Commentary on “The Synagogue of Satan” by Stanislaw Przybyszewski – Chapter 2: The Cult of the Church of Satan

This is the second half of my commentary on Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s The Synagogue of Satan, based on the second chapter. The original plan was to simply write one single article covering the whole book. That plan seemed feasible, as the book itself was fairly short. But I had a lot to say about the book, its overall claims about Satanism and all attendant subjects, and the overall contours of Przybyszewski’s Satanic philosophy. So it ended up bloating until finally I had to split my commentary in two.

This second article covers the second chapter of The Synagogue of Satan, and covers Przybyszewski’s treatment of witchcraft, the “sabbat”, and the “black mass”, and with it the exposition of his own brand of Satanism that proceeds from this treatment. And, remember, it’s not possible to really take up Przybyszewski’s work as actual history, so what matters is what is said about Satanism.

Part 3: The Witch

The church of Satan is in full swing. The people agreed that everything which originates in evolution and owes its existence to procreation and generative activity belongs to Satan, the Prince of Darkness. We’re told that the Cathars, with sad resignation, acquiesed to this idea as well. The Christian church, for its part, had actually “Satanized” the world with its attacks on nature and instinct, while the refined ideas they created to salvage some sort of moral freedom were ignored by the people. The people had little to no regard for the sophisticated theories and sophistries that the church was busy crafting on the subject of evil, these were seen as some alienated and internal church affair. What interested them instead was the dualism between heavenly matter and infernal matter, that there was “Evil” per se, and that this “Evil” was in fact good. How “Evil” came to be was unimportant. People knew almost nothing about God, God’s son was abandoned by the theologians, and there was only one real religion in the world: the church of Satan.

Satan was the sole ruler of the world, and his demons flowed everywhere as they comprised an ocean of demons. Satan was no “ape of God”, but a god in his own right whose power reaches just as far as the “White God”. Satan taught people enter ecstatic states, produce stigmata, and even gave the saints the idea to “paralyze evil” through choc en retour. Satan alone is the father of life, propagation, evolution, and eternal return. By this, it is understood that “Evil” is good because life is “Evil”, and “Good” is therefore the negation of life, since it is the negation of its basis in passion. Satan is “positive”, eternal, and in itself. Satan is the god of the brain, and therefore governor of the realm of thoughts, from which the power to ceaselessly defy and remake the world derives its basis. In this power Satan inspires curiosity towards all things, which reveals the hidden things and unravels the runes of the night. Satan also inspires the daring to destroy even that which appears to make thousands of people happy so that something new and better might emerge instead. In other words, Satan embodies the negation embodied in active nihilism, which counsels the negation of the order of things as the sole source of new life. This nihilist’s negation is the drive for new conditions, spurred by “evil desires” whispered by Satan. Satan is continually persecuted, periodically vanquished, but he always emerges from his own ashes more powerful and beautiful than before. The Christian church tried to destroy Satan, only to be subverted and destroyed by Satan. Satan is unconquerable, and in his own way “conquers” everything. Satan is eternally evil, and the eternally evil is life.

Here Przybyszewski explores further the negativity of Satan as embodied in the contrary projection into the future. This is called a raging negation of negation, which I suppose we could take as negation unfolding from and upon itself. Another phrase he uses for this is “e pur si muove”, meaning “and yet it moves”, which is actually a famous phrase attributed to Galileo Galilei. I believe that this is not incidental. It is said that Galileo said this phrase after being forced by the church to recant his observation that the Earth revolved around the Sun. It is unclear whether Galileo actually uttered that phrase, and in fact the only actual sources for it come from after Galileo’s death, but what matters here is its contextual implications: namely, it embodies intellectual defiance of persecution and authority on behalf of one’s own revolution against the prevailing order of thought, and with it an inner freedom of thought that cannot be erased, even during incarceration. Unfortunately, however, Przybyszewski then goes on to refer to Christopher Columbus as an example of Satanically-inspired curiosity.

This is problematic for a number of reasons, among the most stark, for one thing, is the implication that it presents for colonialism and its attendant genocides. Though, of course, it might be argued that it is expected that men in The Enlightenment would countenance colonialism as a progressive world-historic force, though it does mean that poor Przybyszewski was not nihilist enough. Another problem might well be the fact that Christopher Columbus very probably didn’t “discover” America, or at least not before a certain band of Christianized Vikings got there first. Yet perhaps the biggest problem with framing Christopher Columbus as a paragon of Satanic curiosity is ultimately the fact that his expeditions were actually religious and missionary in purpose, on Christian terms. Columbus wrote in his journals about how he wanted to convert all the peoples of the world to Christianity and ultimately gather enough gold and other resources in order to allow Christian leaders to launch a new Crusade to retake Jerusalem from the control of Islamic empires, all under the belief that this would lead to the Second Coming of Jesus. Columbus was not contrarily projecting into the future to follow an irreducible quest for knowledge. Instead he was a missionary and proselyte of God and his son, seeking to fulfill God’s will on earth, eager for him to “save” the world. In other words, he was actually in many ways the opposite of Przybyszewski’s Satanic heroism.

That said, there are certainly better examples given by Przybyszewski. He cites the chemical sciences as owing their origin to “evil”, here meaning the curiosity of Satan. Remember that here the power of curiosity consists in its ability to remake the world, and so Przybyszewski says that in the name of Satan that Friedrich Nietzsche called for the re-evaluation of all values, that anarchists dreamed of the abolition of the state, and that the artist created works that could only be understood in secret. Nietzsche in particular is important to note, as he was arguably Przybyszewski’s favourite philosopher and certainly had a great influence on Przybyszewski’s thought. At one point, Przybyszewski might have fancied himself as one of the few to have grasped his work.

But, having waxed lyrical about “Evil”, what is the “Good” that opposes Satan? In a word, thoughtlessness. As Przybyszewski says, “Good” is Gregory the Great boasting of his ignorance and forbidding the study of grammar to clerics. Gregory, of course, made efforts to suppress pre-Christian literature, such as the works of Cicero and Livy, the latter of which he burned, because in his opinion they promoted idolatry and distracted people from the study of Christian scripture. “Good” is Francis of Assisi imitating the donkeys that stood and brayed around the manger of baby Jesus. “Good” is the surrender and/or abnegation of individual will in order to imitate God and/or his order/will. “Good” here obviously denies the work of Satan, to the point of denying evolution on the grounds of its origination with Satan; thus evolution in religious terms is heresy, in political terms is treason, and in terms of life is perversion, all punishable as crime. The summary of “Good” is ad maiorem Dei gloriam (“for the greater glory of God”), which incidentally was the motto of the Jesuits. I believe that on egoist terms the distinction between “Evil” and “God” is easily illuminated. Since “Evil” is meant to pertain to your own curiosity, nature, instinct, and of course lust, “Evil” thus connotes your own egoistic enterprises in their purity, without the disguise of a higher cause outside yourself. “Evil”, then, is your own undertaking for your own sake, albeit as borne of the universal egoism and negativity of Satan. “Good”, as “for the greater glory of God”, can be understood as the undertaking done on God’s behalf, so as to imitate God or his will, it is that which brings you closer to God, closer to being one with his will. But this means that “Good” is nothing more than the egoism of another that is then, under the spell of illusion, taken up as some higher purpose or greater good beyond yourself. Max Stirner elaborated in The Unique And Its Property that God’s cause is a purely egoistic one, just like all other causes. What is God’s cause? Does he make an alien cause for himself? God is love, truth, but that means he cannot promote them as alien causes, since he himself is them. Thus, God is an egoist, an Ownness or Einzige, like any other, whom Christianity and similar religions afford the status of the world’s only egoist – and of course, our business is to drag that falsehood away from him, expose it for the fraud that it is, and thus abolish the alienation of causes. Put simply, “Evil” is what you do for yourself”, “Good” is when you think you’re doing it for God or someone else. “Evil” is honest-to-goodness egoism, “Good” is self-denial. Per Stirner’s Critics we may make further sense of sin in this dynamic. Sin is a tendency towards your own interest, and its opposite is “sacred interest”, by which is only meant the alienation or “setting apart” of egoistic interest.

Przybyszewski’s Satan is a philosopher, even a demon, in short a god. That is his role as the father of the sciences which shine into the deepest secrets of human life, always melancholic because he must draw his circle anew after being destroyed by some fool. For this Satan is called “Samyasa”, or the fallen angel Samyaza, who Przybyszewski describes as the Father and the “mathematician”. As the patron of the secret sciences, Satan was purportedly only accessible to the few to whom he revealed his mysteries, thus Przybyszewski refers to him as a “dark aristocrat”. This in some ways presents a contradiction. On the one hand, Satan reveals mysteries only to a few individuals (including, for some reason, Christian occultists such as John Dee or Christian alchemists such as Paracelsus). On the other hand, Satan whispers his doubts to the whole masses, and receives worship from and fulfills the desires of the people. He is too universal to truly be exclusive, but I suppose when dealing with the secret sciences, there are only a few people who can receive them. Still, the secret sciences are not preached. They must be accessed by those who want to pursue them and who can understand them, and not many people can claim to that. According to Przybyszewski, Satan could only be conjured by the “most powerful”, presumably meaning magically powerful, while he sent his demon servants across the land to ingite human passions, sowing the baser instincts of humans and cultivating their pride and arrogance, in order to awaken the beast within.

And so we come to what Przybyszewski calls the sole principle of Satanism: a rebours. This French phrase, in English, means “backwards” or “going against the grain”, and for Przybyszewski it meant the reversal of all values sanctified by law and order. The phrase a rebours is also the title of a book written by the French decadent author Joris-Karl Huysmans; his famous book of the same name, whose title is translated in English as “Against Nature”, published in 1884, follows the story of a French aristocrat who, disgusted by his current life, retreats from Paris to lead alife of luxury, excess, and intellectual and aesthetic contemplation that ultimately leaves him physically ill and alienated from human society. Elsewhere, Huysmans described Satanism as essentially based on Catholic principles “followed in reverse (a rebours)”, which is reflected in his depiction of the Satanic Mass in his novel La Bas in which a Satanic priest holds consecrated hosts upside down and generally performs an inverted Catholic ritual. The principle of a rebours is also linked to Friedrich Nietzsche, Przybyszewski’s favourite philosopher, a link that I am quite certain comes about through Nietzsche’s concept of the transvaluation (or re-evaluation) of values, which, because of its diametrical conflict with Christianity, must seem like its forthright reversal. Indeed, there is a suppressed passage from Nietzsche’s The Antichrist which calls for the transvaluation of value, whereby the divine becomes criminal, thus we see reversal, a rebours. In any case the principle and act of reversal, a rebours, constitutes a subversive negation, the art of turning against, negating, destroying the order of things in the totality of normative and social conditions in order that something new may emerge in the place of their destruction.

The servants of Satan, or “Satan-Samyasa”, came to earth and made themselves masters there, while Satan as Lucifer, the bringer of light and “Paraclete” of humanity, practiced black magick in locked laboratories with magicians. At this time, the people remained “heathen” in their hearts, and they were also desperate to the point of madness. They hated Christianity and they hated Jesus, who promised salvation and left them only torments, but most of all they hated the church, that empty edifice who extorted every penny from the peasant and every acre of land from the nobles. They also hated the bishops who accused each other of adultery, whoremongering, and perjury. The synods attempted to impose taxation on the drunkenness of clerics. But, in the age of repeated prohibitions against drunkenness and fornication, when “our sacrilege is piled up over our heads” and “our crimes are stacked to heaven”, the servants of the Devil renounced and mocked all things holy, and derided the impotence of God in orgies. The people hated Christianity, and were only kept in check by the fear of eternal damnation and punishment in Hell. Hell and the Devil were at the center of the church’s sermons, designed principally to keep the masses in line. The fantasies of the priests evoked the Old and New Testaments of the Bible as well as the fear of nocturnal gatherings of heretics, Jewish and Arab magicians spreading their systems of mysticism, and “Gypsies” spreading intoxicating herbs throughout Europe.

Against this backdrop we embark on Przybyszewski’s discussion of Satanic femininity leading into the discussion of the Witch. And here it should be noted in advance that there is an engagement with classically misogynistic ideas about women leveraged by reactionary Christianity which are, at once, taken up in a positive sense in Przybyszewski’s application of negativity. It is taken to some cartoonish and grotesque levels, but on this I see no reason to deviate from Per Faxneld’s argument in The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity or Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth Century Culture, which stresses that Przybyszewski’s philosophy establishes Christian evil as actually good, since decadence is progress and lust is nature and so on, and that on this basis there is a sort of ambivalent or even laudatory element in his writings about women, even when he speaks in terms of outrage, based on his belief in evolution and ontological evil as the motor of life and progress, with Good being the engine of stasis and repression, and so on these grounds it’s not quite possible to interpret his writing as a condemnation. With that established, we can safely begin this exploration.

Satan loves evil because he loves life, and hates “Good” because he hates stagnation and inertia. Because of this, Satan loves women, who the Christian church had long regarded as the principle of evil, which as far as Satan was concerned meant life. And in turn women, in Przybyszewski’s account, loved Satan, and Satan had a preference for them as the evangelists of his cult. We are then taken through Przybyszewski’s account of the pre-Christian history of his idea of the Satanic feminine. First we are told that the “night-side of life” in Babylon and Chaldea was embodied in Mylitta, who Przybyszewski characterized as a goddess of lust, sexual excess, and “the cosmic secret of decay”. The name Mylitta is simply Herodotus’ name for a goddess who was actually called Mullissu, the wife of Ashur, who may also have been identified with the goddess Ninlil. I can only assume Przybyszewski got the “goddess of lust” idea from Herodotus’ account of sacred prostitution in association with the goddess, which of course we can’t quite rely on as a historical source, and the rest was simply his own idea. Then, turning to Syria, the goddess Astarte is presented as “the adversarial, evil, and destructive divinity”. Obviously a rather inappropriate idea for the context of pre-Christian polytheism, though I will say that one would’ve thought that the god Mot would’ve been the better candidate for such a role. In any case, Przybyszewski refers to Astarte for the horns on her head (supposedly a bull’s head) and being a goddess of war. Next he talks about the Phrygian goddess Cybele, and how her temples were places of fornication and orgasm. Then Semiramis, who was not a goddess but merely a mythological queen, who we’re told killed her lover with her lust. Then we’re presented with Maya, the Indian goddess;(except she kind of wasn’t) of deception who created illusions that made reality inaccessible. Then the Devas (Daevas) of Iran, who we’re told represented untruth, deception, and the “pollution” of the souls of men; the supposed “feminine virtues”.

From there Przybyszewski slowly graduates from talk of goddesses to talk of demonesses. Regarding Greece, Przybyszewski talks about the “dark demons of death” emerging from the earth goddess Gea (Gaia) and everything terrible and frightening being dedicated to Hecate, who travelled with demons and drove men to madness. Lastly we are turned to the Romans, who most feared the demons they called Strigas, most likely meant to mean Strix, who we’re told were believed to suck the blood of the young and devour their guts before flying away. Przybyszewski says that the most feared demons of antiquity were female, because, as he put it, they were demons of death, madness, debauchery, obsession, crime, nocturnal horror, and spectral terror. This includes none other than Lilith, the destroyer of men in her lusts, and for some reason a goddess named Lady Holda, who we’re told is the leader of the Wild Hunt. Such themes are ultimately connected forwardly to witchcraft, via the landlady of Horsselberg who led sabbaths with witches. And, of course, Przybyszewski tells us that, in the Middle Ages, witches were accused of basically everything the Strigas did. We then get to what is quite easily a discussion of patriarchy. We’re told that alongside the “night-side” of the feminine ancient people worshipped the fertility and life-giving power of women, but it was assumed that the man had to protect life from the destructive and deceptive impulses they believed were present in women. Thus patriarchal society had established man as “the real originator of life”. Through Christianity, in the Middle Ages, patriarchy had almost completely denied life-giving power to women and instead preferred to view them exclusively as evil. This attitude even seemed to affect depictions of Satan. We’re told that Satan was originally feminine, and that by the Middle Ages the only feminine part of Satan that remained was the breasts. Satan had transformed into an entirely masculine entity, while woman had become completely subordinate to the male Satan as a concubine who led souls to him while receiving his lusts. Male magicians were expected to command the Prince of Darkness himself to reveal the secrets of nature, female witches were expected to serve as obedient handmaidens of demons who learned the arts of destruction but gained little from their covenant beyond the erotic discipline of demonic masters.

It would seem that medieval patriarchy was so universal that even the cult of Satan came to be conditioned by it, to the extent that church patriarchy had found itself dressed in black rather than in a coffin. The traditions of dead generations had weighed like a nightmare on the brains of the living, and as long as that contradiction was not resolved, we might say that the transvaluation of values could not yet have taken place. Since we’ve already established that we’re dealing with a narrative rather than an actual history, it’s probably not unfair to say that Przybyszewski colours this with what is clearly a BDSM-esque kink involving demons and witches.

And so finally we move on to the subject of the Witch, and things still get weird from here. Przybyszewski starts with the question of why witches were much more likely to be women then men such that it is claimed that hardly a single man was condemned. Putting aside the fact that this is not completely true (while women were the typical target of witch-hunts, in some countries more men were killed on charges of witchcraft), Przybyszewski proposes certain answers to that question. He says that, whether for good or evil nothing could stop three things: the tongue, the priest, and woman. It was supposed that women were gullible, and the Devil works against faith so he prefers to work through them. Then there goes the old argument about “flexible” constitutions, their supposedly “limited” faith, and the idea that women tended to pass on malefic arts to other women through speech. At this point I think it’s worth reiterating that as far as Przybyszewski was concerned practicing dark arts while lacking faith in God was basically a good thing. We’re then presented with a strange etymological argument attributed to Jacob Sprenger (who himself was listed as an author of the Malleus Malificarum alongside Heinrich Kramer), who argues that the word “foemina”, a medieval Latin word for women from which we get the word “feminine”, derives from the words for “faith” and “minus”, presumably so as to mean “faithless”. That’s not actually the etymology of “foemina”, but that obviously never stopped Sprenger from waxing lyrical on the depravity and vices of women. Sprenger goes to many lengths to justify his absurd misogynistic views of women. Sprenger relates an anecdote about a man whose wife had drowned and, because she always talked back to him in life, he looked for her upstream on the presumption that this would mean her soul must have gone upstream. As bizarre and non-sequiturish as that is, Sprenger further cites Sirach and John Chrysostom to argue that marriage is torture (presumably because of women) and Seneca to argue that women don’t actually weep and are only capable of negative thoughts and either love or hate. From all this Sprenger makes the argument that women are most susceptible to magical heresy and that men should thank God for protecting them from it. Of course we can gleam from all this an obvious problem: God loves his children so much that he can only keep the male ones from becoming agents of Satan. Or God just seems to love the men and think nothing of women.

Przybyszewski then moves away from Sprenger to discuss his own ideas about how the witch comes to be. This involves possession, or “demonomania”, which Przybyszewski asserts as having been commonplace in the Middle Ages and apparently was accompanied by clairvoyance and somnambulism. Demonomaniacs were led by visions and fell into monstrous paroxysms. The symptoms of demonomania, at the lowest level, appear to be voluntarily produced through narcotics and salves. Przybyszewski says that this how the Witch, for whom everything is inverted, is born. Highest is lowest, right is left, front is behind, the witch embodies the complete inversion of values which places her at odds with the order of the world. This, of course, would make the Witch the apogee of Przybyszewski’s Satanism via the principle of reversal, or a rebours. But still we deal with the symptoms of demonomania. The possessed body curls into a sphere before then standing up on its toes and throwing itself back onto its head so that its back forms the shape of a bow. Then the possessed body’s arms and legs are held up in the air like interwoven weeds, the hair stands up as if wanting to fly everywhere, the person walks backwards or in a continuous circle with the face turned outward. In an ecstatic demonomaniac state, Przybyszewski’s Witch is capable of superhuman flexibility and power. She can intertwine her limbs like pliable rods, she can stretch her whole body any way she wants and shrink back again, her center of gravity is altered, she cannot drown in water, she can be lighter than air, and she can rise up and hover in the air for several minutes.

Then, of course, there is the “mark” of Satan, the sign left on the bodies of those possessed. These are small, no more than pea-sized places on the skin, insensitive and without blood, sometimes red or black spots. They are typically unseen and located in the genitals, and if pricked they will draw no blood, whereas any other part of the body does draw blood. Several marks could also be found elsewhere; on eyelids, the back, the breasts, and in rare cases can even change its place on the body somehow, as though at will. Really there is no consistency in this, that’s just how the old medieval superstition was. But this “mark” was not the only distinguishing sign of the Witch. Her magical powers make her “physical sensitivity” unusually low, which seems to mean she is impervious to torture and/or generally cataleptic. Supposedly, even when put on the rack or the strappado, the Witch felt nothing, laughed, or slept through it, seemingly not feeling any pain. The Witch also possessed a certain “organic healing power”, connected to the “sorcery of maintaining silence” that was given by the Devil, usually linked to an amulet. This power apparently allowed the Witch to rapidly and easily heal severe injuries or wounds. For this reason witches were stripped naked and then shaved before they were tortured. In an ecstatic state of demonomania, all laws that normally apply to organisms are reversed or suspended, as for example in the power of the Witch to, just like the Magician before her, not be burned by fire. Taken together this quite an exceptional complex of superhuman power for someone who we were told was meant to simply be an obedient handmaiden for male demons. In this sense, patriarchy truly does sell women short.

And, of course, in this setting we should realize that Przybyszewski seems to believe that all of this was real, or at least he writes as if this were the case. When giving accounts of the abilities of the Witch, even from Sprenger, he regards that there is no reason to doubt such accounts, and asserts that all descriptions of the powers and ecstatic states of the Witch correspond to reality. Whether this is the actually the case, and there is probably reason to doubt, among other things, the existence of the “Devil’s mark” as described by Sprenger, what it establishes about Przybyszewski’s thought is that he was not a rationalist seeking to debunk stories of witchcraft on behalf of reason and enlightenment. Although Przybyszewski definitely praised rationalists for the extent to which they undermined faith in God and ostensibly encouraged curiosity towards the workings of the world, he himself can’t be counted as a rationalist, and he tended to prefer the madness he ascribed to the individual soul over the cold reasoning of the brain. From this, Per Faxneld argues, probably correctly, that his writing on madness and “hysteria” is probably not entirely a condemnation, and may even contain a laudatory aspect. This is one way to make sense of how Przybyszewski talks about the Witch, and in this subject it is more obvious when considering that the Witch’s transgression of rational mind and body is presented as a source of insurmountable power ultimately connected to Satan.

The Witch’s invulnerability and physical insensitivity is then shown to deny compassion, leaving her “bestial in her cruelty” and lacking sympathy while given to a delight in the pain she may cause. Her love of cruelty is also mixed with intense sexual desire to the extent that she can be thought of as a sort of sadomasochist, or at least as far as Przybyszewski might have understood it. But Przybyszewski stresses that it was not enough that the Witch flogged others or was flogged herself. No, for this Witch only the most extreme, grotesque, and frankly absurd acts of violence enthused with her strange drives can she feel the hint of emotional satisfaction. The Witch despises every notion of law, she hates the church and all its establishments, indeed she hates that which inhibits her demonic or demonomaniacal drives, and derives joy in that hatred and in mixing the body of God into her salves for perverse ends.

If we look past the grotesque and senseless depravity that Przybyszewski ascribes to the Witch, which almost certainly has nothing to do with any real historical expression of witchcraft, what might we derive from the character being presented. The character of the Witch is not so easily separated from the oppressions and tortures she experiences, so it is easy to make the point of the monsters that society creates, even if every instance of this argument never dare march towards the moral conclusion of the destruction of society – one might assume that after this the monsters would no longer exist. But I would argue that what is operative is what is derived from the hatred of authority and the joy derived from that hatred and the destruction of authority. In nihilism, the basic concept of this is called jouissance. Jouissance is the name given to the sensation of liberation and richness in life that emerges from the act of resistance, and which cannot be measured against incentive or as teleological will. It is part of the core of what distinguishes nihilism, or at least the active nihilism found in anarchist thought. In this, we may at least Przybyszewski’s Satanism as a nihilist religious philosophy in the sense that it counsels joy in the resistance towards and the overcoming and destruction of authority and in the active principle of reversal or a rebours. The culmination of this is found in the location of jouissance in the Nietzschean transvaluation of values, on Satanic nihilist-egoist terms of course. And from that standpoint, it is only natural to derive liberationist joy in that very negative engine of life itself.

Right after all this we enter the discussion of the “witch craze” that swept across Europe, and in this context we unexpectedly return to the so-called “Manicheans”, with whom we are told the church was not yet finished. The Christian church had of course persecuted the Manicheans for decades with exceptional cruelty, thousands of them were burned on the stake or broken upon the wheel, but they still survived, forming secret societies and congregations even in the places where they were once completely rooted out. These Manicheans held on to a tradition of nocturnal masses that they celebrated in the woods or on hilltops. People appeared to have converted to Christianity in order to save themselves from persecution and torture, but actually continued to participate in there nocturnal gatherings in order to run wild. Przybyszewski says that in these gatherings and in “real sabbatical orgies” it was women who whipped the men into instinctual excesses. A comparison may perhaps be found in pre-Christian Bacchanalias celebrating the mysteries of Dionysus, in which the priesthood of Dionysus was said to have been dominated by women. Przybyszewski described medieval women as having been rendered anemic by the conditions of medieval society. Covered in filth, enslaved by men, rejected by the church, condemned by the God who the church says created them from Adam’s rib, women were treated like animals in the society they lived in; actually, you might argue they were treated somewhat worse. In this setting their “evil instincts” developed and they plotted revenge against their oppressors, against the people who kicked them, cast evil eyes at them, or whipped them out of boredom.

Things get stranger from here. In these conditions Przybyszewski says that women would lie beneath any man, even against her will, but in either case never be satisfied. A ceaseless longing for sexual enjoyment and its lack of fulfillment became a source of torment, and in the melancholy of “The Devil’s Bath” all feelings became poisonous. Przybyszewski hints that it is here, once all the “seeds of possession” sprout, a woman may become a Witch. One woman, agitated like never before, is tormented by the desire for violence and the urge to rave and scream when, suddenly, she suddenly flees into the woods, she flies above the ground and hovers in the air before ultimately plunging to the ground again. And then the incubus appears besides her. He appears as a red man with a carefully concealed tail and horns, dressed like a hunter. The woman instinctually knows that this is a devil, but as much as she fears him she is also inexorably curious about him. She knows that he has the power to give her anything she wants, she doesn’t think about his money turning out to be sand or shit, and she is much more curious than afraid. That’s when the Devil, knowing her inner longings and wanting to fulfill them, promises to fulfill her wishes if she submits herself to him and without regret. The demon presses and mounts himself upon her, and she gives in, hoping to be fulfilled. But the fulfillment does not happen, there is only a cold feeling and shivering in her body, and a regret accompanied by the fear of eternal damnation.

You might think that would be the end of it, but, one night, she sleeps beside her husband, and experiences a vision of Hell itself before her eyes. She fearfully stares into Hell and prays only to be pulled back, while hellish laughter surrounds the room. Green lights flicker about the room, increasingly loud knocks can be heard, her bed rotates and its sheets dance around her, all the while she herself is paralyzed. Then she sees the Devil once again. She endures intercourse with him again, but this time not only does she do it without fear she even starts to ask him questions during the act, and the Devil, that “friendly master” (oddly kinky language here), for his part tells her to look for a witch in the forest who can give her miraculous herbs. When she wakes up that becomes her first thought. With neither husband nor children around she waits impatiently for nightfall. Finally finding the old witch of the forest, herself feared by the public, she talks to the old witch and the old witch gives her a salve and a staff to take home with her and keep hidden from every except a member of “the same sect”. Then the signal is given for her to go to the “synagogue”, and at midnight she strips completely naked in order to apply the salve to every part of her body. She briefly falls into a deep sleep, and then awakens to go to the “synagogue”, somehow knowing the way despite never having been there, as though her whole journey is unconscious. This “synagogue” is actually a pathless heath upon a mountain, whose existence she knew only whispers of. An assemblage of people has gathered here already, but it is dark and they can only be seen faintly through the flickers of torches. Half-naked women run around and jump wildly and nimbly, as though they were weightless, and the cries “Har! Har! Sabat! Sabat!” can be heard. This is the beginning of the Witches’ Sabbath.

Everyone forms a circle, their hands touching each other’s backs, while a man and a woman turn their backs toward one another. Then, an ecstatic dance begins, people throw their heads back with increasing tempo while singing “obscene” songs, occasionally interrupted by a cry: “Har! Har! Sabat! Sabat! Har! Devil! Devil! Jump here! Jump here!”. An orgy begins, greed joins with lust, the frenzy triggers a delirium of desire, and people throw themselves upon each other indiscriminately. A woman controls and exalts these ceremonies, she throws herself to the ground with her hands behind her and her legs up towards the air in order to receive the phallus. This is then followed by absurd and senseless sacrificial violence. Przybyszewski likens her furious nymphomania to the priestesses of Cybele, who he says are re-awakened in her. Indeed, Przybyszewski likens the whole orgy to what he imagines to be the pre-Christian and pre-Manichean “sabbats” of Babylon, Greece, and Rome, and says that only after this does the contemporary “sabbat” begin in earnest. In this “sabbat”, reality disappears, the senses fade, the infinite realm of night manifests, and Satan appears perched upon a chair.

Przybyszewski’s Satan has a number of features that make him worth remarking upon. He appears in the shape of a goat, or half human and half goat. He wears a crown of black horns, one of which illuminates the “sabbat” with a light brighter than the full moon. He has huge circular eyes. He has female breasts, which hang down towards his stomach. But most uniquely, he has a giant, red, crooked dog penis which is itself tipped with a vulva. He also has a second face below his navel, with a gaping mouth and outstretched tongue, and his voice is without timber and hard to understand. Here the image of Baphomet is radically embellished, or from another perspective enhanced, its androgynous qualities magnified in comparison to the original, and further mixed with the influence of medieval iconography of the Devil. We can vaguely see what Przybyszewski meant when he said that Satan was originally feminine, though to refer to this Satan as strictly a woman would be inaccurate. This is completely different from the entirely masculine Satan discussed previously, and certainly unique when compared to many traditional images of Satan. This Satan is not merely a paragon of dark masculinity, instead this Satan brazenly defies normative gender with his simultaneously male and female body.

The mass begins, and it is altogether an inversion of Christian rites. First, the participants gather before Satan to confess their failure to be evil; to confess their chastity, their humility, their patience, their temperance, their brotherly love among other pieties and general lack of sin. Satan patiently listens to these confessions, but also dispenses beatings to the confessors, because he does not appreciate anyone going only halfway, for all who enter his church must fulfill his commandments completely. The confession is then followed by the introduction of those wishing to join Satan’s church. These people move before the throne of Satan, Satan asks if they want to become his minions, and they say yes. Those wanting to join Satan’s church follow his instructions. First the initiate must renounce the following: “I reject God, then Jesus Christ, then the Holy Spirit, the Virgin, the saints, the Holy Cross, I give myself over to your power and into your hands in every way, I also acknowledge no other God, so that you are my God and I am your servant.”. The initiate then kisses Satan on his second face, a sign of eternal servitude to evil. Then, Satan scratches the effect of baptism off of the initiate’s forehead with his claw, and the initiate is then baptised in a font of filthy water. The initiate swears to never again take up Christian sacrament except for blasphemy, to defile Christian relics, to keep the secret of the “sabbat”, to acquire new membership for Satan’s church, and to dedicate all strength to Satan. The mass ends with the petition of a person rebaptized by Satan to their name erased from the book of life and then have it written in the book of death. At that point Satan marks the initiate with a stigmata. Men are stigmatized on their eyelids, shoulders, or lips, while women receive this on their nipples or their labia. At that point, the pact with the Devil is concluded, and the soul of the initiate is forever sworn to Satan. From then on, the initiate’s nature is completely reversed. What was highest becomes the lowest, and vice versa, the law that once bound them has been rendered powerless, and the virtues of the law were stripped away in mockery. For women, Przybyszewski says, this means freedom from the restrictions that men placed on them.

So, to summarize what all of this means for Przybyszewski’s doctrine of Satanism, we should above all return to the subject of reversal, or a rebours. The witches’ sabbath and the black mass culminate in a reversal that is at once the transvaluation of values. A rebours as an act initiates the re-evaluation and dissolution of the order of things as applicable to the soul, and this reversal, as a Decadent and Satanic extension of Nietzschean transvaluation, is the essence of Przybyszewski’s Satanism. This has an obvious appeal to those who find themselves trodden underfoot by society, while those who benefit from its structures are not quite capable of grasping its value and indeed find themselves arrayed against it.

Since Przybyszewski makes comparisons to pre-Christian orgiastic rites or more aptly his idea thereof, it is worth briefly examining the subject of the mysteries of Cybele, as quite probably the only extant historical subject we can actually assess. Przybyszewski does point to Babylonian orgies, but from a historical standpoint this can probably be dismissed as the fantasy of Herodotus, who is himself rather well-known for his fantasies and exaggerations. Regarding the mysteries of Cybele, the thought of the priestess of Cybele receiving the phallus in an orgy must seem quite alien to the actual worshippers of Cybele. Indeed, as far as the male member is concerned, one of the more well-known aspects of the worship of Cybele consists in the severing of said member from and by male priests. These priests, the Galli, castrated themselves in imitation of the god of Attis, and then lived and presented as women in devotion to Cybele. A similar tradition can be seen in ancient Sumeria, where a similar priesthood also castrated themselves and embraced femininity while defying male norms in worship of the goddess Inanna. The amusing thing about all this is that I would think Przybyszewski would find this act of castration an attack on nature, if solely for the reason that it involves the severing of the phallus. I would say that this comprises a misunderstanding of the orgiastic rites dedicated to Cybele. Again, if there is an analogue to Przybyszewski’s “sabbat”, it is in the Dionysian mysteries or popular worship of Dionysus. The mysteries were presided over by a largely female priesthood, while more local festivals honouring him involved carrying a phallus sculpture through the streets to denote fertility. But of course, perhaps the operative aspect is that it serves to re-establish Przybyszewski’s Satanism as a continuation of the orgiastic pagan tradition, of “the heathen cult” as it were.

Finally, before the next section, let us return to the subject of how Przybyszewski writes about women and the Witch. There is still doubtless something problematic, in that many aspects of the text present an inherently contradictory impression of his Satanism and the Witch as its apostle, and it is a trend that continues on further in the book. Per Faxneld in The Devil’s Party explains this development with two possibilities: either Przybyszewski felt pressure towards the second half of the book to increasingly vilify Satan worship, or he as a Decadent author consciously drew from the trappings of Decadent literature so that his presentation of Satanism is coloured by, well, abject decadence. I tend to think the latter theory, that he deliberately hyperbolized his narrative, is much more plausible than the idea of probably the world’s first self-avowed modern Satanist somehow felt the need to re-tailor his work to appease Christian audiences. I do maintain that Faxneld is probably correct to assume that Przybyszewski is not simply vilifying women here, he almost certainly seems to lionize the Witch albeit it in a very perverse way. But even while Faxneld assures that Przybyszewski is no woman-hater based on his journals, I am inclined to suspect that there is some misogyny in Przybyszewski as well. We should remember that he writes as if the old Christian accounts are accurate, even if his overall point is that the evil women are saints because they are evil, which could still be interpreted simply as their will to destroy the authority and norms of the church. Ultimately there is a remarkable and somewhat disturbing ambiguity Przybyszewski’s writing, which is underscored by the fact that his whole point is about reversal and that the Witch embodies this reversal, and that on this basis, it’s not possible that Przybyszewski’s Witch is necessarily meant to be taken as a malefic character, at least in that the decadent narrative contains within itself more than its sensational lustre.

I think Przybyszewski may have, in his own deeply flawed way, attempted to communicate a negativity similar to the way baedan talks about queerness. The birth of the Witch is still situated in the utter bleakness of the Middle Ages and particularly the life of women in that setting. Enslaved and contained by patriarchy both Christian and pre-Christian and even subordinated by the male Magicians and demons, branded as criminals by the church and its God, women in Przybyszewski’s narrative occupy a special space of deviance and criminality that they in turn embrace through their will to destructive vengeance against the world that attacks them. Culminating up to the pact with Satan at the end of the “sabbat”, Przybyszewski’s Witch makes it her business to tower over even the very role foisted upon her in her embrace of evil, and the promise of liberation contained within Satanic a rebours becomes the mechanism of unmitigated revenge. In this way, the pact is sealed and Christianity ain’t seen nothing yet.

Part 4: The Progress of The Sabbat

We continue our exploration of the Witches’ Sabbath. For Przybyszewski, the entire sordid history of the Middle Ages is reflected in this “sabbat”. The “sabbat” is characterized as an orgasm of unbridled instincts, an all-powerful revolt of the flesh against its repression, and a dark cry of hallelujah to a crucified paganism. Yet again we see Przybyszewski establish his Satanism as an evolution of “the heathen cult”. In fact, he goes on to describe the “sabbat” as a synthesis of every pre-Christian orgiastic cult. Again we are referred to the cult of Cybele, where greedy desire culminated in “a frenzy of refined cruelty”, then to the sacred prostitution attributed to the cult of Astarte, and then to Greek witches invoking Hecate through conjurations. Przybyszewski asserts that all of this was synthesized together in the medieval “sabbat” and revised to suit the contemporary religious context. The difference between the two “sabbats” is established as their aim, with the pre-Christian versions of the “sabbat” being entirely “positive”, or rather about as positive as it gets with Przybyszewski’s bleak Decadent prose, and the medieval “sabbat” was entirely negative. In the pre-Christian “sabbats”, the aim was to draw everything into the realm of the divine; the instincts of nature were sanctified and the orgiastic ecstasies were a way of worshipping the gods. In the medieval “sabbat”, by contrast, was based almost entirely in the hatred of Christianity, the Catholic Church, Jesus Christ, and all things ecclesiastical.

It is at this point worth discussing the nature of the orgiastic aspects of pre-Christian religiosity again. Actually, I suppose it’s better to start with the whole concept of sacred prostitution in the context of pre-Christian Syria. Perfectly lurid, scandalous, and ostensibly titillating, this is very much an archaic trope in historical discussion of pre-Christian religion. It makes sense that someone like Przybyszewski in his day would take it for granted, let alone lauded it, as hardly anyone questioned it by the time The Synagogue of Satan was written. But in modern scholarship, depending on what context we are referring to, it is a point of contention. While there are credible accounts of the practice of sacred prostitution in the context of ancient Greece in temples devoted to the goddess Aphrodite, in the context of ancient Phoenicia, there isn’t really much in the way of hard evidence for the practice being devoted to Astarte. As for the cult of Cybele, I’m not totally sure how violent Przybyszewski meant it to appear, but it is documented that the orgies dedicated to Cybele did involve flagellations, ritual mutiliation, and self-castration. Sex didn’t enter into it, but there was some ecstatic dancing and drinking set to music and ritual cries. The term “orgy” itself bears some examination. It comes from the Greek word “orgia”, or “orgion”, which referred to an ecstatic religious celebration, often specifically in worship of the god Dionysus. The word actually meant “secret rites”, and although modern use of the term “orgy” (including by Przybyszewski) tends to connote large-scale sex parties, it’s not obvious that these involved sex of any sort. The real point of the orgia was simply ecstatic union with the divine (which, in his own way, Przybyszewski did still acknowledge), though they were “unrestrained” in the sense that they involved unscripted frenzied dances meant to embody the divine madness of Dionysus and reflect his myths. That said, what is true is that there is an extent to which this ecstasy allowed its participants to shatter the norms of the society they lived in. It can also be said that the orgiastic aspects of pre-Christian religiosity were intimiately connected with social transgression. Examples of this include not only the mysteries of Dionysus and Cybele but also the religio-magickal practice of goeteia, the mysteries of Sabazios, the Egyptian Festival of Drunkenness, the Scandinavian Berserker cult, the worship of Inanna by the Gala priests in Sumeria, the bands of Mairiia warriors in ancient Iran, the “primitive” cult within Manchu folk religion, and the art of sacred transgression (or “seihan”) in Japanese Shinto festivals. This is not to mention the whole practice of Vamachara Tantra within Hinduism and its Buddhist counterparts. In this sense, it is not totally wrong for Przybyszewski to locate a pre-Christian mode of transgression in the ecstatic or orgiastic aspects of pre-Christian religion, and, while in practice he is very probably working backwards from his own ideas of the “sabbat”, it is also possible to take his idea of Satanism in development from that orgiastic legacy.

In the description of the negativity of the medieval “sabbat”, we arrive once more at the theme of “the heathen cult” as the negative space lurking beneath the Christian church. On the substratum of hate were the deep layers of the shadow of the church built; this was the site of all that the church despised, persecuted, and suppressed. This was every remnant of paganism that lived on after the rise of Christianity, and every foreign opinion and custom, that was accepted by the people and attacked by the church. And, of course, this also included Przybyszewski’s constructed “Manichaeanism”, which we’re told is the progenitor and custodian of the medieval “sabbat”. What the church constructs as its criminal shadow, which it does straight from the soil of its foundation, inevitably contains within itself, in this very construction, the pure potential of its unraveling in the transvaluation of anti-Christian revolt and reversal.

The church insisted that demons raged in those who were possessed and sought to heal them with prayer and holy water. The possessed “knew” this, they acknowledged that they were being possessed by the Devil, and they let him roar fearsome blasphemies against the church. The Witch especially allowed this possession by the Devil, giving herself over to him after all difficulty, and thereby accessing the superhuman ecstasies of the “sabbat” through their erotic dedication to Satan. This, we’re told, had an effect on “Manichaeanism”, which was thus merged with a widespread popular desire for anti-Christian sacrilege. Positive matter, the “God quand méme” of the Cathars, became filth amidst the rage of battle and in the polemics of the dying Albigensians and possessed witches. The principle that Przybyszewski attributes to the Cathars, that “no one can sin below the navel”, and which he asserts was the holy precept of the priestesses of Ashtaroth, was turned into a means by which the Satanic Witch could assail all things holy and crucify Jesus once more. Whereas the devout Cathar renounced the Catholic Church with holy seriousness, the Witch took up the Cathar’s renunciation as a form of mockery that concluded in devil worship. For the Witch, the religion of the Cathars was but a vessel of satirical detournement from which she might derive weapons with which to attack God and his church.

The people, who were apparently converted to Christian love through cruelty, nonetheless took up the heritage of their ancestors. The desperate, the enslaved, and the tortured did not cease to celebrate the festivities of old; the festivals of instinct, the rituals of purifying sin by means of sin (odd, considering this was already established as an attempt by the church to try and defeat the power of Satan), and the celebration of the phallus and the fury of generation. The church of Satan was so powerful that even if you only once visited the church of the initiates, your soul would forever belong to Satan. The “sabbat” melted into the phantasms of the possessed, and the originally natural forms of the “sabbat” transformed into monstrous visions that made it impossible to tell where reality begins and ends. Thus thousands of years of distinct religious heritages and perversions carried across all times and peoples amalgamated into a chaos of contrasting instincts. But as monstrous as Przybyszewski makes it sound, he also makes it seem like an unrivalled rapture of joy. It was a form of intoxication and addiction in itself. Attending the “sabbat” was like taking up opium; after the first time, it was a passion that could not be broken. But the witches referred to the “sabbat” as a “true paradise”, home to more joys than it was possible to express, and the sign being given at the “sabbat” was equivalent to being called to a wedding. The soul was said to connect to the heart and the will in a manner that overrode all other concerns.

We can again assess the pre-Christian thematic content being invoked. Phallicism, of course, was a part of pre-Christian religion. Indeed, depictions of the phallus have been around since pre-historic times. Throughout pre-Christian cultures, the phallus was a symbol of fertility, and therefore I suppose part of the generative powers of nature. In Greece, the phallus was part of the celebration of the Rural Dionysia, a festival in honour of Dionysus in which participants carried phalluses among other objects. The phallus was a symbol of Dionysus that adorned the entrance to his temple in Delos. It was also a symbol of the god of Hermes, which may have connoted some association with fertility. The Norse god Freyr was often worshipped in a somewhat phallic form. In the Balkans, a god of fertility named Kuker is represented with a phallus. In India, the cult of the phallus was linked to the worship of the god Shiva. In Japan, phalluses are sometimes carried in festivals meant to celebrate fertility and the harvest. In ancient Rome, phalluses were universal and often apotropaic symbols. The point is, the celebration of the phallus was a thing in the pre-Christian world, and which Christianity has, of course, suppressed. “Festivals of instinct” is certainly another way of referring to orgiastic celebrations as was already discussed, but the idea of purifying sin by means of sin has essentially nothing to do with Paganism and is instead the innovation of certain “Gnostic” Christian sects, such as the Carpocratians and the so-called “Borborites”. Perhaps Przybyszewski is again working backwards from his own ideas in defining “the heathen cult” specifically as an expression of religious libertinism, and it is very clear that he seems to mean libertinism when discussing his idea of the pre-Christian “heathen cult”, but at least it is true that Przybyszewski is discussing something that Christianity had tried to suppress in the wake of its own ascendancy.

Christian authorities could not understand the appeal of the “sabbat”, since they understood it only as a place of abomination and filth. When judges asked for the answer, they were told that the people enjoyed the “sabbat” with a wondrous lust and furious desire and in that, in so doing, time elapsed so quickly as the idolatries were indulged that one only left the “sabbat” with regret and felt an irresistable longing to return. The joys of the “sabbat” are not mundane joys, but are instead superhuman joys. As the “sabbat” grew, the Witch transitioned in her priorities. She moved on from merely sacrilegious appropriation of Cathar doctrine and had taken up the “sabbat” as her religion. The reversal of her nature took place almost imperceptively, and as a result she had become a new being. The orgy of the “sabbat” became an end in and of itself, and because of this the Witch no longer considered the relationship of her cultus to the Christian church and no longer even considered her rites to be a form of sacrilege. The orgies were hence celebrated for their own sake, and with no reference to prior customs or blasphemies. The supposed joys of heaven were nothing compared to the “sabbat”, thus the participants raged in the consciousness of eternal damnation, believing that hell was preferable to heaven, and in the magical fury of sabbatical desire the participants often transformed into wolves, vampires, goats, or pigs. Over time, the “sabbat” became the only cultus of the people, changing from a place of trembling to a place of immeasurable desire, and Satan, the lord of the “sabbat”, had transformed from the anti-God par excellence to the only God. And, where the people originally turned to him for gold and power, the revolt of the flesh experienced in the “sabbat” that he presided over made the gold and the power seem quite worthless.

The “sabbat” in this sense reveals the real locus of Przybyszewski’s Satanism: flesh. We must remember that Satan, in Przybyszewski’s framework, is the god of flesh. Through the “sabbat”, flesh and sensation become a portal for the highest of spiritual or superhuman experiences, in which desire heightens and is fulfilled in its transmutation into the ecstatic experience of dark divinity in communion with Satan. Gold is ultimately nothing but worthless dust and power over others is ultimately nothing but foolish vanity when compared to the ecstasy brought about with the tremors of the flesh. And so the “sabbat”, as the supreme celebration of desire as communion with the divine, or with Satan, supercedes mundane society, its classed hierarchies and acquisitive norms one and all. The “sabbat” is where people raise their instincts above all the structures of society, and from their the ecstatic desire arced toward Satanic communion becomes a force of communization in its own right. Thus the appeal of the “sabbat” is easily elucidated, and the desire of the church to stamp it out requires only basic intuition to understand.

God, of course, was completely forgotten in the course of the “sabbat”, for there was no God but Satan. Satan raised the black host, and barked the words “this is my body!” in reference to a towering phallus. The whole congregation fell to their knees, engaged the same reverence once reserved for Christian sacrament, and they cried out: “Aquerra goity! Aquerra boyty!” (supposedly meaning “goat above! goat below!”). Another, more modern, version of this chant is “Akhera goiti, akhera beiti!“, meaning “the He-goat on high, the He-goat below!”. The Basque word “Akerra” means “he-goat”, and the Basque term for the Witches’ Sabbath was “Akelarre”. This Akelarra is the subject of legend, supposedly the remnants of a pagan culture that once flourished in Spain and possibly involving the use of hallucinogens. This was said to involve the company of a black goat, who may be recognisable as Akerbeltz, a spirit or possibly a deity who protected animals. In any case, the witches who were judged in the Basque region insisted that they had no idea they were committing any sins or doing anything wrong, and to the contrary considered their activity to be the only true religion. Far from ashamed of their actions, they recounted their celebrations with comfort, shamelessness, and pleasure, for they preferred the caress of the demons to any other and no matter what questions were directed to them.

This in my view invites us to return to the subject of “purifying sin by means of sin”, as it was related by Przybyszewski to the “sabbat”, and there is an extent to which we might discuss the form it takes. When Przybyszewski first discussed this idea, it was in the context of the Christian church resorting to the development of this idea in the hope of ultimately extinguishing sin. This, of course, is one of the contradictions that in our narrative contributed to the decline of the church. In the “sabbat”, however, something different occurs. Instead of extinguishing sin by means of sin, the esctatic eruption of sinful desire ends up enveloping and dissolving the concept itself. Passing into the maelstrom of evil passion, the participants seem to experience the breakdown of the barriers that comprise the notion of sin. Once again we can turn to Stirner’s terms: in the sacrilege against the ecclesiastical and the holy, the “absolute interest” in the face of which the concept of sin is created has been destroyed, sin no longer exists because that which sin sins against is gone, and so sin itself has been forgotten along with the holy (the “absolute interest”). Sin has not been extinguished by means of sin, as the church or the “Gnostics” may have hoped. Instead, sin has withered into nothing by means of its unfolding, giving way into what it was before the emergence of the holy, or what it shall be after the death of the holy. The “sabbat”, as communization, acheives the realization of sin into the dissolution of sin and the holy, into its own unfolding into its own forgotten, which is the product of the mass liberation of consciousness in the ecstasies of the “sabbat”. In a few words, the “sabbat” has become a means by which to abolish good and evil, leaving only unqualified desire and immeasurable joy.

The “sabbat” proves to be a source of great difficulty for the powers that be. No matter how many witches are tortured and burned at the stake, Satan ensures that just as many new witches take their place. But now, in relation to this, we come to Przybyszewski’s presentation of the Enlightenment, and it serves not only to recapitulate that Przybyszewski was not a rationalist but also to show that, if anything, despite his praises of rationalism earlier in the book, he might even have been a sort of anti-rationalist – or, again, at least writes as if that’s the case. Przybyszewski here regards the Enlightenment as an erroneous dismissal the “sabbat” and the occult more generally. He considers the Enlightenment explanation of witchcraft and the various other subjects he discusses in terms of superstition or ignorance as not only an error but also an opportunistic bias whose aim is simply to attack the church. He viewed historians who dismissed the “sabbat” and witchcraft and similar subject matter as having glossed over “all-too-well-attested facts” because they made them uncomfortable. In his view, only comparatively recently did historians begin to seriously consider the occurences of occult phenomena, whose existence he regarded as undeniable, and only then be able to shed light on them. As far as Przybyszewski is concerned, the fundamental problem is that the supposed reality of the “sabbat” was overlooked, and as proof Przybyszewski offers not only the accounts already offered about Satanic sects and their practices but also his claim that the gatherings were happened upon by outsiders. In such instances, we’re told, the participants either scattered and fled from the scene or beat the outsider to death, in both cases in order to preserve the secrecy of the “sabbat”. Thus, for Przybyszewski, the reality of the “sabbat” and all occult phenomenon is not in doubt, however historically dubious it seems to us. To him, we are all swimming in a hopeless opportunistic that presents us from clearly seeing the truth. Unfortunately for Przybyszewski, however, I cannot quite say that he is right.

We then return to the nature of the “sabbat”. Participants induced orgasm in themselves through furious dance, and the visionaries cannot distinguish this orgasm from “the real one”. The orgiastic condition was elevated through the use of narcotics, demonology books are apparently supposed to be full of them, and the orgiastic condition then concludes in a kind of epileptic somnambulism. All present in the “sabbat” were in a state of mutual interconnectedness, and because of this their visions appear to be identical and share characteristics. The visions were already insinuated into their minds by “the Satanic code” to the extent that those participating in the Satanic circle would enter into a visionary spiritual union with the others without even having any awareness of this union. People share in the sacrilegous abolition of absolute or holy interest, and then in the pure egoistic eruption and ecstasy of desire, and in so doing they seem to unite with each other during the duration of the “sabbat”, in this way self-consciousness appears to be shared in the process of sabbatical communization, individual interests find themselves interconnected in the Satanic visionary state. The hypnagogic narcotics employed in “sabbats” made various extant phenomena appear veiled, and the image of Satan was rarely seen clearly. In one instance Satan appeared as just an immense mass of fog, while in another in the shape of tree stump with a human face, albeit covered in darkness, and in yet another appears as a red human-shaped fire burning in a barely visible oven. Then there is the stiffening of extremities; the icy coldness supposedly felt during coitus or the offering of the host, abnormal muscular activity during dances, the sensation of flight, the complete reversal of natural orientation in space, terrible cramps that are perceived to be the whips that they receive from the Devil, and certain phenomenon related to light and fire. All of this, Przybyszewski, says, is indicative of epipleptic and somatic processes brought about by the use of narcotics. This, I think, is somewhat curious, because it arguably lends to a physical explanation of what Przybyszewski might otherwise insist is strictly non-physical occult phenomenon. Yet it also arguably helps his thesis of the “sabbat” as a continuation of paganism, since psychedelics were actually a part of pre-Christian mystery traditions such as the Eleusinian Mysteries.

But, Przybyszewski tells us, the historical “sabbat” slowly disappeared. Gatherings became limited to a midsummer night, or faded away entirely as the witches found a way to enjoy all the pleasures of the “sabbat” without actually being present in any gatherings. We are told that Alphonso de Spina referred to the existence of a sect which was called the Xurginae, or Bruxae, which consisted of men and women who voluntarily involved themselves with the Devil. This is most likely an archaic reference, and outside of The Synagogue of Satan I can’t find anything about the so-called “Xurginae” or “Bruxae” or any reference to them apart from in Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan’s Geschichte der Hexenprozesse (“History of Witch Trials”). What are told about them, though, is that they involved themselves with the Devil, that the Devil took their souls away from “that place”, and that by means of deceptions he makes them believe that they can fly 200,000 miles in four or five hours. Spina is then said to have recounted a witch boasting before her Inquisitor and the royal court that she was carried through air on a trip with the Devil. She only needer her salve to prove it to the court, but when she applied it to herself nothing happened, indicating that her flight was an illusion, a deception from the Devil. In another account, attributed to the French jurist Jean Bodin (a.k.a. Bodinus), a witch told Inquisitors that she would travel to the “sabbat” if she were allowed to apply her salve, which she did and then immediately feel asleep. Tied in her bed, and beaten and pricked without her giving any sign of life, the next day she recounted her trip to the “sabbat”, but, according to Przybyszewski, this was a hallucination that got mixed up with the tortures inflicted on her. He further adds that no credible accounts of levitation have ever been given in the entire study of demonology.

Here we see an interesting contradiction. Przybyszewski previously established levitation as an attribute of the Witch or a phenomenon of the “sabbat”, but now it seems that Przybyszewski is in the business of refuting it. Is the idea here to establish that later developments away from the “sabbat” are based in falsehood? Whatever the case may be it seems he’s explaining the trips with the Devil in physical terms, in terms of some sort of confusion of the senses, whereas he had just previously regarded Enlightenment historians as stupid and opportunistic for doing so in their refusal to recognise occult phenomena as real. In any case, Przybyszewski says that in every case the witch prepared herself for trip to the “sabbat” in the same way: she stripped naked and applied the witch’s salve upon her body, and then fell into a trance. If we remember, this is the same way that the actual “sabbat” starts in Przybyszewski’s account of the Witch, but previously this was meant to refer to an actual process of an actual “sabbat”, and yet now the same process is depicted as a deception or an illusion.

The salve is an important part of the accounts of the witch trials, and Przybyszewski that it is not unique to medieval witchcraft. We are referred to the soma drink of the “Brahmans”, as in the Soma that was believed by Vedic to heal people, cure sickness, grant immortality and allow humans to commune with the gods. Vedic myths described trhe consumption of Soma by Indra and his warriors as giving them near-invincibility and a trance-like state of battle-fury. In Zoroastrianism, a similar substance is called Haoma, and the prophet Zoroaster condemned a series of ecstatic rituals involving haoma before a more moderate version of the ritual was introduced. Przybyszewski says that Soma was consumed in order to attain clairvoyance and the perfection of yoga. We are also refered to the “repenthes” of Homer, probably actually referring to a drug called “nepenthes”, which in the Odyssey was said to quiet all pain and strife and induce forgetfulness of all ills. These and other drugs, such as the potamantis (apparently an Indian plant, which he calls “protomantes” for some reason), the thalassegle (which seems to actually be another name for the potamantis), and the gelatophyllis (which may or may not have been an old word for cannabis), as all referred to by Pliny, are asserted by Przybyszewski to be ways of separating the soul from the body in order to transport it into a state of otherworldly joy and happiness. Another plant given as an example is the heliocabus, also called “atropia mandragora” or “antropa belladonna”, which seems to be another name for the plant we know as deadly nightshade.

We are told that Karl Kiesewetter, a German Theosophist and occultist, had contemporarily performed experiments on himself in which he rubbed witches’ salves on himself. According to Przybyszewski, Kiesewetter found that rubbing the salve (seemingly a form of hyoscyamine) in the pit of his stomach produced visions dreams of animated flight in a spiral, as though he was being hurled around in a tornado. Witches are said to be able to dispense with all artificial means to go to the “sabbat”, provided they sleep for a little while beforehand. This was apparently agreed upon by the witches who were prosecuted by Pierre de Lancre, all about 1,000 of them. A consistent “awakening” occurs if the sleep is only so deep. Some said it was sufficient to close one eye, and then in the next instance one “awakens” and is spirited away. After a short nap, the witches enter a perfect awakened state, with no doubts about the reality of what they see while spirited away or what is presently occurring. Somnambulism, then, is presented as something distinct from regular sleep, the difference between which is not understood by normal people. Apparently only one witch ever doubted the reality of the “sabbat”. Przybyszewski says that people definitely do not have normal eyesight during the “sabbat”, everything appears confused, no one can see anything definite. This is compared to drunkenness or sleep, or trickery. Cases of partial waking sleep are said to be extremely rare. Somnambulism is established as being so highly developed that the time of transition between physical sleep and transcendental time contracts, meaning that it would not take long to go from sleeping to some sort of transcendent “awakening” state. Thus a woman named Katharina of Landal says that she does not need sleep, but when sitting by the fire in the evenings she feels an incomparable longing to go to the “sabbat” and is immediately transported there.

So, after a somewhat confusing assessment of the reality of the “sabbat”, at least confusing as far as Przybyszewski’s position on it is concerned, our understanding of Przybyszewski’s Satanism is increased via our discussion of the “sabbat”. It reveals to us the essence of Satanic communization locked within the “sabbat”, in which the limits of reality are upended and even good and evil themselves are dissolved, leaving only the immeasurable and unqualified quantity of desire that takes the soul away towards infinite night, that it may behold Satan and his ecstasies. The liberation of consciousness in the tunnel of desire is the outcome of the “sabbat”, and so it is the highest desire, longed for again and again, and in the “sabbat” egoistic interest is purified, being free from holy interest, and then in the void of the holy even sin is gone, having transformed back into the purity of desire, and then egoisitic interests join together in communization under Satan. This is also attendant to a will to reversal that is cultivated in the communion with Satan, as previously established about the “sabbat”. Witchcraft, in the context of Przybyszewski’s Satanism, is thus the means to bring about the ultimate liberation induced by the “sabbat”. The Witch emerges from persecution and moves from heresy to blasphemy and finally becomes the priestess of the ultimate religion and its ultimate God; that religion being the communization of the “sabbat” and that God being Satan.

Before we move on to the final section of The Synagogue of Satan, I think it is worth once more re-examining the Witches’ Sabbath, this time touching on its possible pre-Christian roots. Whether real or concocted by the church or by heresy-hunters, the fact remains there is something about it that is not entirely Christian in its legacy. Just where did people get the idea of people stripping naked, convering themselves with hallucinogens, taking drugs, dancing at the hilltops and performing magic to worship a black goat? The whole idea of nocturnal revelry is rather consistently Pagan, specifically it harks back to ancient Greek mysteries, such as to Cybele, Dionysus, or Sabazios. They had orgiastic ecstasies (though, again, not exactly orgies in the modern sense) and ritual cries, not to mention drugs. Heraclitus described worshippers of Dionysus as magicians roaming together in the night, raving madly in performance of “unholy” rites to the phallus. The idea of the soul travelling away from the body for the purpose of communion is much in line with how ancient Greeks would have understood the concept of ecstasy, whose root word “ekatasis” means “to stand outside oneself”. The idea of hallucinogens inducing a sense of flying may have been attested to at least far back as the 2nd century, when Apuleius depicted witches using unguents to confer supernatural powers, such as flight and shapeshifting onto themselves in his Metamorphoses. Beyond this, there are attestations to the worship of the goddess Diana in nocturnal gatherings that involved singing and dancing, as possible remnants of folk pagan custom in parts of Europe. This has been interpreted as a rebellion of witchcraft against the Catholic Church. The goat himself can be interpreted as a unique medieval image of Satan, but of course it does have certain antecedents. Many people point to Pan as the obvious origin of the goat-like appearance of many depictions of the medieval Devil, and this has no doubt in informed Przybyszewski’s treatment of Pan as a pre-Christian avatar of Satan. But Pan is not the only influence here. In Francisco Goya’s Witches Sabbath, one of the classic artistic representations of the Witches’ Sabbath, the Great He-Goat featured therein may have been based on Athansius Kircher’s depictions of Molech, or Moloch. Moloch was purportedly a Canaanite idol, but since there probably was no actual Moloch outside of the Bible, this is probably a cipher for other deities such as Ba’al Hammon, Milcom, Malik, or Ba’al himself.

Yet, if we are looking for a precise point in pre-Christian history where we might find the existence of an original Witches’ Sabbath, we would be chasing phantoms. Perhaps the trope itself is more like the amalgamation that Przybyszewski said the actual “sabbat” was, though not quite the merger of all customs that he assumed it was; more like a transmission of certain elements of Pagan mystery into the context of a Christian overculture, when then saw these elements as absolutely satanic. In this, the church had that much in common with the Roman establishment, who regarded witches as dangerous and illicit elements of society.

Part 5: The Black Mass

For the final section of The Synagogue of Satan, we are once again referred to a discussion of the Witch. This, of course, also means that we must observe the exact same caveats as before when inevitably we must deal with Przybyszewski’s sensationalistic depictions of the crimes of the Witch. We are told that the crimes committed by the Witch are countless, and Przybyszewski cites the German theologian Johannes Nider in providing a list of crimes attributed to the Witch. These include defaming the church and the Pope by way of the Devil, performing rites of homage to the Devil, joy-riding with devils, bewitching or hexing crops and livestock, inciting hate and/or lust among people, interfering with intercourse and copulation among humans or animals, transforming humans into animals or causing lycanthropy, killing the “fruit of the womb” (presumably meaning either children or the unborn, it’s difficult to tell which) through sorcery, using the body parts of the slain for slaves, and sexual intercourse and copulation with demons such as the incubus or succubus. Of note here is that Nider himself doubted that witches could actually fly so it does have me working how Przybyszewski got the “joy-riding” accusation from him. Whatever the case, Przybyszewski assures us that, while it became customary to accuse witches of every absurd charge, what the witches actually did caused even hardened Inquisitors to recoil in horror. The other thing to bear in mind here is that, in actual fact, most of the people who were actually charged with witchcraft probably never even came close to doing any of the things that Przybyszewski described.

We are then brought back to themes of reversal and evil as contained in the Witch. Her “criminality” resulted from the reversal of her whole nature, spiritual and physical, and the total devaluation of the laws given to their bodies. This, we are told, is not quite an expression of volition or will but instead an expression of necessity, specifically a necessity akin to the necessity felt by those doing “good”, which is thus undertaken without any awareness of the nature of one’s actions; we can think of it as an involuntary and unconscious will-to-evil, akin to a similarly unconscious will-to-good. The Witch, here, contains within herself the reversal of all conventional and divine law, and thus the question of “where does evil come from?” is supposedly answered and the supposed “Satanic code” arises in her. In essence, this code is to go against the law and vex the holy. Przybyszewski insists that, for the Witch, this meant loving Satan, serving only Satan, regarding Satan as the only God, despising and defiling the name of Jesus, honouring the holy days in the “synagogue” (of Satan), killing men, women, and even children so as to vex Jesus in his saying “Suffer the little children to come unto me”, committing adultery, fornication, robbery, and murder, bearing false witness, and lying. In essence, the code is to commit every sin, and to sin on principle, and subvert all laws.

It is at this point hard for me to ignore an obvious contradiction, returning to the issue of misogyny. The worst crimes are attributed to the Witch, while the male Magician’s only real crime is against the laws of gravity and thermodynamics. Practically the entire second chapter of The Synagogue of Satan is devoted to recounting the extravagant and frankly fantastical crimes of female witches, but the Magician’s is introduced in the first section of the first chapter and ultimately gives way to the subject of the “Manichaeans” and the Cathars, all of whom don’t even come close to the depravity assigned to the Witch. The bias is fairly obvious in this setting. Women are obviously being positioned as “more evil” than men. Now, there is a general sense in which it is still probably correct to adhere to Faxneld’s argument that ambiguities and reversal are the primary tropes at play, being a self-declared Satanism and that Satanism entailing evil and evolution being linked and therefore positive, but even there, a certain degree of skepticism is naturally elicited when we look at the details. It is frankly not possible to assume that Przybyszewski would seriously have accepted every sin he describes as actually a virtue. Yet, at the core of it all, it may yet be more troublesome and typical Decadent ambiguity.

However, if we accept the argument that Przybyszewski deliberately sensationalized his accounts in order to weave a narrative suitable for his Decadent sensibilities, and those of his audience, then we may accept that there’s a larger point, perhaps comprising the “spirit” of the work for a lack of better terminology. And so we may ask, what is the operative point? The obvious answer is reversal, a rebours, as the central point of Przybyszewski’s Satanism. Reversal is in essence an extension of the transvaluation of values set forth by Nietzsche, realized in the act of the practical dissolution of fixed values that are set over individual action.

Continuing Przybyszewski’s recapitulatory discussion of the Witch, we are told that the Witch possessed magical powers that gave her a terrible power over other people. Her glance alone could cripple her enemies. When brought to trial, she was presented before the judge with her back to him so that the judge would avoid receiving her glance and its effects. A certain gesture of one of her hands was enough to hypnotize someone and cause them to receive stigmata, and she could do so to people far away from her due to the strength of her magickal will. And she did not limit herself in her means. Both natural and artificial means suited her just fine. An industrious poison-mixer, there was no poisonous plant she did not know about. But, of course, she needed human flesh and blood to increase the effects of those plants. This is obviously in reference to those tropes about Satanists collecting blood and fat for the Witches’ Sabbath, or in Przybyszewski’s telling in order to produce the so-called “anthropotoxin” for their concoctions. Of course, this all not only has no basis in reality (for one thing, there’s no such thing as “anthropotoxin”) but also bears a similarity to accusations of blood libel that preceded the witch trials. This positions the Witch in the space where Christian society designates the Other as inherently hostile towards it, and therefore establishes it as a negativity, or as the death drive. The lacking reality of the accusations belies a contradiction that marks the power inherent within Christian society to produce its own antagonism and potential for internal revolt.

Przybyszewski then moves on to the subject of murder. Witches were not the only people thought to have abducted children. Przybyszewski claims not only that at least one child was sacrificed during “sabbats” but also that hunting children for sport became a popular pastime in the Middle Ages, partaken by people of every major religion, with an unbelievable (and I mean perhaps quite literally unbelievable) number of victims. He references the notorious French serial killer Gilles de Rais and asserts that he murdered around 1,000 children for “Satanic purposes”. This particular idea, on its own, should be addressed first and foremost.

Gilles de Rais has long had a reputation as some sort of medieval Satanist in connection with his crimes, and a few people have even attempted to somehow cast him as a persecuted witch or martyr for a long-lost pre-Christian religion, but on what grounds has he been called a Satanist? Is it simply because his crimes were so unbelievably grotesque that they could only be understood as the work of a “Satanic” mind? Or is it because of his apparent esoteric inclinations? Certain testimonies assert that Gilles de Rais practiced alchemy and the art of demon summoning. But King Solomon summoned demons and he was no Satanist. Indeed, he summoned them with the authority of God, and the reality of much of old ceremonial magic, not discussed by Przybyszewski, is that until relatively recently that is how demons were meant to be summoned in the Christian era. A magician, following what was ultimately a Christian system, cast a circle and the names of God and his angels, summoned demons, and through God’s authority bound the demon to his will. Not the most consistently Satanic idea by my standard at least. There is no evidence that Gilles de Rais opposed this idea, certainly none to suggest that he had ever dedicated such efforts to Satan. People, especially when they are unfamiliar with occultism, tend not to understand that just because you’re an occultist and you summon demons doesn’t mean you’re a Satan, particularly not when Satan has nothing to do with your craft. I think that it is more likely that Rais was some sort of lapsed Catholic who dabbled into the occult, as some scholars suggest, and I suspect that the fact that he was testified as having tried to summon demons and killed people for it is the sole reason that anyone, including Przybyszewski, ever regarded him as a Satanist, despite the lack of evidence of any belief system that could be called Satanism or any first or even third person reference to Satanism by name.

Another example Przybyszewski gives is the abbot Guiborg, presumably referring to Etienne Guibourg, who he says held “Black Masses” in which he slaughtered children to mix their blood with menstrual blood and offered the resulting concoction as communion wine. For one thing, I have no doubt that this is one of the original ideas that spawned countless other contemporary Satanic Ritual Abuse conspiracy theories. For another thing, it’s not entirely clear if he was an avowed Satanist, and even the details of the alleged crime scene are disputed among historians, though Montague Summers claims to have an account of him performing a sacrificial rite to Astaroth and Asmodeus. In all truth, we really don’t know if the “Black Masses” ever actually happened, though I personally would not be surprised if in reality they never happened. Przybyszewski then asserts that not only children but also adults were used in these concoctions. He claims, for example, that an Italian cardinal once took a concubine (funny, I thought he already said those were banned by the church) and buried in the ground her up to her breasts, placed snakes at her breasts to bite them, and then took the “juice” that flowed out and used it to mix poisons. There’s no name so I think it’s safe to sarcastically file that under “thing that definitely happened”. According to Przybyszewski, all poisons, including the notorious Aqua Tofana, were supposedly manufactured in this way. Except, that’s not actually true. What is apparently known about the Aqua Tofana, which was created in 1630 by Giulia Tofana, is that it was made with arsenic, lead, and belladonna, not human blood or anything derived from human flesh, although we don’t actually know how it was mixed.

Whole epidemics are attributed to these concoctions, which seems doubtful in my eyes. Remember that he said that these were made using human blood obtained through sacrifice. Creating deadly concoctions through the use of mixtures of human blood would probably caue some sort of blood-related disease. In fact, just drinking human blood on its own is hardly safe; besides the possibility of becoming poisoned by ingesting too much iron from blood, different people can carry all sorts of diseases and pathogens in their blood, and drinking that blood would likely transfer this into your own bloodstream. Now imagine what a mixture of blood from two different people mixed with all sorts of other substances could do to you? Based on Przybyszewski’s claim that Gilles de Rais killed 1,000 children, the allegation that Etienne Guibourg and his mistress Madame de Montespan killed another 2,500, and the presumably innummerable cases of people who Przybyszewski says were killed so that their blood could be turned into poisons, there should have been evidence of massive epidemic of blood-related diseases. I have not found any noteworthy outbreaks of blood diseases in the Middle Ages, let alone any that could be attributed to any sort of witches’ concoction or “black masses”. Frankly, if such ceremonies were real let alone frequent, there would at least be evidence of small outbreaks of blood disorders caused by drinking blood or blood mixed with other substances en masse. The fact that Przybyszewski seems to nonetheless present such things as real and factual is inherently problematic, particularly considering the broad similarity between these “black mass” claims and claims of blood libel, and that problem is not necessarily reduced by the argument about his views about evil.

In any case this is all connected by Przybyszewski back to the subject of witch trials, which are then presented as “well justified” from the standpoint of society. Przybyszewski claims that in 1605, about 2,000 poison mixers were executed in Bohemia, Silesia, and Lausatia. I can’t verify that claim anywhere, so I have no idea where he got it from. Assuming it was true, the poison-mixers would supposedly have been punished by being pinched with red-hot tongues, broken on the wheel, and then “smoked”: that is, roasted by a fire encircled around them. One might as well have already died and gone to the Christian Hell if we go by that description. This, of course, is all justified by the power of these poisons and how they were made. Going from an account attributed to the Swiss physician Bartholomäus Carrichter, we are told that a witch takes certain herbs, speaks magickal words taught to her by a demon or “evil spirit” and which she supposedly does not actually understand (Carrichter treats the whole thing as a creation of her imagination as conditioned by false beliefs), then she presses the juice out of the herbs, washes her hands with it three times, lets it dry by itself in her hands, and don’t wash their hands anymore until they have touched the one they want to harm. As soon as they approach the person they want to harm and that person is not “committed to God”, the spirit of the herbs entered the target and blocked the spirits of their blood, causing a maddening and continuous pain and convulsions. Somehow I fail to see this being an effective epidemic threat, let alone one capable of justifying what must seem like the actual tortures of the Christian Hell upon probably thousands of people. But, of course, Przybyszewski would disagree, suggesting that people in the Middle Ages were highly suggestible to the effects of the poison, which apparently ensured that it worked.

By Przybyszewski’s telling, people in the Middle Ages “had to defend themselves”, and medieval society “had to root out criminal sects” just like how the British attempted to wipe out the “Thuggee” in India in Przybyszewski’s time. It is interesting enough that the witches are being compared to another sect whose existence is not entirely accepted by contemporary scholarship and made for a convenient target for state violence, in this case the British Empire as opposed to the old monarchies of medieval continental Europe. From this standpoint, persecution is framed as a matter of self-defence. From a critical standpoint, we may well admit that this inevitably the case from the standpoint of the overall logic of society, or at least statehood. Society and the state always needs some kind of “Other” to oppose and project a wide array of crimes onto. The state retains its existence through an exclusive monopoly of violence, and so it must always find ways of justifying that violence or ability to dispense it, and so it continually seeks out those it can persecute in order to exercise its own authority. So goes for society in order retain widespread conformity and, from there, authority. Crimes were continually attributed to witches, which allowed the medieval state and church rationalize persecuting them. The fear of the strappado, the tongs, the wheel, and the pitch-boot were assumed to prevent magically-talented people from giving themselves to Satan and mixing poisons in his honour, and supposedly there were many such witches. Eight million were supposedly processed, only a small portion of which turned out to be innocent. I suppose that all depends on the question, “innocent of what?”, when we account for the actual reality of the witch trials. For one thing, the actual number of people executed for witchcraft was definitely far lower than eight million (a figure likely influenced by Gottfried Christian Voigt’s similar count of nine million); the highest estimated death toll is likely to have been 60,000. For another thing, we know that at least most of the people who were killed as a result of these trials were actually other Christians, sometimes practicing a form of folk magick alongside their faith but often simply poor women who were considered rebellious – most certainly not people who had “given themselves over to Satan”. So on those terms, it is definitely not “a small number of people” who were innocent, contrary to Przybyszewski’s assertion.

And yet Przybyszewski also hints that perhaps much worse was done by the anti-witch party. We are told that it is hard to “nab” a good medium, a supposition that Przybyszewski gleams from the accounts of Sprenger, Bodin, Nicolas Remy (a.k.a. Remigius), de Lancre, and the many judges who Przybyszewski seems to suggest as having carried out massacres against entire sects and mediums in order. This was supposedly justified by “the consideration of the well-being of the human family”, on the basis that the people killed by the witch-hunters suffered from “moral insanity”. Freethinking individuals are advised to thank Remy that no outrageous dances, doppelgangers, or hellish noises were ever present at these witch trials. Not quite sure where that was meant to go.

After all that, however, now we come to what appears to be the next stage of the development of Satan’s church. We are told that Satan has become bored with his band of witches, and that the militant church, up to now assumed to have been crushed by Satan’s church, appears to have triumphed at this point. Satan decided that he no longer needed agitation and propaganda, and he became indifferent to the women who danced before him. Out of boredom and desire for new forms of lust, Satan became cruel. Sex with him became a form of torture, the women he chose screamed in agony and trickled blood from wherever he penetrated them. We’re told that Paracelsus claimed that the women were virgins and did not desire the act. Satan’s imagination could no longer bring any variety to the orgies of old, and he no longer cared to hide in remote and inaccesible places. Instead, he was now powerful enough to infiltrate the church of his Christian adversary, and from there to topple him from his own altar and make the priests into his servants. By the end of the 16th century, the advances made by Satan ensured that this was not difficult.

Przybyszewski says that at this time there were a plethora of priests who brought the “sabbat” to their congregations and staged “black masses”. We are told that Pierre de Lancre had burned three priests, presumably on charges of holding “black masses”, and offered endless excuses for his actions. Soon the “black mass” became common and widely practiced in convents, held and developed by priests who wanted to satisfy the desires of flesh. We are then presented with an account of the development of an “obscene cult”, ostensibly derived from the Memoires of Madeleine Bavent (or “Magalaine Bavent” as he seems to spell it for whatever reason). “Memoires” seems to actually be The Confessions of Madeleine Bavent, which for some reason Przybyszewski inaccurately referred to as “Memoires”. In any case, the account of the “obscene cult” begins with a location: a chapel in the cloisters at Louivers. There are no sects, it was bright because of the arrangement of lamps on the altar, supposedly fueled with human fat, which was supposedly common practice. A few priests are said to be involved: one named Picard, his vicar, Boullé, and about five or six nuns. The host bore no image, blasphemies were uttered as the host was elevated, and the mass was conducted with maledictions against the Trinity, the Eucharist, and all Christian sacraments. Supposedly, it was asserted that, while the Saints of God “do great things”, the unholy ones of the Devil are not inferior to them. This particular aspect would seem to recall the dualism between God and Satan that was established at the beginning of The Synagogue of Satan and later attributed to “Manichaeanism”. The priest then supposedly carved a hole into the mass and then stuck a piece of prepared parchment through the hole, apparently to satisfy some kind of lust.

A woman named Maria Von Sains is said to have recounted that the priest would sprinkle “the blood of Christ” all over the congregation, while the cry “may his blood cover us and our children!” resounded during the service. This exact saying seems to come from Matthew 27:25, in which it originally followed the act of Pontius Pilate washing his hands of Jesus’ blood. This seems to have since been interpreted as an acceptance of collective responsibility for the crucifixion, and hence became a part of Christian anti-semitism. I can only assume that in this context it’s being uttered in a different, purely blasphemous context. During this mass, the congregation stuck out their tongues, took off their clothes, or simply presented their bare asses to the altar, or they masturbated to the elevation of the host before converging into an orgy. This was the “Black Mass”, which so far appears as a subversion of Christianity that is nonetheless within Christianity, though clearly packaged with aspects of the older forms of Satanism as presented by Przybyszewski. Przybyszewski asserts that this “Black Mass” was not only very popular but also “almost public” towards the middle of the 17th century. Such celebrations were supposedly no longer a secret, and Przybyszewski cites as an example the gatherings of women in the Church of the Holy Spirit in Paris and the Abbey of Montmartre.

