Ghosts vs. Demons in the Supernaturalverse
Author's Note: Hey SPN fam! This first post will be a long one, as I want to start off by giving a strong impression of how influential ancient history has been on the pop-culture and moral compass of Supernatural. For some background context, I became a Supernatural fan late to the party in March 2025. Like for many, my pre-watch impression was that the show was unnecessarily long with cliche dialogue, campy CGI, and grungy colour grading, so it seemed a decent option for background noise while I studied. Little could I have predicted how swiftly I would be sucked into the world of Supernatural, or rather, how swiftly Supernatural would be sucked into my world!
On the 27th of April I awoke from a dream that visualised a Dante's Inferno-esque stratification of Supernatural's S4 soul-market economy - crossroads demons in the outermost circle of hell functioned as brokers, serving the more evil "lender" demons in deeper circles who assessed the creditworthiness of souls based on their moral purity and longevity. Suddenly, my economic anthropology subject made sense, and my eyes were opened to the rich field of study that is Supernatural's lore. I felt a renewed passion for the purpose of my higher education in Anthropology and Ancient World Studies, and have since written a number of essays analysing various features of the Supernaturalverse, such as the representation of Osiris, and the influence of Romulus and Remus on Sam and Dean's brotherhood (which I'll likely post about in future). This post, in fact, will be graded as my final assignment for the Ancient World Studies capstone project (breaking the fourth wall here in true Supernatural fashion) which will mark a fitting end to my degree, as well as the beginning of a new, post-grad hobby. I hope that my rambles can help even the most dedicated fans to uncover new (or rather, old) meaning in the Supernaturalverse :)
Some housekeeping rules: I will be using the MLA referencing style in my blog for academic integrity (as a victim of social media misinformation, sourcing is important to me!!) which brackets the author's last name and relevant page number of a source. "Et al", Latin for "and others", is used when 3+ authors are involved - I know a lot of bloggers prefer footnotes but I like to include page numbers so it's easier for people to fact-check me if they feel so inclined. For supernatural scenes the episode title will be bracketed, with a timestamp if I'm mentioning isolated/covert details. At the bottom of each post I'll put an MLA list of all academic sources referenced, but I won't bother including the episodes as I suspect you're familiar with finding them. To avoid any confusion between my comments and the citations, from here-on I will only use brackets for citations, and I'll also italicise the titles of ancient texts/artworks and highlight key phrases for legibility. A final note on archaeological dating: BCE = before common era, 2025+ years ago. CE = common era, -2025 years ago.
Now let's get into it!
[Demon Azazel ("Salvation")]
[Woman in White ("Pilot")]
In the very first episode of Supernatural, we get a sense that the demon that kills Mary and Jessica is a separate, more formidable species than the common-or-garden ghosts Sam and Dean are accustomed to hunting. The monster/ghost of the week, the Woman in White, is characterised comparatively with the demon. She is introduced floating aimlessly on the side of the highway, her image flickering in and out of transparency, and fluctuating between youth and decrepitude. Her eyes are wet with sorrow, and when a minor character picks her up in his car, her cold miasma causes condensation to creep over the windows ("Pilot" 13:01-15:00). The Woman in White is framed as dangerous due to her erratic attacks; the magnitude of her grief and guilt driving her to kill. By contrast, the demon is portrayed as threateningly in control of his physical and mental faculties, calculatedly targeting those closest to Sam and Dean. His use of pyrokinesis in his kills expresses a focused cruelty at odds with the ghost's seemingly reflexive thermokinesis.
Throughout the rest of the series the difference between ghost and demon is less clear-cut, only seeming logical because of this initial distinction. Possession of human bodies - particularly those emotionally vulnerable - is introduced as a demonic behaviour by the demon on flight 2485 ("Phantom Traveller"). However, Dirk McGregor later demonstrates that ghosts share this ability ("After School Special"). Outside of occupying a host, both ghosts and demons are depicted in an amorphous, smoke-like form, with true faces that terrify humans. Both have telekinetic abilities, can be summoned and exorcised, are hindered by iron, salt and hallowed ground, and will be destroyed if their original human remains are burned - although the locations of demons' corpses are rarely known, Bobby touches on the latter point when he uses Crowley's bones as blackmail material ("Weekend at Bobby's" 35:33-36:00). In the same vein, both beings were once human, and characters of both species fall variously on a spectrum of amiability to malice throughout the show. If the variation between any individual ghost and demon is hardly more drastic than between a ghost and another ghost, or a demon and another demon, why have this distinction at all?
