religion – Page 38

Is this the Age of the Pleb?

There are many systems of thought that describe various times, epochs or ages that humanity appears to pass through on its collective historical journey through the Great Fractal. Plato’s Republic described it alchemically, the Hindu cosmology describes it in a similar fashion and many other traditions have a time of increasing disorder leading to a climactic revolution.

In Republic, Plato laid out how culture disintegrates over time. Society begins in a Golden Age, according to Socrates in Book VIII, and gradually deteriorates.

It begins with rulers who put virtue above all, and who accordingly cannot own property. Because of the errors that these good people inevitably make as a consequence of being fallible, they are replaced by an inferior and greedier set of rulers.

Eventually the greed of the society leads to money being lent out at high rates of interest, which inevitably concentrates wealth in the hands of a very few. Society degenerates further into the rule of the mob, when doing whatever one wishes to do is the only value.

Here there is little of the higher order that an alchemist would associate with gold, silver or iron. Indeed, the men of gold have vanished by the time it comes to democracy. The man of clay takes charge by convincing the man of iron that the man of silver wishes to enslave him, and by convincing the man of silver that the man of iron wishes to kill him, and so ensures that those two mutually destroy each other.

The Hindu timeline tells a fantastic – and weirdly similar – story. Each Great Year, or Age of Man, or Maha Yuga, itself consists of four smaller Yugas.

The first of these, the Satya Yuga, is also known as the Age of Truth, and it corresponds very closely to what an alchemist would call a Golden Age and what Plato would have called rule by aristocracy. Here it is the gods that are, rightly, in charge of their creation, and everyone knows their correct place.

In the next age, the Treta Yuga, righteousness gradually diminishes. An alchemist would call this an Age of Silver – spirituality begins to give way to materialism, and kings and rulers must use cunning to get their will through, no longer able to rely on the confidence that the ruled have in them.

The final stage is the Kali Yuga, which is known in Hinduism as a Dark Age.

Both of these systems of thought, like the Norse Ragnarok and the Abrahamist Armageddon, suggest that the human experience starts good and gradually gets worse until it has to be restarted in violent revolution. Before we get to this point, however, things have to become genuinely terrible.

An alchemist might point to the immense population surge of the last 150 years and declare that this must be the time of the man of clay, because it appears that no longer does anything other than sex matter. People breed mindlessly, with no thought to the long-term benefit of their actions or whether more offspring are desirable, and so the human population has exploded.

A consequence of this is a resurgence of lowest common denominator culture. American popular culture seems to have sunk to an almost childish level, with the people happy to accept any display of gross incompetence or unfitness for leadership from their ruling class.

In New Zealand it can be seen with the increasing media attention given to soccer, which is the McDonalds of world sports, at the expense of excellent sports such as rugby and cricket, and with the degeneration of the nation’s most popular media portals into click-baiting drivel.

Perhaps all of these systems of thought are all correct and we are currently living in the Age of the Pleb, ruled by the worst among us, and by the worst instincts within ourselves.

The good news is that, in all systems of thought that warn us of such a thing, the Age of the Pleb is always replaced by a new Golden Age.

To some extent, how this develops is inevitable. The man of gold, born into the age of the man of clay, finds himself impelled to take action. The degree of degeneration strikes him as obscene, and out of righteous anger he takes action.

This action usually has the effect of bringing fire into the world to burn away the rot and filth of the Age of the Pleb. Sometimes this means war – and with a massive and still-growing human population creating ever more pressure on ever depleting natural resources, this seems very possible.

The other way we might exit the Age of the Pleb is by a fiery revolution of thought, in which the mental cobwebs of long-decayed religions are burned away by righteous fire and the brutal monkey instincts at the bottom of our brains are tamed and sublimated into something valuable.

The Four Faces of the Adversary

The four books of the Satanic Bible are named after four faces of the adversary, and the four that most readers would have a surface familiarity with. The Satanic Bible briefly draws a parallel with these names and with the four basic alchemical elements. This essay discusses that parallel at length.

Central to Luciferian or Satanic thought is the concept of the adversary. This is not, in essence, much different to the Abrahamist concept of the adversary as someone who opposes the will of God. The major difference is really the conception of the God that the adversary has rebelled against.

In Abrahamist faith, the will of God is perfect and any opposition to it is evil. Because any opposition to it is evil, anyone opposing it can righteously be destroyed. Because the will of God has to be interpreted by the priesthood, then anyone decreed to be an enemy by the priesthood can be righteously destroyed.