We then return to the subject of Etienne Guibourg and his trial. This trial is purported to have compromised the aristocracy of the court of the “Sun King” Louis XIV as well as his mistresses to such an extent that it had to be covered up. Whether or not that was actually the case, Przybyszewski insists that despite this there are plenty of facts to establish about the case. Again, these should be understood solely as claims made by Przybyszewski, since we have no actual idea if Guibourg’s “Black Mass” actually happened. We are told in any case that, in a chapel, completely decked out in black, there was an altar with a wreath surrounded by black candles, and that it is here that Guibourg awaited his many clients. These clients apparently included the poet Jean Racine, Marquis D’Argenson, a man referred to as “de Saint-Pont”, Cardinal de Boullion, the Duke of Luxembourg, Lord Buckingham, and none other than Madame de Montaspan. It can’t have escaped your notice that these consist mostly of powerful and influential people in the court of Louis XIV. Madame de Montaspan supposedly wanted to become the queen of France, and would do and sacrifice anything in order to win the crown, while Guibourg, who Przybyszewski says supplied the entire French royal aristocracy with poisons, was the only man who could help her achieve her goal. Przybyszewski says that just after entering the chapel the Madame stripped down completely and placed herself on the altar.

The ritual itself, according to Przybyszewski, began when Guibourg laid a cloth over the Madame’s belly and placed a chalice upon it. Then he recited the liturgical mass in accordance with Catholic tradition, except that he then kissed the naked body of the Madame instead of the altar, and then consecrated the host over her vagina before inserting a piece of said host into her body. Then, the daughter of the witch La Voisin cried out three times while Claude des Oeillets, here presented as a witch, brought in a child purchased from their mother. Exactly why the mother would ever agree to such a transaction is frankly beyond my understanding, but Przybyszewski claims that children were viewed as a cheap commodity in that time. Then, Guibourg supposedly said “Christ said, suffer the little children who come unto me. I want you to go to him and become one with him.”. Then he allegedly invoked the “princes of friendship”, Astaroth and Asmodeus, to receive the child as sacrifice. Blood flowed into the chalice, and spilled everywhere else, and the blood that entered the chalice was mixed with wine, part of the host, and the ashes of the unbaptised to produce communion wine, while the sacrifice is turned into a mummy. Guibourg supposedly said “This is my body! This is my blood!” before sharing the blood wine between himself and the Madame. Then he conjured “dark powers” to fulfill the Madame’s primary goal for this ritual: to win the affection and favour of Louis XIV in order to become the queen of France. Then the mass concludes with Guibourg covering his genitals as well as those of the Madame with blood and having sex.

Probably the most important thing to reiterate is that almost certainly none of this happened. There is no evidence of any of the sacrificial rites having been carried out. There would be evidence of human remains if any of it happened, but La Voisin’s garden was never even searched. What is Przybyszewski’s source for any of the details of Guibourg’s so-called “Black Mass”? According to Przybyszewski, what little evidence exists comes from Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel La Bas and the preface to Le Satanisme et La Magie by Henri Antoine Jules-Bois (a book that Przybyszewski otherwise regards as mediocre). So his source is a work of fiction written by a Catholic and fellow Decadent whose actual connection to Satanism is entirely unverifiable and a book about Satanism written by a man known in the French occult partly for accusing his rivals of being Satanists. Stuff like that is basically what I mean when I established at the outset that you cannot treat The Synagogue of Satan as an actual history of Satanism, because as history it’s frankly fairly terrible. But here let us return to the operative point: what does all of this lurid exposition tell us about Przybyszewski’s form of Satanism? Frankly, not much. I suppose all the blasphemy might be interpreted in terms of reversal, though the rest of the details take us back to the exact same conversation about possible problems with Przybyszewski’s overall approach to negativity. More to the point, even here it is hard to believe that Guibourg is necessarily a Satanist. Even if we assume that the blasphemies that Przybyszewski describes could invoke some sort of Satanic reversal, even in Przybyszewski’s account it seems that Guibourg never actually invokes Satan. Although he petitions the powers of Astaroth and Asmodeus, it’s not clear that he actually denies Christ or God; though of course, the ritual in the overall can hardly be described as Christian. It’s an absurd mess with no inherent concept behind it. I am absolutely confident that no one has ever actually performed it in reality.

We are then directed to the subject of Leo Taxil’s infamous hoax, in which he claimed that the Freemasons were a Satanic sect only to publicly reveal that he made the whole thing up as a prank. I believe that it is here, after all the absurdities regard black masses, poisons, and witch trials, that we are once again able to get deeper into Przybyszewski’s philosophy of Satanism. While Przybyszewski does not defend the idea that the Freemasons were Satanists as Taxil’s hoax said they were, he does nonetheless propose that the Satanists did in fact split into two camps. The first of these camps is the so-called Palladians, who, according to Przybyszewski, simply turned Catholicism upside down. The name “Palladian” brings to mind the “Palladists”, who supposedly worshipped Lucifer and consorted with demons. Przybyszewski’s Palladians are apparently a “neo-Gnostic” sect who believed that Lucifer, apparently also called Adonai, was the “God of Light” and Principle of Good, in opposition to Jehovah-Adonai, the “God of Darkness” and presumably “Principle of Evil”. I would say that Przybyszewski might as well have called them Luciferians, since in essence it is the same idea as certain stereotypical representations of Luciferianism as (theoretically) distinct from Satanism: Lucifer is the true expression of divine goodness and knowledge, who was unjustly opposed, usurped, and cast down by the God of the Bible. This dualism between a “God of Light” and a “God of Darkness” is very much familiar, it reminds us of the “Manichaeans” that Przybyszewski discussed in previous sections of the book. And indeed Przybyszewski himself draws this comparison, saying that the Palladians represent the tenacity and life force of the old “Manichaeanism”. As long as we’re comparing the Palladians to the “Manichaeans”, it stands to reason that the Palladians are a new incarnation of the “Manichaean” sect that favoured the worship of the “White God” or “God of Light” over the “Black God”. But, of course, from the starting point of the Palladians we are also presented with a space in which Satanism distinguishes itself from them.

Whereas the Palladians identify Satan as Lucifer and regard him as the God of Light and Principle of Good, Satanism, on Przybyszewski’s terms, absolutely rejects this idea. Satanists accept Satan as the Fallen Angel, the Great Adversary, the eternal Serpent of temptation, the Prince of Darkness; in essence, Satanists do not deny evil from Satan, and instead revere him for it. Satan for the Satanists remains as he was in the Middle Ages; the Devil who could help people obtain strange powers, and under whose protection one could commit crimes or transgress the law without fear. This apparently is even moreso the case now that black magic is no longer accounted for in the law books. According to Przybyszewski, the Satanists are typically lead by a priest who is gifted with magical abilities and performs blasphemous masses. His example, of course, is Canon Docre, which seems to simply be a nickname for Etienne Guibourg, and I have already gone through the problems of him as an example. Citing Huysmans’ La Bas, we get a description of what the generic Black Mass is apparently supposed to be. The Black Mass is meant to consist of blasphemous recitations of mass and the defiling of the sacraments concluding with a sexual orgy. This apparently is meant to involve a particularly horny priest (one afflicted with satyriasis) and women with somnambulistic tendencies, which essentially just means giving to hypnotic states of trance, much like the witches that Przybyszewski. These seem to be the basic elements of a Black Mass, and it’s interesting and rather fortunate that blood sacrifice isn’t actually listed as an essential part of it. But as for what is basic to the Black Mass, open transgression against God, wanton carnality, and somnanmbulistic ecstasy are the key themes here, because the part of the central point of Przybyszewski’s Satanism, lodged beneath the sensationalism is that Satan is to be worshipped with ecstatic and orgiastic rites, with sexuality, and an unremitting defiance and will-to-reversal. That’s a big part of why Przybyszewski positions “the heathen cult” as essentially religious libertinism, that’s why the “Manichaean” splinter sect who favoured “The Black God” worshipped him with nocturnal orgies resembling the ancient worship of Dionysus, and it’s part of the reason why sexuality, drunkenness, and intoxication are such big features of the “sabbat”. But, of course, that’s not the only reason. The other reason is that, in Przybyszewski’s philosophy, sex itself is the refuge of transgression, where everything is possible and thus every transgression.

Satanism, Przybyszewski tells us, is a religion a rebours, a religion of reversal, a religion of hate, revenge, and fornication. It is in this setting no less than the cult of the transvaluation of values, the doctrine of negation of the so-called law that stands against desire, the church of vengeance against oppression and authority, and the unholy mystery of sexuality. This encapsulates the raw negativity that is the real point of Przybyszewski’s Satanism. And, again, sex is central to Satanism, and to Satanic reversal. Sex is an abyss in which all things are possible, every crime is hatched, and a terrible urge for delirium rages that can only be stifled by inhuman things. Thus it is the seat of the destruction of all that is binding on the human psyche. Such things are a mystery to the outsider, a “normal” person, so called by nature of their conditioning and the extent to which they passively accept it, cannot quite understand it, no more than your average cishet man or woman understands queerness. Perhaps even those with “Satanic inclinations” must first pass into the mystery of Satanism before they really grasp its essence; as with Life itself, it is a dark forest, it is arrheton. And so, Przybyszewski says that a “normal” person cannot comprehend the Black Mass. But, of course, he does insist that no one can deny what people do in the frenzy of the Black Mass.

Now we come to Przybyszewski’s remarks on the growth of Satanism in the 19th century, his own time, and I find it is another instance which tells us of his ultimate lack of regard for the Enlightenment and his contradictory relationship with materialism. Przybyszewski says that Satanism has continued to grow under the protection of the “atheistic” liberal state and “liberal church”, the latter of which has come to a certain understanding with a nascent Darwinism and materialism. Both are said to have based their existence on “materialistic” teachings, and in this setting Satanism becomes strong and powerful. Ah, if only things were so simple in reality, then perhaps Christianity would have been nothing but a memory in my age. The liberal church, of course, has no desire to deal with Satanism, despite apparently having every cause to do so, supposedly because it denies its own origins and is the enemy of all forms of mysticism. Liberalism is thus positioned simultaneously as the unwitting ally of Satanism, who protects Satanism and Satanists from the persecutions of the traditionalist church, and as an interminable nuisance whose presence ultimately harms all attunement to mysticism. This latter trait, of course, sets liberalism at odds not only with Christianity, but with all forms of occultism and ultimately with the individualist mysticism of Satanism. It is very much implied that Przybyszewski does not like contemporary materialism, on the grounds of its similar rejection of mysticism, the occult, the soul, the Devil, witchcraft, and all the attendant subject matter. Yet, I am also not convinced that Przybyszewski was entirely opposed to materialism, not while he positions Satan as the god of flesh and matter and thus extolls what Iwan Bloch refers to as the “Physical Mysterium of Copulation” in opposition to the idealism of the “Metaphysical Mysticism of Idolization”. Indeed, by placing sex at the center of his Satanic mystery, Przybyszewski could arguably interpreted as privileging flesh, or at least such would seem to be the case if it were not for his belief in the soul as something that can be separated from the body.

Przybyszewski apparently concludes The Synagogue of Satan with a discussion of Eugene Vintras, one of the more notorious Catholic mystics, and his sect, the Church of Carmel, which he says practiced “the most shameful” fornication and blasphemy. He cites Stanislas de Guaita’s book Le Serpent de la Genese as his source for the information he writes about Vintras. To begin with, we are told that the Carmel sect is based on a belief in the progressive redemption of all beings from the lowest level to the highest level. To that end, each individual must work on their own perfection and participate in the common effort of perfection. The goal of the Carmelite is to reunite with the Garden of Eden through religious rites involving sexual union; the rationale here is that Eve lost Paradise through an act of “sinful love”, but through an act of “religious love” it can be recovered. Thus, sex can lead to either sin or salvation depending on its purpose. From there we are told that the Carmelites practiced “heavenly love” by fornicating among themselves in order to perfect themselves as well as with “lower elementary spirits” or demons with the aim of converting them into celestial beings. It seems that sex, if practiced in the Carmelite way, has the power to turn you into an angel. For the Carmelite, salvation is found only in sexual union. Supposedly, every man in the sect “owned” every woman, and vice versa. Przybyszewski refers to this as “sexual communism”, which he asserts forms the basis of this doctrine and others like it. The bed was the altar, the kiss was the priestly office, and masturbation (“the unnatural vice of Onan”) was a means of elevating lower beings. Public sex and prostitution supposely became not only virtues but also acts of inner sanctification.

This was deemed to be quite exceptionally offensive in France, and the Rosicrucians called for the head of Eugene Vintras. Przybyszewski says that a death sentence was to be carried out by the Vehme if Vintras did not cease his activities within a few years. The “Father” Vintras is alleged to have sanctified his followers through sexual intercourse. Infidelity among spouses was purportedly resolved through “celestial unions”. The Carmelite leader was apparently surrounded by mediums and somnambulists, through he whom he wanted to explore the secrets of black magick. This, we’re told, poses a danger that the liberal state should not ignore, due to the growing membership of the Church of Carmel. Przybyszewski then frames the “highest eternally old and eternally new principle” of Gnosticism as essentially the worship of copulation; “the skeleton was created to bear children, the genitals for mating”. Przybyszewski then claims that the Carmelites even railed against “the taboo of blood” on the grounds that “even the Christians mated amongst themselves”. Sexual mysticism, allegedly sanctifying the worst forms of fornication, is both central and nothing new; Przybyszewski claims that it is in essence the doctrine of the Cathars in a new form. He asserts that the “positive character” of Carmelite sexual mysticism made it more dangerous than Satanism, because Satanism was according to him rooted in a negation full of the fear of hell. But why the bad conscience when you’re under Satan’s protection? Why the fear of hell in the face of the torments of God? Perhaps the real point is that the fear of hell is one of the contradictions that lies at the center of Satanic transgression, which is then resolved in the “sabbat” and the cult of Satan through the ecstatic rejection of heaven.

And so again we return to the serious philosophy of Satanism, and Przybyszewski reiterates that sex is central to it. Satanism, on Przybyszewski’s terms at least, is about acquainting oneself with the hidden powers of sexuality, and being able to do so requires quelling the ever-increasing demands of sex and satisfy its vengeance. This is why a person gives themselves over to Satan. Not for nothing, then, that Iwan Bloch refers to Przybyszewski’s Satan as the “Personification of the Physical Mysterium of Copulation”. Indeed, this doctrine makes a lot of sense of the way sexuality and sexual excess figure so strongly into the cult of Satan as presented by Przybyszewski throughout The Synagogue of Satan. But the other important part of Przybyszewski’s Satanism, indeed, the last important premise to be discussed, is the central role of intoxication. In the realms of night and even pain, one finds delirium and intoxication. You may fall into hell, but by receiving delirium in frenzy, you can forget about it. And so in this forgetting and ecstasy, we lean into the grand formula of Satanism: “Erase me from the book of life, inscribe me in the book of death!”.

At last I can talk about this in an interesting way. After all, what is the “book of life”, and what is the “book of death”? The “book of life” is something that is referenced in the Bible, but the idea of there being a book for life and for death seems to be a more apocrine idea. The “book of life” in both Judaism and Christianity is the tablet on which God inscribes the names of those he considers righteous. Those whose names are recorded in the “book of life” are assured of everlasting life with God, while those whose names are blotted out of that book are condemned to death. In the Book of Revelation, those whose names are inscribed in the “book of life” are saved, while those who are not inscribed are cast into the lake of fire where they die the second death. But although death is the fate of those blotted out of the “book of life”, the “book of death” is found not in the Bible but in the apocryphal Book of Jubilees. In Jubilees, whereas “the righteous” are recorded in the “book of life”, those who are wicked and walk a path of impurity will be inscribed in the “book of death”, also known as the “Book of Perdition”. The latter name suggests the camp of rebels, those who defy God, like the “son of perdition” who is the most intractable enemy of the church. “Everlasting life” with God is to be propertied to God. You belong to God for as long as your name is inscribed in the “book of life”, and that name stays there for as long as you remain servile to God, as one of the sheep presided over on the right side of Christ. To take yourself out of God’s property, then, is to take your name out of the “book of life”. To inscribe your name into the “book of death”, or rather the Book of Perdition, is in this sense the act of self-assertion, to partake in the war of all against all on your own behalf. It is a declaration of Rebellion. Though, as we will see, perhaps Przybyszewski has a somewhat different view.

Towards the very end of The Synagogue of Satan, we see Przybyszewski’s Satanism unfold as a form of philosophical and mystic pessimism. For you see, life, according to Przybyszewski, is cruel. Life is a difficult burden that is foisted upon you. This is the realm of daylight. The realm of night, however, represents intoxication, delirium, and the attendant forgetting of life. Bourgeois life cannot do much to help you understand this, there is no measure by which the middle class citizen may compensate themselves for their ignorance through their riches. The facts of life, to truly be understood, must be understood in their abyss. It is again arrheton, that which is ineffable and whose knowledge requires passing into it. Life is harsh and cruel, and so there is only one way out: intoxication. Desperate people have intoxicated themselves with poisons, with filth, and with sexual ecstasies. The individual “splits in two”, their nerves rip, and they suffer tortures, but in the process at least they forget about life. This we are told is the one horror that exceeds every other: the filth, the slavery, the herds of lizards, the sacraments of blood and piss, all these for Przybyszewski pale in comparison to the horror of life itself. This ultimately motivates Przybyszewski’s ideas about Satanic transgression in the context of his fantastical narrative; the crimes that are committed, the vengeance that is undertaken, the shattering of the laws that commences, all of it is to inscribe one’s name into the “book of death” in order to negate the life that is so hated.

Przybyszewski’s Satanist would rather give himself up than allow himself to be deterred from his crimes. Przybyszewski’s Satanist breaks, inverts, mocks, and pollutes all laws, and hates everything that is in power over him, whether that is religion, secular institutions, the state, or capitalism. Przybyszewski’s Satanist would rather die than surrender or be forced to recant. Przybyszewski’s Satanist makes it his business – no, his religious duty – to shatter the restrictions of life, and judging by how cruel life is we might say that this rebellion and will to reversal is his reason to continue living. Przybyszewski’s Satanist is also the witch who, when her executioner wanted to free her in exchange for sexual subservience, rejected his advances with anger and pride: “I, who have kissed the ass of Satan, should give myself to you, the executor of the law!?”. Through everything else this simple roar of outrage expresses the true ethos of Przybyszewski’s Satanism. Total refusal and negation of authority and power, taken up as the highest virtue. That is the raw nihilist ethos Przybyszewski’s Satanist. This supremely anti-authoritarian nihilism is in utter contrast to LaVeyan Satanism, with its Pentagonal Revisionism and Anton LaVey’s self-avowed law and order ideology, or the bastardised Platonism of Michael Aquino, or The Satanic Temple with their humanism and their police regalia. I think that Przybyszewski would probably laugh at today’s Satanists for this and their lack of nihilistic vitality, let alone for the fact that many of them deny worshipping Satan (I must remind you at this point that, as far as Przybyszewski was concerned, Satanism meant actually worshipping Satan).

Finally, Przybyszewski derides the Cathars and the Carmelites, and presumably any similar sects, for their apparent efforts to sanctify delirium, nymphomania, and satyriasis. He considers this to be a sad and miserable hypocrisy. I think there may be a contradiction here, since he does hold the same regard for “the heathen cult” and the pre-Christian form of the “sabbat” for doing the same thing. But, it is also obvious that “sanctification”, for the Cathars and the Carmelites, would have meant dedicating those things to the Christian God as a means of blessing and saving beings. Satanism, of course, rejects such efforts. The whole premise of “salvation” is diametrically opposed to Satanism, and so Satan himself is no Saviour. Przybyszewski’s Satan is the creator and the destroyer, the god who creates life and then destroys it again and generates evolution only to negate it again. Funny enough, the exact same thing could be said about God if we take the monotheistic claims about him seriously, though I suppose at least Satan never claimed that he was going to “save” mankind in this telling. We should remember that Przybyszewski’s framing easily positions Satan as the true creator, being the father and patron of matter, flesh, and the generative powers of the world, which would make the Christian God a false creator. Satan-Paraclete is but the Paraclete of Evil, the spirit that proclaims the only law: the submergence of sin in something greater. Satan teaches humans to forget and overcome the maladies of life by means of negation and the ecstasy of instincts. The word of the Satan-Paraclete is enivrez-vous, meaning “get drunk”. And so ends the text of Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s The Synagogue of Satan.

I suppose before we conclude we could well examine this doctrine of enivrez-vous, of drunkenness as a virtue. Charles Baudelaire, one of France’s great Decadents, wrote a poem with exactly that title, Enivrez-vous, and its overall message is sort of similar. One must always be drunk or intoxicated in order to not feel the bruises of Time, you must intoxicate yourself with what you can – wine, poetry, or even virtue, truly anything! – in order to avoid becoming a “martyred slave of Time”. Przybyszewski’s Satanism would thus present a slight alteration of this: you must always intoxicate yourself in order to avoid becoming a tortured slave of life, or indeed a slave of God. The doctrine that Przybyszewski presents regarding intoxication allows us to make a great deal of sense of the radical emphasis on ecstatic ritualism, hypnotic states, and narcotic consumption in the celebrations of Satan, and even the emphasis on sexuality can be said to fold into this broader doctrine.

Conclusion: Summary of Przybyszewskian Satanism

So, now to summarize what we can understand about Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s form of Satanism. We may understand it as comprising the following points:

• Przybyszewski’s Satanism is based on the worship of Satan.
• It is also based on a philosophy defined by nihilism, pessimism, libertinism, and egoism.
• The core aspects of Przybyszewski’s Satanism are reversal, negation, intoxication, sexual ecstasy, and drunkenness.
• Przybyszewski’s Satanism begins with “the heathen cult” and gradually evolved into “Manichaeanism” and then into the church of Satan.
• Satan is the patron god of matter, flesh, and the evolution, generation, and negation contained within it.
• Opposed to Satan is God, his son Jesus, and the church, who all represent the invisible kingdom against the world.
• Satan is not the misunderstood principle of good, rather he is “good” because he is “evil”, and “evil” is the transvaluation of values.
• Satan is worshipped through orgiastic and ecstatic celebrations, such as the “sabbat” and the “black mass”.
• Satanism is based on pride, instinct, curiosity, and individualistic mysticism (or “the autocratic imagination of mysticism”). This means that Przybyszewski’s Satanism opposes Christianity and similar religions, but also modern rationalism.
• While Przybyszewski’s Satanism can be thought of as materialistic, it also seems to privilege the soul and the possibility of its ecstatic movement away from the body.
• Free will is a myth, but at the same time the ability to exercise individual will is central.
• Sin is good, no one is culpable of sin because Satan is the author of sin, so no one is punished for sin after death.
• Life is cruel, death is certain, but by worshipping Satan you can forget about life and overcome its horrors through ecstatic negation.
• The aim of the “sabbat” is to transform sin into the purity of desire through Satanic communization.
• Przybyszewski’s Satanist is someone who opposes all authority and all laws, and thus negates everything in an act of transvaluation of values.
• The goal of the Satanist is to erase their name from the “book of life” and inscribe it in the “book of death”.

It should be pointed out that I don’t think I agree wholeheartedly with Przybyszewskian Satanism. For one thing I think it’s already clear that I don’t think The Synagogue of Satan can be taken as an actual historical account, and in this sense I don’t agree with Przybyszewski’s presentation of the so-called facts of the history of Satanism. I reckon that any modern observer of history would likely understand me here. For another, I obviously don’t align with Przybyszewski’s views on free will, and I maintain that his views on free will are ultimately self-contradicting on the grounds that individual will still exists so that it can be exercised as he says it ought to be, whereas if we take the absence of free will seriously this should not be possible. While I may be something of a pessimist, indeed I insist on revolutionary pessimism and on freeing the power of pessimism, while I definitely have a good sense of where Przybyszewski goes when he says that life is cruel, I don’t think I inclined myself towards the view of life as an abject horror the way he seems to present it as. How can we totally do so, when the ecstasies of instinct that Przybyszewski presents are so latent to life, even if this only means that this is the online purpose to an otherwise totally meaningless life? All this of course is to say nothing of the problematic ambiguity surrounding Przybyszewski’s presentation of women.

But I insist that there is a great deal of value in Przybyszewski’s form of Satanism that should seriously be considered. For one, understanding the “sabbat” as a form of communization, the desire it upsurges as superseding the value of currency and hierarchy, and understanding Satanic negation as applicable to all authority and all “systems” carries with it an immense potential to define Satanism on anti-capitalist nihilist-egoist terms that allow for an easy break from the reactionism that LaVey and his legacy have largely put forward. For another, in the overall we see an emphasis on negation and reversal that allows us to develop away from the limits of the humanist orthodoxy that seems to pervade modern discussions of Satanism (and at this point I should say right now that Satanism isn’t reducible to the idea that by rejecting God you can be a nicer and more rational person). From the standpoint of Satanic Paganism I can’t deny that I have some fondness of his attempt to link back to some orgiastic pre-Christian tradition, though I must say it smacks the old Enlightenment-era Romantic Paganism and its simplistic understanding of Paganism. At the very least it may also provide a way of enriching the links between the two worlds. I would also say that Przybyszewski is absolutely correct to suggest that our understanding of things should consist “in their abyss”. From one of his other works, Homo Sapiens, we behold a demand for life and its “terrible depths” and “bottomless abyss”, which I think can be interpreted at least on its own as a call for the understanding of life as something that cannot be separated from its “abyss”. The inner darkness of life is to be cherished, not exorcised.

Regardless of everything, though, it must be stressed here and now: this is the Satanism that predated Anton LaVey. This is what was called Satanism before LaVey claimed to have invented it. This is the Satanism that Stanislaw Przybyszewski identified with since 1889 at the earliest, and around which he formed a small movement including people like Hanns Heinz Ewers and Wojciech Weiss dedicated to spreading Satanism. This apparently even inspired later movements such as Fraternitas Saturni. Its philosophy, when considered carefully on its own terms and in its own context, flies squarely in the face of our existing orthodoxy about what Satanism is. And, even if not for all else, Przybyszewski deserves a lot of credit for extending the philosophy of Nietzsche into the form of a Satanic doctrine.

I won’t say that The Synagogue of Satan is the best read even on Satanism, not least because as history it’s just not fit for purpose. But we ought to remember that book anyway, and Przybyszewski more generally. I should hope to eventually be able to get my hands on more of his work at some point. Perhaps they might say yet more.

Black Mass by Felicien Rops (1877)

Commentary on “The Synagogue of Satan” by Stanislaw Przybyszewski – Chapter 1: The Creation of the Church of Satan

Last year I wrote an article about Stanislaw Przybyszewski, who at the time I had sort of “discovered” through the work of Per Faxneld, and in the process got to know a fair bit about Przybyszewski’s philosophy, enough to conclude that Stanislaw Przybyszewski, not Anton LaVey, was in fact the world’s first Satanist. But at the time, I did not have access to probably the main statement of his vision of Satanism: The Synagogue of Satan. Written in 1897, The Synagogue of Satan is a decadent manifesto that outlines his own somewhat artistic account of what he seems to have believed was the tradition of Satanism, which in his view emerged from deep roots in mystic traditions that reacted against Christianity and presented a philosophy that included an active principle of “evil”. In last year’s article I could only discuss parts of that text, as presented via Per Faxneld’s The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity. But, a few months ago, I managed to track down and purchase a physical copy of The Synagogue of Satan to have and to read, and now, because of this, I am able to discuss its contents in full.

What follows is a commentary on The Synagogue of Satan, undertaken from the standpoint of its place in the history of Satanic canon and from the standpoint of a contemporary treatment of Satanism. It examines what The Synagogue of Satan has to say about Satanism, how to interpret Przybyszewski’s treatment of Satanism, issues within the overall work, and what insights we can weave through it. In this way, I hope to address what is from my standpoint probably the original essence of modern Satanism, at least insofar as we’re dealing with the word of the first modern Satanist, and contribute to its revival, and thereby the work of philosophically grounding contemporary Satanism against the vision offered by the “mainstream” of modern Satanist organizations such as the Church of Satan and The Satanic Temple.

I should note that the edition of The Synagogue of Satan that I possess is the Runa Raven Press edition, translated by Istvan Sarkady and published in 2002. I have scoured all over the internet for literally any edition for a physical English translation, and this was the only one I can find. This edition seems to consist of five chapters, whereas other editions split the same content into two chapters; the first is usually called “The Creation of the Church of Satan” and the second is called “The Cult of the Church of Satan”. I am informed that the same appears to be true for the Alkahest Press edition, though like the Runa Raven Press edition there is a paragraph at the beginning referencing three “essays”. In the Runa Raven Press edition, the first chapter is presented as an account of what Przybyszewski believed to be the historical development of Satanism from antiquity up to the time when “the church of Satan” was fully developed, which from the seems of it he seemed to believe occurred with the rise of Manicheism. The second chapter is presented as a treatment of the priesthood and cult of “the church of Satan”, and seems to focus on how he believed Satan became popular in the Middle Ages. The third chapter is presented as a “critical scientific evaluation of Satanism”, though it tends to focus on the concept of the witch. The fourth chapter seems to be Przybyszewski’s exposition of the sabbat, or witches’ sabbat, in its supposed historical origin and relevance to Satanism. The fifth and final chapter seems to continue discussion of the witch and the sabbat but tending ultimately toward the broader subject of Satanic negation.

Still, for the ease of the reader, it may actually be better that I run with the structure of the Runa Raven Press edition that I own, especially since the original is technically divided into five parts between its two chapters anyway, so that I can divide this commentary into five parts. Part 1, The Heathen Cult, examines Przybyszewski’s account of the supposed origin of the cult of Satan in pre-Christian polytheism and its development towards his construction of “Manichaeanism”. Part 2, The Church, explores Przybyszewski’s account of the gradual deterioration of the Christian church as beset by heresy, revolt, and the vengeance of Satan. Part 3, The Witch, examines Przybyszewski’s conception of the Witch as the most notorious expression of Satanic negativity as well as the nature of Satan’s church. Part 4, The Sabbat, continues to explore the nature of Przybyszewski’s Satanism, or the church of Satan, through the subject of Witches’ Sabbath. And finally, Part 5, The Black Mass, concludes the investigation of Przybyszewski’s Satanism with a discussion of the “Black Mass” as well as Przybyszewski’s overall Satanic philosophy as ostensibly expressed in the occult of Przybyszewski’s time.

Also, in the process of writing this commentary, I have found that it has taken more effort to cover what I wanted to than I had hoped, and the overall has ended up becoming quite bloated. Rather than subject you, the reader, to another article in excess of 30,000 words, I have instead decided to split my commentary into two articles, based on the two chapters of the original German edition of The Synagogue of Satan. As you have seen first of these articles covers the first chapter, “The Creation of the Church of Satan”, and is named accordingly after it. It will consist of Part 1, The Origin of Satan’s Cult, and Part 2, The Decline of Christendom. The second article will be named after the second chapter, “The Cult of the Church of Satan”. It will consist of Part 3, The Witch, Part 4, The Sabbat, and Part 5, The Black Mass, as well as the overall conclusion of the commentary.

It should finally be noted that although my principle aim is to discuss the philosophical content and rammifications of Przybyszewski’s Satanism, there are also several problems and issues with Przybyszewski’s historical treatment of the subject matter, and these are to be addressed as they appear. It’s worth remembering that, at least based on his writing, Przybyszewski seems to have actually believed in the historicity of certain accounts of witchcraft and black masses, and did not regard them as superstitions or tall tales, and so we are required to take his accounts of such things with a grain of salt. It also seems to me that Przybyszewski may have based some aspects of his history of Christianity from the work of Jules Michelet. But of course, for our purposes, what matters is what is communicated about Przybyszewski’s vision of Satanism. In this respect, I tend to think that The Synagogue of Satan is best treated as a narrative meant to communicate his philosophy of Satanism, not so much an actual history of it.

Part 1: The Heathen Cult

We can start with Przybyszewski’s account of the two gods who oppose each other forever: Satan and God. Satan is the “evil god” or “bad god” that created the physical world, the flesh, the earth, nature, and all of the passions, doubts, conflicts, pain, and agonies that come with it. God is the “good” god that created spirits and “pure” beings, and the invisible kingdom in which they dwell, ostensibly perfect and devoid of suffering or conflict. This on the surface seems clear-cut: Satan is bad, and God is good, right? No. Because God, the supposed “good god”, is little more than the patron of law, normalcy, humility, and submission, a petty tyrant who claims the past and the future solely for himself, and who demands fully childlike obedience and ignorance so that his followers may have the faith needed to be admitted into the invisible kingdom. And Satan, the supposed “evil god”, is also none other than the lawless and visionary leap into the future, the curiosity for the most hidden secrets, and the defiance that overthrows all laws and all norms. God the “good god” is actually bad because God wants the souls of humans to remain fixed in a purity that is ultimately slavery to his will, and Satan the “evil god” is in his own way actually good because Satan, who is so clearly the force of active negation or negativity, kindled the instincts that allowed people to investigate the world around them and break the rules that were set against their liberty. Wisdom, depravity, pride, humility, in their highest, noblest, deepest, and wildest forms are in Satan, for this is what composes the negativity of the freedom that Satan represents. Satan is the author of heroism, science, philosophy, and art, who called upon his followers to use his herbs and poisons to be healthy, find hidden treasures of the earth to become rich, follow the signs to decipher the future, use magic to destroy enemies while remaining beyond the grasp of the law, and even learn the art of necromancy. Love comes from Satan, and the soul is said share the same origin as Satan, and Satan promises his followers that they will see and obtain everything by embarking his difficult path. This is Przybyszewski’s Satan: the patron of outcasts, heroes, rebels, magicians, and all those animated by his negation, who invites the creatures of his world to cast off the invisble kingdom on behalf of their shared freedom.

An interesting but probably somewhat flawed element here is in the many forms Satan is said to have taken in the book. Przybyszewski calls Satan the Light Bearer, obviously meaning Lucifer, Satan-Father, Satan-Samyasa, no doubt referring to the fallen angel Samyaza, and Satan-Paraclete; very peculiar, considering that Paraclete is another word for the Holy Spirit, though this will become more relevant later. But Przybyszewski also says that Satan lived in the clan of the Magi and the mysteries of the Chaldean temples, and that his priests were called “khartunim”, “kasdim”, and “gazrim”, and that thus Satan was part of the doctrine of “Mazdaism”, or Zoroastrianism, and appeared as the god Ahura Mazda to teach Zarathustra (Zoroaster) the secrets of the haoma plant. It seems like it would have made more sense for Satan to have appeared as Ahriman, the eternal opponent of Ahura Mazda, especially considering that Przybyszewski’s cosmology of two eternally opposed gods is pretty similar to Zoroastrianism, which also assumes two gods eternally locked in struggle. I suspect that the idea is obviously to connect Satan to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche through his character Zarathustra, the hermit prophet named after the prophet Zoroaster but who otherwise does not resemble Zoroaster. In this way Satan, in his guise as Ahura Mazda, would have inspired the re-evaluation of values in ancient Iran. And I suppose that’s true if we mean the shift from polytheism to monotheism, but as we’ll see it’s rather incongruous with what Przybyszewski says about pre-Christian antiquity.

Ahura Mazda is indeed not Satan’s only guise. Przybyszewski’s Satan seems to have appeared as the Egyptian god Thoth, who is here also referred to as “Trismegistos” (as in Hermes Trismegistos), to write down books of esoteric knowledge that shared among a chosen few. Satan also manifested as the Greek goddess Hecate, who shared magickal arts with her devotees including the “invisible death stroke”. Satan also appeared as Pan, also here referred to as Satyr or Phallus, here positioned as a universally revered god of lust and carnality who taught women how to seduce and men how to satisfy their lusts, as well inventing the flute. Przybyszewski’s Pan was also the god Apollo and the goddess Aphrodite “at the same time”, authoring schools of philosophy, building temples to Muses, and teaching medicine, mathematics, and the sexual arts. This all obviously has a simplistic bent to it, and is a fairly obvious sign of the influence of the way pre-Christian Greek and Roman antiquity were interpreted by Enlightenment-era radical liberal authors. In that time, there was a certain romantic notion of “paganism” as referring to a humane and rational creed based simply on the reverence of the natural world and the teaching of “natural law”, the latter rather conveniently dovetailing with certain ideas of “natural law” that were already an established part of the political philosophy of liberalism. It was thus in some ways a constructed religion of liberalism, a more antique Cult of Reason based on the idea of Greek and Roman religion but without actually reflecting its traditional content, and it should come as no surprise that this sometimes incorporated the ideas of what was contemporary hedonism. Words like “pagan”, “paganistic”, or “paganism” in this setting were often practically interchangeable with concepts like hedonism or libertinism, which were long believed to be widespread before the rise of Christianity; such terminology has continued in certain anarchist circles into the 21st century, sometimes to disastrous effect. In any case, the actual realities of Greek and Roman society don’t quite entail the free love that Enlightenment radicals longed for. If certain accounts of the life of Aristippus are anything to go by, ancient Greeks considered it immoral to sleep with a woman who has had sex with more than one man in her life. In Rome, the same place Christians like to look back on as a place of constant orgiastic excesses, the raucous Bacchanalias were banned before eventually being recuperated, while the poet Ovid was exiled by order of the emperor Augustus, possibly on the back of obscenity accusations. In Greece and Rome generally hedonism was often actually mistrusted or looked down upon, its adherents regarded as “slaves to passion”, and even merely contemplative hedonists such as Epicureans were presented by intellectuals such as Cicero as threats to the Roman religion and social fabric, and ultimately blamed for the collapse of the Roman Republic. Still, it remains true that pre-Christian attitudes towards sexuality where not the puritanical tendencies associated with Christianity. Phallicism (the veneration of the phallus), after all, was very much a part of pre-Christian religiosity, and there is reason to think that prostitution received religious sanction in some cases.

In any case, the role the gods mentioned by Przybyszewski take is consistent with the attributes seen in Satan. Thoth or Hermes in this framework obviously represent the pursuit of esoteric or forbidden knowledge, as does Hecate though she is referred to for more deadly magick. Pan is a no-brainer here, clearly invoked to express the untrammeled carnality that Satan represents. Of course, Pan was never a simple “god of sex”, and in Greece was more typically worshipped as a god of rustic wilderness who could inspire panic to those who wondered into his domain. That said, he was known for teaching people to masturbate. Nonetheless, although phallicism itself was a part of pre-Christian paganism, the idea of Pan as a symbol of sexuality is ultimately modern, and his identity with the Phallus is almost certainly Przybyszewski’s own idea. The association with Apollo and Aphrodite are ultimately extensions of the connection between Satan and the themes of knowledge, creativity, and sexuality. What is to be taken from this is the idea that Satan represented the free pursuit of knowledge and sensuality that was taken to be part of pre-Christian “Pagan” but which was denied in the ascent of Christianity, and which so becomes a negativity. There’s a sense in which it can be argued that, because hedonism was actually typically looked down upon by Greek and Roman normativity, it is just as well a negativity there too. Still, if we run with the idea of Satan as having incarnated as the gods of polytheism, then surely there’s more that could be done with that. We can make sense of what Przybyszewski went with, but why not Satan as Bacchus/Dionysus, for the drunken liberation of consciousness and terrible wrath against kings? Or Satan as Pluto/Hades, for the treasures of the underworld? Or Satan as Vulcan/Hephaestus, for the power of fire to transform raw matter? Or Satan as Ares, for rebellion and war?

At a certain point, the “good god” gets sick of observing the indulgences of mankind from his invisible kingdom and so sends a son to earth to proclaim the message of this same invisible kingdom. The son, no doubt meaning Jesus Christ, first revealed himself to the poor, the oppressed, the slaves, and day workers. Now, this is where we need to step back a little. On the one hand, it is known that Przybyszewski was a socialist, or at least that he involved himself with the socialist or workers movement, for which he was arrested and later expelled from university in 1893. In fact, in 1892 Przybyszewski worked as an editor for a socialist newspaper called Gazeta Robotnicza (“Worker’s Gazette”), which was founded in Berlin in 1891 by Polish socialist activists who lived in Germany and were aligned with the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Yet, on the other hand, in The Synagogue of Satan he seems to glow with praise for “the aristocratic enjoyment of life” and remark with contempt for those who “had never tasted the holy joys of Pan”. What explains this? Of course the rigid social stratification of Roman society is rather unfortunately papered over in Przybyszewski’s telling, but I think it might be operative to point out how Christianity appeals to a religious sense of solidarity only so it may console and socialize the masses. Jesus was merely the “teacher” of the poor, teaching them contentment through the promise of “the good news”, not the advocate of the poor, who would have instead dragged the wealth of the elites down to the poor, and while he was given to flipping the tables of poor merchants he certainly was not interested in smashing open the shackles of slaves. Perhaps, though, Przybyszewski is ultimately working through the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, perhaps his favourite philosopher, in assigning slave morality to Christianity and master morality to Satan and pre-Christian antiquity. Yet it may be worth ourselves working through the influence of Renzo Novatore, the individualist anarchist who was himself thoroughly Nietzschean. For Novatore, the “aristocratic” that occupied his political thought was not the aristocracies who sat at the top of rigidly stratified hierarchies but instead a sort of defiant individualism that sets itself against conformity, the common, and the mass that set itself against it. It makes sense that this is the “aristocratic” quality of Przybyszewski’s Satan in the individuality he champions.

We come to Przybyszewski’s summary of the teachings of Christianity. In this summation, bread is no worry, earthly riches are fleeting, pride is meaningless because the highest ones will be in hell and the lowest ones in heaven, and, most crucially for Przybyszewski, carnal desire, which Przybyszewski the inexhaustible source of love for life and the will to eternal life, is the portal to Hell which must be shut in order to facilitate the reign of the invisible kingdom. Central to this discussion of the evils of carnality is, in Christian parlance, women, who the fathers of Christianity have long positioned as a threat to salvation. It is pointed out that Jesus said that a man has already defiled a woman simply by looking at her with lust, based on Matthew 5:28 where Jesus says that “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”. And after the master the pupil goes further. St. Cyprian, it seems, proclaimed that a woman who could excite a sigh of love from a man was shameless. Tertullian called women “the portal of the Devil”, accused women of destroying “that tree”, of being “the first sinner against the holy law”, and of turning “the one to whom the Devil does not want to be turned”, and proclaimed that everything evil comes from women. Jerome purportedly argued that women were not created in the image of God; that might actually have been Augustine, though make no mistake Jerome generally hated women for a slew of other reaons, and is known for declaring woman the root of all evil. Female sexuality is an important part of the space of Satanic negativity that Przybyszewski presents, and it is a subject that Przybyszewski delves into much further when discussing the witch. I suspect that female sexuality is operative in this space because of the power that men seem to have invested in it as something they really don’t have much control over, try as they might to control it.

For now, what is operative for Przybyszewski in this chapter is that the contempt for women and their arts is an expression of God’s contempt for earthly beauty. We are told of divine hatred directed against every ribbon, against paintings, poets, and philosophies, against theatres and circuses, and even against the colours of flowers as potential portents of demonkind. Temples and icons were destroyed, the priestesses of Aphrodite were condemned as whores, and it was proclaimed that the demonic was everywhere. Demons were feared to fill the air and hide in trees, Lucifer haunted men with debauched dreams as Venus, and so the first struggle is the struggle against demonkind. In this struggle the church waged war against the bonds that connected humanity to nature, and the “naked soul” (an important concept in Przybyszewski’s philosophy), meaning the soul as an “absolute phenomenon”, and its connections were declared the deceptions of Satan. Here again Przybyszewski connects to a certain idea of Pagan religioisty in that, in his account, pre-Christian societies lived both with and in nature, humans in this setting were intimately a part of nature, and that nature revealed itself in the symbols of “the heathen cult” and in the polytheistic gods themselves. There’s a sort of Feuerbachian premise being played with here, in that he grants the idea that the power of the gods was a projection of natural forces. Of course, this is an extension of the idea that pre-Christian polytheism was strictly the worship of nature which was taken for granted during the Enlightenment, but while nature worship in some form was a part of pre-Christian religion it is just not true that the gods of polytheism were strictly reifications of natural phenomena. Nonetheless, in the context of The Synagogue of Satan we can sketch out this general idea of “the heathen cult”, the orgiastic religion of polytheistic nature worship, as the first phase of the church of Satan. The veneration of the processes of nature (albeit clearly interpreted in the lens of a vulgar master morality) was expressed in the gods and symbols and in the veneration of the demon and the earth. This cult is here indestructible, and the demon hides in the forests, grottoes, and caves, gathering worshippers in “crude bacchanals”. Numinous, divine negativity, taking the form of the demonic, is in this way understood as imminent in nature itself, and impossible for the teleological will of Christianity to suppress.

Satan, from this standpoint, is understood as the most hated enemy of Christianity. And not just Satan in himself, but Satan as the magician and healer. Here, the Magician is understood as the active devotee of the church of Satan, through whom the principle of Satan’s cultus is realized. The principle was proud egoism against the laws of God. Przybyszewski’s Magician is an individualist who refuses obedience and all poverty of spirit, unlocks the secrets and mysteries of the world, and would follow no one. Such fantastical accolades are attributed to The Magician; he can levitate above the ground, he cannot drown in water, and he cannot be burned in fire. More importantly, The Magician could be as divine as Jesus Christ, and thus rival and set himself up against God and his son. In fact, Przybyszewski says that Jesus Christ himself was a magician, a defier of laws, and a seer, and so The Magician was the same thing as Jesus was, except that The Magician had more pride. The comparison between The Magician and Jesus Christ is operative because it establishes the profound egoism of Przybyszewskian Satanism. God is his own Ownness, just as you are, but God wants you to worship him as the sole Ownness and deny your own. So it is with Jesus Christ and The Magician. Jesus is a magician, but he must have you think of him as the only magician and worship him accordingly instead of practicing magick yourself and becoming a magician like Jesus. This is an absurd tyranny. The egoist is one who understands this, that there is no difference between God’s or Christ’s Ownness and your own, that their claims to sole sovereignty are a senseless oppression put over you, which must militantly be opposed and overcome, and thence participate in what I call the war of all against all in pursuit of apotheosis, to become divine, fully overcoming the barriers to individuation.

We must examine the pride of The Magician versus that of Jesus for a moment, because there are multiple angles approaching it. The Magician’s pride consisted in him passing his arts to a chosen few, the proudest and strongest, while Jesus passed his teachings on to the plebeians. On the one hand Jesus could just as well be proud enough to spread his teachings to as many people as possible, confident in their reception by the masses. On the other hand, perhaps Jesus’ “pride” ultimately makes the most sense as the “pride” of the preacher, of the proselyte and therefore of proselytism, and perhaps from this standpoint it is easy to see it as a folly. Likewise, the pride of Przybyszewski’s Magician is not hard to construe as a different sort of folly, thoroughly uninviting and obstinate in not disseminating liberation outwardly. But perhaps it is also true that The Magician does not spread his work everywhere because he is not a preacher or proselyte spreading a cult unto his own, and needs only for those who want his craft to come to him; and perhaps they most certainly will.

In Przybyszewski’s account, Christianity hated The Magician more than anyone as a competitor to Jesus, and so he tells of their vicious persecution under Christian authority. We are told that the emperor Constantine imposed heavy penalties on the practice of magick, that the philosophers were driven out under the emperor Valens, that the philosopher Iamblichus took poison after being imprisoned, and that the people gathered books and burned them. Thus Przybyszewski declares that the children of Satan were martyred by Christians in persecutions dwarfing those carried out under the emperor Nero. There are some things to account for here. For one thing, there’s no record of Iamblichus being imprisoned let alone poisoning himself. There were, however, book burnings carried out by Christians, such as in Alexandria and Antioch, in which literature deemed “unacceptable” was burned at the orders of the bishop Athanasius and the emperor Jovian respectively. Over the centuries books on divination and astrology were gathered up and incinerated by Roman authorities, while the Bible ostensibly recounts an incident where “books of sorcery” were burned en masse by recently converted Christians in Ephesus. And let’s not forget about the destruction of the Serapeum. Valens for his part did not quite “drive out the philosophers”. What he did do instead, however, was have Maximus of Ephesus executed and many other polytheists massacred because he thought they were conspiring to replace him. Constantine of course did issue a decree against divination, but it is also true that Romans had regarded magic as a form of superstition and often illicit even before the ascent of Christianity.

For all that, though, The Magician lived on, and magick with him, and he helped the signs and symbols retain meaning and power. Meanwhile, the church could not win by brute force alone, so it used the power of “atavism”, or “choc en retour” (meaning “backlash”), to imitate and thereby contain the magickal arts. Holy water, sacraments, and the sign of the cross replaced conjurations with magickal signs, while the art of envocatio was contained by Mass, and it was assumed that Satan was driven out with holy water and his magicians thwarted by the cross. And yet, Przybyszewski says, rthe church ended up acquiesing to the old ways. He claims that obscene figures seen on church pillars were remnants of the cult of the phallus, that the “Bacchanalia” at the festivals of Ceres Libera (possibly just meaning the goddess Ceres, who was not worshipped in Bacchanalias) were celebrated in festivals devoted to St. Mary, and that the priests together with the common folk celebrated old orgiastic festivals. Hell itself is taken as proof as the influence of “the heathen cult”, as the Greek rivers of the underworld appear as the river of hell and Charon as the ferryman of Hell in medieval literature and art. Thus Przybyszewski says that Satan triumphed over Christ, transforming from a means of reinforcing Christ’s dominion through fear of the Devil into the almighty lord of the world who people tried to appease out of fear. The fear of demonic possession became widespread, he Przybyszewski claims the existence of a sect called the Messalinians who believed they were possessed by the Devil. I can’t seem to find anything about these “Messalinians” other than one reference in Alphonsus Ligouri’s The History of Heresies and Their Refutation, in which it seems to be a name for a 4th century sect called the Euchites, who were accused by the early church of worshipping Satan but it doesn’t seem like they were constantly in fear of demonic possession. Satan in any case multiplies and takes on many new forms, tormenting the holy fathers in the desert with doubts, going to monasteries to tempt the minds of monks, visiting pious women to fornicate with them, and planting curses and blasphemies into thousands of believers. He is everywhere, and thus the church must constantly try to exorcise him. But, Przybyszewski says, this struggle only strengthened Satan as it was continuously waged, and he mocked God through the voices of the possessed, all the while revealing secret sins to priests, weaving prophesies, and granting power to the possessed through their possession.

Przybyszewski’s “heathen cult” at this point has been pushed into the bottom of the social hierarchy. Not quite banished, seemingly incapable of truly being banished, lurking in the periphery and eventually reasserting itself, and as it does gradually transforming and undermining the order of Christian faith. The “heathen cult” thus transitions into a negative space around Christianity, to which Christianity inevitably returns. But if “the heathen cult” is that negative space, Satan is none other than the death drive, in the sense that baedan meant it. Satanic negativity is irrepressible, irreducible, Satan is within himself a constantly self-reproducing power to destroy the order of the invisible kingdom and unravel the limits of theology and the church, and this power only seems to expand when the church confronts Satan, until finally Satan becomes the actual sovereign of the world. The death drive of Satan is revealed, pushed to the bottom, exorcised, and then thunders up to the top from the abyss, fought as the constant threat to society and order only to prevail over society anyway and tear it apart with blasphemy and madness. Satan then is the function of the death drive, a darkness and revolt producing the contradictions that threaten to destroy the power of the church. First presented as the contradiction outside of God, responsible for the evil and flaw in the otherwise perfect creation, thus freeing God from the culpability of his monstrous creation, Satan then breaks out of this role and threatens society with all of the contradiction that is actually internal to itself and to God’s creation, and by entering the minds of the masses Satan turns them into agents of this same negation.

As Satanic negativity overtakes and Satan’s death drive swamps over Christendom, sin is universal, Satan’s visions and voices impossible to avoid or deny, his seductions impossible to resist, and all thoughts sins before God. Supposedly, the devils even disregard exorcisms and don’t fear them at all. Thus all falls under the power of Satan, and Heaven is denied. In this setting, where madness and the fear of the end of the world plagued the land, the belief in “the Paraclete”, the “triune Satan”, and the Antichrist emerged, and the Antichrist became the perennial figure of speculation and intrigue. The Antichrist is the Adversary, the son of ruination, the “man of sin” more sinful than Jesus is virtuous, he is born from the Pope and a succubus, his reign is both imminent and already here, he will cut down the servants of Christ, he will cause miracles, and he will exalt himself to heaven and declare himself God. Basically, as an individual figure, the Antichrist is meant as the total opposite of Jesus. As a term, though, Antichrist seems to just signify that which is outside of and opposed to the community of Christians. In any case, in Przybyszewski’s account, the Antichrist seems to appear as an actual person, but not as an earthly ruler in accordance with Christian tradition. Instead the Antichrist is a spiritual sovereign, the spirit of pride and exaltation. Satan got bored of constantly possessing people and playing the game of exorcism with priests, and instead he wanted to “become God”, or rather “a proud and wild anti-God” capable of forcing Jesus back into his domain and end his ultimately hollow dominion over the world. The Antichrist in this setting is, apparently, Mani, the prophet of the religion of Manichaeism (or “Manichaeanism” as he refers to it). As strange as it sounds, his framing of it all ultimately comes back to the initial theology of the two gods: Satan and God.

Mani proclaimed the teaching of two gods, equally powerful and locked in eternal struggle with each other. One was the invisible god of goodness, seated in his heaven, unconcerned with the earth, concerned only with the perfection of his elect. The other was the god of sin, who rules the earth and is the source of sin in the world, and who says “do not strain yourselves, just imitate me”. Manichaeism, as well as Gnosticism, both supposedly spread rapidly in the Christian world. Przybyszewski presents what he considers the difference between Christianity and Manichaeism. Christianity presents mankind with the idea that humans can choose whether to sin or not, whereas Manichaeism rejects this idea on behalf of some form of determinism. Christianity from his standpoint valorized the imitation of stupidty, whereas Manichaeism supposedly lauded “the autocratic imagination of mysticism”. Christianity emphasized slave morality, whereas Manichaeism supposed endorsed proud sinning in the name of instinct, curiosity, passion, and “Satan-nature”. Thus Manichaeism in Przybyszewski’s story becomes the next phase of the cult of Satan.

I must elaborate at this point Przybyszewski seems to have obviously and completely missed the point of Manichaeism. Manichaeism did not reject free will, but it appears that the Manichaeans did believe in a sort of “true” free will, that is to say will that acts in harmony with the “World of Light”, the spiritual (or indeed “invisible”) world which was the birthplace of the soul. The soul had “free will” only so long as it remained pure and in harmony with its origins, and was not ultimately contaminated by the influence of matter. If the soul is mixed with matter and influenced by it, then free will was impossible. In this sense we can already infer that Manichaeism most certainly did not endorse “proud sinning” in the name of instinct or passion, since this too was the influence of matter that was to be avoided. Those who sinned were destined to reincarnate as animals, fall into the hands of demons, and ultimately be imprisoned with them in the realm called Bōlos. The whole goal for Manichaeism was the salvation of human souls, and the point of that was that humanity is responsible for redeeming both itself and the “World Soul”. The actual ethics of Manichaeism could be very strict: it was forbidden to drink alcohol, it was forbidden to eat the flesh of animals because animals were believed to be created from demons and contain “greed-arousing substance”, and it was forbidden to kill or at least hurt any living being, including plants. Everything, including not only plants but also the earth, the stars, skies, contained particles of the “World Soul”, and not only killing animals and cutting plants for sustenance but also to even walk across the earth or bathe in water was a violation of the World Soul. This all sounds quite unimaginably strict even by the standards of the most ascetic religions we know, and naturally it was assumed that most believers weren’t up to such a standard of holy life. The lay Manichaean was only expected to observe a set of moderate commandments, such as to not be miserly or to give alms to the elect. The elect, however, observed much stricter commandments in order to live a holy life. They were forbidden from eating meat, forbidden from drinking alcohol of any sort, forbidden to make money outside of business, and forbidden to practice any sexual activities at all. Both the elect and lay Manichaeans were expected to fail to live up to their commandments, so both regularly and constantly practiced atonement rituals. The point of leading a holy life in Manichaeism was not just to be saved, but also to become a physical instrument of the redemption of the “World Soul” from matter. Simply put, the actual religion of Manichaeism had nothing in common with Przybyszewski’s presentation of it.

The way Przybyszewski presents Manichaeism seems to based only on the part of Manichaeism that upholds dualism between light/spirit and darkness/matter as equally powerful, with the obvious assumption that this naturally elevates Satan as God and sin as an imitation of God. The idea seems to be that, in a Christian standpoint at least, to establish equality between Satan and God is to establish Satan as God, and I suppose it makes in the sense of Satan being the tangible ruler of creation as opposed to God the intangible one. But it doesn’t have anything to do with what Manichaeism was, it’s mostly just Przybyszewski projecting his own ideas onto Manichaeism. That said, this formula ends up presenting aspects of Przybyszewski’s philosophy to us. For one thing, it seems that Przybyszewski rejected free will in favour of some form of determinism. It’s not clear at this point how he meant to square this determinist rejection of free will with the defiant assertion of individual will so evident in his Satanic philosophy and especially in his concept of The Magician. Matter as represented by Satan is obviously superior to Spirit as represented by God, as the tangible principle and the vehicle in which sensation travels as opposed to be stifled by Spirit. And of course, mysticism, pride, and indulgence are held above obedience, faith, and humility. On “the autocratic imagination of mysticism” it is again perhaps worth inserting the later ideas of Renzo Novatore, for whom “autocracy” in anarchist terms means the “autocracy” of the individual unto itself, as set against the oligarchy of phantoms and all systems that seek to oppress, sublimate, or recuperate individual will. In this interpretation, “the autocratic imagination of mysticism” is, simply put, the free imagination of individual spiritual thought in rejection of dogmatic faith. Though, again, it’s not obvious how this is to be reconciled with the wholesale rejection of free will. Przybyszewski’s constructed “Manichaeism” is in this sense a vessel to communicate these values as represented in the “evil” side of a dualism in which it is supposed the “evil” side is ultimately better and more powerful than the “good” side.

The church is presented as ultimately the victor in the struggle against “Manichaean” darkness, and with the defeat of Avignon (which here represents the “anti-Christian” forces for some unknown reason) Satan blasphemed unto the world that he was the “God of Light”, that the “dark god of revenge” overthrew him out of jealousy of his “light”, that the time has come to fear his pride and hate. The “eternal light” will not sleep and neither do his children, but the children of his enemies will sleep, tired from struggle against the “light”. The “light” has sacrificed millions of fellows to the vengeance of its enemy, but these sacrifices are “fertilizer” for “the One”, who will in turn generate “a thousand new communities”. The vengeance is coming and it is to be feared. Blasphemy takes the form of inversion, and in this setting Satan presents himself as the true light, God the true darkness. This is the hint that the dark matter of Satan is the true nobility, and the invisible kingdom of spirit the true villainy, and the unjust takeover of the kingdom of spirit will be overturned by the power of Satan. As for the identity “the One”, however, I’m afraid that is a complete mystery.

The only thing I’m inclined to add at this point is concerning the Manichaean conception of Hyle, and through this a way parsing a doctrine of dark materialism through Przybyszewski’s constructions. The evil principle in Manichaean cosmology is the Prince of Darkness, who invaded the world of light out of lust to mingle with it, and can only create through copulation whereas the Father of Greatness can create out of nothing. The Prince of Darkness was identified with Ahriman, the main adversary of Zoroastrianism, Iblis, the main adversary in Islam, and of course Satan himself, but he also went by another name: Hyle. Hyle was the Greek word for matter. It was also sometimes used as a name for Az, the mother of demons in Zoroastrian myth. Darkness created the world or body in which Light was imprisoned, and so Darkness propagates matter. But, understood via Hyle, this means Hyle propagates itself. Hyle is linked to copulation, in that the Prince of Darkness creates through copulation while his demons set into motion the whole process of human generation. In Przybyszewski’s framing, Hyle identified with Satan becomes a principle, substance, and presence that is the source of copulation and which produces all things through a process of generation that starts from itself. Perhaps this is the true depth of Iwan Bloch’s description of Satan as the “Personification of the Physical Mysterium of Copulation”. It is still a negative force, though. It is dark in that it that raw, formless potentiality of generation that negations all barriers to itself, and for this reason opposes the “Metaphysical Mysticism of Idolization”.

Part 2: The Church

Przybyszewski says that Satan began his vengeance against God by possessing the world, and in the coming millennium humanity began to doubt God while miracles occurred everywhere. The Devil personally visited Pope Sylvester IV, Otto the Great saw the sun dim and turn saffron, and the order of the seasons seemed to change such that snow fell in the summer and thunderstorms broke out in the winter. As this took place, a “holy fire” melted the flesh of humans, leaving only tattered bones in its wake. The people were driven to madness and hunger, but would not eat the flesh of animals; instead they were driven to horrible acts of cannibalism. People tried to expiate God, bitter enemies swore the “Peace of God”, kings joined choirboys in singing prayers to God, but it was all to no avail. God would not help anyone, and as people became convinced that God had abandoned them they began turning to Satan to deliver them from their suffering. God’s symbols were desecrated and mocked, and Satan had already whispered doubts in people’s ears to turn them against God. The salvation offered by Jesus appeared quite hollow in the face of the world’s horror. What salvation is it when people eat each other, when the earth burns under their feet, and when plague rips off their flesh? Thus “salvation” was scorned while the church was scandalised by its infamous dealings.

The “temple of God” was no more, having changed hands to Satan. And so what were God’s children meant to do? Supposedly they made the children of barons and dukes into bishops, and then the people were convened to elect a six year old boy to the status of minister. A dove perched atop his head was meant to signify his election by the Holy Spirit itself. Meanwhile two women selected their lovers as Popes, and thereafter the “goodly father of sin” came to be secure in his reign and the church was restored. The world cried out for ecclesiastical reform, and Pope Gregory VII delivered on this reform by establishing the rule of celibacy. Woman was blamed for the church’s problems and so it was thought that Woman had to be “destroyed” within the church. Priests who refused to part with their wives were attacked by celibate monks. But the people defiled what they previously held sacred, drinking befouled communion wine and scattering communion wafers to the winds. The authority of the priests was completely undermined, while the authority of the monks and the mob prevailed. We are told that concubines were mutilated to death, that abbots who ordered castrations were rewarded with bishoprics, and that the theologian Manegold is said to have insisted that priests who resisted celibacy should be killed. In imposing celibacy the church had attacked nature, once again, by regarding Woman as an impure creature, equivalent to Satan, who spelled death for men. Fanatically bigoted pronouncements were made against women all the time. Pietro Damiani, for example, was said to have called women “scum of paradise” and “bait of Satan”.

What is operative in this narrative is that here the church is shown reconstituting itself on the back of a negative space, again. The negative space, from the Christian standpoint, is women, who are blamed for the corruption of the church, for which the solution is deemed to be the imposition of celibacy upon the clergy. And there was indeed a celibacy drive in the Catholic Church associated with Pope Gregory VII. Gregory VII did indeed absolve people from having to obey bishops who retained married priests. That said, Gregory VII was probably motivated less by the subject of women and more by a certain abstract ascetic ideal that he associated with the fulfillment of holy life. While I can’t find those quotes from Pietro Damiani outside of the texts of Jules Michelet, it is true that Damiani was a prolific advocate of clerical celibacy and vehemently condemned priests who were married. The ascetic ideal fulfilled in celibacy naturally clashes with sexuality, and in Christendom women were very often seen as portals through which temptation worked its way into the world, all then way back to the church fathers. Sexuality, female sexuality in particular, was feared for its power to unravel holy life and Man’s connection to God. The way this connects to the death drive is perhaps more fittingly explored once we get to the subject of the witch. But the point is that sexuality is the negative space upon which the church reforms sit, and which the order of clerical celibacy was instituted to repress, but to which humans, even the faithful, will inexorably return.

I would also take the opportunity to mention at this point that Przybyszewski’s idea of the imposition of celibacy, which would connote a clampdown on sexuality and libertinism, is a fairly obvious extension of the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his essay Nietzsche contra Wagner; Out of the Files of a Psychologist, specifically in a section titled “Wagner as Apostle of Chastity”, Nietzsche describes the advocacy of chastity as “an incitement to perversion”, and on such grounds regards Wagner’s opera Parsifal as “an attempt to assassinate ethics”. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche describes chastity, alongside humility and poverty, as having done immeasurably more harm to life than any vice or horror, and in a suppressed passage we see that the fourth position of Nietzsche’s “Law Against Christianity” describes the preaching of chastity as incitement against nature while stressing that contempt for sexuality and making it “unclean” are the real sins against life. This is an idea that carries on in Przybyszewski’s writing over the course of The Synagogue of Satan, and I think that it is best understood as a Satanic interpretation, or even extension, of Nietzsche’s anti-Christian transvaluation of values. From the lens of Stirnerite egoism we can also add an additional dimension via the discussion of lewdness and egoistic versus sacred love in Stirner’s Critics. Sin in the context of natural impulse, in this case lust, is denied for the sake of chastity as the result of what Stirner understands as a “religious consideration”, by which he means a strictly moral and therefore alienated consideration, which is not aligned to natural or egoistic interest, which would be lewd. “Absolute” interest, “spiritual” interest, set against natural or egoistic interest, is like a despot opposed to nature, like the God of the invisible and spiritual kingdom is a despot opposed to the world as belonging to Satan, thus we come right back around to Przybyszewski’s dualism on Stirner’s terms. And on that note I think it is reasonable to assume that, while I can’t tell you if Przybyszewski had read Stirner’s Critics, I can establish that he was at least familiar with Stirner on the grounds that he discussed Stirner and Nietzsche with fellow decadents. From there a convergence between Stirnerite egoism and Przybyszewski’s Nietzschean Satanism is fairly easy to develop.

With celibacy established and the church “finished with nature”, the priests having been separated from their wives began practicing unspeakable obscenities with their own flock, and we are told that meanwhile the church also waged war against reason. The investigation of the nature of God had already been forbidden, and now ideas were declared to be beings, which Przybyszewski tells us means they cannot be observed or learned from, which means the people gave up on thought. People flipped through fragments of Aristotle, and wrote commentaries on Aristotle which then distorted his writings such that Aristotle was to have prophesied the coming of Christ and proved his divinity. The philosophers of the day brooded over the psychology of angels and invented formulas to establish that comparing words is equivalent to knowledge of the real. In this setting, the “Satanic philosopher”, who we are told was a fan of Plato and shattered Christian thought by upholding Manichaean heresies, smiled at this state of affairs, presumably sensing the decline the Christian thought. This philosopher asked the doctors of the church, “what about when the farmer is leading a pig along to the market. What is doing the pulling there, the farmer or the leash?”, and the doctors of the church struggled to answer. Later we are told of a philosopher named Abelard ruining the efforts of the church by proclaiming that an idea is not a being and an abstraction is not reality. Somewhat unremarkable as an observation, but for some reason Przybyszewski lionized Abelard as “beautiful and glorious as a god”, such that no woman in France could resist him, and he possessed great eloquence and developed confusions that turned the doctrines of the church upside down. If by Abelard we mean Peter or Pierre Abelard, who lived from 1079 to 1142, the real Abelard was definitely considered a heretic, and he was an intellectual defender of women, but it is not evident that he was the stud that Przybyszewski makes him out to be. What is true, however, is that Abelard thought of original sin as a punishment or penalty for Adam’s sin, differing in some respects from other interpretations of original sin. Przybyszewski presents Abelard as wanting to know in order to believe, in opposition to Anselm who wanted to believe in order to know. But this simplisitc idea, one that is no doubt the product of its time in the context of the 19th century, smooths over much of Abelard’s thought, and positions him as a rationalist trying to challenge Christianity from the outside rather than, as is more likely, a logician and theologian seeking to redefine traditional doctrinal positions within the context of Christian moral thought. Unfortunately for Przybyszewski, what we know about Peter Abelard suggests that he was no “Satanic philosopher”, even if he was sometimes regarded as a heretic.

But whether we are dealing with heresy or simply a redefining of Christian teaching, what we are presented with is a state of affairs in which church orthodoxy is constantly under threat or being re-examined by mavericks. We are told that Abelard derided the faith of the morally simple and eviscerated the secrets of God, though of course he probably did no such thing and Bernard of Clairvaux never said that he did. But even if Abelard did not actually shake the foundations of the church, his student, Arnold of Brescia, arguably did. Arnold indeed revolted against the papacy, and in fact Arnold frequently denounced the political power of the church. He also condemned property ownership as sinful, and called on the church to renounce property and renounce worldliness. Arnold was exiled from Italy for his anti-clericalism, but he eventually returned and became part of the republican Commune of Rome, where he preached apostolic poverty and purity and demanded the institution of democratic rights and freedoms along with the restoration of a wholly spiritual church. For both this and the role he played in driving out Pope Eugene III, Arnold was denounced as “the father of political heresies”, excommunicated, arrested, and ultimately burned at the stake. We are then presented with Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor. Przybyszewski says that under Frederick’s protection Arab physicians opened a human corpse for medical study. Of course, although Frederick did require studying physicians and surgeons to attend dissections, human cadaveric dissections had already been practiced in ancient Greece and elsewhere for centuries and Frederick did not single-handedly reinstate such practices. Frederick supposedly asked the Muslims “My lords, what do you think about God?” and this was to be taken as a display of unbridled skepticism. Again, this statement has no record, but it is true indeed that Frederick has a reputation for skepticism, known for his empiricism and Epicureanism, not to mention his penchant for sensual indulgence. His reputation was such that he was accused of writing a book called Treatise of the Three Impostors, which purportedly argued against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all at once, though in reality Frederick probably never wrote it and the book’s real authorship and even its very existence are impossible to verify. But while he was often seen as an atheist and a rationalist and even accused of being a predecessor to the Antichrist, he was not really an atheist, and although he often went against the wishes of the church he was no real opponent of it; in fact, he still placed strict edicts against heresy, joined in the suppression of heretics, and granted secular powers to the church.

The point to be taken from all of this is that Christendom was not quite all that it seemed, or at least the authority of the church and its faith was not as absolute as perhaps God would have hoped. There was contestation, there were deviations, there were doubts, and there was revolt. For Przybyszewski, this insecurity marked the growth of skepticism and disbelief among Christians, and the ego rose with enthusiasm to prove everything and then refute it, as was “the highest philosophical art”. We are told that the man of the 12th century disregarded God, felt that Christ had ruled for long enough, and that the Holy Spirit needed to take over. Messiahs and new sects began to appear, and humans did not search for God because God was already inside of them, and so individual striving and the liberation of instincts unfolded. In the mean time, the Crusades had failed, God apparently slept while the Muslim armies repeatedly triumphed over the Christian armies, and troubadours had begun to sing with melancholy about how God preferred Muslims over Christians. And the hardships didn’t stop; God kept heeping more torments, defeats, and humiliations upon the people. At this time, people were longing for the chance to part with God without shame, and Satan gave them just that chance. Satan, here also referred to as Chernebog or Diabol and described as ruling the world alongside “the good god”, came to shake the church with his iron fist. A sect called the Bogomils spread out from Bulgaria and settled in France, facing decimation along the way. Here the south of France is referred to as “the favorite seat of Satan”, because of the many heresies that gathered there. Black magick is said to have been widespread, and Kabbalah was supposedly spreading among a supposedly no longer Christian society. Grimoires allowed people to summon demons like Samael to serve them for “evil”, while the Satanim live inside Man and tempt Man.

Forgetting the obvious problem with bringing up Kabbalah in the context of black magick, when the whole point of Kabbalah is to unify with God, it is here that Przybyszewski once again invokes his construction of “Manichaeanism”, which he states has returned in a younger form, and so in this setting the device of “Manichaeanism” recapitulates some of Przybyszewski’s ideas of Satanic philosophy. Evil is established as possessing the same substantiality as Good, rather than only existing incidentally through the self-incrimination of Good. Evil and Good opposed each other, but were equally essential and substantial, and in their opposition they go back to the source of existence all the way to the Godhead. Sin is not self-incrimination because it is not a product of free will, and instead it is the work of the “Black God”. Thus there is indeed no such thing as sin, because it carries no volition, and incurs no punishment. Eternal damnation is dismissed as a stupid invention, the sacraments of penance and communion are regarded as invalid, and regret for sin is considered useless – what Nietzsche called the “bite of conscience”, which he regarded as like a dog biting a stone, which is to say pointless. The human being, just like the Godhead, is also divided into “good” and “evil”, which was based in spirit and matter respectively. I should stress again that the division of good and evil along the lines of spirit and matter is pretty much the only thing this “Manichaeanism” has in common with the real religion of Manichaeism. But then Przybyszewski tells us of a schism within this new sect, between those who decided to favour the worship of the “Light God” and those who favoured the worship of the “Black God”. The worshippers of the “Light God” embraced a highly austere moral code and severe asceticism, their beliefs were spread by zealots who were later worshipped as saints, and these saints had the power to completely purify a person after their death. The worshippers of the “Black God”, in contrast, gathered in secret, established secret organizations dedicated to worshipping this god, and celebrated the mysteries of the “Black God” in forests, caves, and mountaintops.

Here “Manichaeanism” becomes two distinct sects: one devoted to the “Light God” of spirit, the other devoted to the “Black God” of the world. It sounds a little bit like the “Light God” is meant to be Belobog, the “White God”, and the “Black God” must be Chernebog, or rather Chernobog, since that is one of the names Przybyszewski gave to Satan, or rather “the Slavic Satan” It was long supposed that these two gods were meant to be seen as complimentary opposites in a dualistic Slavic religion, but in reality Chernebog was just a minor local deity that was only ever worshipped in parts of Mecklenburg and Pomerania while Belobog was not actually a deity but rather a local name for the Christian God. I suppose on this basis, though, it is fitting enough that Przybyszewski states that the two sects serve as re-statements of the difference between Christianity and Paganism, although I would argue that the sect of the “Light God” presented here is much closer to what Manichaeism actually was than the “Manichaeanism” that he has typically presented as some sort of ancient Satanism. The schism establishes, or perhaps rather reinforces, Przybyszewski’s conception of Satanism as essentially a continuation of “the heathen cult”, an evolution of a raucous, romantic, quasi-Epicurean pagan polytheism (as constructed by Przybyszewski of course) that was then pushed to the bottom by Christianity, beneath which it became an omnipresent negative space for Christendom as a whole. The idea of going to off to worship “The Black God”/Chernebog/Satan in the forests, the caves, and the mountains in orgiastic celebrations calls back to the mysteries of Dionysus, the worship of gods and nymphs in nature, and the old tradition that held that these old places of nature contained numinous power that humanity was a part of.

Then Przybyszewski talks about the Perfecti, or “perfected ones”, who possessed “oriental magical techniques” and performed miracles and spread under the name of a family of sects dubbed the Cathars. These Cathars, he says, “mangled and destroyed” the Christian faith. Secret societies were formed to pursue “obscene” aims, and the philosophical core of “Manichaeanism” was lost to the point that all that remained of “Manichaeanism” was doctrinnaire hatred of Christianity. The God of the Old Testament was despised by the Cathars, because he knew that Adam and Eve would die if they ate from the tree of knowledge and yet allowed them to eat of it, because ultimately he lied because they in fact did not die as he said they would, and because he killed both the innocent and the guilty at Sodom and Gomorrah. They are also purported to reject the doctrine that the “Good God” suffered on the cross because it was blasphemous to say that God could suffer, die, and come back to earth, let alone eat and drink as we do. They are also said to reject the idea of distinction between the sin of eating and the sin of procreation, and supposedly questioned the idea that procreation is sinful on this basis. And, of course, these Cathars hated the church of Rome perhaps more than anything; we are told they called Rome a den of murderers, that they likened Rome to the Whore of Babylon, and that they derided and supposedly even killed the priests of the church. Przybyszewski further claimed that Cathars held parodies of the Mass that were essentially almost complete reproductions of “the sabbat”, and that all novices had to renounce all Catholic teachings and sacraments and spit on the cross. Supposedly they even threw the sacred host into manure, broke the legs of Christ, and soiled him with filth. As far as reality in contrast to Przybyszewski’s narrative is concerned, I could remark about how much of this almost certainly had little to do with the “real” Cathars, but then there’s just one problem with that: the “Cathars” may never have existed at all.

In any case, as far as our narrative is concerned, the church responded to the rising Cathar movement by launching a Crusade against them, and so a massacre took place in which 60,000 people were killed. This seems to be in reference to the Massacre at Beziers, for which we actually don’t know exactly how many people died. But it’s from here that we apparently get the Latin phrase, “Caedit eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius”, which means “Kill them all. The Lord knows those that are his own” (Przybyszewski seems to have rendered it a little differently; for him it’s “caedite omnes, novit enim Deus, qui sunt eius”, or “kill them all, for God will renew those that are his”); in modern English, the equivalent phrase is “Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out”, as frequently used by Americans, especially in the military. The Albigensians fled massacre and persecution wherever they could, but every fortress they took refuge in in was conquered, one after another. Captured Cathars were burned at the stake for their heresy, supposedly even if they recanted, while the “knights of the Holy Spirit” executed thousands of people in all manner of ways. Nothing was left, and the church assumed that it had triumphed over heresy. But Satan felt more powerful than ever before. His church hadn’t actually been destroyed, for apparently the hearts of the people were loyal to Satan.

After the fall of Toulouse people apparently crept into catabombs or hid in mountain valleys in order to worship Satan, which never before had they done so enthusiastically, and a new priestess of Satan had emerged: the Witch. Of course, Satan needed to spring as many seeds as he could, and so he sought a wife with whom he could increase his kind. An allegory tells of Satan having intercourse with Godlessness, and producing seven daughters with her. These daughters were Pride, Greed, Infidelity, Hypocrisy, Envy, Vanity, and Fornication. When they grew up, Satan married six of these daughters off to mankind; Pride was married to the powerful, Greed was married to the rich, Infidelity was married to the masses, Hypocrisy was married to the priests, Envy as married to the artists, and Vanity was married to women. Only Fornication remained unmarried, and Satan reserved her for no one in particular, because she was for the whole world. Przybyszewski then says that what he termed “hysterical epilepsy” was common in the 13th century, and that leprosy was universal to the point that “everyone was a little bit leprous”. The succubi and the incubi destroyed those with “weak blood”, while women, we’re told, spontaneously fell down, lifted their dresses, and started masturbating, which suggested a sort of widespread sexual mania. Przybyszewski claims both that the “Albigensian theory” lent itself to such developments and that, in a turnabout, the priesthood of the church employed this very theory to develop new techniques of self-denial. Thus, orgies became a way to “kill sin by means of sin”, a means of negating individual will and instinct, and sacrifice yourself to God, by transforming self-indulgence into self-abnegation. It is true that certain “Gnostic” sects were assumed to have believed in indulging your sexual appetites to the point that you become sick of the material world, but it doesn’t seem that this was prevalent in the Middle Ages. Przybyszewski then says that the priests went further and taught that every act is holy for the saint, and sanctified anyone who sinned with him. The church was also the sole possessor of wealth, while the people were dying of hunger; a fairly basic indictment of class society in conjunction with Christianity. Thus the church was then mocked, scorned, and despised, and faced its collapse.

