What Fills the Spiritual Void? Demonology and the Ruin of the Maine Wilderness
If you ask an animist or folklorist, they’ll tell you: every living feature of the natural world has its own spirit. Rivers, mountains, groves, stones - each home to beings older than human memory. These nature spirits form a spiritual ecosystem as complex and interdependent as the biological one we know from science. When the land thrives, so do they. When it is degraded, they diminish or disappear.
Now consider the modern world. Urbanization, industrial agriculture, and suburban sprawl all force out the native biology of a place. Trees are felled, wetlands drained, species go extinct. And the spirits bound to these features? They too are displaced, scattered, or silenced.
But what happens when the land is not covered by cities or suburbs - but is instead used in a quieter, crueler way?
Welcome to Maine.
Maine: The Unseen Ruin
Maine is often described as “unspoiled wilderness.” Travel brochures boast of endless forests, pristine lakes, and rugged coastline. It’s true that Maine is one of the least urbanized states in the U.S. But hidden beneath that idyllic language is an unsettling reality: nearly 95% of Maine is privately owned, much of it by industrial timber companies. Now I do not intend for this blog to be a social commentary. But in order to understand the situation, it is important to know how it occurred.
These companies practice aggressive clear-cutting and - unique among U.S. states - are permitted to aerially spray glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, over vast woodland tracts. The goal? Kill off unwanted plant life and force fast growth of uniform, spindly trees. The forest becomes a monoculture - a crop, not a habitat. Animals have less to eat because fruit bearing trees and bushes are killed by the glyphosate. Beneath the forest floor lies a vast, unseen network - the mycorrhizal fungi that link trees into a living community. Its like Avatar, but without the blue aliens. This “Wood Wide Web” allows forests to share nutrients, warn of danger, and support new growth. It allows trees to communicate, share food and water, because they are physically connected to each other and the mycorrhizal network. But glyphosate spraying, repeated clear-cutting, and soil disruption from dragging out logs and burning the remaining scrap wood shatters this delicate web. Without it, trees become isolated, seedlings struggle to survive, and the forest loses its collective intelligence. What once was a vibrant underground symphony becomes a dead zone - severed, silenced, and stripped of memory. Glyphosate spraying seeps into waterways, disrupting aquatic life from the bottom up. Amphibians, fish, and insects suffer directly, while the microbial and plant communities that form the base of the water’s food web are slowly dismantled. Even where water still flows and forests still stand, the living balance is broken. What remains is a chemically muted landscape—spiritually hollowed, ecologically thinned—a place where natural life fades, and something else begins to take root.
This creates a strange paradox: the land is biologically "alive," but it is not living. There is forest, but it is not wild. There are trees, but no deep-rooted spirit of the forest remains. The ecosystem is a manipulated echo of what once was.
So the question is: when the natural spirits have been driven out - but humans don’t replace them - what takes their place?
Filling the Void: Demonology and Parasitic Spirits
Nature abhorrers a vacuum. In spiritual and occult traditions around the world, places do not stay empty.
Just as in urban environments where displaced wildlife gives way to rats, raccoons, and coyotes, so too does the spiritual ecosystem adapt. When native spirits - nurturing, protective, bound to the health of the land and water - are destroyed or driven off, other entities move in.
Demonology has long warned of spirits that are not tied to place, but to corruption. These entities thrive in environments of decay, toxicity, and death. They are parasitic rather than symbiotic. Instead of embodying the land, they consume what remains of its spiritual energy, they thrive on slow death and suffering.
Some traditions speak of chthonic spirits - lower, underworld entities that seep upward when the natural balance is lost. Others point to egregores - collective thoughtforms, sometimes unintentionally created by fear, grief, or despair. In a spiritually poisoned land, these beings may root themselves like weeds in fallow soil.
Maine’s dead forests are full of such things: spiritual parasites and pathogens.
The Feeling of Emptiness
Ask anyone who has wandered deep into the Maine woods - not Acadia, not the postcard trails, but the endless spindly reaches of corporate owned timberland - and they will tell you: something feels wrong.
No birdsong. No rustle of deer. No squirrel chatter.
The trees themselves seem off - too thin, too close, too desperate for sun. The light is gray even on clear days. There’s a pressing, watching stillness that clings to your skin like fog.
It is not merely absence of sound. It is presence of a different kind. The stillness of a plague ward, where everything is waiting to die. The only life is the infesting parasites thriving on the suffering.
And perhaps that is the true horror: when we destroy the spirit of a place, we do not leave it empty. We invite something else in. Something not bound to life and growth. Something less interested in balance. Something that thrives in silence, suffering, and slow rot.