[Ghost ("Paint It Black")]
[Demon ("The Magnificent Seven")]
During the first demon encounter, Dean declares: "This isn't our usual gig... demons, they don't want anything, just death and destruction for its own sake" ("Phantom Traveller" 20:35-43), suggesting that the core difference between demons and ghosts relates to the latter operating on some understood biological/emotional instinct. However, the semantic distinction isn't dependent on whether the hunters themselves are able to decipher spirits' motivation - after all, there are some other minor but tangible differentiations, such as which weapons can kill each, the ghosts' aforementioned cold aura, and the unnatural eye colour and sulfurous traces special to demons. This final factor points towards the separate development of ghosts and demons underlying their different motivations: where ghosts form out of a human's refusal to pass on to the afterlife, demons are conceived in hell. A deep dive into ancient history reveals how this division ended up in Supernatural, and more so what it means for Supernatural's definition of humanity!
So get this... the earliest evidence of a strong distinction between spirits trapped in the living world vs. those sent to the underworld and returned comes from Ptolemaic Egypt, 200-ish BCE.
When a Macedonian-Greek general called Ptolemy I took over in 305 BCE, he started messing around with the Egyptian religion to justify his foreign kingship, namely by creating the Cult of Serapis (Chandler 4). The cult revolved around a god - Serapis - who was a confusing mash-up of Egypt's supreme god of the afterlife Osiris, Greece's god of the underworld Hades, Greece's supreme god Zeus, and Egypt's sacred bull Apis. Ptolemy I, and his son Ptolemy II, and HIS son Ptolemy III built an associated temple in Alexandria, called the Serapeum (Gordon 1). This started an interfaith culture in the city, breaking off from the orthodox religion that dominated the rest of Egypt (Chandler 5). If legend in Gilles Quispel's 1997 translation of The Asclepius treatise can be trusted - bearing in mind that the text's earliest Greek fragments date to 100 CE, at least 300 years after the founding of Serapeum - a lodge was built in Alexandria soon after the Serapeum, and dedicated to a different, more successful Greco-Egyptian religion: Hermeticism (Chandler 10). Hermeticism follows the teachings of the legendary figure Hermes Trismegitus: a simpler comination of the Egyptian god of wisdom and writing, Thoth, and the Greek messenger god, Hermes. The Asclepius is only one text out of a body of religious treatises called The Hermetica, with The Corpus Hermeticum being the most popular collection therein. The earliest fragments of The Corpus Hermeticum are similarly dated between 100 and 300 CE, although the version known today is a translated compilation from the medieval Eastern Roman Empire (Chandler 15-16) - keeping in mind that the Romans conquered Egypt, and in fact sacked the Serapeum in 389 CE (Chandler 5)!
The history speedrun is to say: although the origin of Hermeticism is hard to pin down because of limited archaeological remains as well as some texts only preserved in much later versions, it seems two separate branches of the restless spirit co-existed following Ptolemaic religious propaganda. One branch concerned the traditional Egyptian ghost-like entity, taking form when a human's soul is denied access to the afterlife due to improper burial - or in some cases, due to a violent or premature death - and doomed to madly wander the earth (Ikram 348-350). The other, Greekified branch concerned spirits who have developed powers in the afterlife, then been summoned back to earth. Sounding familiar?
You may be thinking that in the grand scheme of archaeological evidence going back tens of thousands of years, there must have been earlier instances of these coinciding types of spirit, particularly since most societies have minority cults deviating from whatever the popular religion is. I present Ptolemaic Egypt as the blueprint for this spirit divide because Hermetic beliefs were more than an obscure trend, spreading out from Alexandria into the wider Egyptian norms, as evidenced by the Greek Magical Papyri.
The papyri is a scattered series of spell handbooks dating as early as 200 BC (Nock 225), mostly containing recipes for invocations and exorcisms of the demon-kind of spirit (219). The largest intact papyrus came from Thebes - more than 700km from Alexandria - but remnants have been found all over Egypt, with editions in Greek, Demotic - basically cursive hieroglyphics - and Coptic, a Greek alphabet-based Egyptian script from the later Roman Egypt (Betz xlii-xlv). Although the papyri is not part of The Hermetica, it shares clear theological commonalities with Hermetic texts, as well as with successive Christian Coptic and Gnostic ones (Mekus 35)... which have further influenced the spirit lore of Supernatural!
But let's start with the lore laid out in the Greek Magical Papyri, the earliest text I've outlined. From its 1986 compilation and translation, we can glean several features that have made their way into the ghosts and demons of Supernatural. The separation between ghost and demon in this translation is represented through the English "ghost" and the Greek "daimon", from which the word demon derives (Mekus 3). While daimons may be invoked to do one's bidding or grant a wish - e.g. in spells I.1-195 and III.165-86 (Aune et al. xi, 22) - ghosts are only referred to in spells seeking to protect oneself from them, or to project their malevolence onto others (Aune et al. 59, 88, 90). Ghosts are overwhelmingly imbued with 'calamity' and 'terror' (Aune et al. 59), making them unsuitable for diplomatic contracts compared to daimons. This is reflected in Supernatural - demons are largely portrayed as more apathetic and strategic than ghosts, with a proclivity for pact-making.
