On the Problem of Evil, Part II
Who's your devil?
There seems to be a revival of devil worship in America. Some might recall Sam Smith’s performance at the most recent Grammy’s (the Grammy’s were sponsored by Phizer, you might recall as well.)
Lil Nas takes it from behind from the devil, then kills the devil and takes over hell.
Here is the leader of The Satanic Temple, Lucien Greaves,
Precisely the sort of guy you want running your kid’s after-school club?
The Satanic Temple is different than the Church of Satan, which was started by Anton LaVey in 1966.
The Church of Satan is currently led by a married couple, High Priest Peter H Gilmore and High Priestess, Peggy Nadramia.
Libs of TikTok recently profiled a Chicago public school art teacher who had a curious social media profile. Satan respects pronouns, don’t you know? (Profiled recently also on Coffee & Covid.)
What do you think the odds are Satan is so mundane, so cartoonish, so dumb, so in-your-face? Do you get the sense, something of the childish-juvenile? Rebellion in the late empire of eternal liberal childhood? I imagine such antics are the hallmark of every late empire, complete with the sacrifice of children. By contrast, Eliphas Levi said about the Devil, in his book The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic (1854):
Let us begin with the subject in a frank and bold manner,
Does the devil exist?
What is the devil?….
THE DEVIL, IN BLACK MAGIC, IS THE GREAT MAGICAL AGENT USED FOR THE PURPOSE OF EVIL BY A PERVERSE WILL….
We have said that the astral light is the receptacle of forms. Evoked through reason these forms are produced in harmony; evoked through madness, they turn up disordered and monstrous….
When we call upon the devil with the required ceremonies, the devil comes and we see him.
In order not to die, struck down by this vision, in order not to become cataleptic or insane, one must already be crazy.
Do you suppose these clowns above have ever actually met this character? (For Levi, “reason” is another word for the science of the unseen, or magic.) He continues:
In a word, the devil, for us, is the power used for a period of time in the service of error, just as mortal sin is, in our eyes, the persistence of will in absurdity.1
Earlier he states:
There is a true and a false science, a divine magic and a magic that is infernal, that is to say misleading and obscure: we will reveal one and unveil the other; we will distinguish the magician from the sorcerer and the adept from the charlatan.
The magician disposes of the force which he knows, the sorcerer struggles to abuse that of which he is ignorant.
The devil, if it can be permitted to use this reviled and vulgar word in a book of science, surrenders himself to the magician, and the sorcerer surrenders himself to the devil.
The magician is the sovereign pontiff of nature, the sorcerer is but its desecrator.2
In the beginning was the Word; we are all a kind of magician, weaving our own narrative, our life story, our own version of the creative Word. “Sorcerer” in this context is anyone who manipulates words to abuse others, as in relationships, in advertising or politics.
I think the following speaks clearly to our time and The Official Narrative:
The instruments or enchantments is none other than the great magical agent itself, which, under the influence of a malicious will, truly and positively becomes demonic….
This is what explains the strangeness and even atrocity of magical performances during antiquity and the Middle Ages: the satanic masses…the spilling of blood, the human sacrifices, and other monstrosities….Black magic is in fact simply a combination of sacrilege and progressive murder whose goal is to forever pervert the human will and to produce in a man the hideous phantom of the devil. It is thus, properly speaking, the religion of the devil, the cult of shadows, the hatred of the good brought to it’s climax; it is the incarnation of death and the permanent creation of hell.”3
CBDC’s, WHO pandemic mandates, WEF derived ESG, institutional DIE, one gender called trans, anybody? How about a graphene neuralink administered through the veins? Fifteen minute cities you can’t leave, whenever they decide to lock you down for any reason? You will own nothing and be happy?
Lucifer is the “light bringer,” but also he propagates darkness. I have always assumed, believed, that the more information the better, the more information the more self aware people would become, but social media and media generally, consumerism broadly speaking, has been like too much light for a lot of people. To much light will blind you, as staring directly into the sun. Satan as a snake in the garden offers you an apple from the tree of knowledge; the tree of life is made forever protected by the cherubim. Pandora opens her box and the whole world puts out their own eyes.
