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Chapter XV
NOXIOUS FUMES AND LURID FLARES
Milton’s lakes of seething fire in Paradise Lost are a travesty of truth, unless taken purely as the symbology they are. For Satan is the god himself--on earth! This broad assertion is incontestable. It is proven by the very name. The descending god was the Light-bringer, Lucifer, the bright and morning star, which is precisely the character assumed by the Jesus of the Biblical Revelation! The Christian devil, the hated serpent of evil, Satan, is Lucifer, the god of light on earth, Prometheus, the "benefactor of mankind,"--"the god" himself.
Indoctrinated orthodoxy may rise to protest the identification. Some ghastly mistake will be alleged in the philology. It will be in vain. Erudite theology has at times perhaps known the truth, but has kept an advised silence. The general mind has lost the key to the mystery. By dropping the name Lucifer and clinging to that of Satan alone, the mischief has been bred and perpetuated. That Satan and Jesus are identical is as true as that Sut and Horus in Egypt are twins! The god and devil are kindred. They are full brothers. Their mother is one. They are the two aspects or manifestations of the same force. It may be said that the evil character is the good seen in reversed reflec-
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tion on earth. For an ancient esoteric adage in Latin ran: DEMON EST DEUS INVERSUS, "the devil is the god turned upside down." Satan is the god in incarnation; or he is the god as he appears after his nature has been diffracted in its passage through the blurred medium of earth life. The devil is the god transformed into a being of reduced power, blunted moral sense, befogged intellect and forgotten glory. He is the god bemired with the slime of carnal generation, beset with the strong sensuous and sexual urge of the brute. In short, he is the divine soul entangled in the bestial nature and himself lending more fiery intensity to the impulses of the body by his vitalizing presence!
The genesis of what is called "evil" may perhaps be dialectically derivable from the fundamental premises of thought. But the origin of evil in reference to man’s specific cosmic situation is a particular problem, only to be determined by full knowledge of this situation. As the world does not possess such knowledge in full measure, the great problem is enveloped in some obscurity.
But the sages of the early dawn vouchsafed a portion of this knowledge deemed sufficient to yield to reflection an intelligent comprehension of the issues involved and a philosophic attitude toward them. The rank of the gods sent to earth, their endowments and capabilities, their attitude toward their mission, their obligation in relation to past dereliction, and the implications of their tenanting the animal bodies assigned to them, were broadly revealed to the initiates and theodidaktoi of an early period. With all these interests and relations the connotations of the term "evil" are intimately concatenated. This knowledge, elaborated to much detail, was the treasure of the Mystery Societies and Brotherhoods, and formed the esoteric motivation of their regimes of discipline, instruction and consecration. The modern revival of interest in this mine of truth has not yet recovered all that has slipped away. The uncertainty about some of the major premises is supplemented by the additional difficulty of determining which of the two phases of the representative figures, Satan, Lucifer, Apap, Sut, Typhon, the serpent, the dragon, the beast, is being emphasized in the numberless myths and legends. And there is the ever-present doubleness of the meaning of the symbols, making it difficult to know whether the higher or the lower aspect is meant. But enough hints are provided usually to enable scholarship to work with intelligence upon the material.
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The origin of evil is indeed the mystery of our life. It is inwrought with the key situation of humanity. The arising of evil in a system of total and absolute good is indeed a riddle that taxes the best effort of brain and heart. The difficulty, however, has been made by the mistaken common assumption that Good is absolute, that is, good as conceived in human ideation, good in its specific human relevance. The Supreme God has been called the Good, and this has been misleading. Good can only be absolute if evil is also absolute, and this can not be, since there can not be two different and opposing absolutes. The absolute is beyond good and evil alike. There is an abstract and detached conception of good which the mind can predicate of the entire scheme of things, to posit which, however, would require our saying that that which is beyond both good and evil is the good. Yet such a declaration is dialectically impossible, because that which we would characterize as good is beyond all character. Descriptive statements about it are empty sound. It is not within the scope of any predication whatever. The ultimate is neutral to us always.
ab khun lost light