Moreover, the spiritual encirclement motif frequently used in the papyri (Aune et al. 22, 49, 74, 95, 107, 125) is prevalent in Supernatural if we consider the use of salt circles to contain/ward off ghosts, and devil's traps to contain demons. The Hermetic adoption of the Egyptian ouroboros icon - that symbol of the snake eating its tail - alongside the practice of circumabulation - walking around an amulet during seances - popularised the use of circles in ritual interaction with spirits (Mekus vi). The use of salt to hurt (Aune et al. 227), ward off (Aune et al. 87), or purify (Aune et al. 278) spirits likely became incorporated into the Greek Magical Papyri from the Pharaonic Egyptian tradition of dessicating the body with salt to ensure passage to the afterlife (Ikram 343). This clarifies Sam and Dean's tradition of salting the corpses of ghosts before burning them.
[Ouroboros]
[Salt circle ("Defending Your Life")]
[Devil's Trap ("Salvation")]
A spirit hierarchy is further revealed in the papyri. The weakest spirit type consists of "restless human spirits... entrapped energies located upon and limited to the earthly plane" (Mekus 6) - AKA the ghost, made of air currents (Mekus 14) - who is surpassed by the typical magical daimon that can be bargained with; who is surpassed by the demi-god/arch-daimon empowered to grant special wishes. The daimons are called down from astronomical bodies such as star constellations, where the Egyptian afterlife is positioned (Mekus 12). So there we have an explicit divide between spirits of the earth and spirits of the afterlife, while the ground of extrapowerful daimons also seems to match up with Supernatural's first generation of demons, the Princes of Hell. The only glaring inconsistency is the fact that the afterlife is located in the sky rather than underground. Fire and iron also make a cameo in spells seeking to harness arch-daimons for prophetic dreams (Aune et al. 123) - bringing to mind Azazel's dreamwalking powers - although here fire is exclusively used BY the daimons to warn a person against doing something.
Moving onto the official translated Hermetic texts of The Corpus Hermeticum and The Asclepius, moral condemnation of ghosts and daimons comes into play. Ghost-like spirits are described in The Corpus Hermeticum as creeping things 'void of reason' and with a 'appetites inordinate' (Mead 5). They live in the air, and are created from human souls afraid of passage to the afterlife due to their spiritual ignorance (Mead 24). This fits pretty well with Supernatural's conception of ghosts as human souls driven mad - or excessively emotional - after refusing a reaper's accompaniment to the afterlife. The text also specifies that daimons are transformed human souls, empowered through passage to the astral afterlife (Mead 13). Here, daimons are not all inclined to immorality; in fact, only a select few are characterised as evil by their behaviours of adultery, murder and impiety (Mead 21). However, the separate sins of ghosts and demons are starting to manifest, with ghosts being a product of ignorance and misfortune, while demons are the outcome of conscious wrongdoing. The concept of ghost possession is introduced here, explained as ghosts yearning for a human body again (Mead 27), rather than as a means to make deals like for daimons in the Greek Magical Papyri. Some hell-adjacent ideas are also emerging, such as the concept of an 'Avenging Daimon' (Mead 5) that makes impious souls, new to the afterlife, into 'beasts' by torturing them with sharpened fire and whips (Mead 27-28). Daimonic darkness is additionally characterised as 'coiling in sinuous folds... unto a snake... belching out smoke as from a fire' (Mead 2), which sounds remarkably similar to demon smoke in Supernatural. The Asclepius adds to this lore by specifying that the 'evil entities' may possess a man whose emotional state has 'led his desire towards evil' (Salaman 31).
So, at this point in history there's the foundational idea of ghost-like spirits: floating in the air, getting more and more "inhuman" with passion due to refusing to move onto the next life, and their refusal being inspired by dissatisfactory circumstances of their life/death. These spirits may possess people out of a yearning for human life. At the same time, there's powerful, smoke-like daimon spirits that live in the afterlife but may be called down by humans, who have come into being through punishment for the sins they deliberately committed when alive. These spirits may possess people as part of a deal or just to wreak havoc. Oddly, only the ghost's humanity is seen as innately corrupted, as Hermeticism equates humanity with spiritual wisdom - opposed to emotion.