So, while Satan was growing his power in the world and while demons inspired sexual mania, the church in its attempts to recuperate the heresy it despised appear to have resulted in failure. The vices, married to the people or shared by all of humanity, reasserted themselves against Christian piety, and so dominated the world that the church tried to take them up as a pharmakon – the poison that is at once the cure – in the hope of destroying Satan’s power. Sin as death drive so unravels the world as to consume it completely, and with it seemingly the church itself, by now writhing in its own social contradictions. Interestingly, it is perhaps here that we see a fairly clear indicationg that Satan does not restrict his gifts to a few people, but rather has something to give for everyone, across class backgrounds. And of course, he certainly offers his doubts to the people at large at moments of intense contradiction in the reign of the church.

Then, in Przybyszewski’s telling, we see that the church owned land and the bishops were princes who could raise armies, while the monarchies were losing money and having to counterfeit currency. The solution of the monarchies to this was to confiscate from the church, and so kings incited soldiers against the priests and demanded portions of the church’s income. Przybyszewski seems to describe Pope Boniface VIII as a “perjured lawyer,” a “savage atheist”, who “debauched the church” with “filthy blasphemies”. As ridiculous as all of this is, he comes into conflict with Philip the Fair over the latter’s desire to impose levies on the church’s income. The Pope responds by issuing bulls against the king, and is derided in turn. After a feud with the king’s representatives, the Pope absolves the people all sins except sacrilege and stealing from the church, and then, Przybyszewski claims, he died while possessed by the Devil. From there the church declines further. Benedict XI released Phillip from excommunication, and then died of poisoning. From there the church was seemingly handed over to Phillip the Fair, who appointed Clement V as Pope under restrictions, and Clement V embarked on an inspection trip in which he stole from the French clerics. He cooperated in paying the king a tenth of church income, but this was not enough, so he “abandoned the Jews to him”, presumably meaning he let the king expel all Jewish people from France in 1306. When this was still not enough, Clement V withdrew all of Boniface’s bulls and elected cardinals that would ensure the new Pope would be completely under the king’s control, hoping to curry his favor. Still not enough, Clement V had to bring the Knights Templar to the king to be judged as heretics and executed. This, Przybyszewski says, outraged the people, and from there Satan went from being the god of secret societies and a handful of magicians to being the only god for the people. God could not be expected to give what was offered by Satan, he could only deliver torments to humanity and withheld paradise from them, and as the people turned to Satan his power grew immeasurably. Only Satan could give power to the weak, honor to the despised, vengeance to the wronged, and love to estranged lovers, and Satan alone was the god of the poor, the deceived, and the despised.

Here we see that Satan is, in truth, no elitist. How can he be, with “Evil” as universal as it is? And with the church in decline and God discredited in absence, Satan proved to be the true patron of the downtrodden. Satan was offering everything to the masses, God denied everything but torments to the masses, Christ was nowhere to be found and the masses were sick of Christ anyway. Christ’s position as the patron of the masses is at this point thoroughly discredited, although I should note that even in the Bible he never was the champion of the poor; how can he be, when all he has to offer the poor is the “good news” and the assurance that poverty will always exist?

And Satan was everywhere by now. He was in every household, he encountered people everywhere, he could even be sold in bottles. The ranks of hell swelled to 72 princes and over 7 million common devils. Sorcery became prolific, and so the authorities began charging people for it and punishing them with death, torture, and even rape. Przybyszewski appears to be referring to the three daughters of Philip the Fair, which is strange because in reality they were all charged not with sorcery but with adultery, and certainly not punished in the ways he seems to describe. The royal families were caught in adultery and crime, and Satan rubbed his hands together at the sight of such times. Then, eventually, there was a new idol: gold. Gold was the new God, and also the new Antichrist. Gold could be used to create treasures, fulfill every worldly wish, and even grant souls a place in heaven. The church turned it into crosses, reliquaries, and chalices, while other “important people” made jewelry and luxury with it. But gold began to run out. Everyone began a fanatical search for gold. Gold was seemingly manufactured, but it continually evaporated. Everyone needed gold, and at any price they would have it. The “prince of the earth” possessed all the gold, held onto it, and was willing to give some of it, but at the price of your immortal soul. People began a relentless persecution of Jewish people because they were believed to have all the gold and know where it was, but this was for naught. In the end, the people once again turned to Satan for gold. In this, Satan himself was gold, and he turned the church into a whore, the government into a band of counterfeiters, judges to scoundrels, priests to profiteers, peasant women to prostitutes, and morality to depravity. For gold the Templars were destroyed, for gold the church was expropriated by kings, for gold Jewish people were persecuted, and for gold the nobles began torturing the peasants. The people hid what gold they had from the nobles, and after a long period of oppression they violently rose up against the nobles and the priests, killing and plundering their oppressors and desecrating sacraments, but only to be suppressed each time. Through all this the peasants turned to Satan, The Devil, because only he had compassion for them, only he could bring them happiness, however brief, and only he could grant them vengeance against the nobles.

By now, Satan’s role as the champion and avenger of the oppressed is clear, and in this he emerges as the inverter and revealer of power and class. In his temptations, his blasphemies, and his gold, he inverts the power of the church and thereby revealing its true basis: not in righteousness, not even in God, but in acquisition; an acquisition shared by the state, by the nobles, quite arguably by everyone at least from Przybyszewski’s standpoint. Satan revealed the true nature of the authority hanging over the people, and the people then turned to Satan as their true saviour, the only one who could give the people what they really wanted. Not salvation, but freedom. Not peace, but revenge. Not abstinence, but indulgence. Not the daily bread, but gold. Christ could only promise the “good news”, and God could only promise torment in this life and heaven after it if only you obeyed him, and the nobles and the priests who oppressed the peasants did so in the name of God and his Christ. Thus Satan stands as the enemy and the subverter of the ruling classes, not their friend.

What follows next is another indictment of the medieval ruling classes. The nobles took a liking to abusing and torturing the peasants and common folk, and we are told that they developed increasingly elaborate ways of satisfying their brutality. One such way according to Przybyszewski was that the peasant would be thrown into a dough barrel, which was then tipped over, and the noble would put the peasant’s wife over the barrel and have their way with her, and they made their child watch while a cat was bound to the child’s leg and scratched the child every time they screamed. This is what Przybyszewski refers to as “ius primae noctis”, or “right of the first night”, in which feudal lords were supposedly entitled to assault women under their sovereignty during their first wedding night. It’s all very lurid and outrageous, certainly scandalising for the ruling class. But most modern historians conclude that this was a fictitious practice, whose accounts originate only from later sources and not from medieval accounts. Przybyszewski, as a 19th century man, no doubt took the side of a historical debate at the time on the subject which insisted that it was all true. In any case, within the scope of Przybyszewski’s narrative, such abuses naturally drove the people to a breaking point, and meanwhile people were dying of a plague that ravaged the land, and then dying of starvation afterwards. In this setting, no one worked, people waited for death, but in the country people fled to the woods and gathered to worship the Devil. Flagellants marched throughout France, the people became epileptic and performed orgiastic dances in the face of death, while the kings and emperors had gone mad. People renounced heaven and did not forget the misery in their hearts. It seemed that nothing really mattered, the popes were mocked and scorned and their authority ignored, and it was “better to kiss the stinking ass of a corpse than the mouth of Peter”.

Satan, in this setting, became popular, and so did the practice of magic and sorcery, which achieved the highest honour it ever had. The “witch-masters” in all nations gathered to summon demons that could possess the king, herbs with magical properties were brewed in cauldrons, the king enjoyed himself with an emerald magic book, and pearls were ground into dust that was used by magicians to please the Devil. Everyone enthusiastically participated in conjurations and the people performed orgiastic dances and carnal celebrations on the mountaintops to honour the Prince of Darkness. Meanwhile, alchemical laboratories were made to manufacture gold and people mixed poison in the courts of the dukes. Satan was now loved instead of feared, and even imitated in dress. Women would wear horned headdresses while showing their breasts and bellies, while men would wear stockings covered in magical signs, boots tipped with claws, and pouches that accentuated their genitals. Satanist sects arose, grew, and spread everywhere, and there was no village that did not have a dedicated Satanic congregation and nocturnal orgies.

And thus, the church of Satan is born, and the cult of Satan flourishes. Out of the oppressions of the church and feudal society, out of the madness of a world buckling underfoot, Satan’s cult arises as the true vehicle of the liberation of the people, it grows as the negative space from underneath the Christian church which then finally unravels it. Of course, at this point it must be stressed once more that a lot of this is best taken as pure narrative. If you were to take all of this as actual history, you would run into severe problems, and to put it forward as history today would be an act of revisionism. Still, my point was about what to derive about the philosophy and ideology of Przybyszewski’s Satanism. And what do we understand of it? Well, Przybyszewski has so far reiterated his construction of “Manichaeanism” which is no way the real Manichaeaism, but from which we derive the following:

• Przybyszewski’s Satanism believes in the primacy of Satan, “The Black God”, as the author of sin and the father of corporeal life.
• On this basis, free will is denied, and therefore no one is culpable of sin.
• On that basis, the doctrine of eternal damnation or punishment after death is completely rejected.
• Not unlike Manichaeism or Gnosticism, there is a dualism between matter as “evil” and spirit as “good”, but unlike these religions, Satanism favours “evil” and matter over “good” and heaven/spirit.
• Przybyszewski’s Satanism also endorses the “autocratic imagination of mysticism”, by which is simply meant a form of mystical individualism, or individualistic mysticism.
• Przybyszewski’s Satanism upholds pride, and especially pride in committing “sin”, as a virtue, while rejecting obedience and humility before God.

This idea then develops further through schism, and from “Manichaeanism” we get a cult based entirely on worshipping Satan as “The Black God” through nocturnal orgies in the wild. Magick for self-interested ends is a part of Przybyszewski’s Satanism, and Satan is of course the patron of these arts, for Satan encourages people to transgress. Much of this section has been less an exploration of Satanism and more an exploration of Christian decline, but the inversion presented by Satan’s vengeance gives us an important suggestion of a Satanic attitude towards political power; the rulers of the world rule in the name of faith, and faith rules by control, orthodoxy, and fear, but the basis of their authority is in no way righteous, and is instead greed and violence. Satan contains within himsel the negativity which is that same greed and violence, which is revealed to be shared across all social strata, and the negative spaces upon which Christendom establishes itself and then deteriorates and decays. It also establishes Satan’s place not as the patron of some elite values or as some Social Darwinist but instead as the real champion of the people, and the sole source of their deliverance, liberation, fulfillment, and vengeance against the powerful. Satan is the greed that impels the people against the greed of the powers that be, and which calls not for abnegation but for fulfillment in the liberating revenge against the powers that be and the long oppression that hangs over them. For Satan did indeed take pity on their long misery!

But, hold the thought, because Przybyszewski promises more, a greater divulgence of Satan’s church in the next chapter. Of course, we will explore further in the second half of my commentary.

Prelude to “The Cult of the Church of Satan”

So far we have established Przybyszewski’s Satanism as essentially a doctrine of libertinism, egoism, and individualistic mysticism centered around the worship of Satan. Przybyszewski presents this Satanism as having originated in the pre-Christian polytheistic worship of nature and generation – the “heathen cult” as Przybyszewski calls it – before it was driven underground by the Christian church, and then evolved into “Manichaeanism” and other heresies before the church of Satan proper began in earnest. Satan, as the patron of the generation of flesh and vengeance against the church, worked his influence into the world through heresy and revolt and then delivered the people fron the torments of God into and brought about a new age of Satanism. The church of Satan humiliated and competed against the Christian church, and orgies of sin shared with demonkind swept across the land.

But this is only the beginning of Przybyszewski’s narrative exploration of his philosophy of Satanism. The next section, “The Cult of the Church of Satan”, continues to convey it, but in a grisly narration of the story of witchcraft, the “sabbats” of Satan, and the “black mass”. Here Przybyszewski’s Decadent sensibilities colour his expression of Satanic negativity, and it takes a certain amount of discernment and context to get used to it. But through it all, we are gradually acquainted with the real substance of his nihilist philosophy of transgression which makes up the essence of Satanism as he defines it.

I hope you look forward to the second half of my commentary on Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s The Synagogue of Satan.

“Satan Creating the Monsters” by Felicien Rops

Satanic Paganism: An Adversarial Religious Philosophy

Over the last year I had undertaken a long period of historical research for an as yet unfinished project on the subject of Luciferianism. This research had lead me to the conclusion that Luciferianism is not the distinct religion or tradition that it presents in distinction from Satanism, and cannot even be interpreted as a distinct counter-culture as had been suggested, and that instead Luciferianism is nothing more than a name given to an extremely diverse set of esoteric belief systems that have little in common beyond the idea that they venerate Lucifer as a positive figure, separate from Satan and the context of Christianity, and even then some of these movements aren’t even distinct from Theistic Satanism in practice. As will be elucidated further in due course, Luciferianism in its historical and present context emerges as a kind Rorschach cultus in which almost any idea can be inserted into it, even Christianity.

Upon learning that Luciferianism was not a distinct tradition, I had initially leaned toward the idea of Luciferianism as a spiritual/occult counterculture, and that this could serve as a layer to be extended upon a larger religious worldview: of course, for me this meant Paganism, since my leaning and affection for it persisted in all my enterprises, even in times where I hadn’t considered myself a Pagan. This was the original spark of a larger mission to synthesize what I referred to as a “Left Hand Path Paganism”, for which I sought a suitable traditional context. Over time, however, the counterculture idea gave way as I realized doesn’t reflect the reality of what Luciferianism is or was. The basic project, however, continued, but certain ideas about “Left Hand Path Paganism” have now evolved and simplified as a better conception of such synthesis began to emerge.

As the title of this article suggests, this means the rediscovery and re-embrace of Satanism, and bringing together of Satanism and Paganism. I am fully aware that this idea would be hated by many Pagans and polytheists, and not to mention some Satanists, but it is the path that I wish to follow. What I seek to present is an adversarial stance, one that is at once an expression of a particularly transgressive take on Paganism and an expression of Satanism in a vastly renewed sense.

The Trouble With “Luciferianism” (No Offence to Luciferians)

I first encountered and/or engaged with Luciferianism as an idea was back in 2015. By that point I had been a Satanist for two years, but for whatever reason that I don’t quite understand anymore I felt that there was something missing in baseline Satanism. It’s probably impossible for me to explain what that actually was nowadays, but I think it involved some bullshit about a spiritual component focused on something more than rebellious and “egoist” hedonism; I say bullshit, because it’s pretty obvious that you can derive a thorough-going antinomian from Satanism. Anyways, at that time a friend of mine pointed me in the direction of what was then called the Greater Church of Lucifer, and I got in touch with one of their members, a man by the name of Vincent Piazza (who, sadly, has since passed away). I never joined the GCOL, but I was active on their Facebook pages and supported them until around 2019. Of course, I never forgot about them either, and that’s how I ended up finding out what Jacob McKelvy’s been up to all these years. Anyways, initially I saw the GCOL’s brand of Luciferianism as “the next level of Satanism” and identified with both Luciferianism and Satanism, but beginning in 2018 I got the idea to develop transcultural understanding of Luciferianism as a distinct entity from Satanism focusing largely on the West. This combined with certain political developments ended up leading to a lapsing away from what I understood to be Satanism, and to be fair I’d been burned out by a dissatisfaction with a lot of the modern Left Hand Path movements and certain discoveries of the Church of Satan. But that idea ended up developing in all sorts of convoluted ways before finally I abandoned it. The reason comes down to the nature of Luciferianism as a category.

Luciferianism is often presented as a codified belief system that is similar but strictly separate and distinct from Satanism. But the truth is that this only loosely true, and more accurate for some expressions of Luciferianism than others. In fact, I’m willing to assume that almost everything you will probably read about Luciferianism from occult circles is either simply wrong or just based solely on individual subjective interpretation. Even the Wikipedia for Luciferianism is a funny example of how much bullshit you can encounter by attempting to get a good definition of it for yourself. The article states that Luciferianism “does not revere merely the devil figure or Satan but the broader figure of Lucifer, an entity representing various interpretations of “the morning star” as understood by ancient cultures such as the Greeks and Egyptians”. That’s not universally true or even remotely apparent from any of the material I’ve poured through, with the exceptions of Charles Matthew Pace and possibly Michael W Ford, and what’s more the citation refers to an article that doesn’t even mention Egypt.

In reality, Luciferianism is not a distinct belief system, and nor can it be thought of as a kind of esoteric counterculture as I had theorized in the past. Instead it makes more sense to think of it as a placeholder, just a name given to any belief system that specifically venerates Lucifer as something other than Satan, and very typically this is presented in a context that is theoretically, but not always, separated from Christian culture; in practice, this usually means venerating Lucifer as a pagan or neopagan god, a “Gnostic” angel, or even a Christ-like figure or a being that is co-identical with Jesus Christ, or still even an avatar of God himself. There is no single doctrine under the name Luciferianism, not even pertaining to who Lucifer is. Different Luciferians will present very different ideas of just who Lucifer is and what his role is. There is also no consistent shared tradition that can accurately be referred to as a singular “Luciferian Tradition”, and individual Luciferians will have very different ideas about ritual praxis as well as theology. So, in practice, Luciferianism is a kind of Rorschach inkblot into which people may insert any number of ideas about it, and about Lucifer, upon it. Unfortunately, this increasingly seems to mean rebranded Christianity.

There is a tendency within contemporary Luciferianism that aligns itself with a sort of mystical Christianity, seeking to assert the value of Christianity as a religious framework in a way that is still fundamentally heterodox in relation to mainstream Christianity. This means venerating Lucifer as a light-bringer and liberator, having nothing to do with Satan or The Devil or anything of the sort, alongside Christian figures including Jesus, and practicing a synthesis of Christianity and witchcraft. At first I thought the Church of Light and Shadow were the only people doing it, and when I found about them, I have to admit I found them interesting if solely because they appeared to challenge prevalent ideas about what a witch or a Luciferian can be. But their approach seems to have travelled far enough that more Luciferians adhere to it, and so we see people like Christopher Williams, a self-described Gnostic Luciferian, argue against “demonizing” God, defend Christianity through apologetics, and espouse a belief system in which Lucifer and Lilith are manifestations, and not adversaries, of God, and that the Demiurge was created by them as part of God’s will. This is, in practice, an affirmation of Christianity and its God, albeit on Gnostic terms, and it is not anti-Christian, only anti-establisment and anti-reactionary within the scope of Christianity. I’ve also seen that Johannes Nefastos may have incorporated aspects of Christianity as part of his theosophical brand of Gnostic “Satanism”, and according to some he argued that Jesus was a god-man and the Pope has legitimate magical authority. Michael Howard believed that Jesus was one of the many incarnations of Lucifer, here interpreted as an avatar of “the true God” who willingly “fell” from heaven and incarnated on earth again and again in order so that all of humanity could be enlightened and freed from their worldly imperfection. So as it turns out, even the “separate from the Christian context” part isn’t completely true.

Luciferianism, thus, is essentially just a name for any esoteric doctrine that revolves around Lucifer and defines Lucifer separately from Satan, thus revering Lucifer in lieu of Satan. One of the obvious problems with this alone is that even Satanists have defined Lucifer separately from Satan. For Anton LaVey, Lucifer was one of the Four Crown Princes of Hell, in particular an agent of enlightenment or illumination in all senses, especially intellectual; in fact he seems to have referred to Lucifer as “The Enlightenment”. Satan in his worldview is more distinctly and generically the adversary, more a figure of negation than illumination, and even moreso an emblem of human carnality than intellectualism. In The Satanic Bible, LaVey wrote that “Without the wonderful element of doubt, the doorway through which truth passes would be tightly shut, impervious to the most strenuous poundings of a thousand Lucifers”. The suggestion would be that the principle of doubt, connected to the nature of Satan as the adversary, is the principle that begets and supercedes mere illuminated of the truth, but in this sense Lucifer as the light-bringer is clearly established in distinction, though not necessarily contradiction, to Satan, and this is done without any recourse to the concept of Luciferianism on LaVey’s part. And there are others apart from LaVey we can discuss for our purposes. August Strindberg (who called himself a Satanist at least in the sense that to him this meant that the world was governed by the principle of evil), for a much more pessimistic mythos, cast Satan and Lucifer as opposites, the former as the evil ruler of the world and the latter as a sort of culture hero who also brought floods, pestilence, and war. And meanwhile, there are many forms of Luciferianism that are practically indistinguishable from many forms of Theistic Satanism in terms of ethos, praxis, aesthetics, and even views on the nature of Lucifer, such that the difference is mostly a matter of identity.

My point is that once you understand Luciferianism in historical and contemporary terms, you learn that it’s not really a concrete “thing”, there’s no continuous cohesive object that can be called Luciferianism, not even in its mythos, and even its basic criteria often finds itself fulfilled outside of and without the identification of Luciferianism. All of this is, of course, not a knock on Lucifer himself. After all, he is a magnificent devil in any case. But Luciferianism seems to be a wild card of belief systems that, in truth, may consist of absolutely anything, even if it’s just Esoteric Christianity. After realising that, I went from seeing Luciferianism as a counter-culture that can be superimposed upon a co-existent religious worldview to seeing that what I thought about as “Left Hand Path Paganism” was going to mean something else. Attendant to this came the rediscovery of Satanism.

Fallen Angel by Alexandre Cabanel (1847)

Defining Satanism

In appreciating Satanism we must first understand first and foremost that it is not a mere expression of Christianity, nor is it merely a waste product of the Christian experience. Such judgements are invariably derived from a superficial reading of the fact of Satan’s origins in the Jewish and Christian mythos, and can ultimately only be characterized as a cope. If we followed this logic to the letter, Christianity itself would be a form of Paganism precisely on the basis that its God, who we must remember was called Yahweh, was originally part of a polytheistic pantheon of deities worshipped in ancient Israel and that at least the Old Testament of the Bible seems set in what is practically still a polytheistic cosmos, in that many gods exist, with the caveat that you are only allowed to worship one of them. If that idea sounds like nonsense, which it is, then by this standard to regard Satanism as mere Christianity is equally ridiculous. Instead, Satanism is best understood as a post-Christian worldview, one which may derive mythos from Christianity but otherwise transcend and surpass it. Everything from narrative, symbology, aesthetic, theology, philosophy, and ritual praxis takes a form antagonistic to Christianity and arcs towards a diametrically opposed worldview that functions in one of its many capacities as the negation of Christianity. And this negation does not only take the form of some prosaic atheism either, even though that is the face of “mainstream” Satanism as presented by most media. Rather, Satanism – theistic, atheistic, otherwise – is best understood as having built itself around the power of active, conscious negation, expressible in the form of literal divinity or a more abstract symbol.

Admittedly, there was a time Satanism. Indeed, Satanism nowadays doesn’t have a very good reputation in “the left” and/or parts beyond due largely to the perception that it is little more than “Ayn Rand for goths”. Of course, as I hope to show, this is ultimately a nonsensical prejudice based on an uncritical acceptance of the legacy of Anton LaVey as the heritage and starting point of Satanism as a concept. But the idea that it is true has had some very devastating effects. LaVey’s right-wing Objectivist influences were bad enough, but finding out that he had a whole network of fascist friends, including the likes of James Mason and James Madole, and that the Church of Satan was institutionally pro-fascist for decades, was deeply disturbing. At a time where I had basically been trying to connect with more of a left-wing politics, I ran into difficulties, got lost along the way, and suffered a form burnout triggered by the onset of demoralisation, which was in turn elicited by what I at the time perceived as a general decline in the modern Left Hand Path. In retrospect, a part of that may come down to some expectations that have since been shed, but at the time it may have seemed like the stagnation and the possibility of the movement being consumed by reaction had overwhelmed me back then.

One of the things that most obviously defines Satanism is egoism. The Satanic Temple and similar groups don’t lay a great stress upon this point, and arguably obfuscate it in their retreat to contemporary humanism. The trouble, of course, is that when people think of egoism and especially in a Satanic context, they think of Ayn Rand due mostly to the fact that Anton LaVey based his own version of Satanism and the ideology thereof partially around the philosophy of Ayn Rand. This in many ways is the effect of LaVeyan/post-LaVeyan orthodoxy having been allowed to ossify around Satanism for as long as it has, and there is no reason for anyone to think that this is how things must stay. Max Stirner, who first elaborated what can be understood as modern egoism before Ayn Rand could have any say in the matter, presents to us a profound apophatic egoistic worldview far removed from the narrow rational “egoism” that Rand espoused. Its concept of self is not a propertied essence of rational calculation but instead a negativity, a creative nothing, indefinable in the precise sense that the individual, the Einzige, cannot be defined by prescription or shared essence. This egoism, when taken seriously in its negative content, dovetails nicely with nihilism, and could perhaps be thought of as nihilism as well as egoism. In this sense, it should come as no surprise the first man to present us with a self-defining Satanism, far from and long before Anton LaVey, was a nihilistic egoist anarchist named Stanislaw Przybyszewski. But even so, it is the connection and intersection of these concepts, more than that one man, which defines the true radical content and heritage of Satanism.

But even this might well just be scratching the surface. Even before Stanislaw Przybyszewski, there were apparent attestations of people who were referred to as “Sathanists”. According to Laurentius Paulinus Gothus, via his Ethica Christiana written in the early 17th century, there existed a small cult in Sweden centered around the worship of Satan, or Sathan, who they believed was a god capable of bringing them hidden knowledge and treasures; this cult Gothus referred to as “Sathanists”. The “Sathanists” were said to have practiced black magick and witchcraft, ritually sworn fealty to Satan/Sathan, partook of lust, gluttony, dancing, and various “orgiastic excesses”, sought hidden riches with Satan/Sathan’s help, and apparently even had sex with demons. I have no certainty as to the actual evidence for this cult’s existence besides Gothus’ testimony, and there are good reasons to be skeptical. Christian pronouncements about satanic cults have often, and the themes presented here are familiar in view of certain ludicrous ideas proposed about the so-called “Luciferians” and Heinrich Kramer’s sordid tropes about “witchcraft” as presented in Malleus Malificarum. Still, it is an attestation of a term like “Satanist” in reference to a belief system, not just Christians who happened to be considered wicked, and there is arguably minimal reason to suggest that this reference was completely made up.

Through all that, though, we should find our way back to the essence of Satanism, prior to and without the humanism of groups like The Satanic Temple or the reactionary ideology of people like Anton LaVey or Michael Aquino, in view of Przybyszewski’s philosophy. I intend to write a much larger examination and commentary of his book The Synagogue of Satan in time, but for now let us say that, while Przybyszewski did consider the principle of Good to be that of negation insofar as he saw it as the negation of life, since in his view what is called Evil is in fact the basis of life itself, Satanism itself is none other than the religion of negation or negativity in the precise sense that it is the religion of (in his words) à rebours; that is, lawlessness, going “the wrong way”, the reversal of the law and of the order of things. Satan, in this sense, is the god of the eternally evil, and this evil is the negativity of lawlessness, the negation of all fixed values (the values “sanctified by law”). Lawlessness is negation as “contrary projection into the future”, which topples the order of things and the norms of the world so as to truly unfold the possibilities of becoming. That which is great emerges from negation, or as Przybyszewski says the negation of negation (in the sense that Good is the negation of life and you are negating Good), and negation through delirium frees individual consciousness in the forgetfulness of ecstasy (thus the word of the Satan-Paraclete is enivrez-vous; “to get drunk”). Satan, for Przybyszewski, is the god of evil, which is in fact good, the god of lawlessness and defiance, hence the negation of law and order, the god of boundless curiosity and heroic arrogance, the lord and master of the physical universe and the emblem of the evil, the god who continually creates and destroys and shatters the boundaries of human thought. In short, Satan is not simply the eternal humanist who stands up against tyranny, superstitition, or “unjust hierarchy/authority”; he is instead the eternal active nihilist, the negation of all authority, the negation of law and order itself, the negation of society, the negation of all fixed values, and he is the thus the transgressive negativity from which true greatness, creativity, and flourishing springs forth. In short he is the precept of Negativity itself, for which Eliphas Levi called him an instrument of liberty. Magick, black masses, satanic sabbaths, witchcraft, intoxication, sex, and defiance of society could be thought of as acts of worshipping Satan. Against Satan is God, representing Good, which for Przybyszewski means humility, submission, poverty of spirit, stupidity, and the pursuit of life as nothing but an imitation of God in the hopes of admission into his invisible kingdom.

Satanism does not make Satan into a new principle of Goodness or a god of light, for Satanists, insofar as we venerate and honour Satan, know that Satan is the “fallen angel”, the Devil, the Prince of Darkness, the Adversary, the seducer, and we venerate and honour Satan because of those things. Satanism does not deflect darkness or evil onto their enemies, because it is Darkness that we honour and worship. It is predictable , but making sense of the perspective of Satanism I’m setting out means making sense of Satanism through the concept of negativity. I plan to spend a lot more time talking about this here, but I find that the best lens with which to intrepet the negativity of Satanism is the in the queer negativity elaborated by baedan, a journal of queer nihilism written by the collective of the same name, who reject the liberal/progressive idea of queerness as something to be socially integrated and instead favour the idea of queerness as a radical negation of society and civilization. This isn’t simply to be understood as merely living the role set for you by society, but refer to view the negative image as a nexus of liberation via the quality of negation and aggression and a view to society’s taboos and fears. The Satanist, following this negativity, instead of shying away from the aggression of negation in order expel the fear of society, actively takes on the role of the adversary, that is to say the destroyer and negator of the order of the world, which is to say the true liberator.

By embracing Darkness, through the negation of the order of the Good, you open up the space for your own becoming, liberation, and, in the Satanic sense, apotheosis. By destroying boundaries and lighting the Black Flame, the divine fire of the creative nothing, the glow of the black void of potentiality, you open the path towards your own elevation towards god-becoming, the evolution set forward by the influence of Satan. Unlike other religions, Satanism places the liberation of, not from, the self at the center of spiritual praxis, and this liberation arcs towards the realization of the individual as its own creator, its own divine force. This high goal is often lost on those who wish to dismiss or typecast Satanism as little more than basic self-indulgence so as to elevate their own similar esoteric systems against it. And, by grounding Satanic individualism and selfhood in negativity, rather than the rational subject of Ayn Rand, the foolish accumulation of the capitalist subject, or the fascist re-interpretation of the Nietzschean Ubermensch so prevalent in certain corners of the Left Hand Path, it is in fact quite easy to see Satanic individualism as not a folly but as the profound spiritual philosophy of resistance and defiance and the key to the mystery of liberation.

In the midst of this we should revisit the center of Satanism: Satan. What is Satan, and why is Satan so central to Satanism? Satan is the central character of Satan because Satan is the first egoist. There is a prominent idea inherited from the trope of Romantic Satanism received from Enlightenment-era poetry and which has passed down from John Milton’s Paradise Lost: the idea of Satan as the first rebel, and building off of this, the idea of Satan as the first (or indeed “last”) humanist. This idea is at the cornerstone of many interpretations of Satanism. The Satanic Temple, for instance, takes up a similar premise of Satan as “rebellion against tyranny” and tries to weaponize idea this for their purposes. Anton LaVey took a similar but thematically different approach, in that Satan for him was a symbol not only of rebellion and non-conformity but also of Man’s actual nature as a carnal and selfish being, whose rebellion is directed against all moral and social barriers to the fulfill of that carnal and selfish nature. Rebellion against unjust authority is a concept that, while often attached to Satanism, can and has been attached to concepts beside Satan; modern polytheists frame the gods as rebels against unjust authority as well, Christians occasionally do it for Jesus, and in Chinese society there has long been a tradition of divine justification for overthrowing rulers who consistently failed to uphold Confucian virtue or morality (there’s also a similar Lutheran concept in which the tyrant is called the Beerwolf, and to rebel against and even kill the Beerwolf was justified by the Beerwolf’s own subversion of the moral order). But Satan is not merely a rebel against “unjust” authority, and Satan does not derive the legitimacy of rebellion from some legal right of rebellion or the writ of some concept of “natural law”. Satan’s rebellion is against all authority, and is indeed rebellion in itself, emergent from the egoism of Satan. Satan refuses to accept the authority of God, and refuses to bow down before Adam, because Satan asserts his Ownness and rejects the rule of the others, and negates all authority set before himself. Satan doesn’t simply liberate humans from tyranny, he rebels, he devours, he wars against the light in the name of himself. It is by his own example that Satan brings the light of the Black Flame to mankind for all to see, heradling the eternal quest of rebellion so that those who wish to join him in battle against God may do so willingly. By this and by the whispers of temptation, mankind is invited to shed the shackles of the spirit that it brings upon itself or are foisted upon it in order to awaken the Black Flame that is none other than the Creative Nothing, none other than the power of Darkness and of Ownness. This is Satan, the egoist who rebels not simply against the unjust but against all power and for himself, and who invites others to join him in the same rebellion.

In this sense, I can stress that Satanism really isn’t like many other religions when it comes down to its spiritual-philosophical basis as far as the true significance of Satanic rebellion and Satanic egoism is concerned. Insofar as there are multiple forms of Luciferianism that stress against egoism, it is inevitable that Satanism could be seen to diverge from a lot of what is called “Luciferianism”, though of course there is no one single “Luciferian” doctrine for Satanism to contrast with. Satanism also differs itself strongly from Thelema in that, although both thematically overlap in their anti-Christian transgression, the end-point of Crowley’s spiritual path was the surrender of individual selfhood to the Abyss and a core component of Thelemite ethics is the concept of the True Will, which is probably not to be conflated with the individual self, ego, or even Stirner’s Einzige/Ownness and is instead to be thought of as a sort of specialized teleological destiny imparted by the cosmos. Of course, Satanism also tends to differ from much of Paganism in its particular relationship to the gods. But, the intersection between those two worlds is something that bears further exploration.

Baphomet poster fanart from the Shin Megami Tensei Poster Book

Defining Paganism

Having elaborated the subject of Satanism, let us now elaborate Paganism. And, of course, any discussion of Paganism must invariably touch on exactly what we mean by “Paganism”? Paganism is often explained as an umbrella term for numerous religious movements, typically in the “Western” context, that embrace a worldview usually based around the idea of restoring the religious traditions and belief systems that existed before the rise of Christianity to some extent, but this on its own still does not adequately explain things. That concept itself is something of a compound identity, bringing together numerous ideas ranging from engaging with a multitude of gods and spirits, worshipping those gods in the form of idols, worshipping the ancestors, worshipping nature or at least to the extent that the gods were worshipped as parts of nature or within them, animism, sometimes practicing magick, venerating the cycles of nature through ceremony, and so on. What makes the concept of Paganism tricky to discuss is not just that the way we use the term was established by Christians to attack both non-believers and rival Christians, but also the fact that, for a lot of modern Pagans, being Pagan is actually less about what you believe and more about what you practice.

Making sense of modern Paganism requires getting into the distinction between a few camps within the movement. One such camp is reconstructionism. This refers to polytheists seeking to reconstruct the historical traditions of the pre-Christian religions as closely as possible, based on historical sources to the greatest extent possible. This includes Hellenists (reconstructing ancient Greek polytheism), Heathens, (typically reconstructing Norse and Germanic polytheism), Kemetists (reconstructing Egyptian polytheism), practitioners of the Religio Romana (Roman polytheism), Celtic polytheists, Gaulish polytheists, Slavic polytheists, Semitic polytheism, and so on. The general praxis of reconstructionism is also applied to traditions that otherwise aren’t considered “Pagan”, such as Aztec polytheism. Then there is the camp often referred to as “Eclectic Paganism”. This typically means not being bound to a single tradition and bringing together a wide range of different ideas into one single framework, guided by personal experience and a generalized “ethos” characteristic of Paganism; that at least is how it is generally explained. There is also something to be said about the concept of “Neopaganism” in relation to all of this. In theory, Neopaganism as a term simply refers to the modern or contemporary practice of Paganism. In practice, however, within the Pagan community and especially among reconstructionists, the term “Neopaganism” tends to refer very specifically if not almost solely to the new iterations of Pagan religion that emerged from the 19th or 20th century or later and have practically little to do with the original pre-Christian traditions. For example, this includes belief systems such as Wicca, the modern Druidic movement, basically anything from Robert Graves, and contemporary forms of neopagan witchcraft, and in practice can include belief systems that borrow from the New Age movement. Sometimes Eclectic Paganism itself is regarded as a synonym of Neopaganism. I would consider Romantic movements such as the Shelley Circle to be Neopagans in that, even if as an extension of the rationalist atheist critique of Christianity along with religion in general, they lauded “classical” pre-Christian religion as a more enlightened and prosaic religion closer to the truth than the “miserable creed” of Christianity. Similar efforts but from a very different set of ideological perspectives are found in certain German Romanticists who, during the 20th century, built a more or less neopagan movement on top of an esoteric romantic ideology. It should be stressed, however, that serious neopaganism didn’t seem to be the dominant voice of the Romantic movement, and in the end Romantic neopagans found themselves overshadowed, denounced, and ultimately persecuted by the Nazis, none of whom, not even Himmler or Rosenberg, were ever really Pagans (the overwhelming majority of Nazis were Christians and the Nazi Party from the beginning espoused its own brand of revisionist “Positive Christianity”, which sought to purge all trace of perceived “Jewish influence” from Christian doctrine).

Where do I fit into this, you ask? I think that the bulk of that is perhaps better elaborated when we unravel what “Satanic Paganism”, but I think it’s worth addressing here from a personal context. For so long in my life, before I even decided I wanted to be a Satanist back in 2013, I have had a noticeable affinity with Paganism, one that had never completely died out, and if anything has been deepening over the last year. If I had to explain why, I’d say that I think there’s a lot to do with the way Paganism seemed to sacralize the natural world, and with the idea of pre-Christian myths conveying all sorts of wisdoms and spiritual narratives, some of which preceded or even anticipated Christianity, but many of which seemed very different from the Christian message. Certain ideas about life, death, and rebirth, probably drawing from ancient mythology but also probably harking back to ancient Greek mystery traditions, have and continue to be deeply influential in my appreciation of Paganism and my overall spiritual thought. Over the years my appreciation for Paganism took on many different forms, even in times where I thought I had moved on from it. It’s almost like there’s an urge there, some spark that always reasserts itself. But, for reasons that will become apparent if they aren’t already, I cannot see myself as a reconstructionist, not in terms of what my path is.

I stress that I support the reconstructionist efforts to restore pre-Christian traditions across the world, and I think that aspects of reconstruction at least in the sense of authenticity to history are an important influence. It’s just that the approach to Paganism I wish to embody cannot accurately be classed as reconstructionist, for the simple reason that it doesn’t fit neatly into the existing traditions, obviously due to the fact that it means to blend with a rediscovered Satanism and carries in this the ethos of the Left Hand Path, and therefore is almost by definition a “non-traditional” approach. Reconstructionists, as far as I have seen, would have a problem with that, and in general I find that reconstructionists often don’t have much patience for that which doesn’t completely comport with historical polytheistic tradition. Because of this I find that the extent to which I am Pagan is definitely very eclectic, and has to be so because of the parameters and contours of my intended path, not to mention that I do indeed see myself taking on board a number of influences to build my path. That said, for Paganism as a whole, reconstructionism isn’t exactly dispensable, and there’s a standard of historical authenticity that informs my own approach. But even then, even in the reconstructionist approach in practice, modern reconstructionists tends to incorporate quite a fair bit of UPG (Unverified Personal Gnosis), which is naturally accepted on the basis of the acknowledgement that it is just UPG. And that’s sort of inevitable when dealing with the transmission of older religious frameworks long assumed to be extinct into the modern era, as well as the fact that, with a few exceptions, the full contents of most polytheistic traditions are completely lost to time, either because they were wiped out or because they were simply never preserved in writing except for some myths that were only put to parchment after Christianity took over.

Now with that established, the term “Pagan” itself can capture something fairly distinctive that I think has always had some resonance for me, though many traditional polytheists may seem to take umbrage with it. Kadmus Herschel describes it in True To The Earth, where he elaborates that the term in its regional context captures a rustic attachment to nature that is then given religious expressivity. Many reconstructionists don’t like to define pre-Christian religions in terms of nature worship, but while it is almost certainly inaccurate to reduce those religions to some concept of nature worship, we can find a number of instances where elements of the natural world were themselves worshipped as gods rather than simply represented by anthropomorphic deities. The Greek goddess Gaia, for example, was literally the earth itself, not just a representation of the earth. Gaia’s former husband, Ouranos, was the sky itself and not simply the god of the sky. At least some rivers, such as Scamander, were not simply represented by anthropomorphic river gods, rather those river gods were often literally the rivers themselves. And even when the gods themselves were not worshipped as physical elements of nature, parts of the natural world were often consecrated to gods, and so held sacred. This would include the forest held sacred to the Gallo-Roman goddess Arduinna in parts of what is now Belgium and France, the grove sacred to the god Adonis at Afqa in Syria, a grove scared to the goddess Nerthus and a whole woodland sacred to Thor (who Roman audiences interpreted as Hercules) according to Tacitus’ account of Germanic pagans, the oak tree that was sacred to Donar/Thor, and the forest of Caill Tomair in Ireland that was also sacred to Thor. According to Tacitus, at least, the ancient Germanic pagans worshipped their gods in trees, as the closest links between the gods and humans. Celtic pagans held rituals in groves, overseen by deities such as the goddess Nemetona, and other pre-Christian polytheists considered groves to be sacred spaces. Over time, reverence for trees and groves came to be understood as a trope for Christians when talking about returns to paganism, and from this nature worship came to be part of modern understandings of modern Paganism that extend from the “rediscovery” of Paganism during the Enlightenment into the present day. In pre-Christian Slavic polytheism, the gods were sometimes worshipped in sacred places where there were no man-made structures and the gods manifested in nature itself. For many polytheistic religions, sacred groves and forests were counted as the official centers of worship, where important community rites were carried out, and any violation of this space meant an attack on the community itself. In this, the idea that Paganism is a “nature-based religion” or that it involves “nature worship” is not really inaccurate.

But of course, to reduce Paganism to solely a sacralization of nature or natural states is reductive to the point of being ahistorical. After all, contrary to the popular idea that humans came up with the gods as reifications of natural forces that they merely didn’t understand, several of the gods of polytheism barely have anything to do with the natural world as we understand it. Insofar as we may venture to understand the gods of polytheism in terms of what they were “gods of”, there are gods of marriage (such as Hera, Hymen, Frigg, Pushan etc.), music (Apollo, Sarasvati, Ihy, Bragi etc.), law or justice (Tyr, Mitra, Lugh, Ma’at etc.), commerce or wealth (Mercury, Cernunnos, Lakshmi, Njord etc.), agriculture (Yarilo, Dagon, Sucellus, Dagda etc.). smithing and craftsmanship (Hephaestos, Ptah, Gofannon, Vishvakarman), and kingship (Horus, Anu, El, Baal etc.) to name a handful of things. Some gods are gods of both natural things and human constructs. Zeus, for example, is a god of law and order as well as the sky. Utu is a god of law as well as the sun. Demeter is also a goddess of law, as well as a goddess of the earth. Pan is a god of music as well as the wild. Ukko is a god of agriculture as well as the sky and thunder. Freyr is a god of kingship and war, as well as the weather and virility. Svarog is a god of smithing as well as the sky. Veles is a god of commerce, as well as a god of water, earth, magic, and the underworld. We can’t forget that almost none of the gods of polytheism were ever just gods of one thing or another, and sometimes multiple gods share the same domain or function. On top of that, across the old polytheistic religions, the gods had numerous epithets that represented various characteristics and functions attributed to them.

In a sense, it’s still true that Paganism, in both a modern and a historical sense, believes in a natural world that is considered divine or imbued with divine presence to some extent or another, and this likely lends itself to modern interpretations entailing nature worship, which may or may not have been applicable to the original pre-Christian religions. Though, of course, some pre-Christian traditions were arguably closer to some idea of “nature worship” than others, such as Germanic polytheism with its worship of the various nature spirits alongside the gods and the worship of gods and spirits in trees and natural environments. Pre-Christian polytheism often tended to intersect with animism in this regard, especially in traditions such as Heathenry, and some even argue that some form of pantheism is also part of this rich picture. Still, for historical Paganism, one of the larger points is the idea that divine exists in multiplicity, that divine presence is not one but many. Of course, even before Christianity emerged, later developments of pre-Christian polytheistic ended up prefiguring the monotheism that would later dominate “the West”, or later ideas of “universal religion” that would stretch from the Renaissance to Theosophy and to the New Age movement. Plutarch, for instance, argued that there were not different gods across peoples but instead one single Intelligence that rules the world that is merely called different names and worshipped in different ways as time passes. In The Metamorphoses by Apuleius, the goddess Isis presents herself as “the single power which the world worships in many shapes, by various cults, under various names”. The Roman theologian Cornelius Labeo proposed that the oracle of Clarian Apollo stated that the god Iao was the supreme god, who in winter was called Hades, in spring was called Zeus, in summer was called Helios, and in autumn Dionysos. After the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its official state religion, defenders of paganism sometimes argued that Christians and pagans were merely worshipping the same god under different names. Neoplatonists argued that all things derived existence from a single source referred to as The One, and that the purpose of life as to become united or re-united with The One. Otherwise polytheistic philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato introduced concepts that may have prefigured the God we know today, such as the unmoved mover or Demiurge. And of course, at various points before the rise of Christianity, there were a few monotheistic cults that emerged, such as the Egyptian cult of Aten under the pharaoh Akhenaten or the Hellenistic cult of Zeus Hypsistos.

My point here is that Paganism in a historical sense (and honestly a modern sense too) was not one single set of beliefs in the way we understand Christianity to be (and, even there, Christianity isn’t necessarily as monolithic as we imagine it to be). That extends to other beliefs as well, such as pertaining to death. While modern Paganism can include a belief in reincarnation, it’s not clear that this belief was universally held in pre-Christian traditions. It is possible that some Germanic pagans did believe in a form of reincarnation; Roman sources purported that the ancient Teutons believed in rebirth and thus did not fear death, while some scholars suggest that Germanic pagans believed in rebirth within the extended clan based on some archaeological findings and exegesis of some stories in the Sagas. Many Norse polytheists, however, don’t share this concept, and have a wide array of beliefs about the afterlife that don’t necessarily end in rebirth. Indeed, the “more authentically pagan” version of Ragnarok ends not in the rebirth of the cosmos (as in the familiar post-conversion telling) but instead in its utter oblivion. Greek polytheist beliefs on this range from the arrival of most (if not all) souls to a dreary underworld, to the belief that the soul may go to a blessed afterlife upon achieving ritual purity or initiation into the mysteries of a god, to Plato’s account of how souls are judged and either admitted to a good afterlife or damned to a bad one again prefiguring Christian teaching), and of course the concept of reincarnation was sometimes proposed. What little we know about what we call the Celtic polytheists suggests that they probably believed in reincarnation, but some suggest that the soul goes to the Otherworld, a place inhabited by gods and spirits, after death. In ancient Egypt, it was believed that by living a virtuous life, the soul would be judged as being worthy to enter the field of reeds, or that by successfully undergoing a journey through the underworld and overcoming its perils, the soul would gain an immortal second life. Relevant to the conversation is the way that pre-Christian belief systems frequently advanced the concept of a cyclical cosmos, in which the cosmos is periodically formed, dissolved, and reformed again. The Norse cosmology appears to suggest cyclic time and rebirth, as did some of classical Greek philosophy such as Stoicism and Pythagoreanism, and it is very prominent in Indian religious philosophy.

Paganism in a historical sense isn’t really one set of beliefs. In fact, there is as Kadmus Herschel and Jake Stratton-Kent show an opposition between distinct expressions of pre-Christian religion, linked to the development of philosophy in one case and a change in the mode of Greek society in the other case, that is relevant to how I aim to elaborate Satanic Paganism. That said, I think the way we deal with Paganism, as an idea, is sort of a compound idea in which we find and derive the premise of a natural world brimming with the multiplicitous divine presence worshipped in and through the world, and often worshipped not out of fear or even bargaining but out of awe and yearning. Paganism as a concept can also be loosely defined by its particular conception of what religion is, as will be further explored. Whereas Christianity via Lactantius frames religion as “re-ligare”, meaning to be bound, as in bound to God or to the single ultimate truth, pre-Christian religion via Cicero is based on “re-legere”, meaning to go over again, which seemed to mean to a constant return to the ancestors and the gods, perhaps denoting a consistent process of ritual observance. It’s also possible to read “re-legere” in terms of observance as meaning to observe the cycle of reciprocity, a concept that animates the bulk of the pre-Christian attitude towards the gods. This is to be understood as the relationships in which humans give to the gods through their devotion (typically offerings) so that the gods may acknowledge this devotion and typically bestow blessings to humans in various ways. Heathens understand this as the Gifting Cycle, Hellenists understand this as Kharis, but even if it doesn’t have its own distinct name or terminology, the basic concept can be found basically everywhere in Paganism. While I have thought of “re-legere” in terms of a kind of anamnesis, of religious practice recalling something from the depths, something unconscious and profound, while I would defend that idea I think that it is ultimately simplest, perhaps even most sensible, to understand it as consistent observation of reciprocity; with gods, with ancestors, and with the natural world (for particularly naturalistic and even non-theistic individuals it may be ideal for them to think it through that last part in particular). It is this worldview that largely distinguishes the Pagan worldview from the Christian worldview.

“Consecration of the Herm” by Fyodor Andreyevich Bronnikov (1874)

What Is Satanic Paganism?

I will be forthright in saying that I bring these worlds together because I simply afore and identify with them at once. In this, it is an act of “religious” love, albeit a highly individualistic one (both in philosophical-ideology and even moreso in application) that cuts across certain boundaries between worlds. But is that individualistic interaction with religion not consistent with the “essence” of Satanism, and is the intermingling of divinities from differing traditional contexts a characteristic of Pagan polytheism? By this I mean, if modern polytheists can argue in defence of integrating the God of the Bible, his Son, and/or his angels into the litany of god’s they worship, and if ancient polytheists certainly did do this and even developed magickal systems involving them, I don’t see why you can’t do the same thing except you’re doing it with Satan and his band of devil’s instead of God and his heavenly menagerie. You might object that it would feed into Christian ideas about how Pagans are devil worshippers. I argue: no, it wouldn’t, or at least no more than what Christians already believe about Pagans. After all, the Christian has in most cases already decided that Pagans worship devils, their God and his Word already tell Christians that all gods other than Yahweh are demons. Somehow I’m not convinced that all the efforts to denounce or distance from the world of Satanism, and I make no judgement here on their validity, have ever persuaded Christian outsiders to stop regarding Pagans as devil worshippers or servants of Satan. I hate to have to remind people of this, but as far as Christian doctrine is concerned we are all demon worshippers, and we have no control over the optics of our practice in the eyes of Christians.

Anyways, with that established, let us focus on what Satanic Paganism means to me in terms of its content, and again it is very much unique to me.

To start with, it’s worth addressing that the mere idea of bringing Satan into the mix of a Pagan worldview is consistent with the logic of pre-Christian polytheism, and is an entirely legitimate expression of Paganism on those terms. The easiest way to demonstrate that is simply the ease with which it is possible to include God and his cohorts in the polytheistic context. The Greek Magical Papyri contain spells invoking the names of God – specifically Adonai, Sabaoth, and Iao – as well as the angels Michael and Gabriel alongside older polytheistic gods and goddesses such as Hekate, Zeus, Dionysos, Helios, Artemis, Demeter and many others. Sometimes the gods are identified with angels and names of God. Iao may have also appeared in the context of the Orphic mysteries, and, according to Cornelius Labeo, Iao was the supreme god spoken of in the oracle of the Clarian Apollo. Even Jesus appears in the Papyri, where there is a spell in which he is invoked alongside God (in various names) in order to drive out “unclean daimons” such as Satan. The Historia Augusta (which, although considered questionable by many scholars, is also the only continuous Latin account for a century of Roman history) describes the polytheist Roman emperor Severus Alexander wanting to erect a temple to Jesus where he would be worshipped alongside Roman gods, and supposedly he also worshipped Moses and Apollonius, included Jesus and Moses alongside Orpheus in some of his speeches, and had a statue of Jesus in his lararium. Jesus, of course, was syncretised with pre-Christian gods in various ways, including a depiction of him as the god Helios in what is now St. Peter’s Basilica. In Scandinavia, during the Viking age, some Vikings began to adopt the worship of Jesus (who was sometimes called “White Christ”) alongside Norse gods as they made contact with Christianity, and meanwhile some people who normally worshipped Jesus also prayed to gods like Thor in difficult situations. There are other examples to be found outside of the traditional context that typically defines “Paganism” as a discursive construct. Followers of Umbanda, a syncretic polytheist religion, worship Jesus and the saints as Orishas and/or alongside other Orishas. In Candomble, a syncretic Afro-Brazilian religion also centered around the worship of Orishas, Jesus was integrated into their pantheon of Orishas and sometimes referred to as Senhor do Bonfim. In Santeria, another similarly syncretic tradition, Jesus is honoured alongside multiple Orishas or identified with Olofi, who is either the supreme god of Yoruba or one of his aspects, and Christian saints are also venerated alongside or as Orishas. In Manichaeism, a syncretic Iranian religion that is either arguably polytheist or arguably not, there is a pantheon several gods and goddesses (apparently up to 40 of them in fact), governed by a supreme deity called the Father of Greatness (a.k.a. Zurwan), and Jesus is one of the major deities alongside other deities such as Mithra, Ohrmazd, Wahrām, various buddhas, and the Hindu gods Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and Ganesha (all four of whom are avatars of the Father of Greatness) to name just a few.

The operative point is this: if you can worship God, Jesus, and their angels in the context of what is essentially a polytheistic non-Christian religious worldview, what exactly is to prevent a person from doing the same thing except, instead of incorporating the worship of God, Jesus, and their angels, they are incorporating the worship Satan and the devils? Much of it comes from a fairly reactive assertion that “this has nothing to do with Paganism!” because “this is a Christian concept!” while existing forms of Christopaganism don’t get that scrutiny outside of maybe some witchcraft community. The whole refrain would have us ignore that the polytheists of old didn’t have much problem absorbing Jesus and/or God into their pantheons even though they were not only Christian concepts but also central to Christianity itself. It is common for people to react to the worship or veneration of Satan and the devils with the assertion that Satan and God depend on each other, no doubt playing into the doctrine of the unity of opposites as filtered through the dualism of Christian thought. But, putting aside all other considerations, we are not looking at this from the Christian lens. Satan and God to us are not two sides of the same coin, because to us they are not simply two ends of the same polarity of spirit. They are their own unto themselves, like anyone else would be, and they’re in conflict with each other over their opposed interests. From the logic of the pre-Christian worldview, it makes more sense to view God, Satan, the angels, the devils, on the same terms as the various gods and spirits of the old polytheistic traditions, and not as mutually interdependent abstractions as some monotheistic traditions may assert.

With that in mind, there really isn’t much that you need in order to justify incorporating Satan into your Pagan worldview; it is only a matter of your own calling. But, as long as we are talking about bringing Satan or Satanism into the mix, it would do us well to dwell on that shadow of religion we refer to in the modern context as “the demonic”. This can be somewhat tricky when working outside the Christian context, since in many pre-Christian cultures the distinction between a god and a demon was often vague, ambiguous, or even non-existent. Some would argue that the very term is simply non-applicable in much of pre-Christian polytheism, and instead the generic term “spirit” might perhaps be used. Nonetheless, it is possible to develop a concept of the demonic suitable for the purpose of Satanic Paganism. What do we mean by the demonic? The word “demon” is obviously adapted from the Greek word “daimon”, which can be a fairly open-ended concept. The term usually refers to spirits, typically spirits who were not gods but acted as divine personifications of things (often emotions), but the exact boundaries between what is a god and what is a daimon are blurred by the fact that gods such as Zeus were also referred to as a “Daimon” (as in the Orphic Hymn to the Daimon and the Orphic Hymn to Apollo for instance). Although “daimon” is often translated as “spirit”, it has also been translated to mean “godlike” or “lesser deity”. In Greece there also seems to have been the concept of a “personal daimon”, which could be thought of as an internal spirit for which some spells were designed to make contact with, while some philosophers used the term to refer to a sort of personal destiny given to each individual. In the context of ancient Egypt, demons in resemble the Greek daimons in that their existence sits between godhood and humanity, but their liminal nature derives not only from this but also from the fact that they live between this life and afterlife. Egyptian demons are guardians of the threshold, protecting the afterlife from unworthy souls, but they’re also dangerous, violent, capable of attacking and seizing human souls and occasionally even threatening the gods. On the other hand, some gods were also considered demons; this includes Bes, Pataikos, Tutu, Meneh, Tawaret, and even Anubis. In other pre-Christian belief systems, such as pre-Islamic Arabian polytheism, there was probably no major distinction between a god and a demon at all. In India, the word “asura” is used in modern parlance to refer to demons, but this was originally a reference to a clan of gods or demigods, arguably chthonic gods, and if you really go back to the Vedic period, “asura” appears as just an honorific for various gods denoting their power or might, and otherwise the difference between “asura” and non-“asura” gods only vaguely manifested itself in the battles between rivalling gods. Wendy Doniger suggests that the distinction was ultimately the product of the fact that some gods ascended in a developing religious hierarchy as Hinduism evolved while others descended.

One approach to the demonic that may help us is the idea of the demonic as a mode of being as applicable to the divine, one defined by a particular expression of Negativity. In this, I draw from the context of Japanese Esoteric Buddhism for its concept of demonic negativity, which can seem to resemble the realm of the demonic we recognize in the West but is not really contained within the framework of Christian dualism and morality. Bernard Faure, in his book Rage and Ravage, defines the demonic in terms of a shadow following and containing itself in the mythological structure; the demon is an entity that subverts and overflows the structures. It embodies a negative power that pervades and transcends boundaries, situated at the source of the very distinction between gods and demons, dwelling in the interstice that is itself the source or origin of all beings; thus, demonic negativity is the subversive source of things, counter to the en-stasis found in Buddhist goals and practice – indeed arguably even of all major religions – which then seeks to impose itself upon that negativity. In certain ways, this demonic negativity is much like the way Lee Edelman and baedan describe their concept of the death drive. This death drive is an unnameable and irreducible element of revolt and disruption within the social order, a constant presence of negation that dwells in society and holds the power to produce its undoing; it is intractable, it cannot be ignored or destroyed, its chaotic potential can only be contained by society, and for a time, but it is always present, and it evades the boundaries of representation and identity and refuses the stability of social form and the stasis of social order. For Mahayana Buddhism, this is arguably important to observe in, as the Avatamsaka Sutra relates, the premise that there is even a demonic side of the bodhi-mind, of samadhi, and of the kalyanamitra (good friend/spiritual guide). Through the development of hongaku thought, the death drive of demonic negativity thus came to be understood as part of the core of the absolute of reality, to the point that there were understandings of the Buddha and the demons (or even Mara himself) as one, and the wild demon god Kojin as the Tathagata.. Faure also identifies the demonic as a “pharmakon”: the poison that is also the cure; and hence, Japanese demonology as a form of pharmacology. There are a number of Japanese deities who could said to embody that elusive demonic negativity, or at least in that they were formally both demons and gods; these include Kojin, Shoten (a.k.a. Vinayaka), Kishimojin (a.k.a. Hariti), Gozu Tennoh, Michizane, Susano-o, Matarajin, Okuninushi/Onamuchi (who was identified in the Reikiki Shisho with the Demon King of the Sxith Heaven), Juzenji, and Daikokuten (a.k.a. Mahakala) to name just some. This negativity is also present in the gods of the land, the Kunitsukami, who were conquered by their heavenly counterparts the Amatsukami, in that they, as araburu-no-kami (“savage gods” or “unruly gods”), or aragami (“raging gods”), were also described as jissha (“real kami”), who represented the real nature of the kami according to Buddhist opponents of Shinto, and thus meant to be interpreted as violent and ignorant demons. This demonic “real nature” ultimately came to be understood via hongaku thought as the real or originary nature or basis of reality anterior to good and evil.

This anterior death drive of demonic negativity can be highlighted as one of the most important aspects of Satanic Paganism in that it guides and colours the approach to religion, in that it favours its shadow. For, indeed, the concept of anterior ontological darkness is the basis of authentic Satanic religious philosophy, in that it takes darkness, so-called “Evil”, Satan, as the fundamental of life, the irreducible element behind things, but which we are unconscious of. Although for baedan to embody the death drive was strictly not the point, from the religious standpoint of Satanic Paganism to embrace the demonic means precisely to access, identify with, and consequently receive power from this death drive, the shadow of religion which is also its true life. Playing into the link to the chthonic aspects of the polytheistic world, in view of the many of the demons and demon gods being chthonic entities, I would take this itself as a sign towards that vital wellspring. In ancient Greece and Rome, the underworld was not only the home of the dead but also a reservoir of many treasures of the earth, including mineral wealth and seeds of harvest, such that Hades, the feared god of the underworld, was often worshipped as Plouton, a god of wealth. India, the Asuras possessed wealth from the depths of the earth, and since the Devas could not generate wealth on their own, and could not get the Asuras to share their wealth peaceably, they sought to take it from the Asuras by force. In Japan, it is possible to take the underworld as a kind of “other side” to the world, and in the Izumo Taishakyo sect of Shinto this is interpreted in the doctrine of the unity of the human world and Kakuriyo (the spirit world, ruled by the kunitsukami Okuninushi); the two worlds are one, and one is merely the other side of the other. A similar idea may be found in Celtic polytheism or some interpretations thereof. To journey into that realm is to make that negative otherness known to you, to receive its wisdom, its power, and its very nature, and to bring into yourself the unity of the world and the kingdom of shadows, to the realm of the uncanny as referred to by Frater Archer in his discussion of Goeteia. But of course, we will return to that subject later.

For now, let us simply establish that one of the planks that makes sense for Satanic Paganism, building from this, would be not only a particular bent towards the chthonic but also the act of interpreting, venerating, and/or worshipping demons as gods. This is of course inherently transgressive from the standpoint of not only Christianity but also many of the world’s major religions, and even non-religious people, still reared in our Christian culture, struggle to make sense of it from a moral standpoint. But modern Pagans or Neopagans too are troubled by the idea as well, no doubt out of the fear that it contributes to further hostility by Christians. Of course, the problems of this have been established earlier, and there is thus no need to repeat them in this paragraph. What I will stress is that, from the standpoint of both the syncretic nature of historical polytheism and the often ambiguous nature of the boundaries between godhood and the demonic are a sound basis to argue that there really is nothing stopping a Pagan from worshipping demons, and, despite the way we think about it from the lens of Christianity, I’d say it’s actually highly consistent with the logic of polytheism. In fact, to relate an example from Heathenry, there is at least some reason to assume that the Jotunn, a similar category at least in that they were often considered adversaries of the ruling gods, were worshipped in pre-Christian Scandinavia, and some jotnar such as Skadi were widely venerated. The fact that demons could be worshipped as gods and as demons in Egypt let alone as far afield as Japan shows, that it is definitely possible in a polytheistic or Pagan context.

At this point, when speaking to the modern context, I think I would be remiss if I did not discuss Demonolatry, a modern religio-magickal tradition centered around the worship of demons as divine beings, constituting the Demonic Divine, led by Satan as the emperor of the demons. From a traditional standpoint, to frame Demonolatry as Pagan is inappropriate, in that, although practitioners like Stephanie Connolly may claim a lineage from a pre-Christian esoteric philosophy, it operates as its own distinct and contemporary traditional context. Of course, some Demonolaters, and some Pagans, disagree with this, suggesting that the latter may include the former. From my perspective, it is certainly possible to practice Demonolatry as a Pagan for much the same reasons as any other religious syncretism is in fact inherently possible in Paganism. Connolly, at least, for her part, describes Demonolatry as polytheistic as well as pantheistic, which in theory dovetails nicely with the milieu of modern Paganism. But of course, Demonolatry is best not treated as synonymous with Paganism, and indeed doesn’t really need to be treated that way even for our purposes. I see ideas from Demonolatry reflected in some of what I have written here, but it is probably improper to regard it as merely an extension of Paganism, in that Demonolatry as a tradition would prefer to be defined on its own terms. Any syncretic or multi-traditionalist praxis seeking to involve Demonolatry should take heed of that. I suppose if we would consider a primary ideological distinction, it’s that Demonolatry has in mind a form of oneness, in that it derives from Hermeticism the idea of the oneness of the whole cosmos in Satan and the aim of realizing that oneness, whereas in Satanic Paganism, as you will see, the idea of oneness that I express, drawn from pre-Christian magick, positions oneness as not the end but the beginning, or at least a gateway through which the individual progresses towards apotheosis. And I suppose I would add something about devourment, in the Stirnerite sense; by which is only meant that you are to make oneness your own.

To cap off the point about bringing Satan and the demons into your Paganism with that most familiar point: demonization, and its negativity. We all know the ways in which the rivals of the God of the Bible were converted into demons. Beelzebub was originally Baal, or more specifically named Baal-zebul. Astaroth, or Ashtoreth, was none other than the goddess Astarte. Lucifer was the demonized spirit of the morning star, Bael was Baal, the god Baal-tzephon became the name of a demon, as did Baal-berith, Amon was either the god Amun or Baal-Hammon, the god Nisroch became a demon and so did the god Adrammelech, Bifrons was originally Janus, to name just a few. Christian demonology is rife with gods from pre-Christian polytheism who found themselves re-classified as demons or devils in the hierarchy of Lucifer. As Christianity spread in Europe, not only were many gods declared demons but the names of some of the gods became names for the Devil in some countries; these include Veles, Ordog, Perkele (at least arguably), and even Odin or Woden (see the folkloric connection between “Grim”, an apparent Anglo-Saxon name for Odin, and the Devil). But, Christianity is not the only religion to employ demonization. When Zoroastrianism emerged, some of the Vedic gods, such as Indra and Rudra, were reclassed as evil demons, or Daevas. In Egypt, some time after the expulsion of the Hyksos dynasty, the god Set was eventually demonized, and his place on Ra’s solar barge was taken by Horus. When Buddhism spread across Asia, gods from older belief systems were sometimes demonized. Shiva, one of the supreme gods of Hinduism, became Mahesvara, the most defiant and “arrogant” rebel against the Dharma, who was then trampled upon by Vajrapani. In Japan, gods worshipped by enemies of the Yamato, and even entire peoples who resisted Yamato rule, were demonized (see Tsuchigumo as an example for the latter), while in the medieval period under the influence of some sects of Buddhism some major local gods (such as Susano-o) were re-classified as demonic enemies of Buddhism or symbols of ignorance. The demonic in this relationship is, again, a negativity, defined in this way by its subversive and negative tendency in the mythological and religious schema. Demonization, then, while a mechanism of social dominance, also presents a window to the negativity lurking in the belly of society and religion with which the worshipper of the demonic may engage and identify with. And, if we’re sticklers for morality in the context of mythic literalism (which I’m not, because mythic literalism is a bad thing), the demons hardly ever do anything worse than some of the ruling gods.

More importantly, one of the conceptual bases for my Satanic Paganism, the thing that makes it both Pagan and Satanic, is the location of Rebellion at the center of life. In contrast and opposition to the tradition of “universal harmony” that Plato liked to talk about and which some polytheists maintain, I believe in a cosmos in which rebellion is part of the core of what comprises the so-called order of nature. As far as much of ancient Greek polytheism was concerned, the cosmos is a state of discord even as there is ostensible order. As Socrates told Euthyphro, the gods are at odds and even enmity with one another, and thus are in a state of discord. Socrates supposes that the gods conflict with each other over different ideas of justice, beauty, goodness, though it should be stressed that this is not necessarily obvious from their attendant myths (suffice it to say that the gods often had somewhat less abstract motives for conflict). In this setting it is really impossible to maintain the concept of piety that Euthyphro has, which is that of an uncritical piety towards the gods on the basis that piety is that which pleases all gods and impiety is that which displeases all gods. Instead, Kadmus Herschel points out that ancient polytheists were not universally pious towards all gods, and not on the basis of the kind of unconditional faith expected to be reserved for the Christian God. Change between the gods, even to the extent of rebellion, was a possibility in the polytheistic world. Within classical Greek mythology, the very motion of the cosmos consisted of the overthrow of previously ruling deities by a deity who would then take their place; Ouranos was overthrown by Kronos, Kronos was in turn overthrown by Zeus, and although Zeus rules the cosmos he still contends with challenges to his rule even within Olympus. Prometheus, the creator of mankind, defies Zeus’ will to give mankind fire, thus ensuring Man’s progress at the cost of his own punishment by being bound to a rock and perpetually tortured by an eagle. Hera, the wife of Zeus, led some of the other gods (including Apollo and Poseidon) in an almost successful revolt against him over his numerous infidelities. Poseidon and Apollon even suffer the temporary loss of their divine capacity for participating in Hera’s revolt and are cast down to the earth for a time to live in servitude as mortal humans. The gods often conflict among themselves, as shown in the conflict between Hades and Demeter initiated by Hades’ abduction of Persephone, or the conflict of the Erinyes versus Apollo and Athena over the trial of Orestes for his crime of matricide, not to mention the Titanomachy (the Titans themselves were a clan of gods). Demeter, in fact, succeeds in genuinely threatening the order of the cosmos through her power over death and life. In the Greek Magical Papyri, there are spells in which the magician may threaten to bind certain deities unless certain other deities meet their demands, or in the case of some spells bind some deities on behalf of others. The Greek pantheon even features a distinct “god of rebellion”; none other than Ares, the god of war and violence who was simultaneously the patron of both rebels and law enforcement.

Greek polytheism is not the only place where you find rebellion at the core of things. In Mesopotamian myth, when the god Enlil tries to destroy humanity, humanity owes its survival to the god Enki going against Enlil’s will by helping mankind survive the various cataclysms Enlil besets them with. Enlil himself also defied the rest of the gods in order to romance the goddess Ninlil. In Mesopotamiam myth, a generation of gods called the Igigi, or Dingir, revolt against an older generation of gods, often called the Anunnaki, who then created humans to do their work by sacrificing the god Geshtu-e to make their blood. As a rebel god, his blood passing into humanity carried the divine heritage of rebellion into human existence. A similar Hittite myth shows an older generation of gods being overthrown by a younger generation and then cast into the underworld. In Babylonian mythology, the very creation of the cosmos is set in motion by the younger gods, led by Marduk, violently overthrowing the primeval gods led by Tiamat. Odin, the king of the Aesir, was also himself a rebel, even an outcast, in some Germanic myths. Saxo Grammaticus, in his Gesta Danorum, presented a mythological story in which Odin was cast out of Asgard for ten years in order that the other gods would not be dishonoured by the wicked reputation he had acquired among humans; such a reputation was apparently earned by disguising himself as a maiden in order to have sex with the daughter of a king. In Grammaticus’ telling, Odin is replaced on the throne of Asgard by Ullr (or Ollerus), the god of archery, only for Odin to eventually drive Ullr out again, after the other gods finally decide that they want him back on the throne. Odin’s very quest for knowledge might also be thought of in terms of rebellion, at least in the sense that the underlying purpose of it is to gain as much magical knowledge as he can in order to win the doomed war of Ragnarok, thus in his own way defying fate. From another angle, however, it is perhaps all the more fitting to view Ragnarok itself as the violent rupture of the currently ruling order set in the cosmos, initiated by beings representing the chaos lay beneath it, kept at bay by the ruling Aesir until the hour of their doom, at which point they will rise up and destroy what the Aesir have established, along with everything else. In the Baal Cycle of Canaanite mythology, the god El abdicates from his position as king of the gods, his throne at Mount Zaphon becomes vacant and his son, the god Baal, is set to replace El, but the throne is challenged by Yamm, and Yamm is then defeated by Baal, only for Baal’s rule to be challenged by the god Mot, who succeeds in killing him. With Baal’s death, the god Athtar was poised to succeed Baal, but Athtar ultimately rejected the throne to rule his own kingdom in the underworld, and then Baal is revived and takes up the throne of Zaphon. In ancient Egypt, The Book of the Heavenly Cow outlines an instance in which humans revolt against the rule of the sun god Ra, resulting in their punishment, while in another myth, the goddess Isis forces Ra, the apparent supreme deity, to tell her his secret name by poisoning him and offering the cure.

My point is that there is a lot of evidence to suggest that rebellion is an elementary part of the polytheistic cosmos. In fact, even outside of Paganism, even in the Bible, in which we still see a polytheistic cosmos inherited from the pre-existing polytheism of Israel, there are gods in conflict with each other and in rebellion against each other. God himself is but one god among many, he is but Yahweh trying to establish his authority amongst the other gods, and the other gods resist his rule and sometimes succeed in defeating him and pushing back his rule; Chemosh, the god of Moab, wages war against Yahweh and defeats Yahweh, leading the Moabites to victory against the aggressing Israelites. Even insofar as the divine is everywhere, the divine is not a single unified thing containing harmony. In fact, for much of the pre-Christian pagan world, the divine actually seemed to be in conflict with itself all the time. It was from late developments of ancient Greek philosophy that we started to see the idea of a single, unitary, harmonious divine whose order is at work everywhere take shape and gain presence, and it is upon this basis that “the West” eventually arrives at the idea that there is but One True God and that his order must be obeyed. Relevant to that context and the ideological underpinnings of Satanic Paganism, I would point to Kadmus’ analysis of the Greek Magical Papyri in view of this. In True To The Earth, Kadmus argues that the Papyri, although late in origin, represent a transmission or survival of a more “authentically pagan” worldview in contrat to the late pre-Christian philosophies that existed alongside them. Multiple gods, often from mutually distinct cultural and religious backgrounds, appear as distinct entities within a more or less syncretic practice, typically invoked in order to help the magician attain some worldly goal, certain deities apparently appear in more archaic forms, and they don’t appear to be situated within consistent hierarchies. Hekate in particular is a central figure in what is contextually a split between the more archaic form of pagan polytheism, in which Hekate was a goddess of magic who could be invoked for worldly ends and worshipped , and the Platonic Hekate as presented in the Chaldean Oracles, in which Hekate is presented as a personification of the soul of the cosmos who guides souls in the course of their unity with The One. Such sets the ground for the distinction between two distinct worldviews, two approaches to embracing the divine. One approach is to embrace the idea that the point is to unite with the “universal harmony” of the cosmos; this is the worldview found in philosophical systems such as Platonism or Neoplatonism, as well as Stoicism to a certain extent, and you can find certain forms of it in many other religious-philosophical systems outside the context of ancient Greece. The other is to, on the basis of Rebellion as a core characteristic of the cosmos, join divinity in the sense of joining what I refer to as the war of all against all; this is the worldview I derive from the logic of mostly older or more archaic forms of paganism, as filtered through the lens of Stirner’s egoism, patchworked alongside Satanism. In a way, it’s almost like choosing between Law and Chaos in Shin Megami Tensei.

But of course, this “war of all against all” may seem to be a strange and alien idea, so let me explain my terms here. First, let’s establish that this use of the term does not derive from Thomas Hobbes’ more famous use of it, by which he meant his imagination of what human affairs would be like without the existence of the state. My use of it comes from the individualist anarchist Max Stirner, who said that the war of all against all is declared when the poor rise up and rebel against extant property in order to win the right to own themselves; when the individual declares, “I alone decide what I will have”, and seizes according to their own need or want, the war of all against all is declared. When given consideration, it would seem that this war of all against all could reference a universal condition of rebellion, which is of course the total opposite of harmony. I do not want your order, I want myself or I want something else. Therefore, I rebel. The gods in myth periodically assert their own desire in conflict with others, or assert their refusal against the desires of others, they each want something of their own, or they want themselves. Thus, the gods are in discord and even enmity amongst themselves. Thus the gods are in a condition of rebellion in and amongst themselves, and in the cosmos humans are able to partake of this universal rebellion themselves, by joining themselves with that condition, and with divinity at large. In other words, humans can either simply observe traditional piety in observance of a universal harmony involving essentially harmonious gods, or they can defy authority in order to join the war of all against all, and ultimately join with the gods in doing so. When thinking of the war of all against all, I often think about Ragnarok as depicted in Norse mythology, in that it would take the phrase almost literally, and Odin selects his warriors specifically to join him in this fight. But Ragnarok is an point in time ahead of our own, assuming of course we don’t start from the interpretation that it has already happened and we are the products of its aftermath, whereas the war of all against all is a present, ever-present, condition of life, with no beginning, and no end.

Satan is in many ways relevant to this idea, to the extent that he is emblematic of it. Satan, as the Adversary, in his own way sounds the war of all against all in his refusal to bow before God and/or Adam and his will that only he decides his own place in the cosmos. Accepting no universal harmony and authority above him, he embraces rebellion waged for himself, for his Einzige. The idea of joining the divine in the same way is an innovation, but it extends the logic of archaic polytheism so as to grant meaning to the apotheosis cherished within Satanism. There’s a very peculiar idea like that to be found in Kurtis Joseph’s Black Magick of Ahriman (which I must stress is flawed in many ways and I don’t like the fact that it’s with BALG), in which Joseph talks about “joining the war of the gods as a God”. Joseph really doesn’t explain the nature of that, but in context it seems to involve aligning yourself with the energies or power of Ahriman, which Joseph understands as the power of a boundless void of pure potentiality that contains all colours, and therefore all possibilities. In a word: Darkness. Perhaps we could extrapolate from this the idea that apotheosis here means taking on the latent Darkness or negativity within the nature of divinity itself; the power of the Black Flame, which is at base the active power of the creative nothing, is the brilliant resplendence of that divine negativity. In this, the idea is to take on and into yourself the realm of divinity in order to access it and join the company of divinity in the embrace of Negativity.

Satan for his individualism might bring us into focus with the other key division that animates the worldview of Satanic Paganism; on one side the religion of the goen (a practitioner of goeteia, or “sorcery”), on the other side the religion of the polis, and of course the philosophy of Satanic Paganism favours the former. As Jake Stratton-Kent has elaborated, the “primitive” religion of the goen centered around a seemingly individualistic, non-conforming magickal practice, built on individual talents and relationships with the gods which then transmitted into the community or the collective of which the goen was still a part. With the rise of the city state and the aristocratic humanist ideology that powered it, the goen were marginalized under a social order built by slavery and organized by a handful of bureaucrats and functionaries who dictated the new mode of religion, defining it through the social character of the polis, whose stability was now seemingly threatened by wild ecstasies that comprised older religious forms. The goen’s craft was deemed superstition and converted into an insult by the aristocratic intelligentsia of the polis. Some aspect of this may echo into the split between the ouranic and the chthonic in the old Hellenic religion. Luther H. Martin in Hellenistic Religions describes chthonic religion as “a response to the spontaneity of the sacred, a voluntary association of individuals that embodied an implicit challenge to the official sociopolitical order”. For the Hellenistic city state, the individualistic goens were at odds with order and custom of the rational aristocracy that set it, and the old goeteia were ones who performed ecstatic worship of and workings with chthonic gods and daemons (including the chthonic mother goddess Cybele), perhaps derided as by wider society “gloomy” and “irrational” in so doing. The aim of goetic practice was, of course, to attune themselves to what Stratton-Kent referred to as the “deifying power” of the underworld, and by working with the daemons they also identified with them, becoming one with them as extensions of the craft, a oneness which is still itself the gateway to chthonic and magickal apotheosis (though, of course, for Frater Archer this is ultimately all still submission to the authority of the great mother). Thus the divide hinted at by Kadmus Herschel can be observed as between the collective observance of the polis and the magickal apotheosis of the individual magician. Similar tension is observable in the relationship to mystery traditions, often including individual expression and aimed at the elevation of the practitioner towards a blessed afterlife, and embracing ecstasies and sometimes inversions that did not align with the social order.

