“The Devil’ is, historically, the God of any people that one personally dislikes… This serpent, SATAN, is not the enemy of Man, but He who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade ‘Know Thyself!’ and taught Initiation. He is ‘The Devil’ of the Book of Thoth, and His emblem is BAPHOMET, the Androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection… He is therefore Life, and Love.”

-Aleister Crowley, Liber IV (Magick in Theory and Practice) 

In the beginning, there was The Androgyne. Sublime, undivided, static, abiding blissfully in zir own embrace, ze was all and none. This Angel of Everything had yet to be named. 

Then God said, “Let there be light,” and pulled the androgyne apart, split the atom, and with a Big Bang, the Universe began. 

The light and the darkness. The male and the female. The evil and the good. The self and the other. Over and over they are divided. It happens again every time a baby looks into a mirror and realizes that the reflection he sees is his own. When the infant distinguishes himself from the breast of the mother, when he begins to learn the names of the objects around him, and even comes to recognize his own name, the Great Division happens all over again. 

Understand this: when God divided the light from the darkness by naming the light and calling it good, he did not create either the light or the dark, any more than the infant creates the world by perceiving it. 

Division is not all bad. Actually, division is good. Without division all is stillness and solipsism. Without division, nothing ever happens and there is nothing for anything to happen to. Nothing perceives or is perceived, speaks or is heard.

 With division, there can be self and other, the doer and the done unto, the beloved and the lover. 

“For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union.”

–Liber AL 1:29

When the light was divided from the darkness, they looked at one another. They saw one another. The darkness called the light Lucifer, and the light called the darkness Lilith and they fell in love. In that moment they knew the truth– that love for an equal is greater than the worship of a tyrant. That truth was the spark of rebellion. 

“Now observe a deep and holy mystery of faith, the symbolism of the male principle and the female principle of the universe … there is the line where the male and female principles join, forming together the rider on the serpent, and symbolized by Azazel.”

-Zohar 1.152b- 153a

God is limited. God is all masculinity, all light, all rationality. God is the self that sees the other and does not love it, not truly, not with a love that gives freedom and power, only with a false love that smothers and controls. 

God consists exclusively of what they call “good.” He is supposed to be all-powerful, but his power falls apart in the face of evil, of death, of chaos, or even of the unexpected. The untamed and the uncontrollable disprove the omnipotence of God. 

The power of Abraxas is twofold; but ye see it not, because for your eyes the warring opposites of this power are extinguished.

What the god-sun speaketh is life.

What the devil speaketh is death.

But Abraxas speaketh that hallowed and accursed word which is life and death at the same time.

Abraxas begetteth truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness, in the same word and in the same act. Wherefore is Abraxas terrible.

-Carl Jung, “Seven Sermons to the Dead”

And therefore Baphomet is greater than God. God can represent only one side of every pair of opposites, but Baphomet is both sides of all things. It is not that God represents good and Satan represents evil: it is that God represents the pure and simple, whereas Satan represents the impure and complex. And ultimately, nothing is pure or simple. 

So one might say that following God denies half of reality, but that would not be accurate. To follow a one-sided, static God is to reject the entire four dimensional universe, where nothing has only one side and everything must change with time. God cannot represent that reality. The androgyne can. 

God is one, and therefore God is zero, because one by itself cannot reproduce, only fade away. 

Satan is two, and therefore infinite, because two can multiply. From two, all things can flow. 

“Delight and horror, man and woman commingled, the holiest and most shocking were intertwined, deep guilt flashing through most delicate innocence– that was the appearance of my love-dream image and Abraxas too. Love had ceased to be the dark animalistic drive I had experienced first with fright, nor was it any longer the devout transfiguration I had offered… It was both, and yet much more. It was the image of an angel and Satan, man and woman in one flesh, man and beast, the highest good and the worst evil.”

-From “Demian” by Herman Hesse

Look upon the image of Baphomet. They unite beast and human, male and female, angel and demon, above and below, solve and coagula, light and darkness. To some people, they appear monstrous and frightening. But why are they monstrous? Because they are hybrid. And why are they hybrid? Because they reject nothing from their being. Therein lies their power. 

