The Zarathustra Seed (Part II)

“With a torch in my hand, the light of which is not by any means a flickering one, I illuminate this underworld of ideals with beams that pierce the gloom.” – Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

Part II.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche announces to the reader that “common goal is to erect a new image and ideal of the free spirit,” in reference to the middle period of his work. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche does indeed “erect a new image and ideal of the free spirit” in his pursuit of the higher man, the Übermensch. Zarathustra is as a whole a compendium of unleashed, overflowing thoughts of the deep, formulations of mythological figures and fearsome archetypes, brimming in an ocean of paradox and contradiction. The doctrine of the “higher man” as proposed by Zarathustra sounds strangely reminiscent to the Indian formulation of the Atman, the the true self that exists in everyone; the small thumbling in the heartbeat of life.  This is the equivalent to the inner core, the pneumatic spiritual seed that is the seat for gnosis that the ancient Gnostics recognized as the spiritual marrow of the soul. I won’t go into every aspect of Zarathustra, but only a few notable excerpts that I think I relevant to the topic of this essay.

In Chapter 61, The Honey Sacrifice of Zarathustra, the speaker is depicted as a “fisher” of men, similar to Jesus’s proclamation in Mark 1:17 or even the Hermetic figure of Poimandres the “Man-Shepherd”, seeking those who are in search of the truth of the higher man:

The best bait, as huntsmen and fishermen require it. For if the world be as a gloomy forest of animals, and a pleasure-ground for all wild huntsmen, it seemeth to me rather – and preferably – a fathomless, rich sea; - A sea full of many-hued fishes and crabs, for which even the gods might long, and might be tempted to become fishers in it, and casters of nets, – so rich is the world in wonderful things, great and small! Especially the human world, the human sea: – towards it do I now throw out my golden angle-rod and say: Open up, thou human abyss!

In the first chapter of Zarathustra, “The Higher Man” the speaker and sage of the text contemplates the fate of mankind and his predicament in his dwelling place on a mountain.

Altered is Zarathustra; a child hath Zarathustra become; an awakened one is Zarathustra: what wilt thou do in the land of the sleepers?

The Atman personified subsequently decides to descend from a mountain after 10 years of meditation and down into the market place of the mob to proclaim the truths that he discovered out of his own innate altruism and compassion to his fellow man.

Zarathustra answered: “I love mankind.”

“Why,” said the saint, “did I go into the forest and the desert? Was it not because I loved men far too well? Now I love God: men, I do not love. Man is a thing too imperfect for me. Love to man would be fatal to me.”

Zarathustra answered: “What spake I of love! I am bringing gifts unto men.”

To his dismay, he realizes he spoke too soon when his words fall upon dead ears from those in the market place  and even spurns his attempts to proclaim the gospel of the higher man in mockery and scorn in order to maintain their mediocre status-quo.

“You higher men,” — so sputters the crowd — “there are no higher men, we are all equal; man is man, before God — we are all equal!” Before God! — Now, however, this God has died. Before the crowd, however, we will not be equal. You higher men, go away from the market-place!

Nevertheless, he gives his speech:

Lo, I teach you the Superman!
The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The
Superman shall he the meaning of the earth!
I conjure you, my brethren, remain true to the earth, and believe
not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes! Poisoners are
they, whether they know it or not.
Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones
themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!
Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died,
and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now
the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher
than the meaning of the earth!

Here, Zarathustra through the conduit of Nietzsche’s (and yes I totally flipped that dichotomy on purpose) deepest concern is to show that neither the “death of God”, nor the demise of all faiths predicated upon otherworldly hopes or this-worldly optimisms, give the last word on man’s existential drama; and to find a way beyond it without recourse once again becomes vulnerable to disillusionment which was a real concern to Nietzsche. More controversially: the death of God eliminated the idea of some despotic divinity judging human beings and weighing down upon them as some oppressive force. But with this weight gone some began to speak of the unbearable lightness of being, as if with the absence of God, and thus with the permission to do anything and everything, life seemed to lack the gravitas of ultimate significance. The eternal recurrence is Nietzsche’s way for the self to generate its own gravitas in the absence of God. It is only though the virtues of the higher man that the “great nausea” of the emptiness and shallow reality of the mob, the rabble, the herd can be solved and wholly transcended.

It is Zarathustra who cannot ignore the great distress of humanity; he is the Atman personified, always ready and able to run the source of the cry for self-realization. In the Subala Upanishad, it describes the spiritual man’s roots as a foundation to “Narayana [one of the names for the Hindu deity, Vishnu], the indwelling spirit of all”:

There abides for ever the one unborn in the secret place within the body. The earth is his body; he moves through the earth but the earth knows him not. The waters are his body, but the waters know him not. Light is his body, he moves through the light but the light knows him not. Air is his body, he moves through the air but the air knows him not. Ether is his body, he moves through the ether but ether knows him not…Thinking mind is his body, he moves through thinking mind but thinking mind knows him not. He alone is the indwelling spirit of all beings, free from all evil, the one divine, radiant Narayana.

However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra differs in the values of both the Buddhist and the Vedantic mystic:

 ”Good and evil,” says the Buddhist, “are both fetters: the perfect one became master over both.”; “what’s done and what`s not done,” says the man who believes in the Vedanta, “give him no pain; as a wise man he shakes good and evil off himself; his kingdom suffers no more from any deed; good and evil – he has transcended both” – an entirely Indian conception, whether Brahman or Buddhist. (On The Genealogy of Morals, What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?)

Zarathustra is the higher man who masters duality and the fetters of nihilism and disillusionment.  Zarathustra is his own god, and runs counter to the Brahman or Advaita Vedantic mystic who’s aim is to achieve mystical union with the One, Brahman or the collective Atman, communicating his sarcasm and ire against such teachings as asserted in In The Happy Iles in Zarathustra:

“Evil do I call it and misanthropic: all that teaching about the one, and the plenum, and the unmoved, and the sufficient, and the imperishable! All the imperishable—that’s but a simile, and the poets lie too much.—”

This so-called unity to Nietzsche was merely a doctrine of the “oldest and most venerable script” in which is to be rejected in favor of a more life-affirming script in support for his gospel of the Superman. It isn’t just a condemnation of one type of mysticism in favor for other stripes but a wholesale rejection of its every incarnation. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche summarizes his contempt for such nihilism masquerading itself as self-negating and transcendent mysticism:

…the hypnotic feeling of nothingness, the silence of the deepest sleep, in short, the loss of suffering – something which suffering and fundamentally disgruntled people have to consider their highest good, their value of values, and which they must appraise as positive and experience as the positive in itself. (With the same logic of feeling, in all pessimistic religions nothingness is called God).

It becomes rather obvious that Nietzsche goes at great lengths to deny an impersonal, supreme and transcendental power that lies beyond the world of the material such as Brahman. Buddhism and its founder Siddhartha  receives a lesser disdainful evaluation, despite the fact that they fundamentally agree on such “fictions” as an immortal soul that survives the sudden cut off of death. It is notable that  ideas such as Eternal Recurrence in which Nietzsche adopts into his personal philosophy shares an affinity with the idea of the cycles and wheels of Samsara or metempsychosis under the realm of dukkha. So what exactly survives death? To Nietzsche there is no “soul” that transmigrates into another body or thing. Instead, the “soul” is replaced by the Will to Power alone, although it seems as though Nietzsche was simply arguing semantics. Still, Nietzsche is far from completely denying a spiritual reality, but yet maintains that it must be understood as shorthand for our experiential lives in the here and now. Consciousness to him isn’t exactly a purely metaphysical or mystical substance but rather a product of social conditioning and of social existence in conjunction with our practical needs and abilities.

In The Indian Origin of Nietzsche’s Theory on the Eternal Return by D. Bannerjee, he goes in greater detail in their similarities:

The central theme of his (Nietzsche’s) passionate hope and aspiration for the future of mankind, namely, the survival of human character and personality in a ceaseless cycle of births  (death being only a harbinger to the eternal return of life’s perfect and heroic moments) discloses likewise an Indian origin and in fact, constitutes the main tenet of Hinduism and and Buddhism alike.” (p. 163)

It seems as though Nietzsche had adopted the concept of reincarnation for his philosophy. Nietzsche’s connection to Asian religion and philosophy started with Paul Deussen aka “Deva-Sena” (a name he adopted for his admiration for the Hindu religion), a German Sanskrit scholar, something of which Nietzsche acknowledges in his works.

In the Advaita Vedanta teaching, it posits that there is an eternal, emantative and incomprehensible spirit beyond the material universe yet imminent in the life-process as an energizing principle. As follows, every sentient being is a unique manifestation of this ineffable force or principle,  in which the world of appearances makes this realization difficult to realize that we are identical to the Supreme Spirit, since the cosmos is marked in terms of separation, illusion and duality under the umbrella of Maya. The Atman thus returns to the Ultimate Reality as the pinnacle of its spiritual journey through direct experience via the dissolution of form and into the unborn. It is this viewpoint that Nietzsche contends with in that he categorically rejects the idea of the world of appearances as the shadow of a noumenal world as promoted by the likes of Plato in the Theory of Forms of his dialogue Phaedo, the Gnostics and the Hindu mystics as a pursuit of a metaphysical fancy.

The attachment and emphasis on the world of ideals is what he dismisses. To Nietzsche, the world of experience, the world of appearances was the only real world, the channel in which the Superman ceaselessly pour the creative energy of the Will to Power. It is the concept of Samsara in being subservient to something that is both space-less and timeless, in which a moral necessity for an absorption back into Brahman to Nietzsche was no different then the notion of the Judeo-Christian God in which he considered a crutch for the decadent and antithetical to the virtues of the Superman. The Atman according to Nietzsche is its own source that it returns too and not some vague mystical reality that is yearned to the nth degree by mystics throughout history.

In The Anti-Christ, although Nietzsche also expresses the Buddha’s doctrine under the banner of nihilism, it is far more favorable in comparison in his contempt for the Proto-Catholic corruption of Pauline Christianity:

Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity — it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation. The concept, “god,” was already disposed of before it appeared. Buddhism is the only genuinely positive religion to be encountered in history, and this applies even to its epistemology (which is a strict phenomenalism) — It does not speak of a “struggle with sin,” but, yielding to reality, of the “struggle with suffering.” Sharply differentiating itself from Christianity, it puts the self-deception that lies in moral concepts be hind it; it is, in my phrase, beyond good and evil.

To Nietzsche, the Buddha offered a far more realistic and approachable path for spiritual practitioners, that was leavened with reason and moderation in light of the Middle Way to liberation without all the extreme bodily mortification prevalent in asceticism of the Yogi’s (for example) or abstaining from addictive sense pleasures and vices of all stripes. 

Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin — it simply says, as it simply thinks, “I suffer.” To the barbarian, however, suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, first of all, is an explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere instinct prompts him to deny his suffering altogether, or to endure it in silence.) Here the word “devil” was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent and terrible enemy — there was no need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an enemy.

While he has a reasonably favorable view of Buddhism in comparison to other more decidedly theistic religions, he however dislikes its evaluation of suffering as a category definition of the world, thus weakening and even negating the Will to Power, instead of fortifying it. To Nietzsche, the weak man dwelt in his own miserable state, picking his mind with festering thoughts of jealously and inferiority while placing blame on others. It is this slave morality that denounces power and happiness while promsing the weak will receive eternal bliss in the afterlife. Yet, Nietzsche had also rejected the idea that mankind was guilty and responsible for everything inherently wrong in the world because this shifting of responsibility from God to man is false though it reverses the direction of the resentment and might serve as a catalyst to personal development.

This world, the eternally imperfect, an eternal contradiction’s image and imperfect image- an intoxicating joy to its imperfect creator:- thus did the world once seem to me.

It is here that Zarathustra paradoxically shares the pessimistic anthropological attitude of the ancient Gnostics such as the Sethians who disregarded the world and its creator as an abortive mistake to be repudiated and transcended. They believed that the creator god was by no means a universal one, but a secondary, subordinate god, angel or even a malicious demon empowered with the ability to craft and construct. It is this being who in his vanity created the world and cosmos in which he was satisfied this work was good and perfect, but in reality was a sham in which its iron manacles kept the inner luminary of man captive to the realm of fate, similarly to the idea of Eternal Recurrence. Yet, he was admonished by his own Mother of the Angels (Sophia) for being opaque and blind. It was the real and true Father which took pity on the half-conscious worms that this creator angel had formed out of the dust of the earth and through his emissaries, provided them spirit and consciousness to animate them on their journey to salvation by carrying the sparks of divine Light to heaven which are burred in living matter.

English poet and artist, William Blake writes in The Book of Urizen where the god of Reason recounts how the mind is imprisoned in the cosmos, deprived of light and eternity:

In chains of the mind locked up,
Like fetters of ice shrinking together
Disorganiz’d, rent from Eternity,
Los beat on his fetters of iron;
And heated his furnaces & pour’d
Iron sodor and sodor of brass

The human being, accordingly is really a spirit entrapped in the tomb that is bodily flesh, like a pearl buried in mud. Both the world of humanity and the world of the cosmos at large are battlegrounds in a war between good spirit of light and the malevolent, counterfeit spirit that rules over matter. Man was originally pure spirit or consciousness, but somehow in the process of emanation and creation, man had become entrapped by the evil eon to the shackles of the cave-world Plato described in his famous Cave allegory. The human race experiences this reality in whatever he projects from his own consciousness but is really a sort of malevolent simulacrum, a matrix-like “time out of joint” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet put it. In this gnostic revelation, the pre-cosmic fall of being from the world of light leading to the creation of an evil, prison-like world made by a stupid and inferior creator becomes the center stage of this unfolding, divine drama.

Whether or not, Nietzsche was familiar with the doctrines of the Gnostics (probably not), he definetly shares a similar attitude as expressed earlier on, despite his insistence on laying a hold of the beauty in the gloomy cosmos as a thriving and independent isle of virtuous light and power that transcends the dichotomy of good and evil. The Gnostic acosmic denial of existence would have turned him off, however.

Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks — those who write new values on new tablets.

Notably, in Plato’s allegory of the cave — there are four phases in the story which includes the prisoner in the darkness, the liberation from the shackles of ignorance, the contemplation of the pure forms outside the cave, and the return to the cave to liberate the prisoners left behind much like a Bodhisattva or a Manichean light-savior would do out of divine compassion to those still left lingering in the world of suffering and ignorance. This is similar to the threefold process of transformation or as it is called in Zarathustra “The Three Metamorphoses” that the spirit of the Übermensch undergoes:

THREE metamorphoses of the spirit do I designate to you: how the spirit becometh a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child. Many heavy things are there for the spirit, the strong load-bearing spirit in which reverence dwelleth: for the heavy and the heaviest longeth its strength.

The obedient camel is representative of the herd man who embraces the virtues of the slave. The freedom-loving lion is second transformation of the spiritual Atman in which the lion becomes the chief symbol for the Will to Power who is ready to pounce and tear at the virtues of the weak and the lukewarm and make it into a strewn, bloody carcass. Yet, Zarathustra makes it very clear that not even the lion can replace the old values of the dead and burried; it has to take a completely new archetype to forge the new ideals like an alchemist transmuting lead to gold. The playfully creating child becomes the last stage in which the Übermensch can rise from the dark ashes of the former into the new, fiery light of the reborn Phoenix. The Übermensch is also (obviously, if you’ve been paying attention) represented likewise through the figures of Zarathustra and Dionysus whom both forged new vistas of vision, new universes of possibility, freedom and liberation:

Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling wheel, a first movement, a holy Yea. Aye, for the game of creating, my brethren, there is needed a holy. Yea unto life: its own will, willeth now the spirit; his own world winneth the world’s outcast.