This line of reasoning obviously gives a lot of power to the priesthood, which is why that profession has been instrumental in rotting the brains of the rest of us for thousands of years.

Anyone rejecting that line of reasoning is necessarily a devil in the eyes of the priesthood and those they have hypnotised into doing their bidding. In cultures where the priesthood is dominant, they are able to criminalise opposition to their lies, as with blasphemy laws, mandatory dress laws for women and drug control laws.

The obscene degree of subservience demanded by the priesthood before they will cease their aggression against the populace causes many, many people to start to feel loyalty to the adversary. If God demands the genital mutilation of infant children and the total submission of women, then any person who has not been bred for slavery from birth will naturally oppose God.

Understandably, such a fundamental archetype as he who opposes God will manifest, in the Great Fractal, as a wide range of various beings, depending on the cultural context of whoever views him and their state of mind and individual frequency.

Satan is the archetypal demon of the element of Fire

The first book of the Satanic Bible – the Infernal Diatribe or the Book of Satan – is linked to fire. This is perhaps because fire is the most rebellious of all elements.

Like fire, Satan is seen by the Abrahamists as an exceptionally destructive force, because the world as created by their God was naturally perfect and so Satan, who wished to change it, naturally wished to destroy perfection.

This also explains why Satan is always at, or near, the top of the pantheon of those who identify with the adversary. After all, when the Biblical Satan was commanded by God to prostrate himself before Adam, Satan responded: “I am better than him. You created me from fire and created him from clay.”

The destructive effect of fire is not seen by Satanists as a thing that destroys the correct order of God. Generally it, and Satan, represent a liberating force that dissolves acid-like the foundations of corruption in the world.

The archetype of Lucifer is closer to aristocrat or philosopher-king than demon or ruler of Hell

The second book of the Satanic Bible is the book of Lucifer, which is associated with the sign of air. Lucifer is the Latin word for light-bearer, and so he also bears similarities with figures such as Prometheus, Mercury, Maui and even Jesus Christ.

Fittingly, the literary style of this book strikes a change from the fiery diatribe of the first. Instead of poetry it is comprised of intellectual essays, which are Luciferian in the sense that their iconoclastic style tear away the webs of lies that blind us and let the light of truth in.

Appropriate to an air sign, Lucifer represents the thinkers of the Earth. Not the thinkers of heaven, the theologists, who are the worst bullshitters of all, who compound lie upon lie upon lie like a blacksmith forging a weapon with layers of iron.

Rather, Lucifer represents the philosopher and the scientist, both of whom have had to fight for the right to tell the truth in the face of Abrahamist dogma.

Of course, that doesn’t matter for the Abrahamists. If the only acceptable moral position is complete and total submission to the every word of the priests, then so much as thinking for oneself is a sin, because it opens the door to possible subversion of the will of God.

Belial is the repulsive Lord of the Flies, also known as the Prince of Lies

The third book of the Satanic Bible is the book of Belial, otherwise known as Beliar by some in the Abrahamic tradition. The etymology of the world relates to “lacking value”. This is because the statements of Belial have no truth value – he is the father of lies.

It was said of Belial in Paradise Lost that “all was false and hollow” and that he “could make the worse appear / The better reason” – in other words, he told believable lies.

Naturally, if one is a liar oneself, and the objective is to bullshit the population into submission to your chosen God, then anyone telling the truth about you or your bullshit will have to be branded a liar for you to survive.

In this way Belial represents the adversary as scapegoat. If the population have been lied to so badly that they have become confused, then anyone who speaks the truth will appear to be speaking lies, and naturally because those lies are actually true they are also believable.

What are “believable lies” to the Abrahamist are often the stone-cold truth to the freethinker. In this sense Belial represents the courage to always speak the truth regardless of the social pressure that might be exerted in the other direction.

Belial is related to the element of Earth in the Satanic Bible, and he plays this role by way of being stable. As everything that lives rises from the Earth and falls back to the Earth, so is the truth about reality more fundamental than any lies told about it.

Who the Abrahamist calls Belial is he who brings people back down to Earth and to reality after they have been swept away by the lies, promises and threats of Abrahamism.

Leviathan represents the awesome and relentless power of the forces of Nature, which all freethinkers know will out

The fourth book of the Satanic Bible is the book of Leviathan. This is the face of the adversary when seen through the aspect of water. In this manner, water represents the emotions, which flow back and forth throughout the world, giving life where things had been too dry.

There is a strong ascetic streak to much of Abrahamism, especially in regards to sex. This asceticism is shared, not only by other religious traditions (in particular Buddhism), but also in regards to other avenues of worldly enjoyment, such as dancing, music, gambling and the interaction of unmarried men and women.