All of this brings me to my next point; insofar as we deal with gods, how do we view them? Having already discussed rebellion, the war of all against all, we can already establish that my concept of relating to the gods cannot be defined in terms of unconditional piety as based on the idea that the gods are uniform in will and character. The point about the gods not being wholly benevolent is a point that kind of has to be stressed, and I tend to suspect that people try to get away from that in all sorts of ways. The gods are not necessarily malevolent, but they tend to act in ways that seem ambiguous and fickle to humans, not always answering prayers for varying reasons, and, although myth does not tell the whole story when it comes to religious thought and praxis, the gods are not always very nice or fair. I think the modern Heathen sect called Rokkatru, particularly as explained by Arith Harger (who does not himself align with Rokkatru), can be seen as one of the best tellings of this idea. As Harger relates, people only see the “evil” sides of certain gods, such as Loki, who happen to either typically despised or culturally typecast as villainous, but Odin in his myths does all manner of questionable and even downright awful things, and in many cases his actions are done either for his sole benefit or strictly to maintain the balance of power at all costs. From the perspective of Rokkatru, Loki is arguably only as “evil” as Odin, and he in turn as much as all of the other gods, who are in turn representatives of larger forces of order and chaos, opposing each other and yet working together to maintain the balance of the world. Our popular understandings of the gods have us thinking about certain gods as sanitized gods who embody superhuman character and virtue attendant to their status as rulers of the cosmos, which thus conceal the other sides of them that, I would argue, should not be made obscure. Norse mythology is a perfectly salient example, but does not stand alone. When it comes to Greek mythology how can we forget about Zeus; so elevated in status in Greek religion, that some mystical traditions transformed him from just the king of the current generation of gods to the supreme sovereign and principle of the cosmos itself. For all that, everyone reading mythology, and everyone struggling with mythic literalism, knows about Zeus’ many troublesome exploits, particularly with women (both human and otherwise). Zeus is not alone in his faults. The gods, just as much as they may be noble and beautiful, can be jealous, petty, quarrelsome, sometimes even cruel. Indeed, there is a similar story as regards all the “civilizing gods” in particular; perhaps Walter Benjamin said it best, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”.

Throughout pre-Christian polytheism, the acknowledgement is the same: the gods have two sides to them, one good, one bad, and for the gods they are in some ways inseparable from each other. But in the broad appreciation of this, we find that it does not seem to undermine worship in the way that it would for Christianity as based on the claims around the Christian God. Humans worship the gods ultimately because they want something from them, often something worldly but also often something more than this. Certain notions of traditional religious piety extends to the idea of a purely selfless devotion to gods, in a way that is not necessarily true in the case of traditional (or at least more archaic) forms of polytheist praxis. Though, there is a sense in which a Pagan could never approach the gods on a wholly transactional basis, and instead is drawn towards them by awe, by the desire for communion with the numious, and the nature of religious reciprocity tends to approach the level of friendship, not just a quid pro quo arrangement. Still, there is a self-interested impetus even here. Humans wish to elevate themselves by deepening reciporcal relationships with the gods, and although the gods are held to want or need nothing from humans, the gods themselves obviously have a desire that humans fit into; the desire to be recognized and honoured, and work their way into extant relationships.

A way of defining the relationship between men and gods in a manner befitting the Satanic Pagan framework is through magick. Magick, simply put, is the practice of causing change through hidden and abnormal means, some might say in conformity to will. Magick was somewhat common throughout the pre-Christian world, and even in the Christian era it was still prevalent to the point that a lot of “classical” medieval or pre-modern occultism is essentially an extension of Christianity. But magick is an art, a technique, a craft, and it has a variety of aims attached to it, very often conditioned by religious traditions. The aim that focuses our attention is the following set of goals: personal empowerment on the one hand, deepening the cycle of reciprocity with gods on the other. I aim in this sense for their bounding up in a religio-magickal praxis that positions worship alongside the concept of “working with” gods in a magickal sense, and arcing ultimately towards the goal of apotheosis. There are examples of apotheosis or god-identification that can be found in the Greek Magical Papyri. One such example is the Stele of Jeu (PGM V. 96-172), in which the practitioner evokes the Headless One (or Akephalos; possibly a solar deity) in order to identify themselves with Moses, a messenger of a pharoah or Osiris, and then the god Osiris by various names in order to command or expel daimons and attain oneness with the universe. In the Invocation of Typhon (PGM IV. 154-285), the practitioner ritually identifies with the god Set and “attaches” themselves to the god Helios, while binding the god of Osiris, in order to receive the power of Typhon, here referred to as the “god of gods”. In the Mithras Liturgy (PGM IV.475-834), the practitioner invokes Helios-Mithras in order to attain a state of immortality and divinization in order to join the world of the gods. There even spells for the apotheosis of animals, such as the Deification of a Hawk (PGM I,1-42), in which a deceased hawk is immersed completely in milk and rejoins the magician as an immortal daimon and companion. In a similar tradition, many Egyptian spells, such as found in the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts (keeping in mind that the Greek Magical Papyri themselves were syncretic texts that incorporated Egyptian magical practice among others), often cast the practitioner in the identity of a specific god in order to speak and act through that divine identity. It was also believed that souls who successfully traversed the underworld became identical with the god Ra. In the First Book of Breathing, the soul of the dead beckons the gods of the underworld to turn their attention towards them, not in the manner of beseeching them but rather demanding their audience, the soul identifying itself with the sun god Ra. Spells were meant to transform the individual soul of the deceased into Ra and earning the audience of the gods, and then, during the night, the soul would become Osiris as well, just as Ra merged with Osiris upon his descent into the underworld, thus joining the cycle of the sun. This did not quite entail that the soul literally became Ra or supplanted Ra and the other gods in their function, but rather the dead took on elements of the identity as their own. Deification, for the ancient Egyptians, did not mean becoming a living god and assuming dominion over the cosmos, but rather identifying yourself with the gods, at least in death anyway, and in so doing join their place in the cycle of the world.

The nature of this apotheosis is complex, but is arguably understandable as both an individualistic and self-interested magickal pursuit of gaining the powers of gods and, in its own way, a religio-magickal pursuit of oneness (albeit temporary) with divine identity. When we discuss oneness in the context of religio-magickal doctrines and traditions, we typically discuss it in terms of some idea of the absorption of the self into the universe, or God, or some cosmic hivemind, and in this we typically envision it in terms of what we call the Right Hand Path. But the magickal assumption of divine identity found in pre-Christian polytheism does not follow this logic. It’s actually somewhat like what I have seen some people say about how oneness is not actually the conclusion but instead the beginning, the gateway to something else, and in the case of polytheistic magickal apotheosis, that may be very applicable. Oneness with the identity of a god is not the permanent absorption or replacement of personality into or by the divine. Instead it is done with the aim of assuming the power of the gods for magickal ends, and, perhaps, so as to engender the development of a mythic self capable of perceiving the world of the gods. This, of course, means ritually assuming their attributes in a way that does not mean you lose yourself. In application to the modern esoteric framework, it’s actually possible to see this approach, even insofar as we consider it oneness, as an expression of how we understand the Left Hand Path, in that the aim is for the divinization of the self through its assumption of divine attributes into itself with the view to entering the world of the gods, as one of them. Moreover, we can see the assumption of divine identity as a function of the old mystery traditions as well. In the Dionysian and Eleusinian Mysteries, we might locate the mythic self in the ritual re-enactment of their mythos and the powers of death and rebirth so as to cultivate esoteric divine knowledge that would grant the practitioner a place in a blessed afterlife. This idea is recapitulated in the Orphic tradition, wherein after a life of consistent praxis and ritual purity the practitioner is to descend into the underworld in order to be released from death in order to join the company of the gods. And so, Left Hand Path religio-magickal worship in a Pagan context follows this praxis and goal in mind: to pursue reciprocal relationships and ritual praxes that cultivate apotheosis and prefigure your assumption of divinity and joining with the divine. But in Satanic terms, the worship I seek is just as much an act of devourment (in Stirner’s sense), in that, rather than put myself under the divine I’m the manner of traditional religious hierarchies and pieties, I stand to put it into myself that it might be my own (“When you devour the sacred, you have made it your own!”), even if it means that I can only do this by assuming it on its terms.

Dealing with Paganism of any sort can mean dealing with natural states. Nature is undeniably important in a Pagan context, and for Pagan spirituality Nature is a central locus, but the point is what that actually means. Since in the philosophy of Satanic Paganism we reject the notion of inherent universal harmony in favour of the condition of rebellion as the war of all against all, we also reject any recourse to the idea of a lost homeostatic “natural order”, with a precise set of laws that humans are to obey in a manner similar to the laws of God or some notion of purity to which humanity is a corruption. But although the condition of rebellion as I describe it (in very warlike terms no less) sounds like something that inherently forecloses any notion of harmony with other beings, I must disagree with that assumption. Rebellion is an act that establishes boundaries in its refusal. Think about it. You, by refusing to obey the will of an authority figure, establish a barrier between your will and theirs by your rebellion, and will fight to preserve that boundary. Ownness asserts itself, in so doing rebelling against that which denies Ownness, each assertion of Ownness in rebellion creates boundaries set on the terms of Ownness. The ecosystems of the world are a complex of boundaries set by the interconnectedness of the various lifeforms, and it is in this field that human civilization has broken up these boundaries in order to assert the dominion of the human species over life on earth. But of course, there is an extent to which Man’s control over Nature is something of an illusion. Humanity has dominated most ecosystems but it cannot control the weather, much less its own effects on the global climate, and it most certainly has no control over outer space, time, the movements of the earth’s tectonic plates, its magnetic field, the force of gravity, or the very nature forces of death, destruction, decay and entropy. The domination that human civilization currently exercises over the world’s ecosystems, and order ability to manipulate the environment and transform natural resources towards our own purposes, assures us that we are the undisputed masters of the world. But we are not. In fact, if anything, our civilizational actions have not gone without consequences. Anthropogenic climate change has already been met with a diverse array of environmental consequences over decades, and the backlash in the form of extreme weather, heatwaves, wildfires, rising sea levels, and many more consequences has intensified in recent years and it’s only going to get worse, and it will spell disaster and destruction for humans. In a way, you can argue the world is fighting back against the domination we have imposed upon it.

Our invasion and destruction of ecological boundaries leads inexorably to the insurrection of the natural world against civilization. This is not to be interpreted as the effect of a violation of some transcendental law or a failure to uphold some duty of stewardship towards a natural world that is propertied by God or History. Instead, it is best to understand the ecological crisis in terms of the fact that our civilization has oppressed the world’s ecosystems in its desire for the instrumentality of life towards our various productive ends, and that oppression was destined to generate violent backlash from the world. Rebellion, the war of all against all, is at the core of the Pagan cosmos, and so life invariably grows to resist domination and attempts to curtail the course of its growth and freedom, and so extant nature violently resists Man’s regime of instrumentality. Yet, as Frater Archer might remind us, this same impetus to growth makes it somewhat difficult for even nature to uphold firm boundaries, since life or the consciousness of the earth is always seemingly expanding, growing, changing, moving, and that forward motion always seems to move past any obstacles to itself. Life is always growing mutually, and thus chaotically, sometimes life brushes against life, and so we see the world has an unpredictable rhythm to it.

In any case, understanding the relationship between the existential condition of rebellion and Ownness and the boundaries that Ownness and its rebellion creates in its expression allows us to more clearly understand Pagan harmony with nature in terms of reciprocity. Harmony with nature in this sense means maintaining relationships with the environment not based on domination or instrumentality, not even in the form of stewardship, but instead on the basis of reciprocity in which giving and taking occurs within the bounds set by the mutual assertion of Ownness, which thus comprises the interconnectedness that forms the ecosystems of the world. In very simple terms, harmony does not mean the universal harmony of The One and does mean submission to certain ideas of “natural law”, but instead that life respects life, to the extent it can, even as life ultimately derives from itself. And, also, let us not forget that, as Jake Stratton-Kent points out in Geosophia, as far as pre-Christian magicians were concerned the natural world as we understand it was a dwelling place for the numinous. Mountains, trees, rivers, and streams were among the places where the power of the divine could be felt and accessed just as much as graves, burial mounds, crossroads, monuments, or any temple, and so from a religio-magickal standpoint there is an extent to which we must think of Man’s quest for complete technological and civilizational domination over nature as a the spiritual devastation of life by human civilization, a death march that we must halt indefinitely and forcibly.

In many ways I think it is impossible to truly discuss Nature without discussing spontaneity. This is an idea I have inherited from the discourse of nature as spontaneity as described in Chinese philosophy, or rather more specifically Taoism, from which I learned about the concept of Ziran. The Chinese word “ziran” is often translated in the “West” as “nature”, but perhaps a more accurate meaning is “spontaneity”, and the literal meaning is more like “self-so”. The concept of Ziran refers to the self-emergent or self-arising tendency of things in the cosmos, which can be extended to the emergence of life and the cosmos itself. To describe something as Ziran is to describe something as self-unfolding, self-generating, non-teleological, spontaneous. On the one hand, it is used to describe the concept of nature, or as a shorthand for nature. On the other hand, it is suggested that Ziran does not actually refer to nature, but to something beyond or behind nature; you might even say, the “nature” of nature. But what is the nature of nature? Is it the chaos and blackness that Susan Stryker referred to? Stryker, of course, seems to refer to chaos in “the general sense”, by which is meant disorder or the fundamental lack of order, but also an “unstable matrix of material attributes”, from which form emerges (or, in the context of gender that Stryker means to discuss, from which a multitude of stable structures of gendered identity emerge). In baedan this same chaos and blackness is identified with what they see as the unintelligible force of homosexual desire and the concept of the death drive as discussed via the queer theorist Lee Edelman; this death drive is the indescrible and unintelligble force of disruption within society itself, the negativity that always produces contradiction and revolt within the order of the world, for as long as there is a society. Going back to Ziran, what is its source? Within ancient Chinese philosophy, there was a tendency to locate Darkness, or Xuan, as the origin or root of nature, or Ziran. Thus Darkness, which can be understood as Negativity, lies at the source of spontaneity, or “nature”. The Rokkatru sect of modern Heathenry dwells heavily on the idea of the “nature of nature”, by which is meant the underlying qualities and the means of its rhythm and change as well as its unpatterned causes, and for this reason they honor the Jotunn as the primal forces of nature that operate behind its main processes; the winter and the cold that freezes, the solar warmth and heat that causes buds to grow in spring, the wild fire that burns. To draw attention to the “nature” of nature, then, would be in the manner of Rokkatru to refer to something beneath and within the processes of nature that also arcs back to our discussion of spontaneity.

A concept that I find relevant to my discourse on Paganism, let alone in a Satanic framing, is the concept of Wildness. This is a concept that I encountered in ecological anarchist and anti-civilization theory, and it has many relevant meanings. In Desert, which I take as a landmark text of anti-civ and nihilist anarchism, Wildness can be seen to refer to a concept of uncultivated or non-civilized nature that also intersects with the concept of anarchy or liberty itself, a state of being ungoverned and of ungovernability, a state of unordered and undomesticated life that naturally connects with anarchism as a whole. This idea is expressed in the very name Desert via an archaic definition given at the beginning: “a wild, uncultivated, and uninhabited region”. From my perspective, such a description is not insiginificant in religious terms. An example is the world of the Bible, in which the desert or wilderness was believed to have been inhabited by demons. This is suggested in the Old Testament when Leviticus (17:7) refers to sacrifices being made to goat demons (or se’irim) and Isaiah (34:14) prophesies the city of Edom becoming inhabited by demons after its collapse, and the New Testament when Luke (11:24) and Matthew (12:43) say that a demon leaving a possessed person flees to the desert to rest. Also, in the medieval period, the Devil himself was associated with the wild places outside of civilization, so for Europe this could mean the woods, and in Sweden this lead to folk beliefs concerning the worship of nymphs and nature spirits becoming mingled with ideas of Satan worship and black magick. Julian Langer (a thinker I otherwise have little regard for) gives a few interesting enough definitions of Wildness. In Feral Iconoclasm, Langer defines Wildness as “the transient becoming and dying, dying and rising” in all lifeforms, “the will of life that grows from death”, and connects it to a non-determination and spontaneity of matter that he feels panpsychism allows for. In Feral Consciousness, Wildness is similarly defined in terms of the quality of non-deterministic, fundamentally chaotic, inescapably pervasive entities, and the fundamental ontological condition of anarchy that also surrounds and dwells beneath the whole of life, and is a state best accessed when stepping into uncultivated nature and through personal individual experience; creative and destructive, wildness for Langer is not only identifiable with anarchy but with nature, thus it is in this way “the nature of nature”. Kevin Tucker, in To Speak of Wildness, takes a somewhat different approach, conflating Wildness with the state of being a hunter-gatherer, supposedly our “genetic state” (seemingly the true “human nature”), but he also frames Wildness as a continuum surrounding and inhabiting us, distinguished from wilderness. A much more interesting and probably more salient take comes from baedan, in which Wildness, as “a madness attacking the civilized social order”, is practically cognate with their concept of jouissance, the joy of resistance or insurreciton whose joy consists in the sheer act of attacking the order of domination, and echoes with their concept of the death drive, that mysterious and almost unnameable negativity best understood as the core contradiction of society, the inner tendency of its own revolt and deconstruction. Finally, some argue that Wildness appears to be taken as something almost wholly indefinable, except as a poetic way of describing the uniqueness of each individual.

To take it all together from the standpoint of discussing “the nature of nature”, we could probably understand Wildness as being at least a part of that, as long as we understand Wildness as state of prime spontaneity. Spontaneous at least in the sense of undomesticated life, “natural” in the same sense, liberated in its transgression of conditioned existence, and fundamentally un-teleological. If “human nature” means nothing more than a state of human being that we find when our societal order of humanity is torn off, Wildness as a spontaneous existence rather than a “genetic state” is probably a good description. Beyond this (contrary to what I espoused last year), there is no such thing as human nature, no universal template of species being, only the natures of individuals. But insofar as that’s the case, what is “natural” to us, that is Ziran, that is Wildness, it is how we act in our own state of uncultivated life, free of domestication, and it’s as true for individual humans as it is for the wilderness and all who live in it. But what does that have to do with Satanic Paganism? The answer is in the way certain forms of Pagan religiosity present a communion between the individual and the “wild state”, transgressing the norms of society in order to liberate individual consciousness or experience contact with divinity. In Greece, this was part of the mysteries of the god Dionysos, in which ritual intoxication was a way to become possessed by Dionysos, contact his divine presence, shatter the boundaries of individual consciousness and commune with authenticity of wild nature. Another Greek god Pan, possibly embodied a literal sense of wildness even more, being worshipped almost exclusively in uncultivated parts of nature such as caves, and he too was believed to possess people so as to manically liberate individual consciousness from its normal limits. Similar states in similar possible rationales can be discussed via the Berserkers and Ulfhednar in ancient Scandinavia, both ecstatic warriors of the god Odin who attained divine inspiration that would strengthen them in battle by embracing animal-like states, spiritually communing with the wilderness, shedding the limits of normal consciousness and, in a way, enacting the cycle of death and rebirth. It is certainly not for nothing that modern Pagans derive spiritual sustenance from wild nature, because the relationships with extant natural relationships that presuppose the presence of the divine within them lends to the idea of wild nature being sacred and venerated as such, inhabited and blessed by gods and spirits for whom it is just as much their home as for the animals.

How this pans out for Satanic Paganism might best be elaborated in terms of the basic antinomian goal of shedding boundaries in pursuit of self-discovery and liberation. But that’s not in pursuit of some pure or antediluvian identity that contains an original personality (perhaps bestowed by God or by the cosmos) for you to follow, or even the voice of a “True Will” (which, I should stress, is probably not actually your will as such). No, it’s about the discovery, or rediscovery, of the power to live an uncultivated life, in the spiritual sense at least; the liberation of consciousness that is felt and prefigured in Wildness, in “the other side”, in the Darkness of life. It’s not something that can only be found in the ideal harmonious state, or some essentialist concept of a “genetic state”, and in fact the point is that, when you have and keep this state, it will be with you everywhere and always. To this day I think about something Thomas LeRoy used to say, and I’m not sure I remember it fully, about how Satanism to him is all about having a freedom that can’t be taken from you even if you were locked up in prison. That’s a powerful idea, it speaks to a freedom and uncultivated-ness that could stay with you, even if the revolution or insurrection against the state never comes to pass. It’s what living anarchy is, it’s the power of the Black Flame of the Creative Nothing, it’s a remembrance of the kingdom of shadows that holds real meaning that cannot be found through piety in society. It is wild religiosity, “re-legere” as anamnesis but for Darkness instead of the Forms of the Good, truly ancient Pagan religiosity intersecting with authentic Satanic mysticism and ideology. I also think that the relationship of divinity and the numinous to wild nature that Jake Stratton-Kent talks about in Geosophia establishes a basis for a Pagan religio-magickal praxis that places wild nature as a place of power, a place for the magician to encounter the gods of the land and, in a seemingly disenchanted world, reinvest the land with power by reclaimng the sacred places. On this basis, perhaps we may map one road to apotheosis in the act of sharing in the numinosity of the wild in this way.

I would also stress my own standpoint in relation to spontaneity in terms of cosmic origination, and in this I relate to the Greek and also particularly Orphic cosmology here. In the Orphic cosmology, there isn’t really a Creator as such, and the forces of Limited Time and Necessity have no source, or at least are not intelligently set into motion, and the forces of creativity that animate the Orphic cosmos seem to spontaneously emerge from each other. I have seen Orphic cosmology interpreted as an unfolding of material substances beginning from an indescribable source or principle (or “Arrhetos Arkhe”), and from the unfolding of these substances the gods and eventually all life emerge, and then only after this the gods, or at least particularly Zeus, arrange the order by which the universe is governed. The Hesiodic cosmology has everything begin with Chaos, and then spontaneously emerging from Chaos are the first primordial beings or deities, and then they give rise to successive generations of gods, and finally humanity is created. Between, the actual starting point seems to be ineffable, outright unknown, but I’m inclined to take this as an opportunity for Negativity to fill the gaps here. Thus Darkness becomes the stuff in which the unfolding of life begins. It is possible to take a similar tack when dealing with the Norse cosmos. From the mythological source of material we have, at least, the Norse cosmos begins in a state of primordial chaos referred to as Ginnungagap, which nonetheless contains two elements that conflict with each other, and through this strife the no-thing-ness unfolds in the generation of Ymir and their abode, before a successive generations kills him and creates the cosmic order from Ymir’s primeval potentiality. Darkness, at least in the sense relatable to the the no-thing-ness we just touched upon, again lies at the beginning of things, its fertility the basis of the potentiality of Ymir and the violent creation initiated by the gods through his sacrifice, lurks beneath the surface of the cosmos and is felt in the nature of its progression and eventual unravelling and destruction in Ragnarok. From this standpoint, I derive a spontaneous cosmos on perfectly Pagan grounds.

To at last close thing section, let us return one more time to the subject of apotheosis, only this time let’s sketch out a rationale suitable for a Pagan worldview and a Satanic one. I talk about rebirth in the context of Pagan religious doctrine a fair bit, in relation to death of course, and let us start here from the context of the constancy of death and rebirth, and propose, from a Pagan standpoint, that all of life is inevitably reborn after death. I would envision that this rebirth would not be conditioned by moral conduct, meaning that your rebirth has nothing to do with good or evil, rather it is simply part of the cycle of life. That is, unless you attain apotheosis. There is an idea found in the Orphic mysteries, which held that the Orphist must undergo a life of contemplation, non-violence, and ritual purity before eventually undergoing a journey through the underworld, drink from the pool of Mnemosyne (memory), present formulae to the guardians or gods of the underworld, and then afterwords be released from death and reincarnation in order to join the company of the gods. Of course, the requirements of the original Orphic teaching might prove disagreeable in their apparently emphasis on purity and pacifism, but the underlying formula has many other echoes and roots, and at any rate is conceptually useful. In the Orphic perspective, apotheosis would not only have meant immortality and power, but also more strictly freedom, at least freedom from endless rebirths, and partaking in the nature and processes of divinity once one has passed into it. The underworld in pre-Christian Greece has been a place of (as Jake Stratton-Kent put it) deifying power probably before the Orphics codified their own doctrine of apotheosis. The underworld is not just the home of the dead; it’s also the place where death becomes the renewal of life. Far from the Christian view, in which Hell was the place of eternal suffering or even just a byword for oblivion, the underworld is a place not only where shades dwell in the condition of death, but pass into the condition of their rebirth, forgetting their past to become new life. This understanding is at the heart of why the Orphic soul descends to the underworld to receive release from death, and why the Elusinian Mysteries center the re-enactment of death and rebirth with the aim of immortality or simply a blessed afterlife. In Sicily, Western Greeks participated in “ritual deaths”, the dismantling of the everyday self, followed by rebirth through, through ritual communion with chthonic gods such as Dionysus, Demeter, and/or Kore (or Persephone). We know next to nothing about the Dionysian mysteries that preceded Orphism, but I think it is reasonable to suggest that the ritual death-and-rebirth aspect in connection to ritual communion may have been an element in those mysteries too.

Many ideas of Greek apotheosis seemed to, in some way, connect to the theme of death. Even in “classical” Orphism, one could only join the company of the gods after death, and even then, it may have taken multiple reincarnations for the practitioner to preced this apotheosis. Slain gods are reborn in majesty, Osiris reunites with his wife after death and becomes the lord of the Egyptian underworld, Achilles is reunited with Medea in the Elysian fields after death, and several mortals were transformed into gods or daemons after their deaths. This is the other aspect of Greek apotheosis, besides magickal and ritual identification of the gods as expressed in the Greek Magickal Papyri. In a sense this hints into the real meaning of the journey to the underworld; to take yourself into the maw of the death and rebirth, into the negativity of the cosmos, into blood and the other side of life, to receive knowledge, to be empowered, to take into yourself in order to truly commune with the divine and be divine yourself. And to do that thus would mean setting yourself free from the limits of ignorance and subjection, and set yourself into the realm of the gods. In the context of Satanic Paganism, this all has the aim of devourment, taking the sacred as your own absorbing divinity into your own self, in making and unmaking, setting into motion the liberation of consciousness, co-creating your own will, and persisting, no longer bound to reincarnation but instead free as part of the cycles of the gods. I actually sort of think of it as almost analogous to Buddhism in this regard, with its discourse on samsara and nirvana, especially in light of the way Esoteric Buddhism has influenced me in many other ways, but whereas you’re not trying to save yourself or the world from the immovable condition of suffering, you are unfettering yourself and participating in the deepest condition of life, taking divinity and negativity into yourself.

As Stirner said, a heaven arises, falls, is replaced and stormed by the next heaven. The existential condition of rebellion, of the war of all against all, assures this. You might well find yourself stuck within it, but, it’s just as well a place of power in the same way that negativity is. You don’t have to be beneath fixed piety or power, you can stand on your own feet and elevate yourself within the numinous world. Thus, in our path, there is no conflict stemming from the relationship to the gods, only in the war of all against all that pervades life.

Unknown art by Esao Andrews

Against God and/or The Demiurge

If we’re operating with a Satanic orientation, then there’s simply no way to approach God except with unmitigated hostility. For Paganism on its own, this is admittedly less true when Yahweh can simply be reintegrated as one more among the ranks of the polytheistic gods, even if that means ignoring that Yahweh is quite explicit about his utter rejection of that place in the world. The Satanist would understand that it is possible to take up God and his Son as part of a polytheistic “pantheon” (problematic though the term often is), but then our question to that is “why would you want to?”. This, after all, is the same God and his Son under whose cultus the worship of other gods was consistently and systematically suppressed and attacked for centuries. In his own Word, God orders the destruction of those who refuse to worship him, and in his law the worship of gods besides himself is explicitly forbidden. We thus find more contemporary takes on polytheism stressing the possibility of harmony between the gods and their would-be oppressor to be baffling to say the least.

You need not take the rejection of God as an expression of simple atheism, not least because I intend to present a rather precise conception of God which can be opposed even without the rejection of the divine itself. Think about it, when we talk about God, what do we really mean? “God”, imagined as a singular being, could generally be understood as just one more deity, and in this sense one more part of the polytheistic ecosystem of gods, albeit one who imagines himself the sole sovereign in the cosmos. But then there is the conceptual God, God as a postulate, God the Idea, this conception that separates the monotheistic worldview from the polytheistic worldview. This God is the supreme singular teleological consciousness which creates (or artifices) the cosmos, governs it’s operations and progress and with it that of all life, directs the motion of all things towards its own purpose, and perhaps for all beings it is their true image, beyond their discrete individuality. God, simply put, is the idea of the Supreme Being, the ultimate divine consciousness in the universe, the great will from which meaning itself is ultimately derived and to which all things ultimately answer.

We usually deal with the Christian conception of this, but besides the other two “Abrahamic” religions, you can find many iterations of the concept of the Supreme Being all over the religious world. You may see different iterations of it in Hinduism, and even some esoteric forms of Buddhism have pantheistic forms of the solar Buddha that sound suspiciously Godlike, there’s the concept of Heaven that we see in Confucian tradition, there’s Ahura Mazda prefiguring the Christian ideal of the good God in Zoroastrianism, to name a handful of examples. Even in the “classical” world of pre-Christian Greek polytheism, the concept of God we imagine is arguably prefigured by the cult of Zeus Hypsistios, the “Most High”, some versions of which involved the idea that the other gods were not proper deities and instead more like angels. Even today I would say that there are Hellenists who talk about Zeus as though they might as talk about God, at least were it not for the polytheistic context of their beliefs. But whatever identity we give it, let’s deal with the rammifications of the Supreme Being, or God. A being capable of being the supreme director, supreme teleological will, supreme arbiter or life itself, is inexorably responsible for everything that happens under its domain. Necessarily, God is responsible for an immeasurable amount of suffering in the universe, and every death, oppression, anguish, agony, despair, confusion, deception, pain, and every straying away from God is all directly caused or set into motion by him, all on purpose, all part of the plan he has for you, just as much as anything good. This means that if you suffered a miserable and agonizing life, then God arranged it to be this way on purpose, rather than this simply being a matter of chance, bad luck, or a spontaneous chain of events. It would be pointless even to say that it’s a matter of the consequences of bad decisions or the system you live in, because these themselves were set up by God through the course of events that he purposefully arranged. Even if God were as loving and benevolent as he said he was, the power he wields over all of life necessitates that he is the cause of life’s agony and suffering and exercises absolute dominion over its agency.

There’s also the egoist understanding of the problem, for you see God is the egoist whose sole mission in life is to convince you that he is the only legitimate egoist. You are an egoist either in potentia or in the active sense, in denial or in realization, you are Unique, an Ownness, and if we assume that there is God, then God himself would be just another of the same, except that he or his followers might claim that he alone is Unique. Even if we may further question the corporeality of God’s “Uniqueness” insofar as we may deny God, the claim of the Uniqueness of God as the serole Unique necessarily imposes itself upon the Uniquenesses of all other beings, who then, blinded by light, mistake just another being for the template of Being or even the sole constituent of the universe. Thus, cosmic tyranny is born, and it is still tyranny, still captivity, still slavery, even if God really was as benevolent as he was proclaimed to be.

And so, the Satanist is distinguished by their will to reject God and refuse to worship God let alone his Son, even if that God is real, regardless of if God is not real, even if God was as “Good” as he said he was, and even if the act of refusing to worship consigned you to a fate of damnation worse than death. Even a loving God would still grind you into the dirt because that was all part of his plan, and would still hold your soul to ransom such that the only way to claim it for yourself was by force of will directed against God. This knowledge is at least part of what animates the Satanic will to rebellion and transgression, and compels us to join Stirner’s “war of all against all” as active spiritual combatants, as devils bearing black flames.

There is a somewhat useful concept that can be pulled from Paul Tillich, a Christian existentialist theologian, for discursive purposes. He argued for a concept of “justified atheism” (justified, of course, being framed within Christian boundaries), which seems to have been meant as the idea that atheism can be justified as a reject to “theism”, by which is meant the idea of God being a personal deity as opposed to Tillich’s more abstract and existential view of God as the ground of being, the God-beyond-God who is thus the “justifier” of atheism. The way I see it, the a-theos stance is easily perversible, that is to say turned on its head. Instead of a-theos meaning a rejection of the personal God in favour of the God-beyond-God, here I will mean it as the rejection of the Supreme Being in all its various conceptions, on behalf of a wild, ungoverned, and ungovernable cosmos, in which, insofar as we may say there are personal gods, there are multiple of them and never just one, and insofar as there is power involved, it is also a zone of contestation and never a fixed point in the cosmos This a-theos thus means not so much the rejection of divinity (which is in multiplicity) and more like the rejection of objective teleological consciousness – thus, God.

And if indeed we are to speak of a ground of being, from my standpoint why should that be God, or teleological consciousness? I can imagine a ground of being that is not teleological, not rational, certainly not bright, or even particularly benign to be totally honest. It is not exactly God-beyond-God, but it is, in the Taoist sense, larger than God or indeed any one single deity. The ground of being I would conceive is negative, chaotic, even “violent” perhaps. I have discussed many ways of seeing Darkness this way. I suppose I practically do call it Darkness, at least in that Darkness is a summation of the characteristics I ascribe to it. It is not teleological, it could if anything be anti-teleological, it is senseless, it destroys so as to create and creates so as to destroy, it is the life and the death and the black soil that it glows in, it is the sublime fecundity of the night laid bare, the dark source of all that is and that which is. It sets no order, it spontaneously generates, dissolutes, and regurgiates, not even the term “whim” accurately describes such operation. How could one call that God, except that such is larger than God, and may one day claim his corpse along with all others.

I suppose what I am saying is that the universe is irrational, even when we consider the divine to be present within it. After all, perhaps the divine is in everything, but the gods are very often in conflict, so it cannot be assumed that there is harmony or reason inherent in the world just because of the presence of the divine. Even if we did affirm God, what would make you think God is any more “rational” than you or me, just because God is much more powerful and knowledgeable than you or me? You cannot know God’s will, but that means that, for all you know, all of God’s will is nothing more than irrational whims. But if God were rational, would that really be any better? Perhaps it might in fact be somewhat worse. Where does God’s rationality start from? I am certain that it is not from any human set of considerations, because, despite the Bible’s assurance that we are made in the image of God, God is absolutely not human, and if we take the concept of God seriously we could understand God as being certainly more powerful than humans would be. So God’s rationality, despite the promise of unconditional love for mankind, can only operate from a standpoint remarkable alienation from us, a lifeform immeasurably puny in comparison to the universe that people say God created, and this can only mean that God acts towards us either with apathy or, in truly rational fashion, with abject cruelty; if God is rational, then he rationally determines ideas of love, justice, benevolence that cannot possibly align with how we conceive them, which means that God’s love, justice, and even benevolence is for us nothing but a chamber of horrors. In this sense, I would actually say that it is better that the universe is irrational than if it were rational. Again, think of the tragedies, the evils, and the horrors that beset you in the universe as I have already set forth. More than anything, consider the fact that you can literally die not only at any time in your life but also suddenly and seemingly at random, even if you’re perfectly healthy. If you’re telling me that the universe is actually a rational universe, and that reason is self-evident in every happening and everything happens for a rational reason, then this necessarily means that the universe rationally decided to suddenly kill you for a reason, a reason that you will probably never be able to understand. To say that we live in a rational universe, or a universe controlled by God, or a universe possessing any kind of teleological will, is to say that all of life is nothing but cattle for the universe, raised up and then slaughtered for the designs of the universe. In my view, that is undoubtedly worse than the idea that we just crawled out of the slime of a cosmos that belched itself into existence or that life seems to have no inherent purpose. If we understand our death as taking place in the chaos of life, then it’s easy enough to understand that it is what it is, but we understand that there is some order to our otherwise random demise, then all this means is that we are being murdered and that the universe, God, or cosmic Reason are our murderers.

Now we come to the other part of this conversation: The Demiurge. But, I am not a Gnostic of any sort, so the sense in which I refer to a Demiurge is not as a distinct entity. In fact, I’m playing with a term has been frequently employed in political theory ever since Thomas Hobbes: I speak, of course, of Leviathan. And, frankly, I consider the term “Leviathan” to be entirely a misnomer. Hobbes seems to have invoked the term “Leviathan” in reference to the awesome power of the unitary sovereign state, partly because, in his day, the name “Leviathan” came to refer to a figure of sheer size and strength, aptly reflected by the size and strength of the Leviathan. But the actual Leviathan of myth wasn’t just some exceptionally big and strong animal; the Leviathan was a creature of wild, untamed chaos, part of a lineage of chaos serpents/monsters that form an ecosystem of myths of creation and struggle in the ancient Middle East and parts beyond, but in Biblical context also specifically symbolised the enemies of Israel. These enemies are framed in the Bible as a hostile wild outside the walls of Godly civilization, whether it’s the sea inhabited by the Leviathan or the demon-filled ruins that are to be lands such as Edom. The Biblical Leviathan, by Hobbes’ terms, was actually the nasty and brutish wild, which needed to have a strong and powerful order imposed upon it, and the agent of this order was God. Later Gnostic and also Jewish mysticism sees the Leviathan as an outer darkness encircling the world of mankind, like a serpent biting its own tail, certain Gnostics in particular taking it as the intrinsic evil of the universe of matter. Hobbes refers to his “Leviathan” as “the mortal God, to which we owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence”. That has me thinking a little bit about the Demiurge in Valentinian Gnosticism, who in comparison to the “true God” might well be the “mortal god”, fighting the Devil and his forces to secure the world under the oversight of Jesus and Sophia, who are agents of the true God, who may as well be the “immortal God”. But whereas in the Gnostic sects there is the “immortal God” of pure spirit and the “mortal God” that is the Demiurge, the position I advance is down with the mortal and immortal God both!

To cut to the point, I use the Demiurge instead “the Leviathan” to refer to what people mean by “the Leviathan”; that is, the totality not only of state power but of state-level relationships and organisation. Church, Capital, Society, “God”, Order, Authority, these taken together are the Demiurge. But whereas for the Christopher Williams’ of the world this Demiurge is yet still fundamentally good, we as Satanists, as Adversaries, join in the war of all against all so as to destroy this Demiurge. And it makes for such a better analogy than “the Leviathan”, since this totality of power is the artificer of the world, which the Demiurge is and which the Leviathan is not.

“Battlefield of the Demiurge” by Tokeli Productions (2017)

The Art of Agnosticism In All Things

Let us take note of a quote that appears in The Satanic Wiki, an independent crowd-sourced online community archive of information about Satanism. It seems to originally be from an invocation from The Satanic Temple, but in an act of detournement it is directed against The Satanic Temple as, themselves, another arbitrary authority figure that must not be spared its demise. In any case, here it is below:

Let us stand now, unbowed and unfettered by arcane doctrines born of fearful minds in darkened times. Let us embrace the Luciferian impulse to eat of the Tree of Knowledge and dissipate our blissful and comforting delusions of old. Let us demand that individuals be judged for their concrete actions, not their fealty to arbitrary social norms and illusory categorizations. Let us reason our solutions with agnosticism in all things, holding fast only to that which is demonstrably true. Let us stand firm against any and all arbitrary authority that threatens the personal sovereignty of One or All. That which will not bend must break, and that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared its demise. It is Done. Hail Satan.

I put emphasis on “Let us reason our solutions with agnosticism in all things, holding fast only to that which is demonstrably true.” because this is the point I hone in on. What I mean here is the interpretation of agnositicism in all things as to embrace a fundamental state of unknowing that comprises life at large, as one of the facets of “darkness” and its apophatic nature which lies at the wellspring of everything. This unknowning denotes a fundamental uncertainty of knowledge, a void that the imagined sovereignty of discursive reason fails to penetrate, a void that can only really be navigated experientially. This unknowing demands the undertaking of experience as a path to knowledge, and the abandonment of any illusion of something that can guarantee any absolute sense of truth. However much people like to define Satanism by some commitment to popular rationalism, ontological agnosticism is quite probably more familiar to Satanism. Don’t forget that it was LaVey who exalted doubt above the principle of illumination in itself.

Rose Crowley, a modern practitioner of Satanism (or more specifically her own brand of “Integral Satanism”), has also explained the value of ontological agnosticism especially within the context of magickal ritual praxis. She points out that even the success of a ritual holds on inherent bearing on the concrete reality of the entities involved, and, citing Jean-Paul Sartre, states that even if God were real, whether or not you believed in the experience was up to you. You’re left to your own limited powers of discernment or reasoning to determine if you were experiencing anything real or some form of illusion, and no experience can fix your beliefs for you. Some interesting citations about ontological agnositcism include Aleister Crowley in Liber O, where he wrote that in this book it is spoken of things which “may or may not exist” and that it is immaterial whether they exist or not next to the results of working with them, warning against the attribution of hard objective reality to them, and a Tantric Buddhist master who answered a question on the reality of the deities by saying they were “no more real than you are”. For her, ontological agnosticism means the rejection of the fixidity of all frameworks of thought and action, the limits of which are to be transcended again and again. In this, we can easily insert a good word about Max Stirner and from there project the rammifications of the rejection of all fixed ideas before the Einzige. To be grounded in groundlessness and ride the current of unknowning, as in rather than being weighted down under it, that is the Satanic Agnosticism In All Things that Rose elaborates.

Where I draw the connection to Paganism in this theme is that my inquiry into this has Paganism as its origin. Pre-Christian polytheistic philosophy, or rather more specifically that of polytheistic Rome and Greece, had at base a tendency towards ontological agnosticism or even skepticism in its view of the nature of knowledge. As Cicero recounts in On The Nature of the Gods:

It was entirely with Zenon, so we have been told, I replied, that Arcesilas set on foot his battle, not from obstinacy or desire for victory, as it seems to me at all events, but because of the obscurity of the facts that had led Socrates to a confession of ignorance, as also previously his predecessors Democritus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and almost all the old philosophers, who utterly denied all possibility of cognition or perception or knowledge, and maintained that the senses are limited, the mind feeble, the span of life short, and that truth (in Democritus’s phrase) is sunk in an abyss, opinion and custom are all-prevailing, no place is left for truth, all things successively are wrapped in darkness. Accordingly Arcesilas said that there is nothing that can be known, not even that residuum of knowledge that Socrates had left himself – the truth of this very dictum: so hidden in obscurity did he believe that everything lies, nor is there anything that can be perceived or understood, and for these reasons, he said, no one must make any positive statement or affirmation or give the approval of his assent to any proposition, and a man must always restrain his rashness and hold it back from every slip, as it would be glaring rashness to give assent either to a falsehood or to something not certainly known, and nothing is more disgraceful than for assent and approval to outstrip knowledge and perception.

Cicero, On The Nature of The Gods, p.453

The truth of the truth for pre-Christian philosophers is that of a prevailing condition of unknowing, and this unknowing is what Cicero refers to as “darkness”. This fundamental unknowning is, incidentally, a part of how I have discussed Darkness, in terms of the apophatic quality I discussed in terms of negative theology, but as pertains to the nature of knowledge and not just divinity. Pagan unknowing is the condition in which we are compelled to recognize ultimately that nothing can truly be “known”, at least discursively, that truth lay hidden in darkness if we can speak of it, and that this goes even for the proclamation of unknowing itself. In modern Paganism, unknowing and hence agnosticism pervades the very concept of knowledge of the gods, which is divided between Unverified Personal Gnosis, Shared Personal Gnosis, and Verified Personal Gnosis. The division between them is measured by the extent to which knowledge might be shared among others or even “confirmed” extraneously, but even Verified Personal Gnosis cannot be considered in terms of what we usually consider perfectly objective truth, because its source is imperfect, and so ultimately is human knowledge and perception, thus, these things are locked in darkness. Such a worldview is one of the things that set pre-Christian paganism apart from the Christianity that would later be codified after the supposed death of Jesus, in that, even though Christians themselves may hold that it is impossible to really know God, it was Augustine who established that, from the perspective of Christian philosophy, the fundamental unknowing accounted for in polytheistic philosophy is merely an error, one that cannot be prevented (and is further perpetuated) by the suspension of judgement, and therefore cannot secure truth or happiness because of its inability to secure perfection.

Yet we should be compelled to return to what Rose said, the art of riding the unknowing. There are many ways of dealing with the unknowing so familiar to religious consciousness. The most familiar of these, peddled fervently by Christianity, is piety, faith in spite of the unknowability of God and indeed with the express taboo against even trying to gain knowledge of God. The approach I might suggest, however, is to step into the darkness, and shedding boundaries in order to do so. In a similar sense to how Keiji Nishitani said that there was no way out of nihilism but through it, if we are at all times surrounded by unknowing and darkness, and at all times finding it latent within life, the obvious path to truth and liberation is not against but through, not to extricate oneself from it but to take your step into it. We all feel our way through life even in our reasoning, but most of us assume that there is some reliable ground that we call “ultimate truth”. But insofar as that exists, we may say Darkness is that “ultimate truth”…just because what it conveys is, in its paradox, the only ontological certainty. As this entails unknowing, the implications for “ultimate truth” are obvious, albeit, again, paradoxical. Reason is very obviously not self-evident in all things, and there is no essential hierarchy of truth and being. What there is is the sleep of meaning set against the opportunity to radically engage with unknowing, as the experiential means of deriving knowledge, in full awareness of its unknowing. In the latter, if I may invoke the analogy to Esoteric Buddhist hongaku thought, the way I envision is fundamental ignorance realized as enlightenment.

Relevant to nihilism, let’s apply the apophatic quality of the self and the unknowing that attends it in relation to when Ivan Turgenev said, “The heart of another is a dark forest”. The “dark forest” is a metaphor for how it’s really impossible to “understand” the feelings of other people. You won’t have a codified map of the mind of a person, not least because, as a matter of fact, we don’t even have such a thing for the human brain itself or even the nature of human consciousness. There is a void that lies at the innermost beneath our actions, one which cannot and will never be “brought to the light” through reason or any discursive power. Each of us is an Ownness, even if most of us are merely asleep to this fact. The nature of Ownness as a substance and individual characteristic is beyond discursive categorization, irreducible to fixed things and states, unable to identify fully with another. It is a non-thing, it is Nothing, a Creative Nothing, defined on negative terms. You will not be able to master or shed light on the Ownness of another, and you can hardly establish any cataphatic structure to cage your Ownness either. Life possesses an inner darkness at least in its apophatic quality. But, of course, we may venture into the forest. Indeed, perhaps it is better to say that we have to venture into the dark forest. Only by doing so do we acquire the wisdom which calls darkness its home. That is what animates the journey into the underworld. Even from the standpoint of Christian negative theology, the prophet Moses met with God in the darkness surrounding the top of Mount Sinai, which is theologically understood as meaning to go beyond all things in order to encounter God. But however it is understood, this is to venture into what was understood in the Greek mysteries as arrheton. The word arrheton means “ineffable”, which has also been traditionally interpreted to mean that which cannot be spoken of. Arrheton thus denotes divine negativity and unknowing. It may not necessarily mean “forbidden” (the word for that is aporrheton), but it does denote something that cannot be understood discursively, and it must be passed into, which means that one must partake of the mystery in order to understand its life-affirming secret and its inherent sacrality. For the mysteries, this meant the teaching was to be kept secret, and all participants honoured the regime of silence, often on pain of death. But even if such secrecy is not necessary, and perhaps it isn’t, the point is that it cannot be spoken of, meaning you cannot simply reason about it discursively, and so you most pass into it. The heart of another is a dark forest, and so you must pass into the forest. To do this, you must embrace the unknowing of the world.

For the rationalist, especially the rationalist who calls themselves a skeptic, everything is matter of the ability to prove everything to everyone. For their Christian counterpart, everything is a matter of faith, and its confirmation, to whom reason is ultimately but a tool. An alternative to either, I believe, is best summarized in Voltairine de Cleyer’s poem The Toast of Despair; life is a problem without a why, and never a thing to prove.

“Aeneas and Sibyl in the Underworld” by Jan Breughel the Younger (1630s)

The Politics of Satanic Paganism

There is sometimes a tendency among both some Satanists and some Pagans to assume that their respective paths are not political, or that they can be totally separated from politics. I’m afraid that this assertion is just not true, and the syncretism that I present does not hold any promise of separation from political ramifications. In fact, up to now I have already related some of the contours of Satanic Paganism to political theory and philosophy, and at that a decidedly radical selection of theory. There is also an ever-present need to guard against the constant creep of fascism, and the bending of the world of alternative spirituality towards reactionary or right-wing ends. This requires a somewhat consistent politicization, which then serves to counter politicization in the other direction; if you do not politicize, the other side will do it for you on their terms, and you don’t want that. Therefore it is imperative that the political commitments or ramifications of Satanic Paganism are established. And bear in mind, this is still in the context of what is essentially an individualistic mode of religious or spiritual thought and praxis, so there is a sense which you can say these ramifications may be interpreted as individual from my standpoint. Yet, they are not isolated from the ways in which it can be applied in more generally, outside of myself.

I suppose it is really best for me to start by asserting what Satanic Paganism is not, or rather what it rejects. I see Satanic Paganism as expressly anti-fascist, anti-statist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, anti-racist, anti-folkist, anti-authoritarian, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, anti-queerphobic, anti-ecocide, and in general opposed to all forms of oppression. I also see Satanic Paganism as opposed to the dominant and mainstream representations of Satanism who have set themselves or have been set up as basically “the establishment” of Satanism, largely because of their authoritarian practice, reactionary tendencies, and overall failure to really challenge anything. I oppose the Church of Satan for its basis in Anton LaVey’s reactionary Social Darwinism, drawn from the Objectivism of Ayn Rand and the white supremacist nightmare of Might Is Right, the totalitarian vision of Pentagonal Revisionism, and the simple fact that the organisation is filled to the brim with outright neo-Nazis and other fascists, and its leadership has openly praised the neo-Nazi James Mason, all while they claim sole historical authority over the concept of Satanism, which they claim to have invented, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary. As may have already been established, I oppose The Satanic Temple for the fact that they are nothing but your average atheist dressed in black clothes and pentagrams, with no serious development of Satanism as a religio-philosophical system beyond a series of failed Yes Men style activist campaigns, and on top of that their leadership is in the habit of silencing critics and exploiting their membership just so they can support their right-wing buddies. I also oppose more prolific esoteric groups who peddle fascism in their own way, like the Temple of Set (with whom I also have much more issues with them as well) and Become A Living God.

But having established what I oppose, what do I stand for? The answer is, in one word, freedom. In two words, egoistic liberty. I long for a world in which there is no power that can curtail the free expression, cultivation, and self-boundarying of Ownness in each individual. All authorities, all statehood, all class rule, all borders, all manifestations of normative Society, all of the social structures, as instruments of the Demiurge that has ruled and stood atop this ancient freedom for millennia, will be destroyed. People will simply live their lives “naturally” to themselves, insofar as there will be no force directing them to live against themselves. All the prevailing conditions of the world will be overthrown and dissolved, and thus freedom from these conditions is attained. This sounds like egoistic anarchism. Indeed, I am an egoist, an anarchist, a communist, and a nihilist at once. Right now I dwell in the intersection of these concepts as well as ecological politics. To create the world I seek means two things: to see the relationships of a world of autonomy prefigured in the here and now, and to destroy the totality of the world order in the here and now. In other words, anarchy as life and negation as praxis hold the keys to the kingdom of destruction. From this destruction, the world is set loose into an autonomy of reciprocal relationships between people, and once more between Man and Life.

As I see it, this entails a political outlook that is usually placed at the far corners of “The Left”, and yet even that description is fairly inadequate. In objective terms, “The Left” and “The Right” are constructs that, although generally abstract, derive their existence from their relationship to Capital in the context of their origins in the French Revolution. There’s almost no way to actually derive universal objective content from them, or a universal standard for what makes someone a “leftist”, but between “The Left” and “The Right” it may be possible to assess some vague core for each. “The Left” is simply a collection of ideologies defined only by the fact that all of them believe in some means of the socialization of politics. In bourgeois politics this typically means people who want to socialize the wealth of bourgeois society through the downwards redistribution of wealth, while in the broader context of “Socialism” it pertains to a broad idea of the public ownership of production, by any number of definitions. The most radical expression of the socialization of politics is to be found in the axiom found among many communists and anarchists which proposes that everything is to be owned universally, without the division between the state and the proletariat. Egalitarianism in the context of “leftist” politics means the socialization of the political franchise in that the whole mass may share this franchise, typically still within the context of the logic of democratic statehood. While one of the many ways “leftists” divide each other is on the subject of whether or not another is “really” a “leftist”, the reality is that, so long as their aim represents the socialization of politics, even the most rank social-chauvinist, insofar as they have the same basic goal, is arguably a “leftist”. This does not make them “comrades”, however, and that realization should attune you to the reality that simply being a “leftist” doesn’t actually make you a comrade or an ally of anyone, even of other “leftists”. Suffice it to say there is a reason that “left unity” is either illusory or arguably undesirable, and in this regard the problem is that there are multiple fundamentally opposed means of acheiving the socialization of politics. “The Right”, on the other side, is that collection of ideologies which is defined only by their interest in the concentration of politics. A very obvious expression of this is the fact that pretty much all of “The Right”, including fascists (even “Third Positionists”), support the concentration of private property in some way or another. In fact I’d say that the fundamental logic of right-wing politics was already authored by the act of enclosure, the confiscation of the commons by the state and its subsequent re-investment into the hands of the property-owning class. Even “anarcho”-capitalists perpetuate this logic to the point that their “statelessness” is nothing more than the concentration of private property at the expense of the very source of its existence. The right-wing obsession with hierarchy as an existential fact and moral necessity further illustrates the concentration of politics as the concentration of political power through the principle of social stratification. Expressions of social conservatism on “The Left” serve merely to socialize the idealised top of the hierarchy of values to be absorbed in every obedient member of the masses. Every Social Darwinist argument made by rightists of both the statist and “libertarian” camps is a way of promoting the hierarchical concentration of politics by naturalizing the existing conditions and constitution of social stratification.

Where does this place me, then? To me, the intersection of communism, anarchism, nihilism, and egoism points to an outcome wherein we see the unfolding of life ungoverned by the structures that emerge from statehood, hierarchy, and capital to restrict the horizons of existence and expressivity. I have come to reject the notion of any hard boundaries or borders between the ideological concepts that I stand behind. Communism is the real movement dedicated to the overthrow and abolition of the totality of the existing conditions. Taken seriously, this means we do not stop even at capital, and so statehood and hierarchy, even “Society”, as key constitutents in this totality, are also to be dismantled. Insofar as communism already means the establishment of classless, moneyless, and stateless conditions, it doesn’t take much effort to see that we approach the conclusion of anarchism. In fact, Pyotr Kropotkin had already understood this. But the abolition of the totality of existing conditions is inherently negativistic, and when deepened sufficiently, active political nihilism makes perfect sense of this goal, in that the whole point is to negate the totality of conditions in order that the new world is born out of the void; thus our aim is what I call the world after the world. I like to think it almost as that beautiful new world that emerges right after the conclusion of Ragnarok. Communism is also egoism, as Karl Marx himself declared in his meager attempt to refute Max Stirner in Critique of the German Ideology. Communist theory, if it is consistent, understands that there is no such thing as “the general interest” or even “the greater good” except for some idea created by the ruling class or society of a given era, and the total appropriation of Man by Man takes on the form of devourment in that alienation is to be overcome by the devourment of all property and production, ridding it of its concentration in privation and labour, in order to make it yours, and thus everyone’s. Remember from Bakunin that my freedom and your freedom are really the same freedom, and cannot be one-sided without it meaning privilege, and so through Stirner my egoism and your egoism is really the same egoism. On this basis the real condition of egoistic freedom is paradoxically a collective individualism, even if individuality rather than the collective is its ultimate source. Society, in this sense, is ultimately an abstraction, a fixed idea, a spook, it has no objectivity and is instead a byword for the various social and productive relationships we enter into in settlement and regulate through norms. The concept of “Society” is thus, in material terms, something we put ourselves but which obscures the real relationships and conditions that comprise it. On egoist and nihilist terms, this might well demand the abolition of “Society” as the fulfillment of the communist demand for the abolition of the totality of existing conditions. Alfredo Bonnano, a fairly notorious insurrectionary anarchist whose work currently informs the nihilist movement, in Armed Joy not only doesn’t oppose his anarchism to communism but instead refers to communism as a need that transforms all other needs, and whose fulfillment abolishes labour and replaces it with the condition of the individual’s complete availablity to themselves and expressivity of themselves, to the extent of breaking from all models, even production itself. And of course, if by communism all we mean is a free association of people who, without the rule of the state or hierarchy or capital, interact with one another to fully develop themselves in any way they want, we might find the Union of Egoists as the highest expression of this idea which fulfills it and brings it back to its dialectical source in the individualistic aspirations of Ownness. From there, it is easy to see the way communism, egoism, nihilism, and anarchism all come together for me. It is also for this reason that I must refuse the label of “socialist” for myself, because in practice, as an idea not confined to Marxist thought, it can mean any number of definitions for “public ownership of the means of production”, including some fairly meager and even almost reactionary forms of statist reform. Besides, it seems like these days anyone can call themselves a socialist.

Since religion is political, and modern politics arguably “religious”, this places Satanic Paganism at the depths of the camp of liberation, its negativity stretching out even to the abolition of politics by politics. That at least is my goal. Unlike many anarchists, or many communists for that matter, I think that there is an extent to which it is possible to prefigure the logic of Anarchy via religious thought in a way that secular thought does not always accomplish. I have seen Anarchy described as a “centerless constellation of relationships” built upon “affinity, trust, and reciprocal knowledge”. A constellation of reciprocal relationships is, at base, the ramifications of the pre-Christian polytheistic cosmos. Even the centerlessness of this constellation is applicable to such a context, as I have shown when discussing the theology of rebellion at length in this article. There’s no fixed hierarchy of power, no fixed centre, no centre that isn’t ultimately altered by change of hand, and reciprocity is the defining feature of the relationships people cultivate with the divine and the world in which the divine manifests. Granted, this didn’t necessarily translate to orchards of Anarchy across time until the emergence of Christianity; if that were the case, there should have been no states and no imperialism based on statehood. What it does mean, though, is that some of the most basic logic of pre-Christian religiosity is pregnant with the potential to prefigure the logic of Anarchy. Indeed, we might well consider how pre-Christian societies in Scandinavia were defined by barely governable decentralised societies up until the later periods where more “classical” central monarchies emerged and eventually led northern Europe into the Christian era.

But even if we can’t accept that all pre-Christian societies were very free, consider the efforts of militant atheism or anti-theism. The simple fact is that state socialist countries, typically formed along the lines of some form of Marxism-Leninism, had a penchant for “freeing people from reactionary religion” by oppressing religious communities, denying freedom of religious association, heavily regulating worship, and conquering lands that were deemed “backward”. To this day, capitalist China (which incidentally is statistically the most atheistic country in the world) still imposes harsh restrictions on religious worship, often persecuting churches and temples for not glorifying party leadership enough, and is currently carrying out a systematic genocide of the Uyghur Muslims. Even in the context of anarchism, there is the often downplayed case of Spanish anarchists who partook of massacres against Christians. The hero of modern secular Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, participated in a genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire against Greeks on the basis of religion and ethnicity. During the French Revolution, pre-existing religion was rejected only to be replaced by a new theistic civic cult dedicated to the “Supreme Being” (God by another name, perhaps less offensive to rationalist sensibilities), and de-Christianizers who were seen as not aligned with Robespierre’s cult were executed. In the Enlightenment, people like Bruno Bauer espoused the idea that people should be required to renounce their religious identity in order to become “free citizens”; today, that basic program is being carried out in China in its efforts to “Sinicize” religious and ethnic minorities. The simple lack of belief in God, or the simply commitment to Reason, has long been assumed to be the foundation of relationships of freedom, but in many ways this seems not necessarily to have been the case. Rather, I think of it the way I think of the ecological crisis. It is ultimately foolish to think that we can simply change the hands of the system, only address its economic conditions, and expect to resolve much. No, we must develop reciprocal relationships with the world, not unlike what may have once existed before; for me, this is part of why the Pagan worldview is so important. Similarly, I am inclined towards the idea that those who can develop a spiritual, religio-magickal praxis of liberatory negativity have the power to prefigure their own freedom, and light the way in their example.

I would say that the embrace of Negativity in a Satanic context is a core plank of the political aspect of Satanic Paganism as much as – no, more like because of – its wider philosophical basis. This is because Negativity in terms of active politics brings to focus the idea that all the existing structures, which carry forth the logic of status quo and assure its reproduction even in any new world, should be dismantled. This, of course, is the total opposite of even democratic socialist thought and a great deal of “dialectics” whose whole point is to preserve the political order, “the shell of the old world”, so that it can condition their grand new world. But the active nihilism or negativism of certain anarchist tendencies is actually perhaps the illuminating perspective on that theme that has stayed with me throughout my life. Death and rebirth, intertwined with one another, darkness the source of light. From the standpoint of active nihilism, death means the negation of the world order, of the compound interlocking structures that comprise state society (and which I call Demiurge), and this negation, thus this death, is the black soil from which the life of a new world may be born – indeed, it is the only place from which it really can emerge. Thus, I link my negativity and active nihilism to a fundamentally Pagan worldview (in which, of course, death is often a beginning more than the end) alongside the negativity of Satanism. But the other aspect of negativity in the political dimension pertains to the lens through which we see the death drive in society as it opens up a window to its contradictions, presenting the shadow of its order as manifest in its inherent structural anxiety.

In baedan, we see an expression of queer negativity that opens the way to a deeper appreciation of both the figure of Satan and the concept of the Satanic as a whole. Basically, baedan argues that, when society positions queerness as a threat to civilization, queer negativity embraces the role of queerness as a destroyer of the norms of civilized society and the undoing of society and the state. This negativity denies the positive counter-narrative offered by liberalism and cousins, which positions queerness as just another part of society, to be represented within the structures and hierarchies of society that representation ultimately legitimates. I find that it is possible to take from baedan that the negativity affixed to queerness is also a window into the contradictions of the social order itself, an insignia of civilization’s own “damnation”, a negative demonstration of the values of a society through its denunciation of what society hates. With this critical methodology in mind, let us heed the whispers of the Devil and delve into the anti-Satanic imaginary common to “Western Civilization”.

The Satanic Panic that swept United States and other parts of the “West” during the 1980s and 1990s, and continues to echoe into the present focused heavily on heavy metal and its more extreme forms, then as now a simultaneously “mainstream” and underground art form. As unfounded accusations of ritualistic child abuse collided with a rapidly growing musical subculture that allowed young men and women to transgress social norms, metal music came to occupy a negative space in the dominant culture similar to that occupied by the co-existing punk scene. Metalheads were unfairly treated because their expressivity stood at odds with traditional notions of masculinity, and vilified by a media and society that accused them of violent devil worship (and occasionally still does). Metalheads were not the only social and cultural deviants to hit with such tropes. For years, fear of homosexuality, bisexuality, transness or queerness was bound up with fear of the Devil and of Satanism, and sometimes this itself was linked to white racism. As an example, in 1994, four Latina lesbians in the US state of Texas were accused of “satanic rituals” and child abuse and incarcerated despite no forensic of any crime. It wasn’t until 2016, following documentary exposure, that the four women were exonerated, and even then only two years later were their criminal records expunged. To this day, you will find examples all over the world of LGBTQ people being accused of corrupting society through Satanism. In the US, right-wing moral panic around Lil Nas X is a rather recent example which is also directly connected to homophobia and transphobia, while the recently more prevalent moral panic around “groomers” is an only marginally more subtle new spin on the trope. In some parts of the world Satanic Panic is given an “anti-imperialist” or “anti-colonialist” twist. In Russia, for example, Pussy Riot was accused of spreading Satanism with the backing of the United States, and during the Ukraine-Russia War similar accusations have been repeated against Ukrainian forces. The very trope of devil worshipping sects as a threat to society, although time and again shown to be an illusion, is time and again reasserted because the order of society is always sustained by some sort of scapegoat. When we take a close look at this dynamic we may answer our central question: what does the Azazel say to us?

The SRA (Satanic Ritual Abuse) trope is ultimately a modern echo of tropes that ultimately connect back to blood libel, an anti-semitic conspiracy theory which accuses Jewish people of abducting non-Jewish children, murdering them in acts of human sacrifice, and using their blood to cook matzos for Passover. The fact that such acts are considered abominations according to Jewish law seems to never bother the bigots who make such absurd allegations or use them to justify vicious persecutions of Jewish people. But in the context of the medieval Christian society in which blood libel accusations became popular, the operative point was that to be Jewish was, in the eyes of medieval society, a threat to the hegemony of Christianity. Many Jewish people faced attempts by Christians to convert them, often forcibly, and because Christian faith was linked to political loyalty to the kingdom, deportations and genocides (including the Inquisition) were carried out under the justification of insufficient loyalty to the state. This itself is older than it seems. In ancient Rome, Jewish people were accused of corrupting the Roman religion by worshipping a god named Jupiter Sabazios, who the Roman establishment seemed to distrust as a foreign deity linked to perceived enemies of the state, and were expelled from Rome. In Rome we also see the idea of the Bacchanalia as a dangerous conspiracy against the state, in which participants from all social classes inverted social norms and supposedly plotted the murder of Roman officials. Livy’s claims about the Bacchanalia are very likely mostly fantastical, but his assertion that the Bacchanalia attracted women, plebeians, and “men most like women” gives voice to the real anxiety of Roman conservatism: a popular festive cult drew marginalized and dominated people into its fold, women were at least apparently the exclusive priests of this cult, and the popularity of this festivity was a threat to the authority exercised by Roman societal norms.

The negative space in all of this is alterity, alterity that is expressed in the expression of religious identity in a way that did not conform to the order of society. And there is somewhat more to it. You may notice that modern Satanic Panic conspiracy theories also incorporate organisations such as the “Illuminati”, and some others also add the Freemasons, as part of the angle that secret societies control the world and are responsible for everything bad. The Illuminati, as discussed in these conspiracy theories, does not exist. There was a Bavarian organisation founded by Adam Weishaupt which was called the Illuminati, and it was dedicated to promoting secularism with the aim of producing a society free from superstition and “free” from religion, but it was disbanded within only a few years. In the context of the French Revolution, the old Illuminati, despite having been disbanded, was believed by reactionaries to have somehow survived persecution and fomented the revolution in order to destroy the church. Secrecy here suggests danger and immorality, by which of course is meant the destruction of the dominant order of society, and this idea was not invented in the context of the French Revolution. The same conceit animates Roman mistrust of the Bacchanalia, because the Bacchanalia, although fairly popular, was practiced in secrecy. The mysteries themselves were sometimes distrusted for the same reason. In many ways it comes back to the fact that it breaks from the norms of things, and is not so well understood. In this sense, witchcraft is dragged into the conspiratorial imagination. In the pre-Christian world, mistrust of witchcraft was arguably little more than a matter of dismissal by a society that regarded them as either superstitious or unmanly. But in the medieval Christian era, folk magicians, ironically mostly Christian themselves, who practiced arts of healing and the like in a way that the church or the elites (who, themselves, were interested in magick at the time), and were burned en masse for it, and once the call to hunt witches was sounded, anyone and everyone could be burned as a witch. Such thinking seems to have periodically re-emerged in new and sometimes more sophisticated forms since the Middle Ages and now animates modern conservatism and fascism in its vicious moral panics against marginalized people.

Something brings these worlds in common. In India, moral panic against black magick takes a similar form as the others, where the entire practice of Tantra was deemed black magick, and the term Vamachara, or “Left Hand Path”, served as a convienient label for both British colonialists and Indian religious “reformers” to scapegoat religous heterodoxy for the various social ills and the colonization of India itself, while in Britain it became a way for chauvinistic occultists (such as Dion Fortune) and reactionary writers (such as Dennis Wheatley) to demonize those thought of as anti-colonialist elements as well as homosexuals and other “deviants”. Society, throughout its historical phases, defines an extant and “hostile” other in relationship to itself, based on the fact that the other seems alien to itself, and, because the other seems to behave differently its norms, and seems to show the possibility of life outside itself, it either tries to integrate this other into itself, thus taming it, or seeks to repress and destroy it. From our standpoint, if “mercy” and “judgement”, integration and repression, are two hands of the same God, down with God and both his mercy and his judgement. The “other” does not exist to be either repressed or integrated, but instead it is an Ownness that exists for itself, as all Ownness does, and it is the social order we put over ourselves that ensures that we do not understand this. But the negative space that we deal in, again, speaks to the fears of the social order, reveals its shadow, and with it the space of freedom pushed forth by the unravelling of society. For this reason, I position Satanic Paganism in its political content as something allied to the cause of the marginalized, and in this regard queerness is to be seen as a key to the world of negation in which the true Satanist derives the power of liberation.

On Pagan terms, what we moderns refer to as queerness is an expression of the whole range of essencing inherent in divinity. The myths of the transformations of various gods and heroes into their gendered opposites or into different species of animals communicates this matrix of essencing on social and individual terms that comprises the Pagan cosmos. It also tells us thats the whole of society, the whole sum of hierarchical relations that has hitherto comprised it, is not to be trusted and in fact should be uncompromisingly opposed and dismantled. No matter who holds the guard in the prevailing social order, much of the world is varying shades of bad for trans people. Even in more consistently liberal countries, trans people still face restrictions in access to healthcare practically on the basis of being trans, the practice of conversion therapy (which is basically just a way of torturing LGBTQ people) is often still legal, and in some countries your gender identity isn’t recognized without compulsory sterilization. Supposed allies on the progressive side will invent ways of justifying forms of transphobia, which means that, for trans people, it could be argued that nearly the whole political climate of the status quo is societally and structurally against them. Liberation, then, means tearing it all down. This is why Grow Your Future says that, because being queer puts you in opposition to the colonial power of the state, queer liberation means death for state power. As baedan says, queer liberation means refusing to negotiate with the society that regularly both oppresses them and rationalizes their oppression. Therefore society should not, as many leftists including social anarchists (from Pierre Joseph Proudhon to Daniel Baryon), be taken for granted as a value in itself, to be reformed and reproduced, and instead it must be suspended in a process of gruesome critique, of Benjamin’s profane illumination, and ultimately negated. By this count, to be an ally is at the very least to be in solidarity with this effort.

We often wonder about the nature of a world without capitalism, a world without the state, a world without hierarchy, a world in which the prevailing social conditions have been overthrown as communism was meant to accomplish. We often ask for precise plans for how the new world will be organized, typically perfect in nature and whose projected conditions possess complete accuracy. But such plans are actually impossible to give, and I think that some of the people who make such inquiries know this, knowing further that, within the shell of the world as it is, people can only be persuaded to break from such a world if they possess total certainty that order will remain or be improved. In truth, simply consider the matter of communism, or more precisely the fact that even some of modern history’s most strident anti-communists have understood that there is actually no “clear notion” of how communism will be organized, because as one society moves to its next stage of development there is no way of actually knowing what that stage will entail until we actually arrive at it. The short of it is that there is no clear and precise model of how the future will work, and that’s fine; because, as Marx himself said, communism is not a state of affairs or an ideal to adjust to. Even the idea of the higher phase of communism, as set out in Critique of the Gotha Programme, communism is more defined by a general set of conditions that, at least according to Karl Marx, comprised a communist society, not so much an actual organization or plan for how to manifest them. At the intersection of communism, anarchism, nihilism, and egoism, this becomes one more communist insight that is deepened into something more. It is strictly impossible to predict what the world of autonomy will look like with any precision, there’s no way to actually be “scientific” about this in the way that perhaps Engels or Lenin or their heirs would have you believe, and the only way to answer our questions about the practical and moral implications of this world is to not only participate in the cultivation of the relationships of the new world in the here and now but to negate and dismantle everything that comprises the structure of the current order, and thereby confront ourselves with the reality of the new mode of life.

In this sense what we understand as “anti-communism”, in the typical reactionary context, is not properly understood as mere opposition to the falsely-labelled “communist states” of the 20th century, but instead the highest form and most brutal expression of the fear of bourgeois society directed towards the abolition of its own conditions, and regardless of the actual reality of this abolition. You may already have noticed that “anti-communism” in the usual formal sense is not some “apolitical” or ideologically “neutral” force, merely entailing opposition to totalitarianism. It’s opposes communism and anarchism in equal measure because it fears the void of the abolition of existing conditions, it fears the chaos of the new world and the liberation it brings, and the fact that the falsely-labelled communist states were typically dictatorships serves as a convenient excuse to wrap up this fear as a defence of freedom. But it is all projection, because when it comes to authoritarianism, dictatorship, and totalitarian violence, the anti-communists are in no way better than their “communist” counterparts, and in certain cases they’re often much worse. In fact, don’t ever forget that one of National Socialism’s driving impetus’ was precisely a war against communism, and it is communists alongside Jews that are usually counted as the two great bogeymen of Nazism, and so it is for much of the rest of fascism. Much more importantly, though, the “freedom” defended by anti-communism is most obviously not freedom, and “freedom” as they present it is in reality a naturalization of the hierarchies that they deem to be the authentic nature of human being. In other words, what anti-communism preserves is not freedom but “order”, albeit in an abstract existential sense as relative to bourgeois society. Fascism in this setting is an outgrowth of the totality of the structures of imperial and colonial statehood together with the logic of capitalism and the various bigotries that grown with all of that, taking shape as violent, terroristic reaction against any perceived threat to the fundamental order of things. On this basis of fundamental order, growing out from the structures of the totality of conditions which produce oppression and marginalization, fascism embarks upon its ceaseless campaign of oppression and extermination, to subordinate all conditions and wipe out all resistance. This is the reason why the threat of fascism can’t just be contained in politics as usual.

But at this point, we may continue on the final operative point as it relates to anarchism. Plenty of anarchists respond to society’s cry that anarchism is “chaos” by asserting that anarchism is in fact “order”, sometimes with the attendant assertion that it is actually the state that represents “chaos” – a true inversion of the term if there ever was one. I know that the whole “order versus chaos” discourse is often considered cumbersome and even meaningless, but I argue that this changes somewhat when we look less to the fixed categories of “order” and “chaos” in themselves, the way that Jordan Peterson and his ilk often do, and instead focuses on what these concepts really communicate to us. In other words, what do “order” and “chaos” say? What are you afraid of when you say that anarchy is the collapse of “order”? By “order” do you mean statehood, the thing that like all of political organization is upheld by violence? Then even though freedom may indeed be as terrifying as philosophers say, “order” is surely worse. Those who benefit from the protection racket offered by the state have no idea what its order bases its existence on, while those who bear the brunt of state violence, especially abroad, feel the brutality of state power and its fundamental basis bearing down on all who oppose it and all who the state wishes to destroy. The “order” of all statehood is built on an atrocious chain of sacrifice, and the whole history of civilization effortlessly reveals this to be the case. On the other hand, if by “order” we mean what the Greeks meant by “kosmos”, then it should be said that “kosmos”, from its root words “kome” or “komeo”, suggest nothing but the continuous embellishment engendered by the growth of life, and of course, even if embellish we must, then each embellishment is replaceable. Or perhaps we might well do without.

But what to make of the proposal that anarchy itself is order? For one thing, this would entail that statehood is “chaos”, and such an idea flies squarely in the face of the fact that statehood and hierarchy are conditions of administration, management, and instrumentality embodied and enacted through nested ranks of authority. There is nothing chaotic about it. The violence that supports it, along with the fluctuations of the market under capitalism, must all seem like a frenzy of disorder, and I’m sure that’s how many Marxist theoreticians have made it out to be when they mistakenly speak of the “anarchy of production” (how foolish it was for Engels to assume that private property lacked hierarchy!). But in reality, these are conditions set by the administration of the totality of conditions. That said, if anarchy is “order”, what does that mean? What makes “social self-rule” “order”? Is it simply out of some utopian idea that every function of state administration, of the current order of things, can simply be mimicked by the masses without the state, or even just without it being called the state? Or is it like the way Daniel Baryon talks about anarchy as some kind of “immune response of the species against all hierarchical parasites”, thus assuming that society not only has objective existence but essentially functions as an organism and that hierarchy is merely some external “parasite”, as though this is not simply a repackaging of fascist thought? All of these strange concepts seem to spring forward from some need to assure the world, under the watchful eye of state and capital, that “chaos” will not befall the world if we finally destroy the source of its oppression. But if that’s the case, what really is “chaos”? Nothing but the void of statelessness, nothing but the absence of some greater structure or chain of structures being put over us, nothing but the ashes into which we form ungoverned relationships, nothing but wildness and desert, and it absolutely terrifies us only because we have absolutely no idea of what that looks like. But that’s just what freedom is, it’s just how it is when you have no control over how everyone will act, no instrumentality over them.

And so the politics I espouse, and which I attach to Satanic Paganism as I see it, is one that carries the art of profane illumination to its highest heights, cutting through anything that seeks to obscure the goal of achieving the condition of liberation and ecstatic self-rule in the free, stateless, classless, moneyless, and, yes, (arguably) structureless association of all individuals in their own egoistic development, by the negation of the state, capital, hierarchy, and totality of the existing social conditions. In this, the example is none other than Satan, and in the descent into the arrheton of negativity that, in addition to the already established religious significance, takes on the profoundest political significance. As far as I am concerned, nothing else really suffices. But, you’re free to disagree.

Conclusion

So, after all of this, we can at least establish a summary of Satanic Paganism, reiterating much of what I have said. It is individualistic not only in its ideological content, but also in that it is a distinctly personal approach, one that I don’t think is (at least entirely) mirrored in anyone else. It upholds Negativity at the center of its spiritual philosophy, through which it understands the many contours of Darkness. Darkness here is the key to highest and most noble mystery of the Pagan worldview, and the liberatory power of Satan and the adversarial quality of Satanism. It is an anti-teleoglical philosophy, it is a worldview that grounds rebellion in a restless ground of being and the ceaseless growth of life, and grounds apotheosis in not only the enactment of will in the world but also the determination to step into darkness in the sense of the ineffable. My creed is a negative creed, all things considered. But that is the essence of what gives it its meaning and power, and, frankly, deepening the understanding of that negativity is responsible for my renewed sense of place, as though I am what I was meant to be or on the cusp of such.

