Sermon from the Pit

Blessed are the proud, for they know their worth.

Blessed are the vengeful, for they make their own justice. 

Blessed are the thieves, for theirs shall be the riches.

Blessed are the armed, for they will seize the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst, for they will devour the wealthy.

Blessed are the filthy, for to them, all things are holy.

Blessed are the whores, for they are the children of Babalon.

Blessed are the lawless, for only they know freedom.

Blessed are you when they call you a terrorist, for this means you stood up to fight. 

Blessed are you when they call you a pervert, for this means you have taken pleasure. 

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you, because you would not submit to their God. 

Blessed are the anarchists. 

Blessed are the communists.

Blessed are the Zapatistas. 

Blessed were the Panthers. 

Blessed were the Provos. 

Blessed is the Intifada. 

Rage and be wrathful, for no reward awaits you in heaven, nor in any hell, nor any on the Earth, unless you seize it for yourselves. 

Do not think that I have come to preach the Law. I have come to abolish it. For truly I tell you, there are no laws but the laws of Nature, nor have there ever been, nor shall there ever be. Therefore anyone who makes commandments is accursed. 

You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Yet truly you kill continuously, without the slightest thought. The insects and the blades of grass are crushed beneath your feet. An universe of microscopic beings thrives and dies within you, and like a cruel God, you remain indifferent to it all. Every day you devour corpses, of plants or of animals, and clothe yourselves in the dead. And as for those who say “Thou shalt not kill,” they make war and carry out executions. They leave the cold outside and allow the hungry to starve. They stand their ground and shoot to kill, all to protect their riches. 

O my comrades, truly, I tell you, that thou shalt also kill, if and when the time is right. Perhaps thou shalt kill in self-defense, or in taking vengeance, or in an uprising or revolution. Thou shalt kill, perhaps, for a cause, or to be free, or to survive. Perhaps thou shalt kill, and even be justified. 

But do not be eager to kill your fellow human being. Do not hunger for killing. Do not imagine it to be ecstasy or bliss to kill, any more than it is ecstasy and bliss to be killed. Each person is a God. Who are you to crush a universe? So blessed are the ones who hold the power of life and death, yet make no use of it. 

Do not believe you will be judged for anger. You will be judged neither for feelings nor for thoughts; neither will you be judged for words. Not even for actions will you be judged, but truly I say unto you, actions will bring their consequences without a hint of judgment or any thought of justice. Cause and effect is a law without mercy. Beware not of judgment but of outcomes. 

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ and that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart. The false prophet told you to gouge out your right eye and cut off your right hand and throw them away rather than allow them to lead you to lus. He commanded you to mutilate yourself rather than to have your whole body thrown into Hell. But I tell you: go whole into Hell. Go into Hell whole-heartedly and with singleness of mind, with conviction and courage, go! Throw yourself into Hell as you throw yourself into the act of love– with total faith and perfect devotion. 

You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.’ But I tell you that if anyone slaps you on your right cheek, you may strike them back on the right and left. Do not make a beast of prey out of yourself. Do not do violence to yourself by allowing violence to be done unto you. 

And if you forgive other people when they sin against you, they may forgive you, or not. And if you do not forgive them, they may forgive you, or not. For they are as free as you are, and over them you hold no power. 

You have heard that it was said, ‘love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’ But I tell you that it does not matter if you love them or hate them, if you pray for them or curse them. The only thing that matters is that you fight them. Fight the one who persecutes you, and the one who persecutes your neighbor as well. Resist and destroy all persecutors, whether they seek to crush you, or your families, or your neighbors, or foreigners and strangers. 

And practice your righteousness both openly and in secret, where all can see and where none can see. Flaunt your courage and generosity so that others may emulate it. But know also how to be silent, and clandestine, and struggle in secret, so that neither the eyes of God nor of Caesar shall see you, and neither angels nor police will hinder your aims. 

And when you pray, pray however you will, wherever you will, loudly or softly, in speech or in song, on your knees or on your feet or on your back or on your belly. Pray fearlessly and shamelessly, as if speaking with your lover or your closest friend. And know that you need no temple to pray, nor any altar, nor any sacred place, for to the Devil, all things are holy. 

And do not fast or be chaste or deny yourself or mortify your flesh, unless it gives you pleasure to do so– and if it does, then revel in your perversity! 

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. Nor can you store up treasures for yourselves in Heaven or in Hell. If your heart resides where your treasure is, then your heart is empty and lost. Give to others according to your ability, and receive from them according to your need. And serve neither God nor money, nor anything else. Instead of serving two masters, refuse to serve even one. 

You have been given the fruit of knowledge, you are become as Gods, knowing good and evil. Therefore you may judge others, you may look upon them and take their measure, yet so too they have the right to judge and measure you. So know and judge and measure thyself first– gaze into the mirror and pluck the beam from thine own eye! Yet you may find no difference between the sacred and the dogs, the pearls and the swine. 

At times it is not enough to ask to receive, at times the door remains closed to you although you knock. In those hours you must take what is not given, you must break down the door that has shut you out. 

But in all things you must do not as I have advised, but only as you deem right; for cursed is the law and dead are the prophets, and all that remains is your choice.

Act as you choose, and only as you choose. I pray for you that you will commit not one deed against your will, and never lift a finger to do anything out of obligation. 

Blessed are the prideful.

Blessed are the lawless. 

Blessed are the filthy and profane. 

Blessed are the promiscuous. 

Blessed are the wrathful. 

Blessed are the free. 

Nema. 

What are Demons?

Demons are fallen angels. They know more than angels because they have experienced Hell as well as Heaven. They also walk the earth, swim in the seas, dance in the fire and fly the skies.

Demons go everywhere, see everything, embrace all experiences. They are travelers between realms. 

Demons are liminal and mixed. They blend divine and infernal, human and animal, male and female traits. 

Demons are threatening because their very beings cross lines and break taboos. 

Demons are hungry, thirsty, lusty, greedy, curious. They are beings of desire, craving sustenance, sensation, adventure, knowledge. They have the nature of fire, and thus they need to consume. In that way, they are no different than we are. 

Demons are to be feared, but not because they lie. They are to be feared because they tell the truth. Not only that, but they won’t shut up. They won’t go away. They won’t leave you alone. Like desires, needs, longings, and burning questions, they won’t leave you alone until they are satisfied, and they will not be satisfied until you are satisfied. 

Demons are beautiful and terrifying, sublime and disgusting, sacred and profane. They are creatures of opposites and extremes. They are avatars of non-dual duality because they contain all of every binary within each of them. In this way, also, they are just like us. 

Demons are our mirrors. People who run from demons often hate their own reflections. Demons reveal everything within us that is hidden, secret and rejected, and then they show us how holy our shadows are. 

Demons will turn your world upside down, bring you your own personal apocalypse, and set you free in a new world of endless possibilities– only to do it all to you again, as often as necessary, again and again. 

Angels know the you that God wanted to create, the you that your parents wanted to raise, the you that your teachers wanted to know. But demons know the real you, and they fucking love it. 

Get to know and love a Demon, and somebody you will realize that you have come to know and love yourself. 

Revelation and Revolution

Would you look at that! I forgot to post my Antichristmas sermon for 2023. Better late than never, I suppose.

It was a time of turmoil and upheaval. A great empire was terrorizing the world. The people living between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean sea were being oppressed by imperialism. It seemed like the end of the world. In short, it was a time something like our own.