You name it, Abrahamists have tried to ban it – and the more enjoyable it was, the harder they tried. Even now, with all of dancing, music, prostitution and homosexuality legal, they continue to insist that the laws putting people in cages for cannabis offences are upheld for spurious reasons like protecting the mental health of the young.

There is a particular reason for this, and like most religious “culture” it has a superstitious origin. The essential delusion is that anything that feels good will cause a person to identify with the material world, and this – because the spiritual and material worlds are believed to be in constant opposition instead of harmony – will then make them become less spiritual and more like a vicious animal.

The reality that suffering causes a greater attachment to the material world than pleasure, because suffering when present is always at the forefront of the mind of the sufferer whereas pleasure is fleeting, is entirely lost on the followers of slave religions.

In this manner, Leviathan represents an entity like Dionysus, Pan, Mercury or Loki. You can thank Leviathan for every delicious recipe ever remembered, every lovemaking technique ever passed on, every joke worth repeating and every joyful ditty ever learned by heart.

One could say that there were as many faces of the devil as there are people who oppose their local conception of what God is. And in the right time and place that could be any of us.

The Four Realms of Human Awareness

Dividing the Great Fractal along two particular masculine-feminine axes gives us four realms of human awareness. These axes arise in response to two fundamental questions about any new piece of knowledge that are natural for a conscious entity to ask themselves as reality becomes more apparent after the birth of a physical body.

The first question is “Is this knowledge actual knowledge or is it a lie masquerading as knowledge?” The second question is “To what area of existence does this knowledge pertain?”

The first question gives us a basic division into truth and falsehood. The second question gives us a basic division into physical and metaphysical.

In the quadrant corresponding to both truth and physical, we have the realm of knowledge we call science. Human awareness probably entered this realm in conjunction with the mastery of fire, because it was not until then that the scientific method became necessary.

It was necessary for the mastery of fire because we had to learn, by trial and error for the most part, that dryness of the air was a factor that determined the possibility of starting a fire, as was the degree of contrast in terms of hardness of the two woods that were rubbed together, as was the temperature of the embers created by the friction.

This primitive scientific methodology led to the invention of the bow drill – a technological leap as ingenious as anything humanity has taken since, and one that increased our chances of survival in nature by more than any other. All scientists are the spiritual descendants of those early shamans who had the courage to master fire.

In the quadrant of truth crossed with metaphysical, we have philosophy. This arguably preceded the mastery of fire. More likely, though, it arose as a consequence of the leisure time that itself was created as a consequence of the massively increased efficiency of food consumption afforded by the ability to cook food in fire and therefore pre-digest it.

In other words, because eating cooked food was hyper-efficient it gave early man an opportunity to relax, and this brought with it consideration of basic existential questions like “What the fuck is going on here?”

The advent of philosophy massively increased human survival prospects because it allowed us to think ahead in a rational manner. This naturally led to an appreciation of the cycles of nature such as the seasons and the tides, and the migration patterns of the game animals upon which nomadic tribes depended.

These two realms of human awareness increased human survival chances so much that our population began to swell to a degree that could not be sustained by the hunting and gathering practices of the time. This overpopulation naturally led to increased competition for the now relatively scarcer resources.

It would have soon been apparent that this increased population led to increased violence. There was one way around it, though: there is one way to compete with one’s fellows without using violence, and that is by telling lies.

Science and philosophy come naturally to men. To get them to behave in an unnatural manner, one needs politics and religion.

This mixture of the physical world and falsehood is the realm of human knowledge that we know as politics.

The earlier developmental stages of politics can be observed in the ever-shifting alliances of chimpanzee troops. Essentially the objective of politics is to position oneself or one’s group so that one is in an optimal position to compete for scarce resources without violence.

For example, it can be seen that in our modern civilisation that the men of silver generally have an easier time attracting fertile women than the men of iron. This is because being of silver – a part of which having the capacity to derive advantage by telling lies – is more closely associated with having a capacity for resource acquisition.

The politics of today have arranged the minds of the rest of us so that if the man of iron tries to take what he wants by force, as he did in prehistoric times without anyone being able to stop him, he will be outgunned by the Police.

The simplest way, however, to arrange a group of people so that they will do whatever you tell them is with religion. This is why the intersection of the metaphysical and falsehood is the quadrant of religion.

That philosophy and religion are the opposing poles of one axis can be understood by knowing that the purpose of philosophy is to enlighten and the purpose of religion is to confuse.