I take that in light of what Nietzsche wrote about when the highest values have become devalued, a new system of values needs to be created. The Übermensch must first grow in the wilderness of past mythology and metaphysics, then he must surpass those “lying specters of the ages” and forge his own destiny by staying truthful to his virtues midst the drowning miasma and noise of the herd.

Nietzsche correctly understood that fixed values of the old religions and sciences weren’t not enough to make humans reach their optimal state.  They would need an intelligent utilitarian will, an executive power which transcends moral law and seeks the most highly beneficial outcome in circumstances which the virtues and laws of the common man could not properly address.

 The virtues of the common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in a philosopher; it might be possible for a highly developed man, supposing him to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities thereby alone, for the sake of which he would have to be honoured as a saint in the lower world into which he had sunk. There are books which have an inverse value for the soul and the health according as the inferior soul and the lower vitality, or the higher and more powerful, make use of them. In the former case they are dangerous, disturbing, unsettling books, in the latter case they are herald-calls which summon the bravest to THEIR bravery. Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people clings to them. (Beyond Good and Evil)

A genuine measure of individual sovereignty or autonomy and self-mastery becomes the laid foundation for this  “higher” type of human being, transcending “beyond good and evil” and attaining a higher calling or spirituality. This philosophy does not call for the eradication or repression of ones most innate and basic drives with which humanity is endowed, but rather they are sublimated into a flouring vitality. It supplies the impetus to all higher spirituality and culture, through which alone human life can transform itself into something worthy of esteem. This new set of values provides the means to emerge to a higher platform of vision and being, transcending the  brutish nihilism that is left from a disbelieving herd or mass of people who have resigned themselves to an unsatisfactory life of mediocrity and conformity.

Nietzsche’s characterization of the general idea of an objective truth as a kind of error, and knowledge as a kind of fiction also becomes notable, at last in relation to the traditional model of truth as the process correspondence of thought to being, and of knowledge as justified true belief. This in his view is a myth. All truth expressed by a human has a relational or relativistic character that requires to be understood differently and is purely subjective in perspective. So, what does that say about Zarathustra who ministers and proclaims his existential truths to the mob?

The figure of Zarathustra himself also shares a remarkable similarity to the Hermetic-pagan figure of Poimandres who is likewise similar to the Gnostic Savior or Christ. Poimandres is considered to be the nous or Logos of the highest godhead. Of course, Poimandres was also the name for the first chapter of The Corpus Hermeticum. As mentioned earlier, Poimandres was also called the “Shepherd of Men” who becomes sort of an Illuminator mentor to the Gnostic aspirant and speaker of the text. He is in essence, the sublime Promethian Gnostic hero, similar to the Superman through his own realization, setting an example for those who are strong enough and called to follow. And yet, Hermes himself is a teacher of wisdom not meant for the mob, but only for those initiated into his “secret knowledge”. In the CH, it asserts something that Nietzsche would have approved of:

“If, then, being made of Life and Light, you learn to know that you are made of them, you will go back to the Life and Light.”

In The Poimandres as Myth: Scholarly Theory and Gnostic Meaning, the author Robert A. Segal writes in a footnote:

…The “Will of God” means the “Counsel of God,” and entity which is distinct from both Nature and the Word and which mediates between God and the material world, at once unnecessarily complicates the cosmogony and really makes the Will equivalent to the Word.

Accordingly, perhaps Nietzsche was in fact channeling the Will from the Word or Logos, Zarathustra. Much like in the way Paul had the private revelation an entity he identified as the spiritual Christ appear before him which bubbled up from deep within his unconscious, Zarathustra likewise does the same with Nietzsche dictating the law of the Will to Power. Christ himself becomes is the perfect symbol of the hidden immortal within the mortal man. Other Gnostic archetypes as well (Hermes, Poimandres, Christ, Seth, and even the Buddha) can be compared to the Superman as flourishing figures of the four gates of self-knowledge: light, life, love and liberty, shining through the dark miasma of nihilism and the fetters of the material world. Nietzsche recognized the spiritual and even Gnostic virtues expressed by Jesus Christ in the Gospels, eliminating the Church’s orthodox authority over his words of wisdom in regards to the true “Kingdom of God” that is nowhere to be found but within:

The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something that is to come “above the earth” or “after death.” The whole concept of natural death is lacking in the evangel: death is no bridge, no transition; it is lacking because it belongs to a wholly different, merely apparent world, useful only insofar as it furnishes signs. The “hour of death” is no Christian conception: “hour,” time, physical life and its crises do not even exist for the teacher of the “glad tidings.” The “kingdom of God” is nothing that one expects; it has no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it will not come in “a thousand years”—it is an experience of the heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere.

Nietzsche as a whole is severely critical of everyday cherished beliefs and aspects of society — everything from religion, morality, science, philosophy and traditional values. In this instance, Nietzsche becomes one of the first deconstructionists. However, this does not stop Nietzsche from having the “Lulz” when he suggests that we bury all these serious ideals embodied in the Übermensch, the Will to Power and the urgent need for self-overcoming and make time for laughter and joy, even in the face of utter despair and misery as he writes in The Gay Science:

To laugh at oneself as one would have to laugh in order to laugh out of the whole truth, to do this, the best have not hitherto had enough of the sense of truth, and the most gifted have had far too little genius!  There is perhaps still a future even for laughter!  When the maxim, “The species is all, the individual is nothing,” has incorporated itself in humanity, and when access stands open to everyone at all times to this ultimate emanciption and irresponsibility.  Perhaps then laughter will have united with wisdom, perhaps then there will be only “joyful wisdom.”

This same sentiment is repeated in Twilight of the Idols:

A revaluation of all values: this question mark, so black, so huge that it casts a shadow over the man who puts it down — such a destiny of a task compels one to run into the sunlight at every opportunity to shake off a heavy, all-too-heavy seriousness.

Even the Übermensch must laugh and crack jokes every now and then, which ultimately reflects Nietzsche’s attitude towards life and oneself on the journey towards ascending the golden starecase of self-mastery and into the light of self-possessed being. It is laughter which demonstrates the capacity in taking command of one’s self and the heights of the soul because it is capable of affirming life for what it is, in the here and the present. It is only in the present that the higher man can flourish.

My wise longing cried and laughed thus out of me – born in the mountains, verily, a wild wisdom – my great broad-winged longing! And often it swept me away and up and far, in the middle of my laughter; and I flew quivering, an arrow, through sun-drunken delight, away to distant futures which no dream had yet seen.

The Shadow Lurks: The Vampire Archetype

The vampire archetype is hardly one fit for introduction since they’re all the rage nowadays. It has remained a steadily popular and tired figure that has resurfaced in one form or another through various media, especially nowadays, reflecting the nihilistic mood of not only the country but the world at large.  The most common characteristics of the vampire itself include being a “reanimated” corpse that is only active at night and nocturnal in the day, while feeding on the living in order to maintain its immortality. The victim of the vampire can become one themselves, but only if the victim consumes the blood on the verge of death.

It would be exhausting to list all the different types of vampires since they’re all seem to be neatly compiled in White Wolf’s famous role-playing game, Vampire: The Masquerade. The  myth of vampires soon became romanticized by the time Anne Rice came on the seen with Interview With A Vampire. Of course, nowadays if you spend any time at all in the pre-teen/tween/teen/young adult women, you’re likely to be aware of the Twilight phenomenon in which is quite easy to deconstruct and mock at its piss-poor pulp, Mary-Sue ridden prose. Yet those who spend lots of time doing so, seem only to be annoyed at the level of success of the devout Mormon, Stephanie Meyer.

For many years, vampire fiction as a whole was regulated to two pervasive categorical themes: the Christian Worldview and Nihilism. The former was relegated to the first conceptions featured in Romantic literature such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, John William Polidori’s The Vampyre, and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. The later would resurface in various vampire fiction authored by the likes of (for example) Christopher Moore, Anne Rice and  Laurell K. Hamilton. Other authors would simply reject both worldviews altogether and explore alternative realities such as Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series, Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire series and a lesser known but even more intriguing Miguel Conner’s Stargazer novel and Gabrielle Faust’s Eternal Vigilance series. Movies like John Carpenter’s Vampires, The Lost Boys, The Hunger, A Vampire’s Kiss, Blade and Underworld series, anime programs such as Hellsing and Vampire Hunter D and even videogames such as Castlevania and Legacy of Kain also echo these tropes.

The Christian take on vampires is that they are evil, soulless demons, minions of the devil. That’s why crosses hurt them, holy water melts them, and, in part at least, why they can’t go out in the sun without biting the dust. Nihilism in vampire lore usually features a vampire as the tragic (sometimes not) hero who overcomes conventional morality to create his or her own lecherous morality a midst a world of darkness. Good and evil are created through behavior rather than unchanging standards for good and evil. The current vampire we see in pop-culture today is, however, a cultural reconstruction of the vampire demon that has existed through various countries and religious mythologies. The oldest recorded example of the vampire myth in religious mythology can be found in a Babylonian prayer, thousands of years old:

“Spirits that minish the land, of great strength… knowing no mercy, they can rage against mankind. They spill blood like rain, devouring flesh and sucking their veins. They are the demons of full violence, ceaselessly devouring blood.”

Elsewhere, the vampire archetype resurfaces in Jewish folklore which also continues the myth of the Owl Lady, Innana or Ishtar in the form of Lilith. Lilith herself appears in the third millennium B.C.E. in a Sumerian text called the Inanna, Gilgamesh and the Huluppu Tree featured in the Epic of Gilgamesh. She is mentioned only once in the entire Bible in a prophecy that states that when the land is turned into a wilderness on the day of Yahweh’s vengeance:

“…the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest. There the hoot owl shall nest and lay eggs, hatch them out and gather them in her shadow; There shall the kites assemble, none shall be missing its mate. Look in the book of the LORD and read: No one of these shall be lacking, For the mouth of the LORD has ordered it, and his spirit shall gather them there. It is he who casts the lot for them, and with his hands he marks off their shares of her; They shall possess her forever, and dwell there from generation to generation.” (Isaiah 34).

Although only mentioned once in the Bible, Lilith was so well-known in 8th century B.C.E. Israel that everyone was afraid of her. Sages wrote about her dangerous doings in the Talmud as men were warned not to sleep alone in a house at night because the Liliths (there were more than one) would conceive demons from their nocturnal emissions. There were also male Lili-s or (Incubi) who mated with the women while they slept. The Liliths or (Succubus) were jealous of married couples and hated the children conceived in ordinary human wedlock. They would attack the little children, suck their blood, and strangle them. It was the Lilith that caused barrenness, miscarriages, or complications during pregnancy and delivery.

The vampire trope can also be found in the Zoroastrian religion, which was the first to posit radical dualism in its approach to religion. Angra Mainyu, the inferior “counterfeit” or “evil” spirit that contests against Ahura Mazda, the uncreated and highest deity in the Zoroastrian religion. Ahura Mazda, unlike Angra Mainyu, is able to create the physical universe and to use it as his instrument in the battle against his Adversary. Since Angra Mainyu or “Arihman” has no  corresponding capability to produce an evil world of his own, he must rely instead on his ability to spoil the good world created by Ahura Mazda. Angra Mainyu and his demons can only participate in the life of the universe in a corruptible, secondary way. He and his fellow demons prey on life in a parasitic symbiosis, vampire-like function rather than existing independently and self-sustained. Yet, the difference between the theodicy and dualism posited by Zoroaster and done by Judaism and Christianity is that Zoroaster focused on a primordial dualism in the realm of spirit while those like Augustine, by contrast, believed that Satan is a creature of God or in other words, the good being responsible for evil.

In apocryphal texts such as the Book of Enoch that are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, vampire-like demonic giants called “Nephilim”, Hebrew for castaways become the premiere villains of the text. The text also reveals that these proto-vampire race as the progeny of the fallen angels known as the “Watchers” who had taken consorts with human women which are comparable to the archons or rulers of fate of Gnostic myth. In this regard, the rebellious angels became synonymous with the archons or rulers that work to enslave the human race through doctrines of “error, fear, misery and ignorance”, thus prolonging their deep ignorance under the sway of astral determinism.

In Gnosticism, the demonic powers of the netherworld ascended daily into the sky with the seven planets, and the earth was subject to the netherworld powers. The Gnostics believed that astrology worked, but they did not seek to know their horoscopes. Quite the reverse! They sought salvation from astral determinism, because they regarded fate as demonic. For the Gnostics, the astrological division of the cosmos into the realm of astral determinism and the transcendent Ogdoad implied that matter and the body were evil, while spirit and the mind were good. Underlying these much-remarked antitheses was another pair of opposites: ignorance and gnosis, “knowledge.” The knowledge under question pertained to the unknowable, transcendent God. This knowledge could only be revealed through revelatory information or “gnosis” within the sleeping spirit of the Gnostic through an intermediary figure of revelation.

As wrongdoers, the archons had to be sinners who were ignorant of God; and since they were deficient in spirituality, they had to be material in composition. The archons who are the gatekeepers of the cosmos also feed off the “psychic” energy from the suffering output of the human race. The Gnostics’ identified the leader of the archons as a demiurge. The concept of a demiurge, or world-creating deity, who differed from the ultimate God, originated with Plato and was widespread in Hellensitic culture. In Gnosticism, however, the demiurge was an ignorant and sinful wrongdoer, who imparted his or her failings to the creation. In some Gnostic systems, the creator of the world repented of his ignorance at some point after the act of creation. According to Poemandres, the Shepard of Men of the Corpus Hermeticum, these archons or ”seven rulers” are the stewards who:

enclose the cosmos that the sense perceives. Men call their ruling Fate.

Within the Enochic corpus, the identification of the stars with the lustful, fallen angels becomes explicit when in it states that these same beings:

“seized that first star which had fallen from the heaven, and bound it hand and foot and cast it into an abyss…and fathered and took all the great stars whose privy members were like those of horses, and bound them all hand and foot, and cast them in an abyss of the earth.”

The Apocryphon of John says of the Watchers’ unholy deeds:

“And he [the Demiurge] made a plan with his powers. He sent his angels to the daughters of men, that they might take some of them for themselves and raise offspring for their enjoyment. And at first they did not succeed. When they had no success, they gathered together again and they made a plan together. They created a counterfeit spirit, who resembles the Spirit who had descended, so as to pollute the souls through it. And the angels changed themselves in their likeness into the likeness of their mates (the daughters of men), filling them with the spirit of darkness, which they had mixed for them, and with evil. They brought gold and silver and a gift and copper and iron and metal and all kinds of things. And they steered the people who had followed them into great troubles, by leading them astray with many deceptions. They (the people) became old without having enjoyment. They died, not having found truth and without knowing the God of truth. And thus the whole creation became enslaved forever, from the foundation of the world until now. And they took women and begot children out of the darkness according to the likeness of their spirit. And they closed their hearts, and they hardened themselves through the hardness of the counterfeit spirit until now.”

Before the fall of the angels, they had the intention of ministering to the human race with the message of repentance and obedience to God, but soon fell prey to lust over the women of flesh. These demonic beings became so ravenous they after they had consumed the majority of all life on earth, including mankind and creatures of all kinds, they had even turned on each other, introducing the concept of cannibalism since they became the first anthropophagites. The Book of Enoch asserts:

When they turned themselves against men, in order to devour them; And began to injure birds, beasts, reptiles, and fishes, to eat their flesh one after another, and to drink their blood.

The Manichean Book of Giants also gives a much more detailed account of the fall and punishment of the angels:

“ … they took and imprisoned all the helpers that were in the heavens. And the angels themselves descended from the heaven to the earth. And (when) the two hundred demons saw those angels, they were much afraid and worried. They assumed the shape of men and hid themselves. Thereupon the angels forcibly removed the men from the demons, laid them aside, and put watchers over them …. the giants …. were sons … with each other in bodily union …. with each other self-…. and the …. that had been born to them, they forcibly removed them from the demons. And they led one half of them eastwards, and the other half westwards, on the skirts of four huge mountains, towards the foot of the Sumeru mountain, into thirty-two towns which the Living Spirit had prepared for them in the beginning. And one calls (that place) Aryan-waizan. And those men are (or: were) …. in the first arts and crafts. …. they made … the angels … and to the demons … they went to fight. And those two hundred demons fought a hard battle with the [four angels], until [the angels used] fire, naphtha, and brimstone.”

