Tag Archives: theology

Guest Post: What is an Inner God? by Frater Babalon

Homily at Church of the Morningstar on 3/18/2023

So as part of my theology I firmly believe that every human being is possessed of an inner god.  This god is utterly benevolent towards the person it is a part of.  They love us, as we ought to love ourselves.  They are the part of us that knows how to keep moving, to keep loving through the hardest shit in the world.  They can banish any frightening spiritual force.  They give us our capacity for compassion, and moral reasoning.

It’s weird, but I think most of us have experienced something like our inner god at some point.  That voice within us that is kind, and that holds us together in the face of hardship.  It is the voice that gets you through.  And it can be drowned out by so many things in life, fear and other people’s unkindness, our own pain, innumerable things.  I don’t believe the world is naturally a just place.  I don’t think the ledger is balanced by some divine hand in the end.  Justice is up to us.  So I don’t think that our inner gods can always yell over the din, we have to find a way to listen.  They are a resource we can turn to if we know how.  

The inner god is a concept about which I still have a lot of theological questions.  Are inner gods one per person?  Given the same information, will all inner gods reach the same moral conclusion?  If morality is too complex to be axiomatic (as in reduced to a series of axioms) but they would come to the same conclusion, would that be to suggest there is some absolute morality?  Objectively true in itself?  But of course, I think there is usually more than one “right” answer to most things, and of course there are a lot of times where there’s not really a good answer, just a lot of least bad answers and unavoidable collateral damage.

But I mean I suppose, despite their lack of omnipotence, inner gods are the closest thing to the vast and ineffable “big god” style gods to me.  Every human being contains that sacredness, and of course, the sacred is also the potentially dangerous, isn’t it?  We all know about wrathful gods.  I think a mistreated god is likely to become a wrathful god.  As well, I don’t know whether if everyone truly listened to their inner god if there would be no conflict?  I’m not sure it would.  I do not think we live in a clockwork universe where when everything is “working properly” we function as a well oiled machine, each piece fitting perfectly into place, never bashing into one another.  We’re not a puzzle with loops and blanks perfectly aligned, destined to make a perfect whole if we all just find our right place, I think.  But if that’s true… what is this?  What is it for?  Why do we have it?  How do we do it?

This is a hard sermon to write, because for me the inner god is so deeply a felt experience, that trying to describe it, to explain a rational theology of the inner god, to explain what conclusions I draw from this felt experience, and I think it’s a good exercise, a useful thing to actually think about.  I think it must be for something in a way, but of course like any idea of human life having a purpose, anything articulable is unsatisfactory.  If we were to know that the purpose of human life is to provide the… specific atmospheric conditions necessary for the universe to function optimally as a doorstop for the cosmic crystalline unicorn that exists outside of time, that would still be unsatisfactory because then we’d wonder what the unicorn was for.  

But of course “forness” is like… a concept that exists within human life.  Purpose is something that exists on too small and specific a scale to cover a whole life I think.  It’s like asking “what color is a human life?” there’s too much color in a human life to answer the question, there are too many human lives to answer the question.  I don’t know.

Now, of course, believing every human being is divine and being as you all know, not someone who preaches pacifism or tolerance for injustice, is a complex thing.  What does it mean to believe in the divinity of humanity and to acknowledge that as long as there is oppression, there may be the necessity of things like wars?

Well, I mean to me it means acknowledging the full weight of that.  The full weight of both the need to combat all oppression and the true potential cost of combating it.  It requires a serious commitment to thinking about the strategies you employ and choices you make.

I do think that there is something to be said for trying to listen for the inner god.  I think we’re happier and generally kinder to one another when we do, but how and why that works?  That’s a mystery of my faith, the way the nature of the trinity might be to a Christian.

I don’t know, it’s the thing that keeps you moving when it’s freezing and you’ll die if you don’t keep walking.  It’s the thing you hold onto.  That’s what I’ve got.  That’s all I’m sure of.

My Creed

I’ve been going through the vast archive of sermons, homilies and other writings I have produced over the years, many of which I have not managed to post here. This is an older one, in which I break down the Satanic creed I wrote for some of our liturgy in Church of the Morningstar. I am not sure I would write it the same way today, but I stand by most of it, and it feels important to share for the benefit of my congregation. That said, I think my discussion of Mary could use a little sensitivity and refinement.