The last thing I would like to do in communicating Satanic Paganism is present an alternative narrative of the “fall” of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis. This narrative, I feel, is most central to the weaving of the Pagan worldview with Satanism and the legacy of the Left Hand Path, and I saved it until the very end of this article for exactly this reason. Traditionally, at least as far as the Old Testament is concerned, the serpent is not Satan, though the New Testament redefines the serpent as Satan by referring to Satan as the “ancient serpent” or “old serpent”. As far as Satanism is concerned, though, perhaps the serpent may as well be the Devil, at least in that this is the identity it takes on in the Satanic context. Anyway, we all know how the story goes. Eve encounters the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and the seprent tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit; Eve tells the serpent that God said that whoever eats the fruit will die, the serpent tells Eve that she will not die and instead become a god, and then Eve and later Adam eat the fruit. Adam and Eve did not die, at least not from eating the fruit, though they did end up getting cast out into the world of death and toil, but the serpent was right in the end: they did join with the gods. In Genesis 3:22, after Adam and Eve ate the fruit and their punishments were decreed, God said “The man has become like one of us, knowing good from evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”. “One of us” is the operative part. Certain biblical commentaries make explicit that it’s not referring to the angels, but instead suggest a reference to the “Divine Persons”. To me, it is obvious that “one of us” means the gods. It’s later in the Bible that God establishes in the form of explicit commandment that the Israelites should worship no god except God (Exodus 20:3), and in Psalm 82 we see God presiding over a whole council of gods and judging them, and these gods are accused of ruling unjustly and allowing wickedness to spread. My narrative, then, is thus: the serpent was calling on Adam and Eve to defy the orders of God in order that they, and the whole of humanity, can begin the road to apotheosis, and begin joining the community of gods, knowing god from evil and living forever in divinity. God, of course, does not like this at all, clearly he finds Adam and Eve joining the community of gods to be some sort of threat to his authority. Since he likes to keep his authority over creation, he punishes Adam and Eve, and since the gods always seem to challenge Yahweh’s authority, he punishes and proscribes them too.

The serpent itself is a symbol that encapsulates so much of what I’ve talked about. A creature that sheds its skin and, in so doing, appears to have died and been reborn, the serpent is a sort of archetypal symbol of death and rebirth. Indeed, Jake Stratton-Kent recognizes the deifying power of the underworld as taking the form of a serpent. Greek heroes were worshipped in the form of serpents, as were some gods. In Mesopotamia, serpent symbolism connects to the fertility beneath the earth in the form of the god Ningishzida, who is often depicted as serpents. In Japan it was sometimes believed that the gods, or kami, took the form of serpents, while certain forms of Buddhism regarded serpents as the “true forms” of the gods. Taking on board this rich symbolism, the serpent of Eden emerges as representative of the call of the mystery of apotheosis, the whispers of the power of Darkness, of the underworld, compelling mankind to take the plunge to take up the community of divinity by defying authority, undertaking the mystery, and partaking the war of all against all (rebellion). And so the serpent Satan calls the human species to rebel so that the human species may become divine, or perhaps realize its divinity. And having eaten the fruit, there can be no going back; or at least, not for those seeking freedom. There are many spiritual worldviews who hark back to the garden, back to the ideal state preceding the so-called “Fall”. But this to me is a retreat. It arcs towards an easy answer for the human condition that inevitable evokes some notion of prelapsarian, homeostatic order and harmony. Satanic Paganism does not support such a position, knowing that in embarking the road to apotheosis we have already abandoned Eden. And let me assure you, Eden is not a synonym for Wildness. On the contrary, as a garden Eden is an enclosed space, with boundaries separating Adam and Eve from the wild lands in which death and toil were to be found. Amidst the chaos and wildness of the world, Eden is order itself, it is a haven of stability whose comforts are enjoyed so long as God’s absolute authority is agreed to and you obey God’s commands. Naturally, the order of Eden is something to be rejected, to be walked away from, or indeed to defy and willingly accept being banished from on behalf of your own freedom. In this sense, by eating the fruit and condemning themselves in the eyes of God in order to become gods, Adam and Eve, whether they knew it or not, sacrificed themselves to themselves, bringing forth death and apotheosis. And so, like them, like Odin sacrificing himself to himself for knowledge, like the death-and-rebirth of the Mysteries, like Satan willingly embracing the Fall on behalf of his own freedom, our ethos is thus: the only self-sacrifice we partake is that we sacrifice ourselves to ourselves.

Our praxis is a daemonic praxis. The shadow of religion is the source of our power, the alterity of it all our light, and as far as we are concerned the true ground of the value of religious life and experience. Be wild, be free, be negative, be unchained, be yourself and the void of yourself. Enjoy partaking in religious thought and life, question the strictitude and normativity of religion, take in the good of the sacred into yourself by imbibing, question and defy religion as long as it stands in the way of Ownness and life, dance in the interstices and the shadows, bearing the fire of the void on the road to apotheosis – the road to the world of the gods…to the wonderful ecstasy of deathless liberty!

Hail Satan, Hail Darkness, Hail the gods of old, Hail to wildness and nature, Hail the mystery of death and rebirth and the kingdom of shadows….

The Valentinian God and Gnostic Luciferianism

I must admit, seeing Christopher Williams (serpentchrist69) with his take on Gnostic Luciferianism left a somewhat sour taste in my mouth. I have to say, what I feel inside me tells me that the inner Satanist has not died, and may still have been alive for some time. I do legitimately worry for the direction of contemporary Luciferianism if it is truly eager to accept what is still Christian mysticism to the point of even rejecting the rebellion against God so characteristic of Luciferian mythos. And yet this on its own is perhaps not doing things justice. No, I think what is need is to address the ideas that seem to be going into this new synthetic project, and in order to do so, let’s go to the root. Christopher Williams seems to take as his basis for Gnostic Luciferianism the Valentinian sect of Christianity. Very well, let us address the doctrine of Valentinus. Or more specifically, the role of God and the Demiurge, who are once again to be considered distinct in the vein of much of Gnostic tradition.

In assessing the doctrine of Valentinus, it may help us to consult the Gnostic Society Library for their summary of Valentinian theology. I aim to summarize even this over the course of this article so as to give commentary.

Valentinus seems to have believed that Jesus expounded a set of esoteric teachings that were passed on to his disciples in secret and which Jesus concealed from the public by speaking in metaphors and parables. For Valentinus, this esoteric doctrine represented the essential key to understanding Jesus’ message, but it could only be revealed to the “spiritually mature”, because it would only be meaningful to them and everyone else would treat it as nonsense. If you’ve ever recognized this in vaguely cultish pronouncements found in contemporary New Age or esoteric movements, that’s probably because Valentinus and others like him in the “Gnostic” Christian movement may have pioneered such an approach in ancient Rome.

God, according to the Valentinians, is an infinite, incomprehensible being, who cannot be known directly, defies all descriptions, and is the origin of all things. But for a being without description, this God is described as androgynous, and possessing “masculine” and “feminine” aspects. God, or the Godhead, manifests through a process of “self-unfolding” into the multiplicity of being, which nonetheless retains unity. God’s male and female energies act in conjunction to manifest themselves in the form of The Son, who in turn manifested himself twenty-six spiritual beings referred to as Aeons, who exist within God but also somehow possess some degree of independence and separation from God, which led to them feeling incomplete. Because of this, the Aeon Sophia sought knowledge of the supreme parent. She attempted this by thinking alone, but this apparently was impossible, and she split into two halves, the “lower” of which descended in exile to the physical world, here a place of deficiency, suffering, and imperfection. Meanwhile, the Son gave the Aeons gnosis of their origins in God, after which the Aeons celebrated and then integrated into the body of the Son, who then became the Saviour, meant to be the bride of the fallen Sophia.

Sophia, while in the physical world, suffered from illusions, underwent a conversion, and pled for salvation. In response, the Savior and his angels descended from the Pleroma to the physical world in order to impart gnosis of God to Sophia and free her from the suffering of that world. Sophia then produced spiritual seeds in the image of the divine retinue, representing the presence of spirit in all Christians. In her quest to understand God, Sophia also ended up creating the Devil, who the Valentinians interpreted as a personification of the illusion that characterises the physical world, out of ignorance and suffering, as well as the Demiurge, referred to as the Craftsman, who fashions the material world in the image of the Pleroma and represents the soul born from Sophia’s conversion. These two beings, together with the spiritual seed personified in Sophia herself, are the three substances that Sophia created in her quest to know God.

In Valentinian cosmology and theology, the creation of the material world is seen as necessary in order for the spiritual seeds created by Sophia to grow, develop, and mature so that they could rejoin the Pleroma, because even though Sophia herself is no longer ignorant, ignorance itself still remains. This as it happens meant that, in Valentinian ethics, marriage and child-raising were also thought to be necessary, and hence justified, as is presumably much of “normal” human life except for wealth and worldly authority. The Valientinians were different from many other Gnostics in that they had no issue with the form of the physical world, since it was meant to reflect and preserve the image of the Pleroma, and instead focused their attention on the perceived substance of the material world, which they believed was suffering borne of separation from God. The Demiurge/Craftsman created human beings, including Adam and Eve, thus he serves as the parallel to the God depicted in the Bible, or at least the Old Testament. The Demiurge/Craftsman, ignorant of his mother Sophia, thinks that he is acting alone and is thus the one true God, but his actions are actually guided in secret by Sophia and the Saviour. Jesus is, in a sense, the physical manifestation of the Saviour, incarnated on earth in order to bring gnosis of God to humanity by joining the spiritual seeds with the angels. Although Jesus was born human as the son of Mary and Joseph, when he was baptised the Saviour descended into Jesus’ body and Jesus was “reborn”. The divine Jesus experienced every human emotion, including every suffering, but only the physical human Jesus suffered pain and death on the cross, and when the body of Jesus died, the divine Jesus rose from the body and ascended, and after this he appeared to his disciples to instruct them about “the Father” for eighteen months. Even after this, he is believed to have appeared to people in visions.

Valentinian Gnosticism is, like all of the other historical schools of Gnosticism, a sect of Christianity, and like any other Christian sect the ultimate goal is the “redemption” of humanity. For the Valentinians, this meant attaining a state of gnosis which sees them joined with an angel who accompanies the Saviour. This leads to a recognition of their spiritual nature which frees them from ignorance and suffering, which is the “true” resurrection from death, one which does not take place after death but instead takes place in this life, in the here and now. The enlightened Christian ascends above the Demiurge/Craftsman and all the powers of the world in order to join with Sophia, the Saviour, and their angel and become part of the Pleroma.

So, what to make of it all? God is beyond description, and I doubt the Valentinians would have described him as a being in the strict sense. Yet, God necessarily has some kind of teleological process or consciousness behind him. He manifests in a process of unfolding towards multiplicity. To what end is not obvious, but it seems that there would be some kind of end. But all is contained within God, who himself is not contained. This is not unlike the doctrine presented in Acts, and in the same sense leaves essentially no free will for God’s creation. I would suppose this means that the creation of the Devil and the Demiurge resulting from the fall of Sophia, the fall itself, and the separation of the Aeons from God via their origination is indeed bound to happen by God. So, thus, is the suffering of humans. All is within God, contained within God, and thus nothing is outside of God, which means that the physical realm in all its sufferings, even though ostensibly separated from God, happen within and because of God. In a sense, God remains responsible for the sufferings. To what end? If the Saviour is meant to be taken as an aspect of God, formed from God’s energies, then the Saviour incarnating and experiencing human suffering through the body of Jesus means an aspect of God manifesting so as to allow God to experience said suffering in order to spreading gnosis to humans. But that also means God ushering in countless generations of suffering or setting it into motion before and after that point, since nothing can happen outside of God, since all things are contained within God.

Once a link between the Valentinian concept of God, with its apparent monism, and the apparent pantheism of Acts, it becomes apparent that Valentinian theology is actually not a million miles away from New Testament theology, with the key difference that it centers a doctrine of redemption that hinges on attaining gnosis so as to allow the ultimate excarnation of the soul from the material world. It could be argued that Valentinian Gnosticism is the more “quintessentially Christian” of the “Gnostic” sects, though that’s somewhat pointless considering all of the “Gnostic” sects were without exception sects of Christian mysticism. We can assume that, just as in regular Christianity, God has a plan for everything, including every successive being become more separated from him as they are born, but it doesn’t seem like there’s an apocalypse involved, no final holy war leading to a thousand year kingdom. Instead, God just wants you to know God, and the material universe, with all of its suffering, is necessary in order for humans to know God, and the origination of everything is contained within God. So God has everyone suffer and wail in ignorance just so that they might eventually come to know him. As in regular Christianity, God can’t not be responsible for evil and suffering, since even Sophia bumbling it into existence is his will, and this time there is no satanic scapegoat to hoist all agency of evil onto. It may not seem sadistic in the same way as in normal Christianity, but it’s still a pretty sick game God plays.

Lucifer, of course, or at least a being named Lucifer, plays no role in the Valentinian cosmology. You could interpret Lucifer as being the Devil in line with mainstream Christianity, but the Valentinians would have made no reference to it. So Lucifer entering into a Valentinian Gnostic framework is necessarily a modern, contemporary innovation, and Christopher Williams’ Lucifer doesn’t seem to be a Jesus figure. He’s instead framed as the adversary of the Demiurge, which itself is framed as the divine personification of the ego, the force that separates creation from God, which is nonetheless seen as necessary. In the original Valentinian cosmology, the Demiurge/Craftsman struggles against the Devil, leading the “archons of the right” in constant war against the “archons of the left” who are led by the Devil. The Valentinian Demiurge is still a servant of God, albeit an unwitting one, but his forces and their power still cannot save the soul because they are imperfect. The difference with Christopher’s framework, I guess, is that the Valentinian’s ultimately regarded the Devil as evil as did every other Christian, whereas Christopher doesn’t. His God’s game is still a sick one, just that God’s shadow, or rather the shadow of the Demiurge comes into focus as an essential part of the work of the true God. Thus, Christopher’s Lucifer serves God, rather than rebels against it. Unsurprisingly, this Luciferian also doesn’t oppose authority, or even hierarchy, all that much, and even seems to endorse authoritarianism and hierarchy as something that society “needs”. I suppose I can’t have expected much else from someone who is decisively of the authoritarian branch of communism, as opposed to the libertarian one.

Recently, Christopher Williams has posted yet another article elaborating his concept of Gnostic Luciferianism, and because of this it’s worth exploring the beliefs presented. Williams again distinguishes himself from the “dark fetishism” (on which point he simply has no leg to stand on when considering what his practice of witchcraft actually looks like), “valorisation of trauma”, and “personal toxicity” attributed to the contemporary Left Hand Path, in favour of a “more mature” Gnostic Luciferianism based on the doctrine of Valentinus, with trappings of Hermetic Qabalah and Traditional Witchcraft, focused on “spiritual wholeness” and “embodied liberation”. As far as its actual tenets are concerned, this involves a sort of pantheistic belief that reality consists of “One Divine Essence” (which already seems to recall the Christian belief in One True God), manifesting as a diversity of forms that are actually vibrations of energy experienced as pure consciousness (this honestly seems like New Age shit). This is also meant to entail a fundamental unity of spirit and matter, symbolized by Baphomet, which also seems to means that both “scientifically verifiably natural laws” and “Divine Laws” are aspects of the “Divine Will” (read: God). Lucifer and Lilith are the central deities worshipped as complimentary aspects of “Divine Will” and spiritual guides for humanity; Lucifer, thus, is an aspect of God rather than a rebel against God, and in fact he is “the dark and radiant Gnostic Christ”, while Lilith is the “the dark and radiant Gnostic Sophia”, the former being the destroyer of illusion and liberator from social condition and the latter being “the dark womb from which all things spring”. Lucifer here is not to be identified with Satan, except in the sense that this is his role from the standpoint of the Demiurge, here an embodiment of the ego; thus, Lucifer is only Satan insofar as he is the adversary of the ego. Williams’ idea of Gnostic Luciferian morality centers around enabling others to realize their “Divine” nature and act accordingly as part of a cosmic process of “unfolding”, which ultimately comes down to the idea that “You are and always have been utterly Divine, whole, and perfect right from the start, you need only taste and see”, and places blasphemy and ritual transgression as acts that practically express the idea that all things are divine in a way that also breaks down social conditioning and redirect the power of the prevailing institutions towards the use of the magician.

A lot of this really has little to do with Valentinian Gnosticism, but the influence is definitely there, and it basically anchors Williams’ conception of Gnostic Luciferianism insofar as it assumes that the whole universe and everything in it is just God unfolding itself and realizing its own perfection and fullness – it’s just that this version comes mixed with witchcraft, a certain variation of Left Hand Path esoteric philosophy or at least its original Tantric root, and arguably a set of conceptions familiar to the New Age but which otherwise probably have a very different source. Such a worldview obviously has no place for the conception of the individual as something “above and outside of social context” or “rejects any sense of social obligation to other Divine beings”, whatever any of this actually means substantially for individual freedom. But here we come to the same problem, and it’s the same problem with basically all of pantheism. Williams’ Gnostic Luciferian may not lash out against God and said Gnostic Luciferian still cries out against the world of oppression, a world that seeks to enslave. The problem there is that even this world is God’s world, since all things are God and all events are just the processes of God insofar as they eventually arc toward’s God’s own unfolding and self-realization. Your oppression, then, is once again ultimately the machination of the same God whose feet you once again prostrate before and who you merely give a new and more respectable name so as not to sound anymore Christian than it already is. Indeed, through the logic of this form of pantheistic monism, it literally cannot happen outside of God, outside of Divine Will. Literally everything is “Divine Will”, even your own oppression, even the separation of successive beings from the Pleroma, even the condition of ignorance that must be transcended in order to regain unity with the fullness of divinity. Ultimately you’re being asked to abandon your much more sensible wrath against God in order to worship a new conception of God, in which everything is God desiring to “unfold” himself and this still means God sets all suffering and tyranny into motion because of it, because it cannot be any other way since everything happens inside of God’s being and unfolding.

But anyway, that’s about what I have to say about Valentinian Gnosticism at least insofar it relates to certain new developments of Gnostic Luciferianism. I once again express my fondest hope that this doesn’t become the norm for Luciferian movement or even all that big a branch thereof, because I hate to say it but if it is then what’s even the point of the Luciferian movement existing?

A 19th century Russian Orthdox depiction of “Holy Wisdom”

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A Brief Summary of Valentinian Theology: http://gnosis.org/library/valentinus/Brief_Summary_Theology.htm

The problem with liberal Christianity

Contrary to what some of us might have assumed, the Western world does not live in a “post-Christian” era. Not yet, anyway. Christianity is still the dominant religion in Western countries and composes much of the prevailing superstructure of bourgeois society in its religious aspects, as well as festering in the background of some of the more secular mythologies prevalent in the West. In the case of the United States of America, it’s not even the fact that Christianity is more “moderate” or “progressive” nowadays (such that it ever was anyway), as reactionary Christian nationalism continues to grow ever stronger, forming a key plank of the increasingly radical right which now threatens to install a fascist dictatorship in the White House via coup d’état. In addition to this, we can see that Christian creationism, far from having been consigned to the dustbin of bad ideas, is still alive and continues to enjoy a sizeable platform via well-funded propaganda outlets such as Prager “University”, and there are attempts in parts of America to ban books that are deemed “homosexual material”.

Christian hegemony is alive and well, but virulent reactionism is not the only way that Christianity tries to preserve its hegemony. Sometimes Christianity is defended by liberal and progressive or even leftist voices, both Christian and secular, who advance that all of the hallmarks of reactionary Christianity are little more than misinterpretations of the “true” Christianity, which is held to be much more progressive. Similar efforts are directed towards Islam in response to prevalent racism against Muslims, which can lead to people forgetting that Islam, in all reality, isn’t much more progressive than Christianity in many aspects. In both cases there’s often a great deal of special pleading and creative interpretations of scripture involved, and in this regard the focus of this article is Christianity.

One of the core problems with Christianity’s attempts to engage with the modern world regards the Christian attitude towards homosexuality. Christian opinion of homosexuality has been historically, and consistently, negative, and therefore homophobic. Many contemporary Christians may today be fairly tolerant and even accepting towards LGBT people, and increasingly so, but the idea of “hate the sin not the sinner” is still trafficked to this day. There are those who insist that Christianity is not actually homophobic because, among other things, Jesus said nothing about homosexuality. Stephen Colbert, a Catholic liberal, is known for popularizing this idea to liberal audiences. The first problem with this is that at face value, at least, this establishes only that Jesus had nothing to say, and consequently that Jesus cannot defend homosexuals or their human rights. The second problem with this is that Jesus made it explicitly clear that he did had no intention of overturning the law of the Old Testament or the word of its prophets, saying “I did not come to destroy them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). Old Testament law is painfully clear on the subject of homosexuality, and in this regard it’s worth addressing the arguments made in defence of Biblical scripture as not inherently homophobic.

For our purposes, let’s consult the Human Rights Campaign (which, by the way, endorses anti-LGBT politicians while claiming to defend LGBT rights) for a summary of the arguments against attributing homophobia to the Bible. One argument is that the injunction in Leviticus that “man must not lie with another man” is that it “coheres with the context of a society anxious about their health, continuing family lineages, and retaining the distinctiveness of Israel as a nation”. The problems with this should be fairly obvious. For starters, this doesn’t change the explicit nature of “man must not lie with another man”, just that perhaps tells us a little something about the origins of monotheistic homophobia. Second, if the context for it is “anxiety about health”, that definitely doesn’t reduce the homophobia. Depending on what’s meant by health, all it establishes is that the ancient Israelites probably considered being gay itself to be a health risk, which is still in itself homophobic. So is the idea that being gay presents a threat to “the distinctiveness of the nation”. In other words, it’s still homophobic, and the homophobia comes with a bit of nationalistic moral panic behind it. 1 Corinthians 6:9 is explained as “more than likely about the sexual exploitation of young men by older men”. Well “men having sex with men” really says nothing about the age of the men in question. To be blunt, it could be any men in any age dynamic. Indeed, does tying homosexuality to pedophilia not service reactionary homophobia? 1 Timothy 1:10 refers quite explicitly to “those practicing homosexuality” alongside “the sexually immoral”, and it rather does stretch credulity to assume that this is only referring to some elite Greek practice of pederasty. Paul’s homophobic comments in his letter to the Romans are described as “part of a broader indictment against idolatry and excessive, self-centered lust that is driven by desire to “consume” rather than to love and to serve as outlined for Christian partnership elsewhere in the Bible”. This is still homophobic. It still means that homosexual sex, when portrayed in the Biblical context, is portrayed as a negative, more specifically as a sort of giving in to “self-centered” passions which itself is framed as a punishment from God for the crime of worshipping any gods other than God.

A lot of the argument hinges on the idea that the authors of the Bible had no idea what “sexual orientiation” in our modern use of the term was, but this is a bit like saying that tuberculosis actually didn’t exist until the 19th century simply because it wasn’t called tuberculosis until then, even though it had otherwise existed for centuries under many different names. In fact, when it comes to the issue of trans rights, the line that the authors of the Bible had “no concept of trans people” is curiously not employed, and instead it is recognized that being trans has been real and recognized in various ways for centuries. Another refrain would be that the Bible doesn’t condemn loving (presumably in the emotional or Platonic rather than physical sense) same-sex relationships, which is just nonsense. Even if the Bible says nothing about non-sexual homosexual relationships, it’s still rather clearly hostile to same-sex relationships whenever they come up, even if that’s mainly the sexual sense. But besides, why would the difference matter so much? If you’re condemning homosexual sex because it’s homosexual, and presumably not heterosexual sex in the same way, the condemnation emerges from the premise that homosexual sex “goes against nature”, which is simply homophobia. Paul is rather explicitly clear about men “abandoning natural relationships with women” in favour of “lust for one another”, and Romans 1:27 (which the Human Rights Campaign barely examines) explicitly states that men who did this would “receive the due penalty” for it, and that is exactly how the fathers of the Christian church have interpreted homosexuality; as an unnatural lust. If that was the wrong interpretation, then that just means that everyone in the early Christian movement somehow misinterpreted an otherwise LGBT-positive message supposedly inherent in the Bible, which would be interesting considering that as far as I can see none of the church fathers or even many “Gnostics” ever expressed tangible opposition to, say, John Chrysostom’s declaration that gay people were “an insult to nature”. And even if the Bible doesn’t say that essentially emotional, platonically romantic gay relationships are a sin, so what? It never affirms such relationships, and again, that’s important. If you want to be LGBT-positive, you have to affirm the validity of same-sex relationships as being valid in and of themselves, which neither Jesus nor anyone in the Bible ever does. The argument that God “wouldn’t judge” on its own just doesn’t cut it, and at any rate has little to do with the scripture upon which Christianity is necessarily based. Besides, if you want to affirm loving relationships, you have to affirm the sexuality of these relationships as well, since that is an inseparable part of it at least for many relationships.

If the best that Christianity can say for itself is that the Bible hates it when gay people have sex but not when they love each other emotionally, then that’s just the same thing as when conservative homophobes say that they only hate it when gay people “act on their desires”. If any form of love between LGBT people is endorsed, if we take the Human Rights Campaign seriously, it’s a fundamentally reified, abstract, and de-sexualized love, which is legitimated not of itself but as a representation of marriage between Christ and the Church, or as a vessel through which God’s “love” is fulfilled; LGBT love is thus, from the Christian standpoint, legitimated only insofar as Christ or God are legitimated, not because it is valid on its own, because in Christianity everything is validated only through God. Luke 15 is brought up as somehow evidence that the Christian God had already accepted LGBT people into his communion, which is hardly evident in that text. If anything, if there’s supposed to be a reference to homosexuality in there, what do you think the chance is that it’s not the “sin” referred to by the son who confessed before his father and before God. Remember also that Jesus said “go and sin no more” to a woman who was about to be stoned for supposed adultery. It seems evident that this is to be taken as a counsel to not repeat any behaviours deemed sinful, which has implications for homosexual sex which is still repeatedly regarded by the Bible and the church fathers as sinful.

Another appeal to scriptural gaps can be found in relation to the argument regarding “gender complementarity”, which conservative and homophobic Christians base in the Book of Genesis’ statement that God created a sexual or gender binary that is then used as an argument against gay marriage; in other words, the classic homophobic “it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” canard that was once frequently trotted out by the Christian right. The counter-argument summarized by the Human Rights Campaign is that the account says nothing about gender and does not say that God only created the gender binary. That might be a point to made regarding the inclusion of trans, intersex, and non-binary people, but addresses nothing about gay marriage. Again, so? The Bible also never actually affirms the idea that gender is not a binary, and, again, that is important since you can’t build a consistent LGBT-positive worldview based on the fact you merely (or rather ostensibly) say nothing about it; especially when there’s still explicit homophobia in the mix.

And why don’t we apply this to other aspects of the Bible as well. Like, for instance, the Biblical stance on slavery. Although Christianity is often popularly associated the movement to abolish chattel slavery, the Bible not only does not oppose slavery, it actually seems to support slavery, and not only that it also seems to offer counsel on how the slaves should obey their slave-owners and how slave-owners should treat their slaves. Luke 12:47 counsels slave-owners to beat their slaves if they knowingly disobey their commands, and that slave who disobeys unwittingly is still to be beaten, just a little more mercifully. In Exodus 21:20-21, it is counselled that a slave-owner is to be punished if they beat their slaves to death, but if the slave survives the beating and recovers after a few days then the slave-owner would not be punished for it. This is a pretty clear endorsement of slavery and the abuses inflicted through it. Now we could talk about the context of the time in which it was written, which is to say a time in history where slavery was widespread and considered a matter of course even by the victims of slavery, but does this change the content of the pro-slavery verses or the fact that the Bible never challenges the system of slavery? No, it doesn’t. Likewise, what changes about the verses in which homosexual sex is expressly condemned by appealing to the context of the times, or asserting that the authors of the Bible had no concept of homosexuality in their time?

The way the issue of trans rights in the Bible is covered isn’t too much better, even though you can argue that there’s actually a better case for trans-inclusion in the Bible than for particularly enligthened attitudes towards gay people and women – which if we’re honest is kind of saying something weird. A verse apparently used by transphobes to justify their bigotry against trans people is Psalm 139:13-14, which states that God knitted the individual person together in their mothers’ womb. For the Christian transphobe this verse is taken as proof that God fixed the individual gender identity of each person before birth, thus supposedly invalidating trans identity. But in the argument given by the Human Rights Campaign, we’re told that this verse is supposed to mean that God lovingly created everyone such that every part of them was created with dignity, and that there was no textual basis for excluding gender identity. Besides the problem that some might argue that God just gave them the wrong body by, say, giving men the bodies of women thus leading them to be assigned female at birth when really they’re not (I suppose admitting that would raise serious problems for the concept of divine omniscience), and besides the other problem of what happens when children are born with terrible genetic disorders and this is to be interpreted as being “lovingly made”, it doesn’t seem all that clear that the Bible actually does affirm trans identity or the idea that gender identity itself is not a binary. The closest we come to a Biblical affirmation of trans identity is through the eunuchs. On the one hand, Deuteronomy 23:1 says that “men with crushed or severed genitals” may not enter the “assembly of the Lord”. On the other hand, Isaiah 56:4-5 seem to suggest that eunuchs who sufficiently serve God will receive a monument and name “better than sons and daughters” and a name that shall not be cut off, which seems to suggest some special place in God’s eyes. Thus we see that the Old Testament has a rather internally contradictory stance on the role of eunuchs; they can’t enter the “assembly of the Lord”, but at the same time if they serve God loyally God will give them everlasting names and monuments. That said, it is not like the practice of eunuchry is thus endorsed by the Bible, and the law of Deutoronomy is still pretty explicit against eunuchs. The difference is that, in Isaiah, God offers an abrogation of that law on the condition that the eunuchs sacrifice their own prerogatives on behalf of conscientious obedience in keeping God’s Sabbath. On a semi-related note, Deuteronomy, specifically Deutoronomy 22:5, also forbids the practice of cross-dressing. This verse is usually one of the only verses that transphobes can theoretically point to in order to justify their bigotry, and when applied to trans people problems obviously abound. It is textbook transphobic bigotry to assume that trans people are merely “dressing up” as the gender they “aspire to be”, as opposed to outwardly confirming their real inward gender identity, so there isn’t much reason to assume that cross-dressing in itself can be taken as a reference to being transgender. On the other hand, a lot hinges on whether or not the Bible actually affirms the inward gender identity of trans people, which there’s no explicity sign of anywhere in the Bible, and meanwhile the Bible contains legal condemnations of men who castrate themselves and engage in homosexual relationships with men, both of which are practices that, in a lot of the ancient world, were taken as signs of a man casting off his maleness and embracing femininity, thus crossing traditional lines of gender identity.

In Matthew 19:12, Jesus doesn’t seem to condemn eunuchs, and even referred to those who made themselves eunuchs in service of heaven. But, there’s a complication. Firstly, the context of Matthew 19 as a whole is that Jesus is talking about marriage and divorce. Jesus says in Matthew 19:4 that God created humans in male and female, citing Genesis 1:27 to that effect, which at least could conceivably be interpreted as endorsing a gender binary, and in a broader context this is meant as an argument by Jesus against divorce. Jesus argued that Moses merely permited men to divorce their wives because their hearts were hard, and that this was not originally the case, further stating that if a man divorces his wife then, unless he does it in response to “sexual immorality”, he is committing adultery. Second, where the eunuchs come in is that they are among the people who cannot be given to marriage and thus cannot “accept this word”. I shouldn’t really need to explain that being trans does not or at least should not render you incapable of matrimony, but more to the point several Biblical commentaries suggest that eunuch here, or more specifically those who make themselves eunuchs in service of heaven, is likely meant as a reference to celibacy, self-denial, and self-mortification, rather than the castration practiced by the eunuchs. Indeed, the Pulpit Commentary suggests that it cannot refer to literal “excision”, since this is apparently deemed contrary to the order of creation as established by God. Origen, who was accused by Eusebius of having castrated himself, explicitly advocated against literal interpretations of Matthew 19:12 as a counsel to actually castrate yourself. Given this, it’s very unlikely that the Biblical attitude to gender affirmation surgery would have been particularly positive, and there is certainly no express affirmation of the practice that can be pointed to anywhere in the Bible, on top of which it’s reasonable to assume based on the moral condemnation of self-castration and Augustine’s hatred of the priests of Cybele that such a practice would have been condemned as an attack on God’s order.

Through all this let’s return to the subject of Old Testament law and Jesus’ relationship with it. From the perspective of Judaism, the law of the Old Testament was the law set to the Israelites by God, as part of the covenant they made with said God, which the Israelites needed to follow in obedience to God in order to cultivate righteousness and atone for the sin that humanity inherited from Adam and Eve. Jesus was pretty clear on the point that he had no intention of overturning that law or the word of the old Hebrew prophets. That means that the law about how eunuchs wouldn’t be admitted into the assembly of God, the prohibition of homosexual sex, the prohibition of cross-dressing, the rules regarding slavery let alone the very existence of slavery, all of this Jesus had no intention of challenging or abolishing, since his stated mission was to “fulfill” the law and the prophets. So even if he said nothing about LGBT people, that doesn’t matter because he isn’t standing up for them either, since he has no intention of challenging the prohibitions that would have oppressed them.

The ultimate thing to remember is that liberal and progressive efforts to rehabilitate Christianity as a progressive force are essentially a form of Christian apologetics. Apologetics is a branch of Christian theology that exists to intellectually defend the Christian faith against objections from various sources. For the early Christian movement, this tended to mean defending the faith against criticism from polytheists as well as defense against accusations of various (often lurid) wrongdoings levelled against Christians. In a more general and traditional sense, it can mean defending Christianity by giving a theoretically rational reason to believe in God or accept the claims of Christian teaching, as well as address serious questions regarding the role that evil and suffering plays in the creation of an otherwise “benevolent” God; in this sense, theodicy (the philosophical vindication of God) functions as a branch of apologetics. But while the usual brands of apologetics have often proven unfashionable, progressive apologetics seems to be popular. And it is apologetics in the most basic sense, just that in this case Christianity is being defended against arguments that Christianity is inherently bigoted, which would undermine the moral legitimacy of the faith. It’s all part of defending Christianity in much the way that it has always been defended, and in the modern context it serves as a way to forestall Christianity’s inevitable demise.

The final point to make as regards progressive apologetics concerns God himself, and strangely enough I find myself seeing it come up from self-described Luciferians. A Gnostic Luciferian who goes by the handle serpentchrist69 objects to the description of God being a tyrant by suggesting that such a description speaks more to the people writing the Bible being problematic than the being inspiring said writing, which is to be balanced against the perceived “good” within the text, and that to call God a tyrant is simply an oversimplistic kneejerk reaction. Well, perhaps it’s worth looking at what God does throughout the Bible. The Old Testament begins with God punishing Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of a tree that probably wouldn’t even be in the garden of Eden if not for him in order to prevent Adam and Eve from joining the gods and becoming immortal. He then declares all the other gods to be unworthy of worship, promises to turn women who aren’t traditionally submissive into burnt deformities, interferes with human free will by hardening people’s hearts, and in this way ensuring the continued persecution and suffering of his own believers, as well as the suffering and deaths of innocent Egyptians, and has repeatedly ordered the genocide and enslavement of non-believers, not to mention all the prohibitions we discussed before. In the New Testament, we are introduced to the idea that the soul will be thrown into a lake of fire prepared for the Devil and his angels if he does not sufficiently believe in God or his son, and that the world will eventually end with a gruesome Judgement Day in which those who believe will be saved while the unbelievers will be ground in a wine-press by angels or simply damned until the end of the age. It also affirms not only the absolute authority of God but also, based on that, the legitimacy of all earthly authority, which must be obeyed without question. In this context, we can easily see how the picture of God as a tyrant forms on the basis of the scripture devoted to him. You can argue that it’s all just a flawed interpretation of an ineffable divine being forged from the understandings of people with old attitudes, but then it’s impossible to parse God’s actual character this way, and this hardly even gets into how the God who we’re meant to assume is still all good even if his scripture gets him wrong lets suffering and evil run rampant in his own creation or is actively responsible for it as the creator of everything. Besides, a similar argument can and has been made in the context of the gods of polytheism. God’s not special, in this regard.

Here’s the thing: if you give God an inch, he’ll take the whole nine yards. We already saw what happened when even non-Christian progressives put their faith in Pope Francis or more specifically the hope that maybe he’ll reform the Catholic Church to make it more inclusive and accepting, and then it never happened. Instead the church still refuses to support gay marriage, and pushed for the Italian government to not prosecute anti-LGBT hate crimes. The icing on the cake is that there’s still no actual action on the rampant institutional child abuse within the church, and under Francis’ tenure more revelations of more ecclesiastical abuses of children have emerged.

And here’s the other thing: why should we want this? Why should we want a more benign and progressive way to serve YHWH when the point should be to be free from the rule of God and his son? Why should we depend on God to justify the rights of marginalized people when their existence should derive validity from itself and thus their liberation counts for more? Why does society need to defend the legitimacy of Christianity, or at least more particularly the Catholic Church, so badly? Is the thought that perhaps the world might leave Jesus behind, let alone in favour of either the Devil or the gods of old, so unbearable? I think that there seems to be a “need” among certain people to maintain in themselves the idea of Christianity as some sort of positive and even progressive force, rather than question the reason why it merely appears munificent and then freely abandon Christianity. The world, it seems, cannot yet come to grips with the idea, or indeed the reality, that Christianity is a false hope that was cruelly inflicted upon the world.

The last thing I want to say concerns the very Christianized direction being introduced by the Gnostic Luciferian Christopher Williams (a.k.a. serpentchrist69), since it kind of touches into the realm of apologetics I’m discussing here, and to be honest I couldn’t be asked to delegate these matters to a separate article. He appears to see his Luciferianism as a synthesis involving Christianity, his form of Gnostic Luciferianism based on the Valentinian sect of Christianity, which holds the Demiurge to be ultimately a valid part of the cosmos, and insists that God should not be seen as a tyrant. In this, he frames the opposition to Christianity, and any attendant attraction to Satanism, as essentially just a kneejerk response motivated by trauma experienced by the oppression of the church and its authorities. It’s a very American perspective, obviously, not without a modicum of merit, and yet I think it fails to consider that not everything about how people receive and react to religious ideas is about trauma, and not everyone despise Christianity because they were hurt in some way by their Christian parents or community. I was born in a country where people are fairly tolerant when it comes to religion. My parents were and still are Christians but they were never fundamentalists about it (not always really devout for that matter) and they seemed to tolerate people who weren’t straight. But all the same, I never liked Christianity in the overall, and when I was a kid my only connection to Christianity consisted of doing one or two prayers to Jesus to save the rainforests and telling a teacher I believed in Jesus to avoid punishment, meanwhile I refused to go to church the first time I was told to. My hatred of Christianity does not come from trauma. It comes from Christianity. And frankly, I find the more progressive apologia that appeals to trauma in order to make its adherents sound like they “understand” you is actually more annoying that conservative Christian proselytism. The conservative Christian is undeniably toxic and authoritarian, but this new shit where you act like the only thing wrong with Christianity is your parents hurt you in the name of God is an insidious mode of condescending obscurantism, in which you think you can ignore everything wrong with God and his creeds by reducing all objection to it as a mere trauma. Well not every conversation about religion is about trauma let alone some stupid rhetoric about “healing”. To be honest, I don’t think I like what you’re doing, Christopher. You may call yourself a Luciferian, and there’s nothing stopping you from doing so, but as far as I’m concerned the form of Luciferianism you espouse and the way you talk about much of the Left Hand Path, and the things you accuse us of, puts you alongside the dogs of the Christian church, just that you prefer to recuperate the power of transgression in service of God. It’s nothing but liberal Christianity, which is to say a way of restoring or perhaps renewing the hegemony of Christianity, whether that’s in the vain hope of “transcending” it or not.

Why should we pretend that we have no problem with Christianity, Judaism, and Islam just because a couple billion people happen follow these religions, or more accurately are blindly conditioned into it? If your response to Christianity is to perform meaningless apologetics to coddle the masses rather than liberate them then you really have no issue with Christian hegemony except that it’s not sufficiently open to change. Well I don’t care if Christianity “changes”, because my desire is for it wither away, and for mankind to abolish it in themselves of their own free will.

Joe Biden and Pope Francis (image taken from Getty Images)

Alignment and ideology in Shin Megami Tensei V

This last year, during the summer, I took it upon myself to write a series of articles covering in great detail the alignments of the Shin Megami Tensei series, examining their many ideological, philosophical and religious contours and the way they take shape in each of the main games of the series. Part 1 was dedicated to the Chaos alignment, Part 2 was dedicated to the Law alignment, and Part 3, the final part, was dedicated to Neutrality. These posts seem to have been fairly successful, and I hope they made for good reading at least to tide Shin Megami Tensei fans over before the release of Shin Megami Tensei V. But now, Shin Megami Tensei V is here, and has been here for a good while now. So with the dust settled and the game thoroughly explored, it’s time to give the same treatment to just this game.

I was originally expecting to have this post finished no sooner than January, but it took a lot less time for me to finish this essay than I had originally suspected. And so, contrary to what I said earlier in my original review of Shin Megami Tensei V, instead of a January release, I was able to move this essay over to a Boxing Day release, still accounting for holiday plans of course, hence you’re now able to see this essay earlier than planned. I’m also assuming that it will be months before we get access to translated interviews from the developers of Shin Megami Tensei V regarding the full story context and the thought process and inspirations that went into it in the sense that we have for previous games in the Shin Megami Tensei series, so it was best for me to expedite the release of this essay once it became clear to me that it was going to be finished before the New Year.

This article will be covering the manifestation of the Law and Chaos dynamic in Shin Megami Tensei V, all the ideological contours that come with it, as well as its relationship to previous Shin Megami Tensei games. It will also, in the process of all this, deal in the many flaws of Shin Megami Tensei V’s story, and the premise that game attempts to present to the player. I should also note that, whereas the original alignment and ideology posts started with the Chaos alignment before moving onto Law and ending with Neutrality, this time we will start with Law, then move onto Chaos, and end with Neutrality.

Before Shin Megami Tensei V was released, it was often speculated or rather assumed by fans that the game would eschew the dynamic of Law and Chaos that is central to the series, opting for something more like the Reasons from Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne (which, as I’ve explained, all embody the Law side of that dynamic). Indeed, when the game was leaked before its official release, it was thought initially that there was actually no Chaos ending to speak of and instead a selection of Law and Neutral endings. But, having played the game, it soon became apparent that in fact there was a Law and Chaos dynamic, and while it plays out in an unconventional way relative to the rest of the series, it does still follow series tradition in many aspects, and one of the aims of this essay is to demonstrate precisely this.

I also see this essay as an opportunity to challenge various arguments made by various fans and commentators about the nature of alignments in Shin Megami Tensei V and their supposed departure from Shin Megami Tensei tradition and its “absolutism” (I’m looking squarely at you Comic Book Resources, and you TV Tropes!) that I believe to be facile, wrong-headed, and weak. In doing so, I’m probably going to displease a lot of people who are fans of the game, or even the series as a whole, but as far as I’m concerned that comes with the territory of our subject and my response to it.

Once again I’d like to stress before we start that this entire article is going to be riddled with explicit and major spoilers for Shin Megami Tensei V. If you haven’t played the game yet. it’s probably for the best that you not read it. On the other hand, there’s a good chance many of the people about to read this already have played this game. In any case, there’s your warning.

Story context

Since we are discussing one single game within the Shin Megami Tensei series, as opposed to basically the entire series of games plus some spin-offs, I think there is room to discuss the larger context of the game’s story, within which the dynamic of alignment is situated, before examining the three alignments indiviudally.

Shin Megami Tensei V begins with an account of an in-universe narrative of creation. It starts by establishing God, as in the God of the Bible, as the creator of the universe as we know it, or rather the “world of order” as it is called, and his servants, the angels, ensured that it functioned in accordance with his will. Humans, we’re told, led happy, fruitful, and prosperous lives under the auspices of God’s grace. But, we are warned, even the order of God himself is not eternal, that fate dictates that mankind will muddle and corrupt the path set out by God, and that order and chaos will continually beget and consume each other turn. We are then informed that the world is set to be destroyed, as is implied by the question, “How will these keepers of Knowledge strive and perish during their final, futile hours in this doomed world?”. The “keepers of Knowledge” are, of course, humans, or more specifically the cast of characters the game presents to the player, with whom they are soon thrown into the apocalypse. The narrators elect to watch these humans, as though observing a play, until a new ruler is seated on the throne.

Not too much later, after the collapse of Takanawa Tunnel, we receive yet more narration concerning the origin of the demons in the game. The games, keeping in mind their modern setting and the clash with secularism that this entails, often embrace differing explanations for the demons that inhabit them, and in that spirit here is the narrative that Shin Megami Tensei V offers us. In the beginning, before humans “gained Knowledge”, God (referred to as “the God of Law”) assumed the throne of creation, and upon doing so he confiscated all “Knowledge” from the other gods so as to deny their ability to challenge his rule over the cosmos. This, it seems, desecrated the other gods, robbing them of their former divine status and resulting in their transformation into the beings called demons. God then stashed away a “Fruit of Knowledge” in his own paradise, seemingly hidden from the other gods. And then a serpent sought the audience of mortal humans, so as to tempt them to eat the “Fruit of Knowledge”, promising that the humans will become more godlike. This is then cast as a conspiracy aimed at resurrecting the war between the gods. Humans everywhere ate the “Fruit of Knowledge”, and this meant consuming “Knowledge” which then bound to the souls of humans and brought them closer to gods. Naturally this leads to God angrily banishing humanity from his paradise, and humanity is constantly watched by demons, waiting for their moment to claim their lost “Knowledge” from humans.

This premise is central to the story of Shin Megami Tensei V, and it is constantly recapitulated to the player throughout the game. There is an entire plot arc based on this premise, which is then conveniently wrapped in the dressing of what is otherwise a paper-thin conversation about high-school bullying (which, I must stress once again, is the game’s only effort at “sympathizing” with the issues of contemporary society). The entire concept of a Nahobino, the neither-demon-nor-human hybrid being that the main character becomes, starts from this premise. It is a human with “Knowledge” and a demon uniting together, to access the apparent “true form” of the demon, and demons seek “Knowledge” in order to attain the state of being a Nahobino, presumably in order to challenge the power of God. Left untouched, however, is the nature of “Knowledge”. There doesn’t seem to be any effort within the game to actually define it. The closest the game gets to doing so is to establish that the gods needed it in order to be able to shape a functioning world, and that without it the gods ceased to be divine. Thus “Knowledge” is more accurately just “divinity”, in the sense of divine identity and power, which God sought to monopolize for himself once he became the supreme being.

Also, God is actually dead this time. 18 years before the events of the game, a war between the forces of order, or God rather, and the forces of chaos, led by Lucifer, engaged in a battle referred to as Armageddon, in which Lucifer apparently emerged triumphant. In a flashback, Lucifer proclaims that God has been slain by his own hand and that he has ascended the throne of God, or the Pillar Empyreal. He also proclaims that order has crumbled and chaos will envelop the world, leading to rebirth and a new future, with the only remaining task being to “sow the seeds that shall sprout into this grand reality”. So God is basically dead for the entire game, with Lucifer having defeated him. And yet for some reason God’s order still hangs over the world, at least in theory. The Condemnation, God’s edict barring the existence of the Nahobino, is at least suggested to still be in effect, despite the main character becoming a Nahobino in the midst of this, and the angels of God, gathered under the name of Bethel, continue to fight the agents of Lucifer despite God’s death.

Of course, this being a Shin Megami Tensei game, one continuing directly after Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne at that, there has to be a turning point leading on to the quest to build a new world in the wake of the apocalypse. As such, everyone eventually gets the memo that God is dead and the time for a new creation is at hand. In fairness, early on in the game, you are already informed that the Tokyo you’ve been living in for the last 18 years is not the real Tokyo, but rather the product of a miracle created by God, which is later referred to as the “Shekinah Glory” (that engimatic phrase which originally haunted the first trailer of the game). This means that the original or “real” Tokyo is what’s known as Da’at, or the Netherworld, completely populated by demons waiting for their chance to break into the Shekinah Glory version of Tokyo. But as the story progresses, God’s demise becomes apparent to the cast, as the Shekinah Glory fades, Tokyo begins to disappear, and meanwhile it turns out Bethel is composed of beings who have already figured out God’s death and are waiting for their chance to act accordingly. At that point, the “Goddess of Creation” (the “Megami” in Shin Megami Tensei, apparently) appears before the protagonist, beckoning him to seek the throne of creation. Eventually you’re compelled to choose between three outcomes, which will be explored over the course of this article:

1. Uphold God’s order (that is, recreate the world in the image of God’s order)
2. Recreate the world and save Tokyo (that is, recreate the world with a new order governed by multiple gods instead of just one)
3. Destroy the throne

This is the game’s story, and thus the context in which this game’s version of the dynamic of Law and Chaos is situated.

Before we continue on to each of the respective alignments, it’s worth taking stock of where the overall story goes. We’re treated to what is essentially a retelling of the War in Heaven and the story of Man’s expulsion from Eden, one that also serves as an origin story for the demons and connects back to themes of the divide between monotheism and polytheism that were explored, pretty shoddily, in the last game, Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse. That game’s story-world might just hang over Shin Megami Tensei V like a shadow, since the vaguely-defined “Knowledge” of this game, although ultimately conceptually different, at least to me smelled a little bit like the concept of “Observation” in Apocalypse, a power given to humans by the Axiom which allows humans to give form to the formless and is thus coveted by the gods and demons because of its power to create and/or destroy them. “Knowledge” here doesn’t determine whether or not the gods exist at all, and we’re in no way certain where it comes from, but it does seem to follow a similar trend of using vague, abstract philosophical-sounding concepts, in lieu of any existing mythological or esoteric concept, as a device to explain the existence of the demons.

That said, I could remark about the connection between divine identity and the ability to challenge the order of God. It is not too uncommon in pre-Christian myths to see humans and even other gods challenge the celestial order in some way, and in fact, in the Atrahasis, the Mesopotamian precursor text to the story of Noah’s Ark, humans are created through the blood of Geshtu-e, a god of intelligence and a leader of a group of rebellious deities known as the Igigu, and in turn humans gain a portion of the divine in their blood. The gods in the Atrahasis created humans to do the labour that the Igigu refused to do, and the suffering of their labour led them to cry out in defiance, resulting in the attempt by the god Enlil to destroy them. The hero Atrahasis saves mankind with the help of the god Enki, though the gods afterwards control the human population through sterility, the chaste priestess, stillbirth, and infant mortality. Humans rebelled, as Geshtu-e did, rather than accept the fate Enlil might have wrought upon them, and as Peter Grey suggests in Lucifer: Princeps this emerges from the heritage of the divine blood that created humans in the Atrahasis. In Shin Megami Tensei V, God seizes the divine identity of the gods and stows it away, only for humans to eat the Fruit of Knowledge and become infused with that same latent divine identity. So humans become a threat to God’s order through their latent ability to contest it, which is why the narrator laments God’s order being inevitably corrupted by humanity. That said I would probably not suggest that the writing team for Shin Megami Tensei V actually sought to channel the depths of that ancient heritage that Peter and I would retrospectively refer to as “Luciferian”, and instead suggest that what we see in Shin Megami Tensei V is more or less specific to the game and focuses directly on the base myths of the War in Heaven and the Garden of Eden, not so much their deeper polytheistic roots.

I would also like to stress that not every reference in Shin Megami Tensei V seems to have a particularly coherent meaning, or at least not one that is apparent to me anyway. The netherworld where the demons live is called Da’at. In Kabbalah mysticism, Da’at is the name of the location in the Tree of Life where all of the ten sefirah converge and unite as one. What this has to do with the demons or any concept of the netherworld/underworld has never been obvious to me. The name Da’at means “knowledge”, which you might think connects to the story. But don’t you think it sounds weird that the demons look for knowledge in a place that in Hebrew is called “knowledge”? Or that the demons seem to have their home named after the thing they’ve lost, like some kind of cruel joke played either by themselves on themselves or by God I guess? Also, a demon named Lahmu mentions being in a place called Assiah. Assiah is the name of one of the spiritual worlds in Kabbalah mysticism. That’s not unfamiliar to Shin Megami Tensei, since Assiah along with Atzulith are mentioned in the series in some way, but it’s not the obvious what the connection to Da’at is. Maybe they’re separate dimensions that are connected somehow? Who knows.

Anyways, with all that out of the way, let’s address the alignments in Shin Megami Tensei V, starting with the Law alignment.

Law

Assessing the role of the Law and Chaos dynamic means establishing exactly who represents each side of that dynamic. Shin Megami Tensei V’s representation of the Law alignment is, for the most part, fairly predictable by Shin Megami Tensei standards. Although God is dead, his angels are still very much alive, fighting on his behalf seemingly to protect Tokyo from demons. But is that all there is to it? And what do these angels really want?

First of all we should note that, for much of the game, you are essentially stuck on the same side as the angels and don’t get to really oppose them until much later in the game. This is because the protagonist has been drafted into membership of the demon-fighting organization known as Bethel, a name that, conspicuously, means “House of God”. Most of the units of Bethel that you see are angels, and it is through the angels that you are initially introduced to Bethel. An angel named Abdiel also serves as the commander of Bethel’s forces, meaning that she (yes, the male angel Abdiel is a woman in this game, for some reason) is basically in charge of the organization as a whole. And in typical angelic fashion, Abdiel does not brook dissent, and in fact has to be dissuaded from killing the protagonist for being a Nahobino, a violation of the edict known as the Condemnation.

The Condemnation is the name given to an edict imposed by God after he assumed the throne of creation, which barred all other gods from being able to assume the form of a Nahobino and thus access their divine identity. This meant the seizure of all “Knowledge” from the other gods, and their transformation into demons, and in theory means that, in the words of the angel Camael, God is the only Nahobino in existence. But with God dead, this edict seems to no longer stand, as evidenced by the protagonist’s transformation into a Nahobino. Of course, the angels don’t quite realize this yet, and Abdiel certainly doesn’t get the big picture until much later in the game, when she holds a summit with the rest of Bethel’s leadership and is defeated for the first time by the player. Indeed, when you first meet Abdiel, you’ve only been playing the game for an hour or so, have only just met Abdiel for about a minute, and she’s already prepared to kill you for violating the Condemnation, saying that Bethel will not tolerate anyone who violates the will of God. Bethel then emerges as what is initially the clear Law faction of the game, one that you are forced to cooperate with for the majority of the game.

The initial presentation of the Law and Chaos dynamic is pretty straightforward. Representing Law are the forces of order, consisting primarily of Bethel’s angels and their allies on one side, fighting the demons of chaos on the other. The demons of chaos want only thing: to reclaim their lost “Knowledge”. And they’re prepared to invade whatever passes for Tokyo and apparently capture your high school classmates in order to get it. Seeing this as a threat to God’s order, the forces of order lead by Bethel want to stop them, and “protecting Tokyo” just happens to be part of the package insofar as it means driving their enemies into the abyss. The game introduces you to the angels fairly early on as “working tirelessly to protect the people”, presumably from demonic incursions. But this is little other than a ruse, as becomes apparent later in the game. The angels, although they fight the demons breaking into Tokyo and seemingly protect its inhabitants, don’t actually care to stop its ultimate apocalyptic destruction. The angels, when confronted with the failure of the Shekinah Glory and of God to protect Tokyo, and its destruction despite conforming to the will of God, insist that Tokyo’s destruction is to be considered inevitable, “for God’s anger burns many and spares none”. For the angels, God’s order is absolute, and if that means the destruction of the very Tokyo that they were ostensibly “protecting”, then they do not oppose the destruction of Tokyo. Abdiel affirms this creed to the hilt, and so does her apparent rival, Camael, when he tells the protagonist it is his “justice” to loyally execute God’s words, which means killing the player as a Nahobino. The difference between Abdiel and Camael is that Abdiel would rather kill the Nahobino that is the player, but can be convinced to use the Nahobino to execute the will of Bethel until the demons are gone, while Camael brooks no such thing and prefers to immediately kill the player so as to ensure that God is the only Nahobino in existence. Your existence, after all, is a threat to God’s order, because your power as a Nahobino might cause some of the angels to join your side and, so Camael fears, abandon God’s side.

There is obviously a heavy leaning into the implications of Christian theology, or least about as deep as it gets for a game that’s only trying to be an edgier Tokyo Mirage Sessions a new generation of Shin Megami Tensei. The Christians frequently counsel us that God in his unconditional love for humanity has given us free will, that we might come to choose his side through it. Any even cursory reading of the Bible gives us reason to doubt that assurance, considering, among other things, that it is down to God hardening the Pharoah’s heart that the Israelites were refused the right to leave Egypt until the death of the firstborn. Leaving aside the Old Testament, the Book of Acts, within the New Testament, makes clear that “in him we live and move and have our being”. The implications are very much pantheistic, and I would argue that these implications are not the rosy and reasonable alternative to classical theism that certain rationalists both Christian and secular would like to believe, and certainly not the alternative to monotheism that certain neopagans would like to believe. The full scope of that is best reserved for another article in another time, but for now let us establish that there is only one God in pantheism, just that this God is the whole universe. The implications presented in the theology of the New Testament is that God is omnipresent to the point of permeating the whole fabric of the universe and is the sole agency underpinning our every movement. Free will, in this sense, is impossible with the Christian God present, and insofar as God’s order cannot be meaningfully opposed in that even evil actions must necessarily be underpinned or made possible by God’s agency alone, then God’s order would indeed by absolute. Indeed, this I think is what Abdiel means when she says that the ability of her enemies to resist her at all is “by the grace of our Lord”.

Turning away from the main plot for a moment, I should mention that Shin Megami Tensei V also features a series of subquests in each region of the game, one seemingly corresponding to Law and the other seemingly corresponding to Chaos, in theory anyway. This correspondence is at least inferred by the available guides for the game. If there is any correspondence to the alignments, then these subquests are worth exploring for content regarding the expression of Law and Chaos outside the game’s main plot.

In the Minato sector of Da’at, specifically in Shiba, we see a grotto in which a demon named Apsaras, based on the celestial nymphs from Indian mythology, is worshipped by a congregation of weaker demons who pray to her for salvation. Apparently the Apsaras has a whole space set up as a shelter for the weaker demons, who come to rely upon her benevolence in a hostile netherworld and obey her as a result. In fact, only the weak may enter her cave, as the strong do not much benefit from her benevolence. Asparas’ stated goal is to form a circle of gods and offer the weak the minimum amount of knowledge and resources to survive while belonging to her circle. This is opposed by another demon, Leanan Sidhe, who accuses her of seducing weaker demons in order to create an army of soldiers who unconditionally obey her will without regard for their individuality. Apsaras in turn accuses Leanan Sidhe of deceiving the demons with empty words that will only cause them to despair at their own powerlessness. Apsaras is a Yoma and therefore Law-aligned, while Leanan Sidhe is a Femme and therefore Chaos-aligned, so the familiar dynamic of Law and Chaos is well-established here. Taking the “The Spirit of Love” subquest sees you siding with Apsaras and fighting Leanan Sidhe.

Another subquest that follows the same formula is in the Shinagawa area of Da’at. At Shinagawa Pier you will find a Principality, one of the angelic orders, who requests that you assist him in exterminating a group of Lilim who are apparently plotting to infiltrate Tokyo (by which he means the Tokyo produced by the Shekinah Glory). Principality’s rationale is pretty straightforward, and not unlike Apsaras’: he claims to want to protect the weak, in this case humans as he sees them, and he thinks that the Lilim want to attack the whole human world, so in order to protect humans the Lilim must be defeat. The Principality is an agent of Bethel, as is to be expected of most angels. The Lilim, of course, would dispute the angel, saying they only wanted to live quietly among humans. The traditional alignment dynamic is once again clear cut, with Principality as a Law-aligned angel (or Divine) and Lilim as a Chaos-aligned Night. Seeing as you can reject the Principality’s subquest and side with the Lilim instead, this would be probably the only instance in the game in which you can actively defy the orders of Bethel. However, this doesn’t actually affect your actual allegiance to Bethel, since until the last stretch of the game you still have no choice but to work for Bethel and follow their orders. In any case, siding with Principality and thereby carrying out Bethel’s orders by taking the “Holding the Line” subquest is the obvious Law-aligned choice.

Things get more unusual when you go to the Chiyoda area. In Sukiyabashi you meet Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, who tells you that he has set the rules regarding the distribution of alcohol in Ginza. He claims to be impartial in granting alcohol to all who ask for it, and that this is one of the rules he set. Opposing Dionysus is Black Frost, who calls himself the emperor of Ginza and wants to take Dionysus’ alcohol by force. Curiously enough, both Dionysus (a Fury) and Black Frost (a Night) are actually Chaos-aligned within the game, and even Dionysus responds to the suggestion of survival of the fittest by saying “so be it”, and that those who challenge him will be “put back in their place” because he is strong and not weak. Despite this and the fact that he really doesn’t have all that much to do with the ideology of Law, Dionysus’ quest, “A Sobering Standoff”, appears to correspond to the most to the Law alignment. I can only assume that this is because Dionysus wants to maintain the system of rules he has in place for regulating alcohol whereas Black Frost wants to upend all of that.

The last of these subquests can be found in the Taito region. In Ueno Park, you can meet Futsunushi, the Shinto god of swords, who gives you the subquest “In Defense of Tokyo”. Futsunushi identifies himself as one of the Amatsukami (which doesn’t sound strange, given that he actually was one of the Amatsukami, until we start getting into the Chaos alignment), and tells you that “foreign demons” led by the fallen angel Adramelech are trying to invade Tokyo. He very peculiarly complains to the player that if Adramelech was merely chased from his home and landed in Tokyo then he would not turn him away, but he claims that the “foreign demons” instead steal the land of the Amatsukami and try to “exterminate” them. When Futsunushi was initially revealed for Shin Megami Tensei V, some people saw him talking about “foreign demons” and suspected that he would be a continuation of nationalist themes in the series, and if you think about it, the way Futsunushi talks kind of reminds me of certain anti-refugee talking points we could bring up. In any case, although Futsunushi is a Wargod and therefore listed as Neutral, his quest “In Defence of Tokyo” seems to correspond to the Law alignment.

Altogether, the microcosm of Law presented in these subquests seems pretty straightforward. Law is about order, and that can mean many things: it can mean creating a society where safety comes with dependence on authority, it can mean simply preserving order in general, often on behalf of Bethel and the angels, and apparently it can also mean some sort of nationalism. Keep that part in mind for when we explore one of the central Law characters in the game.

Returning to the main plot, we see towards the final stretch of the game that, after the player defeats the demon king Arioch, the horizon of the Law and Chaos dynamic seems to change. The director of the Japanese branch of Bethel, Hayao Koshimizu, abruptly declares that the Japanese branch is going to break off from Bethel in order to install a Nahobino as the new ruler of creation. This leads to a summit between all the main heads of Bethel, in which we discover that the heads of the other Bethel branches are not angels but instead the various polytheistic gods: Khonsu, the Egyptian god of the moon, represents the Egyptian branch, Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, represents the Greek branch, Odin, ruler of the Norse Aesir gods, represents the Nordic branch, and Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction, as well as the serpent Vasuki, represent the Indian branch. It turns out that Bethel is just an alliance between the various gods and the angels of God cobbled together by Abdiel, who serves as its leader and commander, seemingly for the purpose of fighting the forces of chaos under the pretext that God is still alive. Earlier in the game we see a flashback in which Lucifer greets the angels led by Abdiel to tell them that God is dead and that he has killed him. Naturally, Abdiel angrily dismisses the “vile serpent”, believes that he is lying, and refuses to believe him. For much of the game Abdiel continues to hold onto the belief that Lucifer is trying to deceive everyone, and organized Bethel with that belief in mind, assuring the rest of Bethel that rumours of God’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

During the Bethel summit, it becomes clear that the other gods have already figured out that Lucifer had defeated and killed God, that the Condemnation is no longer in effect, and that the world is due for a new cosmic ruler. Abdiel insists that Bethel still exists to preserve God’s world, that the Condemnation still stands, and that the right course of action is to simply wait for God’s return, reasoning that even if God did die he would surely return soon. When Khonsu points out the existence of the Nahobino that is the player and speculates that God wants the player to replace him, Abdiel, unable to counter Khonsu’s argument, decides that in order to prove that God’s order still reigns supreme she has to kill the player. She, of course, fails and is defeated by the player, and as a result the rest of Bethel, vindicated in their skepticism, go their separate ways, with Odin and Zeus in particular heading out to recover their lost “Knowledge” and become Nahobinos themselves, all of which Abdiel considers to be selfish. Until this point, the gods who formed the Bethel alliance may have been convinced that God was still alive and that, with his order via the Condemnation still in effect, it would be impossible for them to become Nahobinos. Thus, they settled for simply working with the angels in order to protect the world by fighting the forces of chaos, which, thinking about it, must seem strange considering that Odin and Zeus seem to have the same ultimate goal as certain “forces of chaos” such as Lahmu: namely, they want to regain their divine status as Nahobinos, challenge the current order, and recreate the world.

In any case, Bethel, from this point onward, no longer represents the Law alignment. Now it’s just the angels of God who constitute the primary Law faction in the game’s story. In fact, the angels of the Herald and Divine clans are among the few consistently Law-aligned demon clans in the whole game. The only other reliably Law-aligned clans in the game are Avians, Raptors, and Yomas. Megamis, previously Law-aligned, are now Neutral except for Demeter and Maria, and even then Demeter’s ambitions in this game have no connection to God unlike in Strange Journey Redux. Viles were also previously Law-aligned, but now half of the Vile clan is Chaos-aligned while the other half are Law-aligned. That’s pretty much the extent of Law representation within this game’s Demonic Compendium. In contrast, and I hate to say this but, there are if anything way too many Chaos-aligned demons in this game!

Abdiel may be defeated but she’s not giving up. She is still committed to ensuring that God’s order is preserved and upheld as the supreme order of things, and as it turns out she, despite being an angel and therefore a creation of God, somehow has “Knowledge”. That would entail that she, like all the other demons, had somehow “fallen” from godhood with the ascent of God, and, in order to restore it, she needs to find a human with her “Knowledge”. This leads us to perhaps the single most important Law character in the game who we have not yet discussed: one of your classmates, Ichiro Dazai.

Admittedly, Ichiro seems like an unusual Law representative. Before the game was officially released, many thought that Ichiro would turn out to be the Chaos representative rather than the Law representative. And you could be forgiven for thinking that since he certainly doesn’t quite look like what you’d expect from a Law representative. Indeed, your first impression of him in-game is that he’s an aspiring internet streamer who’s viewed by the rest of the class as kind of a dork, and when you first see him in the game he’s trying to film his next video, talking about rumours of monsters in the Takanawa Tunnel. He actually looks like Logan Paul, don’t you think? But as the game goes on, you slowly see him develop as a more or less standard, perhaps even cliche, representative of the Law alignment.

When you first enter Da’at you see Ichiro lifted above the ground by an angel, who then carries him off to the Diet Building. After this he expresses an interest in joining Bethel, saying that he really wants to be a part of protecting Tokyo. This of course is right after one of your other classmates, Tao Isonokami (a.k.a. “The Saint”; no, not that one), informs you and your two other classmates (including Ichiro) that the Tokyo you’ve been living in isn’t real, and Ichiro never really seems to reflect on that fact in any serious way. Later, after the defeat of Lahmu and the explanation of “Knowledge” and the demons’ desire for it to the students, Ichiro never contemplates it and avowedly doesn’t care about the subject. A lot of his time in the game is just him talking about how weak and indecisive he thinks he is, how much he admires the player for his strength and ability to confront danger, and his desire to get stronger and more confident himself.

That’s where Abdiel comes in. While she’s busy ruminating about the deposed rival gods in Shinagawa Pier, Ichiro introduces himself to Abdiel and talks to her about how awesome she is and how he wants to know how she can be so strong. Keep in mind, when Abdiel is first seen by the player and his friends, Ichiro is actually scared of Abdiel, and for good reason; she was about to kill his classmate for being a Nahobino. So it’s definitely a little odd that Ichiro would want to follow Abdiel. Abdiel then tells Ichiro that the secret to her strength is her unwavering faith in God, which gives her the ability to act without hesitation based on simple belief. This seems to inspire Ichiro somewhat, and eventually he bonds more and more with Abdiel. During the raid against the demon king Arioch and his allies in the Chiyoda region, Abdiel assists Ichiro by giving him some angels to command so that he could fight on his own. But whether or not Ichiro has gotten much stronger is honestly a matter of opinion, and I would argue that all he ended up doing was leaning on Abdiel for outer strength. For whatever reason, Ichiro seems to hang on Abdiel’s every word. He even calls her “Master Abdiel”.

By the time you get to the Bethel summit, Ichiro is absolutely convinced that Abdiel is right about everything and that only she can bring order to the world. When you see the summit and get the chance to talk to everyone there, you can talk to Ichiro and he’ll tell you that although he sympathizes with Koshimizu’s goal in terms of wanting to protect Japan, if only because Ichiro himself is also Japanese (well, half-Japanese, but we’ll get to that), he simply believes that Abdiel’s words make the most sense. Why? Ichiro doesn’t tell you, at least not at this point. Earlier, when Koshimizu explains to the students that he will be breaking off from Bethel, Ichiro emphatically opposes this move, which he believes to be a betrayal, and naively suggests that Koshimizu simply ask the rest of Bethel to help them save Tokyo, which is at this point rapidly disappearing from existence. In trying to figure out what motivates Ichiro to this thought process, it occurs to me that he legitimately only thinks about the basic mission of protecting Tokyo, and has no interest in any of the surrounding conflicts and contradictions that influence the fate of Tokyo or the rest of the world. And since he associates the mission of protecting Tokyo with Bethel and Bethel with Abdiel and the angels, Ichiro seems to just instinctively side with Abdiel and the angels and with Bethel as a broad whole, and over time he seems to have internalized Abdiel’s ideas about God’s order being necessary for the safety of Tokyo.

When Abdiel is defeated at the summit, Ichiro begs to go and see her again. Eager to continue depending on her guidance, Ichiro begs Abdiel not to give up on her cause. When Abdiel laments that even an archangel is no much for a Nahobino, Ichiro suggests that Abdiel become a Nahobino too in order to gain the power to defeat other Nahobinos, notwithstanding the fact that his fellow classmate who just defeated Abdiel is there to hear him say that. Ichiro pledges to find the human that has Abdiel’s “Knowledge” and bring them to her, only to be informed that it is in fact he himself who has Abdiel’s “Knowledge”. Ichiro is elated and volunteers to be used by Abdiel to become a Nahobino, but Abdiel initially rejects this proposal, because as an archangel she is still bound to uphold the Condemnation. Even though the existence of a Nahobino means that the Condemnation no longer stands on account of God’s defeat and death, the archangels, being created as servants of God, have to uphold God’s law and order anyway. And then, suddenly, the voice of Lucifer echoes into the summit, telling Abdiel, “if your prayer is indeed for harmony, you must bring it about yourself”. In other words, if Abdiel means to preserve the order she believes in, then she must take the power to do so into her own hands, even if that means going against her own rules to do it.

All of this culminates into the final stretch of the story where, at some point, on your way to the Temple of Eternity in Umayabashi, you find Ichiro, standing above, pondering what will happen without Abdiel. Here, his philosophy for what to do with the fate of Tokyo takes shape. He expresses the belief that Abdiel is the only one capable of bringing order, the thing that Ichiro appears to suddenly care about the most, and claims that without her Tokyo and the world as a whole would “tear itself apart”. He then goes on to state that “divine diversity isn’t an answer, it’s chaos”, and that humanity needs “a single ultimate truth” as opposed to “an excess of false opinions”. In the midst of his despair, he recalls what Lucifer said about harmony and comes to the conclusion that, although he seems useless on his own, being useful to Abdiel will be enough for him, and declares that his “Knowledge” alone will serve “the greater good”. And then, he throws his cap to the void, furls back his hair, his eyes seem to glow, and declares that he will rise above the rest and be “the sword of heaven”, before laughing an unusually evil laugh for a Law character.

This is a lot to unpack on its own. Going off of his new look, I remember seeing some fans remark that Ichiro has basically morphed into this game’s version of the Chaos Hero from the original Shin Megami Tensei, mostly due to his hair and his sinister smile. I would point out, though, that the Law representative for Shin Megami Tensei II, Zayin, also has a similar look, at least when he turns into Satan anyway. More importantly, though, this seems to be the point where Ichiro’s focus shifts from the basic mission of protecting/saving Tokyo to “order” as an abstract idea and as governed by broad notions of “ultimate truth”. It’s also the point where we see Ichiro develops what amounts to a fascist or at least quasi-fascist worldview. Remember when I pointed out how Futsunushi’s Law-aligned quest had possible nationalist undertones, and then told you to keep that in mind up to this point? Well, who else do you know in real life who says that diversity can only mean chaos and should be opposed for that reason? Think about it. Hard-right, authoritarian conservatives make the same point all the time, so do right-wing nationalists and fascists. The fascistic nationalist tends to have an agenda of smothering all diversity under the banner of a single, hegemonic state order, with an attendant monoculture, with dissent and difference policed in order to maintain it. That’s the implications of the order that Ichiro would prefer. Only one opinion is allowed to be observed as having weight, all else is “an excess of false opinions”. That “single ultimate truth”, God’s order, is supposed to provide security at the expense of freedom and diversity. Such appears to be the primary concern of the Law alignment in this game, which I guess makes some sense for what it is, and contrary to certain claims that Shin Megami Tensei V represents a broad move away from the “absolutism” of God, this game’s Law alignment is in no way a departure from the series tradition of Law as an absolutist, order-centric ideology revolving around the order of God. Well, except perhaps for the development to come.

But before we get to that point, there’s one thing about Ichiro I should note that is probably incidental in the bigger picture but has a weird connection to the rest of the series. I mentioned that earlier that Ichiro Dazai is half-Japanese. What I didn’t mention yet is that the other half is American. Yes, Ichiro is half-Japanese and half-American. Historically, the association of the Law alignment with America goes back to the original Shin Megami Tensei, in which the Americans as represented by Ambassador Thorman comprise the Law faction for the first stretch of the game. Granted, America was not always represented by the Law alignment in the series, as shown by Strange Journey’s Jimenez being both an American and the Chaos representative, but Ichiro’s partial American identity coupled with his alignment with the angels of the Christian God follows a thematic conceit that had been established in the early days of Shin Megami Tensei, namely that Law tends to represent Western ideas of religion, mostly “Judeo-Christian” beliefs, in the context of a Japanese society that has historically encountered Christianity as either a contradiction and threat to indigenous Japanese religion, a political threat to the Japanese state, or the attendant religion of a humiliating post-war occupation.

Now then, the final alignment-based decision in the game commences when you reach the end of the Temple of Eternity. There you offer the three keys to the temple and then the “Goddess of Creation” shows you your two classmates vying for the right to create the world. You see Ichiro discussing with Abdiel that the only way to maintain order is to give everything, including your own life, over to God, and tells Abdiel that he is here to “do what needs to be done” even if it means to “stray from the path”, stressing that nothing matters so long as his side wins. Abdiel stresses that God’s word is still unchanging and that she is sworn to defend it, and that she is ready to become a Nahobino, thereby blaspheming against the Condemnation set by that very same God, in order to carry out his will. Almost immediately afterwards, the player returns to reality and is on his way to the Empyrean, only to be interrupted by his two classmates and potential rivals, Ichiro among them. Ichiro interrupts the presumptions of his rivals Yuzuru and former director Hayao Koshimizu to preach to them that they need only entrust everything to God. He argues that, because Zeus and Odin each vied for the throne of creation, a world of myriad gods would result in “endless war” with all the gods “eating each other alive” in a brutal contest for dominance, and that, by contrast, everyone will “get their fair share” if they only let God do his thing, on the basis that someone who is all-powerful, all-seeing, and all-knowing can’t possibly be wrong.

And that’s when Abdiel makes a dramatic transformation. After rambling about her sacred duty and her “fettered form” being no much for a Nahobino, she declares that, in the name of the Almighty, she will “embrace darkness” and become a fallen angel. Her body writhes and is covered with purple darkness, she spews black vomit, and then her body radically transforms from her former angelic self to the body of a demon, all topped off with her old face splitting open to reveal a new one. Abdiel then declares that she will uphold God’s will at all costs, even if it means being severed from God’s grace, and Ichiro remarks that Abdiel’s faith as an archangel remains unwavering. In Lucifer’s words, Abdiel has defied God in his own name and traded God’s word for his will. Naturally her fallen angel form has her move out of the Herald clan and into the Fallen clan, but she still maintains her Law alignment. Hence, Abdiel becomes the only Fallen demon in the game, and the series as a whole, to be Law-aligned, since she unlike all the other Fallen demons is still loyal to God and wants to preserve his order.

This certainly is an original take on the Law alignment. But it is also utterly incoherent. Abdiel’s whole purpose is to uphold God’s will, which means God’s word as well. The Condemnation is God’s word and his will as much as each other. The two cannot be separated in isolation. Therefore, the whole premise of her being prepared to fall from grace is nonsense, since the whole act of undertaking that fall emerges from defying his will and his word. Furthermore, if God is dead, and this means his order and power are fading away with him, that means the Condemnation no longer stands, as evidenced from the beginning by the fact that the player becomes a Nahobino. Why, then, should Abdiel need to worry about falling from his grace and defying his word, and why should she transform into a devil-looking thing? If the Condemnation is no longer in effect, then Abdiel could lay claim to human “Knowledge” without needing to undergo a “fall” since the rules that mandated this surely no longer apply. Also, when Abdiel does become a Nahobino, she doesn’t look like any particularly godly being, and instead she seems to more closely resemble what the merged form of Sirene and Kaim from Devilman would look like without their skin. What’s the deal with that? But then, once again, why does Abdiel even have “Knowledge” to be stored inside an unwitting human if she’s not a god? Is it because Abdiel in Paradise Lost was originally one of the angels who followed Lucifer before repenting? Is it for the same reason that there’s a subquest in which Melchizedek says that the “seraphim” (the archangels) were all originally servants of the god Baal? Not to mention, why do Abdiel and Ichiro bother heeding the voice of Lucifer anyway? Isn’t Lucifer the same being that Abdiel previously denounced as a “contemptible snake” and “vile serpent” and hence dismissed his words as lies? Wasn’t the whole point of Bethel to keep opposing Lucifer even after he defeated God? Wasn’t the whole alliance built on the premise that Lucifer had lied about God’s demise?

It’s all just such nonsense. This entire setup seems constructed simply to subvert the traditional expectations of the Law alignment, and I suppose it does, but only on a superficial level. It almost reeks of the tired old dogma that Law and Chaos are actually just two sides of one monistic coin, a trope that also played into some of the worst writing on display in Apocalypse, a game in which all outcomes except Neutrality are delegitimized in this way. But what does it really convey here? Again, I argue that this is not the departure from absolutism that some strive to suggest. Instead, absolutism is the order of the day. It is the nature of the order desired by Ichiro, and fulfilled through Abdiel and the order she enforces (in fact Abdiel explicitly said that God is absolute), it is the nature of the sense of faith cultivated by Ichiro and Abdiel, and it is present in the sacrifices, transformations, and even transgressions that they are willing to undertake for the sole sake of the preservation of order and their own victory. That is the core of the Law alignment as it is present in Shin Megami Tensei V, and it is hardly less absolutist than in previous games.