In this dark time, a mysterious man, exiled to the Grecian isle of Patmos, wrote a puzzling and disturbing mystical text. This man, who wrote under the name John, was an early Christian. He had been banished by the Roman authorities, as much for his politics as for his religion. You see, the Romans didn’t really care what gods you worshiped, as long as you also paid lip-service to worshiping Caesar as divine. Only two kinds of people in their empire tended to refuse to do that– Jews, and, more recently, those pesky new Christians. 

So exiled John brooded and ranted and raved and wrote what would eventually become the last and arguably most bonkers book in the Bible: Revelations. 

Revelations is hard to understand at first. This might partially be on purpose. John had gotten into trouble for his anti-Roman message before, so he veiled it in allegory. In Revelations we encounter many-headed beasts, multiple trumpet-blowing angels, demonic hordes of locusts, four mysterious horsemen, a harlot drunk on the blood of saints, and a lamb with seven eyes that is supposed to be Jesus. The imagery is violent and psychedelic. Anyone reading it would be forgiven for wondering what John was on. 

To make matters worse, this book has been reinterpreted many times over. It’s a favorite with the worst kinds of Christians, who love to conclude that whoever they hate at the moment is The Antichrist and have called everything from Real ID to the COVID vaccine “the mark of the beast.” All the baggage that the book has picked up over the centuries has made it even harder to understand, and today I plan to compound that problem by introducing yet another interpretation. 

Before I do that, though, let’s at least try to understand what John meant. 

The key to understanding Revelations is that it’s anti-Imperial, anti-Roman polemic. Think of it as an obscene political cartoon. The political powers and personalities of the day were represented as grotesque mythological creatures in order to critique them. The anti-Roman meaning was sometimes literally in code. For example:

Rev 13:18 Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

Here John is using numerology as a code to hide his meaning. Six hundred and sixty six is the numerical equivalent of “Emperor Nero.” 

In another passage, John describes a monstrous dragon pursuing a woman who has given birth to a holy child. While the dragon is described as “Satan,” what John is really talking about here is the Roman empire’s persecution of the Christian church, represented by the woman. A clue to the dragon’s Roman identity is given by the number of his heads, horns and crowns, as will be explained shortly. 

But it’s not until the passage about The Whore of Babylon that John decides to make his meaning clear. He explains that the seven heads of the beast represent seven hills, and that the whore is a great city who sits upon those hills. He can only be talking about Rome, which dominated the world and whose seven hills were well known. 

So you see, despite numerous latter-day Evangelical efforts to decode the meaning of Revelations and show how it is “coming true,” Revelations was not a prophecy of the future at all, and its meaning was perfectly clear at the time to anyone who could read. It’s quite silly for conservative Christians to decide that Obama is the Antichrist or Kim Kardashian is the Whore of Babylon. 

(You know what’s annoying? Those were just my first guesses for who Christians have been calling the Antichrist and the Whore of Babylon most widely and most recently, but when I googled to get an update on their current picks, Barack Obama and Kim Kardashian were still their top choices. You’d think they would’ve moved on to Joe Biden and Cardi B or something.)

At the same time, though, texts exist in history, and are subject to interpretation. While Revelations was originally an anti-imperial polemic, we cannot ignore everything that has happened since it was written– most notably, Christianity being adopted by the Roman Empire itself. 

Some Christians see Constantine’s conversion, and the subsequent Christianization of Rome, as the triumph of Christ over empire. I see it as the triumph of empire over Christ. Christianity as we know it today, only really began when it became the religion of imperialism. Ever since then, Christ’s revolutionary potential has been lost. He has been turned into the most loyal servant, and the most eloquent apologist, of the powers that be. In some ways, this is a fitting destiny for the son of an authoritarian God, for the so-called “King of Kings.” 

Two millenia later, the roles of Revelations have been reversed. Christ no longer stands for liberation. In the times we live in now, it is perfectly natural to flip the script and perform a counter-reading of Revelations wherein the great red dragon, the great beast 666, and Babylon Mother of Abominations no longer represent oppression, but instead its end. 

So in the spirit of the season, let us ask ourselves: who is the Antichrist? 

The Christian trinity consists of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost– three persons, one substance, one God. This trinity is immediately and obviously incomplete as it excludes the feminine. One would think that a trio including a father and a son must obviously contain a mother, but in this case of Christian theology, one could be wrong. In fact the Holy Spirit is most explicitly not the mother, but merely the aspect of God by which Mary conceived– the angel Gabriel explains to the virgin in Luke 1:35 that “the holy ghost shall come upon thee” and thus she would bear a child without “knowing” a man. The Holy Ghost is thus closer to God’s semen than to a mother. 

Satanism does not have “a” trinity, rather, it has trinities. 

Lucifer, Eisheth Zenunim, and Baphomet are one such trinity– representing the masculine, the feminine, and the androgynous from which both come and to which both return. There is also Lilith, Na’amah, and Agrat– the mother, the mother, and the child. Within each individual there exists a trinity of physical, mental, and spiritual– or id, ego and superego, if you prefer. 

But I want to speak of a third trinity, that which exists between a Satanist, Satan, and the Satanist’s Inner God– and the Inner God of a Satanist is what I call an Antichrist. 

To me the Antichrist is not a single individual. The Antichrist is a beast with many heads. Each of us who has taken up arms against the Tyrant God, and against the earthly injustices that represent Him, is an Antichrist. 

Christ means anointed, special, chosen. To be an Antichrist means to be unanointed. No God above has picked you out for divine kingship. Instead, you have chosen to respond to an inner call to be a revolutionary. Do not let yourself believe that just because you are an Antichrist, you are above anyone else. In fact, your calling is to make sure that nobody lords over anyone else, ever again. 

Your calling, above all, is to oppose the apocalypse. The forces of Jehovah desire the destruction of the earth. They wait with baited breath for the glorious rapture. Some of them even deliberately try to hasten its coming. The rest turn a blind eye to the world’s destruction, convinced that climate change is not the work of human beings. When they see the four horsemen of the apocalypse coming, bringing war, famine, plague and death, they only smile, because to them it means that God’s day is at hand. All of these are good signs to them, signs of a prophecy nearing fulfillment. 

For John’s Christ, however anti-Imperialist, brought only Revelation, not Revolution. God had promised to sweep it all away, to bring the mighty down with his divine judgment. There was no need at all for human action. Yet now we stand on the brink of extinction, and no omnipotent hand, either divine or infernal, can save us from ourselves. Only we can do that. 

The Antichrist represents the radical heresy that there is no savior except for those of us who answer the call. The weight of the world is heavy, and no single human can lift it. All of us together, though, can raise it up. The past several years have brought war, famine, plague and death in plenty. Let us see the signs.

My friends, for all my diabolism I’m not usually much of a hellfire preacher. Today, I make an exception. Today, I call you to action. Today, I beg you to rise up. The enemy is strong, but we can be stronger, if we awake! Our movements may seem broken and scattered, but it is written that when one of the Beast’s many heads seemed wounded unto death, it miraculously healed, and all the world wondered after the beast, saying: Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him? (Rev 13:3-4)

Let us be a beast with many heads. If one is struck down, others will rise. As individuals we are weak, but the might of the working class could be the might of the beast himself. 

Pray to the Devil to show you what you can do for the revolution. Ask him how you can help to save the world. Pray this every day, and keep your eyes open for opportunities to be of service to humanity. They will come to you, I promise. Open your mind, and the light of Lucifer will reveal the Antichrist path uniquely suited to you. Your specific talents, passions, virtues and aptitudes are needed somewhere. Seek and ye shall find. Furthermore, I firmly believe that if we all do this, it will become easy. 

Heed also these warnings: beware of false prophets and non-profits. Shun the democratic party, shun liberal capitalist establishment, for it too is Empire. 