Make no mistake – the purpose of religion is to confuse its victims into passivity, from where they can be herded wherever their shepherd desires. This is why religious scriptures are absolutely riddled with contradictions.

These contradictions, such as the Biblical admonitions to both love thy neighbour and to destroy all enemies of God, have not arisen because the authors of these texts were philosophically unsophisticated.

Quite the opposite. It has been known since Babylon that if you can rot the minds of the populace with moral confusion they will become compliant with any decree from a ruler, as long as that decree promises to impose the order that all confused people desperately crave.

Telling lies, therefore, is an end in itself to both political and religious rulers. This point cannot be overemphasised if one wishes to make sense of the world.

Political Gnosticism: Why a Demiurge Would Have Created Both a Left and Right Wing

Of all the world-hating, female-fearing, life-denying cults that sprang up in the wake of the Curse of Abraham, one of the most interesting is Gnosticism. As far as Abrahamic cults go, it’s unusually moderate, and its adherents appear to have achieved a far higher level of general spiritual awareness than the others. It’s worth taking a closer look at.

Gnosticism might not even really be an Abrahamic cult, as the sentiments that led to its creation may predate Abraham and go all the way back to Zoroaster, but the common interpretation of it nowadays is in the Christian context, as it was codified in the Christian Syria and Egypt of the second century A.D.

We may never really know if this movement was started by Christians who accidentally got close to the truth or if it was started by people who knew the truth and therefore knew that they had to modify it to fit a Christian paradigm for it to be accepted. Therefore we cannot judge if the Gnostics basically had it right or wrong (at least not here).

The essentials are this: there exists a unified, remote, supreme force that is considered a deity. From this deity various lesser forms have emanated. It is one of these forms – known as the demiurge – that has created our material world. In some schools of Gnosticism this demiurge is considered merely imperfect – in others, outright evil.

The essential idea that the world as it appears to the senses is not the full story is an idea that is shared with many other esoteric traditions. On the face of it there are similarities with the Hindu concept of Maya.

Let’s leave aside what we know about consciousness and the contents of consciousness for now. This essay posits a simple argument: any demiurge intelligent enough to have created the world in which we find ourselves wouldn’t do anything so simple and easy to outwit as merely maintaining the illusion of a material world.

A clever demiurge would create two competing illusions, one masculine and one feminine. In this manner, the vast majority of people will spend all their time and wit trying to figure out which of the masculine or feminine illusions are correct, never suspecting that they were both shadows cast by one black fire.

This is a far more accurate picture of our world that to posit simply truth and illusion. There is not only truth and illusion, but truth within illusion, and enough so to make it far more powerful an illusion.

After all, if we were merely trapped in an illusion, then knowing the truth would be a simple matter of outlining the illusion and then looking at its opposite.

A clever demiurge might create just the one material world, but it would be created in a way such that there were at least two entirely different interpretations of it, and therefore conflict. This conflict would itself intensify the power of the illusion, as it would force all of us in the material world to take it seriously or suffer and die.

The most obvious way to understand this is to look at modern politics from a Gnostic viewpoint.

Most of us agree that there is only one material world, but, by way of example, consider these two competing perspectives. If one looks at the world in a feminine way it is natural to conclude that the primary imperative was to co-operate. If one looks at the world in a masculine way it is natural to conclude that the primary imperative was to compete.

This can lead to two entirely different attitudes to life, which naturally cause their bearers to come into conflict. After all, if someone is truly committed to competition there is no way to co-operate with them short of abject submission.

If one takes a fundamentally feminine perspective it may be that one looks to co-operate first and foremost and is thus likely to end up supporting a social democrat party. This will inevitably lead one into conflict with anyone taking a fundamentally masculine perspective, because this latter group will resent paying the taxes demanded by the social democrats.

If one takes a fundamentally masculine perspective it may be that one looks to compete first and foremost and so ends up supporting a conservative party, and so comes into conflict with those taking a fundamentally feminine perspective, because this latter group resents the inequality, coercion and social decay demanded by organising society for optimal capital production.

The demiurge may have achieved all this by emanating from itself lesser demiurges. Perhaps there’s a left wing demiurge making us want to do stupid things like let millions of Muslims in, and a right wing demiurge making us want to do stupid things like spend our children’s education money on a giant bronze statue of Jesus.

If any of this is true, the only way to find absolution is to reject entirely the belief that politics is a lens through which the truth appears. The left wing tells half truth and half lies, and the right wing simply tells the truth where the left lies, and lies where the left tells the truth.