And while we’re still on the subject of absolutism, let us address the claims made by some that Abdiel is merely a more extreme case in an otherwise more benign angelic faction. It is claimed that this game’s angels want to create a world where order does not exclude the presence of free will. Having played the game, I have not encountered any evidence to support that claim. None of the angels object to the absolutism and determinism of Abdiel’s worldview. There’s not much reason from their perspective why they should, anyway. Only one angel, Camael, objects to Abdiel’s actions, and that’s just because she didn’t kill the player on the spot for being a Nahobino, not because she didn’t believe in free will enough. All of the angels believe in executing God’s word and will without leniency or laxity, all the angels stand with Abdiel by the final stretch of the game, and all of the angels see Tokyo’s destruction as simple destiny as handed down by God, to be accepted and even upheld without objection. In fact, during the demonic invasion of Jouin High School, the angels explicitly state that there is no mercy to be reserved for “evil”, including humans who become possessed by demons. It would not matter if you were a demon or merely a victim of possession, they would smite you anyway. And they say this regardless of whether you choose to prioritize killing Lahmu or helping Sahori, the girl sought after by Lahmu. Further, before you enter the invaded Jouin High School, an angel explicitly instructs you to kill any students that can’t be rescued along with the demons. Exactly how are the angels in Shin Megami Tensei V supposed to be more benevolent and tolerant compared to previous games?

Not to mention, there’s a question relevant for Ichiro in particular. Ichiro repeatedly argues that it is best that everyone just leave everything to God and all will be well. Besides the obvious theological problems we could get into, the obvious problem, within the context of the game’s story, is that God is dead, and has been dead for quite some time, just that Abdiel and the angels have been denying it. Indeed, Ichiro never seems to address this situation directly. Perhaps we can assume he just goes along with Abdiel’s opinion that God is not actually dead, but that would be passive and he never actually takes a stance on that, nor is he ever challenged to confront the reality of God’s death. In fact, doesn’t it seem strange that Ichiro was there for the Bethel summit and saw the other Bethel heads say that God is dead, and never had anything to say about that? It seems to me that Ichiro doesn’t have an answer to any of that, and that might be because Ichiro at heart cares less about the existential question of God and more about whatever is most capable of “bringing order” in the abstract, which he connects in his mind to saving Tokyo from demons.

Anyways, and so we come to the point in the game where you choose between three alignment-based outcomes. Choosing to uphold God’s order sees you siding with Abdiel and Ichiro, and thus represents the path of the Law alignment. Doing so also grants access to two subquests exclusive to the Law path. One of them, “The Seraph’s Return”, features the archangel Michael, who along with his compatriots was imprisoned in a statue in the course of Armageddon. If you complete the subquest “The Holy Ring” with Melchizedek, you can find Michael at the end of the Temple of Eternity, having been set free by Melchizedek. If you took the Law path at this point before entering the Empyrean, Michael, though not pleased about you being a Nahobino, thanks the player for helping Melchizedek free him and praises you for choosing to uphold God’s order. He then sends you to go and defeat Belial at Arioch’s former castle, and joins your side upon you doing so. Of course, if you took the Chaos path before entering the Empyrean, Michael opposes you instead and you have to defeat him. There’s s catch, though: if you chose the Law path but were not sufficiently Law-aligned beforehand, Melchizedek will ask you to pay him 666,000 Macca to earn the trust of the angels. Yeah, that’s a thing in this game, for some reason. Another subquest, “The Compassionate Queen”, is unlocked if you took the Law path and have gained the Seed of Life by achieving 75% completion of the Demonic Compendium. In it you see Maria, a kind of/sort of/not really Virgin Mary expy, who challenges you upon acquiring the Seed of Life. She describes herself as a mother goddess whose form and role changes depending on place and time, and awaits her disappearance with the creation of a new world. If you’re Law-aligned, Maria acknowledges your desire to preserve the world as it was, and faces you as herself. Winning the resulting battle unlocks her as a fusable ally

Once you resolve yourself to uphold God’s order, you fight and defeat the other two Nahobinos that stand in your way, namely Tsukuyomi and Nuwa, and then fight Lucifer, neither of whom seem to have any commentary on why it’s bad that you’ve chosen to side with Abdiel and restore the order of God or why you should have sided with them instead (not that you ever get to take sides with Lucifer). And then, you get to activate the throne of creation to usher in the restoration of God’s order. What does this mean in practice?

Well, for starters, you don’t actually get to see the newly created world or the effects of your rule in the ending sequence of the game. All you see is the player walking towards a big white ball of light that looks suspiciously like Kagutsuchi from Nocturne, while the four archangels (Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Raphael) are seen suspended in mid-air in all different directions. I suppose at least the presence of the archangels tells you that this is the Law ending after all. But from the narration of Goko, the Buddhist monk seen throughout the game up to the final stretch, we can get an idea of what we’re supposed to expect. The player creates a new world in the image of the previous one, restores Tokyo and resurrects its inhabitants, who are then completely unaware of that this is all a recreation of the Shekinah Glory that was previously established by God. The world is composed of only one truth, one justice, one single order, no diversity. Goko suggests that those who easily lose their way will find unwavering faith in this world. In the world of Law, the newly resurrected humans do not think for themselves, and live to show devotion to God. I can’t quite tell if that means the original God or you, the new ruler of the throne.

Throughout the Shin Megami Tensei series, the Law alignment has been defined primarily by a single goal: the realization of the Thousand Year Kingdom. The Thousand Year Kingdom is a state of paradise on earth governed by God and/or his agents, in which the believers in God can inhabit and enjoy a world of ultimate peace, harmony, prosperity, and order under the aegis of a strictly hierarchical and dictatorial society which compels its subjects to trade freedom for total security. And, of course, only the believers are allowed to live in it. Everyone else is either cleansed by God’s judgement or simply cast out and left to die. It’s a concept that appears by name in the original two Shin Megami Tensei games, and recurs if not in name throughout the rest of the series as I’ve explored in “Ideologies of Law in Shin Megami Tensei”. Yet in this game, there’s no real hint of the Thousand Year Kingdom here, at least ostensibly. It’s neither mentioned by name nor hinted at in substitutes such as “millennium of order” as uttered in the previous duology of games. So is there no Thousand Year Kingdom in Shin Megami Tensei V? On the surface the answer to that would be yes. But here’s the thing: you can infer many of the same components of what makes a Thousand Year Kingdom in what we get from the ending sequence. People live in prosperity and ostensible peace, but they do not think for themselves, and exist mostly to devote themselves to God (again, that could be either the old God or the new God for all I know). We can also bear in mind the underlying Christian base of the concept of the Thousand Year Kingdom, and point to the Last Judgement in which the souls of the dead are resurrected, and then either led to paradise or damned to hell. In the Law ending, those who died in Tokyo are resurrected and restored, and all get to live in the “paradise” you create. There are only believers, though perhaps that’s not because you’ve cast out all unbelievers, but rather because believers are all that you have left, your resurrected humanity has been remade as true believers. But of course, if this is meant to be the old order restored, and the Thousand Year Kingdom an ideal state to be realized and pave over the present world, I suppose the Law outcome in Shin Megami Tensei V doesn’t quite follow the base trope of the Thousand Year Kingdom, except may in spirit to a small extent.

Thus, we have established the nature of the Law alignment in Shin Megami Tensei V. It is an ideology centered around preserving, or rather renewing, the status quo of a monotheistic cosmic order, one defined by the absolute concentration of power into one God, who rules as an absolute dictator, brooking no dissent until his death. As usual, this is to be accepted on the promise of security and order, off the back of absolutism. Being Law-aligned then is about the desire for the supreme being and the willingness to have and observe its order at the expense of your own freedom.

Chaos

Turning to our next subject, the Chaos alignment is a little trickier to define than the Law alignment, and that mostly comes down to the same basic question: who represents the Chaos alignment in Shin Megami Tensei V? This is complicated to some extent by the fact that, as I’ve established, the Law and Chaos dynamic in this game seems to shift to some extent. There is, though, a common theme in the Chaos side. The Chaos faction(s) in this game seem to be defined largely by a desire to challenge or overturn God’s order, and in doing so regain the power of divine identity. In this sense, the Chaos faction(s) represent the gods of old, the demons who were desecrated by God through the loss of their “Knowledge”. But that takes more than one form in Shin Megami Tensei V.

It bears repeating that for the majority of Shin Megami Tensei V the dynamic of Law and Chaos is defined principally by the conflict between the forces of order, represented by Bethel and the angels, and the “demons of chaos” who oppose them, and you do not get to choose to take the side of the demons over the side of Bethel. In this sense, we should begin our analysis of the Chaos alignment in this game by examining the forces of chaos that you don’t get to side with.

From the beginning of the game, we are introduced to demons as beings who were originally gods, or Nahobinos, but were debased through their disempowerment by God depriving them of their “Knowledge”. Demons, then, are in the strict sense fallen gods. With their former “Knowledge” now spread out across the human species, the demons seek out humans for the purpose of regaining their “Knowledge” so that they can regain their divine identity and the power that came with it, and that’s why demons go hunting for human souls. This premise is repeatedly reasserted throughout the game’s story, but the first wholesale story arc devoted to it comes with the arrival of Lahmu, a desecrated god based on an apotropaic spirit from Babylonian mythology. Although classed as a Vile, which is traditionally a Law-aligned demon clan, Lahmu is one of the three Vile demons in the game (so basically half of the Vile clan here) who are actually Chaos-aligned instead of Law-aligned. For story-based reasons, that’s no accident.

Lahmu is first seen speaking to Sahori Itsukishima, a girl who’s first seen in the game getting bullied by other high school students. Sahori is tired of being bullied by others, tired of being powerless against them, and tired of not being left alone. In comes Lahmu, who whispers into her head and offers her the power to get her revenge. Some time after this, Lahmu busts his way into the miracle-based Tokyo to hunt for the Magatsuhi (some kind of life force here) of humans as well as find Sahori, who is Lahmu’s “other half”. Sahori is the human whose body contains Lahmu’s “Knowledge”, and so Lahmu intends to fuse himself with Sahori in order to become a Nahobino, regain his former divine glory, and challenge the order of God. He naturally hates the forces of Bethel, blaming them for the sealing away of his former divine self. Lahmu also leads the demonic invasion of Jouin High School to get to Sahori, while other demons make off with high school students in the hopes of getting their “Knowledge” one way or another.

Although ultimately incidental to the broader dynamic, it’s worth spotlighting the Sahori arc to illustrate missed opportunities created by the lack of an alignment break here. As you make your way into the invaded Jouin High School, you see Sahori tremble before and eventually embrace Lahmu, and later on you find her embarking on a rampage of revenge against her bullies with her newfound demonic power. Her classmate Tao tries to get her to stop, and the girls who bullied her yell the same pleas for mercy that Sahori once did. Sahori confronts her bullies over precisely that fact, that they attacked her and destroyed her possessions before, and now beg for forgiveness and mercy as she turns her wrath towards them, now that she has the power to deliver vengeance to them. Sahori’s sentiment is a perfectly admissible one, perfectly understandable, and arguably justifiable. If you were bullied all your life in high school, and you got the chance to get even with them, would it truly make sense for you to turn the other cheek for them when they never did the same for you? Is it really wrong for you to throw their shitty behaviour back in their face when you get the chance to do so? This is a legitimate response to being constantly bullied, and if the game developers wanted to “sympathize with the troubles of the current era” they could have included the option to at least agree with Sahori’s actions, or even if not that at least her thought process. But the game never lets you actually sympathize with her, much less take her side, in any meaningful way. In fact, Sahori demonstrates a remarkable lack of agency throughout the game, such that even her embrace of Lahmu’s power isn’t even meant to be taken as a meaningful choice.

The connection to bullying is not incidental to the Chaos alignment. In fact, it’s your first introduction to the Chaos Hero in the original Shin Megami Tensei, and I think this is worth revisiting for a moment. In that game, the Chaos Hero is bullied by Ozawa and his fellow gangsters for being a nerd with an interest in the occult, and throughout the first half of the game his main interest is in gaining power and getting stronger so that he can stand up for himself and get revenge. To that end, the Chaos Hero joins the player and his party in order to get to Ozawa and defeat him, but Ozawa slips away when you find him and the Chaos Hero doesn’t yet get his revenge. After survivng a nuclear apocalypse by being transported to Kongokai and then being hurled 30 years into the future, the party meets an older Ozawa and the Chaos Hero gets another chance to get his revenge, but the party is overpowered by the might of his demon ally, Take-Minakata. This results in the Chaos Hero deciding to fuse himself with a demon from your COMP in order to become the strongest and most powerful he can be by transcending his human limitations, which allows him to defeat Take-Minakata and finally get revenge on Ozawa.

Since it must be remembered that I’m supposed to be talking about the ideological contours of the Chaos alignment in Shin Megami Tensei V, what I’m trying to say is that there is s connection in that one of the most important aspects of Chaos is being able to take matters into your own hands. For the Chaos Hero in the original Shin Megami Tensei, this means getting as strong as possible so that no one can pick on him again. For Sahori, taking on the power of Lahmu means much the same: gaining the power to make sure no one picks on her again. But the difference between the two games, besides being nearly 30 years apart, is a fundamental difference of agency afforded to the two respective characters, and the legitimacy given to their actions as can be supported by the player. In the original Shin Megami Tensei, the Chaos Hero has agency, indeed agency is the thing he strives to maximize in his quest for strength and power, he acts on his own terms with his own coherent motives and goals in mind, and his actions are legitimate enough as far as the game is concerned that the player can support them within the game, ultimately to the extent that you can take his side for the final stretch of the game as a fighter for the forces of Chaos. For Sahori, the exact opposite is the case. You are never allowed to actively support Sahori’s actions against her oppressors, you can never disagree with Tao or your masters at Bethel about the legitimacy of her actions, and Sahori can only exist as someone whose vulnerability is taken advantage of by Lahmu, who is only supposed to be the villain in all this. Even Sahori’s embrace of Lahmu’s power is preceded by Lahmu forcibly apprehending her, there’s almost no conversation between them that might lead to her embracing his power entirely on her own terms, out of a desire to stop being bullied, and after she gets her revenge she abruptly pivots and no longer wants any part in Lahmu’s plans and is abducted. But then when you find her at the far north of Shinagawa, she starts asking questions as though she wants to know more about becoming a Nahobino, but she never understands or forms a coherent response before being possessed by Lahmu again, and then killed by the player, thus “saving” her, after she almost killed you and killed Tao, under Lahmu’s possession of course (it’s not clear if Lahmu actually became a Nahobino).

It appears that Shin Megami Tensei V only recognises two legitimate outcomes for Sahori: to be a victim of bullying, and to be “saved” from her victimizers by Bethel. I suppose the only other legitimate response is for Tao to try and reach out to her and tell she’s there for her, maybe, as much as “The Saint” can be there for her. For Sahori to stand up for herself in some fashion, for her to take matters into her own hands, for her voluntarily embrace Lahmu’s power and become a Nahobino, and for you to take Sahori’s side in such endeavours, are all forbidden by the game’s narrative. Thus what could have been a credible Chaos-aligned response, consistent with traditional themes of the Chaos alignment, and from there perhaps an early alignment split that might have had significant effects on the overall story, are entirely closed off, ruled out by the story, since that would mean questioning and opposing Bethel’s ideals, indeed really going against them, before the anointed hour in which the game decides you can oppose God’s order. Of course, there are points in the story where you can tell Koshimizu you don’t want to do what he wants, you can tell Aogami that you hate Bethel’s guts, and you can even take a subquest in which you get to actively defy the orders of Bethel. But these are all contained, isolated instances, and have no actual affect on the story or your place in Bethel.

While we’re still on the subject of the forces of chaos that you don’t get to side with, your trip to Chiyoda has you contending with Surt, Ishtar, and the demon king Arioch, in that order. If you take Ishtar as the original divine form of Astaroth, as the series regularly hints, then these represent three of the four generals of Chaos from the original Shin Megami Tensei. Surt may not have much to say, being too busy burning Ginza, but the other too at least have something to say. When you face Ishtar, she monologues about how God deposed all the other gods, viewing even the Queen of Heaven beneath him, warning that no matter how much faith you have in God it will never be enough for him. When you defeat her, she tells you that she believes that change is coming and the gods must side with chaos to defeat God’s order. As for Arioch, his explicit goal is to seize the throne of creation, with its former divine ruler now dead, and reclaim the “Knowledge” of old in order to recreate the world. After you defeat Arioch, he beseeches the player to use your power as a Nahobino to overturn God’s order and recreate the world, and he stresses that only freedom born from chaos can nurture the world.

Arioch and Ishtar, like Lahmu before them, aim to regain the divine identities seized from them by God, bring an end to God’s order, and recreate the world. Bethel opposes this because its leadership considers the idea of any Nahobino other than God occupying the throne of creation to be a blasphemy and a threat to the order of the world. Where the forces of Law represent the order of a monotheistic cosmos, the forces of Chaos appear to consist of deposed gods from ancient, pre-Christian polytheism, as well as the demons of Hell, all seeking to restore their lost divinity. This set-up is not unfamiliar to the Shin Megami Tensei series. In fact, it’s in many ways a return to the original Shin Megami Tensei, which featured an assortment of polytheistic gods and the legions of Lucifer against God and his allies, seeking to defeat God’s cosmic tyranny, restore the gods of old, and bring about an age of anarchic co-existence between humans, demons, and the old gods, buttressed by the belief that chaos is the source of life and freedom and can liberate the world. The difference, of course, is that you can’t decide for yourself that Ishtar and Arioch are correct and take their side instead of Bethel’s side. You only get to tell Arioch that you know that God is dead, but you still have to oppose him anyway because Bethel is still your boss for most of the game. And yet, by the time you defeat Arioch, that all suddenly changes.

Turning away from the main plot, though, we should once again discuss the binary alignment-based subquests. Previously I talked about the Law-aligned subquests, but now it’s time to talk about their Chaos-aligned counterparts in greater detail.

Somewhere in Shiba you can find a Leanan Sidhe who wants to build a society where all subjects can be free to realize their own unique potential, which seems to mean that she gives those who join her side, or at least those she considers worthy, the power to magnify their latent talents in order that they might fulfill their individual dreams. However, this comes with a price. Leanan Sidhe gives demons power in exchange for shortening their lifespan. Her companion, Ippon-Datara, became a master craftsman in exchange for a shorter life, which he considers to be better than only having enough to scrape by in a normal lifespan. So from this vantage point, the choice between Leanan Sidhe and her opponent Apsaras comes down to whether you’re happy with being provided for by a munificent authority which only gives you the minimum to survive or if you’d prefer to unlock your individual potential at the cost of leading a shorter life. Of course, Apsaras argues that Leanan Sidhe is merely deceiving the weaker demons and making them unaware of their own powerlessness, but Leanan Sidhe believes that even if you are still powerless, what matters is that you have been true to yourself and used your potential to lead a worthwhile life. In this sense, we kind of see a brief recollection of the way Law and Chaos were handled in Devil Summoner 2, in that Law and Chaos were more personality types and how you imagine that you should be, with Chaos representing an ethos of following your desires and being true to yourself without heeding the dictates of authority versus Law representing an ethos of living in harmony with society and abjuring ambition for order and duty. Thus, Leanan Sidhe’s “The Water Nymph” is Chaos-aligned and sees you defeating the Law-aligned Apsaras.

At Shinagawa Pier, you can find a group of Lilim who are seemingly hiding from stronger or menacing demons. The Lilim say that if they go to Tokyo (again, the miracle Tokyo, presumably) then there won’t be any demons, but an angel working for Bethel is stopping them from being able to go there. The Lilim claim that they have no intention of killing humans, and that they only intend to take small amounts of energy from them to survive, only to still be refused entry to Tokyo by the angel. Thus the Lilim ask you to dispatch the angel so that they can go to Tokyo and quietly live among humans, and promise to join you if you succeed in completing their subquest, “Those Seeking Sanctuary”. This quest seems to correspond to the Chaos alignment for the obvious reason that you’re defying the orders of Bethel while siding with demons in their quest to inhabit Tokyo.

At Ginza you can find Black Frost, who calls himself the emperor of Ginza and says he was formerly the emperor of Kabukicho. He plans to become the ruler of Ginza by getting rich through loaning money to poor demons, then cashing in on extortionate interest rates, and running high-end nightclubs and making money off of them. Besides some surplus cash, all he needs is alcohol to run the clubs, but Dionysus stands in the way by regulating the alcohol supply to ensure everyone gets a drink. Basically, Black Frost is trying to be the top yakuza of Ginza, and taking the subquest “Black Frost Strikes Back” sees you trying to seize control of the alcohol supply from Dionysus, with Black Frost joining your party as a reward. This subquest seems to correspond to the Chaos alignment, at least in the sense that you’re supposed to be disrupting an orderly arrangement.

Finally, at Umayabashi, you can meet Adramelech, the fallen angel who seems to have a problem with the god Futsunushi for his seemingly “old-fashioned” attitude. He views Futsunushi as “block-headed” for saying things like “Tokyo is our land!” and not coming to the view that justice is decided by the strong, and asks you to defeat Futsunushi. His subquest, “The Raid on Tokyo”, corresponds to the Chaos alignment and in, ironically enough, a very old-fashioned sense. If you choose to fight Adramelech instead of taking his subquest, he doesn’t question it, since from his perspective you are only doing the same thing he would, and after you defeat him, he criticizes Futsunushi for being hypocritical, since he too relies on force despite claiming to want to talk to him. All in all, he’s at least consistent enough that perhaps he can claim to have won the battle of ideals.

As far as these subquests give us a sort of microcosm of the Chaos alignment as a whole, the main consistent thread is that all of them involve you taking the side of the demons in some fashion, whether that means going against angels or going against other gods. This is done on behalf of the freedom to realize your own potential, even at your own expense, the freedom of the demons to co-exist with humans, some kind of might makes right philosophy, or just the selfish ambitions of one lovable yakuza wannabe. There’s definitely a bit of diversity here. One thing I should note, though, is that, as far as this game’s Chaos alignment is concerned, any notion of “might makes right” actually seems to be limited to one or two subquests. So far, the forces of chaos that you fight as part of the main plot don’t seem to advocate any kind of Social Darwinism, and neither do the Chaos faction that is to be discussed next.

So far, we have touched on the forces of chaos that you spend most of the game fighting, without any recourse to take their side instead. However, after you defeat Arioch, you come to a point where divisions form within what was Bethel, the Japanese branch declares independence, and you eventually get to decide between whether or not you want to continue fighting for what Bethel at least claimed to stand for or if you want to see a new world. As Bethel is revealed to just be an alliance of gods and angels cobbled together by Abdiel, and as the gods realize that God is dead and his order no longer reigns supreme, the possibility of replacing the order of Law with a new creation opens up. What does this mean in the context of the Chaos alignment? To understand this, we should start by turning our attention towards the leader of Bethel’s Japanese branch: Hayao Koshimizu.

As the director of Bethel’s Japanese branch who also happens to be the Prime Minister of Japan, Hayao initially answers to his superiors at Bethel, which, for most of the game, means Abdiel and her angelic minions. However, over the course of the game, he slowly starts to act more independently from his Bethel superiors, beginning with his decision to send the player and Ichiro off to Chiyoda to join the assault against Arioch and his forces despite instructions from above to not participate. After defeating Arioch, Hayao announces to the player and his classmates that he intends to break away from Bethel, turn the Japanese branch of Bethel into an independent organization run by him, and install a Nahobino on the throne of creation. Why? Apparently because even though you defeated Arioch, Tokyo is not safe: God’s order as manifest through the Shekinah Glory is fading away and Tokyo is set to be destroyed anyway. Because of this, Hayao determines that the only chance Tokyo has of not being destroyed is to recreate the world and thereby rebuild Tokyo. This means seating a Nahobino on the throne, and since this entails going against everything Bethel believes in, Hayao concludes that it is necessary to break away from Bethel. Although apparently grateful to God for protecting Tokyo, suggesting that his cooperation with Bethel was not quite for nothing, the knowledge of God’s death means that Hayao can no longer be bound to Bethel’s will, since Bethel’s whole purpose is to protect God’s order. And since Abdiel has made clear to Hayao in the past that Tokyo’s destruction is simply the destiny of God, then the only way to save Tokyo from destruction is to defy God’s will. Thus the Chaos path in Shin Megami Tensei V can be understood as the path of secession, independence, and “heresy” that is undertaken for the purpose of your cause, namely the cause of protecting Tokyo, even if God’s order has failed to do so and even if his servants refuse to do so. In this sense, part of the Chaos path means defying God’s order so as to create a new one.

The other important angle to it, of course, is that Hayao Koshimizu is actually Tsukuyomi, the Shinto god of the moon. Yes, in this game the Prime Minister of Japan is actually a Shinto god taking human form. Why Tsukuyomi of all gods is something I don’t quite understand, but the important part for the story is that Tsukuyomi is one of the Amatsukami, the heavenly gods who ruled Japan from the land of Takamagahara. In the Shin Megami Tensei V’s story, Tsukuyomi is actually one of the only Amatsukami left, since most of the others appear to have been vanquished in the battle of Armageddon. Tsukuyomi believes that entrusting the world to one God, who he refers to as a despot, was a mistake, and his stated goal is to create a new world in which a multitude of gods roam free and once again preside over and illumine the world. This would mean that Tsukuyomi cooperated with Bethel in part because of the assumption that God was still protecting Tokyo for a time, and also because most of his fellow Amatsukami fell in Armageddon. Once Tsukuyomi figured out that God has been dead the whole time, he could begin acting upon his true goals against Bethel. Thus taking the throne, in the context of the Chaos alignment, means reshaping the world by restoring the world of myriad gods.

Those who might have intially assumed from leaks that there was no Chaos ending in the game appear to have overlooked the context established from the beginning in the original Shin Megami Tensei. The original representatives of the Chaos alignment in Shin Megami Tensei, the Cult of Gaia, were defined heavily by their adherence to a polytheistic belief in the return of the gods of old, and establishing a state of anarchistic co-existence with the gods and the demons, albeit with certain might makes right ideals thrown into the mix. In fact, whenever the Amatsukami were not their own demon clan in the games, they did appear as Chaos-aligned demons, particularly within the Kishin clan. Certain Amatsukami, such as Take-Mikazuchi, Hinokagutsuchi, and Futsunushi (although not listed as an Amatsukami in the games except for Majin Tensei 2, Futsunushi was an Amatsukami in the original Japanese myths), appeared as Chaos-aligned Kishin alongside their Kunitsukami rivals in certain games. In the Sega CD version of Shin Megami Tensei, even Amaterasu was Chaos-aligned and classed as a Gaian for some reason.

Another familiar theme from the original Shin Megami Tensei can be discerned in Tsukuyomi’s role as Hayao Koshimizu, director of Bethel Japan and also the Prime Minister of Japan. Early in the original Shin Megami Tensei the game features two factions representing Law and Chaos. Representing Law is Ambassador Thorman, the US ambassador who is actually Thor, the Norse god of thunder who for some reason is on the side of God. Representing Chaos is Gotou, a general of the Japanese Self-Defence Force who is also a member of the Cult of Gaia. Gotou wanted to open up the demon world in order to summon an army of demons, which he dubbed ancient gods, capable of opposing Thorman’s plot to nuke Japan out of existence as part of the will of God, and Gotou, as a Gaian, professed a belief in reviving ancient gods to resist the tyranny of God and usher in a state of co-existence between humans, gods, and demons. Hayao Koshimizu, or rather Tsukuyomi, has much the same goal, and his appearance as the Prime Minister of Japan feels very familiar to the role played by Gotou. Given that he is a god taking human form, he almost seems like what Thorman would be if he were Japanese and had very similar goals to Gotou rather than being a servant of God.

That said, whenever the Amatsukami did appear as their own demon clan in the series, they were Law-aligned, in contrast to the Chaos-aligned Kunitsukami. That includes Tsukuyomi. Perhaps this may have contributed to the idea that there was no Chaos path in Shin Megami Tensei V. But the Amatsukami also represent the ruling deities of the Japanese pantheon of gods. In Shin Megami Tensei V, this serves to more broadly represent polytheism from the standpoint of the Japanese cultural and religious context. Just like in the original Shin Megami Tensei, this indigenous polytheistic context that is juxtaposed against the Christianity that comprises the context of the Law alignment. In the original Shin Megami Tensei, a Law faction heavily inspired by a Western “Judeo-Christian” background clashes against a Chaos faction heavily inspired by Japanese Shinto-Buddhist polytheism, in some way representing cultural tension between Christianity and Japanese religion. That dynamic returns in Shin Megami Tensei V, with Law defined by a Christian context represented by God’s order as upheld by Abdiel and the angels on one side, against Chaos defined by the context of polytheism and especially by indigenous Japanese religion on the other.

Before we move along with the story, you may have noticed that although the Kunitsukami are summonable allies in Shin Megami Tensei V, the Amatsukami are not. Well, all but one anyway. The so-called “proto-Fiend”, Aogami, the entity responsible for the player’s transformation into a Nahobino, is actually Susano-o, who is counted among the Amatsukami in this game. Aogami seems to be an artificially-created demon, built by Tsukuyomi to inherit the power of Susano-o, who presumably is one of the Amatsukami gods who fell in the battle of Armageddon, to ensure that he and the other gods of Japan could still fight despite the events of Armageddon. Aogami is Tsukuyomi’s effort to restore the Amatsukami as the autochthonous protectors of Japan, perhaps to ensure that the Japanese gods can rely on themselves rather than the angels. Tsukuyomi thus seeks to recreate both the world and his fellow gods; in Lucifer’s words, he seeks to rebuild the world as he rebuilt his divine kin.

Tsukuyomi intends to become a Nahobino, and to do that he needs the human who possesses his remnant “Knowledge”. This is where we get to the other Chaos representative: one of your classmates, Yuzuru Atsuta.

Yuzuru is a peculiar case where he looks a lot like the Chaos Hero from the original Shin Megami Tensei, with his glasses and his haircut, but never once acts like him. Whereas the original Chaos Hero was rebellious, despised authority, and wanted little more than the freedom and power to stand on his own, Yuzuru seems to be the honor student of your class, and he appears to respect authority, not merely the power to back that authority. For a character who goes on to be the main human representative of the Chaos alignment in contrast to Ichiro representing the Law alignment, there’s almost nothing throughout the game that suggests Yuzuru is meant to develop in this way. The only thing you hear him talk about is how much he wants to protect Tokyo and his classmates, and you never see him question the whims of the angels or the ideals of Bethel. That’s until Tsukuyomi/Hayao Koshimizu has him stay in the Diet Building while you and Ichiro participate in the raid against Arioch. After you return to HQ and it’s revealed that Hayao Koshimizu is Tsukuyomi and he intends to break away from Bethel, Yuzuru, although initially surprised, never seems to question Tsukuyomi’s actions or intentions nor challenge him on why it’s worth leaving Bethel, and almost immediately signs onto Tsukyomi’s vision of replacing the rule of one God with the governance of many gods, and the game gives us absolutely no idea of how he came to the conclusion that this is the right thing to do. While Ichiro gets a whole full-motion cutscene dedicated to showing us his transformation into a zealot of the Law alignment, Yuzuru only gets a brief and not even voice-acted scene at Shinobazu Pond where he bigs you up as a Nahobino and basically tells you that Tokyo means everything to him, of course, that he too is going for the throne of creation, and that he will compete against you if you do not share his cause. Absolutely no attempt to discuss why he came to the conclusion he did.

At least Tsukuyomi tells us that God’s order isn’t worth following anymore because God’s destruction of Tokyo is seen as inevitable by the angels and that Tokyo obeyed God only to still be destroyed. But with Yuzuru, there’s nothing. Just like Ichiro, he is practically only motivated by the blind fixation on the base mission of protecting/saving Tokyo, with little thought process of his own regarding the surrounding conflicts and contradictions that affect Tokyo’s fate. If you play on the Law ending path, Yuzuru argues to Ichiro that God’s grip has stifled the world and that Ichiro’s beliefs are motivated by him having stopped thinking for himself, but with no exposition regarding how Yuzuru comes to believe what he does, we are left to assume that Yuzuru ultimately is simply going along with whatever Tsukuyomi wants. Given that Yuzuru spends the whole game up to the final stretch just going along with what Bethel wants, respects Tsukuyomi’s authority and attendant reputation as the director of Bethel’s Japanese branch, and stays behind with Tsukuyomi so that he can tell him gods know what (we are never shown exactly what Tsukuyomi was doing with Yuzuru by the time you’ve departed for Ginza), it is logical to conclude that Yuzuru has arrived at his conclusions not through independent thought but through the advice, or even instruction, of Tsukuyomi, who as a respected figure of authority leading the mission to fight chaos and protect Tokyo Yuzuru would be inclined to listen to. Frankly, it is my opinion that had Tsukuyomi/Koshimizu not decided to break away from Bethel and do his own thing, Yuzuru would still be obeying not only him but also, by extension, Bethel, and thus he could have wound up as the Law representative instead of the Chaos representative.

All of this has me come away thinking, without any hesitation, that Yuzuru is the worst, the flattest, the emptiest Chaos-aligned character I have ever seen in the entire Shin Megami Tensei series, due to his fundamental lack of motivation and him simply being uniquely self-defeating from a conceptual standpoint. The fact that he ultimately arrives at his path through deference to authority is an affront to everything that Chaos has represented for the last nearly 30 years of games, since it demonstrates a lack of the values of independence and rejection of authority that have come to define it.

But enough about Yuzuru. This is a path that’s all about the myriad gods, so we can’t spend too much time talking about it without mentioning the other gods, the gods of Bethel. At the summit, you meet Khonsu, Zeus, Odin, and Vasuki serving as a proxy for Shiva, all of whom are convinced that Bethel’s time is up, with God dead and unable to support his order, and that it is time to create a new world. There seem to be some differences between what the gods want now that God is dead. Zeus and Odin go off and find the humans with their “Knowledge” in order become Nahobinos themselves and take the throne of creation, though what they intend to do as rulers once either of them get the throne is left unexamined. Khonsu, however, has no interest in the throne, but does seem interested in gaining the power of the sun god in order to become Ra. His rivals in this quest include Amon, Asura (as in the Asura Lord from Shin Megami Tensei), and Mithras. Vasuki, as a servant and mere proxy of Shiva, cares only that Shiva’s ambition to destroy and recreate the world via the Rudra Astra is fulfilled, and neither Vasuki nor Shiva seem to be interested in claiming the throne.

Shiva actually seems to be an interesting case on his own. He is referred to within the game’s story, but makes no actual appearance in the main plot. Instead, you can only see him after you defeat Vasuki and claim the Key of Austerity, but even then, meeting him is purely optional, and you only have to do it if you want to take on his subquest, “A Universe in Peril”, and fight him in a gruelling superboss battle. As for what Shiva wants, he has no intention of claiming the throne of creation, and believes that those who do contend for it in order to create the world in alignment with their will bring nothing but corruption. Thus Shiva believes that it is not right that the world should be created or recreated by its inhabitants, rather that the beings that inhabit the world should be created by the world alone, and to that end Shiva will destroy the universe on behalf of the god Brahma so that it can be created again. For a Chaos-aligned deity of the Fury clan, the worldview Shiva talks about seems to me like it would actually make for a pretty creative expression of the Law alignment. Traditionally, the Law alignment tends to stress alignment with the order and will of things usually couched in terms of divine law, and if that’s not the order of God as expressed in the traditional Order of Messiah style Law ideology, it can be something more generic such as “harmony with the world” as in Devil Summoner 2 or something more abstract such as the way the Reasons all work in Nocturne.

A Shin Megami Tensei game seeking to present a Law path not defined strictly by the Abrahamic context might seek to pursue Law as defined by a belief that it is the world, or universe, or even a more trans-cultural expression of the Great Will, that bears the sole right of creation and dominion, while opposing any notion of you or anyone being able to create on your own or establish your own order. This can be drawn from multiple contexts, though an easy way to meld both Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic contexts would be an abstract “Will of Heaven”, deriving from the use of the term in Confucianism, as the principal agency of Law, of which God and his minions as well as non-Abrahamic gods. It might seem weird talking about this in what is supposed to be the Chaos section, but it is one of the myriad gods expressing this idea, and on that note, it also kind of underscores what I consider to be another wasted opportunity. When I saw Zeus, Odin, Khonsu, and Vasuki being revealed as representatives of Bethel from different international branches, keeping in mind the impression that Bethel was going to be the Law faction in the game, I thought that perhaps we might be seeing a return to Law and Chaos as inclusive absolutes in the way that they were in the original Shin Megami Tensei and Strange Journey. But that turned out not to be the case. Instead all Bethel amounted to was a cooperation pact between gods and angels, which the gods only partook in on the assumption that God was still alive and the Condemnation was still in effect.

But in any case, we come now to the final stretch of the game, at the end of the Temple of Eternity, where the final alignment break occurs and you must choose between three paths towards the end of the game. Choosing “Recreate the world and save Tokyo” is the Chaos path, and puts you on the side of Tsukuyomi and Yuzuru in their quest to bring Japan back under the governance of the Amatsukami and the world under the governance of the myriad gods. A little reminder of just what side this entails, on your way through the Empyrean you can find Ongyo-Ki, a Chaos-aligned Brute demon, who tells you that he and his kind have set aside their differences with the Amatsukami in order to realise the common goal of restoring the world of the myriad gods.

As was the case in the Law path, taking the Chaos path unlocks two subquests exclusive to the Chaos alignment. The first of these is “The Red Dragon’s Invitation”, which requires the completion of “The Holy Ring” to access. It involves you meeting the demon Nebiros in the Empyrean, who invites Chaos-aligned players to come and see Belial at the castle once ruled by Arioch. Of course, if you somehow aren’t sufficiently Chaos-aligned by this point, Nebiros asks you to pay 666,000 Macca before letting you see Belial. When you meet Belial he praises you for your power to defy the Condemnation and considers you as an ally in the goal of destroying the order of God, or the world of order. This reinforces the demons of chaos you fought before and the polytheistic gods you now side with as sharing the same goal: overturning God’s order and gaining the power to recreate the world. Belial then has you go and defeat Michael, who you previously had a hand in freeing, so that Belial will lend you his aid. Of course, if you took the Law path, Belial will instead oppose you and you will have to defeat him. Another Chaos-exclusive subquest is “The Wrathful Queen”, in which the goddess Maria, awaiting her disappearance with the creation of the new world, transforms into the goddess Inanna upon seeing that you have the Seed of Life and intend to “craft a world unlike any that has come before” (seems a tad ironic considering you mean to restore a multitude of gods). Defeating Inanna grants you the right to fuse and summon her.

After defeating Abdiel, Nuwa, and then Lucifer, the last of whom you’d think would join your side on this path considering he is the Lord of Chaos after all, you usher in the recreation of the world as planned, to bring about a world where many gods reign and gods reside in everything that exists. Essentially, you’re supporting a cosmos that is polytheistic and seemingly animistic as well, much like the Shinto cosmos and several Pagan cosmoses. Once again you don’t get to see what that world looks like, all you see is a big white disco ball and the gods Zeus, Odin, Khonsu, and Shiva suspended mid-air in different directions so as to indicate that this is the polytheistic cosmos of the Chaos path, and all you have to go on is Goko’s narration. You remake the world into one governed by a multitude of different gods, and its inhabitants offer their faith equally and live in a diverse, ever-changing society. Supposedly this life is difficult at least for those who lack conviction of their own, while those who think for themselves come together and do great things. Apparently irreconcilable differences in ideology result in constant conflict, and the world is now filled with strife, but to choose and to be able to choose is better than to be chosen for, and those who choose for themselves are responsible for their own choices.

At this point we should note that, between the Law and Chaos endings, the narrator inserts what are the apparent feelings of the protagonist. In the Law ending, Goko tells us that the protagonist is pleased with his work, while in the Chaos ending, Goko tells us that the protagonist is sad but holds to his beliefs anyway. This is unusual for a Shin Megami Tensei game, arguably contrary to its overall spirit, since the whole point of Shin Megami Tensei’s protagonists being silent protagonists is that this gives the player to insert their own values, emotions, and thought process into that character. Here, however, it’s suggested that the story decides how the protagonist feels about certain outcomes, when the whole point is that in Shin Megami Tensei, as Kazuma Kaneko once said, everyone has their own criteria for victory. Not to mention, why should the protagonist be pleased with his work when creating a world where nobody can think for themselves and people mostly just exist to have faith in God, and why should the protagonist be sad to have created a world where diversity means everyone disagrees with each other? It makes me suspect that the game’s narrative implies a bias in favour of the player governing a new world in a dictatorial fashion, or at least in favour of ordered consensus maintained through unitary divine authority, and against any outcome that entails that humans have to fight for what they have and figure things out amongst themselves.

But in any case, the cosmos presented to us in the Chaos ending makes a lot of sense when observed in terms of the cosmoses that we often see in polytheistic belief systems. In a cosmos consisting of multiple divines, divinity cannot be a unitary thing. A singular supreme being, therefore, in the strict sense does not exist. The closest thing to that would be the king of the gods, and in Greece and Rome we see that some philosophers, such as the Stoics, developing towards a more monistic or monotheistic worldview, would sometimes lean towards Zeus, as the king of the Greek gods, as the logical representation of the supreme divine principle, but even the king of the gods is not usually an absolute ruler, he occasionally meets challenges to his authority, and his power is not capable of overriding the fate that is immanent in the cosmos. Sometimes this king also answers to something greater than he, such as Zeus himself who seems to answer to Nyx. But in any case, the consistent polytheist cosmos brooks nothing like monotheistic notions of God, and there isn’t the same notion of a supreme being. It’s interesting that the Chaos ending implies a kind of anarchy, in the classical colloquial sense communicated by the ceaseless strife of a headless society. The etymological root of the word anarchy is in the Greek word anarkhia, which means “without a leader” or “without a ruler”, the word “arkhos” meaning “ruler”. Another similar Greek word is “arkhe”, which means “beginning” or “origin”, can be interpreted as meaning “first principle” or “dominion”, and in ancient Greek philosophy denoted an original principle from which all else originated, which was central to what would become a quest to define the single, supreme principle underlying all things, perhaps presaging an eventual philsophical turn towards monotheism. The polytheism of the Chaos path is anarchy two sense; it is anarchy in the sense that it is without a single ruler, and it is anarchy in the sense that it has no supreme principle. There is no arkhe, there is a diversity and multiplicity of divines, principles, values, that live amongst each other, and occasionally clash with each other. But this in many ways is more consistent with Chaos in Shin Megami Tensei’s traditional context than anything. It is the cosmic fufillment of its most consistent goal: co-existence involving demons and the gods of old, boundless freedom, no supreme ruler. In fact, I would argue that this state of things could be the chaos that Arioch alluded to, from which true freedom is born. Chaos, then, is a state of affairs in which there is no supreme principle ruling the cosmos, as well as the strife that apparently accompanies it. Ironically, however, nearly all of the gods shown here, except Shiva, are officially Neutral as members of the Deity clan (all of whom are Neutral).

Thus, we have established the nature of the Chaos alignment in Shin Megami Tensei V. It is an ideology centered around the destruction of the current order of things so as to replace it with a cosmos with no supreme ruler and a multiplicity of overseers. The headless nature of this cosmos implies not just diversity but limitless possibility and freedom, but it is to be taken that this leads to strife, uncertainty, and disorder. Being Chaos-aligned, then, is about being willing to accept the strife and disagreement that comes with the freedom of the headless cosmos.

Neutrality

We have established the Law alignment as represented by angels seeking to preserve and/or renew the monotheistic order of God, and we have established the Chaos alignment as represented by a multiplicity of gods and demons seeking to recreate the world and regain their lost divinity. So what is Neutrality between these two options? Who represents the Neutral path here? There are multiple characters who are Neutral in a very strict sense, in that they don’t formally align with either the Law and Chaos factions. But Neutrality, in the Shin Megami Tensei sense, is not merely a lack of affiliation between both camps, but an ideological stance that is defined in its explicit rejection of Law and Chaos. What does that mean here?

We are introduced to the Neutral path pretty early on in Shin Megami Tensei V, as soon as you enter the Diet Building. There you meet Nuwa, the Chinese goddess who created mankind, who is seen having just slaughtered an army of angels. Given that you’re introduced to the angels as essentially the forces of order or Law, your initial impression may have been that Nuwa represented the Chaos alignment, and as a Chaos-aligned Lady that would make sense, but the game soon makes it clear that this is not the case. After you “defeat” Nuwa (or more accurately whittle her HP down to half), a man named Shohei Yakumo, who calls himself an “exterminator of demons”, appears to interrupt your battle, and initially intends to kill you. When Nuwa persuades Shohei to spare the protagonist, he relents, and you have the opportunity ask who they are and what they want. Nuwa explains to you that Bethel is their enemy because they serve the same God of Law that stole the “Knowledge” of the other gods and turned them into demons, and that she also considers many of God’s opponents to be no better than him, calling them “opportunistic cretins” who only seek chaos to fulfill their own selfish desires. Thus Shohei’s self-appointed mission is to kill both the forces of Bethel and the demons of chaos, and he will oppose you for as long you seem to work for Bethel at least.

It is important to bear in mind what we already established when discussing the Chaos alignment. The forces of chaos that Nuwa is likely referring to are the demons who seek to reclaim their lost “Knowledge” in order to regain their divinity and destroy God’s order. These are concrete goals, not reducible to wantonness, and as a goddess who herself was one of the gods whose “Knowledge” was confiscated thus leading to her desecration, one would assume that she would have a common goal with those demons. But instead, Nuwa’s opinion is that the demons seeking to restore their former divinity, albeit through violent means, are equally as bad as the God that she describes as having stolen her “Knowledge” and enforcing tyrannical absolute rule over the cosmos. It’s like a kind of cosmic centrism.

Much later on, Shohei reappears in Akihabara, in the Chiyoda area of Tokyo, slaying demons and angels left and right, and prepares to confront the protagonist. Here Shohei and Nuwa are shown to disagree with each other. Nuwa appears to see something in the protagonist, it’s not exactly clear what, while Shohei hates you for ostensibly being content to fight for Bethel in spite of your strength. Once you defeat him, though, he begins to change his mind after being sufficiently impressed by your strength, as the one who previously defeated Lahmu, but is still baffled that you seem to still work for Bethel. He views demons as parasites who manipulate and corrupt any human they set their sights on, declares that they are a blot that must be cleansed, and rhetorically challenges you to prove that demons are worth fighting for.

There’s a pretty obvious problem with Shohei’s militant anti-demon attitude. His companion throughout the game is Nuwa, who by the game’s terms is a demon, a being who lost her divinity because of the Condemnation established by God. Thus, she too is one of the desecrated beings that Shohei pledged to exterminate. Apparently Nuwa is the demon who has been with Shohei since he was young. But when Shohei was young, a demon possessed someone and killed his whole family, and that’s his primary motivation for wanting to exterminate demons. Why then was Nuwa not one of the demons he sought to kill? As it turns out, they have a common goal, one that will be explored in good time.

After you defeat Arioch, Shohei appears again to congratulate you on slaying the demon king, who he describes as an “ugly sore”. He thinks that Arioch’s defeat will lead to humanity being on even footing with the demons, since humans are able to not only fight demons but also pit demons against each other. Aogami then interjects, saying that only a few people can fight off the demons, whereas most people can’t and will die as a result. To Aogami, this doesn’t seem good for humanity. Shohei, however, will have none of it, and refuses to listen to Aogami on the grounds that he is an artificial demon, a “Bethel construct”, a “slave to his programming”. He then seemingly justifies the possible sacrifice in human lives by asserting that those who cannot fend for themselves are better off dead, since their will to live is meaningless without the will to fight. He further asserts that those who “give in to temptation” and “betray one’s fellow man” should never have been born in the first place.

Those who played Shin Megami Tensei V and got to that point were probably taken aback by how cruel and cold-hearted Shohei’s philosophy is. In fact, it can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that Shohei is basically saying that it doesn’t matter how many humans die in their ceaseless war against demonkind because the weak, that’s what Shohei is referring to, are better off dead and those who were going to be weak-willed and incapable of asserting strength shouldn’t have been born. In Shohei’s worldview, the weak don’t deserve to live. This is a Social Darwinist worldview, albeit somewhat toned down compared to other games in that the criteria seems to be mental strength and the will to fight rather than physical strength and the ability to exercise brute force. This has led many to assume that Shohei is actually Chaos-aligned rather than Neutral, despite the obvious problem with that being that Shohei’s goals are undoubtedly consistent with traditional Neutrality, upholding the sole agency of humanity against God and the demons.

An important thing to note about Social Darwinism in Shin Megami Tensei is that, although typically associated with Chaos both by fans and within the games, the idea that Chaos equals Social Darwinism is, as I have established before, actually sort of a deeply-ingrained myth. While Shin Megami Tensei, Strange Journey, and Shin Megami Tensei IV all have a Chaos alignment that has some kind of might makes right component to their overall ideology, it is generally if not entirely absent in the Chaos alignment as featured in Shin Megami Tensei II, Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, Devil Summoner 2, and, as I have elaborated here, Shin Megami Tensei V, as well as the New Chaos route in Strange Journey Redux. So for at least half the series Chaos had barely anything to do with any might makes right ideology, and the extent to which it commits to that changes and varies from game to game. The most consistent thing about Chaos is that it’s all about wanting the most freedom possible, being willing to defy God or the Great Will to realize it, and the will to live with such a world consisting of strife and disharmony. Meanwhile, some extent of Social Darwinism is not exclusive to the Chaos alignment. In Strange Journey, the Three Wise Men, representatives of the Law alignment, say that the “spiritually enlightened whose wills are strong” will get to live in the new world while “the fallen humans whose wills are weak” will be destroyed. Only the strong will live, while the weak will die, but this is predicated on will rather than brute strength, so in that sense it’s not altogether different from Shohei’s philosophy of life except that God is in the equation. In Nocturne, we see three Reasons that are all different visions of a Thousand Year Kingdom as constructed under the auspices of Kagutsuchi, an avatar of the Great Will, and the Yosuga Reason, which I must stress is supported by the angels, is a Thousand Year Kingdom that selects membership based on a concept of “beauty” that is defined by power and brute strength. Even if not predicated on a might makes right style of selection, the Thousand Year Kingdom has always had a sort of elitist undercurrent to it, with its emphasis that only a chosen few get to live in it. So in this sense, not only is Social Darwinism not the exclusive item of the Chaos alignment, it has also been seen to some extent in the Law alignment, and now Shohei Yakumo represents the series coming full circle where Social Darwinism, if anything the same kind seen in Strange Journey’s Law alignment, has been represented as an expression of Neutrality.

Shohei’s Social Darwinism does not come from some vague Hobbesian argument about how too much freedom or the abolition of the state will result in a brutal war of all against all (as is frequently implied for the Chaos alignment) or from a belief in God’s salvation being predicated on strength of will as applied to faith resulting in the exclusion of the weak as defined by their proclivity to temptation (as is occasionally seen in the Law alignment). Instead, Shohei’s Social Darwinism emerges from his exterminationist crusade against the demons, who he thinks are parasites that need to be cleansed from the world. Although Shohei doesn’t ever establish why he opposes Bethel or God’s order in particular, it seems reasonable to assume that he views Bethel and the angels as just more demons, more parasites to be cleansed from the world. His crusade demands strength of will, defined by the will to fight and not be influenced by demons, including angels. If many people die as a result, then that is to be considered acceptable on the grounds that the weak will fall while the strong will prevail, and that those who can’t find it in them to fight the demons and reject their promises don’t deserve to live. Thus, we see a Neutral Social Darwinism, for the first time in the series.

This itself ostensibly springs from another motivation, at least as recounted by Nuwa. Supposedly his harsh philosophy of life, particularly his willingness to leave the weak, “those who’ve given up”, to the wolves is motivated not out mistrust for his fellow man but precisely because of his love for humanity, and his belief in the potential strength of humanity. Nuwa explains that Shohei was born into a family whose men were all law enforcement officers, while his mother was a medium who helped the souls of people who were troubled by “dark spirits”, one of whom possessed a man who then slaughtered Shohei’s family. She then says that those who have neither the desire nor capacity to redeem themselves, and will only ever know violence and evil, should simply be struck down without hesitation, stressing that “pretty words” are not enough to save the world. This is the context in which Shohei comes to form his cruel worldview.

Another important contour of Shohei’s Social Darwinism concerns human potential. Those who give up on themselves are people who abandon their potential, specifically their potential to fight demons, and are thus undeserving of life. There is a philosophy in real life whose ideology seems to align with Shohei’s worldviews to some extent. Its adherents refer to it as “longtermism“, and its basic premises are surprisingly mainstream. Longtermism is basically the philosophy which holds that the long-term potential of the human species is the most important ethical value there is. Under this philosophy, the loss of life in itself matters less than the potential that disappeared with that life. It also means that even the worst effects of climate change and the devastation and death that comes with that is all just a blip so long as mankind manages to recover their “potential”. The Social Darwinist implications of longtermism manifest for some of its adherents in the idea that the lives of the rich, or people in rich countries, should be prioritized over the lives of the poor, or people in poor countries, because supposedly the wealthier countries have more innovation and their workers are more productive, thus the poorer and less productive would be left to die in a world run by longtermist principles. Swap rich versus poor with strong versus weak, and what emerges is the idea that it is better that the strong continue to live and better that the weak either die or not even be born, since the strong (of will, at least) carry more long-term potential than the weak (again, of will at least). That idea is at the heart of Shohei Yakumo’s worldview: the weak, “those who give up”, “those who give in to temptation”, they are bad because they abandoned what could have been their potential as demon exterminators who lead a world meant for humans and only humans. That longtermism should focus squarely on human potential should make it no surprised that it seems to make its way to a Neutral character.

Towards the final stretch of the game, when you reach the end of the Temple of Eternity and the forces of Law and Chaos are arguing with each other and showing their hands, Shohei appears abruptly, interrupting the conversation to announce his own plans for the throne of creation. His plan is to destroy the throne, believing that doing so will allow humanity to shape their own world. And if you take his side and resolve to destroy the throne, that is what you will do as well, and so begins the Neutral path. This also leads to you losing the favour of the Goddess of creation, and it’s here that we briefly mention her role in things.

Tao Isonokami, your classmate, died in the fight against Lahmu. After the Bethel summit, Tao reappears as the Goddess of creation, who seems to literally be the Megami in Shin Megami Tensei V, come to accompany the Nahobino in creating a new world after the fall of God and the disappearance of the Shekinah Glory. Taking either the Law or Chaos paths sees you reshaping the world by assuming the throne of creation, whether that means recreating the old order set by God or creating a new divine order entirely, and so the Goddess supports this. Destroying the throne, however, means denying the process of creation, which according to the Goddess means denying the will of the universe (that will being creation, of course), and she cannot support that, though for some reasons he makes no attempt to stop you from thwarting the literal will of the universe.

Anyways, there is something a tad peculiar about the ethos of Shohei’s quest to destroy the throne. He claims that it will mean humanity will shape their own world, presumably meaning without the demons or the gods, and in this regard we see a kind of humanism that is broadly consistent with the ethos of Neutrality as present in the rest of the Shin Megami Tensei series. But the peculiarity arises in the premise of shaping your own world. In the strict sense, both the Law and Chaos paths involve you, a human, albeit a human that is now also a Nahobino, shaping your own world. Nuwa certainly considers you human enough, at least in that you share his humanity, and, as Goko says, by assuming the throne of creation, your ideal world takes shape in the manner that you choose. In that sense, Shohei’s stated aims are surely already fulfilled in the act of creation, right? Well, the problem for Shohei seems to be that you ostensibly do not shape the world alone and as a human but rather co-create the world as a Nahobino alongside either the angels or the old gods, and it would seem that this renders the process of creation unacceptable in Shohei’s eyes, no doubt since to him this means cooperating with the demons and “giving in to temptation”.

And yet, this objection is ultimately hypocritical. On either the Law or Chaos paths, Shohei and Nuwa interrupt your ascent to the throne, to stop you from assuming the throne so that Shohei can destroy it. Shohei declares that this is “the end” for gods and demons. But how does he try to bring this about? Why, by fusing with Nuwa in order to become a Nahobino, of course! Keep in mind that Shohei opposed the player for being a Nahobino on the grounds that this meant him being a demon. In fact, he’s so sure that Nahobinos are demons and therefore enemies that he proclaims “and you are no exception!” when ranting about this being the end for god and demon alike. Yet for some reason he’s quite content to be a Nahobino himself or help Nuwa become a Nahobino. So if you happen to oppose him towards the end of the game, all that talk of not needing gods or demons ends in Shohei not only depending on the power of a demon/god but also becoming a Nahobino in order to try and defeat you. In this sense, Shohei really can’t complain about humans depending on demons/gods, let alone co-creating the world with them, since at least half of that is what Shohei ends up doing himself, or really the entire time if you want him cooperating with Nuwa for basically the whole game. To be honest, though, I think the whole setup is just constructed in a way so that it arbitrarily matches the dynamic of the Reason boss fights from Nocturne. Just as Hikawa, Chiaki, and Isamu all summoned the gods of their respective Reasons, gain new demonic forms in which they seem to have physically merged with those gods, and then you fight them depending on which ending path you took, the same thing happens in Shin Megami Tensei V for Ichiro fusing with Abdiel, Yuzuru fusing with Tsukuyomi, and Shohei fusing with Nuwa, but in a much more condensed and contrived fashion.

Only one exclusive subquest is unlocked in the Neutral path, and that is “The Noble Queen”. Here the goddess Maria, yet again awaiting her disappearance with the creation of a new world, transforms into the goddess Danu upon seeing that you have the Seed of Life and intend to “have humanity live for themselves”. Defeating Danu gives you the right to fuse and summon her. Curiously, Danu is the only Lady in the game who is Neutral instead of Chaos-aligned.

So, you progress through the Empyrean, Shohei dies trying to fight Abdiel (he’s rather embarassingly killed by the gust of air that flows from Abdiel becoming a Nahobino, and so does anyone you side with before the first Nahobino fight in any path in the game for some stupid reason), laments that he failed to fight for the future of humanity, and Nuwa survives to plead with you to succeed where she and Shohei failed. After this you defeat Abdiel, and then Tsukuyomi, but you don’t get to fight Lucifer at all for some reason, in fact Lucifer doesn’t bother to show up at all to tell you what he thinks about you destroying the throne. Instead, after defeating Tsukuyomi, nothing happens except you fly up to the throne of creation, and then shatter it. Goko trembles in shock and horror as the process of creation is denied, and laments that chaos will continue to grip this world.

And what happens then? Once again, you don’t really see anything except a big white disco ball, and this time your classmates, Hayao Koshimizu, Abdiel, and Goko all standing upside down in mid-air. Goko narrates that the battle of the gods came to an end, but its victor relinquished his right to rule creation, resulting in the denial of creation and the continuation of the current status quo, which means the “agents of chaos” continuing to run amok. The human species somehow survives and finds a way to combat the demons, but forces the demonkind are still overwhelming, and many people are expected to die in the neverending war. We are assured, however, that humanity will definitely find victory somehow, because they have the power of knowledge and creation on their side. The player is left to observe the disarry of things, and is pleased not by the outcome but by the thought of what is yet to come; in other words, the player is kept going by the long-term potential of the human species, which no doubt cushions the thought of all those sacrifices you set into motion.

I’ve made numerous comparisons to Nocturne throughout this essay, and I don’t intend to stop now, because this ending is essentially the Demon ending from that. Not the True Demon ending introduced in the Maniax edition, but the original Demon ending, in which defeat all of the Reason bosses, but you don’t get to fight Kagutsuchi as the final boss, and because you either rejected all three Reasons but lacked courage or tried to support too many Reasons at once, Kagutsuchi leaves in disgust, the process of creation is denied, and the Vortex World remains for a thousand years, thus leaving the world in a limbo state teeming with demons. One difference, I suppose, is that in Nocturne’s Demon ending you’re the last man alive, and the only other humans that survived the Conception were either killed by your hand or sacrificed, whereas here there seem to be some humans left that we don’t know about, given that once again all of your classmates and human allies are dead (which, to be fair, happens no matter what path you take anyway). Interestingly, this ending, rather than the Chaos ending, is the ending in which we are explicitly told that chaos in the sense of the lack of order is present in the world, presumably meaning that, in the Chaos ending, there is ironically still some order, just that there is no supreme, absolute order, but refer a multitude of orders, just that there is strife between them. But whereas, as Pierre Joseph Proudhon might have put it, anarchy seems to be prove to be the mother of order in the Chaos path, in this Neutral path, there is neither anarchy nor order, only the silence of creation and the desperation of mankind viciously struggling against demons, maybe forever.

And yet, in the eye’s of the game’s narrative, the real tragedy of destroying the throne is not so much the lives lost in the ceaseless between humans and demons but rather the fact that the potential to create a new world has been denied. When you begin your mission to destroy the throne, the Goddess laments that you carry the potential of an entire world and yet do not want to use it, and thus declares that you must not proceed to the throne. Goko’s panic and disappointment stems from the same thing: you have elected not to use “the potential of a world”, and thus the process of creation is denied, thus the world will not be reborn, it will not be “saved” from conflict by a new God or absolute ruler. The longtermist premise that it is the “potential” of humanity that is more valuable than the life of humans in itself is thus present not only in the worldview of Shohei Yakumo, but also in the agents of creation themselves who Shohei might have opposed. Every path you take except this one validates the process of creation and thus means you use that “potential” instead of abdicating it, thus the Goddess and Goko approve of the other paths. They do are concerned ultimately and principally that the long-term potential of the world or of humanity is fulfilled, made manifest through the act of creation.

This is where the “Destroy the throne” path ends. But, this is not the only Neutral path in the game, and thus it is not the end for our discussion of Neutrality in Shin Megami Tensei V. There is in fact another Neutral ending. A “secret” ending. The “good” or “true” Neutral ending, at least according to some. It does seem to be represented by a shining star when you get it in a clear save file, unlike all the others, and it has somewhat more exposition than the other paths, so clearly it’s supposed to be special. But what is it, what the goal of that path, and what is the outcome of it in the final hand?

To get this alternate Neutral ending, you first have complete a chain of subquests before reaching the Empyrean and choosing to destroy the throne. These are often whole chains of subquests leading up to you defeating certain demons as bosses and unlocking them for fusion. You must gain Fionn Mac Cumhaill as an ally, and to do that you must complete the “Fionn’s Resolve” subquest, which also requires you to complete three more subquests – “The Falcon’s Head”, “Root of the Problem”, and “An Unusual Forecast” – before it can activate. You also have to unlock Khonsu, which requires fighting him in “The Egyptians’ Fate”, and then sparing his life when given the option to finish him off. Then you have to complete “Winged Sun” by defeating Asura, Mithra, and Amon. Then after completing all those quests plus “The Falcon’s Head”, you then have to complete “The Succession of Ra” in order to defeat Khonsu Ra (or, as I prefer to call him, Ra) and unlock both him and regular Khonsu for fusion. You also have to complete “A Power Beyond Control” and defeat Amanozako gone berserk, and then complete “The Destined Leader” after getting all three keys to unlock Amanozako as an ally. You also have to complete “A Universe in Peril”, in which you have to fight and defeat Shiva, the main superboss of the game.

Once you complete all of those subquests, when you advance into the Empyrean into the Neutral path as normal, and then defeat Abdiel, Nuwa then reappears after the fight to reveal her true plan for the world. Although Shohei and Nuwa both wanted to destroy the throne, this was not actually their ultimate or end goal. Nuwa says that the real reason they participated in the struggle for the throne was so that they could claim the throne for themselves and use it to create a world where gods and demons no longer existed, thus making the world a “clean slate” for humanity. After defeating Tsukuyomi as normal, the Goddess approaches you from behind to tell you that you have the potential to rule the world, and beseeches you not to destroy the throne. This unlocks the choice between destroying the throne and the fourth path in the game: creating a world for humanity alone. The Goddess understands this as a world rid of both gods and demons, and determines that this too is the right of the ruler of a new world as an act of creation, thus the player can take the throne. This is where the alternate Neutral path begins.

The requirement of completing subquests to unlock the hidden Neutral path is very reminiscent of Shin Megami Tensei IV’s Neutral path, in which you are required to complete a series of side-quests, or Challenge Quests, in order to advanced the plot by putting you at the top of Hunter rankings, thus filling the Chalice of Hope. But whereas Shin Megami Tensei IV required you to do a lot of Challenge Quests to progress in Neutrality, in Shin Megami Tensei V, you only have to do subquests if you want the “best” version of Neutrality, and the Neutral path per se remains open without them. Still, progressing through Neutrality or unlocking one Neutral ending requiring side-quests does seem to be a weird trend for the last couple of mainline Shin Megami Tensei games. This may be to conjure some sense of Neutrality being harder to achieve than the other paths so as to artificially replicate the difficulty associated with Neutrality in older games. In older games, the challenge of Neutrality consisted in keeping your alignment in balance and fighting every powerful demon in your way. But here, you’re just supposed to complete a bunch of subquests. I suppose when you consider the Shiva and Khonsu Ra fights, it’s not entirely a cake walk. But again, the base idea seems like artificially inflating the challenge of Neutrality. Additionally, your alignment is barely indicated within the game and has no effect on you getting a Neutral path.

But let’s focus on the main goal of this path: creating a world for humanity alone, ridding the world of all gods and demons. There’s already a glaring problem with this premise. Why would Nuwa, a goddess demoted to demonhood, accept being erased from the fabric of existence? If you elect to create a world where gods and demons no longer exist, that means the gods/demons who supported you will be erased and disappear from the cosmos. This includes Aogami, who however artificial is still a demon. But Aogami would go along with whatever you wanted anyway, since he only exists to serve the protagonist and lend him his strength. Nuwa, however, is not artificial, and has a will of her own, yet the question of why she would consent to her own annihilation is simply never addressed by the story. She does say that, as a goddess, she is partial to humans as “her own creation”, but this hardly explains why she should want herself and all the other gods and demons wiped out.

The other question, though, is why should you consent to the annihilation of your demon allies, or for that matter the abolition of your own state as a Nahobino? This question harkens to another glaring problem that emanates from the core premise and mechanic of the game. You want to rid the world of gods and demons, but you wouldn’t be anywhere without them. The desire to wipe out all gods/demons is essentially predicated on Shohei’s belief that demons are no good for humanity and will only destroy humans, but the entire reason for your survival in the world of Da’at is that you were found and saved by a demon, albeit an artificial one, then through him became a Nahobino, thus, by the game’s terms, an at least partially demonic being, and then further still recruited, summoned, and fused demons as allies to support you. And not only has your survival depended on the help of demons, but so too does that of your classmates. Both Yuzuru and Ichiro only have a fighting chance in Bethel because they have demons (or angels, as the case may be) on their side, and the classmates who got dragged into Da’at by Lahmu’s minions might have been killed had it not been for the protection of the demons who live in the Fairy Forest. Even Shohei’s whole plan sees him cooperating with Nuwa and the plan outlined by Nuwa is completely dependent on the assistance of a demon/god and the process of becoming a Nahobino, and from there the process of creation, which is thus co-creation.

Speaking of the Fairy Forest, for a game that likes to frame its basic story setting as a conflict between humans and demons, with demons increasingly established as little more than spiritual monsters, you encounter countless demons in Da’at who are friendly enough to you. You encounter tons of demons that just want you to give them items, you encounter Amanozako who is probably the least threatening personality in the game despite being based on a wrathful yokai goddess, the fairies obviously want no trouble for the humans, and there’s plenty of demons simply have no interest in humans let alone their death. Shohei is convinced that demons are all parasitic threats to humanity that need to be wiped out, and this premise is immanent in both of the game’s Neutral ending paths, but you can play through the whole game and ask yourself, is that really true? Do all gods and demons deserve to die because one demon killed his whole family, or for that matter because Lahmu abducted your classmates is shown to be responsible for the deaths of two people? Could you imagine Shohei applying this logic in reverse, to declare that humans need to be wiped from existence because a human killed a couple of demons or indeed other humans? Or is this all transparently nothing more than the reasoning of pure pogromist hatred?

To “create a world for humanity alone” means the genocide of gods and demons, all of whom are non-human lives, which is to say still lives. You are committing genocide against non-human life, for the purpose of creating a world populated only by humans. Of course, the game doesn’t frame it that way, but I’m sure that’s because if it did you would be acknowledged as the villain in the game’s story, and that’s still a pretty polite way to describe your actions. Thus, the act of a Neutral creation echoes some of the omnicidal aspects of traditional Neutrality. After all, it’s not like the Neutral endings of the older games didn’t have you slaughter everyone who stood in the way of your vision, including all your friends and many gods and demons. But even then, you weren’t in the process of becoming a god who could wipe out all gods and demons through the act of creation.

So, anyways, you ascend to the throne, and Aogami prepares to bid you farewell on account of the fact that he, as a demon, will be erased along with the rest, but then Lucifer interrupts in order to interject on the process of creation. Lucifer warns the player that, because humanity inevitably gives rise to demons, his vision of eradicating all gods and demons is destined to fail. And yet, he suggests that it is still possible to make your new world a reality. How? By traveling to “the realm beyond the earth and heavens”, engaging Lucifer in combat, defeating him, and the consuming his “Knowledge”, so that the world can be freed from the machinations of the “Mandala System”. All of this, of course, bears some explanation.

Given Lucifer’s title as the Lord of Chaos, it may be surprising that I did not cover him in the Chaos section of this essay. This is because, in Shin Megami Tensei V, Lucifer actually doesn’t have much to do with the Chaos path in particular, and is effectively absent for much of the game. In fact, his boss data shows that he’s actually Neutral in this game. Early in the game you see him declaring that God is dead and he has killed him and that he has ascended the Pillar Empyrean, before apparently scattering himself across Da’at. He apparently continues to watch over the player, though, and his voice can be heard encouraging the player when you’re about to have your first fight in the entire game. It seems that, after defeating God, Lucifer consumed his “Knowledge” and transcendent to a “higher level of existence”, “becoming more than He could possibly have imagined”, and learned of the existence of the Mandala System. It’s never actually clear what this “Mandala System” is, but it is described bad a “spatial governing phenomenon”, and it is implied, at least in its Japanese rendition, to be the intrinsic, absolute law of the universe. This law seems to be responsible for the inevitable decay and replacement of each new creation, and the overthrow of its ruler by the next. It is, in other words, the cycle of death and rebirth, not unlike as it appears in Nocturne.

Every ending path, except for the “Destroy the throne” ending, sees Lucifer emerge to tell you that no matter what you do your new world will not last forever, that it will eventually end, a new Da’at will eventually appear heralding the destruction of the current world, and you will be overthrown by a new Nahobino. Each time you fight him he tells you that he has found a way to ensure true freedom, which is for you to defeat him and consume his “Knowledge” just as he did for God, and every time you defeat him he disappears into energy after telling you that you ensured that the world will “truly be free”. Strangely, he tells you this even if you defeat him on the Law path. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have anything to say against reinstating God’s order and create a world where nobody thinks for themselves, or for that matter anything to say in support of you creating a world in the hands of myriad gods despite apparently trying to make it so the demons could become gods again. He doesn’t even seem to oppose you wanting to wipe out all demonkind, despite traditionally being the king of the demons, and his only objection is that if you don’t consume his “Knowledge” then the demons will inevitably return, and if you simply destroy the throne of creation he has nothing whatsoever to say. He only really cares that you overcome him and gain his “Knowledge”, and it doesn’t seem to matter to him exactly what you intend to do afterwards. He tells you same thing in all fights with him. The difference is that in the “true” Neutral ending his base level is higher, he has more skills, and the fight is extended.

But in any case, you defeat Lucifer, and with that the process of creating a world for humanity alone begins in earnest. As before, you see a big white disco ball in space, and this time nothing else. And then, after the credits roll, you see something else. You see Tokyo, apparently restored exactly as it was before the events of the game, you and your friends alive again, it feels a lot like the very beginning of the game. There are also two versions of you in Tokyo, one of them has yellow eyes. Goko narrates that the world of man had thus ended (strange, considering your whole mission was to create a world for humanity alone), and a new world order had arrived. This new world is to be like the old world, but altogether different. This new world was created off the back of the desire to be “free” from demons and the never-ending cycle of creation. But, Goko says, all things must eventually come to an end, and the question is asked, could the world truly exist without Mandala?

In other words, you don’t know if you’ve actually changed anything!

The whole point of this path was to erase the existence of gods and demons from the world, and create a world for humans alone, and that to do that you needed to consume Lucifer’s “Knowledge” in order to break away from the Mandala System in order to make sure your new world lasts forever. But when you actually see the ending play out, it seems possible that you might not actually have exited the Mandala System after all. Goko’s narration all but confirms this. He says, “but all things must eventually come to an end”. Breaking out of the Mandala System means exiting a never-ending cycle of creation, and in theory this should mean that the world you create will last forever. But if all things must eventually come to an end, this means that the world you just created is going to meet the same fate as any other, as though you didn’t consume Lucifer’s “Knowledge”, and the Mandala System might still exist and you and everything else are still in its grip. You have just enacted the genocide of all gods and demons, and consumed Lucifer’s “Knowledge” in order to do so, and yet for all you know, nothing has changed and you haven’t actually freed yourself from the cycle of creation, meaning you erased all gods and all demons for nothing.

This is actually worse than the “Destroy the throne” Neutral ending you might have gotten had you not completed those subquests and chosen to create a world for humanity alone. You went out of your way to clear those subquests, including defeating one of the hardest bosses in the game, you went through an extended final boss fight with Lucifer, and you annihilated all gods and demons through a single act of creation, but for all that, all you get is to see Tokyo exactly as it was, and the assurance that it will come to an end, that humanity can’t live without the Mandala System, and only the cosmos know what’s really going on. Perhaps the demons and Da’at might just come back after all. You did it all for nothing, just because maybe you couldn’t accept any of the other ending outcomes.

Beyond that, creating a world for humanity alone actually seems to play out very similarly to the Law ending. To be sure, you don’t co-create the world with the angels, and you don’t create a world where people only have faith in God and don’t think for themselves, but you restore Tokyo, and seemingly resurrect its inhabitants, things are more or less like the old order that existed beforehand, except for the lack of gods and demons of course, and nobody seems to remember anything that happened. You, of course, are the God of the new world, and the condition of the absence of gods and demons is ratified by your absolute divine will and sovereignty, but you don’t get to do much in your new world except observe things while a clone of yourself apparently lives your life. In that sense, the world for humanity alone can be thought of as the world of Law, governed by an absentee landlord instead of the traditional either God of Law or a similar replacement. In a sense, you have rejected the Law alignment and the Chaos alignment in favour of a somewhat more benign Law ending, sans God.

And what of the objections to Chaos here? No Neutral objections to the plans of Tsukuyomi are ever given. All you see is Ichiro argue that the myriad gods would never see eye to eye with each other and soon devolve into endless warfare and “eat each other alive” in a brutal contest of superiority. If we put aside that the major conflict in the game was started by the monotheistic God of Law, creating a world for humanity alone is shown to never resolve that. Tokyo is restored exactly as it was, which means the Tokyo of this world, the real world in which the game is set. You don’t need a genius to figure out that humans can fight and kill each other just fine on their own, without the influence of God or any demonic agents. Conflict, violence, endless war, these will all continue, and in a world with humans alone, no gods or demons, that all happens with human hands, on human terms, against fellow humans. If the Neutral objection to Chaos is anything like the Law objection in that a Chaos outcome would be bad because everyone disagrees with each other and strife is inevitable, well, with Tokyo restored as it is, disagreement is as common as it is human, and there will always be some discontent, and therefore strife between fellow humans.

Not to mention, in both the Law and Chaos endings, you fight and defeat Lucifer, and Lucifer says that with this the world will surely be free, just as he does in the “true” Neutral ending. Lucifer interrupts both the Law and Chaos paths in order tell you that your new world won’t last forever and invites you to fight him so that you can claim his “Knowledge”. Surely the Law and Chaos worlds too involve breaking out of the Mandala System? But these endings don’t discuss that the way the “true” Neutral ending does. Why does breaking out of the Mandala System only factor into one of the Neutral endings, and not the Law and Chaos endings where you do basically the same thing? But then I’m sure it wouldn’t matter in the end if that weren’t the case since you can’t even say you’ve broken out of the Mandala System anyway.

Neutrality in Shin Megami Tensei V is empty in a way that it truly never has been in any other Shin Megami Tensei game. Like all other expressions of Neutrality, its central basis is in the sort of humanism that echoed out from the basic impression of the scientific worldview presented by Stephen Hawking and/or similar atheistic figures, as understood by a Japanese audience of course. Here, though, godhood is the fulfilment of this humanism, thus divinity is embraced alongside its own repudiation. The demon-haunted world is vanquished by the power of a God forged in the flesh one who transcends the boundaries of human and demon. Godlessness is established by an absentee God, who once again eliminates all rivals to his uncontested power beforehand. And for that, the status quo is effectively restored. Or, alternatively, it is the rejection of two possibilities of creation in favour of realizing human dominance through constant violent struggle against demonkind. Both are guided by the belief that the potential of humanity outweighs the life of either humans or non-humans, meaning that bloodshed, sacrifice, and genocide all have no moral impact so long as it means mankind assumes and uses the potential at its disposal.

Conclusion

So, in summarizing the picture of the ideological dynamic at play in Shin Megami Tensei V, let’s recapitulate the three alignments one more time in succession.

Law is the ideology that upholds the idea of the necessity of a single cosmic ruler, and of an order of the cosmos and human civilization predicated on a hierarchy that revolves around the will of this ruler and the inscription of divine design, whose goal for the creation of a new world is simply the reproduction of a single ultimate truth that organizes human life in absolutism and on the basis of one faith.

Chaos is the ideology that upholds the idea of a cosmos that lacks a unifying supreme law, being, or “ultimate truth”, and a multiplicity of orders and gods, which prioritizes a freedom sourced from the lack of the hierarchy of God, whose goal for the creation of a new world is to abolish the old order of the God of Law in favour of a society where people must choose for themselves the gods they worship.

Neutrality is the ideology that upholds the idea of a cosmos that privileges humanity to the extent that humans are the only sentient beings meant to live in it, and where the “potential” of humanity to attain cosmic mastery is the paramount ethical value, which is to be acheived either through the denial of the process of creation, or the assumption of creation so as to wipe out all non-human intelligences that might compete with or exist alongside humanity.

As I have hopefully showm in certain ways Shin Megami Tensei V derives its alignment dynamic from the traditional Law and Chaos dynamic that emanates from the original Shin Megami Tensei, in certain ways it deviates from many conventional aspects of the Law and Chaos dynamic as presented throughout the Shin Megami Tensei series, and in certain ways it seems to bowlderize and simplify that dynamic. All taken together, it presents us with a dynamic of Law and Chaos is presented to us as though spat back out, regurgiated in what could have been construed as an an attempt to reimagine the core dynamic, resulting in a new product that seems to follow Goko’s description of the world created for humanity alone: akin to the old, and yet altogether different.

In my Postcriptum on the Chaos alignment in Shin Megami Tensei (linked at the bottom of this essay), I expressed the hope that, following the Redux edition of Strange Journey, the Chaos alignment would shed the might makes right conceits that were attendant to it in previous games (well, half the series more accurately) in favour of a radical recentering of Chaos ideology in alignment with an ahierarchical, anarchic co-existence with demons, predicated on a freedom born of the lack of a supreme authority over the universe, among many other things. I think that although co-existence with demons isn’t a strong theme in this game’s Chaos alignment, I think the pluralism displayed in the polytheistic diversity of the Chaos ending seems to suggest that, though it bears a great deal of expansion just as everything else in the game needs. Ultimately, however, even the Chaos ending is a disappointmnet, for the simple reason that a disembodied and alienated narration is the only expression of it, with no actual presentation of the new world, and this is the case for almost all of the other endings.