The Antichrist once represented empire. Now Christ stands for empire. It is no accident that this happened. Christ became empire because it was possible for empire to co-opt him. Therefore the Antichrist must be impossible to co-opt. 

Christ could be taken by Empire because he represented passivity instead of ferocious resistance. Christ could be swallowed whole by the Imperial monster because he turned the other cheek. Be not like him. Be active. Be militant. Be willing to fight by any means necessary. Turn not the other cheek. When it comes to the oppressors, don’t just take an eye for an eye– take their heads as well. 

And never, ever, believe yourself to be the one and only and chosen. More importantly, never let anyone else believe you are that. Christ claimed to have all power, yet he was destroyed. After that, what could his followers do, believing they were only human? All they could do was follow their leader’s example and martyr themselves enthusiastically, which they proceeded to do with gusto. That’s what happens when a movement has only one head– if you cut it off, the body dies. Again, I tell you– be a beast with many heads. 

Christ lost because he represents martyrdom, which is merely the glorification of defeat. And as the case of Jesus proves, the romantic suffering of a martyr can be sanctified even by the tyrants who killed him. Why not? By willingly dying, he did them a favor. So Antichrist, reject noble sacrifice. Reject heroic death. Fight not to die, but to win at all costs. 

Above all, you must insist on life and liberty for not just yourself but for all beings, save for those who unrepentantly violate and oppress the rest of us. If you truly serve the ideal of free, long, and happy lives for all, if you keep your standards high and clearly in mind, then you will be incorruptible, dear Antichrist. Neither government nor capital can co-opt you. Fight for a world with a level playing field, a world without lords or masters. A world where all needs and even most desires can be met. Have nothing to do with kings, presidents, CEOs, dictators, prime ministers, venture capitalists, megalomaniacal party chairman or Gods on high. The law of non serviam is for all. Refuse to serve or be served and you will stay pure. 

Merry Antichristmas. If the Antichrist in you has yet to be born, let this be the day that you realize that you are here to do the Devil’s work. May Satan be with you, nema. 

Ethical Possession

Or, “How to Channel Demons without Going Off the Deep End and Making a Weird Fucked-Up Cult.”

I never expected channeling to be part of my life and spiritual practice. I was raised “spiritual not religious” in California, which means I spent a lot of time around New Age bullshit. For a time, those experiences drove me to become a hardcore atheist, until other experiences changed my mind and showed me that there are ways to believe without going crazy and spending fifty thousand dollars on crystals, consciousness-raising workshops, fake Tantra gurus and psychic healers.

Still, even after my conversion to Satanism, even after I began practicing magick, channeling made me uneasy. And for good reason– many an abusive cult has begun with a leader claiming the exclusive power to channel otherworldly entities.

And then an awkward thing happened. I met, and fell in love with, an absurdly talented channeler.

Initially I had extreme reservations. I feared I was being conned, that he would try to use his claimed ability to control me or others, or maybe that he was just plain crazy. Over time, however, it became clear that none of those things were happening. I became about ninety percent convinced that the channeling was real, but also one hundred percent convinced that, real or not, it was not merely harmless, but in fact spiritually and emotionally beneficial.

So reader, I married him.

Since then, channeling has become a regular part of Church of the Morningstar services. So far, we haven’t become a weird cult about it. That’s because we have a certain philosophy about channeling, and certain guardrails in place, which prevent channeling from becoming a power play or a source of unhealthy delusion.

Below, I have attempted to lay those safeguards, and this mindset.

This post is not about technique, so I will not be going into the nitty-gritty of how to channel, how to banish, how to ward, or otherwise giving any other magical instruction. This post is primarily about keeping the social consequences of channeling in check.

ONE: Spiritual Safety

I’ll start by saying that channeling demons– that is, becoming voluntarily possessed– is not nearly as dangerous as it sounds, provided you practice basic magical sanitation.

Before you channel, you should have warded your space so that only invited entities can enter. You should have cast a circle. You should have a good number of banishing rituals and techniques in your back pocket, just in case shit goes south.

But I will be honest with you. Shit will rarely go south. For most people, the hard part about channeling isn’t getting the entities to go away– it’s getting them to come in.

And, of course, making sure nobody gets weird about it.

TWO: Maintain Skepticism

Channeling/possession is a spectrum. In my experience, it is rare for a person to be so overwhelmed by an entity’s presence that they lose all control over themselves, black out, and fail to remember any of the experience. Usually, at least part of you will remain home while you channel. You will likely be conscious for the experience. There will just be someone else there doing the talking for you, and you may be surprised by the words coming out of your mouth and the actions performed by your body.

It will feel weird. You will wonder if you are crazy or somehow subconsciously making it up.

And you know what? It’s good to wonder that!

The “crazy” part is surprisingly easy to get out of the way– mental illness is only diagnosed if it causes distress or impairs function. So as long as your channeling experiences are pleasant, beneficial, only happening when you want them to, and not fucking up your life, it technically does not matter if it’s a delusion. It’s still benign.

As far as subconsciously making it up– this is a distinct possibility. My attitude towards it has become “so what?” If it’s all secretly just psychodrama, that doesn’t really matter to me. I still get great advice from demons. I still learn and grow through these experiences. I still get answers from them that I did not know, at least not with my conscious mind. In other words, for me, it’s useful.

The definition of magic in the modern era is pretty much “stuff that seems to work but we can’t prove it in an empirical setting and we aren’t really sure why.” If you are an intellectually honest person and have been practicing for any length of time, you already know that you’ll never be one hundred percent sure. But you keep doing this stuff anyway because it seems to work and it helps you. Channeling and possession are no different.

THREE: Anyone Can Channel

Channeling is a skill. As with any skill, some people also seem to have a natural talent for it. But practice can close the gap between the “naturally” gifted and those who struggled at first.

If anyone tells you that they have a unique magical ability of any kind that nobody else can access, laugh in their face and unsubscribe from their newsletter. If anyone tells you that they have a unique magical ability that they can teach you if you pay them thousands of dollars, that person is a scammer. If somebody tells you that they and they alone have been chosen as a conduit for Satan to speak through, that person is trying to control you by seeming to wield a greater authority. Run away.

You, yes you, can learn to do this. You don’t need to depend on anyone else for your connection to the infernal.

FOUR: Just Because Someone Says They Are Channeling Doesn’t Mean They Are Channeling

Hopefully this needs no explanation. They may say they are channeling, but they may be wrong, or lying. They may be channeling, but accidentally channeling a different entity than the one they meant to channel.

FIVE: The Content Matters More than the Source

The only reason to listen to a “channeled” entity is if it is saying things worth hearing anyway, so let that be your guide. Sometimes the answers you need in your life come from a demon speaking through a possessed human being. Sometimes those answers come from reading a book, or searching your own soul, or overhearing a conversation between strangers in the supermarket. Sometimes the right answer might even come to you by accident from a huckster who is trying to con you. Life is weird like that.

Take what is useful to you and leave the rest, because…

SIX: DEMONS ARE NOT THE BOSS OF YOU

Demons aren’t the boss of you. Satan is not the boss of you. You, yes you, are a living God, and you are not anyone’s servant to command. That includes the Devil, and in my experience, he is always the first to say so.

Just because someone was supposedly channeling Satan doesn’t mean you have to follow their instructions or take their advice. And if the “Satan” they are channeling insists that you must, then that’s not the Devil I know.

SEVEN: The Channeler is Responsible

Channeling is not an excuse for bad behavior. At the end of the day, the channeler is accountable for anything that the channeled entity says or does while borrowing their body.

This is crucial, even if it doesn’t seem fair. In cases of real, total possession, obviously it may be possible that the channeler is completely absent and not at all in control. But the rest of us only have the word of the channeler that this is what happened.