Speaking of marxicissim, cancel culture and the competency crisis:
Most of all one must remember…that the names of Satan, of Beelzebub, of Adramelech…do not designate spiritual unities but the legions of impure spirits. “I am called Legion,” the spirit of darkness says in the Gospel, “for we are many.” In hell, anarchy reigns, it is the crowd that rules, and progress occurs in the inverse direction, that is to say those most advanced in Satanic development, in consequence the most degraded, are the least intelligent and the weakest. Thus a fatal law pushes demons to descend when they believe and wish to climb up. Also, those who call themselves the leaders are the most impotent and the most despised of all. As to the mass of perverse spirits, they tremble before an unknown leader, invisible, incomprehensible, capricious, implacable, who never explains his laws and who always has his arm extended to strike those who cannot perceive it….but this phantom is nothing but a shadow and a memory of God, disfigured by their voluntary perversity.4
Their voluntary perversity. The implication being, Satan, the devil, Lucifer, has no power over you that you do not voluntarily give him. That, and the liberal project to eliminate all limitations and boundaries is the voluntary embrace of perversity and the devil.
Does the devil exist, really? The 15th chapter of Levi’s ritual is an evocation to summon the devil. I have never summoned the devil, I never will, but I have faith that Levi tells it true. About that he says:
We shall provide, in the 15th chapter of our ritual, all the diabolical evocations and practices of black magic, not so as to make use of them, but so that we know them, judge them, so that we can protect ourselves forevermore from such aberrations.5
There are traditions that have the devil as some opposite equivalent to God, like chaos and order, darkness and light. But Levi, who was Christian, considers that notion a kind of sorcery, the devil is merely a fallen angel, equivalent to other angels, if once one of God’s most favored. The devil as we know it is peculiar to the human condition. He may be like a part of God but he is not God’s equivalent, or the other half of God. You might even say, the devil is a creation of humanity, God as perceived by the wicked, from a distance.
These images [of God], less perfect as they move away from the source, cast a final reflection or a final glimmer in the darkness which represents a horrible and disfigured old man: it is what is coarsely referred to as the devil…within the symbolism itself, the demon is an angel fallen from heaven for having wished to usurp the divinity. This pertains to the allegorical language of the prophets and of legends. Philosophically speaking, the devil is a human idea of divinity surpassed and dispossessed of heaven through the progress of science and reason.6
From this perspective, if the devil seems so powerful now, so ascendant, that might have a lot to do with modernism, and the tacit belief long encouraged that there are no limits to human acquisitiveness, growth or progress, you should have whatever you want whenever you want it. Greed gone global, which is a human failing, neither liberal nor conservative necessarily, not particular to the west, east, north or south. We have sought to supplant God with our technology, nay, to become God. But that only empowers the devil, and puts the soul at risk.
The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, Eliphas Levi, Greer and Mikituk translation 2017, pg 140
ibid, pg 30
ibid, pg 145
ibid, pg 305
ibid, pg 140
ibid, pg 103
Is the belief that the devil exists, shared by devil-worshippers and devil-haters, useful for disempowering pedo-sadistic rituals? It seems to me that it's counter-productive. It reinforces the idea that supernatural power can be gained through horrific acts.
As you know, my research has led me to the conclusion that the Bible is imperial propaganda. But even Bible historians who are believers, like Elaine Pagels, have shown that Satan and his demons represented the Judean insurgency rising up against Roman rule--and WINNING.
If we want to take down the very idea of empire, that some people are born to rule over others, I think we need to find out the truth. Those characterized as Satan and his demons knew something powerful alright. And yes, they were legion. They were the masses of the colonized and enslaved that the empires feared. And when the empire couldn't defeat them with violence, they turned to a false narrative that inverted the truth.
All the machinations of modernity after the turn of the 20th century are part of the agenda to blind people to their true divinity, generally incrementally, but also through the mesmerizing technologies which can so easily disconnect us from our senses. Once that separation happens, people are more susceptible to demonic possession because they've given up their Creator-given abilities and rights to "experts" and "authorities" who will only abuse their power and cause harm. If people are not "in their right mind," they must be "in the wrong mind," in terms of Natural Law.