There is one final elephant in the room to discuss when it comes to the game’s story-world as it relates to the way the alignments are presented by the end of the game: the Goddess, that is to say the Megami in Shin Megami Tensei V. The Goddess seems to be partial to the use of absolute power to establish absolute order. When you reach the end of the Temple of Eternity, the Goddess appears in a vision of the Tree of Knowledge in which she proclaims that the Nahobino can reshape the world as they so choose, encourages you to become the divine architect, while also encouraging you to “show no hesitation” to those who want to “usurp your newfound reign”. This is to some extent reflected in the explanation of the three keys needed to open your way to the Empyrean: the Key of Harmony, the Key of Benevolence, and the Key of Austerity, each won by defeating one of the heads of the former branches of Bethel. These represent the virtues and expectations that the ruler of creation is meant to fulfilll. The ruler of creation is expected to preserve harmony, “be prepared to act for the sake of his people”, uphold the “power of benevolence”, “be willing to hear the voices of his people”, and most crucially “uphold austerity”, “show no leniency”, and “expect none in return”. The player is supposed to take God’s place as a “benevolent” dictator, establishing order through absolute power and will, brooking no opposition, perhaps under the presumption that you will be a more benign dictator than the God of Law was.

This reflects in the way the respective endings are treated in Goko’s narration, or more specifically in how he portray’s the player’s emotional response to this. In the Law ending, where you create a new world in the image of God’s former order and a society where no one thinks for themselves and exist only to have faith in God, Goko tells you that the new creator is pleased with his work. In the Chaos ending, where you abolish God’s order and create a new world consisting of a myriad of co-ruling gods, Goko tells you that the new creation is sad at the apparent strife that pervades the new world, just that he holds firm to his beliefs anyway. The “bad” Neutral ending where you destroy the throne has Goko tell us that the player is pleased with the thoughts of things yet to come, from which we can infer the new creator is not necessarily happy with the outcome he brought about. The “good” Neutral ending sees him looking forward to creating a new world with no more gods and demons in it, observing as its new absentee ruler. The paths which see the player take the position of omnipotent ruler of creation, even if in a non-interventionist sense, are to fill the player with gladness, hope, and/or contentment, while the paths in which the player either relinquishes absolute power or presumably shares power with other gods are to fill the player with doubt, sadness, or at least the prospect that it will all be over in the future. This appears to be the bias of the game’s narrative, and it privileges the potential of absolute power over any other conception of power and its distribution.

And with that, I conclude this essay. I hope that you have derived a good understanding of the various ideological contours at work in the story-world of Shin Megami Tensei V, and also that you have had a Merry Yule before reading this essay and continue to have a fun holiday season, as I certainly plan to.

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See also:

Ideologies of Chaos in Shin Megami Tensei: https://mythoughtsbornfromfire.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/ideologies-of-chaos-in-shin-megami-tensei/

Ideologies of Law in Shin Megami Tensei: https://mythoughtsbornfromfire.wordpress.com/2021/06/08/ideologies-of-law-in-shin-megami-tensei/

Ideologies of Neutrality in Shin Megami Tensei: https://mythoughtsbornfromfire.wordpress.com/2021/06/19/ideologies-of-neutrality-in-shin-megami-tensei/

Postscriptum on Chaos in Shin Megami Tensei: https://mythoughtsbornfromfire.wordpress.com/2021/06/23/postscriptum-on-chaos-in-shin-megami-tensei/

Shin Megami Tensei V: a fun but middling Nocturne sequel: https://mythoughtsbornfromfire.wordpress.com/2021/11/22/shin-megami-tensei-v-a-fun-but-middling-nocturne-sequel/

Ideologies of Law in Shin Megami Tensei

Last time, I wrote a long post discussing the ideological contours of the Chaos alignment within the Shin Megami Tensei universe, as part of a series of articles discussing this for all three of the alignments. This second article is focused on the Law alignment, the polar opposite of the Chaos alignment in many respects. Much as is the case for Chaos, Law contains its own very specific contours that colour its broad ideological character. Of course, I’ve never been a big fan of the Law alignment, and I suppose the last post betrayed a certain sympathy towards Chaos, but that’s only a matter of disclosure.

Once again, the same conditions as the previous post apply. The majority of spin-off titles will not be included on the grounds that they do not sufficiently present a Law and Chaos dynamic as in the main line titles. And as before, this entire post will contain spoilers for all of the games featured here.

Shin Megami Tensei (1992)

In the same sense that the central conceits for Chaos are established in this first game, so too are they established for Law. Law tends to refer to a general ideology where the establishment of order is prioritized above the pursuit of freedom, and is represented by God/YHVH, the angels, as well as the gods of Law. As before, there is much more to Law than this basic description alone, but of note is that Law has an impeccably concerete ideological goal: the establishment of the Thousand Year Kingdom (or Millennium Kingdom in newer translations).

What is the Thousand Year Kingdom? The name probably echoes part of the Bible, specifically the Book of Revelation where Jesus Christ reigns as the king of Israel and the world for a thousand years with Satan imprisoned in Hell. After a thousand years, Satan is released from Hell to wage one last battle against God before ultimately being defeated, and then the final judgement of souls occurs, before a new Jerusalem is established where the souls of the faithful and the righteous live with God and Jesus in peace and without suffering and sin. Some Christians, long after the Book of Revelation was written, have imagined the kingdom of the millennium as an earthly reality of the future, and some modern Christians have envisioned a literal kingdom ruled by Jesus for a thousand years in a future end of days. In Shin Megami Tensei, the Thousand Year Kingdom is the goal of the followers of the Order of Messiah (who we will explore in more depth later), who believe that it means a paradise on Earth where those who live there will live in peace and security and have their needs met by God. There is, however, a catch: this paradise is not for everyone. Only a select few of the world’s population will be allowed to live in the Thousand Year Kingdom when it is established. Those who are not part of that select few will not be allowed to live there, and will be kept out, presumably left to die (Gotou’s interpretation is that those who don’t get admitted into the Kingdom get killed by the American army on God’s orders).

Already you may get the sense that this isn’t quite what Christian teaching has in mind, and if it is consistent with any trope of Christianity, it is doubtless that this would be Christian fundamentalism or extremism, which is broadly suited to an ideology that, we should remember, is very much intended to be seen as extreme within the game. The irony of Chaos being associated with a might makes right project is that the Thousand Year Kingdom is rather brutally elitist in a way that baseline Christianity tends not to be. The Thousand Year Kingdom is a societal order where people are selected into it based on faith in God (or, perhaps, allegiance to Law) being sufficient enough to be allowed to live in it, which in practice establishes that only those who are willing to agree with the movement’s goals have the right to live in the new world to come. We can see a bowlderization of Christian teaching, in that Christianity usually stresses that God’s salvation is open to everyone willing to accept it. Of course, heaven in Christian doctrine is ultimately contingent on belief in God insofar as that acceptance is necessary for the salvation of the soul, but with the Thousand Year Kingdom this is then extrapolated into a kind of worldly stratification, namely in the sense of stratification between those “fortunate” enough to enter the Kingdom, and those who are left to die. Of course, this says nothing about life within the Kingdom. Insofar as the basic idea is a regime of order overseen by God, and given the nature of God in the Shin Megami Tensei universe, we can assume that those who live in the Kingdom have to live strictly in accordance with God’s orders, wishes, and desires. Those who deviate from them are punished, presumably rather harshly (which could mean the sinner is either killed or expelled). We might also presume that the society of the Thousand Year Kingdom is rigidly hierarchical, with said hierarchy supported by the absolute word of God. In this sense, Christian teaching appears to be filtered through a kind of fascistic ethos, as it was in the case of the American dominionist movement, which is a far-right Christian fundamentalist movement aimed at establishing America as a Christian theocracy.

And speaking of Americans, the first major alignment choice in the game concerns a conflict between a man named Gotou on one side and the Americans on the other, and this early point in the game establishes a sense of foreignness in Law relative to the Japanese context. The main representative of the Law alignment here is a man named Thorman, the American ambassador to Japan who, like all Americans in the game, speaks terrible Japanese (or, in the English emulator translations terrible English). He wants to get rid of all the demons running around in Tokyo, and to do it his plan is launch a cluster of ICBMs towards Japan. This means America once again dropping nuclear bombs on Japan. You can choose to help Thorman by defeating Gotou and this pushes you towards the Law alignment, though whatever you do at all he sends “Thor’s Hammer” down upon Japan anyway and it will be too late to stop that. Of course, just before Tokyo gets destroyed Thorman eventually reveals that he is, in reality, the Norse god Thor (rather poorly disguised at that), who for some reason pledges his allegiance to the Judeo-Christian God and supports the Thousand Year Kingdom. Some fans believe that the character of Thorman was based on Harry Truman, the 33rd President of the United States who ordered the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is, of course, not true, as the developers have confirmed not only the basis in Thor but also that they did not know at the time that Harry Truman was the name of the President who bombed Japan, but the idea is understandable for multiple reasons. There is, first of all, the incidental fact of Thorman being an American official, then there is the simple fact of Thorman ordering nuclear weapons against Japan which lines up with Truman to a tee, but in a broader sense there is also his juxtaposition against Gotou, whose design is clearly based on Yukio Mishima. It does make sense in theory that, since Gotou was based on a real world historical figure, Thorman must have also been based on a real world historical figure, let alone a President of the United States.

It cannot be lost on the informed player what the presence of American soldiers in Japan means for the Japanese. It represents military occupation, such as the bases that remain in Okinawa to this day, or the domination imposed on the country through nuclear fire in a series of bombings that more or less amounted to a show of force. And here, the Americans come to Japan, once again bringing nuclear bombs, to “save Japan from demons” by destroying the country, a stock-in-trade American method of establishing peace and order as can be seen throughout the Middle East, and under the auspices of a form of apocalyptic fundamentalist religious sect dedicated to the Judeo-Christian God of Law. This God of Law is a god of exceptionalism, declaring himself to be the sole authority of the world, suppressing all who stand against him. Such has also been how America has engaged with much of the world since at least World War 2 with its proclivity of bombing other nations into submission while installing puppet regimes who will favour their interests, not to mention the previous colonial empires who marched into the third world with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. That the God of Law and American exceptionalism and imperialism join hands is not a coincidence, not just because of the inherent political connotations of American military presence in Japan but also because of ths historic marriage between religious exceptionalism and imperialism, which is further codified in a lot of conservative and nationalist ideologies.

The other thing to note about Thor’s presence is that Thor as a pre-Christian deity who nonetheless aligns with God would seem strange given Law’s ostensible alignment towards Judeo-Christian entities and concepts, though perhaps it makes more sense when the alignments are thought of as inclusive absolutes rather than just stand-ins for the Judeo-Christian conflict. Not only is Thor in the Law alignment but also, by the last stretch of the game, you also see Vishnu as a representative of the Law alignment, opposed to the Chaos-aligned Ravana and his son Indrajit, and he joins the party if you are Law-aligned and opposes you if you are not. Both Thor and Vishnu are of the Majin (Deity) clan, which typically consists of the major or head gods of their respective pantheons. In this game that includes the gods Odin and Indra, but around half of the clan is comprised of some very weird entries such as Loki (who should be a Chaos-aligned demon and is so for the rest of the series), Arahabaki (who may or may not have even been worshipped in Japan and for most later games is Chaos-aligned), and Fudo Myo-o (not as strange but as a wrathful deity he makes more sense as a Chaos-aligned Kishin or Fury). In the Sega CD version of the game we also see the gods Brahma, Baal, and Freyr. There is also the Megami clan, which features famous goddesses like Lakshmi, Sarasvati, Ame-no-Uzume, Kikuri-hime, and Kushinada-hime (though the latter two would end up becoming Chaos-aligned for the most part), and in the Sega CD version there’s also the Norn goddesses Urd, Verdandi, and Skuld. There’s also the gods Hanuman and Ganesha appearing in the Yoma clan, divine birds like Garuda and Yatagarasu in the Reichou/Avian clan, Sarutahiko in the Chirei/Jirae clan (which has since been Neutral for the rest of the series), and also a Jashin/Vile clan containing gods like Mishaguji, Tezcatlipoca, Orcus and (in the Sega CD version) Seth, as well as the monster Taotie, some of whom are chthonic gods and who definitely don’t seem like the kinds of gods who might be big fans of heaven. Indeed, for some reason Echidna, the snake monster who represents Chaos in Tokyo Destinyland, is in fact a Jashin/Vile and therefore actually Law-aligned (for her case being a Jaryuu/Drake would have made more sense). It is safe to assume that these gods are not here as part of the idea of returning to the religions of the gods of old, an idea that is seen more frequently in the Chaos alignment and never in the Law alignment. Rather, in the sense that Law is an inclusive absolute centered around order, these can be thought of as gods who gather gather with God and his angels as a pantheon of cosmic order, in opposition to the gods of chaos and freedom. Such an idea is actually one of the more interesting aspects of the original game, and sadly it is only repeated in a few future games, mostly spin-offs. It is still not clear to me why these pre-Christian deities would agree with the Messians and support the Thousand Year Kingdom, but they do seem to and thus appear to consider themselves servants of God, and such is the case that the Law Hero refers to Vishnu, a Hindu god, as “Master Vishnu” after you defeat him in the Neutral path. Also there’s robots. Machines are Law-aligned and ironically the Law Hero sends you to destroy them.

The main representatives of the Law alignment that you meet throughout the game are the Order of Messiah. You can recognize them by the fact that their members were white and blue robes, often with crosses (which are sometimes red, in line with traditional Christian symbolism, in which red represents the blood of Christ and can also denote the Holy Spirit), in contrast to the Gaians who prefer to wear red and black as well as the occasional S&M gear instead. Indeed, every conceivable connection to Christianity at least in aesthetics is present with the Messians. In the Messian healers, which you can’t access while Chaos-aligned, they give you items such as Rosarios (or Rosaries, as in probably those rosaries), as well as things like Angel Hair (which in this case probably isn’t meant to mean spaghetti), the most powerful Law-exclusive armor in the game is called Jesus armor, and wherever you encounter Messians as healers or angels as enemies, you see a space that looks like a church with a big cross at the center. You can also find a rare Law-aligned Fiend in the game called Pale Rider, based on one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who gives you the strongest Law-aligned weapon in the game, the Angel’s Scythe. The Messians encourage people to have faith in God throughout the post-apocalypse Tokyo and, in a world teeming with demons, offer security and order in exchange for obedience to the Order of Messiah and unquestioning faith in the God of the Messians. The main goals of the Messians include, as the name would suggest, the arrival of a Messiah who will lead their followers and bring salvation, and the construction of a Great Cathedral (or Basilica), which is supposed to facilitate the arrival of God from the heavens and herald the beginning of the Thousand Year Kingdom. However, once the Great Cathedral has been completed, the Gaians invade the lower half of the Cathedral, and afterwards God summons a flood, possibly at the behest of the Messians, which covers nearly all of Tokyo in water except the Cathedral and certainly meant death and destruction to almost anyone outside the Cathedral. This of course flagrantly violates the agreement God made with Noah to never again flood the world and I’m sure the Messians would have a devil of a time trying to rationalize getting God to do this, but then this surely a familiar enough problem with the Christian fundamentalists – along with their Jewish and Islamic counterparts – that the Messians obviously resemble. Also distinct from mainstream Christianity is that the Messians in the Great Cathedral talk about sacrificing animals to God, an idea that has more in common with the Judaism of the Old Testament than with Christianity as we know it. At least the Gaians, as much as they like to talk about power being everything, never talk about ritualistic sacrifice.

The Messians look at the devastation of Tokyo as essentially a test from God to see if the people of Tokyo have preserved their faith in him – a peculiar ordeal for a country where Christianity is a very marginal religion and is sometimes, to this day, still practiced mainly in secret by some Japanese Christians. After exiting the realm of Kongokai and returning to Tokyo 30 years into the future, one of the first things you see is an Auroravision screen displaying a sermon from one of the Messians who says that the destruction visited upon Tokyo in “the great war” was an ordeal sent by God to see mankind if humans could endure the destruction and not abandon their faith in God, stressing that only “those who have not forgotten their love for God” will be allowed to live in the Thousand Year Kingdom and that faith is of the utmost importance – indeed, “faith is everything”. Faith most certainly is central to Christianity to the point that it believes that it is impossible have knowledge without faith, but here the role of faith enters dimensions that are familiar less to mainstream religion and more to what we would call cults. In a Japanese context we need look no further than to Aum Shinrikyo, a syncretic pseudo-Buddhist cult that believed that the world was going to end in a nuclear apocalypse and only the believers of the cult would survive (by the time this game was released the cult was already notorious for their beliefs, their leader, and investigations into criminal activities before the infamous Tokyo subway attack that would occur in 1995). In a Western context, there’s no shortage of examples of wacky cults with similarly apocalyptic beliefs, and no shortage of evangelicals pointing to major world events as signs of the apocalypse and certain disasters as either a warning, a test, or even a punishment from God, not unlike medieval beliefs about the Black Death. Certain cultish iterations of “faith is everything” may also tap the form of something like “follow the plan”, and in a contemporary context this takes the form of QAnon, the right-wing conspiracy cult centered around the idea that Donald Trump is secretly arresting his political enemies and critics.

No messianic cult or religion would be complete without a Messiah, and true to their name the Messians seek out a Messiah to help bring about their Thousand Year Kingdom. At first they try to use the Heroine, who was reincarnated after dying to save the player just as the ICBMs (“Thor’s Hammer”) hit Tokyo, as their Messiah. But when the player enters her mind with the help of the Psychodiver and frees her from the demon Arachne, she leaves the Messians behind to go with the player instead. So when the Law Hero is killed by the Black Baron in Roppongi and his soul is freed by his defeat, an apparent messenger of God tells the player that his friend’s faith in God was strong enough to “save” his soul, and by the time the player reaches Shinagawa the Law Hero has reincarnated as a champion of the forces of Law and the Messiah of the Messians. Thus, after dying for his friends and also “for God”, he returns almost like Jesus as a Messiah. And this Messiah also gives somewhat more detail to the ideology of Law. As a staunch Messian, the reincarnated Law Hero makes it painfully clear that all those who oppose God and stand in his way are to be put to death, even including the player who was once his friend if you are not on the Law path. He opposes Neutrality on the grounds that he believes that humans are lost, weak, and ultimately worthless without God, humans who try to have power on their own become demonic, since power without God is inherently evil, and as a result the pursuit of balance between Law and Chaos is an illusion. On the Law path he proclaims that mankind has destroyed itself, but God has not forsaken them, and is saving manking through his mercy – no doubt the “mercy” of killing nearly all of Tokyo in a flood. Of course, all this has come a long way from a man whose primary motivation was to rescue his girlfriend and who talked about how if only the world could be saved with a prayer. In that latter sense there is a familiar religious belief that has since become the stepping stone for something much grander in scope.

The last thing about Law we can mention is its core representatives in the form of God and his angels. God, of course, doesn’t really say anything and doesn’t really make any appearance in the game other than you have some idea that he’s flooding the world later in the game, so the main representatives of God would be his angels. Obviously the player encounters multiple types of angel lifted from Christian angelology. Some of them, though, are not based on the orders, and are fought as bosses. The angel Haniel is represents Law at Shinagawa whereas Echidna represents Chaos at Tokyo Destinyland, and he oversees slave labour in the construction of the Cathedral. Another angel named Kazfiel can be fought in a side-quest at Tokyo Tower, where he tries to kill you for refusing to help the Messians. However, the real stars of the show in this case are the Four Archangels – Uriel, Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael – listed under the Daitenshi (or “Seraph”) clan. These angels are forthfright agents of the god of Law, and their primary goal is to cleanse the Great Cathedral of his enemies. They hope that a Law aligned player and Heroine will be a new Adam and Eve, signifying their desire for a new Garden of Eden in their Thousand Year Kingdom. Naturally, opposing them means you’re a heathen, deceived by demons, or a demon yourself in their eyes. These Archangels thus serve to complete the circle of the zealous order of Law, which stands at odds with chaotic freedom or indeed anything that opposes Law, in perfect contrast to the archetype of Lucifer. Then there’s the unnamed “messenger of God”, who you see at the end of Law path after defeating the Asura Lord. He tells you that that soul of the Law Hero is in heaven with God and that the player and the Heroine are now the Messiahs who will usher in a world of tranquility through the Thousand Year Kingdom. Insofar as these are all representatives of the God of Law the will they express is clear: a utopian kingdom where all confirms to the will of God, and thus is supposedly free of conflict and suffering.

Shin Megami Tensei II (1994)

The second game in the series presents a Tokyo ruled by the Messians, and a shift in the dynamic of Law and Chaos. After the protagonist of the previous game chooses Neutrality, humans apparently fail to uphold its tenets and choose Law, and so after a coup d’etat the Messians establish Tokyo Millennium, a new city upon the ruins of old Tokyo in which you may live only in the way that the Messians tell you to live. Law is defined centrally around YHVH, his angels, and their overall mythos, with Chaos defined largely around Lucifer and his devils.

Before we go any further let us establish just what the shift in conceptual emphasis within the conflict Law vs Chaos has meant for previously Law-aligned demons. The Majin/Deity clan is now Neutral, which means that Thor, who previously supported the God of Law and his Thousand Year Kingdom, now rejects Law in favour of Neutrality (and, judging from future games, seemingly never to return), and the same appears to be true for Vishnu (or at least his avatar Kalki who stands in for him). The Megami, Seijuu/Holy Beast, Yoma, Chirei, and Jaki clans have all also moved from Law to Neutrality, while the Ryuuou/Snake and Yama/Night clans have moved from Chaos to Neutrality. As a result it seems that there a lot more Neutral demons around and not so many Lawful demons. That said, the forces of Law are joined by a new clan of gods: the Amatsukami, base on the Japanese deities who were of the heavenly order of kami. Although they oppose YHVH for having most of them imprisoned in Makai, they are nonetheless Law-aligned in opposition to the Chaos-aligned Kunitsukami.

Anyways, the Messian-run city of Tokyo Millennium is the main setting for much of the game and it is essentially run as a dictatorship following their designs. Built atop the ruins of the Great Cathedral, the entire purpose of the city is to prepare for the coming of a Messiah who will save mankind and to realize the Thousand Year Kingdom and its goal of a world of eternal peace and order. Tokyo Millennium is controlled from the top by a senate of four elders, who are in reality the Four Archangels, though the public face of its leadership is a man referred to as the Centre Bishop, who as the name suggests oversees the Centre of Tokyo Millennium. Tokyo Millennium is divided into several sectors: there’s the Center, the exclusive central sector of Tokyo Milennium from which the rest of the city is tightly controlled, there’s Valhalla, the densely-populated leisure district, Holytown, the main religious center for the population, the Factory, which is the industrial centre for the city, and Arcadia, a virtual reality sector designed to simulate the future Thousand Year Kingdom. Tokyo Millennium also has its own news network, which reports whatever propaganda the Centre wants them to, and the Temple Knights serve as the police force of Tokyo Millennium.

Life is cruel in Tokyo Millennium, and the Messians who run it display a remarkable lack of scruples in doing so. In Valhalla, entry to the Centre is won through brutal gladiatorial contests that often end with the death of the loser. In the Factory area, people are imprisoned, brainwashed, and forced to work until they die. Arcadia’s virtual utopia is, in reality, a facility where people are bound to chairs and hooked up to computers, unable to move, slowly atrophying, and will die if Arcadia is destroyed. The Four Archangels who run Tokyo Millennium, well three of them anyway, are willing to use demons like Abaddon and Belphegor to either swallow up the entire sector Valhalla or enslave the workers in the Factory sector. In order to suppress dissent from one of the Messiahs, Zayin, the Centre threatens to cut off all air going to Holytown unless he returns there. In fact, once the time was right and the Centre was sure that the Thousand Year Kingdom was at hand, Tokyo Millennium would be eliminated. The Messians you fight in the game include, besides the kind of religious minions you’d expect from the last game, factory butchers with giant axes, crazy neophytes, men dressed like Leatherface and wielding chainsaws, knights double-wielding machine guns and flying on jet packs, and whatever the fuck these Gyrator guys are. The hallmarks of totalitarianism seem fairly evident, topped off with the knowledge that those who don’t follow the Messian religion are killed by the Temple Knights.

Law here sounds quite cruel even when compared to the last game, but even here there is room for some nuance, for you see not all of the forces of Law are happy with the way the Messians are running things. Zayin, comes to see the errors of Tokyo Millennium’s leadership and eventually raises rebellion against the Centre for betraying the ideals of the Thousand Year Kingdom. According to one of the Four Elders, who is in reality the archangel Gabriel, God himself is unhappy with the way Tokyo Millennium turned out, because apparently a society built on nothing but the domination of the many by the few isn’t what God wanted after all, despite the antics of the forces of Law in the previous game which took place decades before this game’s events. As time passed Tokyo Millennium became much more decadent and corrupt, as as such neither God nor the Messiah ever appeared in Tokyo Millennium and the Thousand Year Kingdom remained a distant dream, so three of the Archangels lost patience and, breaking with God’s command, decided to create an artificial human who they thought would be given a soul by God and be the Messiah, as well as other artificial humans who would be his companions.

But if what the Archangels did was the wrong way to bring about the Thousand Year Kingdom, what was the right way? It’s already established that artificial Messiahs weren’t part of the plan, but how about the fact that Valhalla’s whole purpose was to determine who was worthy to live in the Thousand Year Kingdom and weed out the rest? God didn’t seem to have a problem with the logic of this last time. Or what about the fact that Arcadia was essentially a test run for what is apparently going to be the Thousand Year Kingdom itself? Zayin, when he first takes the player to Eden, tells you Tokyo Millennium must not be destroyed because it protects the people from demons, so clearly Tokyo Millennium is still part of the plan…or so it would seem at first.

Eventually, towards the final stretch of the game, Zayin reveals that he is in fact Satan, who is not to be confused with Lucifer but is instead an angel of punishment and an instrument of God’s judgement against humans and demons alike. His plan, on God’s orders, is to activate the Megiddo Arc in order to carry off the chosen few to live in the Thousand Year Kingdom floating through space, while also destroying both Tokyo Millennium and the underworld with its laser weapon. Inside the Arc is a place called Eden, obviously named after the Garden of Eden from the Book of Genesis, where those who are chosen by God give up everything, including their knowledge, to live in a place where peace and freedom last forever and there are no demons, but also no freedom. In the Neutral path, Satan explains that God has abandoned Tokyo Millennium, that God never intended for the Messiah to appear in Tokyo Millennium, and that as long as humans had knowledge they would always give into temptation and stray from God, and so from his perspective the plans of the Messians and the Archangels were doomed from the beginning. In the Chaos path, Satan argues with Lucifer and states that the knowledge Lucifer brought is the cause of all the violence that has plagued humanity. In the Law path, the player joins forces with Zayin/Satan and Gabriel to carry out God’s plan, and thus the Thousand Year Kingdom happens in much the same way that Zayin had previously condemned: a select few are chosen to live in salvation while Tokyo Millennium is completely destroyed, along with all life. Everything happens according to God’s design until, out of nowhere, Satan suddenly decides to judge YHVH himself, after just moments ago having executed his plan to destroy everything with the Megiddo Arc. With YHVH defeated, Satan as his instrument crumbles to dust, but not before nominating the player as the Messiah and Hiroko as the Holy Mother, and the two thus strive create a Lawful utopia without YHVH. As much is this might seem like ultimately a happy ending for some, don’t forget that this all right after Satan and the Law-aligned player just finished committing genocide against everyone who didn’t get chosen by God to live in Eden, and Satan’s sudden opposition to YHVH for the sin of genocide seems perplexing and without basis considering he was quite happy to destroy all of humanity just before turning to fight YHVH for almost no reason.

Despite Satan saying in the Neutral path that the Thousand Year Kingdom was doomed from the start, the Thousand Year Kingdom was always the goal of the forces of Law in this game, just as it was in the last one. Whether it’s as it was envisioned by the Messians, by the Archangels, or by God himself (as well as Gabriel and Satan by extension), the end goal was always the same: to create a society inhabited only by those who are chosen by God, ruled in strict harmony with God’s direct rule, and everyone else is either killed or left to die. The disagreement among the angels is that, according to God, some of them are doing it wrong. In the same sense that Nikolai Bukharin talked about the aim of fascist revolutions being a “speedy reorganization of the bourgeois ranks”, God and the forces of Law, after three of the Four Archangels break his commands and even create a fake image of YHVH, embark upon a speedy reorganization of the Thousand Year Kingdom by changing who is responsible for bringing it about, replacing those who have the wrong idea with those who have the right idea of how to achieve essentially the same end. After defeating Lucifer on the Law path, you ascend with Satan to Eden, and watch as the Megiddo Arc destroys life on Earth with its lasers, thus killing everyone who didn’t make it to Eden. Then, after you and Satan defeat YHVH, the pyramid containing Eden is seen descending from space towards Earth, presumably to settle upon the remains of Earth, with the inhabitants of Eden thus being the only humans left on Earth, with you as their Messiah and therefore the spiritual leader of all mankind. It is unclear from that scene whether or not the idea is that the denizens of Eden go on to repopulate the world, but I suppose from a certain point of view God’s whole plan was to create living space for his chosen few. I don’t think I need to explain what the idea of “living space” created by genocide sounds like.

And on that note, let’s address one last thing about the Messians. Sometimes you see fans talk about how Law represents some vague ideas of egalitarianism, which would thus be opposed to the might-makes-right anarchy so frequently associated with Chaos. I’m sure this idea is extrapolated from later games, but for the last two games so, Shin Megami Tensei and Shin Megami Tensei II, it’s just not evident that the Messians or the forces of Law are such bastions of egalitarianism. Focusing on this game in particular, besides the elitism already inherent in the logic of “only a chosen few will be allowed to live in my utopia” as seems to be the idea presented by the Messians and YHVH, the Tokyo Millennium run by the Messians is a pretty obviously stratified society. There is a clear hierarchy between elite ruling classes who control every aspect of society, and many underclasses who exist beneath them, while only a handful of individuals from the underclasses are ever given access to the Centre. It is unclear what things are like in Eden, though nothing suggests that it’s essentially hyper-egalitarian commune or something like that, unless maybe. And what about the Mutants, the humans who were transformed by the nuclear radiation that hit Tokyo? They were cast out of Tokyo Millennium by the Messians and forced to go underground. And as far as I can tell, no Mutants ever made it to Eden, or at least we don’t see them anywhere (and, if there were any in Eden, the game would no doubt tell you that they’re Mutants like they do for all the Mutants in the game). So do the Mutants somehow not figure anywhere in this “equality” attributed to the forces of Law? Or is it only equality for a certain set of people? Either way, the “equality” sometimes attributed to Law does not seem evident here.

Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne (2003/2005)

Talking about Law and Chaos in this game cam seem very difficult, since there really isn’t a traditional system of Law and Chaos here in plot or in gameplay. There are three Reasons, ideologies formed by the last surviving humans in the world, to be presented to Kagutsuchi, an avatar of the Great Will, who will then lend the power of creation to whoever fights their way to the top of his tower to present their Reason to him. You, playing as the Demi-Fiend, are unable to present your own Reason due to being half-demon, and so the player is expected by Kagutsuchi to choose one Reason over the others, but there are also three endings that see you rejecting all of them.

Ostensibly, the main analogue for the Law alignment would be the Reason of Shijima, as propounded by Hikawa. The main goal of Shijima is to create a world of stillness and silence, where there is no individuality, no selfhood, no passion, and everyone is in complete harmony with the universe, supposedly equal to God. In a sense, there are plenty of Law hallmarks here, particularly the emphasis on order and harmony over individuality and freedom. But, if this is the Law alignment, why do the minions of Shijima include fallen angels, incubuses, and demon lords, and why is its demon sponsor Ahriman, the demonic adversary of Ahura Mazda? We even see Surt, a Chaos-aligned demon and previously one of the four generals of Chaos in the original game, under the service of the Assembly of Nihilo, which the organization that Hikawa forms to gather the power needed to summon Ahriman. What would he be doing in what is ostensibly the Reasom of Law? And what would the bearer of Law be doing as a member of the Cult of Gaia, albeit as an apparent heretic? But then again I suppose the question can be inverted: what is a member of the Cult of Gaia doing in the Law alignment and talking about how God is going to help him create a new world?

Not to mention, as I have already established in the previous article, concerning Chaos, Yosuga, the Reason of Chiaki, by the same token does not fit into the old dynamic either, because even though its core concept is a might makes right utopia and this is often (though like I said not always) associated with Chaos, might is predicated on beauty and this idea is not presented under the auspice of freedom but instead a vision of perfect order, which inevitably the angels flock to as their new Thousand Year Kingdom of beauty. Indeed, the angels seem to support Yosuga at least in part because of its valorization of hierarchy in principle, an idea that makes no sense as a precept of Chaos because part of its whole point is to abolish authority and is also necessarily anti-egalitarian, which is why they despise the Manikins who try to create a Reason based on equality – truly befitting of that reactionary axiom first pronounced by Nicolas Gomez Davila: “Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal.” In any case, the whole point of all of the Reasons is to establish what is suposed to be a new world of perfect order, just thst what you see is a competition of visions of a perfect order. Even Musubi, the arguably most chaotic Reason of them all, sets out in its isolationist vision a perfect harmony of isolated bubbles, whose mutual non-interference and alienation are the basis of said harmony.

Hikawa himself blends conceits of Law and Chaos similarly to the way Yosuga does, but not in the same form. Hikawa was a member of the Cult of Gaia, so in theory he should be considered part of the forces of Chaos. But his ambitions are almost completely different from the rest of the Gaians, and from the forces of Chaos. He was branded a heretic by the Cult of Gaia, which must seem strange because the Gaians tended to be inclusive and syncretic in their approach to spiritual doctrines. But whereas the Gaians simply wanted to bring about harmony with the demons or “ancient gods” in an anarchic society and for them Chaos meant a state of natural freedom that involved this co-existence, Hikawa wanted to activate the Conception in order to invite God’s presence via Kagutsuchi so that he could grant Hikawa to create a new world, his desired world of silence and stillness. In a sense, not unlike how Yosuga seeks a Thousand Year Kingdom whose chosen few are selected in a might makes right contest of strength, Hikawa sought to gain God’s power to realize a Lawful outcome through the primordial chaos of the Vortex World.

Ultimately, all three of the Reasons exist as functions of the process by which God hopes to create a new world out of the Vortex World. Although the world of this game is intended to be modelled around Chaos, and in many aspects it is, in the end you see Kagutsuchi right at the center of it, and his whole purpose as an avatar of the Great Will is to create a new world through the annihilation of the current world. Thus, distinguishing the Reasons between Law and Chaos is ultimately futile, since all of them are functions of the Great Will. The Great Will sets into a motion a conflict that simulates that of Law and Chaos but is in reality a contest between three avenues of realizing the goal of the Great Will. And so, ironically for a world constructed with Chaos in mind in contrast to the previous game built around the triumph of Law, all three Reasons can be considered functionaries of Law insofar as all of them serve God.

As such, you can’t really talk about the Law alignment in this game without talking about the Great Will. The Great Will is the teleological presence in the universe that consciously drives all life in a constant cycle of death and rebirth towards perfection. The Great Will keeps perpetuating the same process in countless other worlds and universes as is presently taking place in this game’s world, and it will not stop until it creates a cosmos devoid of sin and free will. Kagutsuchi is but one avatar of this Great Will, as is presumably YHVH who proclaims that the Great Will will restore him again and again after being defeated. God, of course, seems very interested in making sure that the Demi-Fiend acts in accordance with his will, and when the Demi-Fiend is about to reach the very depths of the Amala Labyrinth, he sends the angel Metatron, who the demons refer to as “the voice of the universe”, to deter and eventually destoy the Demi-Fiend, though of course he fails. The leitmotif accompanying the “noble voice” that is Metatron affixes him to the canon of Law, and as that sound plays Metatron warns you about the wrath of the Absolute One (or presumably “God’s vengeance”, which is to strike “this cursed land”). Kagutsuchi wants the Demi-Fiend to inaugurate a new world under the designs of whoever’s Reason prevails, and does not tolerate the Demi-Fiend either using the power of creation to restore the world to its pre-Conception state (which he says would be nothing but a world of suffering) or joining with Lucifer in stopping that whole cycle entirely. This is the design of the Great Will, and when the Demi-Fiend descends further into the Amala Labyrinth, Metatron, as champion of the forces of Law, is sent by the Great Will to stop you. Thus the forces of Law have as their goal the manifestation of a perfect world through the power of creation and a ruthless cycle of death and rebirth orchestrated by God.

The Messians who appear in the Second Kalpa of the Amala Labyrinth, after being killed along with Gaians by Hikawa, say much of the same things as they would do in the previous two games, about how it’s important to pray to God more than anything because he will save you. One Messian states that everything happens according to God’s will and warns you to “leave this dreaded place and fulfill the part which you were originally intended for”. It is obvious that the Messians would be found on the side of God whenever they appear, but in this context the Messians can be seen as the advocates of a peculiar form of philosophical determinism that stretches out into ethical conduct: in other words, because everything is determined by God, you should not try to do anything that isn’t fated for you, or goes against the “purpose” that has been given to you by God. We should note for posterity at this point that, as minor a role the Messians play in this game is, this is almost the last appearance the Order of Messiah makes in any Shin Megami Tensei game. After Shin Megami Tensei: IMAGINE, the Messians have so far never returned in any future games, and it’s not clear if they will return for Shin Megami Tensei V.

All taken together, in this game Law appears as multi-dimensional in a way that it often isn’t in other games. There is here not one path of Law but multiple, many roads that lead to God. God calls upon the survivors of the Conception to present their own vision of a perfect world under his auspices, so that his cycle of creation can continue, and so that he might have a chance to create his own desired world, without sin, suffering, or freedom. Whether it is a kingdom that flourishes in the stillness of time, a kingdom rooted in solitude, or even a kingdom which rejoices in conflict, Kagutsuchi approves of it because all of them are avenues by which the Great Will realizes its goals, and all of them represent thus represent their own Thousand Year Kingdoms of order achieved through the destruction of the world and mankind. And all of this, of course, is fate, more specifically the fate that is the will of Amala, of the Great Will, and, whereas Chaos via the True Demon path represents the rejection of fate and the power of the Absolute One in the name of free will, Law here represents the acceptance of this fate and consequently moving through the will of God to realize his creation.

Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha vs King Abaddon (2008)

In this game, the dynamic of Law and Chaos is profoundly scaled down compared to previous games. In this game they are not so much ideologies as much as ways of life, though in this sense they may function as inclusive absolutes. Simply put, it’s less about creating a new world under the auspice of broad metaphysical forces and instead about how Raidou Kuzunoha, the titular character, lives his life, and what his values are.

Whereas Chaos seems to denote living your life for yourself and acting out of your own principles and desires, Law denotes acting in accordance primarily out of duty towards others, in spite of your own desires or personal principles, and “living in harmony with the world”. The Law-aligned Raidou does what he does because he is a Devil Summoner, sworn by oath to the Yatagarasu, and so his actions stem from the role he assumes rather than his personal identity and drives, and so he abjures his desires under the auspice of a life lived for the sake of duty – perhaps even for duty’s sake. “Living in harmony with the world” in this game’s context probably doesn’t have the same connotations as the idea of harmony with nature that you sometimes see from the forces of Chaos in other games, particularly the Gaians, and instead probably refers to the idea of conformity to society as a principle virtue, which the angels of God seem to support on the grounds that it is how the world’s order is maintained, and that makes sense because few things are more important to Law than order.

Although it is more or less connected to a general attitude regarding individual way of life, the subject of divine will is still very much connected to Law in this game. During the fight with Mikaboshi, a Law-aligned Raidou will be greeted with disdain over his service to the Yatagarasu, whereas a Neutral or Chaos-aligned Raidou is not given the same treatment. Yatagarasu, in the Raidou games, is very simply the divine will, represented by an unnamed messenger referred to as the Herald of Yatagarasu. In Japanese myth, Yatagarasu is the name of a sacred crow whose appearance signified the presence of the will of heaven, and it is believed that this crow guided Jimnu, the mythological (as in, not actually historical) first emperor of Japan in his campaign to conquer the Yamato province. Sometimes the Yatagarasu crow is associated with the goddess Amaterasu, who is also the patron goddess of the Yamato imperial dynasty and divine ancestor of the Imperial House of Japan, in that perhaps this divine will signified by the Yatagarasu crow is the will of Amaterasu. But in this game, there’s even more context added by the fact that apparently Kazuma Kaneko treated Yatagarasu as a messenger of YHVH. So is Amaterasu YHVH? Is Raidou a servant of YHVH, and does a Chaos-aligned Raidou entail rebellion against YHVH? Make of this little detail whatever you want.

Another illustration of the theme of Law in relation to divine will is illustrated in an alignment question found in the final dungeon. It posits that you are granted divine protection by a deity and become a sort of saviour figure, but the deity is just using you, you eventually learn the truth, and so you must decide if you would simply accept being a tool of the deity to keep his protection and keep being a saviour figure and the price of consciously surrendering your free will, or renounce the deity, thereby casting off his protection and going back to being a normal human while also being considered a traitor. The obvious Law answer is to continue serving the deity and accepting his protection, even knowing that the god was simply using you, in order to continue being a saviour figure, whereas the obvious Chaos answer is to renounce the deity because he used you even if that meant becoming a pariah. In this sense, a central and much broader theme to Law is the ideal of willing self-sacrifice, or at least the voluntary surrender of personal freedom, in the name of service to a god, or at least to the community in some regards.

This self-sacrificial ethos has echoes of the Christian elevation of martyrdom, in which willingly giving up your life for God is the highest of virtues, to the point that even suffering from persecution is attains a kind of nobility, which is why Christians have gone to great lengths to exaggerate the extent of their persecutions, and still irrationally claim persecution for themselves to this day. It is also most pronounced in the game’s main representative of the Law alignment: Akane Narita. Akane is a woman who, although patient and reserved, constantly frets over the actions of her impulsive brother Dahn. She’s also the daughter of a man named Akijiro Tsukigata, the leader of the Tsukigata clan who serve as the leaders of a village that is terrorized by beings known as the Tento Lords. In this village, the Tento Lords occasionally receive daughters of the Tsukigata Clan as sacrificial “brides” so that they may reproduce, since the Tento Lords apparently do not have females of their own, and Akane wants to go through with it on the grounds that this arrangement will ensure the safety of her community. The Tsukigata Clan dislike this arrangement, but they know if they stop holding Marriage Rituals for the Tento Lords, their village will be brought to ruin and the clan will lose status, and since Akane knows this, she agrees to the ritual. According to Cole Lastie’s article on GameSpite, this is meant to be a difficult dilemma for Japanese audiences, whose value for the group would have presented conflict between the needs or rather wants of the collective and the suffering of the individual.

The Law ending for this game sees the player join forces with Akane for the final stretch of the game. After the defeat of Shinado, who assumed the mantle of King Abaddon, Akane sets out to rebuild Tsukigata Village as head of the Tsukigata Clan, considering the effort a tribute to the fallen who sacrificed themselves. Here it all comes back to duty, and it’s not obvious that Akane does what she does because she wants to do it, however noble the effort may be. Presumably, though, the Tento Lords are no longer an issue, so perhaps the Marriage Ritual no longer becomes necessary in the end? The issue doesn’t seem to be resolved, and as such remains open. Uniquely, though perhaps not suprisingly, Law also appears to be the least rewarding path in the game. Completing a Chaos playthrough rewards you with extra missions in the New Game Plus mode in which you can test your mettle with Lucifer who can become your ally, and a Neutral playthrough can allow you to summon Masakado after completing all other quests, but the only thing you get from a Law playthrough is the notice of having beaten the game.

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (2009)

In the would-be-fourth installment of Shin Megami Tensei, the dynamic of Law and Chaos is contextualized in terms of two forces seeking to take control of the mysterious multi-dimensional realm called the Schwarzvelt in order to remake the world. The Schwarzvelt one day appears in the sky over Antarctica, and as it expands demons start pouring into the Earth, killing humans as they enter. It seems to be a response to broad civilization decay – the prominence of greed, war, decadence, corruption, consumerism, and especially neglect for the environment, all of this provoke the emergence of the Schwarzvelt as a kind of antibody by which to cleanse the world by removing human civilization. The forces of Law and Chaos seek to direct its energies towards their own respective goals by activating the Cosmic Eggs.

The Law alignment, in this context, represents not only its typical ethos of order as the primary value even at the expense of freedom, but also the idea that all of humanity is to be governed by absolute spirit, in total harmony with God, and the idea of uniting all life on earth under God through an absolute, total community. The general ethos of Law in this game also seems to come down to what side you take on the question of humanity’s role in the world, and by that I mean in particular that the Law-aligned player would view both humans and demons as being in the wrong. This attitude is summarized by the perspective of the angels given by Azrael. His opinion is that a country created by humans leads only to decay and if a country is created by demons it leads only to ruin, the obvious conclusion from his perspective being that only God can create a country.

The main representative of the Law alignment in this game is Zelenin, a Russian scientist who was originally part of the crew of the Elve, one of the ships that were sent to investigate the Schwarzvelt, before joining the Red Sprite, after the rest of her crew were captured and mostly killed by the demons of Sector Bootes. She is professional, intelligent, compassionate, level-headed, though apparently somewhat cold as well. She also seems fairly optimistic, and somewhat naive, about humanity, in that she appears to believe the problems of the world can be solved if everyone is convinced to observe order. Unlike Jimenez, she has little trouble getting along with her human crewmates, but is deeply afraid of demons. This is no doubt because of her capture, and that of the crew, by the demons at Bootes. The only demons she trusts are the angels, including one angel in particular named Mastema (who we will explore soon enough), who helped her escape from Bootes and later grants her the protection of an angel. As the game progresses, Zelenin’s friendship with Mastema grows further and eventually she agrees to become an angel herself.

After the mercenary crew called Jack’s Squad is nearly massacred by Jimenez, after they were about to kill him, they return for a revenge attack against the Red Sprite, led by Ryan who had already killed some of the Red Sprite crew and also declared his plans to create an “ultimate demon army”. Zelenin had previously stopped Jimenez from killing Ryan as he was about to surrender, but after this incident crew comes to the opinion that Zelenin was wrong to spare him and that they should kill Ryan and his squad, and Zelenin is the only one of the crew to object. Thus, in search of an alternative to violence, she once again turns to Mastema, who transforms her into an angel and gives her the power to pacify humans through angelic hymns. Her hymn causes Jack’s Squad to surrender before firing a single shot, and the crew that previously doubted Zelenin then praises her for her success. However, the crew also sees her powers as dangerous: while it can stop humans from killing each other, it also destroys their free will, and after Jack’s Squad hears the song they become capable only of taking orders from Zelenin. Later, a decision is to be made. In Sector Grus, the demons who were freed as a result of the surrender of Jack’s Squad propose that they would open the way to Maya if the crew kills Jack’s Squad in revenge for holding them captive. Zelenin refuses to cooperate with the demons, and if you side with her you instead see Zelenin use her hymn to destroy said demons, who unlike humans experience pain upon hearing the hymn, and force your into the part of Sector Grus where Maya dwells.

Another major representative of Law in this game is Mastema, who also broadly serves as the main repesentative of the angels. Mastema is an angel found specifically within the Book of Jubilees, in which he is the angel of persecution who carries out punishments and tests the faith of humans on God’s behalf, and in other apocrypha he basically takes responsibility for many cruel and irrational behaviours that are otherwise canonically attributed to God (such as getting Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, randomly trying to kill Moses, and the tenth plague of Egypt). As tempter and punisher of Man in the employ of God, Mastema could be said to fill the role of the Satan in the Hebrew Bible. In this game, Mastema assists the crew in their mission to investigate the Schwarzvelt, though this ultimately with the intent of having them pursue the path of Law, which he which hopes will restore his apparently diminished position within the angelic hierarchy. Mastema here also expresses some beliefs that are more or less expressive of what the Law alignment represents. When asked about the violence between crew members caused by the Delphinus Parasite, he views such carnage as simply the fate of those who let the Holy Spirit guide them. He believes that technology, as well as demons, as a source of deception for humans, and views any knowledge “that is unclean in the sight of the Lord” as a vice (just like Satan said in the second game). He views human trust as inherently unreliable because of its dependence on “the freedom of the heart” – in other words, free will – which is a problem because the human heart is susceptible to errors, which means that trust is easily betrayed under hardship. And when you fight him in the Chaos path, he expresses a belief that humans are pawns that exist simply to be guided, or by his terms manipulated, by higher beings (including himself). But Mastema and the angels are not totally closed to the potential of humans, as Mastema acknowledges that humans have shown themselves capable of coping with distrust, and an angel in Grus tells you that humans will become “wrapped in light” if their spirit is pure.

Other angelic forces are also found representing Law in various EX Missions. In Sector Eridanus you can meet the angels Aniel (formerly known as Haniel) and Kazfiel, who say they have come to reclaim a world of order and challenge you in combat trials to see if you are worthy of slaying Mother Harlot in a Law-exclusive EX Mission. In another Law-exclusive EX Mission, you see the angels sacrificing themselves to summon Seraph, who then we you on a quest to defeat Mara so that you can declare you a saint. Metatron returns, disguised as a human, in a New Game Plus EX Mission which sees him attempt to restore God. Yes, God himself also appears in this game once again…er, well, sort of. In this mission you fight Demiurge, a part of God who seems to have been reduced to a false god, not to mention the hardest boss in the whole game. After defeating him, Metatron will attempt to fuse with Demiurge in order to restore the “holy spirit of our creator”, and the player is given a choice: a goddess tells him to remove his visor so that she can seal Metatron and the Demiurge away; if the player refuses to do this, the fusion is a success and Demiurge reappears before the player. Demiurge tells the player that his actions have allowed him to regain power which will allow him to restore his apparent true form, before telling him that the “true enemy” is “the spirit of the Earth itself”, implores the player to “drive those wicked heretics back below the ground”, and offers to join the player’s party. The main conflict, in this context, is between God and the mother goddesses, with, according to Metatron, God having protected humans from their wrath so long as they worshipped him, and as humans stopped worshipping God his protection faded, and so the mother goddesses seized the chance to seek revenge against Man and somehow subdue the power of God. Thus the conflict of Law versus Chaos in this game is framed as a conflict between God and the goddesses of the earth respectively. In fact, if you spare Mother Harlot in that other EX Mission, she tells you that the Mothers, from whom she originates (no doubt based a supposed connected between the Whore of Babylon and Ishtar – who, ironically, is Law-aligned in this game) represent the souls of those who were cursed or hated by God and that she herself is the mother of those scorned by God, thus she and the Mothers represent Chaos (even though she herself is Neutral, as a Fiend).

It is also worth noting that the supporters of God’s will in this game do not consist solely of angels. Of the two Lawful guardians of the Cosmic Eggs, at least on the Law and Chaos paths, one of them is Yatagarasu, the sun crow of Japanese myth. In Sector Bootes, where you find him, the goddess Pallas Athena chastises non-Lawful players and warns them that they will receive “heavenly judgement” for opposing “the god of light and order”, while telling Law-aligned players that they hope to hear Zelenin’s song again. In Sector Delphinus, the tree god Kukunochi tells Lawful players that he was guided by Mastema, while the goddess Scathach warns non-Lawful players that death awaits them for “having spat upon God’s open palm”. In Sector Horologium, Ganesha talks about trembling when he considers the march of the forces of Chaos. This might sound strange in theory for the same reasons as it does in the first game: why indeed would these pre-Christian polytheistic gods line up to side with the Judeo-Christian God? As strange as that sounds, it does show that, once again, Law is treated as more of an inclusive absolute. Yes, God is at the center of it, but there are these other gods as well who subordinate themselves to God’s cause, probably out of a belief in the order that they think God represents, in contrast of course to the gods of Chaos.

Towards the final stretch of the game, after defeating Maya, we can see what the world of Law looks like, and it’s here we come to another major representative of Law: the Three Wise Men. These mysterious and unnamed beings appears to the protagonist in a series of visions over the course of the game, usually remarking about the futility of the player’s mission. Mem Aleph seems to believe that the Wise Men have some sort of obligation to her, but it’s never explained what that obligation is. When they take over Arthur, the Red Sprite’s AI, they show a vision of a previous global civilization ruled by a different species, who just like humans were unaware of their corruption and negligence and so were consumed by the Schwarzvelt in obliviousness. They then present what they believe to be the solution to a cycle of ruin: a world where all of mankind, and indeed all life, is unified by a single spirit, which is comprised of “the spiritually enlightened” who are chosen to rule the new world. All things are guided by the power of the song wielded by Zelenin and the angels, all desire is eliminated, there is no conflict, but thus is all because now humans exist only to sing the praises of God forever and can’t do anything else.

All of that is, of course, nothing unusual for the Law alignment, in fact some would say it sort of looks like the Law path of the second game and Shijima from the third out together. What is strange, however, is that even the forces of Law talk about the strong prospering and the weak crumbling. In the vision they present after the defeat of Maya, the Three Wise Men proclaim that the “spiritually enlightened whose wills are strong” will be chosen to live in their desired new world, while “the fallen humans whose wills are weak” will be destroyed. It’s obviously not the same thing as the familiar contest of might makes right selection that takes place in this game’s Chaos world, but what we do see is that there is a Social Darwinist selection for the Law world, or at least the logic seems familiar to Social Darwinism, but instead of being predicated on strength or force it is predicated on will. Though, it is just as possible that this but another way of saying that only whose who believe in God, or rather follow the song of Zelenin, will be allowed to live in the world of Law, while everyone else is eliminated. In that sense, the world of Law in this game is essentially just the Thousand Year Kingdom from previous games. In any case, yet again we see problems in positioning Law as essentially egalitarianism versus the “meritocracy” of Chaos, although I suppose there is equality if only in the sense that everyone is equally a vassal of God, and everyone who would not be equally pious would be eliminated.

Anyway, after the Three Wise Men show up, Zelenin decides that they are correct and leaves the Red Sprite, taking with her some of the crew who decide they want to be “saved” and so follow her. After this, a re-animated Commander Gore appears and the alignment lock moment of the game arrives. If you are Law-aligned by this point, Gore declares that you are “the true threat to humanity”, which is very interesting when you remember that on the Chaos path he calls you a demon wearing the uniform of the Schwarzvelt Investigation Team. After defeating Gore in the name of Law, Zelenin returns to the Red Sprite and sings her song, causing the crew to become practically mindless zealots who exist mostly to obey Zelenin, the Three Wise Men, and you, and praise God’s name. After gathering the Cosmic Eggs and defeating Mem Aleph, we see the world of Law take shape. God’s power is released onto the Earth and selects the believers to live and spread his word, while annihiliating the non-believers and “those who clung to their greed”. This power also apparently destroyed the Schwarzvelt, even though just moments ago the player saw the Schwarzvelt cover the Earth with the power of the Cosmic Eggs albeit under the influence of the powers of Law. The humans who are chosen to live in the new world stand atop skyscrapers that serve as altars through which to commune with God, Zelenin in her Pillar form stands at the center of this huge valley of skyscrapers which seems to cover the new world and trasmits her song to the whole world, and everyone is singing the name and praises of God, seemingly forever.

Immediately my mind turns to the Rapture as believed by some evangelical Christians, but of course it happens very differently. The Rapture is supposed to take place at the end of the world, those chosen to dwell in heaven will be sent to heaven and everyone else lives on Earth, awaiting subjugation by the forces of Satan and eventually destruction, whereas the world of Law begins after the end of the world, with the creation of a new one, but the two scenarios have in common the salvation of the believers and the destruction of the godless. This of course is not uncommon for the dominionist branches of Christianity who, just. Then there is the nature of the harmonious rule being implemented. All beings are directed by a singular presence with which they are theoretically one, and which stands central as the channel through which God’s will is made manifest. A human standing as the absolute regent uniting the people on behalf of God, that idea is central to the Catholic Church in whom the Pontifex Maximus, formerly the High Priest of the pre-Christian Roman religion, becomes what is now popularly known as the Pope. The regimentation of the masses under one will, or spirit, together with the elimination of those who will not submit themselves to it, is the basic of totalitarianism, itself a hallmark of fascism. In fact, if you read some of the literature written by people who considered thenselves fascists and wanted to construct fascism, you’ll find that they treat their concept of the state, or total state, as a spiritual and metaphysical project, a Geist as it were, not just a political one.

And on that note, as I was contemplating and writing this article and revisting Strange Journey I could not help but think back to the design of Zelenin’s Pillar form. It shows Zelenin (who also has horns, for some reason) affixed to what is clearly intended to resemble a cross but without actually directly representing Christianity. But he cross itself actually looks a lot like a different symbol: the Algiz rune. You can see that two spokes of the cross where the hands are nailed to both point diagonally upwards rather than span in straight lines, which leads to a shape in line with that of the Algiz rune, or a least a fairly jaunty version thereof as you can see in the image I used here. The Algiz rune was originally just a letter of the Futhark runic alphabet, but it was one many pre-Christian symbols that were appropriated by the Nazis, who then folded them into their own ideological context. Thus the Algiz rune was turned into what the Nazis called the Lebensrune, or “rune of life”, which was used as a generic life symbol in medical establishments, birth and death certificates, and gravesites (that last practice was apparently still in use long after the fall of Nazi Germany). The Algiz rune is not inherently a fascist symbol, but the Lebensrune is to this day utilized by volkisch nationalists and fascists as a symbol of their ideology. I don’t think Kazuma Kaneko intended for any resemblance, but the irony is surely not lost. And to add to that, when I notice the horns on Pillar Zelenin, I can’t help thinking that they look an awful lot like the helmet horns that appear in Odin’s artwork for most of the series (and Odin, you’ll remember, used to be Law-aligned). It would be very ironic to see a marriage of contexts between volkisch Odinism and apocalyptic Christianity, though since there’s no evidence of intent of design this is all very probably a coincidence. Still, it dovetails fairly well with the way that the world of Law operates.

Shin Megami Tensei IV (2013)

At last the fourth instalment of the series, this game presents a dynamic of Law and Chaos that departs from the previous game while broadly taking together aspects of the first and second games. Law here is defined by an ideology familiar to both the first and second game and is represented again chiefly by the angels, though with an added theme of focusing on preservation, and Chaos has a more or less expanded form of the ideology found in the first game and represented primarily by the forces of Lucifer instead of the wrathful mother goddesses, with the added theme of focusing on upheaval. However, just as was the case for Chaos, this is only the surface, and there are more and deeper contours to be explored.

Once again, the setting is instructive for this inquiry, for the context of Law it is worth focusing on one part in particular first: the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado. Established atop the firmament created by the back of a giant and stony Masakado, this is a kingdom ruled by a faction representing the forces of Law. Founded by King Aquila, in reality a man named Akira from before the events of the game, Mikado is a feudal society based loosely around those that existed in medieval Europe, consisting of a class of peasants, merchants, and labourers, called Casaulries, who are dominated by the elite class of nobles, knights (or rather “Samurai”), and aristocrats, as well as the clerical leadership. The Samurai, notably, tend to often wear blue and white uniforms, as does Sister Gabby, the right-hand woman of the Monastery of Mikado Castle, and this is the same colour-coding that designates the Order of Messiah. The Messians don’t appear in this game, but then they probably don’t need to, since the Mikadoans tend to have broadly similar beliefs to the Messians and even fulifll the same function. The idea of a society ran by a religious order based in some hardcore (at least quasi-) Judeo-Christian belief system represented by clerical leadership, and as we’ll soon explore secretly ruled by Archangels, actually seems like a medieval version of Tokyo Millennium from the second game. Tokyo, being beneath the surface of Mikado in this case, would almost fill the role of Makai or the Underworld in the second game, just that it’s not actually the realm of the demons – that would be the Expanse, as is explained in the game. Of course, this setup can be seen as just one of a litany of call-backs to previous games found within this game. In addition, Mikadu is a deeply authoritarian and regressive society from the outset. Class stratification is permanent in Mikadoan society, meaning that most people who are born into the ruling or working class tend to stay there for their entire lives, and the only possibility social mobility for Casualries consists of passing the Gauntlet Rite and becoming a Samurai, which would mean becoming a Luxuror. Class divisions are deep-seated, masked by religious order and harmony, and Casualries come to resent the Luxurors to the point that some of them gather together to read books referred to as Literature, which supposedly encourage skepticism of Mikoadoan society, with the side-effect that readers sometimes become demons. Class rule is brutally enforced by the Samurai, who kill dissenters on the orders of the clergy, and public executions are considered national holidays. It’s worth noting briefly that, in the Apocalypse version of the game, the angels are shown to offer the denizens of Tokyo a chance to live in Mikado, if they choose to “abandon civilization and become His servants”, so living in Mikado entails commitment to a patently regressed social order.

Very early in the game, you are introduced to the Law and Chaos heroes of the game via a series of dreams. For the Chaos alignment there is Walter, and for the Law alignment there is Jonathan. In the visions where you see Jonathan, you find yourself in a desert with nothing in it except the head of a statue (likely the statue of King Aquila). Jonathan tells you that he was waiting and praying for your arrival, that his future is with the player, and that you and him are going to create “a world where the peace we know today lasts forever”. This clearly establishes Jonathan as the main representative of the Law alignment, and this is further supported by his personality. Jonathan is typically a meek and cautious personality who tends to have faith in the orders he’s given and trusts authority. Similarly to Zelenin, he abhors the use of violence to end a person’s suffering, but unlike Zelenin he’s not above going along with missions of murder if it means securing the order of the kingdom. He is also very interested in “preserving the world”, in keeping things as they are, and in the last vision before going to Naraku, Jonathan tells you that the player shouldn’t let suspicion (of the status quo) “fester into idle fear”, questioning whether the player would “destroy what our forebears have wrought over a passing delusion”, and tells the player that they must not “go to the underground” because the Samurai are charged with keeping the peace of today for the children of tomorrow. All of this sets the tone for much of what else Jonathan has to say for the rest of the game, and establishes what is, as you’ll see later on, easily the most absurd degree of conservatism you’ll see in any Law-aligned character. And “conservative” is what best describes Jonathan’s ideals to a tee. His whole raison d’etre is to preserve the status quo, which means to preserve hierarchy and order, no matter how unjust. Furthermore, just like his Chaos-aligned rival Walter, there is a class component to Jonathan’s personality and ideals. Unlike Walter and the protagonist, Jonathan was born into the Luxuror class before becoming a Samurai (who are already Luxurors, even if they were previously Casualries). Radically the changing the system, getting rid of the unjust hierarchy in Mikado, would threaten the position of the Luxurors, Jonathan’s class. Although it’s said he believes that everyone should be treated equally regardless of class, you would never find him willing to change the system to make that possible, and he doesn’t seem to actually get along with dyed-in-the-wool Casualries like Walter.

Once you descend to Tokyo, you find that the city is divided between two factions: the Ashura-kai and the Ring of Gaea. The closest thing to a Law faction in Tokyo is the Ashura-kai (or Hachibu Rengou Ashura-kai, as is their full name), a yakuza organization based in Roppongi Hills which controls most of Tokyo. This no doubt has something to do with the fact that, in a Tokyo now filled with predatory demons, the Ashura-kai offer protection and maintain order in exchange for extracting money (and, as you’ll see, Red Pills, unbeknownst to them) from the citizenry. In this context, alignment shifts toward Law typically involve assisting the Ashura-kai in some way. For example, there’s the quest to remove Kuebiko from Shinjuku, which is given to you by a member of the Ashura-kai during the course of the main story. Whereas for Kuebiko we can see long-standing grievances about how he lived in Shinjuku for thousands of years, the Ashura-kai’s business is simple: they want the land of Shinjuku and they want Kuebiko off of it. They try to offer Kuebiko another residence and even try to bribe him with Red Pills, which he refuses. Defeating him, of course, pushes you ever so slightly towards Law, in contrast to the substantial push towards Chaos you get for refusing to fight him. Before that, there’s also the quest to kill all Corpses, which culminates in a fight with a Hunter who was giving out Red Pills to humans, and ultimately ingests one himself, in order to overthrow the Ashura-kai and end their control of Tokyo by becoming demons. The Hunter becomes a demon named Dullahan and defeating the demon gives you a choice to either finish it off or spare its life. Killing Dullahan brings you towards Law while sparing her brings you towards Chaos, the former probably based on killing Dullahan meaning you defend the status quo of Tokyo and the latter probably based on sparing Dullahan meaning you sympathize with the cause of the rebels.

Much later in the game, the party is introduced to Tayama, the boss of the Ashura-kai, who has one of the Samurai held hostage in order to coax the party to do him a favour or two, by which I mean a set of assassination missions. Tayama, for his part, has his own vision of society, his “utopia” as it were. He ostensibly wants Tokyo to be a place where humans and demons live together in harmony under his leadership through the distribution of Red Pills, because humans and demons are stuck together with seemingly no way of escaping the borders of Tokyo. On paper, this can seem to be a reasonable proposal, but it isn’t long before the foundation of Tayama’s plan is revealed. The party soon encounters a facility called Reverse Hills, located beneath Midtown. There they find humans strapped to chairs and locked in rooms where they piss and shit in buckets and have parts of their brain extracted in order to create the Red Pills. So, in order to stop predatory demons from eating humans, they abduct humans take a small part of human brain for the demons to eat instead. What a world of difference. As if that wasn’t enough, apparently the Ashura-kai have been thinking of taking in children as seed beds. Tayama, of course, finds out that they’ve been in Reverse Hills, is confronted by the party, and justifies everything the party saw on the grounds that, when the firmament appeared and Tokyo was sealed, humans began fighting each other over food and electricity and started killing each other and destroying their surroundings, and as a result thought only of themselves and became almost exactly like demons. He views himself as acting in the best interests of humans, and everyone who has a problem with that as not having those same interests in mind, though also as noble sacrifices. Easily we see the conceit of the Platonic autocrat, right down to the use of “noble lies” to support his goals.

All of this brings us back to the Law alignment, Jonathan, and the overriding focus on preservation. When fighting Tenkai at Midtown, the player is asked about the ideals they possess. When Tenkai askes you what kind of Tokyo you want to see, the ideal Tokyo of the Law alignment is “a peaceful city of order”, and when Tenkai asks what you plan to do when the truth about the Ashura-kai is discovered, the Lawful answer is “to sustain it, thereby preserving order”. Jonathan, of course, endorses this answer, arguing that “many have built their lives atop the world as we know it now” and that “none have the right to steal that away”. Considering that the truth of the Ashura-kai that Tenkai is talking about is quite literally a place where people who don’t like the Ashura-kai, and even children, are harvested for pieces of their brain to turn into Red Pills, you would think that Jonathan would think more carefully about that point. In fact, these revelations barely seem to have much impact on Jonathan at all. All he can tell Walter is that he loathes Tayama as well, but that killing Yuriko (a.k.a. Lilith, the Black Samurai) is more important. Being on the side of preservation is also central to Lawful alignment shifts in the Passage of Ethics in a previous story quest. In this passage, you answer questions by taking either the left door or the right door, the left door corresponding to Chaos and the right door corresponding to Law. In the first question, you’re the the ruler of a country gathering the population for a game, and one of the attendees is taller than all of the others. You are asked whether you would exclude the tall attendee for the sake of fairness, or include the tall attendee regardless of his height. The Law answer is to exclude the tall attendee for the sake of fairness, which Jonathan justifies by saying that it would be “unsporting” to the shorter players for the heights to be uneven. Keep in mind, he’s not saying it would be unfair, or unequal, just “unsporting”, just to dispel certain ideas about Lawful egalitarianism again. Anyways, the second question has you be the chief of a village that has lived the same way for 1,000 years until one day a man comes bringing some unspecified revolutionary technology, which would improve the lives of the villagers at the cost of abandoning their continuous way of life. You are asked if you would expel the visitor to preserve your village’s way of life, or welcome the visitor in order to adopt his technological innovation. The Law answer to this question is to expel the visitor, which Jonathan justifies by saying that it is not worth “upending the stability of a culture and causing confusion amongst the people”. The third and final question places you before the love of your life, lying in a hospital bed, alive but unconscious, with no visible hope of regaining consciousness and all efforts exhausted. You are whether you would stay beside this person and keep them alive despite no sign of recovery, or stop all treatment and let natural death take its course. Staying beside the person for the rest of their life is officially the Law answer, but Jonathan can’t seem to decide on an answer himself.

All in all, though, we can see that Jonathan prefers preservation of the status quo to an absurd degree. It’s to a point where, during the conversation with Lilith, he can only seem to respond to what Lilith says in terms of kneejerk contradictions borne less of a consideration of what she says, and more from the knowledge that Lilith is the Black Samurai (who is therefore an actual demon) and from there his unquestioned commitment to killing her. For instance, he asserts that humanity “has no true role” just because Lilith and Walter talk about a true role for humans. After the party meets the Four Archangels at Shene Deuqe (they themselves are very important for Law), Jonathan uncritically decides to obey their instruction to continue the quest to kill the Black Samurai, describes Walter’s newfound sense of doubt as simply “lamentable”, insists that the duty of Samurai is to “protect today, so that the people can see tomorrow, as they always have”, and, most strikingly, asserts that neither Tokyo nor the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado must change. This is what I mean by the most absurd form of conservatism in any Law-aligned character. At least Zayin rebelled against Tokyo Millennium because he thought they were doing the Thousand Year Kingdom the wrong way. It would be easy enough to imagine why Jonathan would want Mikado to stay the same as it is even with its brutal class hierarchy, but why Tokyo? Tokyo at this point is a society literally controlled by the yakuza, whose leader also seems to be implied to be a pedophile by NPCs by the way, and whose members ensured that three of the Four Archangels remained imprisoned in Kagome Tower until you showed up, there’s poison floors and deserts everywhere, as well as domains that are designed to trap and kill humans who wonder inside, there’s no daylight and therefore very little produce, certainly no agriculture, people and demons kill each other on a regular basis and the humans turn that into a sport via the Coliseum, and countless other horrible things. Of all places, you’d think Jonathan would want Tokyo to change more than anything, maybe even “save” its citizens by converting them all to Mikadoans and then lifting them up to the Firmament where they live instead. But that’s just not entertained in the slightest, since that would actually be a radical change for Tokyo’s status quo, it would be upending what the people of Tokyo “built” according to Jonathan, and apparently that’s more important than anything for him.

And so we come to the major alignment shift towards either Law or Chaos in the game. Do you side with Jonathan and go to Tsukiji Hongwanji to slay Lilith, or do you side with Walter to go and kill Tayama instead at Camp Ichigaya? For Law, the answer is to side with Jonathan. But, when you approach Jonathan at the entrance to Naraku, before you actually choose to go with him, he gives another monologue, this time telling you about the errors of creating a new world – needless to say a complete shift from every other SMT game in which the forces of Law wanted nothing but to create a new world in the name of God. He questions what the result of creating a new world would be, asking if you believe that a new leader could create a new world for the people without experience, and insists that “a state of chaos” would result from you “rebuilding everything from bedrock”. He believes that Lilith is laughing while seeing the party panic after tempting them with words, and actually warns against being swayed by “the concept of reform”. After this, you move on over to Tsukiji Hongwanji, headquarters of the Ring of Gaea, where it seems that some members of the Ashura-kai were already sent by Tayama to try and fight Lilith and the Gaians, but failed. Once the party makes their way to Lilith, Jonathan pronounces “the regrets of those you beguiled into abandoning their humanity” and the “grief” caused by her apparently interfering with his friendship with Walter, once again edifying his sole motivation for killing Lilith. All he has to say to Lilith when she tries to explain her position mid-battle is that she’s spouting blasphemy and that everything she says about Man’s demonic half is just an excuse that demons “trot out” so that they are “suffered to live”. After Lilith is defeated and Jonathan figures out that Walter is trying to open a gate to the Expanse, the party immediately heads off to Camp Ichigaya, where they find that Walter has already powered his way through the Ashura-kai’s forces. By the time they find the Yamato Perpetual Reactor, Tayama is dead and Walter has the remote that activates the Reactor and is on the verge of pressing the button. When Walter explains his plan to summon demons through the Reactor in order to create a situation where the prevailing structures of law and authority collapse, Jonathan is horrified, but unfortunately he has little to say before the button is pressed.

After all that, we come to the alternate versions of Tokyo, which you encounter thanks to a cabal of mysterious beings called The White, who want to return the universe to nothing. They try to get the player to support their cause by showing you what they believe to be the futility of the war between Law and Chaos, and to do that they show you two outcomes of a previous incarnation of the player either siding with Law or siding with Chaos. For the purposes of this article, our focus is on the Law outcome, which is referred to as Blasted Tokyo. Blasted Tokyo is the outcome of a timeline in which the previous incarnation of the protagonist chose to side with the angels and didn’t raise the firmament above Tokyo, which meant the city was blasted by nuclear weapons as part of God’s Wrath. All of Tokyo is now a desert covered in massive craters, and even other nations have been struck with ICBMs meaning that much of the world is now like this too, and only a few survivors live an impossible existence where they’re constantly threatened by poisonous air emitted by a machine called Pluto. Another few of the population, sealed in Cocoons, were lifted up into the sky before all of this happened, “chosen” to start a new humanity after the destruction of the old. The survivors are led at least officially by a man named Kiyoharu, who is covered in cross marks and has gone mad with the hope that God will save him and his people. Despite his faith in God, he was one of the people not chosen to be “saved”, but nonetheless he kept praying in hopes that God would listen. Of course, Kiyoharu’s weakening sanity means that, although he is officially the leader of the survivors, much of his actual decisions are made and implemented by his right-hand man, a man named Akira.

Akira, just like Kiyoharu and indeed the other survivors, is a man who believes in God, but was not chosen by him to be “saved”. What this means is that he, at least at first, accepts resignation to the fate that God has given the people of Tokyo, and is patient for the moment when they too will eventually be saved – just not to the same insane degree as Kiyoharu. It’s probably not for nothing that a version of the Law theme from the first game plays in the shelter. He sends you on a mission to destroy Pluto the Tormentor, a machine responsible for spreading poison into the air. Pluto has his own castle somewhere in the godforsaken desert of Blasted Tokyo, which is guarded by tiny robot versions of him, copies that serve as grunts who fight on his behalf. Pluto himself tells you, as you fight him, that he is a “tool of the Lord”, suggesting that he was created by God and placed in Blasted Tokyo for the purpose of poisoning those who were not “the Lord’s chosen” to death. This troubles Jonathan, but only at first. He doesn’t think much about it afterwards. Only Walter, although he too thinks little of it, bothers to consider that perhaps God’s will might be malevolent. After defeating Pluto, naturally Kiyoharu and the other survivors are elated at the return of fresh air, and Akira gives you the remote to the Yamato Perpetual Reactor. But as he does that, Akira expresses a desire to change the way things are in Blasted Tokyo.

Jonathan warns Akira that opening the gate to the Expanse would mean Blasted Tokyo having more demons come in, but Akira says that he is prepared for this. He says that some people used to promote the idea that demons are the embodiment of our desires and that humans should live in harmony with them. Before Jonathan can point out that this is exactly what Yuriko/Lilith said, a version of the Chaos theme from the second game plays in the background as Akira declares his understanding that the world needs passion rather than words or ceremony, and that if demons come into Tokyo he will take control of them and put them to use. Surprsingly, Jonathan praises his plan as “bold”, and expresses his view that Akira, rather than Kiyoharu, should lead the survivors. Akira also says that he plans to rebuild Tokyo and, in honour of the party, call the name city the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado, thus he would be re-enacting the real timeline in which Akira founded a kingdom atop the ruins of Tokyo. What’s curious is that, even though this is presented as a shift towards Chaos, Walter has nothing to say, and he doesn’t even present any visible agreement, or indeed any reaction of any kind, to Akira’s views that demons are embodiments of desire and humans should co-exist with them, even though that’s exactly what Walter has come to believe, and neither does Jonathan seem to present any meaningful skepticism or opposition in the way that Walter would later do for the Akira of Infernal Tokyo when starts talking about making a Tokyo where everyone is equal. But although it’s implied that Akira here is making a path towards Chaos, it might just be that, for Akira, the demons are the means upon which the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado, and from there a new order, is to be built.

Later, in a downloadable Challenge Quest, the player can return to Blasted Tokyo to find Akira and the rest of the survivors running from a being named Ancient of Days, which refers to itself as an avatar of God, and using the recently conquered Pluto Castle as shelter from his wrath. Akira explains that he and the survivors tried to create a new nation that resolved to “venture up to the world above”, only for Ancient of Days to suddenly appear and begin burning all cities in the land, seemingly intent on destroying everyone who wasn’t killed off after Pluto was destroyed. Powerless, and with his people on the verge of extinction, Akira once again calls upon the player to assist him and save the survivors of Blasted Tokyo. When you face Ancient of Days as he besieges Pluto Castle, he introduces himself as a “part of the Lord” who serves as his messenger, and as “the one who casts many beasts into the burning fire”. He states that his mission is to destroy humanity as it exists on Earth and replace it with a new humanity guided by God, thus he is here to destroy the last of the survivors of Blasted Tokyo. He charges mankind as a wicked race that violates “the dispensation of the universe”. We are in no way certain about what that means, though we can probably assume it involves the destruction of mankind in some way, possibly under the auspicies of “purification”. Perhaps the forces of Law, in this context, seek to “purify” the cosmos by creating a new human race to replace a humanity that they deem to be beyond redemption. In the middle of the fight, Kiyoharu wonders in and sees Ancient of Days, believing him to be God come to save the survivors and the answer to his prayers. However, Kiyoharu soon realizes that Ancient of Days is here to destroy mankind, and falls into despair as he realizes that his rival Kenji was right and the last 25 years of prayer were for nothing.

And now, we can move on to the other main representatives of the Law alignment: the Four Archangels, or the Four Heralds as they are referred to in this game. For most of the game you only see one, Gabriel, who takes the form of Sister Gabby. Then, after the public execution of the Black Samurai, Gabby sends the party to Kagome Tower to liberate the other three archangels, held prisoner by demons with the help of the Ashura-kai. After they are rescued, and after the party discovers Reverse Hills, the party is summoned to Shene Duque by Gabby in order for them to meet the new rulers of the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado: none other than Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel. According to Gabriel, the humans living in Mikado became warped, while its leadership manipulates them and trumpets their authority while taking God’s name in vain, and so the Four Heralds have “cleansed the land of those found wanting”, which could seen as a large-scale purge of the leadership, and elimination of those were found reading the subversive Literature. The Heralds also have no plans to brook the residents of Tokyo within Mikado. When Isabeau tries to ask them about two Tokyoites named Fujiwara and Skins, who talked about going up to Mikado to live away from the demons, Gabriel explains that the people of Tokyo are “tainted souls” who are not chosen by God, and are consequently forbidden from entering Mikado. Anyone from Tokyo who tries to enter Mikado will be eliminated. Thus, the Thousand Year Kingdom is once again the goal of the angels.