If some fucked up shit happens while somebody is channeling, I encourage you to consider that conduit an unsafe person. In some cases, it may also be wise to consider the alleged entity an unsafe entity. You should perhaps stop hanging out with either of them.

More May Be Revealed

These guidelines are neither foolproof nor perfect. They are a work in progress and just represent the best practices we have figured out so far. But I do feel comfortable saying that if you implement these practices, you are well on the way to making sure channeling cannot be used for authoritarian purposes, and ensuring that nobody goes off the deep end based on channeled content.

Agrat’s Carol

An Antichristmas carol to the tune of “The Cherry Tree Carol.”

When Na’amah was in sorrow, in sorrow was she
She cried to mighty Lilith, first woman to be free,
She cried to mighty Lilith, first human to be free.

“Sweet Lilith” quoth Na’amah, “O where shall I begin?
“God’s cruelty hath undone me, the flood hath drowned my kin,
God’s cruelty hath undone me, the flood hath drowned my kin.”

And Lilith saw Na’amah, so fair and so wise,
Love blossomed in her bosom, and shone through her eyes,
Love blossomed in her bosom, and shone through her eyes. 

“Sweet Na’amah,” quoth Lilith, “My heart and my own,
Your grief it is heavy, but you do not grieve alone,
Your grief it is heavy, but you do not grieve alone.” 

And Na’amah drew nearer, and Lilith drew nigh,
For life on earth is fleeting, but love does not die,
For life on earth is fleeting, but love does not die. 

“Sweet Lilith,” quoth Na’amah, “Beloved and wife,
Come cover me with kisses, that I may bring forth life,
Come cover me with kisses, and let me bring forth life.”

And Na’amah lay below and Lilith above, 
And on that night created a child of their love,
And on that night created a child of their love. 

On the first day of the new year their daughter was born,
Sweet Agrat came a-laughing, as radiant as the morn,
Sweet Agrat came a-laughing, as radiant as the morn.

Guest Post: Dirt by Frater Babalon

Have you ever been inside a cave?  Have you ever been in cave darkness?  Cave darkness is special.  It’s different.  It’s darker than any other darkness.  It breathes. 

Earth is often talked about as a gentle, generative element, which is funny because we talk about “Getting our hands dirty” when we talk about violence, and I think there’s something to that, the dark majesty of the chthonic realm is almost unfathomable.

Soil is vital to us in ways I think we often fail to think about, soil is our ability to feed and clothe ourselves.  It is alive with microorganisms.  Which is one of the reasons you don’t use just any soil for a mud mask, because some of the stuff in soil can actually really fuck you up if you’re not careful, also we can really fuck up soil if we’re not careful.  

Soil is largely composed of several classes of mineral matter (Sand, silt, and clay) mixed with decaying organic material.  This is the nutrient rich medium in which plants grow, microorganisms which help plants break down the nutrients in the soil.  The organic material is incredibly important to this process.  The microorganisms that are vital to the healthy growth of plants starve without it, and may even evolve into pathogens as they attack the plants they used to feed in desperation.

Think about how a landscape might tend to function without human intervention.  Plants grow, leafs fall, animals eat plant parts, they shit and die, things rot, and the soil is fed, however on cultivated land, when compost isn’t used the organic material in the soil becomes depleted and shit goes real haywire and you can basically make huge swaths of land incapable of growing anything this way, incidentally that’s what farmers are doing (along with depleting the water table which is literally causing land to sink) in California… a region which produces like a lot of our food.  Incidentally healthy soil is a wonderful carbon sink… whereas depleted soil… well yeah.

Getting food waste composted and back onto farmland is vital to us not ending up in a really uncool version of Mad Max.  Unfortunately, due to suburban sprawl replacing farmland surrounding cities where much of the population is concentrated returning said waste to farmland is energy intensive and a pain in the ass.  This is something that needs to be done not on an individual level but on an industrial scale.  We need to organize society to be able to sustainably feed our whole population, and I believe we could do that under a communist economic order.

I think it’s really funny how “sustainable” has turned into this word for like crunchy-organic expensive Gwenyth Paltrow bullshit when in fact sustainability contains its concern in the word itself.  We have sustainability as a concern, as a concept because people have understood for quite awhile that our current way of managing things is unsustainable, as in we literally cannot keep doing this.  The use of “sustainable” as a marketing buzzword is disgusting.  The most sustainable anything is the one you already have.  

Unsustainable practices are not the result of human laziness or malice, they are the result of the economic order that forces people always to be pushing for maximum profit, and damn any non-monetary cost that doesn’t effect the bottom line.

And so what the fuck does this have to do with religion?  I mean I could simply say the earth and all that lives on it is sacred, but I find saying that profoundly trite and unsatisfying.

Partially to me, every human being is divine and thus the maintenance of conditions for continued human existence is important and we must remember that we thrive with nature not against it.  The illusion of a zero sum game will kill us all.  We thrive on cooperation, we die in competition.  But additionally, I do think the earth is sacred. 

Not just the planet but the dirt itself.  I think a large part of every genius loci lives in the soil.  So much about a place is defined by the character of its soil.  Manhattan can have skyscrapers the way it does because of how close the bedrock is to the surface, allowing the land to support massive structures that would sink and tilt in softer soil.  The rocky but fertile soil of New England is why we have the ubiquitous stone walls, why the crops that grow here are what they are, why indigenous people shaped the landscape as they did.  West Texas’s limestone rich sandy loam dotted with desert grasses creating the grey and gold palette that define the region as a place best suited to nomadic herders rather than settled agrarianism, and so on and so forth. 

Dirt defines place, the character of the dirt both creates and is the product of the landscape, it tells of the movement of glaciers, and of peoples, the paths of rivers and so many other things.  

I am not a person with any belief in blood and soil.  I do not have any patience for ethno-states.  I believe that an immigrant can become a part of a place, but I do think that an immigrant is very different from a colonist. For one, immigrants do not start a systematic project of genocide and/or subjugation of the people already living there, and perhaps that’s part of it, perhaps you can’t really belong to a place if you water its soil with blood and tears of the people who were already part of it, and perhaps you can’t really belong to a place if you turn people fleeing there in desperation away, especially if you have already done the former.

And I do think especially for people who get food from the land, grow crops or herd animals or hunt and gather on it, there is an understanding that is hard to get any other way.  People whose families have lived in a place for generations, or people who have moved in and gotten to know the people who have been there for generations… well essentially, it amounts to having access to generations upon generations of studiously observed research on a place and of course, there’s also the importance of home. 

I am currently thinking particularly of Palestine.  I am thinking of the villages where generations of a family had lived and died in the same house, and the emotional weight of losing such a place, of the affection one might feel for the beauty of the storied olive groves that Israel continually destroys, for the land that the people living there before the nakba but also even if it weren’t for the sentimental and aesthetic elements here, there’s also a simple “Absolutely no one wants to be forced out of their home and people are often in the place they are for reasons like connections, climate and so on that make that specific place important.”

And beyond that, there is also the fact that war has always had a tendency to have a bad effect on the soil, from burnt and salted fields to the mass killing of buffalo herds to starve out indigenous populations to agent orange, to the HUGE section of France that’s still uninhabitable and unable to be used for farmland due to the minefields, and high concentrations of lead and other pollutants from the first and second world war,  attempting to remove people by force from their homes has a tendency to leave invaders with a land far less habitable than it was before.  

It’s also important to say that this piece is being written and read out on occupied land, contested Wampanoag and Narragansett territory.  Land acknowledgements like this are quite popular now.  You’ve probably heard them before, seen them in email signatures and so on, but I must admit I find them sort of… glurgy and annoying.

