(Para)religious Traces in Sylvia Wynter’s “Demonic Ground”

Following various references in Sylvia Wynter’s exploration and explanation of demonic ground across numerous essays she published between 1987 and 2000, this essay suggests that the term was both developed and explained in conversation with scholarship on religion and religious experience. This observation serves as a starting point to reconsider the role, limitations, and future of religion in Wynter’s oeuvre. The first part of the essay highlights that Wynter took inspiration from the writings of idiosyncratic thinker Alex Comfort. Engaging his writings on the demonic, the essay moves from quantum physics and counterculture esotericisms to the “oceanic experiences” that Comfort observes in Hindu ontology and his critique of transcendent explanations of reality. In the second part, I will suggest, in turn, that identifying and following these religious traces in demonic ground allows us to look anew at Wynter’s expansive analysis of the destructive role of religion in the origins and nature of our racialized modernity and her constructive new humanist project to move beyond it. It also points, I will suggest in the third and final part, to a form of meaning-making I have come to call parareligion.