The subject of rebel angels and demonic imposters were no stranger to Gnostic consciousness. In fact, most of the texts dedicated to their various nuanced and complex cosmology are replete with them.  The adaptation of many Judeo-Christianity (among other elements from other religious traditions) into the Gnostic milieu was exploited in a transgressive degree, to the point where many of them were actually reversed. The Gnostic approach to the problem of theodicy or evil was the focal point of their rejection of the deficiency and corruptible nature of the material cosmos. The beckoning of the forces of darkness to “intermingle” and corrupt the children of light was a common theme throughout the ancient heretical variations of the ancient Gnostic doctrines. You can see these ideas reflected even further in various choice texts found in the Nag Hammadi codices. The Gnostic text, on the Origin of the World recounts this tale:

“Let us return to the aforementioned rulers, so that we may offer some explanation of them. Now, when the seven rulers were cast down from their heavens onto the earth, they made for themselves angels, numerous, demonic, to serve them. And the latter instructed mankind in many kinds of error and magic and potions and worship of idols and spilling of blood and altars and temples and sacrifices and libations to all the spirits of the earth, having their coworker fate, who came into existence by the concord between the gods of injustice and justice.”

The same text also describes how Eve was once raped by “the Prime Ruler [God] and his Angels” while in paradise, and thus gave birth to a cursed race of demons implied to be that of Cain and his descendants. And in A Valentinian Exposition, it reveals a contention between the angels and the higher god-forms contained in the Logos and Wisdom:

“And there took place the struggle with the apostasy of the angels and mankind, those of the right with those of the left, those in heaven with those on earth, the spirits with the carnal, and the Devil against God. Therefore the angels lusted after the daughters of men and came down to flesh so that God would cause a flood. And he almost regretted that he had created the world [...] the consort and Sophia and her Son and the angels and the seeds. But the syzygy is the complete one, and Sophia and Jesus and the angels and the seeds are images of the Pleroma. Moreover, the Demiurge cast a shadow over the syzygy and the Pleroma and Jesus and Sophia and the angels and the seeds.”

The parallels between vampires and the cosmic rulers so prevalent in Gnostic and Hermetic texts contained within the Nag Hammadi Library are vast. This is what gnosis does to a great degree, covertly sneaking messages to us from all directions, in the form of myth, right out in the open care of our own people who perhaps do so unconsciously, but not accidentally. Vampirism can even be seen in Orthodox Christianity. Undoubtedly, the most bizarre ritual conceived out of the Roman Catholic Church is that of the Communion rite which symbolically involves the consumption of the flesh and blood of Christ. Even as a purely symbolic act,  the ceremony’s connotations are barbaric, and seem to have more in common with Babylonian ritual and occultism than Christian doctrine. The explanation given for the communion is that the practicing Christian consumes the righteous holiness of Christ and his agape spirit bestowed to the believer. This ritual was partly formed due to the fact that in Matthew 26:29, it states:

And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.

Even in Hinduism, Kali the wife of Shiva also seems to embody divine blood-thirst made apparent vampire-like qualities that include protruding, canine fangs and mouth dripping with the blood of her demonic enemies.

Besides all the religious and heretical examples, the vampire archetype is also indicative of psychoanalytical metaphors that both Sigmund Freud and even Carl Jung discuss to symbolize the juxtapositions death and primal sexuality. One example can be found in Freud’s analysis:

“All human experiences of morbid dread signify the presence of repressed sexual and aggressive wishes, and in vampirism we see these repressed wishes becoming plainly visible.”

For Freud, the vampire is largely representative of brutal, primal sexuality coupled with images of death in dark attempts to reach immortality. The vampire to Freud was a very old archetype that compressed one’s projected fears and repressed urges to whatever perverse and depraved inklings. All one has to do is watch a few episodes of True Blood and see this as evident.

Carl Jung viewed the vampire in a similar manner and understood that the vampire image to be representative of the “shadow“, the dark, unconscious aspect of the self that the ego is unable to recognize at first. Within the shadow contains all the shameful vices and desires one person might contain. The vampire shadow in this sense can be synonymous with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, due to its anti-social, predatory and self-absorbed preoccupations while having difficult times with empathizing with others.  The only concern the narcissist is how to bolster their image in efforts to drain and deplete the energy on part of the prey.

While this is by no means a completely in-depth examination of the powerful vampire archetype (a volume tomes would be sufficient for that) this can provide deeper insight into the dark world of the vampire. Speaking of which *Shameless plug alert*, I am putting the finishing touches of my own post-apocalyptic vampire novel, “Crimson Mist” that will be out sometime next year.

I personally find that it is much easier to use fantasy and supernatural themes in fiction which to me are some of the best ways to teach universal lessons and reveal truths or explore philosophies that otherwise would become rather obvious (as far as fiction is concerned). Many of these writers employ folklore and mythology and of course religion. They all remove you from your nice comfortable reality to teach you the truth of that reality through parables and elaborate metaphors for metaphysics, religion, fortean theories, sexuality, pop-culture and even the reality and unreality of the self.

The Zarathustra Seed

Part I.

Friederich Nietzsche’s evaluation of the world religions varied from one another. Through his “trans-valuations” of the religions and philosophies of his heyday, he created his own Spartan-like doctrines that emphasized the joy, vitality and strength of existence. The worst offenders of his animus belonged to the “decadence” and “immortal blemish of mankind” that was contained in 19^th century, European Christianity. However, his estimation of the eastern doctrines of Buddhism and Hindu mysticism were held in a more favorable light. Yet further still, the doctrine of the Buddha had still belonged to what he loathingly referred to as “passive nihilism” (which will be discussed further on in Part II of this essay). Certain aspects of Greek philosophy and even Hinduism however held a much loftier place in Nietzsche’s heart thanks to a colleague by the name of Paul Deussen. Even a cursory reading of Nietzsche’s seminal Thus Spake Zarathustra seems to echo streams of both Greek and Hindu thought. Is it probable that even the sublime basis of Nietzsche’s philosophy was in fact centered in Greek, Hindu and other esoteric doctrines?

It is by in large nearly impossible to draw a sharp line on Nietzsche’s frame of thought and philosophy. His published works such as Beyond Good and Evil, Will to Power and Thus Spake Zarathustra, however gives us a clear insight into his frame of thought and even religiosity as expressed in the later. His most famous literary work, Thus Spake Zarathustra in which Nietzsche’s philosophy is expressed poetically and symbolically through the affirmative voice of the Persian religious teacher Zoroaster. Nietzsche’s search for meaning was carried out by pointing with a silver-tongue and sharp vigor the equalitarianism of conformity through the “herd”, the stiff sobriety of society over the submerged, chthonic creative forces as symbolized through Apollo and Dionysus, the resentment of the gifted and the increasing nihilism of his fellow man. Rising above this dark mire was his “Ubermensch”, the “Superman” or the “Overman” that was in essence the master of himself and his chaotic passions, the animal nature within. He is an untamable, contrarian revolutionary that rejects societal conformity and religious delusion that draws the person away from the “here and now” of the present world and into escapism of other-worldly hopes found in many religions, in especially Christianity. Nietzsche’s contemptuous and hostile treatment of Christianity no doubt earned him considerable attention through works such as The Anti-Christ.

Of central importance to Nietzsche’s philosophy was the “Will to Power”, which describes the main driving force or “inner dynamo” of man into achieving ambition to achieve the highest possible position life which is essentially life-affirming rather than life-denying inherent in more ascetic, religious paths. Achieving one’s true will is in essence the “Will to Power”, the advancement or expansion of one’s life and surroundings in the greater present. This worldview is expressed succinctly in The Birth of Tragedy:

“For a short time we really are the primordial essence itself and feel its unbridled lust for and joy in existence; the struggle, the torment, the destruction of appearances now seem to us necessary, on account of the excess of innumerable forms of existence pressing and punching themselves into life and of the exuberant fecundity of the world will. We are transfixed by the raging barbs of this torment in the very moment when we become, as it were, one with the immeasurable primordial delight in existence and when, in Dionysian rapture, we sense the indestructible and eternal nature of this joy. In spite of fear and pity, we are fortunate vital beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose procreative joy we have been fused.”

This also includes one’s own consciousness. According to this concept everything in this universe whether living or non-living struggles to expand its power and influence.  From this vantage point for discharging expansive energy, religiously oriented morality becomes insignificant and moot. This point is emphasized in The Will To Power:

‎”There is no struggle for existence between ideas and perceptions but a struggle for dominion: the idea that is overcome is not annihilated, only driven back or subordinated. There is no annihilation in the sphere of spirit.” (323)

For the noble, “strong-willed”, the “good morality” consists of strength, valor and power whereas the “bad” is defined as weakly, cowardly, timid and petty, “Fear is the mother of morality.” (Beyond Good and Evil) This kind of morality to Nietzsche was the morality of “slaves”. It is this “slave” morality that denies life’s most basic and vital impulses to promulgate its self-interests such as love and passion. The morality of “masters,” the autocrats and kings was this Will to Power an unwavering, passionate fire for dominance and authority over the flaccid. Yet more importantly, this doctrine was central to the idea of self-overcoming that is the weaknesses and short-comings within as opposed to the dominance of others. Common religion, to Nietzsche was seen as a crutch that man uses to abrogate responsibly for this life. Rather than assigning the fortunes and misfortunes to some vague notion of “God’s will” or even “fate”, he would rather his fellow man accept the responsibility of their actions and consequences they reap. It is not “God’s will” that Jack graduates from law school but rather through Jack’s “Will to Power” that he achieves this feat.

Of course, this does not mean that man is responsible for everything that happens to him (for example: being laid-off during a recession). Rather, it’s entirely up to each individual on how they would react to such circumstances (i.e. being the victim or overcoming the obstacle). Yet, no one can deny Nietzsche had his share of bad luck during his life time relating from health to relationships with women and financial hardships. Throughout Nietzsche’s life, he was plagued with health problems relating to congenital disease which induced spells of intense head-aches, poor eye-sight and prolonged periods of exhaustion (not to mention contracting syphilis at a German brothel) which added to his several bouts of depression. From his long phases of self-reflection, his views on politics (socialism and democracy especially), religion, philosophy, war, pacifism and even sexuality were realized. Yet, he never really complained of these hardships. In fact, he reveled in them—viewing such painful experiences as a fiery mallet wielded by a blacksmith while the self as the malleable steel being forged into a sword of triumph. From these newly acquired perception and Will to Power, the search for truth and the “meaning of life” becomes a sojourn for self-reinvention and life-affirmation in which is required the full resources of his genius to solve.

“A doctrine is needed powerful enough to work as a breeding agent: strengthening the strong, paralyzing and destructive for the world-weary.” (Nietzsche, Will To Power. Pg. 106)

Eventually, it becomes apparent by reading Nietzche’s writing that it employs insidious language that lures the reader into his philosophies and beliefs that one can find that one isn’t being critical of what he’s proclaiming as truth. Perhaps it’s this persuasive and confrontational manner that shakes the conformist of the herd from the “decadent bubble”. “I’ll lead you to the water, but you have to drink!” This is but one of many impressions I have garnered from his works. In essence, this is the “feeling” that pervades many of his writings. However, this tactic seems to be missing in Thus Spake Zarathustra. In the same text, the Ubermensch is represented as the religious figure of Zoroaster (Greek/Latin) or Zarathustra (Persian).

The name Zarathustra carries many meanings including “ferocious” and “undulated light”. Of course, Zarathustra is also the founder of Avestan (Iranian) religion of Zoroastrianism. It is often suggested that both western religion (including Greek, Jewish, Christian, Manichean and Muslim thought) and philosophy owes much of its inspiration from Zarathustra himself. Radical dualism also finds its origins in Zarathustra’s religious ideas concerning two opposing, independent principles of light versus darkness (the two worlds) embodied in Ahura Mazda, the Creator of Goodness and Anro Mainyus (Ahriman), the Evil Spirit. This type of radical dualism later resurfaces within Manichean doctrine that would eventually include many other religious figures such as Jesus Christ and even the Buddha into their pantheon of avatars of light battling against the denizens of darkness. (For a more precise summary of the Manichean religion and its Zoroastrian influences see The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas.)

Nietzsche however employs Zarathustra as a protagonist for his philosophy which inevitably turns the tables of the world-denying tendencies of religious faith and dualistic heresies of the ancient world. The irony in that Nietzsche would use the founder of religion and by extension Judeo-Christianity and metaphysical morality becomes apparent, thus completely reversing or “correcting” this particular religiosity once conjured up by Zarathustra. It was Nietzsche’s adoption of  Zarathustra’s name that made the ancient philosopher well known to the people of the modern world, whose name and doctrine was lost since Arab invasion in 7th century AD. Nietzsche, like Zarathustra also used battling dualities in his work to express his philosophy. In Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, the German philosopher pits the qualities of the Greek gods viz. Apollonian solar deity’s virtues, beauty and laws against Dionysus’ savage, atavistic and chthonic primal energy. Dionysus is the energy of the Bacchic revel which renders the false idol or the egoic-self into pieces. It is this terrible reveling archetype that poses a threat against materialist culture that struggles in fear to keep the lid on this explosive energy.

Apollo is inevitably a materialist in this context, clinging to the solid, day to day world of the mundane, the visible, and the stable. Greek Mythology also revolved around the rivalries between gods and men, wherein in the end men gained victory over the gods. Here also he proclaims the death of God and hence a need for a  “superman”, a man who overpowered God or the “gods”, a being who would bring a new order, a new morality of vitality.  This eternal and dualistic dichotomy appears again and again in mythological tropes, stories across the world over. The unrestrained Dionysus rises up to tear the totalitarian system of controls that have bred the greatest evils in cool, orderly and iced intellect of the worst murderers of history, including the Nazi’s who would come to twist and pervert Nietzsche’s words in order to fit their reprehensible and ugly agendas.

Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote in regards to the sinful nature of man that would add to the doctrine of pre-determinism (a Manichaean doctrine as well), a view that would be later shared, utilized and taken advantaged of by the likes of later Christian Theologians from John Calvin to Jonathan Edwards:

“Adam and Eve in punishment for their sin “became a natural consequence in all their descendants”.  Moreover, it is not just a corrupted physical nature that we have inherited from Adam, but our… ” human nature was so changed and vitiated that it suffers from the recalcitrance of a rebellious concupiscence….” –City of God, xiii. pg. 3

John Calvin repeats this same sentiment:

“For our nature is not only utterly devoid of goodness, but so prolific in all kinds of evil, that it can never be idle. Those who term it concupiscence use a word not very inappropriate, provided it were added, (this, however, many will by no means concede,) that everything which is in man, from the intellect to the will, from the soul even to the flesh, is defiled and pervaded with this concupiscence; or, to express it more briefly, that the whole man is in himself nothing else than concupiscence.” (Institutes of Christian Religion, Book 2, Chapter 1, Section 8.)

Of course, this teaching flies in the face of many, much earlier Christian theologians that recognized the closer doctrine to actual Biblical theology of free-will as evidenced with Irenaeus in Against Heresies XXXVII:

“This expression, ‘How often would I have gathered thy children together, and thou wouldst not,’ set forth the ancient law of human liberty, because God made man a free (agent) from the beginning, possessing his own soul to obey the behests of God voluntarily, and not by compulsion of God. For there is no coercion with God, but a good will (toward us) is present with Him continually. And therefore does He give good counsel to all. And in man as well as in angels, He has placed the power of choice (for angels are rational beings), so that those who had yielded obedience might justly possess what is good, given indeed by God, but preserved by themselves . . .”