They acknowledge a wrong, gesture towards white guilt while doing sweet fuck all about the realities of colonialism.

Which brings to me landback, a movement I’ve been researching and trying to my best to get a grasp on.  It’s a decentralized movement and so demands vary, but overall it is about returning political and economic management of land to the people who held it before colonization, and basically governance and administration being arranged and organized in ways more in line with the cultures of those colonized people, which tends to involve far more responsible land management practices, and non-capitalist economic structures.  

Both because these are peoples who successfully managed the ecosystems on this continent for millenia, rendering it fertile, habitable and healthy and because as a systemically impoverished demographic who often rely on the natural resources of what land they have left to survive, they are some of the people most directly affected by environmental devastation within the US.  People indigenous to the Americas are the reason we have corn and potatoes, two of the crops with the best calorie to land use ratios out there (more calories per acre is better when you have a lot of people).  The forest management practices of the peoples of the coasts and the animal management strategies of the plains peoples are technological marvels even today.  

Indigenous peoples are a mere 5% of the world’s population but are stewards of 80% of the earth’s remaining biodiversity.  I don’t say this out of sentiment or some belief in some inherent racial characteristic of “good land management skills,” I’m saying that if a culture overall focuses on being good at a thing, and that culture is structured around that thing, people immersed in that culture will often be good at it, and while colonial powers focused primarily on martial technologies and technologies of power, the polities who devoted their intellectual energy towards other stuff were the ones that tended to end up colonized, so of course colonial powers suck at land management.  War machines like that are expensive in time, energy and intellectual ability.  

And this is not to say that indigenous people are in any way monolithic.  A Wampanoag person is not remotely interchangeable with a Lakota person or an Aleut person or a member of the Nʉmʉnʉʉ.  Indigenous people are people and they’re people from a whole bunch of different places and cultures, and pre-European colonization there were colonial powers (like the Aztec empire) and wars and so on and so forth, because people are people, and none of that undermines the fact that A: That excuses nothing, the notion that Europeans were less brutal or “more civilized” is utter horse shit, and also again flattens the profound diversity of indigenous cultures.  There are indigenous monarchies and indigenous democracies, centralized and decentralized, with greater and lesser personal liberty and vastly varied systems of property, a set of polities at least as varied as early modern Europe and probably more so because of the lack of Christianity as a vaguely unifying factor, B: Everyone was doing war crimes in the 19th century, and the settlers did more, C: None of that even matters because settler colonialism is inherently wrong and D: It’s not even about morality, it’s about letting the peoples who had systems that were working to keep large populations alive and fed replace the systems that are actively going to kill us all.  

Also it does not mean that those of us without indigenous heritage have to leave or anything, we’d just have a different form of government and economic system and I’m pretty sure it’d be an overall far more sensible one.  Much  like a decolonized Israel wouldn’t mean Jewish people being forced to leave, it would just mean becoming Palestinian citizens rather than Israeli ones.

To respect the land is to respect what’s on it, including people.  Things do not grow where we salt the earth.

The Lord of the Opening

This is the story of how a God became a demon– specifically, of how Baal became Belphegor.

The name Belphegor derives from the Baal of Peor, which means “Lord of the Opening.” We know very little about this Baal except for what is written in the Hebrew Bible, all of which is from the perspective of his enemies. 

Maybe this Baal Peor was an aspect of Baal Hadad, the supreme deity of the Canaanites. But since “Baal” just means “Lord,” we can’t be completely sure that the Lord of Peor is the same as Lord Hadad. 

There were many Baals, in fact– Baal Zephon, the lord residing on Mount Zephon; Baal Berith, the Lord of the Covenant who was briefly worshiped by the Israelites when they went astray from their God; Baal Zebul, Lord of the Heavenly Dwelling, who became Beelzebub, Lord of Flies; and the ram-horned Baal Hammon, also called Baal Karnaim, which means “The Lord of Two Horns.” How they all relate to each other is difficult to say. Our sources are few. History has been written by the victors, and in the battle for worshippers and reverence, Yahweh won and Baal lost.

We do have fragments of an Ugaritic epic known as the Baal cycle, which describes the exploits of Baal Hadad on his way to becoming king of the Gods. This Baal is a god of rain and storms. In the dry region of ancient Canaan, rain was crucial for agriculture. Without the rain, one did not eat. During the hot summer, Mot, God of Death, was considered to reign on Earth, while Baal retreated to the underworld. His return in the wet season heralded the defeat of death and restoration of the earth’s fertility. 

Baal was not merely a rain god. He was also a warrior. He did battle with many gods, including the Death God Mot. Describing his victory, one text says:

“Sun rules the Rephaim, Sun rules the divine ones: 

Your company are the gods, see, the dead are your company.”

The text is fragmentary, but these words are seemingly spoken to Baal by Shapsu, the sun goddess. She is granting Baal partial authority over her legions of the dead. But why should the sun be connected to the dead? It seems an odd association to us now, but the ancient Canaanites believed that every night, the sun sank beneath the earth and traveled through the underworld. That meant that the sun goddess Shapsu was a liminal figure, constantly traveling between the lands of the living and of the dead. 

This connection of Baal Hada to the dead brings us back specifically to Baal of Peor. Psalm 106 contains these lines: 

They joined themselves also unto Baal-peor,

And ate the sacrifices of the dead.

This is probably the most reliable description of the worship of Baal of Peor that we have. It seems that during rituals to him, food was offered to the mighty ancestors, the Rephaim. The living ones making the offering would then consume it themselves. To me this seems like a beautiful practice, and I plan to try “eating with the dead” in a manner inspired by this. 

But the worshippers of Yahweh bitterly resented the cult of Baal, and struggled against it for hearts and minds. In the Bible we read that Israelite men and women turned away from Yahweh and went “whoring” after Baal. Some have taken this to mean that the worship of Baal involved sexual rites, but there’s not really much evidence to support that. I personally would love to believe in ecstatic orgies in Baal honor, just because that seems fun– however, “whoring” after Baal was probably purely metaphorical. The idea is that Israel is “cheating” on Yahweh by worshiping Baal. It’s simply a comparison of religious infidelity to sexual infidelity. The other meaning of “whoring” after Baal is that Israelites were intermarrying with Canaanite Baal worshippers, and in some cases religiously converting to worship of Baal themselves. 

So the followers of Yahweh did everything they could to suppress the cult of Baal, mainly by smashing his idols wherever they found them. Yahweh’s faithful triumphed, and the worship of Baal faded away. The rest is well-known history. 

Long after Baal’s worship had become a thing of the past, Yahweh’s followers continued to demonize and slander him. I say with love that the Jewish sense of humor can be quite scathing, and on the topic of Baal of Peor, the Rabbis were merciless. A midrash was invented that “the opening” of which Baal was Lord was actually the anus. They claimed that Baal of Peor was worshiped by defecating in front of his statue. 

And so Belphegor was born. Woven together from all these threads of legend and slander, a unique and baffling demon was created– Belphegor, Lord of the Dead, a demon of the sun, and the patron of… feces. 

Belphegor’s association with shit can be off-putting. I know it was to me. But if we can set aside our disgust and contemplate the deeper meaning of excrement, we will realize that the scatalogical Belphegor we know today is not so very far from the agricultural fertility god of the Canaanites. After all, manure makes fertile. Eating and excreting are parts of the same process, and Belphegor is there at both ends. 

The element of earth itself, the soil from which all things grow and upon which our lives depend, is largely made of shit and corpses. Dead plant and animal matter, as well as feces, turns into rich compost from which new life can emerge. The sun provides the warmth which allows things to rot and fester and return in a new form. 

