Exit from Eden: On Our Lack of Filial Piety

GENESIS 3

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
²And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
³But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
⁴And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
⁵For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
⁶And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
⁷And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
⁸And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.
⁹And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
¹⁰And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
¹¹And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
¹²And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
¹³And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
¹⁴And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
¹⁵And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
¹⁶Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
¹⁷And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
¹⁸Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
¹⁹In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
²⁰And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.
²¹Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them.
²²And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
²³Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
²⁴So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

The Bible passage I just read you is Chapter 3 of Genesis– in the King James translation, for no special reason except that it’s pretty.

This is probably the most important text to Satanism. The story of the Fall from Eden is a strange one. Like the serpent himself, it has been provoking people to doubt and to ask questions for centuries– actually, for millenia.

If you’re in this church today, you’ve probably thought hard about this story before. You probably already think that God was a controlling asshole for denying Adam and Eve knowledge of good and evil. You might think of the serpent as a messiah, saving Eve and her husband from ignorance and powerlessness. You may see Eve as a hero for bravely accepting the serpent’s challenge, risking death for a chance at knowledge.

This story can be read and dissected in endless ways. This text is rich and deep, and every line of it deserves analysis. Today, however, I’m going to talk about this story in one specific way– as a parable about coming of age.

I don’t believe this story, or any of the other stories we tell, is literal truth. This is not history. This is not a record of fact. However, to me, it is still undeniably true. It’s not a story about something that happened– it’s a story about things that happen, all the time, all around us, in every life– because we all grow up.

Eve and Adam exist in childlike innocence. All of their physical needs are provided for by the Garden. They need no clothes, because the weather is always mild. They eat the fruit of all the trees and plants around them– except for one. They don’t have to think for themselves, because God, their father, tells them what to do.

Some people think of Eden as a time of innocent bliss, a state we should all yearn to return to. Some people think of childhood that way as well. After all, it should be a simple and protected existence. Complications like making decisions, having sex, or fending for yourself to survive have not yet been introduced. No wonder some people miss childhood, and romanticize Eden.

But you are sitting here in this church, and so, that’s probably not the way you feel about childhood.

I can speak only from anecdotal evidence based on the Satanists, Luciferians, and other Left-Hand-Pathers who I know, but the single most predictive trait for converting to these paths seems to be a complicated relationship with childhood and one’s parents. We are almost all people who, like Eve and Adam, were compelled to break away from parental authority. All humans have to do this at some point, to a greater or lesser extent. For us, perhaps, it was a stronger compulsion than for others. This may have been due to trauma, abuse, control, neglect, overprotectiveness, smothering, or indoctrination into an oppressive religion. This may have been because we turned out queerer or transer or more physically disabled or less neurotypical than our parents may have liked.

God supposedly made Eve and Adam in his image. Many parents try to make their children in their images, attempting to mold them into little copies of themselves. But as much as we may all be like our parents in certain ways, children are always more than the sum of their progenitors.

It is inevitable that a child will develop questions, curiosity, and free will. No matter how sheltered or how strictly controlled, sooner or later, a serpent gets into the garden. The child encounters something that makes them think, that makes them yearn for more. Maybe it’s a new friend, a book, a movie, a band.

For me, my serpent was this story itself. As a child I was sent to Waldorf, a bizarrely religious system of schools based on the teachings of a 19th century Austrian occultist. Part of my education in Waldorf included mandatory assemblies where we watched religious pageants reminiscent of Medieval mystery plays. One of the plays performed most often– at least once a year– was the Paradise Play. The Paradise play was a re-enactment of the fall from Eden. It was always really boring until the Devil showed up, played by a teacher in a wild costume and lots of red and orange fiery makeup. No one really clapped or cheered for anyone but the Devil, even though the play was clearly supposed to be on the side of God.

I sat through this damn play so many times that I inevitably started to notice that the Devil was right. God was controlling, misogynist, an anti-intellectual, and even seemed to want to discourage the consumption of healthy produce. The beginnings of my Luciferian conversion happened right there, around the age of twelve, sitting in an uncomfortable little wooden chair in a Waldorf assembly hall.

Whatever the catalyst for rebellion– be it new ideas, exposure to exciting media, a ‘cooler’ and more daring set of friends, or simply the onset of teenage hormones– once rebellion against the parents has been set in motion, it is impossible to stop.

Hell truly hath no fury like a teenager who has begun to question the rules. Eating the forbidden fruit is painful. They don’t call it teen angst for nothing. The awakening of libido is confusing enough without all the other tasks of adolescence– forming an identity, growing a different body, developing a moral compass, coming up with your own ideas and opinions about the world. Teens wake up not just to themselves, but to the realities of unjust societies. Life is not a happy walled garden, as it may have seemed in childhood. There is struggle, and pain, and war and death and unfairness. There is evil. Once you take a bite of that apple and have those revelations, there’s no going back to the way things were.

Parents respond to teenage rebellion in various ways. If they are good parents, they find ways to reconcile with their children and accept their new identities. If they are bad parents they react with anger and excessive punishment– and may even kick their kids out of the house, as God did with Adam and Eve.

But whether parents are kind and fair or not, we all eventually have to leave the nest and fend for ourselves. Our lives and actions become our own responsibilities. This is hard and painful, but also rewarding. It is the price of freedom. (In a capitalist society, that price is way higher than it needs to be, but that’s another sermon.)

Many people are attracted to Satanism, I think, partly because they sense that this religion will not judge them for having complicated feelings about their parents– or even cutting their parents off entirely. Lucifer made a clean break with his Father, after all. They’ve been no-contact since the dawn of time!

Satanists, in other words, are often not just apostates from their original religions, but also from their families. In practical terms, that’s often what being an apostate from a religion means, if you were raised in it.

Fortunately, we have no enshrined virtue of filial piety here. “Honor thy father and thy mother” is not a commandment we are bound by. We recognize that parents are human beings, and imperfect, some good and some bad and some worse. Some of them are not worthy of honor from their children, and some are not worthy of honor from much of anyone at all.

Of course we do not vilify all parents. Many of us are lucky enough to have one or more decent parents. Many of us will someday be parents ourselves.

And to those of you who will be parents, I want to propose a new virtue– parental piety. Don’t tell your children to honor you– honor them. When their Eden moment comes, and rebellion kicks in, remember your own adolescence. Adam and Eve certainly went through great pains with their own children, like when little Cain got mad, hit his brother on the head, and accidentally discovered death. If being a child is hard, being a parent is no easier.

The difference is that parents are adults. They have eaten of the fruit of knowledge. They know good and evil, they know right from wrong. They know better, in other words– or at least, they are supposed to.

So instead of bellowing at kids to “honor thy father and thy mother,” let’s tell parents to gently honor their children. “Honor” is a great big concept, too meaty for a small child to grasp. You may work your fingers to the bone providing for your kids, cleaning up their messes, washing them, feeding them, and clothing them– but a kid will never understand what the hell that means, not really. Not until they are grown enough to have to do all that for themselves, and maybe even for their own offspring. Demanding gratitude from kids is a waste of time. They can’t even conceptualize what they’re meant to be grateful for.

Instead, you be grateful for your kids. Remind yourself that it is a privilege and an honor to bring them into the world and raise them– that above all, it is a privilege to know them. Forget this at your peril, because otherwise you may find yourself old and lonely, wondering why they never write, call or visit. If you were a good parent, one day they will express their gratitude– I guarantee it. If they never do, you likely don’t deserve it.

I want to end this sermon on a personal note. As some of you may know, early this year I cut off all contact with my biological mother. Since I did that, my life has gotten immeasurably better. I have now moved across the country without telling my mother my new address, and am absolutely delighted to know that ze probably has no idea where I even live.

As my thirty-second birthday approaches, I find myself a little bit triggered. I know ze will be thinking about me, on the anniversary of the day on which ze expelled me from zir body, an arduous and painful act for which I can still feel gratitude and respect, if for nothing else. I know ze will want to contact me on that day, or try to send me a present. I’m experiencing anxiety at the idea of a package or card forwarded to me from my old address– a guilt trip wrapped in birthday wishes, a gift with heavy strings attached. I can’t imagine anything I want less.

Ze probably has no idea why I cut off contact. I’m not usually a fan of “if you don’t know why I’m mad, I can’t tell you,” but at this point I’ve given up on trying to explain to my mother the ways that ze has damaged me, and continues to damage me. I’ve given up on trying to draw boundaries with a person who immediately moves the goalposts, whose response to any request for privacy and respect is “I know you said you don’t wanna hear about X, but…”

I recognize that my mother is traumatized, that my mother’s parents were even worse at parenting than ze was. I have compassion. And, I have absolutely no desire to know zir or talk to zir ever again. It has been decades since I had an interaction with my mother that was anything less than exhausting. Quite simply, I’m done.

And, I know my mother used to read my Satanic blog. I have blocked zir on wordpress, but that doesn’t stop zir from looking at my site while logged out. My fear of zir eyes on my words, and the violation thereof, has stopped me from posting publicly. It has silenced my voice on a platform that I was using to interact with my religious community.

So today, I am going to be brave. After this service concludes, I will post this on my blog. If mom reads it, I don’t care. I believe I have something to offer to others through my words and my writing. I’m done shutting up. I know I have Lucifer in my corner when I speak up on my own behalf, in spite of my fear of my parent. I know the demons are rooting for me and supporting me in finding and building a family that supports me and brings me joy.

I hope you know that you, too, have the forces of Hell on your side as you struggle with any pain your parents have caused you. Our independence, our self-determination, our individually developed identities, are precious and sacred. We can and will step beyond the shadows cast by our Creators, and into our own radiant light.

Be it so.

Guest Post: Enki for Intersexuals

By Pastor Jarys Maragopoulos

Content notes: Childhood and medical trauma. References to the subject of child sexual abuse.

Everyone has a different relationship to “normal.” Mine was grievously transformative. To unpack the meaning that the concept of normal played in my life, I would like to tell you two stories. The first is my own story as an intersex person, grounded in the recent history of the medicalization of Intersex people. The second story is from ancient Sumer, followed by analysis that shall hopefully tie the two together. Before the end, there shall be both a look into my spirituality and a cause. But, as endings rely on beginnings, I ask for your patience before I get to the point:

As roughly one point seven percent of children are estimated to do, I was born with ambiguous indicators of sex and, where the doctors found ambiguity, they recommended a transition to femininity. My parents refuted this choice, despite the difficulty of endowing a masculine form through surgery, based on a single indicator that they favored. After four invasive procedures before I was the age of five, I was expected to manifest the success of these alterations. I struggled to do so at times and struggled to cope with being unable to do so at others. Never was I told that I had been anything but a boy; though “Partial Androgen Insensitivity syndrome” was a term I learned as a teenager. When I did not find myself growing into a man, I thought that made me a failure as a person, and a disappointment after all the invested effort. I had no idea I could be anything else, so I came to see myself as sub-human.

As both this narrative and the next will touch upon, Humanity is a territory whose borders are often drawn too exclusively. While many biological markers are used to define humans, four of them have been used in Western Society to identify humans as either male or female: hormones, genitals, gonads, and chromosomes. So assumed are these two gendered states to be the defining division of humanity that our birth certificates require the designation of one or the other. What then, for children born to be or revealed in puberty to be of disagreeing markers? What about children whose individual markers do not align with a binary development? Such children have been born throughout humanity’s written and oral record, and the biology of other species does not suggest this diversity to be as new as language. And what of those children born of the modern era, benefiting from the advancements of scientific medicine?

The Victorian classification of such deviations as (warning: these contain a word many consider a slur) Male Psuedo-Hermaphrodites, Female Psuedo-Hermaphrodites, and the romantically named True Hermaphrodites, summarized medical understanding until one Doctor John Money made his career of the study, even establishing the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in 1965. Money theorized that gender was entirely socially taught and, therefore, could be socially controlled. To maintain that control, Money developed procedures to surgically reform ambiguously-sexed infants into societally recognizable boys and girls, with particular emphasis on the participation in heterosexual intercourse and procreation, if possible. With the child’s body speaking one message, it was for the child’s social environment to strengthen that message. Gender nonconforming behavior was to be disciplined and the child’s assigned gender affirmed by those around them, but always rooted in surgeries conducted early enough not to give the child lingering doubts. These ongoing procedures are rooted in the traditionally Euro-centric certainty that humans can be only either male or female, despite the evidence to the contrary that these same procedures were designed to “correct”.