Yet it is Augustine’s assertion as well as parts of the New Testament, specifically in Romans 8:7-8 that the good works of men are but filthy rags in the eyes of God and that mankind is unable to save himself from the fatal illness that has infected is being from birth to death (due to the original sin), and into the flaming pits of eternal damnation. It is this conception of the Calvinist/Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin that posits that man was innately and totally depraved due to the “fall of man” which was conceived by his ancient parents of Adam and Eve by the ingestion of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve was merely an archaic explanation of this as to how evil must have came to exist within God’s perfect creation, not necessarily something that, in this day and age, should be taken as fact or anything other than allegorical. This is of course, something Nietzsche more than likely recognized.

In Isaiah 53, it reads the greatest Old Testament description of Jesus Christ’s sacrificial death. That chapter emphasizes the Biblical God’s activity in the events surrounding the crucifixion. It was, the Jewish deity, Jehovah who laid on Jesus the sins of all of mankind. In Isaiah 52:10, it plainly states that this deity was pleased to crush his own Son as a blood-sacrifice in order that salvation might come to a spiritually sick world. The Anti-Christ takes special note of this ridiculous and ironic doctrine of death and lunacy:

God himself sacrifices himself for the guilt of mankind, God himself makes payment to himself, God as the only being who can redeem man from what has become unredeemable for man himselfCthe creditor sacrifices himself for his debtor, out of love (one can credit that?), out of love for his debtor!

It is these notions of sin and redemption that makes up the slave-morality paradigm that Nietzsche completely rejects and eviscerates in The Anti-Christ. Christian morality to Nietzsche relegates self-affirmation as evil, and blesses the meek, the yielding, and the pitying—in short, the slaves and the herd. The mind-set of the “wretched, unsaved sinner” is a vice and anathema for kings! In place of this “slave morality” Nietzsche suggested a Greek morality, a pagan, life-affirming, and rejecting the contrast between good and evil and in favor that is between and above good and evil — the Ubermensch. It is this ideal man that Nietzsche recognizes as a healthy, flourishing and potent archetype who embraces the virtues of pride, courage and the Will to Power. Love your neighbor as yourself is all fine: but make sure first that you love yourself. The true sin isn’t disobedience to the Biblical God’s will; it is disobedience to your own!

In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche responds to the Christian religion’s incessant proclamation that man is born in sin from the get-go, is unsaved, pitiful and above all, eternally hell-bound. He shows the decadent ideal no mercy in his evisceration of it:

“Christianity finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance of health — the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to make people ill. And the church itself — doesn’t it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal? — The whole earth as a madhouse? — The sort of religious man that the church wants is a typical decadent; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the “inner world” of the religious man is so much like the “inner world” of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the “highest” states of mind, held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in form — the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds in majorem dei honorem….”

Furthermore, Nietzsche in the Anti-Christ also minces no words in regards to the stagnant anti-intellectualism of the Christian churches in his day (and arguably today’s Mega-Churches and even modern society at large):

“We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts — the strong man as the typical reprobate, the “outcast among men.” Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!”

Not only is Christianity reviled in the strongest terms, Nietzsche spares no punches in his trans-valuation of the Christian God as evidenced in The Anti-Christ:

“The Christian concept of a god — the god as the patron of the sick, the god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit — is one of the most corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world: it probably touches low-water mark in the ebbing evolution of the god-type. God degenerated into the contradiction of life. Instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on nature, on the will to live! God becomes the formula for every slander upon the “here and now,” and for every lie about the “beyond”! In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy! …”

Calvinism, a subsidiary Protestant doctrine sort of promotes this same worship of a malicious tyrant. It is the Ubermensch that plunges forth his sword of truth against these doctrines of decadence and falsehood. Thus, the Ubermensch is realized and rises like a fiery phoenix over the profane masses and the “great nausea” that is associated with both the Judeo-Christian doctrines and all its schisms as well as nihilism. It is important to note that the Ubermensch is a journey towards self-mastery rather than an end-result in itself.

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” (Nietzsche, the Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufman).

These ideas represent three stages interconnected and one leading to the other. This highly provocative statement is actually a stark observation of Nietzsche concerning Christianity and European society of his time. In Nietzsche’s view, recent developments in modern science and the increasing secularization of European society had effectively “killed” the Christian God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for a thousand and plus years.

The idea of man (or more accurately) the Orthodox, Roman Catholic Church had effectively killed the concept of God by having a parasitic priest class convening over the congregation through their abuse of power and control throughout history. Interestingly enough, the Apocalypse of Peter found in the Nag Hammadi Library had also said the same thing nearly 1,800 years ago!

“And they will cleave to the name of a dead man, thinking that they will become pure. But they will become greatly defiled and they will fall into a name of error, and into the hand of an evil, cunning man and a manifold dogma, and they will be ruled without law.”

Nietzsche claimed the death of God would eventually lead to the loss of any coherent sense of meaning in life. In essence, secularism would breed nihilism. Nihilism, according to Nietzsche was one of the unfortunate “side-effects” for an existential quest for meaning; a void that was felt when Christianity was experienced as a disillusionment and ultimately rejected. Nihilism in a nutshell: Life is a big nothing.

Nihilism according to Nietzsche was sort of a vacuous hole left in man’s existential yearnings since his fellow countryman had abandoned Christian virtues and was left to their own vices. In Will To Power, Nietzsche explains Nihilism in psychological terms:

Nihilism as a psychological state will have to be reached, first, when we have sought a “meaning” in all events that is not there: so the seeker eventually becomes discouraged. Nihilism, then, is the recognition of the long waste of strength, the agony of the “in vain,” insecurity, the lack of any opportunity to recover and to regain composure–being ashamed in front of oneself, as if one had deceived oneself all too long. (4)

This was a great opportunity to reevaluate societal values into something “new” as explained in Will To Power:

“Because the values we have had hitherto thus draw their final consequence; because nihilism represents the ultimate logical conclusion of our great values and ideals—because we must experience nihilism before we can find out what value these “values” really had.—We require, sometime, new values.” (51)

As Martin Heidegger wrote in The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead:

“If God as the supra-sensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the supra-sensory would of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself.” (67)

In response to the loss of values in face of the cold winds of nihilism, Nietzsche wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra, therein introducing the concept of a value-creating “Ubermensch.” Life isn’t about nothing, nor is it about self-gratifying happiness or worshiping a petty, cosmic tyrant in an sadomasochistic like manner (love and fear God at the same time). Life is about power. Nietzsche’s complaints of Judeo-Christian religion were chiefly centered on the ethical dilemmas and the implications of its metaphysics. He never attacks religion from a materialist or secular standpoint; in fact he often complained of the spread of secularism in which he saw as a breeding ground of nihilism as mentioned before. His usage of myth and symbolism in works such as Thus Spake Zarathustra is illustration of his advocating of such devices.The slave-religion of Christianity was so despised by Nietzsche since in many ways had risen up the emasculated morality of the lower classes of the “God fearing sinners” (blessed are the poor in spirit) which undermined the masculine master-class morality.

It should be noted that Nietzsche didn’t hate everything about the Christian religion per se (in fact he held Jesus Christ in very high esteem while holding the founder of Christianity, St. Paul in utter contempt), what he hated was the conventional Christian personality as the soft and effeminate, the “meek and mild”. Indeed, one of his descriptions of the Ubermensch was “the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul” in the Will To Power. His rejection of Christian concepts in favor for Greek ones is obvious. In The Antichrist, of all books, he gives a great summary of Jesus’ teachings, an almost Gnostic examination of Christianity, abolishing the churches’ authority or “orthodoxy” over spirituality because the Kingdom of God resides in every man in the deepest recesses of the inner core, the formless Atman and autonomous spiritual seed.

Part II forthcoming…

The Battle Within

Jesus said, “Perhaps people think that I have come to cast peace upon the world. They do not know that I have come to cast conflicts upon the earth: fire, sword, war.

- The Gospel of Thomas, Logion: 16

For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

- 2 Corinthians 10:3-5

And if ye cannot be saints of knowledge, then, I pray you, be at least its warriors. They are the companions and forerunners of such saintship

- Nietzsche,Thus Spake Zarathustra

Born is the battler who make peace.
The all-good highest of the gods gives you three tasks;
Destroy death, strike the enemies, and cover the whole
Paradise of Light! You paid homage and went out for battle
and covered the whole Paradise of Light.
The tyrant prince was bound forever and the dwelling place
of the Dark Ones was destroyed.
The Light Friend, Primal Man, remained until he carried
out his fathers will.

- The First Hymn of the Primal Man

Blessed are you, oh Soul, you with the divine form!
Blessed are you, oh Soul, weapon and battlement of the gods,
Blessed are you, radiant Soul,
Splendor and glory of the … Worlds of Light!
Blessed are you, divine radiant Soul,
Weapon and might, soul and body, gift of the Father of Light.

- Hymn to the Living Soul, A Manichaean hymn in Parthian.

“O best among men [Arjuna], the person who is not disturbed by happiness and distress and is steady in both is certainly eligible for liberation.”

“Those who are seers of the truth have concluded that of the nonexistent [the material body] there is no endurance and of the eternal [the soul] there is no change. This they have concluded by studying the nature of both.”

“That which pervades the entire body you should know to be indestructible. No one is able to destroy that imperishable soul.”

“The material body of the indestructible, immeasurable and eternal living entity is sure to come to an end; therefore, fight, O descendant of Bharata.”

“Neither he who thinks the living entity the slayer nor he who thinks it slain is in knowledge, for the self slays not nor is slain.”

“For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.”

- The Bhagavad Gita, 2: 10-20

And as to what, again, they say of sleep, the very same things are to be understood of death. For each exhibits the departure of the soul, the one more, the other less; as we may also get this in Heraclitus: “Man touches night in himself, when dead and his light quenched; and alive, when he sleeps he touches the dead; and awake, when he shuts his eyes, he touches the sleeper.”[4] “For blessed are those that have seen the Lord,”[5] according to the apostle; “for it is high time to awake out of sleep. For now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand. Let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and put on the armour of light.”[6] By day and light he designates figuratively the Son, and by the armour of light metaphorically the promises.

- Clement of Alexandria, The Stromata, Chapter XXII: THE TRUE GNOSTIC DOES GOOD, NOT FROM FEAR OF PUNISHMENT OR HOPE OF REWARD, BUT ONLY FOR THE SAKE OF GOOD ITSELF.

Operation: Futureshock!

Hello! It’s been quite a while since my last update. So what have I been up too as of late? Well, I’ve been busy preoccupied with various real life matters. I am also preoccupied with fleshing out my new cyberpunk/sci-fi thriller novel “Delta Heavy” and its subsequent revisions entitled at the moment.

I am also on my last revision of a post-apocalyptic/supernatural-horror novel, “Crimson Mist” that will be released to the public sometime early next year—whether it will be done via the self-publishing route or through a small, independent publisher—all that remains to be seen. Stranger things…

Brace yourself, my little droogies for future entries going headlong into everything from an esoteric analysis of Nietzsche’s spartan doctrines, a candid look into Revelations, research into Goethe, Simon Magus and St. Paul, further future project announcements, book reviews, dead-pan snark polemics and some unexpected surprises for anyone interested in music at all.

In the mean-time here are the blurbs for my forthcoming novels to chew on and digest:

DELTA HEAVY: The year is 2047 in a high-tech Chicago, Illinois. When Darren Ramirez, a former Marine receives a call from a representative working for a genetics firm along with interests of the U.S. Government, his life is changed forever as he and a specialized military detachment whose members, trained in the Black Ops are sent to a remote archipelago off the coast of Spain. They are sent for an investigation of a U.S. military instillation after a subsequent cut off of communication. There, they make a terrifying discovery that the islands have become overrun with creatures that can only be described as genetically engineered abominations. It’s up to Ramirez and his squad to find the truth behind the mysterious cluster of islands, the experiments and the man responsible for their existence.

CRIMSON MIST: After a nuclear holocaust, a new dark age of foreboding has been unleashed as the vampire nobility rises a midst the fallout of a previous devastating world war instigated by humanity. Kalek Desmarais, a vampire noble and explorer has faced his mortality, numerous times, but his recent brush with death has left him in wave of dismay. His recent discovery of a long-previously hidden Necropolis which housed the forbidden blade of darkness, otherwise known as “Pandemonium” that was once said to belong to a fallen angel of ancient lore. The blade was forged from the ancient kingdoms of antiquity only to be rediscovered at a new, fated Armageddon. Against this backdrop is the fight between ruler against ruler, authority against authority. Few remain armed and watchful, wandering and steadfast, willing to give the acolytes of darkness, a baptism of blood on their pilgrimage for humanity’s redemption. 

The Stranger’s Battle Cry: Reloaded

(This article was also published on the former Palm Tree Garden, under the same alias as “AeonEye”.)

In the first installment of my article, “The Stranger’s Battle Cry,” I explored in great detail one particular excerpt from The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, in which Christ himself is seen as both a revealer of salvific knowledge to the spiritual regents that are the Gnostics, and a judge of the self-professed and false “Christians” who would take the tragedy of his death and resurrection as wholly literal. In so doing, they would assert their anti-Gnostic attitudes, and their theocratic dominion over the keepers of the sacred mysteries and knowledge deemed unfit to evangelize to the profane and uninitiated. It is they who despised the Gnostics as heretics. The Gnostics considered themselves the true Christians, the custodians and guardians of a special knowledge and insight into what they believed to be the true message behind Christ’s ministry. In this installment, I will explore the message of the Treat. Seth. and other mysteries that were brought up previously in brief, but will explore and extrapolate even further.

Gnosticism itself had become its own monster, in terms of a religious movement, almost independently of the narrow Christian notion of a heresy, by its adoption of Platonism. By embracing Greek philosophy, it introduced numerous doctrinal variations to Christianity that would also bear fruit as vastly different to traditional Christianity (which would prove to fuel the fire against them as the authors of “Satanic”, iconoclast heresies). And, Gnosticism easily adapted Christian language and concepts into its rich mix of Greek and Oriental thought, as Gnostic language is inherently “soteriological” that is, it is distinctly mystical and poetic in its juxtaposition of paradoxes and emphasis on the transcendental. R. Mcl. Wilson writes in Gnostic Origins:

“…the discovery of the Gnostic library at Nag Hammadi in 1945 has made it clear that the movement with which we are dealing was something much wider than a Christian heresy.” Later on, the author reiterates his point and introduces some new ones, “That we have to deal with something much wider than a Christian heresy is plainly evident, but that prior to the impact of Christianity upon the Hellenistic world there existed a regular Gnostic movement has not yet been conclusively shown. It is indeed possible, but as yet our available resources take us back only thus far and no further. The presence in pre-Christian times of elements which were later to be incorporated in the Gnostic theories is not in question, but it would seem more appropriate to classify these elements as pre-Gnostic, rather than as Gnostic in the proper sense.”(208)

The tenuous claim that Gnosticism was a pre-Christian religious phenomenon is at the very least debatable. There are certain claims that Gnosticism developed out of a cauldron of a pre-Christian Jewish milieu by a few scholars as a sort of Jewish heresy instead of Christian one. Many point to the Apocalypse of Adam being incontrovertible proof for such a claim. A more precise dating would point to the first or more conservatively, the second century, only to be later revised in a Gnostic lens. While there are certainly pre-Christian elements from the ancient world that the Gnostics would use in their religion (Egyptian and Babylonian memes and imagery for one), the claim as a Pre-Christian movement remains inconclusive and prematurely presumed as much. (For a more in-depth exploration of this topic see Edwin M. Yamauchi’s scholarship.)