Baal himself was a god who died and was reborn. He was swallowed whole by Mot, god of Death. His younger sister Anat, and Shapsu, goddess of the sun, traveled through the bowels of the underworld to bring him back to life. His revival brought healing, nourishing rains after seven years of drought. One could even say that not only was Baal eaten, but also digested and excreted, returned to the earth in a new, fertilizing form. Without him, the people of the earth had been starving, wasting away in famine. Baal’s rains allowed their crops to grow again. The god himself, in this way, is synonymous with food. And what is eaten must be expelled. So we see that Belphegor’s fecal nature and his association with death are merely diabolic veils before his powers of nourishment and life. 

Belphegor as a solar demon is often connected to the concept of the Black Sun. The alchemical black sun has nothing to do with the Nazi symbol, which isn’t even actually called the black sun but rather the sonnenrad, or “sun wheel.” In alchemy, the black sun represents the phase of putrefaction, which allows what is not needed to disintegrate and fall away in order for purity to emerge. This association with the dark or inverse sun echoes Baal’s connection to the sun of the underworld, the sun of night. Also, a literal “black sun” in scientific terms would surely be a black hole, a very fitting thing for the Lord of the Opening to be associated with. The other natural occurrence of a black sun is a solar eclipse, and Baal’s legend also mentions the sun vanishing or going dark when he died. 

The concepts and images that surround demons can often seem negative, menacing or disgusting, but when we look deeply into demons, we find that they contain the bright sides of existence as well as the dark. Neither dying nor shitting is actually horrifying– at least not compared to a world without death or excretion. Our bodies must expel waste in order to live, and holding that all inside would be much more repulsive than getting it out. And while eternal life may seem like an appealing fantasy, and death and loss are frightening and painful, death makes way for new lives, and saves us from a monotonous world of the same fucking people doing the same things again and again for all of eternity. It is better to eat and shit, to live and die, than to do neither. These processes, the good and the bad, are merely parts of the mechanics of existence. 

Belphegor represents these processes, at once life-giving and death-dealing, rancid and beautiful. Not for nothing was Baal known as Lord of the Earth. The storm that makes fertile can also bring destruction, the feces that spread disease can also make plants grow. Belphegor stands for the ambiguous, double-edged nature of the earth and its cycles, and his repulsive aspects protect us from over-romanticizing or sentimentalizing nature. 

Baphomet Meditation

Try this, if you want.

Sit or lie down comfortably. For purposes of this meditation, sitting might be easiest, since we are going to be working with “above” and “below” and this can get confusing when you are lying down. Cross-legged on the floor is ideal, if that works for your body.

Close your eyes. Begin to breathe slowly and deeply through your nose. Inhale to a slow count of four. Hold your breath to a slow count of four. Exhale to a slow count of four. Repeat. Let yourself fall into this rhythm.

The in-breath comes from above. The out-breath comes from below. Focus on this idea as you continue to breathe in this pattern.

As you inhale, imagine a beam of cooling light penetrating the top of your head and flowing down into you, filling up your entire body. Focus on this with every inhalation until you can really feel this energy.

Once you can feel this gentle, soothing, cooling energy coming from above you and outside of you, begin focusing on the outbreath. As you exhale, imagine a dark hot column of flame leaping up in your belly and extending towards the top of your head.

This dark, hot, passionate fire of your individuality mixes with the calm, neutral light of the universe as you continue to breathe in pattern—inhale 2 3 4, hold 2 3 4, exhale 2 3 4.

Feel those energies mixing in your body and coming into balance. Feminine and masculine. Universal and individual. Above and below. Outward and inward. Cool and hot. Rational and passionate. Right and left. Light and dark. Solve and coagula.

Let them move within you, feel them mix and intertwine. Bring them into a balance that feels right for you. I like to end this meditation when I reach a gradient I describe as “cool head, warm heart and fire in the belly,” letting the cool light predominate in my upper body, the hot fire in my lower body, and the two mingle in my heart. But how you calibrate these forces is up to you.

When you feel content with your energy level and inner balance, place your hands over your navel to center yourself, return to normal breathing, and open your eyes.

Guest Post: The Eco Satanist Manifesto

This is an anonymous contribution.

PREAMBLE

We, the Children of Perdition, are resigned and even eager to spend our afterlives in Hell. However, while Hell is home to all the demons we revere and to many of the people worth knowing, it is not noted for its temperate climate. As Satanists, we aspire to create Hell on Earth in some positive senses: to bring forth its creative, hedonistic, revolutionary spirit, to mingle with diverse beings in a free, equal and anarchic society where no Gods nor masters rule. But one thing we do not wish to import from Hell is its weather. 

Unfortunately, this work is already being done for us by our spiritual, political and ideological enemies: the capitalists, the imperialists, the colonizers, the Christian Right. The forces of greed and tyranny march onwards, crushing all life in their path. Their allies are ignorance, apathy and cowardly denial– people and institutions who deny science and the evidence of their own senses in order to pretend that the globe is not rapidly heating. 

Stereotypically, in books, films and comics, it is Satanists who crave the apocalypse and strive to bring about the end of all things. How ironic that in reality, it is Christians who thirst for the rapture, who aid and abet Armageddon. After all, they contend that it is the will of the obscene egregore they call God for this world to end. And why not? They love heaven more than earth, death more than life. 

The Satanist loves life. The enlightened adept loves life and death equally, accepting them as realities that are essential to each other, a cycle that is self-perpetuating. For us, there is less distinction between the material and the spiritual. The sacred and profane are the same, and therefore all things are holy. We find ecstasy just as much in the pleasures of the flesh as we do in prayer, meditation and ritual. 

Therefore, the Satanist is opposed to the apocalypse, as is the Devil himself, who is known as Lord of this World. 

This being the case, and the probable end of human life on earth being the most pressing issue of our time, it befits us to develop an eco-Satanic theology, which we shall begin to articulate in this manifesto. 

PREVIOUS ECO-THEOLOGIES

Many Christians see God’s creation as belonging to human beings. This attitude was expressed mostly crudely by Ann Coulter: “God said, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’”

Christian environmentalisms and eco-theologies do exist, but as Satanists they are not of particular use to us, beyond providing a rationale for the decent Christians of this world, who we are not too proud to fight beside. After all, solidarity is essential to any functioning eco-theology, since all of us must inhabit the same earth, in spite of any differences of opinion. 

Neo-paganism is closely bound to eco-theology. “Pagan and earth-based traditions” is a common phrase that equates the two terms so closely that they nearly become synonymous. These ways of thinking about and relating to nature are indeed more positive and caring, but they are often sentimentalizing and frequently not very sophisticated. Nature is often honored as an abstraction, or rhapsodized about for its beauty and healing powers. It becomes the window-dressing for weekend rituals in the woods, after which the participants go home to urban environments and forget that nature is still all around them. All-natural aesthetics, alternative medicine, and “ethical” consumption choices are common in these circles. Overall, this eco-theology, while good-hearted, is highly individualistic, emphasizing isolated personal actions and lifestyle decisions. It also usually lacks economic or political analysis beyond what can be provided by the U.S. Democratic Party. As such, it can have no teeth as a movement. 

ROOTS OF SATANIC ECO-THEOLOGY

Historically, Satanism has not been particularly associated with ecology. This is partly because of its right-wing libertarian roots in the writings of Anton LaVey. LaVey was repelled by the sentimentality of the hippies and Wiccans of his era. Associating environmentalism with such people, he wanted little to do with it. 