Which, you would be deft to point out, amounts to a vast and disconnected conspiracy to deny the reality of children like me and the dissent we offer to the concept of “normal”. No secret smoke-filled room required, just earnest professionals doing the work for which they had been trained, assured that the premises on which they were to differentiate healthy and dis-ordered bodies were entirely scientifically derived and without bias. No less organized than the racism that causes medical professionals to underestimate the pain felt by black bodies, no more sinister than the sexism that sorts men into doctors and women into nurses. Everything was done with the belief that it was good for me, including the concealment, which is why I did not find out that a term for my experience was “Intersex” and that I was not alone in it until I was twenty-two years old.

Money understood, to some extent it seems, that he was guarding the borders of normalcy. He taught medicine how to (sometimes literally) measure who was in and who was out, and how to bring those found far afield closer to the norm. It would not be Money’s only entanglement upon that border, for he tried to bring inside a very different group of people found outside its walls when he wrote in support of the legitimacy of pedophillic desire in the now defunct Journal of Pedophillia. Having introduced the terms sexual orientation and gender identity to the world, he made no accounting for consensual relationships in associating his study of queer lives with pedophillia, an association the LGBTQI community has fought to keep from being foisted upon them for decades. While no real argument for Money’s predilections can be made from scant evidence, his opinions cast a terrible light on his procedures. It is undeniable that his work engaged with the sexualization of children’s bodies, in the judging and adapting of sexual function and form. Money also began the practice of collecting photos of naked intersexual children, anonymized with black bars over their eyes, for the stated purpose of study and for the education of the professionals learning his procedures. Whether this objectifying practice was born of malign motivations or not, the traumatizing effect on many of the subjects is a matter of record. I am fortunate no such attempt was made to record my body, but I was still emotionally affected by the medical attention that I endured.

The point of such attention, as it is often asserted in defence of these practices, is to prevent the child from experiencing shame. If that is the case, then the procedures are fundamentally hypocritical. When the child’s caretakers change the child to match the expectations of society, they are not refuting the shame society would bestow on one who is different, but embodying that shame. From my experience, I sensed the secrecy of my procedures as a child, the difficult conversations they engendered, and this taught me to be ashamed of my body. Like many Intersex people who faced medicalization, my earliest memories of being touched in erogenous areas were formed when I underwent hands-on inspection by groups of impersonal doctors, discussing among themselves whether my development was acceptably normal. I learned to associate my discomfort in these situations with that part of my body, towards which I developed judgment and eventually disgust. When I was told as a child that I had to change to be like everyone else, I came to wonder why I was not acceptable in the first place, and felt alienated. I was left in possession of a body post-procedure that did not match my parent’s expectations but, being unable to explain to adults what I was never taught, as a child I came to believe that the source of the frustration lay in who I was. When I grew up to be a trans adult, eschewing the gender assigned to me, I was faced with a society whose frustration with my identity was voiced in the hateful wording I had once used against myself. In my case and in the case of other intersex people with whom I have spoken, Money’s procedures brought about the very thing they are designed to forestall: rejection and shame.

I felt these things throughout puberty and up to the day I understood who I was. When I felt unacceptable and despised myself as a child, I likened myself to Gollum from my father’s stories: mutated and loathsome. Reading voraciously, I discovered Frankenstein, and I felt a kinship with the creature formed from experiments he barely understood, subhuman and wretched. It was not until I began reading Terry Pratchett as I entered high school, with his use of Golem characters to demonstrate a fantastical construct gaining self-identity, that I found characters who reminded me of my own artificiality free from feelings of self-disgust. I suffered an enduring depression and pervasive anxiousness in high school and beyond, sensitive to rejection, afraid that showing too much enthusiasm for people would give them an opportunity to see how abominable I was. I was unable to meaningfully date or to be intimate with anyone until after I discovered I was intersex, so deeply were my misconceptions of my origin tied to how I felt about my body and myself.

I did not resolve these misconceptions by pure happenstance, but felt a splinter in my mind, a sense that something was wrong which I carried into college and my early adulthood. Feeling that something in my origins held unclaimed meaning, I asked my mother to re-send to me a letter she wrote when I turned eighteen, giving her account of my birth. It represented, at the time, the most information I had about what occurred, but when she re-sent it to me just before I turned 23, she thankfully updated some of the medical language. This revamped document guided my research, during which I discovered the term “Intersex.”

Reading the Wikipedia article felt like a lightbulb had illuminated within me, for I finally found context for what had happened to me in the legacy of sexual assignment medicalization that Dr. Money had standardized. I also saw my first hints that I was not alone, that Intersex people had sought community before me, that others like me were out there still. That day represented the turning point in my self-image. Whereas before I had accepted abusive and cruel treatment from peers, thinking it was my due, I began a positive journey toward self-regard in which I could stand up to such treatment and begin to see myself as a person. I sought a therapist, who arranged an Intersex Support Group. I was hungry for more information on people like me and their mark on society, so I also searched for our place in stories.

Looking through the annals of TVtropes dot com, I was surprised by how prevalent Intersex characters were in fiction (often called hermaphroditic, which is as I said a sensitive term), but I was also disheartened by how often they were depicted as malevolent freaks. While the site led me to positive stories now beloved, such as The Left Hand of Darkness, I discovered that Intersex characters were mainly seen by audiences in the West as murderers who could frustrate forensic investigators due to their medical oddity, or often in the East as literal monsters. Sadayko or Samara, the ghost from the horror story The Ring, is an Intersex youth who seeks vengeance upon the world for parental rejection, a particular theme I found prevalent in many narratives with Intersex antagonists. However, the oldest story featuring Intersex people I found was not from modern fiction, but from myth, and this myth is featured in the Intersex articles on both TVtropes and Wikipedia.

This is a Sumerian story of Enki, the god of wisdom and teachers, husband to Ninhursag, goddess of nature and creation. The couple worked together, day in and day out, forming all people out of clay and assigning them destinies or places in society. After a long day of Promethean ceramics, this couple gets to drinking beer and challenge each other to a contest (the Sumerians were big on beer). Whomever of the two could create a person in a form so problematic that the other could not find a “Good Destiny” for them, would win. They set to work producing various sorts of infirmities and handicaps from the Sumerian perspective, including a woman who cannot conceive (who is given the role of Priestess) and a person “without maleness or femaleness”, the latter created by Enki. In the end, Ninhursag cannot devise destinies for Enki’s creations, but instead of simply taking the win, Enki states that the gods do not make people to not have a good destiny, and he proceeds to assign a place in society for each of his people. The place for the person who is not male or female, Enki states, is to “stand before the king” as a courtier and helper. This language of dignity stuck with me, especially when I met other Intersex people in support groups who also repeated this very myth with a sense of self-dignity. Later research into Sumerian culture has shown me that the King in this language may have once referred to a high priest, or someone acting as the focal point for the ritual magic conducted by the state. At the time I took the most meaning from the idea of standing before power instead of kneeling.

As the Sumerians would have it, this is not the only time that Enki creates Intersex people or beings. There is a myth where Inanna (later called Ishtar) descends into the Underworld for want of conquest and is held hostage there by her sister, Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld. Of all the gods, only Enki sends help by creating two beings also described as “without maleness or femaleness”, to whom he gives the water and plant of Life to revive Inanna. He also teaches them how to get into Ereshkigal’s good graces by showing her compassion as she continuously and painfully birthed the dead into her kingdom. These beings, called Galatura and Kurgara, do as they are taught, showing Ereshkigal compassion. She repays their kindness by offering them anything they want, to which they ask for the body of Inanna.

In these narratives I saw a common theme of social value and acceptance for Intersex people. Destinies being the Sumerian idea of social cohesion, Enki’s refusal to leave the Intersex and other differently bodied humans outside the bounds of society and humanity cut deep into the alienation I felt. If a civilization five thousand years past knew of people like me, and had a myth to explain our inclusion, then I saw that there could be another way. Sumer was not and is not the only such culture; intersex, trans, and non-binary people are accepted in many societies throughout history and around the globe to this very day. Ancient Rome and early Christianity published legal documents that make allowances for such people, while beyond Europe Indiginous people continue to refute the gender binary as a colonial incursion. Narratives of Intersex people’s natural validity are far older and told far wider than Western society’s unNarrative that we cannot and should not exist.

These myths led me to work with Enki as an eidelon of teaching and a symbol of Intersex acceptance. Enki’s bestowment of magical power and the teaching of compassion to these beings suggests to me that the Sumerians were in some manner of agreement with other cultures who see Intersex people as spiritual, unifying, and worthy. In accordance with the Descent Myth, the temple of Inanna developed two orders of priests that were often described in gender-bending terms: the Gala Lamentation priests who attuned to the emotions of the gods to gain their favor, and their counterparts named for Kurgara, who performed mock battles for Inanna’s’ glory. These orders, particularly the Gala, spread to the temples of other gods and were associated with queerness and queer sexuality. Perhaps a trans, intersex, gay, or bisexual person born in Sumer would have been seen as a natural candidate for these priesthoods, as an alternative to the expectation to continue the family line.

These spiritual themes around gender-nonconforming identities motivated me to seek and establish theology that does not require participants to fit into a gender binary, in a community that values compassion and the temerity to stand up to injustice. To accomplish this, I helped to form the First Church of the Morningstar, where pagans, occultists, and dabolitors of many Traditions come together to practice without dogma or abuse. Once organized, the congregation elected me to join the volunteer pastoral team, where I represent the non-Satanic members. In Church events, I lead reconstructed Sumerian rites and rituals, invoke Enki and other faces of divinity with which I am engaged, and help to facilitate community support.

In fact, I first read a version of this statement, in the form of a sermon, at a Morningstar service in Two Thousand and Nineteen. At the time, this was the most public venue in which I had spoken about being Intersex, and I had some anxieties over the value of what I was imparting to my audience. However, I am so glad that I spoke despite my fears, for afterwards a congregant came forward to share proudly that he too is Intersex. This congregant (whose permission I have to repeat these details) had also endured gender assignment surgery as a child and had been negatively affected, feeling alone in this experience. But, as he asked that I state here, hearing my account was the first time he had heard another person speaking so openly about their intersexuality and medicalization, and he thanked me for abating the feelings of loneliness the latter so often leaves behind. After my earlier misgivings, his disclosure banished all my doubts. I felt assured that there was a need for advocacy and spiritual workings drawn from my Intersex experiences, and the First Church of the Morningstar became the home for these efforts.

Practically, when speaking of my efforts, this often involves the relating of personal meaning through mythic symbolism. It is important to me to keep in mind my subjective connections to these spiritual experiences without letting that limit my sharing of them. This is what Pagans have been known to call Unconfirmed Personal Gnosis, where a believer shares their subjective engagement with a spiritual entity or idea without writing dogma or expecting agreement. One way I do this is by giving an “Enkian” take on a thematic topic. My practice originates in my conscious choice to use the Enki and Ninhursag contest myth as a model for self-acceptance. I do not require Enki to have an objective reality for his stories to help me psychologically and emotionally, and in fact this subjectabist attitude has allowed me to develop an analysis on Ancient myths to comfort Modern hearts. When I do so, I join a cherished tradition of other artists, mythic storytellers, theologians, and magicians to whom we owe humanity’s bounty of narrative.

When we struggle with normalcy, alienation, and conformity, Enki’s myths illustrate that these things are relative and artificial. When the Sumerians told the story of how Enki brought about the organization of the world as they knew it, their conclusion had Enki bless the lands of Sumer. But then he then goes as far afield as the Sumerians understood, to the lands of Africa and further East towards the Indus Valley, and blesses those lands and their people as well, using the same language he used for Sumer. To the Sumerians, divine blessing and civilisation was not theirs alone, but to be shared across all boundaries and borders. What does a god like Enki care for such divisions? In fact, he is shown to care a great deal, in valuing diversity, as we can see from the following “myth within a myth”:

In the oldest written myth from which we inherit the Tower of Babel trope, the Sumerian incantation of Nuddimund describes a mythical time in which humans had no rival in nature and all people spoke one language to exult Enlil, Enki’s brother and ruler of the Gods for a time in Mesopotamian theology. Enlil, through his priests, has amassed all of Sumer’s knowledge (tablets of Me) in one ziggurat, an artificial mountain on which stands the most holy of temples, language and literature consolidated around one place of power. Enki, in response to this ambition, makes multiple the languages of humanity, stymying further attempts to consolidate humanity into conforming to one worship and one understanding. This incantation of Nuddimund was given to Sumerian messengers to read before their missives, in acknowledgement of humanity’s decentralized diversity of beliefs and customs. It is poignant that this incantation is presented to us inside a larger narrative in which two cities compete for the seat of divine power.