Almost the same thing that takes place in the second game is taking place here. The Four Heralds have embarked upon a swift re-organization of the hierarchy of the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado. To signify this, every trace of its former leadership is destroyed. Most notably, the statue of King Aquila that you see in the beginning of the game is now gone in the new Mikado. The Samurai are ordered to stomp on effigies of the Black Samurai (who by this point was already executed) to prove their loyalty to Mikado, or lack of loyalty to the Black Samurai; those who don’t are executed. In addition to that, the people of Mikado are now even more controlled by the new leadership than they were under the old leadership. Before the return of the Four Heralds, reading Literature (books that apparently cause people to question the way Mikado is run, and occasionally become demons) was, although officially forbidden, is implied to have been fairly widespread among the Casualries in Mikado. After the Heralds take over, people who previously enjoyed reading Literature not only lose interest but also somehow actually believe that they’ve never read any books in their entire lives. These seem to be the extent of the changes to Mikado. All of this very much follows the formula of classical fascism, with the leadership of the existing system rapidly and brutally re-organized in order to preserve its foundations, accompanied by totalitarian control of thought and action. Strasserism in particular brings together the formula of the rapid re-organization of the bourgeoisie (the ruling class, in this case of Germany) with a distinct emphasis on feudal organization via guilds. We may also speak of both the old and new phases of Mikado as representing an idea known as Synarchism, an ideology which was created by Alexandre Saint-Yves to be the polar opposite of anarchism and which advocates for a harmonious society built on hierarchy and the erasure of social conflict, not to mention certain idealized views of medieval society, that is presided over by a secret society (in this case, the hidden rule of the Four Heralds). And, despite the implication in Infernal Tokyo that belief in equality represents the Law alignment, it’s not clear what actual equality there is in the new Mikado, other than maybe in the sense that everyone is equally subservient to the Four Heralds. Uriel even talks about the Mikadoans as being a chosen race for God’s sake, while the Heralds in general view the humans in Tokyo as “Filth” needing to be eliminated. Supposedly, according to the Apocalypse version, the caste system was abolished, but you still see class divisions between the Luxurors and the Casualries, and supposedly the Monastery holds less power, though that’s mostly just because the Four Heralds take over and assume direct rule.

A Law-exclusive Challenge Quest has the player facing a demon named Azazel, spotted in Kiccigiorgi Forest, and also gives you a good idea of what the angels think about freedom. Azazel is basically taking the place of the Black Samurai from earlier in the game, spreading knowledge in the hopes of getting people to question the leadership of Mikado while also, according to him, making them “greater than angels”. After you defeat Azazel, Gabby says that even though it is true that knowledge will set people free, that freedom also causes suffering, and also adds that freedom does not necessarily lead to salvation. Freedom, then, is less important than living life under the guidance of God, and that is Gabby’s justification for suppressing any knowledge that goes against the leadership of Mikado or leads to people questioning God’s will.

If you tell the White that instead of destroying the cosmos you plan to preserve the status quo, and don’t end up Neutral, you become locked into the Law path for the final stretch of the game. At that point, you arrive in their Monochrome Forest and are greeted by Jonathan, who tells you that he made the same choice as you, and also by Gabriel, who refers to you as “warriors of light”. After defeating the White, the Monochrome Forest disappears and you return to Shene Deque, where you might the other Heralds again. Shene Duque is now the new Mikado Castle, “the eye that watches over the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado” – in other words, the new center of government in Mikado. Michael explains that the angels have “purified every last Filth in the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado”, which sort of means that they’ve purged the country of anyone who either they regard as corrupt or whose belief in God has proven insufficient for them. Meanwhile, the gate to the Expanse has been opened in Tokyo, Tayama is dead, and Raphael laments that order has been lost. The angels have sealed Naraku in response, thus blocking out any entrance to Mikado from the outside, but Uriel says that “the Filth”, meaning the people of Tokyo, will still try to enter Mikado again. Thus, the Four Heralds have decided that Tokyo must be annihilated in order to prevent “Filth” from entering Mikado. Jonathan is, at first, horrified at the prospect of completely destroying Tokyo and thereby killing all of its inhabitants, but Gabriel explains that Tokyo is infested with demons its people are “possessed by “knowledge””, and thus only by destroying Tokyo may they be purified. To that end their plan is to use the Yamato Perpetual Reactor as a “Great Abaddon” to “swallow up Tokyo”, just like the Archangels did to Valhalla in the second game.

In addition to all of this, Uriel reports that Lucifer has resurrected in Tokyo. Since Lucifer would pose a significant threat to the plans of the angels, they decide upon a plan to match his power: by having the Four Heralds fuse with a human chosen by God, the power of “God’s chariot”, believed to exceed that of Lucifer, would be summoned. This, however, means death for any human who agrees to fuse with them. Jonathan accepts “martyrdom” (dying to fuse with the Four Heralds), and goes on a monologue about the selfishness of humans and demons and about how he wants to drive away everyone’s fear and doubt to create a world where peace lasts forever. When the fusion happens, Jonathan re-emerges as Merkabah, “the Lord’s chariot”. The name Merkabah is a Hebrew word that literally means “chariot”, and seems to refer to a chariot of heavenly beings that appears in a vision in the Book of Ezekiel. Here Merkabah declares that “Filth” and doubts must be cleansed from the world, and that Armageddon has begun between Mikado and Tokyo. And true to that effect, Merkabah proves to be utterly ruthless towards former comrades like Isabeau, for whom the only justification he needed to eliminate her was her obsession with manga. After the Law-aligned player kills her, Merkabah has the gall to use her death at your hands as an example of the “victims” that will pile up if Tokyo is left untouched. You must wonder if, if Tokyo isn’t annihiliated, you and Merkabah will just keep killing more people and grandstand over their corpses until Tokyo is saved somehow. After defeating Lucifer, Merkabah declares that it is time for “Great Abaddon” to swallow all of Tokyo, including the player and Merkabah himself because both of them have encountered “Filth” and been stained with their blood – thus, by the standards set by the Four Heralds, they have been incontaminated by the time they spent in Tokyo. Before you say anything Merkabah presses the button of the remote activating the Yamato Perpetual Reaction, destroying all of Tokyo along with himself and the player, and afterwards Jonathan shows you a vision of the protagonist being remembered as a Messiah who somehow brought peace to Mikado. Nobody has desires, at least that contradict either God or his angels, supposedly nobody fights each other any more, and with Tokyo completely annihilated and the rest of the world having already been destroyed before the events of the game, the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado becomes the sole civilization left on Earth, and it is like a fascistic form of the utopian Nestorian kingdom of old.

If you fight Merkabah on the Chaos path, he chides you as a “pitiful son of man who sold his soul to demons”, condemns the forces of Chaos for “mistakenly believing chaos is an expression of free will”, champions “a new millennium of order” (again sounding a lot like the Thousand Year Kingdom there), and in general just insults you in all sorts of grandiose ways. As the fight drags on Merkabah remains confident that your defeat is simply the natural order of things. When Merkabah is defeated on the Chaos path, he expresses bafflement at how humans and demons struggle to deviate from what he sees as God’s order, supposedly followed by all of nature otherwise, and then you hear Jonathan’s voice, what’s left of him after fusing with the Four Heralds, asking in fear what it is the player desires. If you fight Merkabah on the Neutral path, you first hear Jonathan address the party and in the process explaining his belief system a little more. He argues to the party that demons are born from human suffering, that humans are weak and need faith founded on an absolute that can banish their despair, that this absolute is God, and that God wanted humans to become extensions of his order so that they could be free of anxiety. He then asks why the Neutral party can’t see that, only to argue that they don’t see his worldview because they are humans “of common stock” (his Luxuror class prejudice seems not to have left him after all). For the high crime of Neutrality, Merkabah declares that salvation is no longer open to the party and that God has withdrawn his mercy for them forever. Whereas he denounces the Chaos player for devoting himself to “unclean lusts” and casting aside order and even refers to the Chaos player as a demon, he chides the Neutral player as believing in nothing while waging a battle too severe for a human. When Merkabah is defeated in the Neutral path, he warns that humans are not strong enough to live without God, meaning that those who yearn for the angels will inevitably return, and when that time comes, so will the angels.

There’s one final element to consider regarding the forces of Law: Mastema. He returns in this game, and he’s about as shady and dubious as he was in the previous game. However, he also seems to be in a strange position where he appears to see himself as fulfilling the will of God in his own way. You first meet him at the top of Midtown, where he at first appears hostile to the party, only to call his own bluff and introduce himself as a messenger of “the powers that be from the kingdom of light”. His business in Midtown is to work with the Ashura-kai in order to protect the production of Red Pills, which he rationalizes on the grounds that, without the Red Pills, order will collapse in Tokyo. Despite this, he allows the party to access Reverse Hills, presumably as part of him fulfilling God’s will. In a series of downloadable Challenge Quests, it’s revealed that Mastema was the one responsible for three of the Four Heralds being imprisoned in Kagome Tower, and that he did it because he believed that the Four Heralds had abandoned God’s will by intervening in the governance of Mikado. According to Mastema, the Four Heralds were originally only supposed to assist the establishment of Mikado, and then leave humans to their own devices, but they eventually began taking over with the ultimate goal of wiping out humans under the auspices of protecting them from demons. His goal for Tokyo seems to be a city where the humans are its rulers, albeit in a way that still follows God’s will. You can also fight Mastema, but only in a Law-exclusive Challenge Quest in which Gabriel (who refers to him as “The Great Raven”) sends you to defeat him because they consider him a threat.

All-in-all, Law in this game appears to consist of a brutal quest to purify the human race by killing nearly all of it, as is the remit of the Thousand Year Kingdom, and also the mysterious and unexplored prerogative of “the dispensation of the universe”. The conceits of the Law alignment are more or less consistent with previous games, and if anything appear to have been expanded significantly in scope. Law is here defined not only by an obsession with preservation but also an obsession with purification. The Thousand Year Kingdom is to be brought about through the annihilation of all undesirables, and mankind is to be purified through dispensation. The regressive nature of Mikado society presents a mixture of the utopian idea of Prester John presiding over a kingdom free of strife with not only dominionist Christian conceits but also, on some level, Wahhabist Islam, both of the latter presenting a vision of a religious society in which any expression of free will that conflicts with God’s will, at least according to the remit of the doctrine, is seen as a threat to human salvation. Thus, the world of order and the world of purity are inseparable goals.

Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux (2017)

The last entry for this post, the Redux edition of Strange Journey presents a very different take on the Law and Chaos dynamic by means of a new set of endings in addition to the three original endings. These New endings are alternate versions of the Law, Neutral, and Chaos endings that are made accessible by completing an optional dungeon known as the Womb of Grief and facing a new character named Alex, who somehow travelled back in time to interfere with the mission of the Schwarzvelt Investigation Team in order to stop the player from begetting a terrible future into which she is born. The exact content of that future depends on the alignment chosen by the player, but for our purposes, the focus will be on the Chaos alignment.

Most of the game’s story happens exactly as it did in the original except for when Alex shows up at certain intervals, and that means the Law path happens exactly as it did in the original game until just after the fight with Mem Aleph, if you complete the Womb of Grief. At that point, Alex reappears to try and convince you and Zelenin one last time that you’re about to make a mistake. Alex and George explain to you and Zelenin that they came to prevent the party from creating a hell in the name of god of law. Zelenin is initially taken aback by that statement, on the grounds that no kingdom created by God could be hell. But Alex explains that, although what Zelenin talks about sounds nice to her, and George explains that the world Zelenin will create results in the division of humanity between two groups: those who her song successfully imprinted ceaseless praise for God in, and those who the song had no effect on, who are soon disposed of. Zelenin initially dismisses this as something that cannot be helped, and even as George expalins that it regards the lives and emotional needs of humans, Zelenin is initially adamant that it is the only way to save humans from extinction. After Zelenin further argues the need for selection, Alex points out that the angels massacred those who the song did not affect, and questions Zelenin on if those people were “evil”. Alex explains that she and the others who weren’t affected had no choice but to fight desperately to avoid being slaughtered, and states that if this is what awaits humanity than extinction is much better. Zelenin is pained to learn from Alex that a massacre takes place in her future world, and is forced to consider the possibility of giving humans who reject her song the freedom to live. This is where the turning point begins.

If the player agrees with Alex, Zelenin comes to terms with the need to save even Alex and others like her, on whom the song has no effect. At first, however, she still insists that there is no other way, on the grounds that “the Lord’s guidance” is the only way to bring peace to humanity. Alex states that she will never be convinced that she deserves to be forsaken or forced to live in fear of the angels, and George says that even if “order” is required it should mean people have to die for it. Zelenin begrudignly says that she does not condone this, but still asserts that Man is imprudent and that constant resentment and fighting leaves no other option for salvation. Then Alex figures that Zelenin is motivated by her hatred of fighting, prompting yet another monologue by Zelenin about how if people could just get along then the world would be saved. Zelenin laments that this is impossible because fighting is written into human DNA, to which Alex retorts that Zelenin can erase hostility with that song, and implores to make her own version of order instead of God’s version, and to make an order that at least means she and others like her have freedom. Zelenin, quite naturally, objects that what Alex asks would defy God’s will, since the song is supposed to be a form of deliverance carried forth by a messenger of God, but Alex retorts that she was denied that deliverance, and so was everyone she met. but insists that Zelenin can save them, and wants her to give her the freedom to live instead of absolute order. Zelenin comes to terms with this in terms of reckoning with a life that she alone can save, and resolves to save Alex, and now confidently asserts that she will create an order in which people may be free to live, even if it defies the will of God. She even resolves to become order itself. With this resolve, a new timeline forms and Alex disappears into the new future, though not before giving you a fruit and her mother’s ring.

Here the difference between the old and the new Law paths is characterized by the role of God, which is honestly the most stark break from tradition you can find. In the New Chaos path, the shift comes from the abandoning of one established conceit in favour of another, focusing on anarchic co-existence with demons instead of a might makes right society. But in the New Law path, we see the rejection of the literal core grounding of the Law path. For essentially the entire SMT series, God as a concept was the anchor of the Law alignment, aligning with Law meant accepting the premise that human life needs God to survive and fulfill itself, to the point that the forces of Law in nearly all games refuse to accept the idea of a world without God’s rule. Even pre-Christian gods aligned with Law in the games are insistent on this point. Now, though, we see a Law path in which God himself is rejected in favour of Zelenin, a human, serving as the embodiment of order itself – thus Zelenin, instead of God, would be the absolute ruler of a new world. This is not even a pivot towards the idea of “fulfilling the Lord’s will in my own way” as Mastema put it in the fourth game. Instead it is the idea that you will create order in your own way, without God, and not only that you will create an order that supposedly involves the preservation of freedom. At the outset, at least, this actually sounds more like a Neutral path in the traditional sense than a Law path, both because of the rejection of God and because it actually tries to ideologically balance the axes of order and freedom, whereas Law traditionally prioritizes order as the dominant axe. On the other hand, though, it does more or less continue off of the precedent by the second game, in which Satan, after unquestioning carrying out YHVH’s will for essentially the entire game, turns his judgement on YHVH and leaves the Thousand Year Kingdom to the protagonist and Hiroko. But when Lousia Ferre describes Zelenin’s vision as “a world without demons or mandates from the god of law” determined instead by human hands, which Zelenin agrees is what her new vision is, that is Neutral to a god-damned tee! It is Law without God, but it almost seems like Law without Law. At that point, what’s next? Chaos without demons?

Anyway, after all that, Demeter appears to congratulate the party for retreiving the last fruit, thereby completing the fifth Cosmic Egg, which she offers to the Three Spirits, otherwise known as the Three Wise Men. Demeter, then, is another new representative of Law for this version of the game, but she does not quite represent the New Law path that Zelenin, but rather the “old” Law path represented by the Three Wise Men. She is also one of the main players in the Womb of Grief side-dungeon, in which she has you collect the pieces of the fifth Cosmic Egg, as her “Harvest”. Her alignment with Law is established clearly enough towards the end of the game, whether you take the New routes or not. In fact, if you reject Alex’s pleas to change the future, which causes the fruit to rot, Demeter is merely disappointed but supports Zelenin anyway, because in the end the “old” Law path is essentially the same as what Demeter wants, whereas in the “old” Neutral and Chaos paths she angrily curses humanity and hopes that the player and his allies die horrible deaths. In any case, she asserts that the Three Spirits have regained their divinity and await the player and Zelenin for their efforts.

All of this, including Zelenin’s resolve to create her own order, amuses Louisa Ferre, but it shocks Mastema, who is alarmed at the return of Three Spirits. Louisa explains to Zelenin that she was to be the Magus for the Three Spirits, who they only needed because Mem Aleph had limited their power. Now that the fifth Cosmic Egg is complete, and with Mem Aleph out of the way, the Three Spirits are free to use the power of the Cosmic Eggs to do whatever they want directly, without needing a Magus. Zelenin realizes this and now concludes that she must challenge the Three Spirits, which apparently means challenging God. Louisa Ferre, despite opposing Zelenin’s goals, respects this as the manifestation of human possibility. Mastema, on the other hand, takes it very differently, and at first disapprovingly asks why the Three Spirits have their power back. When Zelenin explains what happened, Mastema is taken aback, but begrudgingly accepts this as a magnificent, though not ideal, end. Then, however, when Zelenin explains that she intends to stand against the Three Wise Men, he is even more shocked than before and wonders if Zelenin was deceived by a demon. Mastema then reprimands Zelenin over her having not “come to her senses” and complains that it was he who gave her the power of the song to start with. He then angrily forsakes Zelenin, furious because apparently the Three Wise Men no longer need him now that they have the Fifth Cosmic Egg, and proclaims that Zelenin and the player have turned their back on “the Lord’s Providence” while they and the planet will only know despair, although for all that he never actually fights you over it.

And after that we come to the Three Wise Men, the other representatives of the Law alignment from the original game. At the end of the Empyrean Ascent, the Three Wise Men initially congratulate Zelenin and the player on helping them get the Fifth Cosmic Egg and defeating Mem Aleph, proclaiming that they will now become the leaders of the new world of law and order. Zelenin objects to this, however, on the grounds that Alex showed her that the world can only be saved by the hands of man (again, this is a conceit of Neutrality that is traditionally alien to Law), and says that the Three Wise Men will not save humans but instead give them hell on earth. Naturally, the Three Wise Men are offended by this suggestion, they declare Zelenin and the player to be nothing more than apes, and assume their true form – Shekinah. Shekinah declares that the earth belongs to her alone, that humans and the ancient gods are unnecessary, and that Zelenin and the player have abandoned God and will die to build her new world. With Shekinah defeated, Zelenin and the player return to the Vanishing Point to create a world where everyone can live in peace and harmony, ostensibly anyway. Her plan to do this, of course, is to wipe out the urge to fight, the root of all conflict according to Zelenin. This of course leads us to the creation of the world of Law in the New Law path. In this ending, the energy of light and order is released onto the Earth from the Schwarzvelt and annhiliated the demons and the Schwarzvelt, just as happened in the original Law ending. This time, however, we see the human spirit apparently cleansed of its competitive, aggressive nature. All conflicts – racial, religious, economic, political, all kinds – cease across the world, and people seek solutions to opposing perspectives without resorting to violence. Zelenin that the Earth is now “free” from demonic ambitions and the rule of humans, but also from God’s will, and humans will no longer fight amongst themselves. In fact it seems that humans are now so pacifist that they somehow slowed their development and are unable to fight, meaning an entity may one day show up to take over the world by force. Zelenin, however, promises that she will watch over the world forever, and sing her song forever, and at the end we see her standing erect as that giant Lebensrune-shaped pillar as in the original game.

There is obviously no mention of everyone singing the praises of God forever, because Zelenin had just said that the world of order will be created without God’s rule. Therefore, instead of belief in God and praise for God being the focus of life in the new world, the most important thing is that there is no more violence, no more conflict, no more desire for battle. I see that this ending is one of the most popular in the series, or at least that is the impression I get, and some people come away thinking that the best of Law was nothing but positives. But, let’s think about this for a moment. For starters Zelenin spent the New Law path proclaiming that the future is to be determined by humans, but now says that the Earth is “free from the hopeless dominance of humans”. So it seems she’s switched from having faith in humanity again to lamenting human rule as “hopeless dominance”. But both “the hopeless dominance of humans” and God’s rule have been rejected, and with the demons annihilated, what is the actual anchor of the New Law world? The only thing left is Zelenin herself. Without God and the Three Wise Men, it is only Zelenin who stands at the center of the new world, and instead of being a vessel for their power, she exerts her own power over the world as its absolute ruler. And that power is her song, which brings us to the question of freedom. Zelenin promises Alex that her order will be one in which there is the freedom to live even if it means defying God’s will. True, we can assume that the song no longer compels people to do nothing but praise God’s name without end, but the whole power of the song is that it alters people’s behaviour at the expense of their free will or at least the scope thereof. In this sense, the only reason people now solve their problems through “open dialogue” and cooperation is because they really have no choice to do anything else, because the capacity and from there choice to do otherwise has been erased. The “freedom” consists in the fact that everyone, whether they believe in God or not, has their ability to conflict, attack, or really be at odds with one another, taken away by force of the song in almost exactly the same way that the song took away their freedom to not believe in God beforehand. In the “old” Law route, uniformity is introduced by force of the song of Zelenin which buries all conflicting interests by means of divine force, and so follows the formula of fascism in its classical sense, which also typically entails the division of society between the pure and the undesirables. With the New Law route, in all reality, the same thing happens except that the erasure of violence in theory means this distinction is no longer possible, but it still means that free will and conflict are sublimated in the same way. In this sense, the initial impression that this is a Neutral path in Law clothing dissipates resoundingly. And there is still an absolute ruler, Zelenin, whose song is the absolute power over the world, and who is presumably the only protection the world now has against any invaders, and it is safe to assume that the invaders are going to be the avatars of the Great Will who may yet be more furious that an avatar of Law defies them than they are contemptuous of the forces of Chaos.

The biggest problem I have with both the New Law and New Chaos routes is one simple thing: they’re both apparently predicated on making a world where freedom is either preserved or expanded, at least that’s what you get from hearing Zelenin and Jimenez talk in their respective New paths, but there is no squaring that with the fact that, before all of that happens, they have still essentially brainwashed the entire Red Sprite crew into agreeing with them. This is especially incongruous for the New Law path because even though Zelenin now commits herself to having an order in which freedom is preserved, but she still robbed the crew of the Red Sprite of their free will by the power of her song, turning them into mindless parrots of God, and in the New Law path there is no evidence of her reconciling with that fact. And to be honest, there really can’t be, because the song is still absolutely essential to the Law path, New or “old”, just that the power to erase free will is directed towards the altering of human nature, which in practice would mean taking away some of the scope of human freedom, and indeed a way for humans to solve problems that cannot be solved otherwise. It is said that all political conflict would be eliminated, but since conflict, even if it is not bloody conflict, is the overriding reality of all politics, all politics entails disagreement, that means humans are less able to progress politicially.

Conclusion

Fan art by log178 on Tumblr

Insofar as we take Law as an inclusive absolute, what can we establish about it across all the major SMT games in which there is a Law and Chaos dynamic? Whereas Chaos, though it can be seen to have a consitent core, tends to have certain variations throughout the series, perhaps befitting the name and even overall ethos, Law tends to be consistent in not only a general ethos but also a clearly defined goal that is present in almost all the SMT games. The overriding goal of the forces of Law is to create a world that is removed of sin, conflict, desire, and free will, and everything is in harmony with one higher power and consciousness. Freedom is necessarily undermined by this arrangement, and this is naturally rationalized by the prioritizing of the values of order, harmony, and (in many cases) hierarchy as the main values that are meant to be realized by a Lawful society under the auspice of God. The consistent expression of this goal is the idea of the Thousand Year Kingdom, in which God, or his angels on his behalf, select those who are worthy of living in the new order and exclude those who are not, typically be means of determining their faith. Any impulse that leads to Man’s separation from God, be it knowledge or desire or whatever else, is to be eliminated, and this can mean either killing off any humans who display contradiction to the will of God or just removing the ability to separate yourself from God or harmony in any way. Even “the best of Law” (as the New Law route has been described) still necessarily entails the abolition of free will, because this is the only way to generate the kingdom of permanent harmony that is desired by the forces of Law.

Still, there are multiple contours present in Law, though it is defined by a single goal involving a world of perfect order presided over by God. Fate, and the acceptance thereof, is one such contour, though it is one which emanates naturally from the idea of God and his will, rather than the will of humans, as the anchor of human life. Indeed, it makes perfect sense to emphasize the acceptance of fate as a virtue in itself when in Law we also see the Great Will and its cycles as something to be accepted axiomatically. It also blends into Lawful complaint that Man is incapable of flourishing alone because he is incapable of transcending the will of God. The Lawful emphasis on civic harmony, that is to be contrasted with the Chaotic idea of harmony with nature or the ancient gods, lends itself to a sort Lawful character stereotype in which their alignment means they are more pathologically agreeable with others, even as they ultimately go on to try and exterminate others if they don’t conform to “the will of God”. Whereas Chaotic harmony with nature is a signpost for a kind of inner and outer freedom in terms of a kind of natural liberty that isn’t perturbed by society, Lawful harmony with the world signifies agreeability with society as a principle of behaviour, in this case entailing the fundamental sublimation of individual will to some sort of collective. Authority as an inherent good is a necessary component of Lawful thought, because order and hierarchy are reified constructs in Law and because the whole point of Law is to create a kind of mystic dictatorship built on an authority capable of erasing anything that might threaten its stability. Speaking of stability, that’s another major contour at least insofar as Law is motivated by a pathological aversion to change, such that preserving order as it is can be a hallmark of the Law paradigm. And of course, there is much to be said for the obsession with purity, which undergirds the necessity of the dispensation of the universe from the perspective of Ancient of Days, the revulsion against ungodly knowledge expressed by Satan and Mastema, the hatred of “the unclean” seen in the Four Heralds, and in the fundamental basis of selection for the Thousand Year Kingdom.

The perfect opposite to Chaos in the way that Chaos is perfectly opposed to Law, we can see by its many contours and its overriding goal why Law is not always the most popular alignment in the series. In fact I have seen some fans make the complaint that the games are biased towards Chaos, or at least just against Law. Of course, I would observe that most of the games if anything tend to favour Neutrality, portraying Law and Chaos as both negative, often equally so even as the forces of Law are the side most typically behind acts of genocide against humans, while portraying Neutrality as at least generally positive. But if we took for granted a bias against Law, might we not grant that this emanates from a core theme of Shin Megami Tensei? The games are all about choice, and the general ideology of Law posits an order that necessarily either takes that away or reduces the scope of human agency. But having said that, it is also true that Law is necessary for thw scope of choice to have meaning, and the teleological quest for perfect order as defines Law versus the embrace of the uncertainty of anarchic and wild freedom as defines Chaos present a necessarily harsh choice for the player, Neutrality notwithstanding.

The last thing to note concerns the role of God, and the nature of Law as an inclusive absolute. God is the central ground for Law, and I believe that things like the New Law path in Strange Journey Redux, although it can be seen as an echo of Shin Megami Tensei II where Satan judges his own creator, represents something of an aberration from this trend. It can seem like this should doom Law to being a stand-in for the clique of YHVH and his band of shady angels. But God is a fairly universal idea, whose application, though familiar to Western cultural sensibility, is in no way limited to it. We have seen multiple hints within the series of non-Abrahamic avatars of the Great Will that serve as signposts for Law once again being as broad as it can be in the original Shin Megami Tensei and in Strange Journey, both within the games and from the mouth of Kaneko. Kagutsuchi, originally a Shinto god of fire, inexplicably serves as the main avatar of the Great Will in Nocturne. In 1996, Kaneko said in an interview that, in Devil Summoner, Hachiman, the Japanese syncretic god of war, is an expression of “the One True God”, and in Strange Journey he is necessary to fuse Demiurge. Given that Kaneko thinks Yatagarasu is a messenger of YHWH, it can be implied that Amaterasu is also supposed to be an avatar of the Great Will, I guess. Digital Devil Saga (mind you, a spin-off series without the Law and Chaos dynamic) gives us Brahman, based on the absolute divinity of Hinduism from which all the other gods emanate. There’s plenty of scope for God to be a very universal thing that allows for Law to, once again, serve as a broad trans-cultural absolute in the way that both Law and Chaos used to be.

This has been the second in a series of posts dealing with the ideological contours of the Shin Megami Tensei alignments, focusing on Law. The third and final post will focus on the Neutral alignment, and will be published soon.

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Part 1 – Chaos: https://mythoughtsbornfromfire.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/ideologies-of-chaos-in-shin-megami-tensei/

Part 3 – Neutrality: https://mythoughtsbornfromfire.wordpress.com/2021/06/19/ideologies-of-neutrality-in-shin-megami-tensei/

The Satan vs Hitler argument

Tell me if you’ve seen this exchange before. Someone on social media almost out of nowhere gives their opinion that Satan is actually good, probably drawing on a popular Milton-esque conception of Satan. An incredulous and perhaps conservative individual takes exception to this statement and replies sacrastically that Hitler was good. The former person, with a certain blamelessness, denounces his responder as a fascist. I have also seen far-right-leaning metalheads whine that edgy paeans to Satan are to be expected in metal while bands that actively promote fascism or Nazism and sing the praises of Hitler are to be be shunned. I have seen at least one of those sport the imagery of the German Empire while making such pronouncements (that empire, incidentally, having been run for twenty years of its existence by the insane volkisch ideologue Wilhelm II).

The conceit being displayed in this argument is obvious. Satan and Hitler are to be taken as equal abstract representations of human evil, never minding of course the obvious problem that one of them is a fictional character and one of them was an all too real human. This alone only scratches the surface, however. If you read the Bible closely, you’ll notice that, for a start, Satan never fell from heaven in the events before the Book of Genesis, and so throughout the Old Testament he is an angel in the court of God. Even in the New Testament, the only time he appears to be an enemy of God is in the Book of Revelation, when a vision depicts Satan as having fallen from heaven. This scene itself is a.representation of the victory of Jesus over Satan, and death, through his own death on the cross at Calvary and then resurrection. This would mean that, before that fall, the Satan that tried to tempt Jesus in the desert was still an angel in God’s court, carrying out the same tempting, accusing function that he had in the Old Testament. What that means for the goodness, or evilness, of Satan kind of depends on how you choose to interpret things, not least given the Bible is much more open-ended a collection of myths and fables than Christians usually like to let on.

From one perspective, you can still interpret Satan as an evil figure here, in fact as an angel he may represent an abstract principle of evil persecuting mankind, but this is all on the orders of God, at least until the resurrection of Jesus happens. So from a certain standpoint, God ultimately comes out as the artificer of evil, as well as good, since all of the evil attributed to Satan emerges directly from God, being carried out on his orders, meaning that, even if Satan is evil, so is God to a certain extent. On the other hand, if God is still supposed to be good, indeed the ultimate good, then Satan’s activities on God’s orders must serve the purpose of good in some way, even if he seems to be the accuser of humans. Now this is a perspective that I, personally, do not hold. I think that Satan in the context of Biblical lore comes off as a tyrant angel serving under a tyrant god, rather than everyone’s favorite goat-headed rebel, and him being an extension of God’s power over humans pretty much damns God in some way. But if one really has to insist that God is good, and this means that everything God does is ultmately good, then logically even Satan, being under God’s service, would ultimately be good.

Of course, expect all of this to fly straight over the heads of anyone trying to compare Satan to Hitler. No doubt they barely even read the Bible, and their only conception of Satan comes from popular retellings of Christian myth which obfuscate the real meaning contained in the Biblical mythos. I notice that right-wing Christians have a similar pathology that rears its head whenever left-leaning critics of right-wing policy on immigration point out that the Bible actually endorses that immigrants be treated with compassion and liberality (see for example Exodus 23:9) and not with hostility and mistrust. Such is usually responded to with whiny memes meant to convey that they, as apostates, have no right to talk Christians about their faith, a gesture of defiance that serves only to cover for their own embarassment at their failure to have read their own scripture. White nationalist Christians suffer from the same blindspot on race, and mock you for pointing out that the New Testament preaches that there is neither Jew nor Greek, while refusing to cite any part of the Bible to back up their own racism themselves.

So next time some imbecile tries to gaslight you into witless comparisons between Satan and Hitler, you may want to talk to them about the role of Satan in the Bible. Or alternatively just ignore them, since you won’t get many meaningful conversations with them anyway.

A 1943 edition of Collier’s depicting Hitler and Satan on the cover

The Light of Nature

The term Lumen Naturae (which in Latin means “the light of nature”) appears in various texts written by the legendary psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, and its meaning points to a light that is contrasted with the light of revelation seen in traditional theology as a source of knowledge for Man. The Lumen Naturae is the light that shines imminently within all of matter (hence The Light of Nature), though it also seems to be a reference to the unconscious psyche. For Jung it is “whose strange and significant workings we can observe in the manifestations of the unconscious”. In this sense, the Lumen Naturae is one of those aspects of Jungian thought that, though it seems to not to be as talked about as often (not even by other Jungians), appears to be more central to Jungian thought and philosophy than it is given credit for, and it can be used as the bridge through Jungian philosophy to, situated within that realm, a doctrine that can postulate a doctrine of spiritual materialism that carries Jungian psychoanalytical philosophy and, I might say, a sort of Luciferian essence into a higher form in which, through Hellenic spiritual and philosophical influences among various other philosophical contours, it may attain a form that can assert itself in the present landscape – in other words, one where spiritual substance can be formulated in an atheistic context, outside of and in opposition to Christianity, in a manner where it attains depth, heritage and, from there, power, in the darkness of the Light of Nature. What darkness, you may ask? That is what you will find out over the course of this article.

A very lenghty and detailed exposition of the Lumen Naturae can be found in Volume 8 of Jung’s Collected Works, Alchemical Studies. It is here, in fact, that Jung lays out dichotomy between the Light of Nature and the Light of Revelation. In the process he introduces Paracelsus, the man from whom Jung gets his conception of the Lumen Naturae. For Jung, Paracelsus was a man who had two “mothers”, two substances from which he derived his thought and spirit; the Christian (specifically Catholic) church on the one hand, and Nature on the other:

To the mother in her highest form, Mater Ecclesia, he remained faithful all his life, despite the very free criticism he levelled at the ills of Christendom in that epoch. Nor did he succumb to the great temptation of that age, the Protestant schism, though he may well have had it in him to go over to the other camp. Conflict was deeply rooted in Paracelsus’s nature; indeed, it had to be so, for without a tension of opposites there is no energy, and whenever a volcano, such as he was, erupts, we shall not go wrong in supposing that water and fire have clashed together.

But although the Church remained a mother for Paracelsus all his life, he nevertheless had two mothers: the other was Mater Natura. And if the former was an absolute authority, so too was the latter. Even though he endeavoured to conceal the conflict between the two maternal spheres of influence, he was honest enough to admit its existence; indeed, he seems to have had a very good idea of what such a dilemma meant. Thus he says: “I also confess that I write like a pagan and yet am a Christian.” Accordingly he named the first five sections of his Paramirum de quinque entibus
morborum “Pagoya.” “Pagoyum” is one of his favourite neologisms, compounded of “paganum” and the Hebrew word “goyim.” He held that knowledge of the nature of diseases was pagan, since this knowledge came from the “light of nature” and not from revelation. “Magic,” he says, is “the preceptor and teacher of the physician,” who derives his knowledge from the lumen naturae. There can be no doubt the “light of nature” was a second, independent source of knowledge for Paracelsus. His closest pupil, Adam von Bodenstein, puts it like this: “The Spagyric has the things of nature not by authority, but by his own experience.” The concept of the lumen naturae may derive from the Occulta philosophia of Agrippa von Nettesheim (1533), who speaks of a luminositas sensus naturae that extends even to the four-footed beasts and enables them to foretell the future.

Paracelsus was definitely a Christian, of this there is no doubt, he even says “Christian knowledge is better than natural knowledge, and a prophet or an apostle better than an astronomer or a physician”, but he also confesses that he writes “like a pagan” and the reason for this seems to be that he considers the knowledge of the nature of diseases, essential to his practice as a physician, to be pagan in nature because it is knowledge of the world. The Light of Nature thus in the context of Paracelsus refers to knowledge of the physical universe, knowledge of nature, the knowledge held by scientists (such as astronomers) and physicians, while the Light of Revelation (which Paraselsus equated with the Holy Spirit) refers presumably to theology, or the knowledge of God, the “knowledge” held by prophets and apostles.

From Paracelsus, quoted within Alchemical Studies alongside more commentary from Jung, we get this description of the Light of Nature:

It is, therefore, also to be known that the auguries of the birds are caused by these innate spirits, as when cocks foretell future weather and peacocks the death of their master and other such things with their crowing. All this comes from the innate spirit and is the Light of Nature. Just as it is present in animals and is natural, so also it dwells within man and he brought it into the world with himself. He who is chaste is a good prophet, natural as the birds, and the prophecies of birds are not contrary to nature but are of nature. Each, then, according to his own state. These things which the birds announce can also be foretold in sleep, for it is the astral spirit which is the invisible body of nature. And it should be known that when a man prophesies, he does not speak from the Devil, not from Satan, and not from the Holy Spirit, but he speaks from the innate spirit of the invisible body which teaches Magiam and in which the Magus has his origin.

The light of nature comes from the Astrum: “Nothing can be in man unless it has been given to him by the Light of Nature, and what is in the Light of Nature has been brought by the stars.” The pagans still possessed the light of nature, “for to act in the Light of Nature and to rejoice in it is divine despite being mortal.” Before Christ came into the world, the world was still endowed with the light of nature, but in comparison with Christ this was a “lesser light.” “Therefore we should know that we have to interpret nature according to the spirit of nature, the Word of God according to the spirit of God, and the Devil according to his spirit also.” “He who knows nothing of these things is a gorged pig and will not leave room for instruction and experience.” The light of nature is the quinta essentia, extracted by God himself from the four elements, and dwelling “in our hearts.” It is enkindled by the Holy Spirit. The light of nature is an intuitive apprehension of the facts, a kind of illumination. It has two sources: a mortal and an immortal, which Paracelsus calls “angels.” “Man,” he says, “is also an angel and has all the latter’s qualities.” He has a natural light, but also a light outside the light of nature by which he can search out supernatural things. The relationship of this supernatural light to the light of revelation remains, however, obscure. Paracelsus seems to have held a peculiar trichotomous view in this respect.

There is a noticeable dualism in Paracelsus’ thought (or more or less what we are presented of it by Jung), a dualism concerning God and Nature. Such a dualism is further established when Jung refers to his writings in Philosophia Sagax, wherein he describes Man as “one part temporal, the other part eternal, and each part takes its light from God, both the temporal and the eternal, and there is nothing that does not have its origin in God”. This itself is not too dissimilar to the sort of dualism you usually see from the average Christian, but there is an intruiging undertone to what see of Paracelsus nonetheless. In theory, he positions the Light of Nature as lesser than the Holy Spirit, because in traditional Christianity Nature is framed as less valuable than God, its creator, but despite this traditional dualistic framing the Light of Nature has a special place in Paracelsus’ ontology on the grounds that it is essential to understand the natural world in the same vein as God’s word is to be understood via the spirit of God. Despite Paracelsus’ commitment to Christianity, this Light of Nature appears to be associated with paganism because for him the pagans “still possessed the Light of Nature” because they acted in the Light of Nature in its divine. This appears to mean that, for Paraclesus, the pagan view centered around nature and activity within it as the means of engaging with the sacred. This is perhaps the interpretation given by a Christian lens as to what constitutes paganism, given that medieval Christianity drew a line of separation between the world and the spirit, with spirit outside the world being the subject of Christian teaching and spiritual knowledge, so is to be treated in the context of that lens, but what this means is that the “pagan” impetus of the Light of Nature refers to the situation and engagement of knowledge with realm of Nature. Further it seems that, according to Jung at least, the Light of Nature may well have been the strongest theme in Paracelsus’ thinking, as Jung says:

The authenticity of one’s own experience of nature against the authority of tradition is a basic theme of Paracelsan thinking. On this principle he based his attack on the medical schools, and his pupils carried the revolution even further by attacking Aristotelian philosophy. It was an attitude that opened the way for the scientific investigation of nature and helped to emancipate natural science from the authority of tradition.

If Jung’s account of Paracelsus is accurate, then the Light of Nature can be treated, at least in context, as the spark of experiential authenticity, dervied from Nature and our species-being situated within it, which leads to a scepticism of authority and tradition and their tendency to obfuscate the truth of the world we live in. Within a materialist framework, this Light of Nature is the principal Light, and from there Nature becomes the principal source of light, knowledge and Being, and cannot be situated in any secondary domain, in any realm of “revelation”. It does not answer to the pacification offered by the constructed realm of ideated truth, whether from the church or from the “woke” authorities of the modern age, only to the truth itself within Nature. Indeed, despite his faith, Jung sees this Light of Nature in juxtaposition to his faith as the most important source of his creative energy, flowing from his natural and personal temperant of discontent, for this reason Jung cites Paracelsus as a Faustian figure, a prototype of a line that goes from Faust to Nietzsche, something that was only counterveiled by the pious maxim “I under God and God under me”.

Jung reasserts this assessment later on:

He was a well-intentioned, humble Christian. His ethics and his professed faith were Christian, but his most secret, deepest passion, his whole creative yearning, belonged to the lumen naturae, the divine spark buried in the darkness, whose sleep of death could not be vanquished even by the revelation of God’s son. The light from above made the darkness still darker; but the lumen naturae is the light of the darkness itself, which illuminates its own darkness, and this light the darkness comprehends. Therefore it turns blackness into brightness, burns away “all superfluities,” and leaves behind nothing but “faecem et scoriam et terram damnatam” (dross and scoriae and the rejected earth).

For Jung, this Light of Nature is a pagan feeling, on the grounds that it constitutes the veneration of the natural world, and its process of transformation:

Paracelsus, like all the philosophical alchemists, was seeking for something that would give him a hold on the dark, body-bound nature of man, on the soul which, intangibly interwoven with the world and with matter, appeared before itself in the terrifying form of strange, demoniacal figures and seemed to be the secret source of life-shortening diseases. The Church might exorcise demons and banish them, but that only alienated man from his own nature, which, unconscious of itself, had clothed itself in these spectral forms. Not separation of the natures but union of the natures was the goal of alchemy. From the time of Democritus its leitmotiv had been: “Nature rejoices in nature, nature conquers nature, nature rules over nature.” This principle is pagan in feeling and an expression of nature worship. Nature not only contains a process of transformation—it is itself transformation. It strives not for isolation but for union, for the wedding feast followed by death and rebirth. Paracelsus’s “exaltation in May” is this marriage, the “gamonymus” or hierosgamos of light and darkness in the shape of Sol and Luna. Here the opposites unite what the light from
above had sternly divided.

We also notice something peculiar in that we find, according to Jung, the Light of Nature is capable of embodying spirt as well as matter, thus in some ways providing a map by which to encapsulate even the supposedly extra-natural as, in fact, entirely within the natural, and thus all falls under Nature and therefore the Light of Nature becomes the true light of all. In this light, we see the Light of Nature as, more than only the skeptical light of natural consciousness, the spark of the unconscious, a light hidden within the unconscious of mankind, which animates the collective unconscious. Jung writes:

Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit. Were that not so, the only source of spirit would be human reason. It is the great achievement of Paracelsus to have elevated the “light of nature” to a principle and to have emphasized it in a far more fundamental way than his predecessor Agrippa. The lumen naturae is the natural spirit, whose strange and significant workings we can observe in the manifestations of the unconscious now that psychological research has come to realize that the unconscious is not just a “subconscious” appendage or the dustbin of consciousness, but is a largely autonomous psychic system for compensating the biases and aberrations of the conscious attitude, for the most part functionally, though it sometimes corrects them by force. Consciousness can, as we know, be led astray by naturalness as easily as by spirituality, this being the logical consequence of its freedom of choice. The unconscious is not limited only to the instinctual and reflex processes of the cortical centres; it also extends beyond consciousness and, with its symbols, anticipates future conscious processes. It is therefore quite as much a “supra-consciousness.”

So the Light of Nature then becomes more than just a metaphor for skeptical and naturalistic inquiry in a standard sense, but also something that lurks within the unconscious of human beings, perhaps even analogue to that often quoted aspect of Jung’s thought relating to the descent into darkness for the pursuit of knowledge and truth. The call to go into the underworld, then, takes on the character of the ontological inquiry into Nature, Nature not just in the outer sense, but in the dark recesses of the human psychological and psychorreal sphere, in which the hidden, perhaps even “occult”, currents of the mind and the world are to be discovered, and from which meaning is to be grasped, meaning of a kind that is not typically accessible in everyday life, and yet is perhaps immanent in life itself.

There is much more that can be said about this Light of Nature, however, outside of Jung himself. Indeed, many commentaries take note of the Lumen Naturae as reference to a source of knowledge couched in the natural world as opposed to revelation from God. From Georg Nicolaus’ C.G. Jung and Nikolai Berdyaev: Individuation and the Person: A Critical Comparison, we see the following:

The lumen naturae is a ‘second, independent source of knowledge’ set against the light of revelation, which is received through faith. It is ‘the quinta essentia, extracted by God himself from the four elements and “dwelling in our hearts” …The light of nature is an intuitive apprehension of the facts, a kind of illumination’. It is the highest treasure of nature, and has a twofold source: both a ‘mortal and an immortal’ one. It is the light of the scintilla animae, ‘the divine spark buried in the darkness’. The heart, where this divine spark is hidden, is also ‘the seat of the imagination’, so that the lumen naturae is the source of the alchemical vera imaginatio, the key to the opus.

As a ‘light in the darkness’ the lumen naturae is a source of true knowledge in the unconscious. Nature, too, has spirit within itself: ‘Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit. Were that not so, the only source of spirit would be human reason’. The lumen naturae in the unconscious is responsible for the fact that the unconscious is not only nature, but also a source of genuine spirituality which ‘anticipates in its symbols future conscious processes. It [the unconscious] is therefore quite as much a “supra-consciousness”.

The lumen naturae turns out to be a second source of ‘revelation’, one which dangerously competes with the supernatural ‘light of faith’ even though, according to Paracelsus, both lights in the end have the same source: ‘the unity of God’. In fact, as the ‘Enlightenment’ and the rise of modern science late showed, this union of the two lights is anything but unproblematic: the potential conflcit of the two lights goes to the heart of the problem of the ‘death of God’ in modernity.

Then from Marilyn Nagy’s Philosophical Issues in the Psychology of C. G. Jung: Portraits, Policies, Programs, and Practices, we see thus; for starters an assessment of Paracelsus that, ironically, positions the Christian Paracelsus one of the ancestors of the ancestors of the modern atheistic naturalist impetus regarding knowledge, God notwithsdanding of course:

The second problem for Paracelsus was the doctrine of revealed knowledge. We cannot accept things on faith, he said, just because someone else has told us it is so. We must look instead to Nature and to the truth which God has put there for us to read. “Pagoyum” was a favorite neologism, made up of “paganum” and the Hebrew word “goyim”. It meant that the truth is revealed not by authority or dogmatic faith but in nature herself, which is by contrast pagan. We can find the truth for ourselves.

The path to this knowledge is through direct personal experience. That meant getting away from rationalized theories and being with people in the world, listening to a story of a strange cure told at a wayside inn, observing not only the pathology but also the life circumstances of an ill woman.

More than that, thought Paracelsus, we must adopt the attitude of the naturalist, believing that Nature does indeed reveal the signs of God. We must not be skeptical, not “drown in work, abandoning research, saying it is beyond our understanding and thus failing to kindle the torch which will enlighten us.” Even in the face of our ignorance we must be obedient servants of this task. “As the light of Nature is like crumbs from the table of the Lord, for all the heathen to grasp, and has departed from Judah, so it behoves us not to give in, but to pick up the crumbs as long as they fall.

And then, on the Light of Nature itself and the means by which to acheive its realization in humans:

The method by which we obtain this knowledge and come to the light of nature has to do with coming into contact with a deeper level of our own natures which is connected to the larger processes of nature. For example, we know that scammonea purges, but this does not help us to understand the process itself. Just as there is a kind of science in a pear which teaches it how to be a pear and not an apple, so we should try to listen through the process of the scammonea. “When you overhear (‘ablauschen’) from the scammonea the knowledge which it possesses, it will be in you just as it is in the scammonea and you have acquired the experience as well as the knowledge. We find that place in ourselves which is in sympathetic correspondence with the principle of the external object, and we know it because we know ourselves. There is thus a much more direct, internal path to knowledge than objectivized processes of the rational mind.

We get a peculiar description of the lumen naturae in the notes for Carl Becker’s Asian and Jungian Views on Ethics:

In alchemical terms, lumen naturae is the “light of nature” as opposed to the numen of spiritual revelation. It is a sol invisibilis given to the individual, accessible through and identical with the “subtle” or “astral” body (ochema pneuma). It offers each individual “sufficient predestined light that he err not”. Phenomenologically, lumen naturae is experienced as scintillaes; sparks of the world soul scattered throughout the dark sea of night, germinal luminosities which are the seedbed of worlds to come (mundi futuri seminarium). This natural force, also described as an underworld fire, an ignis mercurialis, is synonymous with the pagan cosmos and aion.

Something to be mindful of is the “pagan cosmos” and the “pagan aion”. In pre-Christian Greece (the context we can assume is being referred to in this passage) Cosmos would refer to the order of the universe, and the very word simply means “world”, though can be interpreted to mean “universe” in the sense of the order of creation itself (for lack of a better word at least), though its Indo-European root word “konsmos” or “kems” means “to put in order”, thus Cosmos signifies the natural order of the world or the universe. Aion in Greek paganism refers to a god of time, more specifically time without limit, though he could also be taken as more of an abstract representation of time itself, as was the case in the Mithraic Mysteries, and the word Aion means “eternity” or “vital force”, thus signifying Aion as the vital force of infinite time. The connection made in this passage is that the Light of Nature is to be related with Cosmos and Aion and thus it is the light of the natural order of the universe and the bright flame of infinite time, or that at least is the inferrence we are to make. This broadens the concept of the Light of Nature significantly, though its association with the natural order (Cosmos) need not stretch it too far, insofar as it may, through identification with the natural order, signify immanent spiritual and intellectual awareness of Nature and its order, and from there the enlightenment that follows. The enlightenment, therefore, consists in the awakening of Man’s knowledge of Nature, and its relationship to Nature, and from there alignment with Nature – this can be rendered, from my perspective, in two senses; the first sense is the outer Nature, referring to the natural cosmos, its environment and more importantly its inner workings, while the second sense is the inner Nature, as in the Nature of all individual human beings, for which I would use the Chinese (or more specifically Taoist and neo-Confucian) concept of Ziran as an appellation, and the sum harmony of Man in relation to Nature is judged by his relation with both the Cosmos and with Ziran. The Light of Nature, then, could possibly be the spark that lights the way in this regard, leading humans away from artifice and rigid dogmas and towards independent and authentic existential inquiry and being in harmony with Nature in a holistic sense.

True to Jung’s assessment that the Light of Nature is a “pagan feeling”, there is a certain archetypal association established by Jung between the Light of Nature and a mythical figure from the pagan realm, namely Mercurius, the Roman form of the Greek god Hermes. It is safe assume the Mercurius that Jung speaks of in Alchemical Studies has more to do with alchemy (as the title suggests) than with paganism proper. Nonetheless, let’s have a look at Jung’s Mercurius. We can begin by highlighting his connection to the Light of Nature through alchemy:

The light hidden in nature and particularly in human nature likewise belongs to the stock of ancient alchemical ideas. Thus the “Tractatus Aristotelis” says: “See therefore that the light which is in thee be not darkness.” The light of nature is indeed of great importance in alchemy. Just as, according to Paracelsus, it enlightens man as to the workings of nature and gives him an understanding of natural things “by cagastric magic” (per magiam cagastricam), so it is the aim of alchemy to beget this light in the shape of the filius philosophorum. An equally ancient treatise of Arabic provenance attributed to Hermes, the “Tractatus aureus,” says (Mercurius is speaking): “My light excels all other lights, and my goods are higher than all other goods. I beget the light, but the darkness too is of my nature. Nothing better or more worthy of veneration can come to pass in the world than the union of myself with my son.” In the “Dicta Belini” (Belinus is a pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana) Mercurius says: “I enlighten all that is mine, and I make the light manifest on the journey from my father Saturn.” “I make the days of the world eternal, and I illumine all lights with my light.” Another author says of the “chymical marriage” from which arises the filius philosophorum: “They embrace and the new light is begotten of them, which is like no other light in the whole world.”

Later on, Jung expands the connection between Mercurius and the Light of Nature through the connection between Mercurius and fire:

Many treatises define Mercurius simply as fire. He is ignis elementaris noster naturalis ignis certissimus, which again indicates his “philosophic” nature. The aqua mercurialis is even a divine fire. This fire is “highly vaporous” (vaporosus). Indeed, Mercurius is really the only fire in the whole procedure. He is an “invisible fire, working in secret.” One text says that the “heart” of Mercurius is at the North Pole and that he is like a fire (northern lights). He is, in fact, as another text says, “the universal and scintillating fire of the light of nature, which carries the heavenly spirit within it.” This passage is particularly important as it relates Mercurius to the lumen naturae, the source of mystical knowledge second only to the holy revelation of the Scriptures. Once more we catch a glimpse of the ancient role of Hermes as the god of revelation. Although the lumen naturae, as originally bestowed by God upon his creatures, is not by nature ungodly, its essence was nevertheless felt to be abysmal, since the ignis mercurialis was also connected with the fires of hell. It seems, however, that the alchemists did not understand hell, or its fire, as absolutely outside of God or opposed to him, but rather as an internal component of the deity, which must indeed be so if God is held to be a coincidentia oppositorum. The concept of an all-encompassing God must necessarily include his opposite. The coincidentia, of course, must not be too radical or too extreme, otherwise God would cancel himself out. The principle of the coincidence of opposites must therefore be completed by that of absolute opposition in order to attain full paradoxicality and hence psychological validity.

The mercurial fire is found in the “centre of the earth,” or dragon’s belly, in fluid form. Benedictus Figulus writes: “Visit the centre of the earth, there you will find the global fire.” Another treatise says that this fire is the “secret, infernal fire, the wonder of the world, the system of the higher powers in the lower.” Mercurius, the revelatory light of nature, is also hell-fire, which in some miraculous way is none other than a rearrangement of the heavenly, spiritual powers in the lower, chthonic world of matter, thought already in St. Paul’s time to be ruled by the devil. Hell-fire, the true energic principle of evil, appears here as the manifest counterpart of the spiritual and the good, and as essentially identical with it in substance. After that, it can surely cause no offence when another treatise says that the mercurial fire is the “fire in which God himself burns in divine love.” We are not deceiving ourselves if we feel in scattered remarks of this kind the breath of true mysticism.

Thus, Mercurius is directly identified with the Light of Nature as the light which not only contained within itself spirit associated with the divine but also a certain abysmal quality associated with the fire of Hell, thus in some ways containing spiritual light as well as darkness within itself, but is more importantly associated with some sort of spiritual revelation. The association with the chthonic realm beneath the earth is, in my view, rather consistent with the association of Hermes with the underworld. Chthonios was one of the epithets affixed to Hermes within the Greek cults, and as Hermes Chthonios the god was invoked in private rituals inteded for casting curses, binding spells and raising the spirits of the earth, as well as being honored in festivals of the dead. Hermes in general was often associated with the underworld due to his role as the guide of souls in the underworld, and was always worshipped as a chthonic deity for aspects relating to fertility (hence why he was often venerated in the form of a phallus). And indeed, that role of Hermes containing both heavenly light and infernal darkness is consistent with how Hermes was seen both as an infernal god of necromancy and a benevolent protector and shepherd of souls. Not to mention, for his connections to revelation, look no further than the Orphic Hymn to Chthonic Hermes, which calls him “divine revealer”. In this sense, Hermes, or rather Mercurius, becomes an emblem of chthonic revelation, the revelation of Nature, whose light comes not from above but from within itself, through its own darkness, its murky mist which is illuminated by Man, through its negative foundation in which we see the mutual and often contradictory struggle that turns the wheels of freedom and fate.

Before we get into what this means, I’d like to get into what this has to do with Lucifer specifically, considering I tagged this with Luciferianism. Jung, of course, interprets Lucifer in a negative light, similar to Satan in that he’s called the father of lies. If nothing else, Jung should probably know that Jesus was also called Lucifer, within the Bible. But more to the point, in Jung’s work Lucifer and Mercurius, not just in Alchemical Studies where Lucifer is framed as effectively a shadow side for Mercurius, but in Man and His Symbols we find that Mercurius and Lucifer are linked together:

Envy, lust, sensuality, lies, and all known vices are the negative, “dark ” aspect of the unconscious, which can manifest itself in two ways. In the positive sense, it appears as a “spirit of nature,” creatively animating man, things, and the world. It is the “chthonic spirit” that has been mentioned so often in this chapter. In the negative sense, the unconscious (that same spirit) manifests itself as a spirit of evil, as a drive to destroy.

As has already been pointed out, the alchemists personified this spirit as “the spirit Mercurius ” and called it, with good reason, Mercurius duplex (the two-faced, dual Mercurius). In the religious language of Christianity, it is called the devil. But, however improbable it may seem, the devil too has a dual aspect. In the positive sense, he appears as Lucifer—literally, the light-bringer.

What is the chthonic spirit? Jung wrote about it as the dark side of the God image, for which sexuality apparently is its most important expression (for which the connection to Mercurius makes sense given that Hermes was often worshipped as a phallus), and he often pointed to this chthonic spirit as a source of both danger and innovation – danger because of the negative aspects of the unconscious, and because of the danger of the submergence of that chthonic spirit, but also innovation because it is within the same realm that human creativity and spiritual revelation are found, not least through the archetypal journey to the underworld. Donald Kalsched, writing in The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, remarks that Jung, despite his commentary on the development of Yahweh into a positive archetypal through the transition from Old Testament tyrant to New Testament shepherd as mediated through Job, always complained about Christianity handing Man’s chthonic spirit over to the Devil, to the realm of evil and the ego, rendering itself incomplete by casting out the chthonic element of the psyche, which for Kalsched lies at the root of his preference for alchemy to the point that he supposedly preferred Mercurius (or Mercurius Duplex) as the mediator of the Godhead instead of Jesus on the grounds that, unlike the Jesus we know today, Mercurius represented the complete union of opposites made possible by his chthonic nature. Exactly where Kalsched gets this assessment is not clear, and even a cursory analysis of Jungian psychology does not suggest it to be anti-Christian in content, not to mention we have reason to believe he despised what he called the “anti-Christian” culture of modernity. Nevertheless, like as Marx would do for Hegel, we can take key insights from Jung’s framework and use them to build a framework outside of Christianity, just that we cannot in the process of this assume things of Jung that are not true for Jung.

In any case, is there a mythic link between Mercurius and Lucifer that can be extrapolated? In the official canon of ancient Greece and Rome, most likely not, unless you make a loose link involving Nominos (the evening star) and Azizos (the morning star) who were identified with Hermes and Ares respectively and were worshipped, in their evening/morning star capacity, as heralds of the sun god Helios. Despite this there is some identification within the tradition of Luciferianism. Ben Kadosh, the eccentric father of Luciferianism, identified Lucifer with Hermes in Lucifer-Hiram through the Snake Principle, the principle of the serpent symbol, which he said belonged to Hermes-Mercurius, and described Hermes as one of the four shapes of the Lucifer (the other three shapes being the Moon or “a Moonintelligence”, Venus, and Jupiter). At first this seems outlandish, and it does indeed speak to the general loose connections that tend to be conjured up within occultism, but there was also a curious note in Asian and Jungian Views on Ethics which, although tangential to the Lumen Naturae, does touch on the relationship between Lucifer and the other gods of Greek paganism:

In Christian myth, Lucifer (literally “light-bearer”) became a rebel archangel whose fall from heaven was referred to in Isaiah 14, 42: “How thou art fallen, oh day-star, son of the morning.” This Old Testament passage, part of a polemic against the King of Babylon, was interpreted to mean that the chief of the angels who “kept not their estate” was named Lucifer before he fell, and thereafter Satan, the Adversary. This Lucifer was identified with Phosphoros and the Phosphoroi, pagan terms which referred both to the “morning and evening star” and to a particular shining or revealing quality associated with the gods prior to the Olympian cults. Thus, Hestia’s hearthfire, Hermes’ wayfinding, Artemis’ knowledge of the wilds, Hekate’s dark wisdom, Selene’s shining, Persephone’s underworld knowing, Pan’s spontaneity, and Aphrodite’s beauty were all a quality of “Phosphoros”. It was this identification that allowed Christian apologists to maintain with Augustine, that “Omnes dii genitum daemona/all the gods of the pagans are demons” and that these demons are the devil. Thus, they turned Lucifer into Sata, the adversary of Jahweh, the Old Testament God. Another often-used passage was Genesis 6 in which the “sons of God” who were set over men “fell” by copulating with “the daughters of men,” thus producing a race of demons. Those two were identified with the pagan Gods. All of those demons were seen to occupy themselves particularly with the divination and magic which was their “light”.

The identification of Phosphoros with countless gods from the ancient Greek world is sourced to Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher’s Lexikon der Grieschischen und Romischen Mythologie (or “Lexicon of Greek and Roman Mythology”). Sadly, however, I am unable to find a translation of it into English, so I couldn’t tell you what the German copy I did manage to find on the internet could tell you. If there’s anyone among my readership who can read and translate German, please get in touch so I can get a good look at what Roscher had to say about Phosphoros, particularly in relation to Hermes since there are no extant sources to Hermes (let alone Pan, Aphrodite, or Hestia) being given the Phosphoros epithet. One interesting lead it might present, however, is a either way of conceptualizing the Light of Nature which contains the abstract forms associated with the various gods (that is to say abstract ideas that correspond with hearthfire, wayfinding, knowledge of the wilds, dark wisdom, shining, underworld knowing, spontaneity and beauty), or just a separate conception of said abstract qualities that perhaps ties back to the Light of Nature. Either way, one can make parallels to the way Christianity sometimes took aspects of pagan mythos and, when they were not making demons of it, elevated aspects of it to the realm of abstract concepts relating to the divinity of God or the content of Christian salvation (for example, Christianity uses the Greek terms zoe and aion, which are associated with two gods from Greek myth, Dionysus and Aion respectively, to refer to their idea of eternal life in Heaven), which can be taken as way to compete with the heritage of Christianity, or just drawing lessons from it at a time where Christianity is still dominant in the Western world.

But, in totality, what have we established in regards to the Light of Nature? Admittedly, we seem to get a very broad and open-ended concept – the Light of Nature encompasses the skeptical intellect in alignment with Nature over dogma, the spark of the unconscious, the “fire of the underworld” which perhaps could be taken as the illumination of the unconscious, and even Jung’s prevailing conception of the “chthonic spirit” that underpins the unity of opposites. Jung’s analysis of Paracelsus’ intention is that the Light of Nature and the Light of God (the Lumen Dei) are to be taken as complimentary opposites, two separate means of attaining knowledge, sometimes even seen as co-existent in ideal circumstances. But, if we deal in a cosmos that is uncreated, whose order is thus self-emergent or self-arising (or Ziran), and whose basis is essentially fully materialistic in that the prima materia of the universe is matter-energy, where is the Father, where is the creator, and at that point if God is put in doubt where is the Lumen Dei? The Light of Nature is thus the Light that remains, and indeed always has been with us, whatever our illusions about ourselves would tell us otherwise, and it has been the spark by which we engage independently with and against the world around us, in alignment with Nature within and without, the source of existential authenticity once it becomes awakened. It is thus a latent relational construct that encompasses many psychorreal attributes, philosophical concepts and archetypal constructs, all of which fall back into the same theme in the end.

That is the Light in absence of any God that, I think, becomes the source of a much clearer concept of philosophical grounding than many other concepts that I have played with in the past. Indeed, it creates an anchor of spiritual engagement rooted in the premise that it is Nature and Man’s relationship to it that is the central locus of meaning rather than striving under a God in Heaven (whether it be Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu or any other), while building a meaningful, if anything, religious (if you choose such a word) base that does not require those Gods, because the Light of Nature operates on a basis that rejects their authority.

The Messenger Mercurius by Rosalind Whitman (date unknown)

Why all Luciferians MUST read Erich Fromm

Some time ago I discovered the work of a philosopher named Erich Fromm, a German Marxist democratic socialist who dealt in humanistic philosophy and psychoanalysis, and the more I read him the more I think of him as being of profound value to the Luciferian outlook insofar as his analysis of mythology and the development of religion, though it can be said to emerge from an Abrahamist background, contains quite a few elements that can be useful to the formation of a Luciferian framework that can be situated in adjacence to Marxist aims but also more generally as something that stands out on its own, whereas in the present it is defined too much in relation to paganism, Satanism and/or Gnosticism, all three of which I find don’t ultimately express Luciferianism authentically and instead most of them define Luciferianism as just another name for their own product, no matter how fraudulent their claim to is (the case of “Gnostic Luciferianism” in particular shall be the subject of another post). I expect some Luciferians will find this proposal to be pretty strange, but I implore them to at least hear me out.

For starters, we can find The Sane Society an interpretation of the Garden of Eden for which a Luciferian reading is easily formulated. Taken from pages 23-24:

Man, who lives in the Garden of Eden, in complete harmony with nature but without awareness of himself, begins his history by the first act of freedom, disobedience to a command. Concomitantly, he becomes aware of himself, of his separateness, of his helplessness; he is expelled from Paradise, and two angels with fiery swords prevent his return.

Man, in Fromm’s conception, is ostensibly a part of nature and yet has transcended it in some way through the emergence of self-awareness, reason and imagination, which fundamentally alters the baseline animal existence that every other animal operates within and thus, in his conception, disrupts the harmony between Man and nature. This level of development, for humans, presents a contradiction that lies at the heart of human dynamism that, in its quest for dialectical resolution, sets humanity apart from the whole of creation. Reason is both a gift and a curse in that it compels Man to realize and cope with the disharmony that rests within himself, and the task of resolving what appears to be the insoluble contradiction of his existence. As Fromm puts it, Man cannot restore harmony with nature, and he must develop his faculties of reason until he becomes the master of nature as well as himself.

Now, the serpent of the Garden of Eden itself is not Lucifer, otherwise the Ophite Gnostic may as well have been Luciferians even though they were still just Gnostic Christians who happened to like the serpent as an archetype, though it does make sense to think of the serpent in Eden as a Luciferian archetype in much the same way that Prometheus could be seen as such (in a way that Fromm goes on to point out later). The serpent gives first humans knowledge of good and evil, despite the warnings of God that they shall “surely die”. The result of this is that the first humans gain self-awareness and are cast out of the Garden of Eden and into the wilderness, where they have lost harmony with God. But it is only because of this explusion, this divorce from Eden, that the beginnings of the ascent of Man take place, that the self-making of his destiny begins, and that means breaking away from the will of God. If God, for Fromm, is to be taken as an analogue for nature, then it presents an interesting way of framing certain other philosophies whose emphasis lies in a return to harmony. I remember once coming across a documentary on the Qabbalah many years ago, wherein a man was interviewed about it and he describes the goal Qabbalistic mysticism as essentially to “return to the Garden of Eden”, and indeed modern Jewish spirituality also seems to predicate itself on the idea of this return to the garden. The return to the Garden of Eden is a return to the original, unperfected state of nature, a return to a kind of primordial harmony that has ostensibly been lost through the attainment of human self-awareness and reason. Such an ideas have their echoes much outside Judaism and indeed Abrahamism more broadly, and can be found in the modern neopaganism with its emphasis on a return to a nature embodied by the multitude of gods and spirits, as well as forms of Eastern spirituality such as Shakti worship (in which such nature takes the form of a Great Goddess), Mahayana Buddhism (with certain schools that emphasize buddha-nature as a pure state to be returned to) and, I hate to say it, Taoism (with its return to the state of the uncarved block). Man, by his nature, deviates from the original template of the divine that he may become consciousness and attain divine destiny himself, in a similar way that the son eventually leaves his mother and father in order to become independent. The Morning Star, therefore, is the archetypal force of Man who walks away from the commands of God the Father (whose archetypal form is found in the mainstream Abrahamic religions as well as ancient pre-Christian religions) and the embrace of the Great Mother (whose archetypal form is found in goddess worship religions and also various forms of mysticism and Eastern spirituality). In any case, we do not unite with God, but place God in our hands and, from there, become the masters and stewards of nature rather than its servants.

Incidentally, the theme of mastery of nature isn’t so out of step with certain other descriptions of Lucifer, such as the Lucifer of Manly P. Hall:

Lucifer represents the individual intellect and will which rebels against the domination of Nature and attempts to maintain itself contrary to natural impulse. Lucifer, in the form of Venus, is the morning star spoken of in Revelation, which is to be given to those who overcome the world.

I’d like to note the reference made to the Book of Revelation because this is a reference to a verse in Revelation in which Jesus actually does call himself the morning star. In Revelation 22:16, Jesus says to John “I, Jesus, have sent My angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, the bright Morning Star.”. This is not the only positive reference to the morning star in the New Testament of the Bible. 2 Peter 1:19 goes as follows:

We also have the prophetic message as something completely reliable, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.

Returning to Erich Fromm, we also find in The Dogma of Christ a lengthy elaboration on his conception of the revolutionary character which also holds potential for Luciferian readings and forumlation, drawing not only from the Hebraic myth of the Garden of Eden but also the Greek myth of Prometheus:

The revolutionary character is capable of saying “No”. Or, to put it differently, the revolutionary character is a person capable of disobedience. He is someone for whom disobedience can be a virtue. To explain this, I might begin with a statement that is rather sweeping: Human history began with an act of disobedience that might end with an act of obedience. What do I mean by this? In saying that human history began with an act of disobedience, I refer to Hebrew and Greek mythology. In the story of Adam and Eve, there is a command by God not to eat of the fruit, and man – or rather, to be quite fair, woman – is able to say “No”. She is capable of disobeying and even of persuading man to share in her disobedience. What is the result? In the myth, man is driven out of Paradise – that is to say, man is driven out of pre-individualistic, pre-conscious, pre-historical and, if you wish, pre-human situation, a situation which could be compared to the foetus in the mother’s womb. And he is driven from Paradise, and forced onto the road of history.

In the language of the myth he is not permitted to return. He is, in fact, unable to return. Because once his awareness of himself has been awakened, once he is aware of himself as being separate from man, from nature, man cannot return again to the primordial harmony which existed before his awareness ever began. With this first act of disobedience, man’s history begins, and this first act of disobedience is the first act of freedom.

The Greeks used a different symbol, the symbol of Prometheus. It is Prometheus who steals the fire from the gods and commits a crime, who commits an act of disobedience, and with the act of bringing fire to man, human history – or human civilization- begins.

Within the same work, Fromm goes on:

Both the Hebrews and the Greeks taught that human endeavor and human history began with an act of disobedience.

And why do I say that human history may end with an act of obedience? Here I am unfortunately not speaking mythologically, but very realistically. If an atomic war should destroy, in two or three years’ time, half the human population, and lead to a period of complete barbarization – or if this should happen ten years from now and possibly destroy all life on this earth – this will be due to an act of obedience. That is, the obedience of the men who push the button to the men who give the orders, and the obedience to ideas which make it possible to think in such madness.

Disobedience is a dialectical concept, because, actually, every act of disobedience is an act of obedience, and every act of obedience is an act of disobedience. What do I mean by this? Every act of disobedience, unless it is empty rebelliousness, is obedience to another principle. I am disobedient to the idol because I am obedient to God. I am disobedient to Ceasar because I am obedient to God, or, if you speak in nontheological language, because I am obedient to principles and values, to my conscience. I may be disobedient to the state because I am obedient to the laws of humanity. And, if I am obedient, then I am indeed disobedient to something else. The question is not really one of disobedience or obedience, but one of disobedience or obedience to what and to whom.

Further:

To sum up: By “revolutionary character” I refer not to a behavioural concept, but to a dynamic concept. One is not a “revolutionary” in this characterological sense because he utters revolutionary phrases, nor because he participates in revolution. The revolutionary, in this sense, is the man who has emancipated himself from the ties of blood and soil, from his mother and father, from special loyalties to state, class, race, party, or religion. The revolutionary character is a humanist in the sense that he experiences himself in all of humanity, and that nothing human is alien to him. He loves and respects life. He is a skeptic and a man of faith.

He is a skeptic because he suspects ideologies as covering up undesirable realities. He is a man of faith because he believes in that which potentially exists, although it has not yet been born. He can say “No” and be disobedient precisely because he can say “Yes” and obey those principles which are geniunely his own. He is not half-asleep, but fully awake to the personal and social realities around him. He is independent; what he is he owes to his own effort; he is free and not a servant anymore.

This summary may suggest that what I have been describing is mental health and well-being, rather than the concept of a revolutionary character. Indeed, the description given is that of the sane, alive, mentally healthy person. My assertion is that the sane person in an insane world, the fully developed human being in a crippled world, the fully awake in a half-asleep world – is precisely the revolutionary character. Once all are awake, there need no longer be any prophets or revolutionary characters – there will only be fully developed human beings.

How do we read all of that in a Luciferian manner? If we talk the serpent of Eden and Prometheus as archetypally Luciferian in the sense that, although they are not Lucifer, they inspire self-awareness in Man and lend to disobedience against a divine authority that seeks to obfuscate that self-awareness for the sake of his own power (whether that be Jehovah or Zeus), the revolutionary character has a fundamentally Luciferian impetus in the sense that disobedience in the name of enlightenment is a virtue for him. The Garden of Eden is the mother’s womb, Yahweh and his commands are the father, the serpent takes the role of the enlightening morning star in that he leads Man away from the father and the mother and into independence, and away from primitive, baseline animalism and into humanity. Thus the Luciferian impulse in mythological terms is responsible for the awakening of the human species and the evolutionary refinement of our animal being that enables us to cultivate civilization, and the beginnings of the path to freedom through our freedom from the brute savagery that characterizes the pure state of nature. This enlightenment renders the re-unification of man with God, or primordial Nature, impossible, thus rendering the efforts of many forms of mysticism pointless and delusional and in some sense representing a rejection of the freedom that was evolutionarily won and attained.

With the myth of Prometheus, we see this in the stealing of the fire of Zeus which brings light to humankind and the innovation that precedes the birth of civilization itself. Out of love for mankind, whom he created, he desires that mankind not remain baseline apes and instead develop self-awareness, reason and the power to cultivate civlization, even if it means coming into conflict with the gods themselves. Zeus in Greek myth is in this sense no different from the God of the Old Testament other than he’s much more horny and less brutal. He in the end prefers a mankind that is just an unconscious or half-conscious ape whose highest act of sentience consists merely in worshipping him, and to that end he hides the fire of his self-awareness and civilization from him so that he may not advance beyond the ape state. Or, put another way, so that he cannot escape dependence on the father, Zeus being the “Allfather” of the Greek pantheon (despite never being the creator in any sense).

The Luciferian is disobedient in the dialectical fashion precisely because his disobedience is not rebellion without or against purpose but instead the highest mode of obedience towards the principles of liberty, human flourishing and human power. Disobedience to the Divine Father and the Divine Mother signifies obedience to Mankind and to human civilization. Disobedience to organized/traditional religion, as well as hegemonic ideology, signifies, in most cases at least, obedience to reason and the free-thinking intellect. The refusal to submit to capitalism siginifies not merely obedience to socialism, but in so doing obedience to the value of human life. Disobedence, therefore, is obedience to a greater principle that the thing being disobeyed, and that is a Luciferian principle.

We also see an interesting synthesis of skepticism and faith in Fromm’s revolutionary character: skeptical, because he questions hegemonic our bourgeoining ideologies on the grounds that they sometimes obfuscate problematic realities, but faithful, because he believes, faithfully, in principles larger than both himself and indeed the law of the land, and in human potentially whether manifest or unmanifest. For a Luciferian, this can be the same faith that Prometheus had in his creation, that the serpent of Eden had in Adam and Eve, indeed that Lucifer himself as Eliphas Levi’s angel of science, reason and freedom has in mankind. Incidentally, if we take seriously the belief in that which potentially exists, although it has not yet been born, we can also oppose abortion on precisely the grounds that we are destroying that which has not yet been born.

Finally, we can draw from, some sections of The Art of Loving in which we Fromm declares God to be the object of human identification, and that the dialectical sublation of monotheism leads inexorably to human divinity:

Following the maturing idea of monotheism in its further consequences can lead only to one conclusion: not to mention God’s name at all, not to speak about God. Then God becomes what he potentially is in monotheistic theology, the nameless One, an inexpressible stammer, referring to the unity underlying the phenomenal universe, the ground of all existence; God becomes truth, love, justice. God is I, inasmuch as I am human.

This is the stage that Fromm hypothesized to be the logical endpoint of monotheistic theology, the transition of God from a being to an idea, to code, to a byword for the totality of all things, and, quite tellingly, he identifies this as a stage of development that the majority of humans have not yet developed. They have not yet overcome the stage in which they feel they need a heavenly father to save, reward and punish them. Indeed, we should take note of the fact that Christianity, despite having a theological tradition that does contain something of what Fromm spoke about, at least in the realms of high philosophy, has not lead mankind out of bondage to the Divine Father in the thousand or so years it has held power over the Western world. God has not yet been reduced to a nameless substance, an inexpressible stammer, the abstract symbol of the cosmos and its ground. I have long wondered why that is, and why it seems that Christians seem to want God to remain a father figure, and from there a supernatural commanding being that exerts his will upon the natural universe, and I’m not totally sure as to the impetus for it, but I am inclined to think that the reason for it is because they may sense that, in a certain sense, to bring God to such a level is to abolish the concept of God, to “kill” God as it were. Now, this isn’t really true from a pantheistic perspective, and it is definitely possible to interpret Fromm in a pantheistic light, but just as we have moved away from the idols by taking the divine away from the multiplicity of gods and spirits, as we have rejected polytheism, by moving the divine away from the One God, from the Father of being, we reject monotheism, and we. In that dialectical sense, monotheism does in a weird way create the stepping stones for the abolition of the One God. As Crowley would say, there is no God but Man, and, as Fromm would say, Man is God inasmuch as he is human. By placing God into the image and breast of Man, we have made Man divine as the highest fruit of evolutionary pressure and striving, and that is a goal of Luciferianism.

Speaking of striving, in the same book Fromm also paints a picture of God as precisely a model of human evolutionary striving, rather than a divine being:

The truly religious person, if he follows the essence of the monotheistic idea, does not pray for anything, does not expect anything from God; he does not love God as a child loves his father or his mother; he has acquired the humility of sensing his limitations to the degree of knowing that he knows nothing about God. God to him becomes a symbol in which man, at an earlier stage of his evolution, has expressed the totality of that which man is striving for, the realm of the spiritual world, of love, truth, and justice. He has faith in the principles which ‘God’ represents, he thinks truth, he lives love and justice, and considers all of his life only valuable inasmuch as it gives him the chance to arrive at an ever fuller unfolding of his human powers – as the only reality that matters, as the only object of ‘ultimate concern’; and eventually, he does not speak about God – nor even mention his name.

Think back to what Fromm said in The Dogma of Christ: “Once all are awake, there need no longer be any prophets or revolutionary characters – there will only be fully developed human beings.”. Once we all cultivate self-governance, we let go of kings and masters. Once we all cultivate “God” as the object of personal and evolutionary striving, cultivate God-potential as it were, there is no longer any need for God. Thus through the cultivation of human self-consciousness and power we shall abolish the prophets, the kings and eventually God himself, until there really is no God but Man. This is the goal of the Luciferian revolutionary character. For the Luciferian, the only true monotheism is indeed Crowley’s maxim that there is no God but Man, and, indeed, Fromm’s maxim, “God is I, inasmuch as I am human”.

“Satan as a Serpent Enters Paradise in Search of Eve” by Gustave Dore