In the wild collage of Gnostic mythology, much of it is focused on the inherent harsh insanity and absurdity interwoven into the cosmos. The main crux behind the message from these spiritual sojourners is that the perception that man does not belong to the misbegotten world of forms and appearances, lacking in autonomy and permanence. The world is often equated with a decaying corpse or garment that must be discarded. (Gospel of Thomas: Jesus said, “Whoever has come to understand the world has found (only) a corpse, and whoever has found a corpse is superior to the world.” Logion 56). Man is a creature belonging to another realm of a higher divine fire, temporarily entombed in the gloom of corporeal being and stark splendor. This kind of religiosity was reflective of the inherent nihilistic and negative evaluation of the cosmos and human existence contrasted with the yearning for a spiritual reality. Gnosis begins as recognition of the soul’s “dire straits” of its predicament and the “escape route” from the fetters of dark matter and into the original unity of light. It is in essence, anti-cosmic mysticism. In order for this to occur, pistis (faith) and praxis (action), must both be utilized to cultivate an in-dwelling knowledge as a platform for salvation. This cultivation of knowledge is achieved through an interior and unknown dimension which reveals a fundamental and supreme aspect of the self, impervious to the limitations of time and space nestled within the spiritual seed. This realization is likened to a luminous lamp, dispelling the darkness of ignorance and unconsciousness. It is not simply a redemptive work, but one of illumination.

Allogenes echoes this sentiment:

“There was within me a stillness of silence, and I heard the Blessedness whereby I knew my real self…..And I turned to myself and saw the Light that surrounded me and the Good that was in me, I became divine.”

This realization results in a recollection or, anamnesis embodied in self-knowledge which is based on a drive for self-exploration of the furthest recesses of the soul and the world. Gnosis is not an end-point or purposeful result but an on-going process, an inner-alchemical change from the darkness within into pnuematic gold of spiritual rebirth or resurrection—a growth into releasing the manacles of the world. This allows one to ascend to a higher understanding of reality, hence “eternal life,” of immortality. Without this knowledge, the soul is fallen in its own delusions of vanity and worldly cares, steeped within the dark abyss which is opposed to the Supreme Goodness of the One. The Hypostasis of the Archons proclaims an existential error that is innate in the human condition:

 ”Moreover, they threw mankind into great distraction and into a life of toil, so that their mankind might be occupied by worldly affairs, and might not have the opportunity of being devoted to the holy spirit.”

So powerful is this “muck of matter” that even if the Soul merely glances in its direction, it is able to seize it, pull it down and drown it in the quicksand of its bottomless darkness. The ordinary human existence without self-knowledge is, at worst, spiritual death. In this state where mankind is unknowing of his predicament as the “walking dead”, the unconscious slaves to the hierarchical fallen psychic powers that hold secret domination over the lower souls of the human race. These chaotic demonic powers of the stars, the lords of fate surround the universe on all sides. The over-all multi-layered universe contains various concentric spheres, occupied by the authorities, archons, angels and demons which leave no space or gap unoccupied so that there is a slight crack to escape the tyranny of the rulers.

In classical Gnostic mythology, the creator of the world was by in large regarded as a Satanic figure. This is clear from his depiction in his outer appearance (a lion-faced serpent), from the “psychic” nature attributed to him and, above all, from the stories about his actions against spiritual humanity (although he isn’t always successful in this regard). The transgressive reading of the Old Testament (the entire Biblical Canon, really) was used to illustrate this point by transforming it into a tale of nightmarish horror and tragedy. The traditional account supposedly given of the God of Israel is incomplete, for he is not the just and protective Lawgiver of Abraham, but in actuality, an irrational and even malevolent agent to whom cosmic evil may be attributed while opposed to spiritual virtue.  A couple examples of this become rather apparent when the Old Testament itself does not depict a God who is wholly good, but in fact has evil spirits at his command and wreaks terrible havoc on his enemies. (1 Kings 22.22). The material world that he put together isn’t peaches either. At the legal God’s express command, the world is a place of thorns and thistle, pain and death. (Genesis. 3.14-19)

This focus on mitigated dualism—the struggle between spirit and matter, mainly served to explain evil and error in the world and cosmos at large by tracing it back to an accident and fracturing in the divine realm. The supreme deity remains absolved of any complicity in the creation of a deeply imperfect world; the folly of subsidiary deities or emanations are, by and large, ultimately responsible. These subsidiary emanations are, in and of themselves, less hostile forces than tragic and sympathetic characters in this unfolding cosmic drama. This tragic story of the disturbance and fall of the divine realm into the abyss of matter profoundly impacts the pathos of mankind in all its metaphysical, epistemological and psychological sophistication and complexity. Not only is there an inherent struggle or duality inherent in the cosmos, but to make matters even more complicated, this tense dynamic also exists within the soul. The spiritual seed’s dimension is divine by default.

In Excerpta ex Theodutus, this spiritual is likened to the “marrow” of the soul, the principle that brings life to the body:

“So Wisdom first put forth a spiritual seed which was in Adam that it might be “the bone,” the reasonable and heavenly soul which is not empty but full of spiritual marrow.”

In the same paragraph, there also exists a “hylic” stain within the psychic soul, that contains the divine breath:

“This is called a “tare” which grows up with the soul, the good seed, and is also a seed of the devil, since it is consubstantial with him, and a “snake” and a “biter of the heel” and a “robber” attacking the head of a king.”

This devilish seed is made of the same substance that is of the Devil, which according to Irenaeus in Against Heresies, was made from grief of Wisdom:

“They further teach that the spirits of wickedness derived their origin from grief. Hence the devil, whom they also call Cosmocrator (the ruler of the world), and the demons, and the angels, and every wicked spiritual being that exists, found the source of their existence.”

This “tare” or appendage of evil spirits are attached the psychic soul. This semi-spiritual organ places man in-between daily, mundane life and transcendent layers of reality. It is also the means that enchains the spirit to the lower-world, providing a battlefield on which wars, rivalries and struggles are fought out by the Devil and his legion of demonic powers as well as the holy angels of God. Demons penetrate and claim dominion over the soul, lacerating it with passions in which they make a haven for confusion, fear and terror. The soul according to the Tripartate Tractate is “double-natured”, inclined to do good but fighting the urges of the material that is by default designed to “sin”.

This is repeated in the Exegesis of the Soul:

“Indeed, it is in order that he might know who is worthy of salvation that God examines the inward parts and searches the bottom of the heart. For no one is worthy of salvation who still loves the place of deception.” Elsewhere in the same text, it describes how the soul that descends into a body falls into the clutches of the “wanton creatures” that “passed her from one to another” and continued to “defile her”.

Hans Jonas in The Gnostic Religion, goes even further to illustrate this point:

“Each man, so the text explains, is from birth possessed by his demon, which only the mystical power of prayer can expel after the extinction of all passions. In this voided state the soul unites with the spirit as bride with bridegroom. The soul which does not thus receive Christ remains “demonic” and becomes the habitation of “the serpents.”

Again, Jonas continues in the same paragraph:

“This is the basic condition of human insufficiency. “What is God? unchanging good; what is man? Unchanging evil”(Stob. Ecl. I. 277. 17). Abandoned to the demonic whirl of its own passions, the godless soul cries, “I burn, I blaze . . . I am consumed, wretch that I am, by the evils that possess me” (CM. X. 20). Even the opposite experience of spiritual freedom is one of receptivity rather than activity: “the spiritual part of the soul is immune against enslavement by the demons and is fit to receive God into itself” (CM. XV. 15).” (282)

In the Corpus Hermeticum XI, it asserts that the universe is completely evil—so evil, in fact, that it is impossible for God to dwell within it. According to that text, both man and the cosmos are completely evil:

“Mind conceives every mental product: both the good, when mind receives seeds from god, as well as the contrary kind, when the seeds come from some demonic being. {Unless it is illuminated by god,} no part of the cosmos is without a demon that steals into the mind to sow the seed of its own energy, and what has been sown the mind conceives – adulteries, murders, assaults on one’s father, acts of sacrilege and irreverence, suicides by hanging or falling from a cliff, and all other such works of demons.”

Not exactly the most popular message, especially in the contemporary world of “new thought spirituality”. It is this unregenerate, natural state of the soul which by the grace of God can only be changed through the indwelling of the Son, sanctifying the dark, stony heart in gleaming regenerative light. Yet, how can embodied soul be in the “exile” of shadowy alienation from the Absolute, find their true selves and return “home”? The “way to return home” means that there is a distinct realization the soul is indeed exiled, experiencing a sort of “poverty” or “lack” of the world, longing to possess that which is “lost”, that is the fullness of being. Contemplation that begins at a “soul-deep” level is key in grasping the soul’s ambivalent predicament. The true story begins at the heights above all heights, at the most primordial of origins.

The Supreme God is named as the ground and space behind all spiritual being, the fountainhead of its heavenly, immortal family tree. Because of its immeasurable and unfathomable depths, it is given several names such as the eternal “silence,” “the broadest depth,” “before the beginning,” etc. In Kabbalistic terms, this non-existent God exists in pure potentiality within a hidden ineffability called Ein Sof (“limitless”). This unnamable deity generates “aeons” or “eternals” in cascading successive waves of a divine family tree (similar to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and the sefiroths as a bridge between the finite and infinite realms). In a sense, these aeons are different attributes of God, forming hermaphroditic pairs of male and female god-forms (syzygies) until there are 30 in all which comprise the divine realm, the Pleroma. They are often depicted as bright luminous beings which mirror the lower forms of human bodies in a much more glorified expression, beyond normal mortal comprehension.

All of these successive aeons long for their ultimate progenitor. The further away the aeon is from the origin, the weaker it becomes. The outpouring and overflowing light descends from density to density in a process of emanation in the sense that each succeeding lower order of reality is not a full manifestation of what preceded it. Instead, the process is rather like a chain of progressively diluted projections of divine spirit—think of the way one feels less and less heat the further one steps away from a fire. The last of these aeons, called Sophia (“Wisdom”), boldly ascends towards the supreme deity in an attempt to comprehend it in a misguided but well-intentioned folly, but fails miserably and consequently suffers for undertaking such a daunting task. Hell paved with good intentions?

Due to Sophia’s hysterical distress, the origins of human suffering arise from her inability to know what is unknowable, and she gives birth to an amorphous substance that crystallizes into an independent entity, the Demiurge, who is described in various sources as the fearsome leontomorphic deity Ialdabaoth which have various meanings, but a popular one would be, “the child of chaos.” He is wholly a product of emotion, which is, in modern occult parlance, an “astral” substance. In another variation of this myth, Sophia becomes haughty in her confidence and emulates the creative power of the Great Invisible Spirit—an act which catapults into divine disaster. Sophia’s mistake was mainly that she copulated (or masturbated) without her mate and the consent of the Holy Spirit. She, in essence, imitated the Father who generated the first aeonic couple. The Apocryphon of John indicates:

“Our sister Wisdom, however, by virtue of her nature as an aeon, conceived an idea on her own; and through the thought of the Spirit and the first knowledge she desired to make manifest an image from herself, although the Spirit had not allowed her this nor permitted it, nor had her marriage partner, the male virginal spirit, agreed to it.”

The result of her attempt at self-generation was an impregnation, and the birth of her blind, bastardly, golem child of chaos. When Sophia realizes her mistake and makes a face-palm at the sight of the deformity of her offspring, she starts to wail in hysterics at the ghastly sight of her aborted child. In her devastation, she relegates him to the abyss far from the true heavens where she can wean him from his innately corrupt nature, but to no avail; he matures into a lion-faced monstrosity, demanding constant worship and attention. Her frustration soon turns into suffering which eventually actualizes prototypes of human emotions—the “passions”—such as fear, grief, and anger, crystallized into the elements of cosmic matter, which in Platonic understanding was completely passive and receptive to the ideal—“a space of the possible,” or a reflections of the light as imperfect copies of the true reality. Matter in this sense was ultimately seen as having no real substance, but is given the appearance or illusion of reality by the spiritual reflected in it, much as the prisoners enchained in Plato’s Cave view the shadowy reflections, brought on by the burning embers of torches set aflame behind them, as the only familiar reality they know. Platonists failed to account for the origin of the primal matter where the Demiurge creates the universe, so many Gnostic groups attempted to “fill in” the gaps of their pre-cosmic story.

The Demiurge himself is by in large ignorant of a higher spiritual reality (i.e. the Platonic realm of forms and ideals) and impulsively creates the “kenomic” or the empty, lower, visible universe out of his mommy’s passions,  modeling it after a dim reflection of the aeons of light that he sees reflected in the element of the dark waters of chaos. Irenaeus reiterates this point in Against Heresies:

“The corporeal elements of the world, again, sprang, as we before remarked, from bewilderment and perplexity, as from a more ignoble source. Thus the earth arose from her state of stupor; water from the agitation caused by her fear; air from the consolidation of her grief; while fire, producing death and corruption, was inherent in all these elements, even as they teach that ignorance also lay concealed in these three passions.”

The Apocryphon of John indicates that Ialdabaoth fills up his fiery realm of chaos by mating and copulating with Madness–in a grotesque imitation of the Unknowable God and Forethought in the original union which sprouted the divine order of the Aeons. This unholy union results in the “begetting” of the authorities of the rebellious angels,

“that are under him along with the twelve angels, and each of them as an aeon, after the pattern of the incorruptible ones.”

These twelve angels or rulers are divided in so that seven rule the numbers in heaven and the five remaining angels preside over the fathomless abyss and the chaos of the underworld. It is also said that Ialdabaoth was blind and insane; an incompetent pretender who is moved by the impulses of his irrational soul and only capable of producing deceptive semblances or a simulacrum of the ideal forms.

In the text On the Origin of the World, it is this substance, which is referred to as a “shadow” or “darkness” outside of the eternal realm, “deriving from the aforementioned Pistis,” from which the gods and angels of men, and their slaves (mankind), originated. In a way, the Demiurge acts as a cosmic alchemist, forming a type of order out of chaos, however flawed that “order” might have been. The creation of the universe from matter––itself the product of divine suffering––ensures that human experience is infused with suffering. Sophia, in this respect, is also seen as a proto-demiurgical figure, providing the means and materials for the cosmic artisan to build the vast prison that is the cosmos. Although the substance of the material cosmos itself harbors pain and corruption, contrasting itself with the goodness and perfection beyond, it is still fundamentally patterned after the beautiful astronomical system of the upper world of light, mirroring a higher beauty. In a twisted way, this mirrors the magical words contained in The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus:

“That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above, corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracles of the One Thing.”

This also goes for the human body which is shaped out of the reflection of the divine-lightened figure of the immortal androgynous man (the Adam Kadamon in Kabbalistic terms). The significance of this story is that the origins of human pathos, a subject that is often of intense focus in Gnostic literature, is not one of divine agency or intention, but one of divine suffering resulting from Sophia’s hubristic but noble intellectual curiosity and profound love for the primal origins. Her son’s unconscious creative impulse to imitate the perfection of the higher aeons is another set-back in eternity. The emergence of worldly evil arises from a “deficiency” (a word often used by Irenaeus to describe the Gnostic reference to the disorderly realm of this world) from Sophia’s descent into hysteria and chaos. It’s as if the cosmos were a warped Alice in Wonderland with “Wonderland” being the fractured mirror world of the Aeons.

In Against Heresies, Irenaeus reports:

“They claim that the duodekad, in connection with which the mystery of the passion of the defect occurred, and from which passion (they maintain) the visible world has been made, is clearly and manifestly to be found everywhere.” (Against Heresies 1.24.3)

To Irenaeus, the notion of the Lord God being an accidental by-product due to the folly of a female divinity was the epitome of lunacy and blasphemy. Imagine the look on his face when the Gnostics would declare themselves as being superior to the creator god! As mentioned earlier, Sophia was also seen as a proto-demiurgical figure who “gives birth” to not only the satanized-form of the Demuirge (who eventually becomes synonymous with Jehovah of the Old Testament thanks to his boastful arrogant proclamation of being the only god in existence) we see in Gnostic mythology the metaphysical goo that binds multi-verse in its stark inglorious and paradoxical beauty.