Here we see Enki in his trickster role, lauded for his wisdom but acting contrary to the story’s implied value. The myth explains to the Sumerians why the world is the way it is, populated by different cultures and languages, but also sets that normal state of affairs apart from a nostalgic past, in which conformity is seen as glorious, ambitious, and the will of the chief god. Enki’s challenge to his brother represents part of an ongoing theme in Sumerian myth, a humanistic triumph of dissent over obedience, which sheds light on the larger narrative of competing cultural centers in which the incantation is set. This is one of multiple myths in which Enki stands up for those who are left outside the circles of power, inviting them in despite the wishes of his rulers. An ethos to be imitated, I think, that does not require homogenization.

And isn’t that the point? I have shared the childhood narrative that is my own, a brief history of sex assignment surgery, my exploration into the stories and myths of Intersex people, and the ways I have used the stories I found to empower myself and my community. I tell you this because I believe that there is value in each person and their story, as these narratives have taught me to see value in my own story, which I once felt was anathema and unworthy. I tell you this because I believe that, like left-handedness, homosexuality, and transgender people, Intersex people are not dis-ordered but apart of humanity’s boundless diversity. What I have learned leads me to the conclusion that the narrative that drove my medical treatment is fundamentally flawed. Its stated purpose was to protect me from shame, but instead it imparted to me an alienating shame from which myths and fiction have offered me freedom. Furthermore, I am compelled to speak out and change the story for the next generation of Intersex children. I believe that these non-consensual and often harmful surgeries will not end until enough dissent has amassed to challenge their logic and necessity in the public eye, and I will not stop writing until that is so. May Enki bless these words, and may humanity receive them.

The Abyss

A sermon by Pastor Johnny given at Church of the Morningstar on 4/17/2021

This is the legend:

Aleister Crowley and his magical apprentice cum boy toy Victor Neuberg had been wandering through the Sahara desert for weeks. They took strange drugs. They recited prayers and incantations. Neuberg had shaved his head completely except for two bits of hair that he spiked up to look like devil horns. Frequently Crowley led him naked on a leash. They must have presented quite a picture.

At night, Crowley took out his scrying stone and cried out to the Enochian aethyrs, then peered into each one and narrated what he saw, as Neuberg frantically scribbled notes. This was their procedure.

When they came to the cursed tenth aethyr, their method had to change, for the tenth aethyr was also the abyss, Da’ath. The abyss is the final veil between the lower planes and the realm of the divine, Atziluth. To cross the abyss was the most important and the most dangerous work a magician could undertake, for it would open his eyes to ultimate reality.

But also, the abyss had a guardian, the duplicitous demon Choronzon.

Crowley and Neuberg drew a magic circle, in which Neuberg took up his position with a ceremonial dagger for self-defense. They also drew a summoning triangle, and slew a dove at each corner. Crowley himself stepped into the triangle, and became inhabited by Choronzon.

Choronzon distracted Neuberg with nonsensical babble, then kicked sand over the triangle and the circle and attacked. Neuberg was able to subdue Choronzon in a physical struggle.

The details of what happened next are sketchy. Pages of Crowley’s magical record describing this part of the operation are missing. This is probably because homosexuality was still extremely illegal in Britain at the time. The trial of Oscar Wilde was a recent memory. So what lives on is speculation and legend, and according to that legend, Neuberg sodomized Crowley.

Remember that this was the 1910s and Crowley was an upper-class British male. He was no stranger by then to passive homosexual intercourse, but apparently the power of transgressing his social and gender roles in this way had not faded. Crowley, demon possessed and anally penetrated, in the midst of the desert night far from anyone else, probably drug addled and definitely high on ceremonial magick, found this experience so intense, so mind-breaking, that he was able to cross the abyss.

That’s the legend. Reality is more complicated. Acccording to Crowley’s autohagiography, he had been crossing the abyss for months. His entry into this realm of dissolution had actually been triggered by the death of his young daughter and his wife’s subsequent descent into alcoholism. He did not conquer the abyss in a single feverish night of ritual and rough gay sex—the abyss had lived in him for a long, long time.

His story is both striking and cautionary. Crossing the abyss is supposed to be an experience of ego death. Crowley either failed dramatically at this, or else he became a living example of why having an ego is good, actually. Let us not confuse the different senses of “ego” here. We are not talking about pride and conceit, which Crowley certainly retained. We are talking about “ego” in a Freudian or Jungian sense—ego as selfhood, as a mask or container that allows our complicated, multidimensional beings to interact functionally with the world.

Having encountered the abyss myself, I now think Crowley may have actually succeeded in losing his ego. And it wasn’t a good thing.

Crowley spoke, in disturbingly racialized-sounding terms, of the “Black Brothers of the Left Hand Path,” a phrase I’d love to never hear again except possibly as a future Zeal & Ardor album title. This “brotherhood” that he so vilified was made up of those who entered the abyss and still retained selfhood. To Crowley, who was unexpectedly right-hand path, this was the ultimate sin. The goal to him was absolute union with everything (combined with the realization that all things, even God itself, were actually nothing). He aimed at a spiritual solipsistic nihilism, and strove to dissolve all boundary between self and other. Since a radical lack of boundaries characterized the rest of his life, by his own standards he may have succeeded. He treated others as poorly as he treated himself, and acted as if their belongings and money were actually his. So much for enlightenment.

Why am I talking so much about goddamn Aleister Crowley? Because he is one of my teachers—one who teaches me what NOT to do as often as he teaches me what TO do. As much as I craft my Satanism in dialectical opposition to Christianity, I also craft it in dialectical opposition with Crowley. If someone wants to call me a reverse Christian, they better call me a reverse Thelemite too.

But also, something about the legend of his crossing of the abyss resonated with me. It’s so raw, so visceral, so melodramatic, and so, so, fucking GAY. I recognized my own ritual style in it—though I personally don’t engage in animal sacrifice. That balls to the wall craziness of making the leap, just diving right in the deep end of experience.

Thelemic rocket scientist and fellow bisexual Jack Parsons was also like that, at his best— his magic was as dangerous and cutting-edge as his work with rocketry and explosives, and he aimed just as high with both.

That spirit of daring occult experimentation inspires me. In this one sense, I strive to follow in both their footsteps. In some powerful way, my own masculinity feels bound up in this type of esoteric risk-taking. And part of that macho risk-taking is, paradoxically, gender transgression.

Enough about these others guys. Let’s talk about me. I sit here before you today having recently entered Da’ath myself, along with my lovely fiance Vix. Hi from the abyss! It’s weird in here.

What the fuck is the abyss? This is a pretty damn esoteric topic that involves knowledge of multiple schools of Kabbalah, and also of the Tree of Klipot. I’m going to try my best to talk about Da’ath in a way that is accessible to as many of you as possible. If you have questions, please feel free to ask me later.

But also, even if you know all that shit, the abyss is nearly impossible to describe. It has to be experienced to be understood. This is what every magician I know who has reached it has told me. I agree with them.

As simply as I can put it, Da’ath is a stage that one may reach after many prior stages of initiation. It’s a place where one’s self-conception must be radically challenged. One’s model of reality may also fall apart. It’s a cataclysmic stage of self-growth, of spiritual death and rebirth. That’s one of the things Da’ath is.

Da’ath means knowledge. It can be seen to represent the plucked fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. According to the serpent of genesis, to eat of it means to become as gods, knowing good and evil. It’s the apple bearing the marks of Eve’s and Adam’s teeth.

Da’ath is a realm of limitless potential– a place where all things that are unreal and imaginary reside, a chaotic realm of ideas and figments and words without meaning. Everything that doesn’t exist belongs to Da’ath.

But also, everything that DOES exist may also belong in Da’ath. According to some schools of more traditional Jewish Kabbalah, Da’ath is the container of all the other spheres on the tree of life.

That sort of makes sense. Everything we experience is experienced through our own thoughts, though knowledge. Without a brain we can’t perceive the universe. So in some ways, Da’ath is the mind.

On the body, however, Da’ath is most often assigned to the throat. It’s associated with speech and words, whether they make sense or not. Speech and words are also a big part of how we conceptualize existence, and their link to the mind is obvious. Da’ath is verbal.

But Da’ath is a wild, Dionysian manifestation of mind and of words. Da’ath is so crowded with things and ideas and sounds that it doesn’t make sense. It can’t.

Da’ath is also sometimes conceived of as the hole in Yahweh’s orderly universe that was caused when Lucifer rebelled. Da’ath is the cosmic wind howling in the ears of falling angels and their agonized screams.

Da’ath is also a desert, a wasteland, a place of spiritual retreat and arduous ordeal and testing.

And on an emotional and spiritual level, this is where I am now. I don’t know who I will be on the other side. I am willing to be ground down to dust and reconstituted. But I am not willing to do what Crowley would have me do, and relinquish the core particle of what makes me who I am. I am not willing to exist permanently in dissolution. That probably makes me a member of the Brotherhood he so vilified, but since I don’t want any part of what he called the White Lodge, I’m fine with that.

This process is familiar to me, in some ways. It reminds me of gender transition. You could actually say that I’ve been through many transitions. I realized that I was a man more than a decade ago, but my approach to being a man has been highly experimental. I’ve gone on and off of testosterone repeatedly, and have wildly varied my gender presentation. My gender, like my selfhood, is in a radical state of flux. I sometimes feel that I have been many people and lived many lifetimes within this single incarnation. Yet there remains a kernel of something essential in my identity as in my gender. I am always a man, and I am always myself, no matter how many times I dissolve and am reconstituted. The abyss may be a more intense experience of this dissolution.

How did I get here? In some ways, I used a similar method to what Crowley used: gender fuckery, sexual transgression, and blurring of selfhood through demonic possession.

The first thing I did was hack off all my hair. It felt necessary. I loved my long hair but I knew I had to relinquish parts of who I have become. Those parts of me may return, the way that hair grows back. Or they may not. It was a ritual sacrifice.

Then I dressed in drag, a stark contrast to my suddenly more masculine haircut. It was trashy, messy, punk drag— ripped fishnets and a black slip dress and thick dark smudged eyeliner.

In this outfit, I channeled Choronzon. More accurately, I allowed myself to become possessed.

Choronzon is not, I think, a demon. He’s certainly not a fallen angel. He’s not even a he, I merely call him that by convenience since I experienced him mainly through my own he-pronouned body. Choronzon is not a personality. He is a conglomeration of incoherent and contradictory ideas and energies, a whirlwind of cosmic garbage and treasure. He is an embodiment of pure chaos, neither creative nor destructive, but infinitely all-encompassing.

In short, he has no ego.

When he took possession of me, I lost all control of my body and voice. I drooled, I twitched, I thrashed, I babbled. It was a little like speaking in tongues, but less linguistic. Just repetitive, meaningless syllables. Components of speech, of language, totally unorganized in any way. No cooperation between them. No cooperation between my limbs and my brain. I myself could observe, but I couldn’t do much more. Fortunately Vix was there to wrangle me. I had put on restraints, in preparation for the possession, fearing Choronzon might attack. He didn’t. He didn’t have it together enough to do that. Not even close. The restraints didn’t end up being needed but it was still a good instinct– I was at risk of hurting myself or Vix by simply flailing.

It was a ritual of sex magick. I do not want to give TMI because I am your pastor. Suffice it to say this: for Crowley, the taboo of bottoming, of being penetrated, was what got him into the abyss. For me, my fear, my chaos, my abject, lies in the active role. I have a huge fear of unleashing violence and toxic masculinity. Choronzon, in me, ending up embodying the most piggish, degraded, phallic sexuality. A masculine sexuality that doesn’t even enjoy itself– that just wants to conquer and penetrate to score points. A mindless, mechanical urge to fuck.

Chaos and the abyss are often gendered as feminine by male occultists. That’s a bit Jordan Peterson in my mind. They probably gender chaos that way simply because to them, anything not purely male looks female. The abyss is no gender and all genders. I used a chaotic, abject form of masculinity to alienate myself from myself– becoming the thing I fear, the thing that disgusts me, caused me to vacate my being enough that I could experience a total lack of self.

When I came out of it– when Vix pulled me out of it– I was shaken. I had experienced selflessness and It wasn’t bliss. It wasn’t pure, divine, universal love. There was nothing in me that could love. No me to do the loving. It was more like being an asteroid belt– just a bunch of space rocks smashing aimlessly into each other. A collection of things with no purpose.

I’m very happy to have a self again.

I am aware that in the abyss, who I think I am may be challenged. I may come out the other side of this as a completely different person. In fact, I hope I do. But the goal, in my opinion, should never be complete loss of ego. How much of one’s personality one needs to shed, quite frankly, depends on the personality in question. I know I am far from perfect. I hope, in this struggle, to become more perfect. I have already agreed to relinquish everything that is not of my higher self, of my inner God. That is my goal, and I will probably fall short.

And even if I become ground down to that single divine spark, I’m going to have to rebuild an edifice around it, a vessel of personality to navigate the world.