Good evening.

Many of you, if you’ve been to this church before and seen me perform a baptism or the Mass of Blasphemy, have heard me recite my creed. It goes like this:

“I deny the tyrant above. I deny his sycophant son. I deny the holy ghost. I deny the so-called virgin mother, and all of the angels, and all of the saints. They have no power over me. I believe in the cause of the fallen angels. I believe in the serpent of Eden. I believe in the kingdom that lies below. I believe in the God within me.”

Great, so, what does that mean? A lot more than meets the eye.

Let me go through it line by line.

“I deny the tyrant above.”

The first half of my creed is negative. A lot of spiritual people would probably find that off-putting. Negativity gets a bad rep. Unfortunately, in this universe, there is a lot of bad, and a lot that is worth rejecting. To me, one of those things is God.

When I call him a tyrant, I make it clear why I reject him. God to me represents absolute power, which corrupts absolutely. Not only does that God represent authoritarianism in all its forms, but his theology also insists that he is ultimately the only force in the universe. I believe in political and metaphysical freedom, and thus I reject Jehovah and all his works.

“I deny his sycophant son.”

Jesus has been called a liberator, but ultimately Jesus serves that tyrant.

No, that’s wrong. That’s bad trinitarian theology.

Ultimately Jesus is identical to that tyrant. They are one God, along with the Holy Ghost. Three persons, one substance, one will. It’s nonsensical to imply that Christ is any better than the Father.

So naturally, I deny the Holy Ghost as well. They are all the same.

“I deny the so-called virgin mother.”

To affirm Mary’s virginity is to deny God’s violation of her.

It’s thought she was about thirteen or fourteen at the time of conceiving Christ.

“And all of the angels, and all of the saints. They have no power over me.”

Mentioning God’s intermediaries at such length is a subtle jab at the supposed monotheism of Christian. I also simply find it important to declare independence from not only God but all his servants, heavenly or earthly.

“I believe in the cause of the fallen angels.”

I believe in what Lucifer and company were fighting for—liberty, equality, and love for one another, rather than merely love for God.

“I believe in the serpent of Eden.”

I’ve talked extensively about Eden before, and what it means to me. In brief: when Adam and Eve ate the fruit of knowledge, they became “as God, knowing good and evil.” We as human beings gained a moral conscience—the ability to know right from wrong. Having this power in our own right, we did not need God to hand us down commandments any longer.

Thus, the serpent is our liberator. 

“I believe in the Kingdom that lies below.”

This is a statement of faith in an afterlife in hell, but it’s something more. Really, I shouldn’t have called hell a kingdom in my creed. It’s been said that heaven is a kingdom, but hell is a democracy.

I envision Hell as an ideal anarchist society—a place of freedom where all are provided for communally. Just as Christians speak of bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth, so I, too, aspire to create the infernal society in this world.

Hell, to me, represents the hope for a better, freer earth.

“I believe in the God within me.”

This is the most important part of the creed. Since the fruit of knowledge granted us all the spark of divinity, it follows that each of us is endowed with a unique, individual Godhead, a higher self, a sacred soul that can never be destroyed.

The pursuit of divinity—apotheosis, as some call it—is important to me. I am striving for perfect union with my own latent Godhood.

Towards this end, I attempt to purify and perfect myself. This is an alchemical process, the search for the spiritual philosopher’s stone, which is the true self.

To no other God do I submit– but to my inner God, to what is best in myself, I strive to practice total obedience. I want to surrender completely to the divine in me. I want it to rule me and control me, and ultimately annihilate all aspects of my being that are not of It.

My God has a name, a secret name I do not utter. “Antichristos,” my magical name, is but a pale echo of that secret word. I worship my God as a word. It is the logos, the word that creates and organizes my inner universe.

And I believe that all of you have such a divinity within you. I would never tell anyone else how to worship their own God. I walk a very stern path with regard to mine. That may not be your style, and frankly it’s none of my business.

My business is to acknowledge the divinity of all other human beings as being just as great as my own. This, probably, is the most important point of all. We are all divine beings, capable of self-governing and moral choice. We need not bow to any but ourselves.

And so the end of the creed loops around to the beginning, to the rejection of unjust authority:

I deny the tyrant above…