Her passionate lust to create without the consent of the upper regions sets a very interesting precedent. In the Second Treastise of the Great Seth, Sophia is described as a lustful Prunikos (“harlot” or “whore”):

“For those who were in the world had been prepared by the will of our sister Sophia – she who is a whore – because of the innocence which has not been uttered. And she did not ask anything from the All, nor from the greatness of the Assembly, nor from the Pleroma. Since she was first, she came forth to prepare monads and places for the Son of Light and the fellow workers which she took from the elements below to build bodily dwellings from them.”

Karen L. King in “Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism” elucidates on the figure of Sophia as the “Holy Harlot.” King spells out the etymology behind the word “Prunikos” as an impulsive or untamed person or nymphomaniac. This would fit rather well with some of Sophia’s capricious actions mentioned throughout various Nag Hammadi tractates. Throughout her book, King stresses the sexual and carnal symbolism inherent in Gnostic myth. John Douglas Turner, in “Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition”, finishes this tale of divine drama:

“In deep grief and sorrow over her error, Sophia begins part two of the drama by offering a prayer of repentance to the divine realm whose order she had unintentionally violated. Her prayer receives a positive response, but it is clear that her former status can only be restored once the deficiency in her creative activity has been corrected; until then, she must be content only to be elevated to the “Ninth,” above the realm of the Archon she brought into being, but not yet to the divine realm.” (74)

As a result from this “mistake”, the material cosmos, though a dim production and reflection of the divine, is the furthest removed from God as a lower level of reality. Immersed in the chaos of passive matter, the pneumatic element sown by Sophia into the powers of the Demiurge, finds itself in an alien environment, as a Stranger, exiled and wingless, whose true home is elsewhere. The creation of the material world “happens” as a consequence of a fall, accident or a rebellion.

Sophia’s “sin” like Lucifer in the War in Heaven, was one of pride and unregulated desire or lust to bolster herself into and above the infinite depths of the Unknowable One without proper understanding, assistance or initiation. She had a glimpse of something better than she was able to imagine, and she wanted it for herself.  Philosophy in itself has an inkling of something greater, an ultimate reality perhaps, but cannot in itself properly perceive it without a proper revelation. Error is thus given form, which had been better it not come into being. Yet, when these errors do arise, the ultimate reality orders everything at will to bring good out of evil. Philosophy can be refined and purified, and all the disorder will ultimately be transmuted into universal harmony. To the Gnostics, this was done accomplished by the redemptive work done by the Cross of Light.

Everything that unfolds from this tragic event needs to be reversed so that the original state can be restored. Yet, there exists a hidden plan for the restoration involving a “panspermia” or “seeding” humanity with a flash of divine light, the pneumatic “germ”, which by default places mankind superior over the craftsman of the material world. Overcoming this disabled condition requires nothing less than the soul’s experiential goal of self-transcendence through transformative philosophy and the intervention of a higher being.

This dramatic incident triggers a plan of action from the higher-forms to send down their emissary, a sort of divine superman. Mission Target: To crucify the world! (The Gospel of Phillip) The Savior Aeon in same text of the Treat. Seth asserts:

“And I subjected all their powers. For as I came downward, no one saw me. For I was altering my shapes, changing from form to form. And therefore, when I was at their gates, I assumed their likeness. For I passed them by quietly, and I was viewing the places, and I was not afraid nor ashamed, for I was undefiled. And I was speaking with them, mingling with them through those who are mine, and trampling on those who are harsh to them with zeal, and quenching the flame. And I was doing all these things because of my desire to accomplish what I desired by the will of the Father above.”

The Tripartate Tractate assigns various names to the Stranger:

“The thought of the Logos, who had returned to his stability and ruled over those who had come into being because of him, was called “Aeon” and “Place” of all those whom he had brought forth in accord with the ordinance, and it is also called “Synagogue of Salvation,” because he healed him(self) from the dispersal, which is the multifarious thought, and returned to the single thought. Similarly, it is called “Storehouse,” because of the rest which he obtained, giving (it) to himself alone. And it is also called “Bride,” because of the joy of the one who gave himself to him in the hope of fruit from the union, and who appeared to him. It is also called “Kingdom,” because of the stability which he received, while he rejoices at the domination over those who fought him. And it is called “the Joy of the Lord,” because of the gladness in which he clothed himself. With him is the light, giving him recompense for the good things which are in him, and (with him is) the thought of freedom.”

In essence, the immortal Illuminator or Revealer (Christ and Seth are also interchangeable names for this savior) descended to the lower worlds to shape-shift his likeness into that of one of the bizarrely frightening, bestial forms of the Archons (the successive wicked progeny of the Demiurge), in order escape their notice and subvert their stupefying power over the Pneumatic elect through spiritual amnesia. This shape-shifting theme is also repeats in other texts of the Nag Hammadi which I won’t list all in its entirety. Christ is nearly equated to a trickster deity, yet his devious actions aren’t instigated against mankind, but rather against the “rulers and principalities”, the jealous powers of the cosmos (often referred to as a “laughing stock” in the Treat. Seth along with many of the familiar Patriarchs of the Old Testament). On the Origin of the World echoes this sentiment:

“Thus did the world come to exist in distraction, in ignorance, and in a stupor. They all erred, until the appearance of the true man.”

Compare this to the Second Treatise of the Great Seth:

“And I subjected all their powers. For as I came downward, no one saw me. For I was altering my shapes, changing from form to form. And therefore, when I was at their gates, I assumed their likeness. For I passed them by quietly, and I was viewing the places, and I was not afraid nor ashamed, for I was undefiled. And I was speaking with them, mingling with them through those who are mine, and trampling on those who are harsh to them with zeal, and quenching the flame. And I was doing all these things because of my desire to accomplish what I desired by the will of the Father above.”

The Savior, who is likened to the image or revelation of the Father, is generated from the harmony and joy of the higher aeons as their “fruit.” The Savior’s revelation in the eyes of the recipient exposes the false pretenders who in their true forms are terrible theriomorphic beasts who exercise control over the visible world of time and space. They are the implacable tyrants and and controllers of all aspects of human existence. It is the Savior who sets up the final deliverance of the human race from their yoke. Through the defeat of the archons, Christ’s descent into the upper and lower astral realms of the “shadows” would spell the fate of the souls of “fruit-bearing trees” (as mentioned in the Apocalypse of Adam) in their redemption from their former state as “creatures of the dead earth,” under the authority of the Archon of Death. Moreover in On the Origin of the World, the worldly visible church is itself likened to “the modeled forms of perdition,” since matter is in itself perishable and illusory due to the intermixing of the seed of the pneumatic (“light”) and the psychic and hylic (“darkness”) substances.

Furthermore, the same text explains how the descending Logos shakes the thralldom of the satanic rulers of fate:

“Now the Word that is superior to all beings was sent for this purpose alone: that he might proclaim the unknown. He said, “There is nothing hidden that is not apparent, and what has not been recognized will be recognized.” And these were sent to make known what is hidden, and the seven authorities of chaos and their impiety. And thus they were condemned to death. So when all the perfect appeared in the forms modeled by the rulers, and when they revealed the incomparable truth, they put to shame all the wisdom of the gods. And their fate was found to be a condemnation. And their force dried up. Their lordship was dissolved. Their forethought became emptiness, along with their glory.”

We see the same sentiment expressed in The Sophia of Jesus Christ:

“I have struck off the chains…I have broken down the doors of the pitiless and humiliated them…I have revealed to you the name of the Perfect and the whole desire of the mother of the angels. I came to reveal to you that which exists since the beginning. I came because of the pride of the archigenitor and his angels, who say, ‘We are gods!’ to condemn them by revealing to everyone the God who is above the universe. Trample under foot their sepulchers! Let their yoke be broken, that mine may be exalted.”

The Second Treatise of the Great Seth:

“For the Archon was a laughingstock because he said, “I am God, and there is none greater than I. I alone am the Father, the Lord, and there is no other beside me. I am a jealous God, who brings the sins of the fathers upon the children for three and four generations.” As if he had become stronger than I and my brothers! But we are innocent with respect to him, in that we have not sinned, since we mastered his teaching. Thus he was in an empty glory. And he does not agree with our Father. And thus through our fellowship we grasped his teaching, since he was vain in an empty glory. And he does not agree with our Father, for he was a laughingstock and judgment and false prophecy.”

And in the Triorphic Protennoia:

“I am their Father, and I shall tell you a mystery, ineffable and indivulgeable by any mouth: Every bond I loosed from you, and the chains of the demons of the underworld I broke, these things which are bound on my members, restraining them. And the high walls of darkness I overthrew, and the secure gates of those pitiless ones I broke, and I smashed their bars. And the evil force, and the one who beats you, and the one who hinders you, and the tyrant, and the adversary, and the one who is King, and the present enemy, indeed all these I explained to those who are mine, who are the Sons of the Light, in order that they might nullify them all, and be saved from all those bonds, and enter into the place where they were at first.”

It is this event that better explains this same theme expressed in John 14:1:

“Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me,” Christ closes it with the words, “be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

Even more so is the similar Gnostic sentiment echoed in St. Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 2:7-8:

“But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom (Sophia), which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

The notion that the gods of men were in actuality malefic imposters of darkness was a unique one to the Gnostic religion and one that no doubt infuriated many pagans. The god’s insistence that they assert to be the first beings in existence was a claim that the author of On the Origin of the World refuted outright. Why was this? This was because there is indeed a higher, spiritual hyperspace above their normal vision, placed in the Empyrean. It is this world that the Gnostics lay claim to as the “Seed of Seth” or the “Gnostic Race” that spring forward in a cry for battle for the Word and against the demons of forgetfulness with gleaming swords of light. It is they that will eventually “withdraw” to their true spiritual roots. Similarly, those belonging to the realm of darkness will be thrown to the abyss and “dissolved”.  No longer is the light (spirit) thrown and intermingled in the flux of dark matter. It is this apocalyptic notion that is purely alchemical in its symbolism where the good and spiritual is separated from the corrupt and perishable. The Apocryphon of John indicates that it is the Gnostic Race that that have devoted themselves exclusively to Incorruptibility “without anger, or envy, or  fear, or desire, or insobriety.”

Mankind is violently thrown into and held in captivity by the lower powers in the darkest pit of ignorance and death. Gnosis is a recital of redemption. Knowledge of this story already signals a reversal of bonds of fate. It is this knowledge that sets mankind above the cosmic prison and set limitations, giving a radical sense of freedom and liberty that is completely “acosmic”. The Illuminator arrives to awaken the scattered lights frozen in the dark. These spiritual seed contains the “blueprint”, of the image of God. To be “born again” is to transform into this glorious image of the solitary light, transcending beyond the cold and ruthless machinery of cosmic fate. This was the spiritual password used to transcend into the next world. In order to transform to this “perfected” state, one must live a life of righteous piety emulated Jesus’ example in the Gospels. Although the sojourn to the spirit is full of tension, pain and confrontation—an inner alchemy—it is indeed what separates the darkness from the light. This mystical union of the soul (symbolized by the fallen Sophia) transcends the duality of the cosmos, the subject and object, the knower and known; it is the escalation of spirit in the unity of the One.

For those who have toiled in the devastation of the abyss of existence on the path to the light of self-knowledge, like Sophia, and have risen to understand her message, it is she and her consort who descended to the depths of hell where the archons and demons dwell who were eventually swallowed and trampled in order to triumphantly rise again. In the union between Christ and Sophia, the masculine and feminine, the higher and the lower, an androgynous union is formed within the “bridal chamber”, the “bedroom” of the One. United, they seek to console the spirits of heaviness, the lost, the broken and the lamenting, to be released from their bondage and transcend the duality within and inherent to the cosmos, and to glimpse into, and take part of, the dynamics of the One. They wage a secret war against the demonic rulers who seek eternal enslavement, inviting fear and misery. It is both aeons that invite us to examine ourselves, to take part and bite into the sweet flowing juices of the fruits of the tree of life.

The Second Treatise of the Great Seth closes with this:

“Now these things I have presented to you – I am Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, who is exalted above the heavens – O perfect and incorruptible ones, because of the incorruptible and perfect mystery and the ineffable one. But they think that we decreed them before the foundation of the world, in order that, when we emerge from the places of the world, we may present there the symbols of incorruption from the spiritual union unto knowledge. You do not know it, because the fleshly cloud overshadows you. But I alone am the friend of Sophia. I have been in the bosom of the father from the beginning, in the place of the sons of the truth, and the Greatness. Rest then with me, my fellow spirits and my brothers, forever.”

The Stranger’s Battle Cry

(This article was also published on the former Palm Tree Garden, under the same alias as “AeonEye”.)

“After we went forth from our home, and came down to this world, and came into being in the world in bodies, we were hated and persecuted, not only by those who are ignorant, but also by those who think that they are advancing the name of Christ, since they were unknowingly empty, not knowing who they are, like dumb animals. They persecuted those who have been liberated by me, since they hate them – those who, should they shut their mouth, would weep with a profitless groaning because they did not fully know me. lnstead, they served two masters, even a multitude. But you will become victorious in everything, in war and battles, jealous division and wrath. But in the uprightness of our love we are innocent, pure, (and) good, since we have a mind of the Father in an ineffable mystery.” – The Second Treatise of the Great Seth (NHC VII,2).

Much like the above excerpt in its vastly confrontational nature, The Second Treatise of the Great Seth (second of the five tractates in Codex VII of the Nag Hammadi Library) contains a very stark dichotomy of the Gnostic call to spiritual transformation, cosmological and ontological mythologies as well as polemical, visceral war-like imagery scattered throughout the very rare tractate and homily.  This excerpt alone stands as a scathing indictment against the proto-orthodox Christians who by in large had taken Christ’s passion and resurrection as wholly carnal in a fundamentalist manner hence the “doctrine of a dead man”. This condemnation of the opposing Christians for their ignorance and pandering to the “profane” multitude who seek to rule them through their “herd mentality” becomes a perfect example of Gnostic elitism. The blessing of warring and battle by Christ to the “Strangers” of the immortal world above against their enemies of the lower world is rarely emphasized in apocryphal and Gnostic literature but yet is found here. It is a Gnostic protest against the Orthodox persecution of their heretical brethren. Although the text carries a title under the name of Seth, Seth (the 3rd son of Adam and Eve, later deified as a Gnostic Illuminator) himself makes no appearance but rather the text itself begins in a narration told by an ascended Christ. However, it is safe to suggest that Jesus Christ was considered to be a spiritual successor to Seth by the very least—the Sethian Gnostics. According to Birger Pearson, they did exactly just that:

“Epiphanius tells us that the sect of the Sethians considers that Seth is “Christ and maintains that he is Jesus” (Panarion 39.1.2-3): “from Seth by descent and lineage came Christ Jesus himself, through not by generation; he has appeared in the world miraculously. He is Seth himself, who visited men then and now because he was sent from by the Mother…” (Birger Pearson, Fredrick Wisse. Nag Hammadi Codex VII, Volume 7. Pg. 131)

The ascended Christ, in first person delivers a message to his followers, the Christians a much different account of his descent from heaven, incarnation and passion then the orthodox account or strict reading of the Canonical gospels. The general tone of this passage could be compared to John 15:19 where Christ proclaims to his followers:

“‎If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.”

Moreover, the text is famous for the “doetic” version of Christ’s supposed incarnation, meaning that the incarnation made manifest by the Logos or Christ was at best illusory and at worst non-existent as Treat. Seth would attest. It is Christ who clothed himself with a body of a psychic substance, arranged in an ineffable way to be received as visible and tangible.