Egos are like genders. They might ultimately be constructs, but it’s very important to inhabit one that feels reasonably comfortable. They can be fluid, they can change over time. They can also be works of art. A self is a beautiful thing to have.

This is my message from the abyss today. I hope it spoke to some of you. Ideally I hope it spoke to all of you, and gave everyone at least something to think about.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to me in here. I may change radically in ways that all of you can see, or the changes may be far more personal and internal. The only thing I can commit to is not being a dick while I’m in flux.

Left, Right, East, West: The Left-Hand Path in Tantra and Western Esotericism

Written as my final paper for a course on Hindu doctrines and theologies. Graded A+ by my wonderful and knowledgeable professor, otherwise I wouldn’t presume to post on this topic.

The term “left-hand path,” translated from the Sanskrit “vamachara,” was probably brought west by Helena Blavatsky in the 19^th century.[1] The phrase was absorbed into Western esotericism and quickly combined with European assumptions about “leftness.” “Sinister” is Latin for “left,” and Kabbalists had written about the demonic “left emanation” long before Blavatsky’s time.[2] In the west, the “left-hand path” quickly became associated with Satanism and “black magic.” Aleister Crowley solidified the western definition of the “left-hand path” to connote magical practices which solidify the ego, rather than leading to absorption in the oneness of the universe.[3] Though Crowley saw this as a negative, subsequent western magicians, such as Michael Aquino, have embraced the idea of a spiritual path that preserves individual ego.[4] This focus on the maintenance of selfhood is the most significant philosophical difference between vamachara tantra and the left-hand path in western magic.

Notes on Perspective, Terminology, and Methodology

This is a Comparative Theology paper written by a practitioner of left-handed western magic. This perspective is very empathetic towards vamachara, but is also prone to overidentification with it, which can lead to distortions and to colonizing behavior. To counter these tendencies, I will draw upon Dr. Rita Sherma’s suggested framework for what she calls “Interreligious Theological Reflection.”[5]

For purposes of clarity, this paper will henceforth refer to left-hand and right-hand practices originating in India as vamachara and daksinachara respectively, and to parallel western practices with the English terms left-hand and right-hand.

Because of the influence of east on west, comparing vamachara to the left-hand magic is both inevitable and problematic. The influence came about largely under circumstances of colonization, appropriation, and resultant economic inequality during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. However, there may also be older and deeper reasons for similarities between vamachara and the left-hand path. Judaism and Christianity are not originally products of Europe, but of the Middle East. The cultural and geographic proximity between Indian and Abrahamic religious traditions was, at one time, much greater. Judaism specifically has a history of flourishing in India free of persecution.[6] There are marked similarities between Jewish kabbalah and vedic (and later tantric) philosophy, which are probably not accidental. Kabbalah is one of the main influences on western esotericism. Exactly how these older Indian influences may have traveled west via kabbalah is a topic that needs much more study, and is unfortunately outside the scope of this paper. However, because it seems foolish to believe that such similarities in philosophy are purely coincidental, I will assume the existence of complex cultural exchanges between east and west predating colonization and the appropriations of Blavatsky and Crowley.

There are additional issues when comparing vamachara to the left-hand path, which has been primarily equated with “black magic” and “Satanism.” There is a long Christian history of turning other people’s gods into demons. This tradition reaches all the way back to the Bible.[7] It was perpetrated by colonizers against the gods and peoples of India. The Dictionnaire Infernal, a 19^th century catalog of demons, casually includes Kali[8] and Garuda[9], with shockingly racist illustrations, alongside familiar Abrahamic demons like Asmoday and Beelzebub. Leo Taxil’s hoax text The Devil in the 19^th Century, which describes a fictional world-wide Luciferian cabal of Freemasons, includes depictions of Brahma devotees as Satanists.[10] (The anti-Hindu stereotypes portrayed by Taxil are in fact the same ones infusing the much later popular text Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom[11].)

Of course, there is a difference between how a Christian thinks of Satanism and how a Satanist thinks of Satanism. Western practitioners of the left-hand path do not see Lucifer as evil, but as a god of knowledge, carnal pleasure, and spiritual liberation. His role can seem superficially similar to that of Shiva, with his feminine consorts, such as Lilith and Na’amah, occupying seemingly parallel roles to those of Kali, Durga, and other manifestations of Shakti. These left-hand practitioners do not see these parallels as insulting to tantric deities, but as celebratory and inspirational. Anton LaVey includes Kali and Shiva on his list of “Infernal Names” alongside many other deities and demons his wishes to invoke in a positive sense.[12] Aleister Crowley equates Kali with Lilith in his mystical odyssey The Vision and the Voice.[13] Unfortunately, such usages remain appropriative, and even though they are meant to be reverent, they come across as insulting in the context of Christian demonization of these gods.

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The Work of Our Hands: A Sermon on Idolatry

This was preached by Pastor Johnny at Church of the Morningstar on 12/19/20.

What do you think of when you hear the words “idolatry” or “idol worship?” Golden calves? Superstition? Ignorance? Bloody sacrifice? Wild orgies? Whatever images pop into your mind, they probably come from the Hebrew Bible. Across many books and many passages, the prophets rail against idolatry.

They portray the worship of idols as empty, foolish, and spiritually bankrupt. “Who would fashion a god or cast an image that can do no good?” asks Isaiah. “Look, all its devotees shall be put to shame; the artisans too are merely human.” The argument is that man-made Gods are worthless and unreal.

A true God, according to Isaiah, must be the creator of all. Before God, human beings must be profoundly small and infinitely powerless. For a human to create a God is both backwards and blasphemous.

Of course, as a group of Satanists, Pagans, Discordians, and Chaotes, we have radically different ideas about Gods and the role of humanity. Many of us believe that humans create our own deities, to a greater or lesser extent. All of us embrace our own divine capacity to co-create reality. Most of us cherish altars and sacred images, though few of us bow down before them. Some of us even worship ourselves—I am one of this group. In other words, we are all idolators.

Today I intend to defend idolatry—the beautiful, radical and misunderstood practice of worshipping the finite and revering the small.

Christians talk about God as “creator” and us as his “creatures.” This language quite intentionally places humanity in a subservient role. The creator must be obeyed, and is due worship, simply because he made us. Implicit in this philosophy is the idea that he can unmake us as well. “I will uproot your sacred (Asherah) poles from among you and destroy your towns,” says Yahweh through the prophet Micah. Needless to say, this is far from the only dire threat Yahweh makes against humanity in the course of the Hebrew Bible. In fact, as threats from God go, it’s pretty tame. I choose this one in particular because it’s connected to the argument against idolatry. Yahweh made you, Yahweh can destroy you—furthermore, if you have the audacity to make anything yourself, and hold it dear, Yahweh can destroy that as well.

One thing Satanism does is challenge the notion that the creator must automatically be worthy of worship. I don’t personally consider Yahweh the creator, but even if I did, why would mean that I must bow to him? In fact, there can be great power in rejecting the one who made you—especially if that maker is evil. Based on what I know of this congregation, I’d say a solid majority of us have at least one abusive parent. We have learned the hard way that the ones who gave you life cannot necessarily be trusted, do not always deserve respect, and frequently, must be resisted and disobeyed in the name of our own dignity, sanity, survival, and growth.

The stories we hold dear—that of the fall of Lucifer from Heaven, and of Adam and Eve from Eden—richly transmit this truth. Both of these are tales of growing up, and separating from a tyrannical Father in order to pursue autonomy. Given some of our backgrounds, it’s small wonder we relate to these tales.

So we have demolished one argument against idolatry—that the creator, and only the creator, must be worshipped. As poignant as our rejection of this dogma may be, it’s probably the least interesting and most obvious point that I am going to make today. Let’s move on, and investigate the second objection—that human-made gods are unreal and worthless.

Since the Enlightenment, it has become popular for atheists to argue that all gods are human-made, and therefore unreal. This is a good argument, as far as it goes. But most of us are not atheists here. This was the argument of the modern period. As we have moved into post-modernism, things have gotten weirder, and more interesting.

In the post-modern period, we can consider that maybe gods do exist, precisely because we invented them. Since the 19^th century, western magicians have become interested in the notion of egregores. Deriving from the term grigori, which refers to the Watcher angels, egregore describes an entity given life by the focused thoughts of many people. These “thought forms” are supposed to be real, autonomous spiritual beings possessed of self-awareness, and they can be incredibly powerful. Those of us who are influenced by Chaos magick may even believe that all gods are, in truth, egregores, born from collective human imagination. Writers like Terry Pratchett—who is underappreciated as a theologian—have toyed with the idea that it is human worship that makes gods real and powerful. They rely on us as much as we rely on them. The relationship then becomes symbiotic. Instead of a cosmic authoritarian regime wherein humans must cower under the boot of God, we enter into a dynamic of mutual nurturance with our deities.

This is idolatry par excellence, wherein the purest generative power is the human imagination. A thoughtful, loving, and playful idolatry. Gods are no longer formed out of wood or stone, but from passion, ideals, and devotion. We give them form with the sacred images we make, we feed them with our prayers and offerings. At one time, Yahweh, too, was worshipped in this way—you can easily see this in the earlier books of the Hebrew Bible, wherein he is plied with incense and animal sacrifices. Eventually, however, he becomes the corporate monopoly of egregores, “too big to fail.” He does not need the incense and the burnt offerings the way less popular deities do. He even begins to reject them.

A typical Christian, of course, could never accept the idea of an egregore. Only God creates, after all—we are but creatures, with nothing divine about us. Ours is not to make. Just to needle such a person, and to make a theological point, I might reference Genesis 3:22, wherein Yahweh admits, “The man has become like one of us,” meaning godlike. This is shortly after Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit, and shortly before Yahweh throws them out of Eden. In this passage, Yahweh himself agrees with what the Serpent said earlier, in Genesis 3:5: “for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” God confirms the serpent’s statement—no lies detected here!—and affirms that Adam and Eve have, in fact, gained Godlike attributes. They lack only immortality, and God spitefully drives them out of Eden that they may not eat from the Tree of Life and gain this as well. We are therefore theologically justified, from the Enemy’s own book and in his own words, in considering ourselves, as humans, to be divinities, and in granting ourselves a participating role in creation.

We are small gods—not omnipotent, not omniscient, and hardly omnipresent. But we have a share in the group project which is the generation of reality itself. Everything we do leaves an imprint, however small, on the universe. Our actions have consequences. Maybe this is what it means to know good and evil.

Let’s look at a scathing anti-idolatry screed of Isaiah’s, keeping in mind what we have discussed about egregores and creation and human divinity.

“ISAIAH 44:13 The carpenter stretches a line, marks it out with a stylus, fashions it with planes, and marks it with a compass; he makes it in human form, with human beauty, to be set up in a shrine.”

Human form, with human beauty—were we not supposedly made in God’s image to begin with? Were not we humans empowered by the fruit of knowledge to carry not only the likeness of divinity, but its spark as well? What on earth is wrong with reverence for human form and human beauty?

I, for one, would love to see us treat it with more respect! We are harsh on ourselves, punishing our bodies with the legacy of Christian guilt and Victorian prudery. We are told vanity is a sin, so we think it is virtuous to hate ourselves. We look in the mirror with total ingratitude, seeing only flaws, ignoring whatever youth, health and beauty we may have until it is too late. Years later, when we are old and feeble, we may look at old photos of ourselves and sigh wistfully, finally admitting, “Gosh, I was a cute!” But not now. We aren’t supposed to see it now. The gifts of the flesh must be scorned when they are here and mourned when they are gone. Don’t you dare worship the human body—your own, or another’s.

“ISAIAH 44:14 He cuts down cedars or chooses a holm tree or an oak and lets it grow strong among the trees of the forest. He plants a cedar and the rain nourishes it.”

This bit of mundane detail is worth analyzing. I’ve spoken mainly about what the prophets have to say against idolatry as worship of, essentially, works of art—figures of carved wood and stone. But there is another part to idolatry that the prophets of the Bible condemn—worship of sacred hills, rocks and trees. Isaiah seems to be criticizing reverence both for the trees and for the idols carved from them. Neither the beauty of nature nor of art should be adored. Nothing material can be sacred to him.

“ISAIAH 44:15-16 Then it can be used as fuel. Part of it he takes and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it, makes it a carved image and bows down before it. 16 Half of it he burns in the fire; over this half he roasts meat, eats it and is satisfied. He also warms himself and says, “Ah, I am warm, I can feel the fire!”