Then enters Roman Christian ideas of emotion as a virtue. Following the Roman Empire's conquest of Egypt, more elements of Greek belief that the Romans subscribed to were combined with the local religion - above all, the belief in an underworld, which developed into the Christian notion of a fiery, underground Hell (Gulbransen 9-11) explored in Supernatural. Alongside Virgil's representation of volcanic gateways to Tartarus in Rome's foundational myth The Aeneid (Scarth), the Greek underworld developed a relationship with volcanoes. The Greco-Egyptian grimoire The Eighth Book of Moses then established volcanic sulfur as a signifier for demons (Fuller 57).
[Gate to Hell ("The Rising Son")]
[Demonic sulfur traces ("All Hell Breaks Loose pt. 1")]
Within the gnostic religion emerging, fire was cemented as an effective weapon against spirits in conjunction with the Roman custom of cremation (Nock 334, 335).
[Sam and Dean warm their hands over burning corpse ("Everybody Hates Hitler")]
Gnosticism, like Hermeticism, proposed spiritual knowledge - "gnosis" - as the ultimate expression of humanity (Chandler 21). However, as humans were fundamentally unenlightened, compassion emerged as an additional, optimistic measure of humanity in Roman Christianity (Blowers 4). Supernatural thereby echoes Gnosticism's idea of immoral/dangerous emotion through the portrayal of ghosts, but also Christianity's value of emotion by characterising demons as lacking feelings.
[Sam to Molly on ghosts ("Roadkill" 18:51-19:04)]
[Demon Crowley's speech ("Prisoners" 25:34-26:06)]
Coptic Christianity around the same time introduced the idea of spirits bearing terrifying, distorted faces that betray their cruelty (Gulbrasen 27), to spotlight one more attribute Supernatural has derived from this genealogy of spirit belief.
[Ghost's true face ("Pilot")]
[Demon's true face ("All Hell Breaks Loose Pt. 1")]
TLDR: Although Supernatural's ghost and demon archetypes are similar, they represent divergences in an ancient Greco-Egyptian spirit legacy. The ghost reflects older ideas of spirithood as a "lost soul" ("Stairway to Heaven" 27:30-38) whose humanity is eroded through excessive emotion engendered by the refusal to pass on. The demon mirrors a more recent class of "twisted, perverted, evil spirit" ("Weekend at Bobby's" 36:10-18), pertaining to a soul whose apathetic disposition has been refined through otherworldly punishment.
Works cited:
Aune, David., et al., and Hans Betz, editor. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, 1st ed. University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Betz, Hans. “Introduction to the Greek Magical Papyri.” The Greek Magical Papyri In Translation, edited by Hans Betz, 1st ed., University of Chicago Press, 1986, pp. Xlii-liii.
Blowers, Paul. “Pity, Empathy, and the Tragic Spectacle of Human Suffering: Exploring the Emotional Culture of Compassion in Late Ancient Christianity.” Journal of Early Christian Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-27.
Chandler, Kegan. Hermes and Hermeticism: A Historical Introduction. 2017. University of Capetown, unpublished manuscript. Academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/34992032/Hermes_and_Hermeticism_A_Historical_Introduction.
Fuller, Marie. From Daimon to Demon: The Evolution of the Demon from Antiquity to Early Christianity. 2009. University of Nevada, M.A. thesis. http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/4478241.
Gordon, Richard. “Saparis.” Oxford Classical Dictionary, 07 March 2016, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.5705.
Gulbransen, Madeleine. From Daimones to Demons: Exorcisms and Cultural Constructions of the Demonic in Late Antique Egypt. 2023. University of Mary Washington, Honors Thesis. https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research/521.
Ikram, Salima. “Afterlife Beliefs and Burial Customs.” The Egyptian World, edited by Toby Wilkinson, 1st ed., Routledge, 2007, pp. 340-351.
Mead, George. The Corpus Hermeticum. Blackmask Online, 2001 (c. 1906).
Mekus, Christopher. The Transformation of the Daimon as a Spirit Entity from Ancient Greece to Early Christianity, and Beyond. 2022. Florida International University, M.A. dissertation. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/5115/.
Nock, Arthur. “Cremation and Burial in the Roman Empire.” Harvard Theological Review, vol. 25, no. 4, 1932, 321-359.
Nock, Arthur. “Greek Magical Papyri.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 15, no. 1, 1929, 220-235.
Salaman, Clement. Asclepius: The Perfect Discourse of Hermes Trismegistus. Duckworth Books, 2007.
Scarth, Alwyn. “The Volcanic Inspiration of Some Images in the Aeneid.” The Classical World, vol. 93, no. 6, 2000, pp. 591-605.
amazing!! fascinating and informative read from someone who is quite literally a professional on the topic.
well worth a read :)