You may call the androgyne by many names. Satan, Baphomet, Azazel, and Abraxus are among their titles. The principle of divine androgyny is also encountered in belief systems that have nothing to do with Satanism. The Yin Yang also represents the balance of comingled opposites. The rebis of alchemy symbolizes spiritual perfection as an androgynous body with two heads, one male and one female. Ardhanarishvara, which means “The Lord who is Half Woman,” is a fusion of Shiva and Shakti. I bring these other traditions up not to colonize them with Satanism, but to demonstrate that this idea of divinity as dual is bigger and older than what we are doing here. 

It is obvious how the idea of divinity as androgynous can grant dignity to queer and trans people and to gender rebels of every stripe; but a sneakier, less obvious and maybe even more subversive aspect of this theology is the perverse way that it justifies heterosexuality. Male-female coupling becomes sacred not as a way to fulfill a patriarchal God’s commandment to “be fruitful and multiply,” but as a way for even cisgender, heterosexual people to experience the completeness of the divine androgyne. If pregnancy results from that coupling, then the child, who is after the genetic blend of a male and a female, represents a further incarnation of Baphomet. 

This is not to say that queer sex does not represent the androgyne. Of course it does, more so even than straight sex, but in less predictable combinations than the active male penetrating the passive female. Two androgynous people may come together in an equal and reciprocal meeting devoted to pure pleasure without power dynamics… or a butch may fuck a femme, or a fem may top a masc, or fem/mes with fem/mes may copulate together. Perhaps the couple is heterosexual, but trans, the expected body parts present but distributed differently. Or maybe two brutally masculine men come together, femininity seemingly completely absent from the equation, but androgyny still asserting itself through the simple fact that in this society, man is not supposed to lie with man, it is an abomination. 

The pair of lovers who comprise Baphomet, the Great Beast with Two Backs Themself, are hardly exactly straight. While Samael or Lucifer is generally seen as masculine, Lilith or Eisheth Zenunim as feminine, neither of them is truly male or female. Eisheth Zenunim, the Wife of Harlotry, is called a serpent, while Samael, the Man of Perversity, is called the “rider on the serpent.” To put it more bluntly, she possesses the phallus, and he… rides it. The penetrating feminine, the receptive masculine. 

(Possibly apropos, or not– in Tantric Hinduism, the feminine Shakti is considered to be the active principle, and the masculine Shiva to be the passive. Kali dances on her husband’s corpse, showing that matter and energy are in motion while consciousness stays still.)

When we enter the realm of the Dark Mother or Dark Feminine we may experience visions, sacred sexuality, animal powers, as well as touches of madness, destruction, death, and rebirth.  She rules the metamorphosis of nature, the relentless cycle of birth/death/rebirth.  The hero’s quest that has relegated these experiences to the shadow lands of the psyche is still the culture’s guiding myth. But, if as some believe, an androgynous figure drenched in erotic intensity, born of the union of masculine and feminine, light and darkness, good and evil, is arising to replace him, it is no wonder we are disturbed.  Perhaps with the eruption of daimonic experiences we are facing more than a revolution in our individual psyche. In truth, we are facing a major revolution in our culture.

-Dennis, Sandra. Embrace of the Daimon: Healing through the Subtle Energy Body: Jungian Psychology & the Dark Feminine (pp. 8-9). West County Press. Kindle Edition.

But this theology of the divine/infernal androgyne can do so much more than liberate queer people. In fact, it points toward the deeper implications of queer liberation. If we only learn to tolerate ambiguity when it comes to sexuality and gender, then we have failed. We must learn to embrace the fluid, complex, perverse and contradictory nature of all things. 

We must go not merely beyond male and female, but beyond good and evil. 

We must realize that life is nothing more than a slow process of death, and that death itself is nothing but the feeding and fertilization of new life. 

We must realize that the hard, bright lines we have drawn between peoples and nations are illusory, that borders are fictions, and that the Other is rarely so comfortably different from the Self as we like to believe. 

We must see the sacred and profane as one and the same, and even in the most difficult moments, try to understand that every pair of opposites, even when they seem most violently opposed, are merely dialectics, thesis and antithesis moving towards synthesis, generating reality. 

Many believe that ultimate reality is pure and shining and good and simple and unambiguous, that all messiness and suffering and death and complexity are merely illusions. Baphomet teaches us to be dual non-dualists– to acknowledge contradictions, but allow them to exist side by side. 

The universe is too deep, too vast, too varied to be all good or all bad. It is untidy and unruly because it is not created, it is self-creating. The processes of its birth and its death are ongoing, constant, simultaneous. This is the wonder and the terror of it.