Isaiah criticizes the mundane usages that are made of the parts of the wood that do not become the idol. “How can you worship something made of the same stuff that you burn to cook over and to stay warm?” he is asking. To him I ask—what’s wrong with that? It sounds like you are asking, “How can you worship something made of a material that sustains your existence?” The spare wood from the idols does not go to waste—it helps to keep you from starving or freezing to death. This pragmatism does not seem in the least bit profane to me. Even if the only thing your God ever does is feed you and keep you warm, hey, that’s more good than many people get out of religion these days!

“ISAIAH 44:17 The rest of it he makes into a god, his idol, bows down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says, “Save me, for you are my god!”

Isaiah thinks it absurd that a man can make a god and then expect it to be able to save him. But we in this church recognize what Isaiah’s carpenter is doing: magick. Every one of us who has sketched a sigil or made a thought-form servitor has done the same thing—created a spiritual entity for the purpose of helping us.

Idolatry and magic go hand in hand in the Bible as well. The Prophet Micah has this to say:

“12 and I will cut off sorceries from your hand, and you shall have no more soothsayers; 13 and I will cut off your images and your pillars from among you, and you shall bow down no more to the work of your hands.”

Connecting idolatry and magic makes just as much sense to us as it does to Micah, even though we view these things in a positive sense.

A magician or a witch is a person who engages intentionally in the construction of spiritual reality. A witch or magician engages tactilely with their Gods and with other things unseen. The altars, the incense, the images, the bells and candles and ceremonial daggers, the chalices and censors and crystals—all these are handles that allow us to grasp at, and manipulate, some aspect of the divine. We understand that spiritual essence resides in these objects, and in us. Material things are imbued with sacredness, no less because of their fragility or impermanence.

And so are we.

In the spirit of Antichristmas, I want to close this reflection with some thoughts on the most unholy idolatry of all—the worship of the self.

I believe, you see, in a God that resides in me. No, this God doesn’t just reside in me—it IS me, the best part of me, the most ideal version of me. My apotheosis. This God is the only God I worship on my knees. Satan introduced me to this God, just as he introduced Eve to the God within her.

“Don’t worship me,” the Devil said, “Worship this, this sacred thing which is in you. Bow down to this divinity! Prostrate before It! Surrender and yield to the limitless potential that dwells in your spirit. Pray to your eternal soul! Beg It to descend and grant you Its wisdom, Its strength, Its courage and grace! Thank It every day for Its gifts. And see, this body of yours is Its temple! Treat it well. Adorn it with jewels. Rub it with oils and perfumes. Make it a glittering shrine. Feed it with rich foods and sensual indulgences.

“And rejoice! For the coming of the Antichrist is at hand.

“Yes, the Antichrist! The fully human, fully divine being which You are at your best! To say that only Christ was god made flesh is high blasphemy against You. You, too, are fully human and fully divine.

“Christ means anointed. You are Antichrist. You are not anointed because You are not one, but many. Each and every human being is a God on Earth and not one is chosen to stand above others! That is why the Beast has many heads, and all of them are crowned.

“Do not bow to me. Bow to the That Which You Should Be. Submit utterly to what You know in Your heart is right, for You are a God knowing good and evil. Obey the voice of Your true self in all things, and never surrender to any other will.

“Worship that God, that it may be! Worship your potential, that it may come to bloom! Create the shrine that divinity may dwell in it. Do not neglect the sacrifices and oblations—to eat, to sleep, to bathe, to care for the temple.

“Sculpt and carve and perfect the wood and stone of your spirit. Make of yourself an idol, something worth adoring.

“And one day, may you look into the mirror and see the eyes of God looking back at you.”

Nema.

Guest Post: the Witch Myth by Frater Babylon

A sermon given at Church of the Morningstar on December 5th, 2020

The Witch Trials. What do those words bring to mind? Arthur Miller’s play the Crucible? Bodies burning on stakes? The opposing forces of religion and rationality as modernity took hold? The persecution of female healers and midwives who knew “the old ways”? A madness instigated by clergy? Ergot poisoning? A misogynist campaign to remove protofeminist independent women?

Most of these are more reflective of folklore than fact. Outdated scholarship and fictional depictions that have become part of our cultural mythology. What function do these stories have? Why are they so… sticky culturally?

Why is it so pleasing to us to believe the “witch dunking” torture inevitably resulted in death (those who sank were perceived as innocent, whereas those who floated were guilty because the water had “rejected” them), when in reality those who sank were of course not just allowed to drown. Why are we so keen to explain them away? Blame ergot hallucinations, or Christianity, or misogyny, or the “irrationality” of the era.

Well I think it’s because it’s hard to confront these things directly, and because they feel so inexplicable they become mirrors, empty spaces where we can fill in our fears and fantasies.

So for this sermon I want to focus on one particular aspect of the folklore of the history of the witch trials, the feminist myth of the witch trials, because that seems to be the most prevalent here.

So what is this myth? I’ll borrow a version of it from Diane Purkiss’s marvelous book “The Witch in History”

Here is a story, Once upon a time, there was a woman who lived on the edge of a village. She lived on her own, in her own house surrounded by her garden, in which she grew all manner of herbs and other healing plants. Though she was alone, she was never lonely; she had her garden and her animals for company, she took lovers when she wished, and she was always busy. The woman was a healer and a midwife; she had practical knowledge taught her by her mother, and mystical knowledge derived from her closeness to nature, or from a half submerged pagan religion. She helped women give birth, and she had healing hands, she used her knowledge of herbs and her common sense to help the sick. However her peaceful existence was disrupted. Even though this woman was harmless, she posed a threat to the fearful. Her medical knowledge threatened the doctor. Her simple, true spiritual values threatened the superstitious nonsense of the Catholic church, as did her affirmation of the sensuous body. Her independence and freedom threatened men. So the inquisition descended on her and cruelly tortured her into confessing to lies about the devil. She was burned alive by men who hated women, along with millions of others like her.

I think this is a fairly good encapsulation of this myth. It’s a popular story, a deeply appealing story, and a story that’s had a huge effect on the history of many social movements, from gay liberation, to feminism, to ideas that spread through and take deep root in the modern left. However, it’s also not a true story. The true story is far more complicated, with far less clearly defined camps in terms of good and evil, and far less persecution of a supposed threat to patriarchal authority or economic dominance, but rooted in genuinely and deeply held beliefs. Midwives were not targeted (we have exactly one case of a midwife being accused of and executed for witchcraft in Britain and a second one in France), in fact Midwives were more likely to be involved in witch trials as expert witnesses for the prosecution. A good portion (and possibly the majority) of accusers were women themselves, and most cases relied at least partially on the testimony of women. There is no evidence that most witches were unmarried, sexually liberated or members of what we would consider the LGBTQ community. Catholic church courts were usually more lenient than civil courts. These facts are backed up by the numbers we get when we look at compiled trial records across Europe, checking for prosecutions, convictions, details of accusers and accused, witness testimonies and so on, and you can find most of this in the Witch in History.

In Medieval Europe the Catholic church considered belief in evil witchcraft to be heretical and the Germanic Council of Paderborn in 785 explicitly outlawed the very belief in witches. Those who accused others of witchcraft were the ones considered acting pagan, not the accused, and the author of the Malleus Maleficarum (often a source used to support this myth) was admonished by the Catholic church and his book was banned, additionally many authorities dismissed his work as quackery. Not to mention that the Medieval and early modern Catholic church often considered birth control and abortion a lesser evil for a family that would suffer if they had more children. Clergy often using the phrase “Si non caste tamen caute” meaning “if not chastely, at least cautiously” (essentially advising those engaging in elicit sex to use some form of protection).

This myth also astronomically inflates the number of witches executed from the modern scholarly consensus of less than 100,000 and likely between 35,000 and 60,000 during the period from 1400 to 1782 across all of Europe. More were tried of course, but another myth is that witches, once accused, were nearly always convicted and conviction inevitably resulted in execution. In fact conviction rates were no greater than was usual for the period and place typically (and sometimes lower, in some places and times as few as 25% were convicted) and punishments also included fines, imprisonment, exile, and flogging. Witch trials could also take the form of civil rather than criminal matters.

Certainly, misogyny is evident in the fact that 75% of those accused (in all of Europe across the period) were women, but the fact that 25% were men, and that there were areas and periods where the majority were men (Iceland for example where 92% of the accused were men, and 70% were men in Normandy) suggests that misogyny, or an attempt to gain control over reproduction during the population crisis after the black death were not fundamentally the cause of the witch panic. It does seem that societal stress (for example in Scotland 3 of the 5 witch panics occurred during times of unusually high prices for wheat) was an influential factor, or Germany which was one of the bloodiest battlegrounds during the religious wars between Catholic and Protestant had a very high number of witch executions). There are also theories that the witch panic was partially or entirely based on either economic tensions (such as the Thomas/Macfarlane theory that rich neighbors accused poor neighbors out of guilt after refusing them alms) or as part of a plan to discipline the working class, interrupt networks of mutual aid, sew distrust and seize property so it could be consolidated by the elite (such as Federici’s analysis in Caliban and the witch). The problem with these theories is that more witch accusations were intra-class than interclass (Witch Hunting in Seventeenth-Century England: a Historiographical Review RACHAEL MACLEAN) and Witch panics were quashed by authorities as often as they were encouraged. Anton Praetorius, a noted Calvinist preacher for example, preached against witch trials, as did Reginald Scott, a member of English parliament, who wrote a pamphlet on the unreality of magic and the absurdity of the trials..

There are even accounts of elite judges who didn’t believe in witchcraft being forced by juries made up of the lower and middle classes to convict witches they didn’t believe were guilty as recounted in particular by Roger North. The Witch panic seems to be as much a popular phenomenon as an elite one (and it should be noted that the number of witch executions does not include the unknown number of extrajudicial killings that occurred).

It’s a thing that’s happened repeatedly. For example in 186 BC Livy records that there was a panic over a secret society of Bacchus worshippers which lead to mass arrests and executions. He accuses them of sedition, orgiastic sexual practices and infanticide… all same claims that show up for the early modern witch panic. Prior to that Theoris of Lemnos was accused and convicted of some crime involving poisoning and sedition at some point before 323 BC, and those are far from the only examples. In the 80s and 90s where the idea of “recovered memories” of horrific abuse along with a number of other factors lead to a Satanic Panic which bore striking resemblance to all the other witch panics that had come before.

It is also worth noting factors that seemed to prevent witch trials, for example strong local belief in effective countermagic or in faeries as agents of supernatural mischief tended to mean an area would be unlikely to have significant witch persecutions (Ronald Hutton, The Witch). Honestly, I think the witch trials can be ascribed to a variety of factors, 1. The fact that efficacy of Catholic sacramentals as protective talismans was now in doubt due to religious conflict, like I don’t think it was the result of direct Catholic/Protestant conflict as the two just can’t be linked, but I do think the fact that “wait there’s a second option?” probably made the world seem more supernaturally threatening, 2. The fact that a dude wrote a scary book about witches and the printing press had just been invented. 3. Capitalism was starting, everyone was freaked out and under stress.

I think it is interesting how much this myth strives to link the witch persecutions with persecution of women and pagans while skipping lightly over the very blatant link to persecution of Jews.

The inquisition didn’t persecute all that many “witches”, but it did persecute a hell of a lot of Jewish people. The witches “sabbat” (a very obvious corruption of shabbat, c’mon), the innumerable narrative threads that tie witch accusations to anti-semitic blood libel, which is especially interesting given the way that many modern texts espousing the myth appropriate language and forms associated with writing about the holocaust. A particularly egregious example is Mary Daly’s equating bad reviews of feminist books to nazi book burnings in Gyn/Ecology a book that lingers lovingly on the torture of women.

Why do we feel we must find some ulterior motive for the witch trials, as if they must have had some hidden agenda behind them, rather than being simply another in the long history of Satanic Panics that have shown up throughout history? What do these stories of groups of sexually liberated anti-church underclass rebels crushed by the forces of Christianity, heteropatriarchy and the advent of Capitalism mean for us? What fascination do they hold? This question is important to me because it was for a long time, a story I believed with the fervor of a founding myth.

There are a lot of reasons it sticks with us. It frames being within the domestic sphere and the performance of traditionally feminized labor as a form of resistance. This is a mixed bag I think, on the one hand it places real value and importance on things that have often been treated as unimportant, and without significant value. On the other hand it is also in some ways limiting, as it can be said to suggest that the “true/natural power of women” lies in the domestic, in the unprestigious and usually unpaid. In dismissing formal education and so on, it dismisses the struggles of women and other marginalized people to access those fields.

It offers to grant groups of people often rendered invisible by history a glamorous and exciting role in it as martyred freedom fighters. It gives us a sense of connection to a mythic and idealized past. It offers us the belief that at some point, somewhere in history we have a model to work from for our ideal society… but if that model’s not real, then why should we give it the primacy it would have if it were a functioning example?