This is due to the typical Gnostic rejection and devaluation of the physical cosmos as well as the flesh. The soul that encases the spiritual seed is foreign and alien to the misbegotten world and cosmos which is by in large hostile to its divine essence.  Because the flesh is destitute and intrinsically corrupt, this in turn caused most of the Gnostics to conclude that Christ could not have taken these transitory garments and taken on the toxic sludge that is the flesh. The Gnostics themselves however were largely divided on this issue of docetism as texts such as The Gospel of Thomas, The Apocryphon of James and The Treatise of the Resurrection suggests:

“Jesus said, “I manifested myself in the flesh.” – The Gospel of Thomas

“If you keep my cross and my death in mind, you will have life.” – The Apocryphon of James

“He existed as flesh being both human and divine, so that he would conquer death because he was the Son of God, yet also restore the pleroma because he was the Son of Man.” – The Treatise of the Resurrection.

Although the flesh is corrupt, the descent and union of the divine pnuema on the terrestrial man, allegorically represented as the Logos or the Holy Spirit (symbolized through a dove) descending upon Jesus, serves as the crux for redemption. The cited excerpt stands as veritable proof of the clashing of doctrines the blood-drenched coliseums of early Christianity. The dichotomy between flesh and spirit are emphasized in both proto-Orthodox Christian and Gnostic writings. However, this contrast is especially evident in Gnosticism (and by direct extension to Platonic dualism) as the above excerpts will attest.

One popular definition of heresy is known as an “option” or “choice”, although correct is much closer to a faction or school of thought. These heretic’s “dogmas” posited that since everything in the material universe changes, deteriorates until nothing remains, it is ultimately illusionary and unreal relative to the immutability of the true God—the primal foundation of all existence—from the ineffable stratosphere of the Pleromic throne-world to the smallest ring-worm writhing in the dirt and mud of the earth. This world-view is exemplified through their adoption of 1st Corinithians 15:50 where St. Paul proclaims that, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.” Heresy hunters and opponents of these ancient heretics such as Irenaeus rebutted this view and complained of the Gnostics:

“That “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” – This passage is used by all the heretics in order to substantiate the lunacy with which they annoy us.” (A.H. 5.9.1)

Sorry there, guy. Moreover, Irenaeus takes an opposite stance in his insistence that the flesh is connected and manifested to God, and that the world was God created in its “finished perfection” as opposed to having a Platonic demiurge to point to for failure in the creative process of the cosmos. In direct opposition to the doetic account of Christ’s incarnation, Irenaeus insisted that “Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,” The essential essence of humanity is not spirit alone but it is rather:

“a mixed organization of soul and flesh, who was formed after the likeness of God, and moulded by His hands, that is, by the Son and Holy Spirit.” (A.H. IV. Preface)

By Irenaeus’ account, the world of forms isn’t fallen nor is it a byproduct of some epistemological and ontological error by some deviated aeon that went astray. For the heresy hunter, incarnation is a condensed link between the Spirit and the flesh, much like how water crystallizes into frozen solid ice. Spirit was seen as synonymous as the flesh. The material cosmos isn’t an accident but a willed act creation from the God revealed by Jesus Christ in the New Testament (who claims is the same deity of the Old Testament). It was Irenaeus who introduced the idea of an Old Testament and a New Testament, with only four gospels revealed by the same God, who adjusted his revelation to the progression of humanity.

However, it does not stand to mean that Irenaeus did not repudiate the “lusts” of the flesh:

“Those persons, then, who possess the earnest of the Spirit, and who are not enslaved by the lusts of the flesh, but are subject to the Spirit, and who in all things walk according to the light of reason, does the apostle properly term “spiritual,” because the Spirit of God dwells in them. Now, spiritual men shall not be incorporeal spirits; but our substance, that is, the union of flesh and spirit, receiving the Spirit of God, makes up the spiritual man.” (AH V.8.2)

Yet, Irenaeus’ stance on the flesh and spirit being more or less equal is of contended with by Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, “If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a wonder. But if spirit came into beingbecause of the body, it is a wonder of wonders. Indeed, I am amazed at how this great wealth has made its home in this poverty.”

Irenaeus also completely contradicts the true Paul on the stance of the flesh being capable of receiving the gift of God, whereas Paul viewed the flesh as irrelevant for salvation as mentioned in Ephesians 2:8. Furthermore, Irenaeus simply dismisses the idea that mankind can simply deduce the correct gnosis of the Ineffable God by his own means without an intermediary:

“FOR in no other way could we have learned the things of God, unless our Master, existing as the Word, had become man. For no other being had the power of revealing to us the things of the Father, except His own proper Word. For what other person “knew the mind of the Lord,” or who else “has become His counsellor?” (AH V.1)

Strangely enough, the highly fragmentary and esoteric Gnostic text, Allogenes agrees with this sentiment:

“And when I was confirmed in these matters, the powers of the Luminaries said to me, “Cease hindering the inactivity that exists in you, by seeking incomprehensible matters; rather, hear about him in so far as it is possible by means of a primary revelation and a revelation.”

In this manner, the supramundane substance of God, which is a stranger to this world, cannot be contained, nor can he be comprehended in Himself in all His glory, for this glory is unsearchable and far beyond the investigative power of our physical and even psychic faculties. The direct gnosis of God is impossible because in God, nothing recognizable is available to us save for the revelation that is given to the individual through grace. However, that is not to say that the quest for self-knowledge visa-vi the knowledge of God is vain because as many different texts such as the Gospel of Thomas which deals with self-consciousness:

“But the Kingdom is within you and it is outside you. When you shall know yourselves, then you shall be known, and you shall know that you are sons of the living Father” (Logion 3). “He who knows everything except himself, misses everything” (Logion 67). Whoever will find himself, of him the world is not worthy.” (Logion ii).

This is comparable to the New Testament in Luke 17:21 where the Christian believer contains the Kingdom of God within by the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit after the subsequent spiritual conviction with the destitute inner heart of man becoming receptive to the bestowed saving grace. The return to the Father is also a return to the true Self, the Pneumatic man exemplified by Christ. Knowledge of God and self-consciousness cohere very closely, and in Gnosticism they practically coincide. Who knows God also knows about himself, from where he comes and whither he goes. The only verifiable way to know God is to “know thyself” or “Gnothi Seauton” of the Delphic commandment. It is this revelation that produces experiential knowledge. In ancient Gnostic thinking, knowing yourself means knowing the cosmological outline you are connected to. To them, the spirit is of course from the spiritual source, and one is cast into the physical trap. Sophia is fallen into the world, and is dealing with the error. The point is the understanding of the mythology was considered part of gnosis, according to the historical Gnostics. Plato described this knowledge:

“This knowledge is not something that can be put into words like other sciences; but after long-continued intercourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul and straightway nourishes itself.” Seventh Letter, §341c.

Texts such as The Second Treatise of the Great Seth were more than likely a retort to all the polemics written by Heresiologists such as Irenaeus. The rejection of this Greek dualism, taken on by the Gnostics, stand as evidence to them which persons such as Irenaeus have indeed taken a prostrated position in that the goodness of the Supreme God above all other gods, is responsible for the countless evils and corruption that is inherent not only to the actions of the human race but to existence itself. This denial of evil and corruption proceeding from Good was explained through various mythologies of how the hypostatization of the negative passions produced by the fallen aeon Sophia through her abortive manifestation of the lower, demiurgical angels’ maligned works as the dark fire extant as the material universe, showing the dualistic and even pluralistic ontology that appears many times in Gnostic cosmology. The error is produced not from the will of the Supreme God but through the mistake of the lowest emanation that being the folly of Wisdom. And even still, according to this theory, the fall had already occurred long before mankind came into the picture. Without concern for world humanity or any “sins” committed of Adam and Eve through disobedience of a divinely ordained law, “evil”, though latent, was already in existence. Irenaeus’ denial of their renunciation of the world in favor for a supernal one and affirmation of the world of appearances no doubt annoyed the Gnostics to no end!

Typical to the pessimistic inklings found in Gnostic cosmology, the visible cosmos is the product of an epistemological error committed within a web of illusion, while slave race of humanity mistake this darkness for true reality much like prisoners trapped in Plato’s allegorical dungeon-like cave. The material world is in fact a botched carbon copy of the higher forms contained within the spiritual realm of the Pleroma. The physical universe itself in all its glaring error and painfully beautiful splendor is but a faint shadow and plastic caricature to the eternal realms of the aeons in which it is preceded by. Jacques Lacarriere writes in The Gnostics:

“For this world, crucible of corruption, excrement of error though it is, possesses the seeds of immortality and a faint resemblance to the distant God, the living Aeon, the veracious model of all things.” (68)

In E.M Corian’s The New Gods, he succinctly summarizes the primal and pluralistic message of the ancient Gnostics:

“It is difficult, it is impossible to believe that the good god, the “Father”, has been involved in the scandal of creation. Everything suggests it took no part, he is a ruthless God, a God weighed. Goodness does not: it lacks imagination, yet it takes to make a world, if it is sloppy. It is, strictly speaking, the mixture of goodness and wickedness that may arise an act or work. Or universe. Starting from ours, it is in any case otherwise easy to trace a suspect god than a god honorable.”

The pneumatic seed is entombed in shells of the flesh, enmeshed and fallen in the imperfect world of forms. Mankind is largely subject to infernal trickery and debasement by his demonic wards, the enemies of the Gnostics. As a result, humanity is drunk, asleep and ignorant of this divine “nous” resident within them and enslaved to the pangs of the physical world—the jailhouse of the principalities. This ignorance is fostered in human nature by the influence of unreality inherent in sentient existence.

The exact origins of this corrupting evil reality isn’t brought through by the ultimate reality but rather through the error and rebellion of the lower angels as mentioned by both canonical and apocryphal texts in all their terrible glory. The only way to redemption and the bypassing the “dwellers on the threshold” is through self-realization of our divine origins through revelatory saving knowledge bestowed by the savior. In the cosmology of the Hypostasis of the Archons, the universe is divided by a veil into two mutually exclusive realms. The primary, incorruptible, and invisible realm above the dividing veil is contrasted with its shadow, the corruptible and visible realm of physical matter and of ignorance beneath the veil. This is where humanity dwells within this vale of tears and all its baneful glory as Jacques Lacarriere also writes:

“Viscerally, imperiously, irremissibly, the Gnostic feels life, thought, human and planetary destiny to be a failed work, limited and vitiated in its most fundamental structures. Everything, from the distant stars to the nuclei of our body cells, carries the materially demonstrable trace of an original imperfection which only Gnosticism and the means it proposes can combat. But this radical censure of all creation is accompanied by an equally radical certainty which presupposes and upholds it—the conviction that there exists a man something which escapes the curse of the world, a fire, a spark, a light issuing from the true God, the distant, inaccessible stranger to the perverse order of the universe, and that man’s task is to reign his lost homeland by wrenching free of the snares and illusions of the dark fire, to rediscover the original unity, to find again the kingdom of this God who was unknown, or imperfectly known, to all preceding religions.” (10)

In other words, mankind who is wrought and enslaved in the realm of appearances struggles to find reality behind this façade of this nightmarish reverie called the world.  Worldly existence is beset by pain, uncertainty, frustration, horror, suffering and death. Its inhabitants mistake ignorance for knowledge, insanity for sanity, pain for pleasure, unconsciousness for consciousness, darkness for light. In many instances when the light of true reality attempts to breaks through the gloomy veil of matter, these attempts are halted by the predatory forces that has been around since the beginning of creation and time. Caught in the vast insane asylum, mankind is seemingly hopelessly lost, immured in a cyclical limbo that never seems to stop.

Unable to discern between the benevolent light and the encroaching shadow, the sounded siren seduces and lulls their prisoners to a much deeper trance of sleep, enwrapped in chains of darkness, held in the pit of existence. However, the hostile sentries that guard the cosmic penitentiary did not count on a covert divine invasion. This raid from the immortal realm outside of the confining bars is lead by the Stranger, a figure of light and truth. His luminous forces are called the “immovable race”, charged by an awakened pneumatic seed, ripping through the darkened wasteland of the cosmos in which the wicked principalities would shake with tormenting fear at such a prospect.

Their grapple hold on the false reality becomes ever so loosened as the immortal spirit—the hated and persecuted Stranger invades enemy ground, the world of the lie, freeing the battered captives from their confinement and into the warmth and light of true freedom. The trumpet calls of the Stranger’s arrival have rend the dark skies from stygian black to a brilliant golden light, signaling an end from the cruel imprisonment placed by the rulers. It is as if the fallen castaways of mankind was destined to be emancipated, a plan set in motion at the very beginning of this glaring error of creation. The faint pnuema resident within man is illuminated by the invading revealer, armed with a sword girt before the tenebrous deception and becomes victorious over the sentries of the cosmic prison.

But I was rejoicing in the height over all the wealth of the archons and the offspring of their error, of their empty glory. And I was laughing at their ignorance. Treat. Seth.

The Letter of Peter to Philip confirms this cosmic struggle between spirit and the darkness that inhabits the fetters of the cosmos:

“Then a voice called out to them from the appearance saying, “Now you will fight against them in this way, for the archons are fighting against the inner man. And you are to fight against them in this way: Come together and teach in the world the salvation with a promise. And you, gird yourselves with the power of my Father, and let your prayer be known. And he, the Father, will help you as he has helped you by sending me. Be not afraid, I am with you forever, as I previously said to you when I was in the body.” Then there came lightning and thunder from heaven, and what appeared to them in that place was taken up to heaven.”

In 1 Corinthians 13:12, it tells us that “For we see through an hour glass, darkly.” The natural vision of man can be described as a winter night under a full moon. The eerie, haunting light of the moon cascades over the horizon. Things can be seen, but not well and indistinct. There are many shadows, deep and dark. It is majestic and beautiful in its starkness as it is in its own entire category. In contrast, those who have received the episteme and an intimate knowledge of their true creator, while seeing the world in a different light where everything suddenly becomes much clearer, brighter, and they can see where others cannot see. The shadows disappear, all the gray areas become bright as noon. Things are sharply in focus. This is the new finely tuned spiritual vision as a result of the redemptive work.

In order to shed and cast off these dark shades and weight of the wasted shells of Malkuthian matter, the symbol of the cross is used as an allegory where the separation and filtration of the spirit from matter occurs. In Gnostic terminology, the cross is known as the limit or barrier veil (Horos). The material is consumed in straw burnt up in flame. The Gospel of Truth speaks in this way of the crucifixion of Christ:

“He was nailed to a (cross of) wood (and) He attached the deed of disposition of the Father to the cross… He abased himself even unto death though he has been clothed with eternal life. Having divested himself of these perishable rags, He clothed himself in incorruptibility. Having penetrated into terror’s empty places (the material world), He passed those who were stripped of the incapacity for knowledge, in which He became both Gnosis and perfection.”

Its result was the separation from the profane world, the receipt for saving gnosis as being as life and light which enabled the Gnostics for remembrance and restoration to the hyperspace of the Pleroma. Deep within the psychic and hylic nature of man lies within the portal to salvation itself: his pneumatic seed. If this is true then why is there a need for a savior when man has a spark of the spirit? The Spirit is in a position of imprisonment or slavery because it has been bound to matter and has been subjected to the fatalistic thumb of the cosmic rulers. From this inference that the every person is under the subject of the thralldom of these hostile powers, this exile also features a kind of haunting of every person from birth to death by their demon, thus in turn becoming a “demonic man” left without the interceding divine power of the Holy Spirit to convict the “hylic” and “psychic” aspects that make up the ego into fires of the Cross. The pneuma is latently exists, but it does not work, for it must first be awakened from sleep. Such is the work of the Savior—for him to awaken the children of the Fallen Aeon who are asleep, forgetful of their celestial origins.