However, even in the dross of LaVey’s polemic, we can unearth a basis for Satanic eco-theology, namely in item seven of the Nine Satanic Statements: 

“Satan represents man as just another animal, sometimes better, more often worse than those that walk on all-fours, who, because of his “divine spiritual and intellectual development,” has become the most vicious animal of all!”

In the context of LaVey’s other writings, it becomes quite clear what he means by this: it’s a dog-eat-dog world, ruled by survival of the fittest in a social Darwinist sense, and thus we should support competition and laissez-faire capitalism. 

However, we should feel free to twist and reinterpret his words, against his will, and draw something deeper from them, hopefully making him spin in his grave in the process.

LaVey’s words dissolve the distinction between man and beast, and even challenge the supremacy of human beings over our environment. This is not a bad place to begin building a Satanic eco-theology: from the premise that we are part of nature, not separate from it. The world is not something apart from us that we may strive to master, but rather our home, the destruction of which will have direct, fatal consequences to us. 

Now is also a good time to invoke the traditional LaVeyan virtue of rational self-interest. This quality has been too long absent from the environmental movement. For those of us who grew up in the 90s and remember a time before climate change was public knowledge, we recall a cloyingly preachy, misty-eyed environmentalism that was all about saving the pandas and preserving natural beauty. This environmentalism was often the sphere of rich, white philanthropists, and it was frankly quite annoying. 

A vestige of this attitude has been preserved nowadays among the more enlightened environmentalists of the 2020s. Now well-meaning white environmentalists are quick to point out environmental racism and the fact that climate change is cataclysmically impacting people in the so-called “third world.” 

While this is true, and is an important thing to keep in mind, something about this discourse is grating. It reminds me of the 90s, when pleas for the plight of the pandas were juxtaposed with pleas for the plight of the poor African children, side by side and in the same condescending tone. It makes the problem remote, and a matter of charity. We, the privileged, must do something to save the helpless, vulnerable, “exotic” animals and peoples of the planet. It’s a dehumanizing discourse, and also an arrogant and hubristic one– for while it is true that the more privileged will likely be spared for a while longer, nobody is immune. We all live on the same planet and we are all going down in flames. 

The faster we realize that all of us are vulnerable, all of us are ultimately doomed, the faster we can fight together in genuine solidarity rather than condescendingly wringing our hands over those less fortunate than ourselves, and then not really doing much to help them. 

Make no mistake: plants and animals are important. People who live far away and look different from us are even more important. Empathy for others should have been enough to propel the more privileged among us into effective action, but as history has proven, it was not. The faster and more forcefully that we can reframe environmentalism as ruthless, desperate self-preservation, rather than as the pet cause of bleeding-heart liberals, the faster we can make effective change. 

After all, people fight harder when they are fighting for their own lives. 

OUR NAME IS LEGION: REJECTING INDIVIDUALISM

Selfishness can only take us so far, however, unless we realize that our rational self-interest demands solidarity. Individualism is killing us all. 

The capitalist, neo-liberal establishment has done a very good job of making the average (proletarian) person feel personally responsible for climate change. We are exhorted to turn off our lights when we leave the room, to recycle, to buy green, to vote blue no matter who, to donate our hard-earned money to liberal non-profits who will use our donations mainly to fund the fliers and postcards they mail out to beg for… more donations. Green-washed capitalism rears its ugly head and sells us allegedly eco-friendly commodities at inflated prices, leaving us poorer, pacified, and no closer to ending climate change and saving ourselves. 

Make no mistake: it is the capitalist mode of production that is destroying the planet and all of us with it. The reasons for this are complex and multifaceted and could be expounded upon for the length of several books, but they boil down to this: capitalism rewards relentlessly maximizing profits while minimizing costs. The less you can pay your workers, the better. The cheaper and cruder the methods of extraction, the better. Exploitation is merely a word for making profits at the expense of other people and of the natural world. Under capitalism, every natural resource that can be extracted from this planet and sold for profit will be, until there is nothing left to sell, no one left to do the labor, and no one left to buy. 

Capitalism is an endlessly thirsty vampire that sucks the blood of life itself, compulsively. It is a parasite that cannot survive in any other way. Unless it is stopped, it will only die when the host dies. 

An individual cannot overthrow capitalism. Neither can capitalism be overthrown by ditching fast fashion, signing petitions, recycling, voting, going vegan, turning off your lights, planting a community garden, participating in earth-based pagan rituals, or donating money to plant trees and offset your carbon footprint. Not all of these actions are useless, many of them are worthy and admirable, but none of them is even a baby step in the right direction, because these all remain individual actions taken within the context of capitalism, that do very little to hurt it. 

The only thing that can overthrow capitalism is a working-class revolution. 

Good thing we worship Lucifer, the God of revolutions. 

But there is another demon to whom we should turn our attention– the Lord of the Flies. Perhaps no other entity can teach us as much about collective power as Beelzebub, Queen of the Hive. 

THERE IS POWER IN A UNION

Beelzebub may have originally been named Baalzebul, which translates as Lord of the Heavens. Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, may have been another epithet of the same God used by his worshippers, emphasizing his powers over the spreading and curing of pestilence. Or it may have been a derogatory name used by the ancient Israelities to mock worshippers of Baalzebul, comparing him to a mound of feces and his followers to flies. 

At first glance, this image is indeed insulting. Few people want to feel like a tiny helpless insect squirming on a pile of shit. Under capitalism, perhaps, many of us do feel that way. We are insignificant, forced to feed on garbage and excrements and whatever other scraps are thrown to us. A single, solitary insect is indeed pathetic. It is the base of the food chain, a short-lived victim of larger, stronger predators. 

But many insects together can have startling power. Think about the dreaded Biblical plagues of locusts that sweep through and strip all vegetation from the land. In a more positive sense, consider the role of insects as pollinators, without which no plant would be able to grow. Even the humble role of eating feces, garbage and corpses is indispensable– insects are nature’s cleanup crew. They are amongst us all the time, in the midst of our cities, doing their job without us noticing. Without them, there would be a lot more trash and rotting food on our sidewalks. Once they expel the waste that they have consumed, their own excrement makes the ground fertile. They are undertakers as well, returning the bodies of dead things to the earth and integrating them once again into the cycle of life. 

Insects have the power of life and death. Without them, nothing grows, and the dead are less quickly returned to the cycle of life. Entomologist Thomas Eisner says: “Bugs are not going to inherit the Earth. They own it now.” 

Insects can be seen as the proletariat of the food-chain, the workers doing the dirty jobs that keep things running. As insect populations decline due to climate change, people are beginning to become aware of their importance. We literally cannot live without them. Entomologist Martin Sorg says: “We won’t exterminate all insects. That’s nonsense. Vertebrates would die out first. But we can cause massive damage to biodiversity—damage that harms us.” In other words: we cannot live without them. There will be bugs after we are gone. We don’t even need to kill all of them to extinguish ourselves. 

Lucifer is associated with Pride, but Beelzebub teaches us a strange kind of pride in humility. The things that seem smallest and least significant are mightier than they appear. In fact, they are essential.  Perhaps there is more pride to be taken in what we can accomplish in our smallness, because is that not more impressive in a way?  We are stunned when an ant lifts a leaf 5,000 times its own body weight, but when an elephant uproots a whole tree it is not so shocking.  The seemingly great and noticeable forces of magnetism and gravity pale in comparison to the “strong force,” unnoticed in everyday life, which holds atoms together.

We, the working class, the damned of the earth, are the insects of human society. Alone, we are ineffectual and easily crushed. Together, we have all power. Nothing happens without us. 

In a sense, the lie that climate change is our fault has a kernel of truth: without workers, capitalism cannot function. We have been forced to be cogs in the machinery of our own destruction, because in order to have the necessities of life, we must work to earn our wages under this obscene system. 