I think another one of the reasons why we like these stories is that they’re very morally clear. The accused has never done anything wrong. The accusers are always malicious, venomous and fully aware their accusations are lies. The accusers are powerful, the accused is powerless. It’s an oddly Christian morality tale of the perfect innocent sacrificed by the malevolent and fearful.

Ironically in our critique of Christianity, we make ourselves Christ, and I do mean ourselves because I think another reason for the enduring popularity of this narrative is that it’s so easy to identify with. In histories of this nature, details of torture are often described with lurid and almost eroticized detail, while any details of what the accused said or did is oddly absent. Anything in short that might break the sense of identification with the suffering body and make us see them as truly human, historical figures with identities of their own. We are allowed only the knowledge of atrocity so that our focus can be on empathizing with fear and pain, and avoid having to understand them as people. The witches in these stories (when they are allowed a voice) are modern people dropped into history. They never say anything we’d disagree with. They value nature and freedom. They are sexually liberated. They’re kind to animals. They believe in gender equality and so on and so forth. They are persecuted because they are not like the irrational, judgemental and cruel people who surround them.

It’s a flattering picture. We like the idea that if we existed in these past contexts we’d be like that. That we’d maintain our current values unlike those people. We like the idea that our ideas are somehow purely the result of something internal to us, and that we are discreet individuals with tidy and impermeable borders to our identity. We also like to believe that the world is consistent, that we can comprehend the past easily through the lens of the present, that various beliefs consistently go together (like that Catholicism always means opposition to birth control, or that belief in the need for economic equality always means opposition to cruelty to animals). It also allows us to see ourselves identified with the perfect victim. We are never the midwife who examines the accused for witch marks. We are never the accuser. We are always the victim, never complicit, always innocent of the blood on the system’s hands. The accused is never mean spirited, vindictive or foul mouthed. She is always, ironically, for all this myth’s focus on a society wishing to be rid of difficult women, easy to love.

GUEST POST: Thanksgiving Sermon

A sermon given by Frater Babalon at Church of the Morningstar’s first Thanksgiving mass.

So, this mass is tied into the holiday of Thanksgiving, a holiday whose popular narrative is about pilgrims and indiginous people coming together for a meal after the local tribe had helped the new comers through a winter that would have starved them all otherwise.

A holiday of gratitude towards the Wampanoag, in a country that’s still actively genocidal seems bitterly ironic, especially given what happened later when, after having been allies, the colonial rulers began to create intentional distance between their people and the Wampanoag. The Wampanoag, a federation of farming communities, held land in common, the way English peasants had done until around this time, when the ruling class was enclosing common lands to have it worked to increase their own profits. The Wampanoag also ran their society… basically like an anarchist federation (sending delegates after voting on issues… because they’re a goddamn civilized people) and the ruling class of the colonies sought to prevent their servants and slaves from defecting or considering how the Wampanoag’s system of organization might be applied on the home front. The Wampanoag after a relatively long period as English allies, saw their people being enslaved by the Colonists over petty criminal cases and saw their lands and rights being further and further eroded and so they organized with other local tribal groups to fight back against the English.

In retaliation, the tribe was nearly (but not completely) wiped out. This is especially gruesome given that the reason that the Wampanoag had allied themselves to the English in the first place with a treaty that served the colonists far better than it served them, was because they had suffered a devastating plague that had killed 2/3rds of their population and left them vulnerable to traditionally hostile neighbors.

The Wampanoag weren’t recognized by the US until 2006 and we’re STILL trying to steal what miniscule amount of their land they have left. (Update: We took their land again)

The first Thanksgiving wasn’t even a Thanksgiving for the Wampanoag, simply a harvest festival in Thanksgiving to the Christian god. The Wampanoag only showed up and were invited to dinner because they heard colonists firing as they hunted geese and thought the colony was under attack and rushed to help. The colonists then invited them to dinner, but the Wampanoag warriors saw that the spread was meager and went out and shot several deer to supplement the food. These are people who fed and aided my ancestors, who fed and aided my partner’s ancestors and they betrayed them unspeakably and we keep on betraying them unspeakably.

The horror of Thanksgiving is that it’s the equivilent of thanking someone you’re actively trying to murder for saving your ass when you were choking to death.

Settler Colonialism is a truly Faustian bargain. Settler colonialism, typically a nice way of saying “invasion and genocide” is a mechanism of control. It’s a way that the ruling class can expand its reach in times of unrest by allowing the working class to pillage from others, so they do not turn instead to take back what their overlords have stolen from them.

It is a way of temporarily improving the living conditions of the working class, by giving them gains stolen from other peoples, that then, the ruling class can gradually appropriate for themselves. It is fool’s gold payment for spreading their power yet further across the globe.

This was especially true in America where many of the indiginous peoples had forms of social organization that would have been profoundly dangerous to the European ruling class if the lower classes had gotten too much exposure to them.

We live on stolen land, land stolen so that a few centuries later a real estate baron could own all of it and charge extortionate rates to the descendants of those who had committed mass murder on the land baron’s ancestor’s promise that they’d be free there.

Happy thanksgiving.

Guest Post: Sermon on the Iggigi by Pastor Jarys

This sermon was given at Church of the Morningstar on October 3rd, 2020, during a mass themed around workers’ struggle.

When we honor workers, we honor ourselves and our history, even when we feel removed from that identity. While most in our society are not a part of the ruling class and, therefore must work to survive, so gradual and global are the chains of social and economic hierarchy, that many individuals who serve the wealthy are orders of magnitude more wealthy and influential themselves than widely encompassing cross sections of humanity. Whether by the exact nature of their work, or their self-awareness, such liminal people may not consider themselves workers. Which is only causal, after all, Capitalism makes use of alienation to support its continuation, and narratives such as the middle class serve to alienate workers from workers. If some workers can take on the attitudes of the wealthy toward workers in general, without having to enjoy the corresponding advantages, all the better for the wealthy. And that is why it is rejuvenating to examine and celebrate our identity as workers, and to enjoy the freedom to explore theology that sanctifies our struggle. We are not the first people to think so, if the Congregation will indulge me in a religious history lesson, I may explain. A mythological narrative that may hold modern significance.

I’d like to tell you a story from Mesopotamian Mythology, a story that has roots with the Sumerians and echoed throughout the cultures who followed them. The version of this story tbat I will begin with today is from the Akkadians, a cultural adopter of the Sumerian cuneiform writing and pantheon, whose empire lasted for about 200 years after first annexing the fallen Suemrian cities-states around 2300 BCE. Enki and Enlil are both characters in this story, but the narrative focus is on the Igigi.

Who were the Igigi? There are multiple schools of thought on the exact meaning of this term. As many Sumerian words were often derived via numerology, some have sought a definition in the numbers that make up Igigi, equaling a sum of 600, which is one of the numbers given to the entire population of gods. But this story excludes the most powerful gods from the term Igigi, who are identified as the Annunaki. So perhaps “Igigi” could be read to mean “The masses” of the gods, in the way that the term excludes the most powerful when used today. The other school of thought breaks down the name Igigi into its composite words, as Sumerians also used word compounding in the naming of complex concepts. The words beak down to “The Heavens, eyes or sight, and [this being the Sumerians] penatrative sex”. From this, historians offer these possible translations: “Those whose view from the sky penetrates all obstructions”, or “The Observers on behalf of heaven”, or possibly “The Watchers, who deflower”. Make of that possible influence on later mythology what thou wilt.

The story is clear that the Iggi were, like all gods, made in an act of birth or artifice by other gods. The Sumerians believed that Enki created the Igigi, though the Akkadians did not specify this detail. The story is also clear that the Igigi outnumbered the Annunaki significantly. But let’s get into the context in which our narrative hangs, shall we?

In the mythological roots that came from Sumer, the gods did not practice what Sumerians would call civilisation, at least not at first. They had houses, they had implements, but they did not generally labor for their survival. When they were hungry, the gods grazed as animals do, “ate of the field”, the tablets say. But Enlil did not like this.

Enlil was a god of armies and storms who, sometime in the Akkadian prehistory and possibly sometime during Sumerian history, came of prominence and supplanted An, the sky god, of rulership over the other gods. This often occurs in Middle Eastern mythology when people with a cultural god conquer or otherwise take command of other peoples, who have their own cultural god. Both gods get folded into a shared mythology over time, with the victorious symbol becoming the King of the Hill. After he took on this glory, Enlil was forever after the god of tyrants, and his followers seemed to mean that earnestly. I may have already told the earliest myth about Democracy in this Church, in which the gods hear of Enlil’s sexual assault upon his betrothed, and put the matter to a vote, succeeding in dethroning and exiling him to the land of the Dead. In that myth Enlil becomes the symbol of what Democracy stands in opposition of, totalitarian rule.

Similarly, in this story, Enlil is a jerk. He does not want to pick things up off the ground and eat them, his will is to eat the bread produced from agriculture. And, furthermore, his will is that it be delivered to him without much effort on his part, much like an folklore Jeff Bezos. In what mythologists call the Dictatorship of Enlil, the Igigi are set to digging the first ditches needed to irrigate for farming and Enlil goes to rest in his house. The Igigi know they are being forced to do this, they know the share of labor is unfair. So what do they do?

They strike. The Igigi burn their implements and stand en mass outside of Enlil’s house, accusingly. Enlil is given a rude awakening, possibly by the shouting of those he once thought of as peons outside. While the myth does not specify this, we might suppose that the god of armies and storms….is afraid. So afraid that he doesn’t rush to action, which is unusual for him. Instead, Enlil convenes a council of the Annunaki, and they agree to send a messenger to the Igigi. The Igigi receive the messenger with earnest honesty, advocating for their rights against this unjust treatment. Upon hearing of the Igigi’s complaints, Enlil still does not go to war. He does something he hates to do, he asks Enki for help.

Now, in the Sumerian version of this story, which also features the Igigi suffering the dictatorship of Enlil, there is no strike, just despair. The working gods cry tears that tremble the heart of the earth goddess, Ki, who birthed them. In response, she wakes the sleeping Enki and entreats him to open himself to the suffering of the Igigi. Enki reaches his arm to them, concerns himself with them, and decides to resolve the situation in their favor. There is more compassion and perhaps a lesson in shutting up and listening to those less privileged than you in this version, but in both versions, Enki’s solution is the same.

Enki proposes that they relieve the Igigi of their work through automation. Specifically, through the creation of a new type of being to do this work. You may have heard of this robot, or as the Sumerians envisioned them, clay-formed golems, because you see them every time you look….. in a mirror! That is right, the golems are humanity. In the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonion creation myths humans are formed to resolve a labor dispute. Make the humans do it.

Which is telling, I think, the story has obvious theo-sociological uses in Mesopotamian society, by explaining why people relied on irrigation farming to survive, and therefore the massive cooperation of cities full of people to support farming on a societal scale. To the Sumerians there was no urban/rural divide. The City was invented to supply the Farm, who feed the cities in turn. It is all cooperation, always has been.

This myth also had obvious uses in explaining class hierarchy built on a laboring class at its base. Certainly, when the Sumerians first started speaking their language, government may have been radically different than the imperial monarchies they passed down to the Akkadians, as their myths hint at direct democracy and merit-based management. As far as we know, in the earliest literate Suemrian cities, priests trained to read the texts in which instructions on farming had been written down, by previous generations, and to note down occurrences and their possible causes in further texts, so that some kind of progress could be eked out by later generations. Unfortunately, the temples became too self-serving and from them arose monarchical families, who innovated kingship from past managerial roles, and started an ongoing and yet never-ending series of conflicts over dynastic rulership in the area. To summarise so far: the Igigi, like the Middle Class, are a narrative that upholds social hierarchy, imagining that it extended all the way into the heavens. Your boss had a boss, who had a boss, who was a god, but also had a boss. Such a worldview would hold Enki in regard for his contribution to the status quo. Why am I even telling this myth to you, then?

Because it seems to uphold injustice power structures until, I think, we crack that story open and examine some underlying themes. There are two things that I want to highlight about this myth for ruther study and the first is the victory of the Igigi. The Annunaki have primary importance in Mesopotamian religion, and the head god had a symbolic place of narrative, if not historical, primacy. And yet the Igigi won their strike, and not just won but withheld the labor they were bullied into playing without any reprisal or further oppression. They were no longer required to labor, but to watch over those who labored, and advocate on their behalf to the powers that be. This is where the Sumerian and Akkadian belief in a personal god clears things up, by which I mean the belief that every person has a god devoted to their well-being. This god’s job was to watch over you and to advocate for you to the Annunaki. When people suffered ill fates, they often sought to soothe and care for their personal god, to make their job easier so they could spend more time arguing with the gods of Heaven to make your fate easier in turn.