It is the task of the “Revealer” or the “Savior” to descend through the heavenly spheres and fan the slumbering sparks of spiritual fires which lie dormant within the soul, leading to the recognition of one’s secret self and spiritual destiny. In this sense, Christ functions in a much different manner than the orthodox notion of the dying and resurrecting God-man:

“The Sethian conception of a final descent of a redeemer identified as the pre-existent Logos who brings salvation as revealed gnosis rather than transactional redemption through his death on the cross was shared by the Johannine Christian circles. Not long afterwards, Valentinus (140-160 CE) too developed the notion of a pneumatic Christ coming to awaken the sleeping spirit in humankind, a notion which lies at the core of his theology.” (249) Christ is the prototype of pneumatic man or perhaps even a newly formed version of the Anthropos or in Kabbalistic terms the “Adam Kadmon.” It is he in which the Gnostic strives to become as the Gospel of Philip indicates, “Those who receive the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit…[are] no longer a Christian, but [are] Christ.”

The pneumatic seed is also pre-existent in the Logos:

“He possesses within himself the grains of seed which will originate, through the promise which came into existence in the one (i.e. the Logos) who conceived it (the seed) as if he were one belonging to the seeds which will originate.” (4th Treatise)

Christ himself is also called “seed of the truth”. The pneumatics are preexistent in him, and they will return to him:

“…and that on the other hand through the Son of Man (besides the Son of God) the restoration into the Pleroma might take place, since at first he was from above, a seed of the truth, when this structure had not yet come into being.” (The Treatise on the Resurrection)

Christ himself is seen as the divine prototype or Logos to the pneumatic man. Thus salvation is realized through this point within him where the man joins his angel in the consummation—a model for Sophia or Wisdom’s union with her bridegroom, the Christos. There exists a gateway or a “portal” buried deep within the inner heart or pnuema, the seed of the soul in which the Gnostic must discover this inner chamber, the passageway that leads to this authentic, unconditional reality that in many Gnostic texts could only be described in apophatic terms (of what God is not rather than what God is). Once this gateway is opened, the spirit man enters a bridal chamber reserved for those waiting to recite their marriage vows with the Savior in the holy of hollies, the “husband in the Aeon” in a syzygyetic union. The way to reach this “doorway” or “portal” to the divine is specifically mentioned in Matthew 7:13-14:

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”

On this journey to the gateway is rife with terror and sorrow which is largely comparable to St. John of the Cross’ the Dark Night of the Soul (also known as the Night Sea Journey according to Carl Gustav Jung) where sadness and grief become disproportionate to the initial causes. It is a period of struggle, pain, strife and difficulty of a spiritual kind and not so much of a purely mental chemical imbalance in the human brain (flesh). Redemption in this sense is natural to mankind, because the pneumatic seed serves as a seat to traverse the narrow way of Christ. From this union, regeneration or the rebirth is realized (from the Adamic to the Pneumatic), bestowing the gift of agape to the believer who traverses this inward path to the Spirit.

It is the culmination of the quickening that is mentioned in John 3:5-8:

“Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit”.

This is largely comparable to The Gospel of Philip where the author claims:

“We are born again through the Holy Spirit, and we are conceived through Christ in baptism with two elements. We are anointed through the spirit, and when we are conceived, we were united.”

This awakened pneumatic man is further demonstrated in Ezekiel 36:25, where God promises:

“I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you.”

In the Old Testament, water and the spirit often have to do with refreshing and cleansing, restoration and life from God. So Ezekiel provides a good lens for understanding Jesus’ statements as well as the statements made in the Gospel of Philip. It is this inward descent into the spiritual heart nestled deep within and beyond the “psychic” and “hylic” substances formed from the passions of Sophia where the Gnostic communication is formed and thus the resurrection and ascent occurs within as a joyous, rapturous event transforming the unregenerate into a Son of Light, the Stranger to the shadows. This gnosis is called “secret knowledge” because it is only knowable to the deep and truest Self and neither to anyone for it is by its nature intimate. It is experiential in nature. Further examples of this spiritual awakening can be seen furthermore in the New Testament:

“For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God.” Ephesians 3:14-19

And in 1 Peter 3:4:

“But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.”

Birger Pearson makes an effective analytical conclusion in regards to the analysis of Treat. Seth:

“Christ’s message during his incarnation and now in Treat. Seth is that he and his followers are one, and one with the Father; that, like himself, their origin is from the heaven and their destiny is one day to return and themselves join in the spiritual union of the heavenly wedding; because of his victory they may now rest in him in the face of their difficulties with the world of the archons and the Great Church.” (Birger Pearson, Fredrick Wisse. Nag Hammadi Codex VII, Volume 7. Pg. 129)

This is congruent to many passages featured in the Treatise on the Resurrection where the close connection between the Gnostic, and Christ is made evident:

“But when we are made manifest in this world, bearing Him, we are his rays, and we are encompassed by Him until our setting, which is our death in this life”, and “We are drawn upward by Him as the rays by the sun without being retained by anything”.

The corporeal and psychic parts of man is completely absorbed into the pneumatic:

“This is our spiritual resurrection which swallows the psychic as well as the fleshly. It is the revelation of that which is and the transformation and a passing on to a new existence. For incorruptibility descends on what is perishable.”

The attainment of spiritual life is the pneumatic resurrection, and it guarantees the resurrection into eternity:

“They who say, ‘One will first die and then he will rise’, err. If they do not receive the resurrection at first when they are alive, they will receive nothing, when they die. In this way one speaks of Baptism, when it is said, ‘The Baptism is great, for when a man receives it, he will live”‘ (Gospel of Philip)

Lastly, an important point should be made that being this is not a polemic against any orthodox Christian or Jewish religion, but rather should be recognized as a call to analyze within and reject the blind and ignorant archon that dwells and festers within the ego’s beating black heart and to strike it with the gleaming sword of knowledge and wisdom.  It is the duality and struggle between the archontic and pneumatic nature within the mind and soul of each individual that should be emphasized. It is easy to use such a text to validate one’s persecution complexes and prejudices to those of “mainstream” Christianity or any other religious church simply because they do not share the similarly deeper understandings of the mysteries of gnosis.

Because their readings of the New Testament accounts were not as strictly conservative in a literalness of a reading in their faith and simply viewed such texts as mirrors of greater truths, the battle of doctrines rang loud. The very fact that there was an assortment of views and understandings among the early Christians should be an indicator that one point of view isn’t necessarily far superior over another. In other words, reality does not have to conform to one’s cognition simply due to the need to be proven right. True knowledge isn’t boosting about how one is “enlightened”. Avoiding the pitfalls of ego projection is just as important as gaining “enlightenment”. It is the discovery of this redemption within us that must be acknowledged, for it not the struggle against the flesh that must be fought but the thralldom of the hostile darkness that abides within the psyche and the cloudy firmament of the soul. The Gnostics are those who had:

“…rituals of investiture and enthronement, perhaps also of anointing, as symbols of their status as the sovereign and autonomous, thus “kingless,” race or generation of seth” (John Douglas Turner. Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition. Pg. 241)

Whereas the Adversary, his minions and even the Old Testament patriarchs are described as a “laughing stock” in Treat. Seth. Instead of acting like the haughty and retarded Saklas once did in his fixed, abiding ego, who at the depths of the abyss was raging against the Almighty–embracing Wisdom and avoiding her passions would go a long way into gaining true, spiritual vision. From the mythological story that portrays this divine drama, the Gnostics believed that the human soul itself was co-substantial to the stuff of the cosmic rulers in that their motions of the soul are caused and controlled by the demonic authorities. It was through the soul that man could be led astray into evil and away from the spiritual core, the divine power in man. They were convinced that  they could sense the wickedness of the cosmic demiurge and his accomplices in themselves. It was therefore their duty to neglect psychic inclinations and to devote themselves exclusively to spiritual reality. This is the true battle cry of the Stranger. Let us be the kingless, sovereign and autonomous generation rather than a laughingstock.

Oh! It’s Magic!

There’s been some recent controversy in various blogs over the legitimacy of occultism and magic that was mainly fueled by Miguel Conner’s article. His argument, inspired Alan Moore’s disjointed, caustic and adjective-riddled up-the-ying-yang piece of polemic called “Fossil Angels” is that modern occultism has fallen (or conceived in to be more accurate) into the mire of Dungeons & Dragons (no disrespect to D&D players) kind of phoney baloney. This kind of occultism has fallen into rank mediocrity and bourgeois, narcissistic materialism rather than containing any truly inspired spiritual or artistic vision like say a William Blake painting.  Alan Moore defines “true magic” as writing, creating music or painting rather than attending some boring old occult lodge,  hearing them drone on and on about nonsense.

Although I certainly agree (for the most part) with his blanket assessment, I do think that “magic” reflects a certain human need to wrap a cordon of mystery and possibility through rituals or gazing into a crystal ball or reading a stack of Tarot cards. Humans are creatures imperiled by their every next breath, with every heart beat closer to death. Humans try to shake a little truth out of their stabs in the dark. ”Magic” which is defined as containing supernatural powers and influence over the forces of nature and the “spirit world” reflects an innate need to control and ”mastery” over one’s destiny in an uncertain, nonsensical and powerless world. The gods have abandoned us long ago to our whims and vices. They have far more important cosmic issues to attend to. They no longer hear prayers and care only to the extent that their mission of planting the seeds of potential consciousness in the soil of the world is long over.

While we do retain consciousness, the mind/body perspective still remains subjective and lacking in autonomy. There is a limit or “veil” that even our spiritual “eye salve” can reach, much like hitting a brick wall. And both modern occultism and (drifting dilettante) new age paths have muddled this spiritual vision to a great degree.

Both the ancient Neoplatonist teacher Plotinus and the author of Allogenes voice a paradoxical proclamation of learned ignorance: ”If you should know him, un–know him” (Allogenes) as per the superlative Unknowable deity, the unconditional reality without form or existence. In essence, if you want to know the transcendent realm, the negation of all preconceptions and though is necessary to gain deeper levels of insight and awareness as opposed through the means of ritual magic, since it is based on form and subjective consciousness. The unmanifest God can only be comprehended by the human mind through either paradox and/or ascent vision mysticism.

“Magic” doesn’t automatically mean “Satanist” or ”evil” (although the Bible certainly seems to think so!), but let’s face it: most if not all forms of “magic” isn’t about communing with God or even attaining self-knowledge. The closest thing to this kind of “high magic” would be theurgy, but even that is up for debate. Magic isn’t a spiritual practice. As one blogger put it, it’s more of a “psychic art” (as in “psyche” or “soul” of the tripartate Gnostic system of substances). It’s about many magician’s own admission of applying one’s will in the material world to produce an effect. It denotes a person with a “will” of “power” and by owning it, you own proper.

According to Aleister Crowley, any willed or intentional act whatsoever is “magick”. He says it quite literally in Book 4: “Every intentional act is a Magical act.” He even gives an example for this:

“It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take “magical weapons”, pen, ink, and paper; I write “incantations”—these sentences—in the “magical language” ie, that which is understood by the people I wish to instruct; I call forth “spirits”, such as printers, publishers, booksellers and so forth and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution of this book is thus an act of Magick by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will.”

With that kind of definition, that could mean almost anything. So I took a magical shit? A magical piss? There’s a certain amount of fetishizing behind the word which becomes so malleable that it loses nearly all its meaning. Kind of like the over and sloppily applied word “Gnostic”. Anything that sounds remotely mystical is often erroneously considered “Gnostic”.

The one thing I don’t agree with Conner’s article however is the notion that occultism is dead as the title of his article obviously indicates. Sure it usually takes the form of narcissistic masturbatory egotism. It’s mostly verbose flowery language to describe something that exists beyond the rational and easily explainable. Regardless of what someone may say for or against, the occult groups remain and still do their own thing. Whether they are increasing or decreasing is a whole other debate entirely.

That all being said, I’m not about to dictate what a person should or shouldn’t do. The important part is to take philosophy, religion or even “magic” and make it your own way and not rely on someone else’s style or technique. Discovering your own voice is what really matters in the long run.

And on that note these meme images are pretty kick-ass.

Heaven & Hell

 ”Every one who has ever built anywhere a “new heaven” first found the power thereto in his own hell.” – Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals.

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“It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.” - Siddhartha Gautama.

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‎”He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.”

“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

“The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. The nakedness of woman is the work of God.”

- William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell.

It all fits.

“The Rich Gettin’ Richer, The Poor Gettin’ Poorer.”

“They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.” – Some Bearded Fat Guy from They Live!

I recently re-watched the campy cult classic They Live! the other day. In the movie, an unemployed George Nada (Roddy Pipper) travels to Los Angeles during an economic depression, looking for work and happens to stumble upon a small, covert fifth-column type of rebellion and their special made “sunglasses” that lets people “see” the truth past the veil. This “veil” or “signal” rather blinds the human populace to the facade that a world-wide conspiracy (or as conspiracy theorists call “The New World Order”) have propped up through the media moguls and their subliminal propaganda campaigns (Obey, Submit, No Imagination, Conform, Sleep)  and control that the Power Elite have embedded into nearly every societal facet (money, politics, advertisements especially, the police, military, religion, etc).

Of course as it turns out, the men behind the “Power Elite” are in fact quite literally zombie/corpse, “formaldehyde-faced” looking aliens that have their tentacled influence throughout society and have lulled the human populace into a comatose and entranced like state of rampant consumerism and materialism. All the while, the world around them crumbles and falls, draining their natural resources until waste and ruin remains. Far-fetched huh? Well, you don’t have to be a super-whiz to see there are strong parallels between the film and current events. Except for maybe the alien part? Maybe.

There’s a great article on Dangerous Minds that explores these same themes. One specific excerpt jumped out at me:

“It’s been quite a scam: the Savior State borrows immense sums from future taxpayers to bribe the current crop of citizenry, and these same citizenry pay the rising interest on that growing debt via their taxes. In other words, the debt-serfs pay for the bribes that keep them complicit.”

Well, that’s if you’re lucky! Do you think that the relatively poor rely upon Jesus Christ’s words about it being harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle? They perhaps feel sorry for the Koch brothers? Misplaced compassion? Paying taxes isn’t all bad and might be better directed to the Power Elite, but of course their servants in the Republican GOP (and Washington in general really) work day and night with utter dedication for this to not happen. All sorts of ham-fisted lunatics and fanatics have taken over the Republican Party (as if they were sane to begin with). Their mantra is quite simple really: cut taxes for the rich, and the poor can eat the last few crumbs falling off the end of rich men’s generosity. The fact that the matter is, corporate America and their Gringotts goblins on Wall Street, are booming. The “trickle-down” economy of course doesn’t actually trickle down, rather it trickles up! Never-mind the fact that the income distribution is so disproportionate, that it’s more accurate to call ourselves a kleptocracy than a democracy, a banana republic rather than a free republic.

That’s how capitalism works, like it or not. It already has named winners, everyone else has to work their butt off for little or nothing. Of course the corporate state isn’t going to hire you, why would they? It’s the LAST thing they have on their minds. Rather, they’re thinking creative ways on how to avoid paying ZERO taxes and raking in more profits. I suppose the archons must have their pets, too.

Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” Matthew 19:21

“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Matthew 19:24

Of course, Jesus’ proclamation to give to the poor and needy is a complete anathema to the Republican “Family Values” and their slave masters. In fact, the recipe that Jesus gives to commune with the divine is so alien to them and the “American Way” that its any wonder any of them call themselves Christian. I guess Jesus wasn’t very clear with his analogy of the rich man and the camel. If you’re content in being a rich and gluttonous “Randroid” sociopath and let the poor get their reward in the afterlife, you’re going to hang out with Satan and roast in hell for all eternity.

Most people just cower, inside, in fear, and suck up to the Power Elite while their little world and quality of life crumbles, and they are herded like cattle into the primordial swamp. No wonder conservatives revile you as you bow and scrape before them while they’re pissing on you. Remember folks, if you’re going to vote at all, vote contra-Republican. It’s the patriotic thing to do!