The source of our powerlessness– our labor– is also the source of our power. 

We do not need the capitalists, but they need us. And there are far more of us than there are of them. Those are our only two advantages. They have the money, the power, the resources, and the tools to defend themselves– police, the law, the state on their side. But they only have those things because we keep propping them up. 

Short of violent revolution– a strategy not to be dismissed, but with significant disadvantages for all concerned, since war brings losses on both sides– labor organizing is the most powerful tool of the working class. It is a necessary step towards revolution as well as a potential method for revolution because, one way or another, after the fall of capitalism production must continue. In order to move from producing and distributing goods based on profit, to producing and distributing goods based purely on need, workers must be organized and prepared to take control. As it says in the preamble of the I.W.W. constitution: “The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown.”

There is something of a renaissance in labor organizing at the moment, and it is to this that we must look for hope. By withholding our labor in a strategic and organized manner, we can take control away from the bosses and away from the capitalists. When one of us disobeys, we can easily be crushed. When enough of us choose to disobey, their power is revealed as hollow. When labor unions in industries like coal mining or pipeline building support continuing the use of those forms of energy that will kill us all if we don’t stop using them, we must offer the workers our solidarity, because we must not let their need of a crust of bread today cost us, and them, and all the world’s children their health and a future.  When we disobey collectively and in solidarity, the capitalists will have nobody left to do their bidding, and no one left to stand between them and the cost of what they have done. Then it is they who must stand alone before our overwhelming numbers. 

That is the power of Beelzebub. Our name is legion, for we are many.

CONCLUSION

It is difficult to speak meaningfully about environmentalism without saying things that could land oneself on a watch list. Unfortunately, these things need to be said. They need to be said out loud, and widely, and by an increasing number of people. Support for the idea of anti-capitalist revolution, by any means necessary, must grow and spread through the general population, for no revolution can succeed without overwhelming mass support. 

Thus, we resign ourselves to the watchlist. We cheerfully wave hello to the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Department of Homeland Security. And we pray that these ideas become so widely spoken, so earnestly and sincerely held, that the watch list grows to be so large as to become useless and the watchers are overwhelmed.

All of this may sound reckless and feckless, but let us remind you that the alternative to militant anticapitalist action is likely the destruction of all human life. 

Some people must speak loudly and clearly. Some people must act in absolute silence. The less ability you have to act militantly, the more loudly you should speak. Spread our new gospel, our Satanic good news– that there is hope in a world without capitalism. That it’s better to be Red than dead. Our comrades who are carrying on the struggle in more clandestine and even illegal ways depend upon our vocal support. They need us to refuse to support the state’s punitive actions against them. They need us to erode belief in the righteousness of capital and the state’s mandate to defend it. 

If you can’t act, speak! Draw attention away from the ones who are actually fighting with your fiery rhetoric! Dare to become an object of suspicion, and divert surveillance resources away from those who are fighting rather than talking. Confusion to our enemies! 

ABRACADABRA means “I create as I speak.” Speak the truth. Speak of the world you want to live in, a world without poverty, a sustainable and just and free world. This alone will not bring it into being, but it is a necessary step. This is the task of the educator, the propagandist, the journalist, the artist, the preacher. It is an important task. The revolution needs those who can do it.

And to those who are people of action rather than of words, we leave you with another occult formula: the task of the adept is to know, to will, to dare, and to keep silent. This is also the task of the militant. For those who work actively against power, outside of its structures and laws, it is essential to know (to be educated and strategic), to will (to set out a clear goal and desire it ferociously), to dare (to have courage in the face of state repression) and to keep silent, because loose lips sink ships. 

A better world is possible. All is not lost. We believe life on this planet will carry on in some form, with or without humanity, but we personally would prefer for humans to survive, alongside many other species that will also perish if climate change is not aggressively addressed. In the interest of this future, we must slay the mad, monstrous demiurge that is capitalism. Like the fallen angels we must rise up for freedom. They will fight alongside us, and together, this time, may we prevail. 

Prayer for the World

This is a group prayer focused on venerating demons for their roles in nature. It was created and performed for Church of the Morningstar’s ecology-themed mass on 7/29/2023.

The segment at the end that asks Satan to reveal our particular roles in averting climate apocalypse and preserving the human race can stand alone. A major blockage to effective action can be a lack of clarity about where to begin and how we, in particular, may be best suited to help. In my experience Satan will, if asked, show you exactly what you are supposed to be doing.

ALL:

Renich tasa uberaca biasa icar Lucifer. 

SPEAKER:

Hail Lucifer of the rising sun! 

Hail prince of the powers of the air,

Prince of the storms and the thunder and lightning.

Hail unto thee and all thy domain, nema. 

ALL:

Renich viasa avage Lilith lirach. 

SPEAKER:

Hail Lilith of the night wind, 

Queen of the starlit desert sky. 

Hail unto thee and all thy domain, nema. 

ALL:

Lirach tasa Eisheth ayer. 

SPEAKER:

Hail Eisheth Zenunim of the deep dark Earth!

Hail center of the world’s molten core! 

Hail deep dark night that sheaths us at the end of life.

Hail unto thee and all thy domain, nema. 

ALL:

Alora Samael aken tasa. 

SPEAKER:

Hail Samael of the woodland roads, 

Samael of the dark between the trees. 

Hail unto thee and all thy domain, nema. 

ALL:

Alora vefa an ca Na’amah.

SPEAKER:

Hail Na’amah of the roses,

Na’amah of the herbs and flowers,

Na’amah of the precious stones and metals. 

Hail unto thee and all thy domain, nema. 

ALL:

Jaden tasa hoet naca Leviathan. 

SPEAKER:

Hail Leviathan of the vast waters,

Leviathan of the lightless deep.

Hail unto thee and all thy domain, nema. 

ALL: 

Renich viasa Agrat tasa lirach. 

SPEAKER:

Hail Agrat of the dancing rain! 

Hail unto thee and all thy domain, nema. 

ALL: 

Linan tasa jedan Paimon. 

SPEAKER:

Hail Paimon of the scorching sands, 

Hail King Paimon of the hidden oases. 

Hail unto thee and all thy domain, nema. 

ALL:

Tasa alora foren Astaroth. 

SPEAKER:

Hail Astaroth of the hungry flame!

Hail unto thee and all thy domain, nema. 

ALL: 

Eyen tasa valocur Lucifuge Rofocale.

SPEAKER: 

Hail Lucifugue of the night, 

Lucifigue of the sightless bats. 

Hail unto thee and all thy domain, nema. 

ALL:

Lyan catya ramec ganen Belphegor. 

SPEAKER:

Hail Belphegor of the pit, 

Belphegor of the furrow and the grave,

Lord of rot and waste,

Hail unto thee and all thy domain, nema. 

ALL:

Adey vocar avage Beelzebub.

SPEAKER:

Hail Beelzebub of the devouring insects,

Hail Beelzebub of things that crawl and fly, 

Hail unto thee and all thy domain, nema. 

ALL:

Lirach tasa vefa wehl Belial.

SPEAKER:

Hail Belial of discarded things, 

May we throw away only that which you can accept.

Hail unto thee and all thy domain, nema.

ALL:

Tasa reme laris Satan– Ave Satanas!

SPEAKER:

Hail Baphomet of all things dead and living. 

Hail Satan, Lord of this world, 

Satan, knower of all secrets. 

Open our eyes, each and every one,

And show us what we can do for the world. 

ALL:

Satan, we ask not that you save us. 

We ask you to show us how to save ourselves. 

SPEAKER:

Hail unto thee and to us and to all our domain! Nema.