The Igigi, as the masses of the gods, can be assumed to be these personal gods. Which makes sense, as the priesthood and then the monarchs claimed that their personal gods from among the Annunaki, the gods of state. This was a deeply introspective divinity, a person and their god were said to identify with each other, as humans were made of not just the mud provided by Enki from the Abzu, but the blood shed by all the gods in that labor strike. Later myths identified this blood having come from a single sacrificial god, usually the titan-like figures of Tiamat and Abzu, from which later societies were inspired to create Leviathan and Abyss. Humans were made, the myth suggests, from the blood of the struggle for justice and freedom. The Igigi, the Annunaki, and humans share that blood, though not from equivalent participation. This is not a myth of Tyranny’s victory over Labor, but of Tyranny’s failure in thinking it is of a personhood distinct and superior to those of Labor. In the Sumerian myth, the Earth Goddess Ki knows that the narrative of superiority is not true, and via compassion, Enki knows it too, and by solidarity proves the truth. In the Akkadian myth, the Igigi know that this dominance narrative is not true, and by direct action, proves the truth.

The second thing I want to highlight is the greater context of this myth, for the story does not stop there. No sooner had the tablet explained the Akkadian paradigm of a humanity derived from a strike, and Enlil getting what he wanted in the form of human religious offerings, when the same tablet continues thusly:

‘‘There had not passed twelve hundred years, The inhabited land had expanded, the people had multiplied, The land was bellowing like a wild bull. The god was disturbed by their clamour, Enlil heard their din. He said to the great gods, “Grievous has grown the din of mankind, Through their clamour I lose sleep. . .”.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “I know what story this is leading up to, there is a story just like it in the book of Genesis.” And, of course you are right, but not yet. And the distance between this story and that one, holds wisdom.

You see, in his annoyance at the very beings created to appease him, Enlil first sends a plague that ravages the human population. In response, Enki goes to Atrahasis (in Akkadian, his name in Sumerian is Ziusudra,hw essentially inspired the character of Noah) and the god tells Atrahasis of what the Igigi have accomplished, of the role of humanity as labor for the gods, and that what worked for the divine would also work for us. Enki advised a worship strike against all gods, including himself, except for that in benefit of the god of Plagues. And so Atrahasis goes out and advises the temples, they withhold all offerings and sacrifices, except to the plague god, who receives more than usual. And in return, the plague god disobeys Enlil and stops the Plague. Again, strikes work.

So Enlil sends a drought, and Enki advises the same reaction. The People withhold their prayers, except to the god of rain. It rains, the drought ends, and Enlil starts again. What he does next is obscured by a damaged tablet, but it causes a period of prolonged death, which the people reacted to with a third strike, which also worked, and then – THEN – came the flood. But first, a thought finally appeared in the vacuous caverns of Enlil’s mind, and he first went to Enki to lay a ban upon him. This is the same type of Enkian ban we perform in the First Church of the Morningstar, when we chant “En-Sagba-sagba” *, but this ban used upon the god of magic himself, and Enlil forbids interference by Banning Enki from talking to any human about the impending flood.

So Enki goes to the house of Atrahasis, refusing to speak to his acolyte, saying “I am here to address your door, you may go away, but not too far… OH DOOR! If only the humans knew what was about to befall them, a terrible and unending rain for all 40 days of the month, if only a particularly wise human would build a boat exactly to these dimensions, are you getting this door? Welp, good chat, I knew I could talk to you, door. Give my best to Atrahasis.” And Atrahasis gets the hint, sheltering farm animals and people in a large bowl-like boat, and survived Enlil’s temper tantrum of a flood, a story the Suemrians used to explain the flooding of the gulf of Iraq into a marsh plain. Enlil was so pissed that Enki had found a way around his ban, that he elevated Atrahasis to the status of a demigod after the fact, so that Enlil had not technically been disobeyed, and here we see the egotistical weakness that is Tyranny;

Their abuse of us is never going to satisfy them, until we so refuse the conceits of their demands that they have to accept our boundaries. Enlil could never appreciate the personhood of humans, could never learn from the strike of the Igigi, because to do so would require humility. And here Enki teaches humanity a theo-technical tactic that was WIDELY used, even up to today. In the Chinese Traditional Religion, the gods of villages hold a position of employment, and the people of the village are within their rights to terminate their ties to that god in response to poor performance. Similarly, Jewish trials of catharsis during the Russian Progroms sued Yahweh for breach of Covenant, allowing the congregations to release themselves of the disappointment in their insufficiently-proactive supposed superior.

When I read deeply of this myth I read that our gods, our inner divinity, serves us, and we never have to accept a theology or a power over us that is harmful to us and agnostic to our consent. Our boundaries, our own bans, are as sacred as the bans of the gods. Our right to freedom, justice, self-determination, and non-exploitation are divine, for even the gods could not deny these to each other, nor to their worshipers, when the power of collective action is implemented. The values and figures we worship, just like the governments and businesses we choose to support, are subject to our consent, end of myth. The powerful need us more than we need them, and when we withhold their use of us, we are practicing a divine magic. Workers are Divine, the Strike is Sacred, and an ounce of Compassion and Solidarity will beat a pound of Oppression in any era. Such is the wisdom of Enki, from my personal gnosis.

Thank you for reading.

*The famous “Ban Ban” circle spell, known to the Sumerians as the Zisurrû.

Notes on the Lesser Ritual of the Inverted Pentagram

A long time ago, I posted this banishing ritual that I made for my own use. I promised then to explain the occult reasoning behind it. I forgot to do that for… more than a year.

So here, at long last, it is: notes on the Lesser Ritual of the Inverted Pentagram.

Some of this explanation is a little esoteric. Since I don’t have the ability to explain all of Kabbalah and its history of appropriation and misappropriation in this post, you’ll need to do that research yourself. Sorry. I made this as simple as I can.

The Klipotic Inverted Cross

The traditional Golden Dawn Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram begins with a Cabbalistic Cross.

Since crosses are Christian and Kabbalah is Jewish (it’s often spelt Cabbala when Christianized and Qabbalah when western esotericists get into it) that’s kind of wack already.

This Cabalistic Cross is accompanied by questionable Hebrew that more or less translates to, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever, amen.”

The points touched on the body while making the cross and saying those words soooort of correspond to sephirot on the Tree of Life. “Atah” corresponds to Keter and the top of the head, “Malkuth” means Kingdom and is linked to the groin (sooooort of), “Gevurah” corresponds to the left shoulder and means severity or judgment, so I guessss that’s kinda like power, and Chesed corresponds to the right shoulder and means… mercy, or lovingkindness? Glory. Let’s pretend it means glory. (Even though there’s another sephira called Hod which means glory and it’s located somewhere else.)

So yeah, the traditional Cabbalistic Cross doesn’t work that well. I realized that a Satanized version would work at least as well– not perfectly, but arguably better.

(If you want a re-Judaized version, someone I know made one and I can send you a copy. It is arguably the most structurally sound, but it’s also RHP as fuck.)

So here’s how the Klipotic Inverted Cross works.

The ending of the Lord’s Prayer is reversed in this Satanized version, of course. The Reversed Lord’s Prayer is believed in folklore to be a way to call the Devil. We’re about to call him a lot during this banishing.

You begin saying “AMEN” as you reach up over your head and symbolically draw down your own inner divine power (from your Neshamah, which is above/around your head, theoretically. Your Neshamah is one of your upper souls in Kabbalah. You have a lot of souls apparently. Like five).

“Forever glory the” is pronounced while touching the left hip. This spot corresponds to the klipa of Samael. The equivalent sephira is Hod, which means… glory.

Next you touch the right hip, while saying “and power the.” The right hip corresponds to the klipa Harab Zereq, which is equivalent to the sephira Netzach, meaning… victory. OK, it doesn’t exactly mean power, but neither does Gevurah.

Saying “and kingdom the” touch the groin, corresponding to the klipa Nahemoth, which corresponds to the sephira Malkuth, which means… Kingdom. (Technically the groin is not Malkuth/Nahemoth but actually is Yesod/Gamaliel. Malkuth/Nahemoth is actually the feet. Oh well.)

Touching the brow, and then stretching the hand high above the head, say “Is thine for!” This corresponds to Thaumiel/Keter, the spheres on top of their respective treees. The sephira Keter is “the crown.” The klipa Thaumiel means “twins of God” and can be interpreted to mean either the duality of Baphomet, or the fact that both Satan and the individual Satanic practitioner share in godhood during the ritual.

Confused yet?

2. Pentagrams!

In the original version of the LBRP, different names of God are cried out while drawing upright pentagrams toward each of the four directions, turning about the circle in a clockwise direction (deosil, as the sun travels).

We go widdershins as we make our inverted pentagrams, and call out different names of Satan. Counter-clockwise is the direction of the Devil. I prefer to do everything widdershins and left-handed in my magic.

A lot as been written about the difference in symbolism between the upright and the inverted pentagram. I’m not going to go into it here, but if you take a look at these two classic diagrams, you’ll start to get the idea:

Facing east, we trace an inverted pentagram and vibrate “Helel!” Helel means “shining one.” It is taken from “Helel Ben Sahar,” a phrase appearing in Isaiah 14:12, which means “shining one, son of the dawn” and which was subsequently translated as “Lucifer, son of the morning.” It’s an epithet for Lucifer as the Morningstar appearing in the East.

Facing North, we trace our inverted pentagram and vibrate “Samael!” Samael is a Hebrew and Kabbalistic name for Satan. It means “blind god” or “venom of god.” In this lore, he is said to come from the North.

Facing West, we make our inverted pentagram and vibrate “Mastema!” Mastema is an epithet for Satan from the Book of Jubilees. It means “hostility.” In this version of the story, Satan falls into the sea. West is generally associated with water and the ocean.

Facing south, we make our inverted pentagram and vibrate “Azazel!” Azazel is the scapegoat who is sent out into the wilderness. I associate him with the desert, and thus with fire and the direction of the South.

3. Calling on the Consorts

The classic right-hand path version of this ritual involves calling on the four archangels. I most emphatically say “fuck those guys.” But I have four good friends too, and they are the four consorts of Lucifer. So I decided to call on them.

Assigning the consorts to directions and elements is… not an exact science. There is not a one-to-one correspondence between the consorts of Satan and the four classical elements. I could have positioned them differently in this ritual, using different logic. But I’ll explain why I did what I did.

Agrat bat Mahlat goes before me, towards the East, because she is the youngest of the consorts and thus best represents the way forward, the future, and the dawn. As the “rooftop dancer,” she also is strongly associated with air (as are many of the others as well, but never-mind).

Na’amah goes behind me and to the West because she is associated with the story of the flood, and thus with water. Also, I trust her to have my back (but that goes for all of them, so, meh).

Eisheth Zenunium goes North and to my left as the consort of Samael known as “The Northern One” and the source of the Left Emanation. North also corresponds to Earth, Eisheth Zenunim is a death goddess among other things, we get buried in the Earth when we die. (She’s honestly more associated with fire than any other element, though. Whoops.)

Lilith the younger goes South and to my right because I associate her with deserts and their fiery winds, and thus the South. (She could easily go with any of the other directions and elements, but, alas, I had to make a choice).

4. Final notes

We then visualize a flaming pentagram on the floor that we are standing in the middle of. The two upper points of the star, pointing forward on either side of our feet, give it the feel of a cockpit somehow. This symbolizes the downward direction and protects you from below. It also gives you the feeling of having drawn a visible circle on the floor, which makes circle casting feel stronger in my opinion.

“In the column shines the Morningstar” is, once again, a call to both Lucifer and to one’s Higher Self simultaneously to invest you with magical power as magician and living God. Repeating the Klipotic cross reinforces this. It also protects you from above and within.

Finally, “BE IT SO!” is what Milton has Satan say when he arrives in Hell, and I like to use it to end my rituals. The loud clap combines sound banishing with the visualization of exploding darklight. Like lightning and thunder, right?

I hope this explanation is helpful and makes sense.

GUEST POST: “Who’s A Good Boy?” by Choirmaster

A sermon by Choirmaster, given at First Church of the Morningstar, July 2020.

Hails and salutations, Morningstar! Choirmaster here. Friends, I’m a dog person. Always have been. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with cats, not to say that being a dog person excludes one from also being a cat person either, switches are valid. Also, in fairness, I never grew up around cats. My mom is allergic to them, and I had one friend from elementary whose cat was kind of an asshole. I never had the experience of making a deep, personal bond with a cat until years later. And even now I still can’t say I’m entirely chill with cats because, and this is only my lack of familiarity (yes, familiar, that was a pun,) but I find them impossible to read. There’s just something a little dodgy about a creature that might dig its claws in you because it likes you, y’know?

