fully formed in my head, and I rush to my phone or pen and paper to scribble down what just appeared.

It’s as if I have become the daimon’s spirit board, and the planchette is being pushed around in my head by unseen, supernatural hands. I am no longer the master of the words; they have mastered me. The tables have turned, I am now the keyboard, and I am being tapped on furiously. The experience is exhilarating, frightening, and wondrous.

I’ve produced pages and pages of daimon-channeled words. Much of it is dreck. But just as often, it is semi-decent, and some of it is published on my Substack. The article Embracing the Tiger, for example, was written in a hypomanic state. As magical as the experience is, the writing itself is no more or less divine than writing in an ordinary state. It still requires editing, which is perhaps the least mystical experience in the world.

Inevitably, the daimon passes on, untangling its fingers from my brain, and I must return to fighting for the words like a mere mortal, just as I’m doing right now.

Possessed by Pan

I used to think I was a sex addict. In my twenties, about once or twice a month, I would become possessed. My skin would crawl with sexual yearning. I would be driven, as by an alien force, to spend untold hours chasing sex through all hours of the day and night. I’d give up everything: work, sleep, and relationships, to do so. I found myself in some perilous situations: at a threesome where heroin was on offer, for example.

I don’t write about this to be salacious, but because a discussion of bipolar is incomplete without a discussion about sex. Hypersexuality is a major manifestation of bipolar mania and hypomania.

I was an athletic young man and had a sex drive typical of that age and sex; it was powerful on a normal day. But these bouts were different. This was a full body-and-brain takeover — yet another sort of possession. If depression is a possession by a demon, and if creativity is a possession by the daimon, then this is a possession by Pan himself.

Pan, the ancient Greek God of the forests and lord of the Satyrs, was famous for his eternally hard phallus and his wild parties in the forest. In the poem Hymn to Pan, wild sex freak and occultist Aleister Crowley gave voice to the experience of being fully consumed by the spirit of Pan:

Am I not ripe?
I, who wait and writhe and wrestle
With air that hath no boughs to nestle
My body, weary of empty clasp,
Strong as a lion and sharp as an asp —
Come, O come!
I am numb
With the lonely lust of devildom.
Thrust the sword through the galling fetter,
All-devourer, all-begetter;
Give me the sign of the Open Eye,
And the token erect of thorny thigh,
And the word of madness and mystery,
O Pan! Io Pan!

This is not mere horniness — this is something far more mystical and sublime. It’s not mere intercourse, it’s sex magick. It’s a transformation into a satyr, offering a sweet, terrible relief from all the burdens of being human. As with the daimon, the tables turn: that which you use uses you. You are no longer having sex; sex is having you.

In my twenties, relief came in two forms: antipsychotic medication which greatly reduced my sex drive to a manageable level, and Jonathan, my now partner of a decade, with whom I could have safe, loving, regular, monogamous sex.

I still, on occasion, become possessed by Pan. But it now takes place in the context of a loving, long-term, trusting partnership with a man who loves my body as his own. When I go on wild sexual benders, Jon comes with me. I have someone with whom I can share my lusts and fantasies, and this limits my excesses — sexual pleasure is now a collaboration, shaped by his needs and boundaries. This keeps us both safe. What once was a dangerous force is now a catalyst for the virtues of reciprocity, respect, communication, and love.

In case you need yet another argument for the social acceptance of gay relationships, consider this: gay marriage provides a socially sanctioned container for sexual expression to flourish, including for hypersexual disaster queers like myself. Without that safe, socially supported container, sexuality will find expression, and it will hurt individuals and society in the process. It will result in risky sex, abuse, disease, secrecy, and heavy drug use.

If socially supported gay commitment was not available to me, I am certain that I would now be dead, addicted, or psychologically destroyed. It was only a matter of luck or divine providence that I didn’t turn out as an addicted skeleton with a phallus, blowing smoke and injecting needles.

Breaking the Spell

If hypomania sounds like a lot of fun, that’s because it is. A not insignificant percentage of my life is spent in rapturous, wild ecstasy: the best party with the greatest guests, sex, and drugs imaginable, all provided for free by my own brain.

It would also be a lie to say it doesn’t tangibly benefit me in some ways. Hypomania feels like playing a game on easy mode. I’m Mario, I’ve just eaten a star, I’m indestructible, and I’m speed-running the level twice as fast. I get great work done, I’m fun to be around, I’m talkative and friendly with strangers, and I get enough good ideas for this Substack to keep me writing for months.

The problem, of course, is that the party overstays its welcome. The guests start to get scary, like the ghost party in The Shining. Sleep is almost always the first casualty, and this is perilous. Sleep is the foundation of a healthy mind, and poor sleep makes the highs and lows more extreme. The wheels start to come off. I neglect all the habits that make life manageable. I become a frat boy, waking up at noon disheveled and exhausted. The veil between hypomania and depression is thinner than paper, and the longer and wilder the party, the more likely the plunge into hell.

In my last article on Bipolar, I concluded with a reflection on responsibility. It is an old-fashioned word, with unpleasant and old-fashioned connotations, but I now know that I am fully responsible for managing the symptoms of Bipolar II.

Responsibility means having a support network of friends who can raise the alarm when I start turning into a werewolf. It means going to therapy, taking my meds, and following my Bipolar Monastic Rule. But, perhaps more fundamentally, it means recognizing that I still have autonomy and that I don’t need to be possessed. Possession is not inevitable. I may never be rid of the satyrs, demons, and daimons, but I can learn to collaborate with them instead of being enslaved by them. The greatest skill I have to aid me in this quest is meditation.

Meditation, simply put, is awareness of one’s inner landscape. Too often, the possession comes upon me before I realize it. Practiced, mindful awareness of my inner landscape allows me to preempt the shifts in my consciousness. It allows me to notice when my mood is elevated and the Images start appearing. When this happens, I know to batten down the hatches, communicate with friends, and drug myself in the evening so I can sleep through the party.

Victor Frankl wrote, "Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." This is still true, no matter how intense the hypomania or how irresistible the possession.

I arrive where I so often do at the end of these reflections: with the acknowledgment that I am no different from you. All of us are presented with towering emotions, temptations, and hells. What differs is the cause, frequency, and severity. But, ultimately, we both have the same challenge. I, like you, must respond to my inner landscape with care. I, like you, have the duty to treat myself and others with sexual dignity. I, like you, have the responsibility to work in collaboration with the spirits, instead of being possessed by them.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments, and if your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

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