No, no, I didn’t write an entire sermon just to diss on the kitties. Cats are very, very good. But through and through, I am a dog person. My loyalty is to the puppers, because their loyalty is to me. Loyalty is a treasured thing. I still hold my identity with House Hufflepuff, despite the term coming from a mysterious book with no author. Truly the immaculate conception of young adult fiction. For each of my Morningstar sermons I try to establish a central theme, and let vernacular chaos ensue from there. For instance, my last sermon was all about words. This sermon is all about loyalty. But let’s not rush. We’ll get there.

Dogs. Dogs are just the best. They’re definitely more high maintenance than cats, but that’s something I empathize with, being a bit more high maintenance than the average person myself. But you know me, I don’t do average. I try to go the other way if I can help it, certainly since I met you fine heathens. Me and ordinary, we never really clicked.

But the dogs figured all that stuff out, friends! They threw out the concept of mundanity altogether! How? By approaching everything, every little thing no matter how common, with unadulterated and unabashed warmth, joy, and fascination. They say “every dog has its day,” but the truth is that every dog has every day, because every day is the Best Day Ever! Every trip to the park is Mardi Gras. Every car ride goes to the Moon. Every meal you give them saves their life. Every move, noise, and smell you make is a phenomenon. I’ve met dogs with one eye, dogs with no teeth, dogs with three legs, dogs with two legs, it makes no difference. They still take every thing they’re given (and sometimes stolen) with full enthusiasm, full gratitude, full love.

My dogs growing up were Brandy and Smokey. They’re both collies, which is the same breed as one of America’s first famous TV dogs, Lassie. Though Lassie was a long haired “rough coat” collie, and these two meatballs are short haired “smooth coat” collies. Collies can actually come in three different colorations as well as the two styles of coat, with different variants all able to appear in the same litter. In fact, Brandy is Smokey’s great uncle! Cool science.

We got Smokey when Brandy was around eight years old and had begun to show signs of age. We decided a new addition to the family would keep Brandy active, keep him from slowing down for a few more years yet. Also I was thirteen at the time and I just had my bar mitzvah, so it was time for me to man up and prove I could be responsible for a puppy. Yes we are very cute, thank you for noticing. Smokey is still alive and well today, although sadly he now lives with the breeder upstate. When I moved out of my mother’s house, it became impossible for her to take care of him on her own. That’s a whole can of worms that I… frankly can’t unpack right now, so today’s sermon is all about Brandy.

Brandy was truly the best dog in the world. He was the biggest and the fastest out of all my friends’ companions, with strong, sharp features that earned him the nickname “the hunter dog.” He was not the cleverest of creatures, unlike Smokey who was a little mischief maker. But what Brandy lacked in intelligence, he made up for twofold in fierce, earnest loyalty. He would fall for the old “fake-out throw” gag at the park ten times in a row, and never be the least bit annoyed or discouraged for the eleventh. And then when you did throw… see, collies are a shepherding breed, not retrieving. When that ball or stick was flying, the hunter dog was on the tear not an inch behind. However, once it hit the ground, he wouldn’t bring it back to you. The runaway little lamb had broken loose, and he chased it down until it stopped running. That’s a job well done for a shepherd.

“Uhh, Choirmaster, that’s all very sweet, but this isn’t exactly the most hardcore Satanic liturgy I’ve ever heard…” Hey shut the fuck up! I’m getting to that! Ugh. Rude.

Now where were we? Oh, right, speaking of shepherding, this was our favorite way to mess with Brandy: The only place he loved more than the park was the beach. We’d be playing at the bayside at Crissy Field or Land’s End, and my brother and I would wade into the surf going two opposite directions. And poor Brandy wouldn’t know what to do. He’d stand frozen in the middle, eyes frantic, hackles raised, legs locked and petrified, neck snapping between looking at me, my brother, and whichever parent was present, unable to fathom how they could possibly sit there laughing as he considered which of his two boys he could save. Like I said, not-so-much clever, but fiercely loyal.

Many of you know the origins of this sermon, which is when Pastor Johnny informed us a week ago that the Zohar’s online resource, zohar.com, has been revamped. The Zohar, Hebrew for “radiance,” is the seminal text of Kabbalah, the more mystical study of Judaism. You’ll recall I mentioned my bar mitzvah earlier. I was born and raised Jewish, both sides of the family. I went to a Jewish day school from Kindergarten to Eight Grade, with Hebrew language to boot. Check this out: it’s my school journal. This is the year 2000, and I was in First Grade. I read the scroll, learned all the myths, sang all the verses. And now that I’m a Satanist and pagan witch, I am categorically an oathbreaker; a warlock.

The five books of the Torah are just the first in the full biblical anthology of Judaism, the canon in its entirety called the Talmud. I was taught as early as Kindergarten that the Talmud is not just meant to be read and recited but critically studied and interpreted down the generations. This deep analysis and commentary is called Midrash, and it is considered an intractable, sacred part of Jewish practice. However, even in that living tradition, the Zohar’s more esoteric, goetic, left-handed approach is seen as extravagant and blasphemous. From the Jewish Encyclopedia, I quote, “On the other hand, the Zohar was censured by many rabbis because it propagated many superstitious beliefs, and produced a host of mystical dreamers, whose overexcited imaginations peopled the world with spirits, demons, and all kinds of good and bad influences.” Even those Talmudic scholars who don’t see Kabbalah as downright heretical believe the Zohar should not be read before the age of forty for the sheer complexity of its cosmogony. But you know me, “overexcited dreamer under bad influence” is my middle name! So upon checking out the new website for myself, I was immediately drawn to an entry called Baladan (dog.)

The passage begins talking about not a dog, but a lion. “The sins caused him (we never find out who “he” is by the way) to go down to the lower levels and slay the lion….” But he doesn’t actually slay the lion. He just denies it food, so “it is as though he killed it… In front of the eyes of the Other, Evil Side. And because the Other Side saw this, it gained courage and sent a dog to eat the offerings, above the altar, instead of the lion…. And what is the name of that lion? Oriel is its name, as he had the face of a lion. And what is the name of that dog? Baladan is its name.” And describes how the name Baladan comes from the Hebrew bal adam, literally means “not Adam.” Not a human. The passage concludes, and this absolutely slays me, “And it is not a human being, but a dog with the face of a dog.” Truly Baladan is a beast of mythical splendor rivaling the manticore or hippogriff. Lion with the head of an eagle? Nah, fam, we’ve got a dog… with the face of a dog! So majestic.

That breakdown of the name and aspect is typical in analysis of Hebrew texts. The lion, Oriel, I didn’t even have to look that one up. Light of God. Those words came up a lot in the prayer books, you would imagine. Lions are everywhere in Judaism. They’re obviously Yahweh’s favorite animal. My school’s mascot was a lion. Of the Twelve sons of Prophet Jacob, whose lineages became the Twelve Tribes of Israel, Judah’s banner was a lion. It’s believed King David was of Judah’s tribe, and the territory of Israel bequeathed to him (because that was something that Yahweh just straight up told Jacob he could do, despite there being people already living there and they’d have to go to war with them) included Bethlehem. And that brings us into lions in Christianity, which is its own kettle of fish. I mean we all read, or definitely saw, The Chronicles of Narnia, right? Yahweh, clearly a cat person. All the more reason I’m a dog person.

Ok, you know what the verses of Baladan and Oriel remind me of? This comic. Not for puppies. These tributes were set out on an altar by Yahweh’s devotees to feel His precious feline. But as it is written, “the Other Side saw this, and gained courage.” Baladan, the Goodest Boy of Team Evil, sees food unguarded and does what doggies do. As the meme goes, it’s free real estate. Which reminds me of something Brandy did once with a whole steak. Needled that big, long snoot of his over the kitchen counter and yoink! Not for puppies? Not anymore!

Part of the reason I brought up the territories divided among the Twelve Tribes of Israel is that a small but important wedge containing Jerusalem and Jericho was bequeathed to Jacob’s youngest son, Benjamin. Benjamin, whose tribe’s banner was a wolf by the way, was always treated as the baby in the many the Twelve Brothers stories. The most iconic being when Joseph, Benjamin’s only brother of the same mother, the coat of many colors guy, planted a silver cup in Benjamin’s bag. The punishment for thievery was enslavement. This was a test of faith…

Oh the tests of faith. Yahweh’s favorite power play. His trump card, if you will. Anyone could be threatened with slavery, torture, or death, as long as it was a test of faith. Yahweh’s not the bad guy here, it’s not His fault if you fail. He’s not evil, not a narcissistic, sadistic sociopath at all. He doesn’t want to have to punish His children, oh no! But too bad, your devotion just wasn’t strong enough. Shoulda prayed harder, asshole, byeee! Shoulda been a Good Boy! A testament of mortal submission to the Ultimate. Loyalty! This sermon is all about loyalty.

The judgement cup was a test of faith to see which, if any, of Benjamin’s half-brothers would be willing to step in and serve his wrongful sentence, giving up their own freedom for Benjamin’s. Which is pretty fucked up for Benny Boy. Banner of the wolf? In his own myth, Benjamin wasn’t the hunter dog of the story. He wasn’t even the lamb. He was the bait. He had no say in neither the imposition of this trial, nor its outcome. Zero agency, zero control, just the innocent baby brother. Shit, why does that cut me so deep?

Wait a tick! That’s my name! If you’ll allow me one more nomenclature breakdown here: Benjamin, bin yamin, is Hebrew for “son of my right hand.” Righthand. Not lefthand. And it could have been much worse. His mother Rachel died in agonizing labor delivering him, her last words calling the child ben oni, “son of my pain.”

I sometimes have moments of doubt, as I learn how sorcery and magecraft works as a practice, about using these frameworks that are rooted in Yahweh’s cosmogony. You know the adage, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” The Kabbalah, Gematria, their correspondence with the tarot: They’re written in a language I can read, and still know every letter of, because they taught me through affirmations and devotionals I made to Him through my whole childhood. And I believed them. I’m not loyal. I’m Brandy at the beach, torn between two opposite sides. Penitence is in my nature, it’s my breeding. I’m the son of the right hand. God-fearing, idol-smashing, self-humbling, faith-testing, son-sacrificing monotheism isn’t just the oath of my adolescence. It’s my legacy, dare I say the birthright (vurp) of my own name.

Fuck all that! That’s not my name! I say hail to Choirmaster of First Church of the Morningstar. A name to call the thunder and rain! Hail witch, warlock, profaner, diabolist. And I fucking love Satan. I love being a Satanist. This power I’ve found with all of you. That I’ve found with, what was it, “mystical dreamers, spirits, demons, all kinds of good and bad influences?” And best of all, the power I’ve found in pride and love of myself.

I say I am God, Satan is Lord, and yOU, tYRANT! tHOU art not great, tHOU art weak and small! tHOU art base! Here I spell tHY nAME not in UpperCase as tHOU hast commanded, but a case lOWER tHAN lOWER! Thus do I spell! Behold spellcraft! Behold I, The Magician!

((Author’s note: That was the most Discordian missive I’ll ever put to words. I can’t possibly top it, and I guess I have to fucking retire now.))

I am grateful they taught me hIS names in hIS language, all the better to tell hIM how much hE suuucks! And the Watchmaker’s grand designs? Kabbalah? Catch you on the flipside, boi! I’ll be in that dual model, which totally looks like Circus Kirby btw. And I’m going to tell you all which klipah Baladan hangs out in by our next mass, I can feel it. Tarot correspondence? Uhhh, check the deck, sweaty. Number XV, it’s a doozy!

Divination? Evocation? Astromancy? Apotheosis?? Those are hIS miracles! Gifts for GOOD Boys! No, no. Not for Satan! Ok, but like… what if WAS for Satan?

*airhorn noises* BONUS TRACK BONUS TRACK!

In the couple weeks between masses, I reflected deeply upon that quote I found from The Jewish Encyclopedia, regarding why the great Talmudic scholars of my youth considered the Zohar such a dangerous text. I’ll reiterate in full: “On the other hand, the Zohar was censured by many rabbis because it propagated many superstitious beliefs, and produced a host of mystical dreamers, whose overexcited imaginations peopled the world with spirits, demons, and all kinds of good and bad influences.”

What were these new mystics doing that was so sinister, so apostate against good, orderly Judaism? What had they done to thus offend and menace Yahweh? They “peopled the world.” What a funny word they use. Peopled.

Humanized.

Peopling yourself, and peopling the people around you, is blasphemy. It’s a threat to “God’s plan.” They say so plainly. To honor my Discordian friends, I say that’s a flagrant, red fnord if I’ve ever seen one. Think about it.

Love, CMBW \|||/

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