I'm currently in the process of writing a book about my experience on the "otherside", and my ensuing philosophy and outlook when I returned.
I'll attach here some select quotes from what is, for the moment, a disjointed brainstorming session.
"The most fascinating book to me then, and now as an adult with a better understanding of the context and history behind it, was Genesis. It’s a creation myth: a bastard child that mirrors its mother, the Babylonian Enuma Elish. It follows many of the tropes that various other creation myths of the Fertile Crescent brought forth.
In reading the first few verses, it is notable to me that God’s creation is an act of turning ultimate simplicity into ultimate complexity; of division. Every act of creation is an act of seperating one into two, from the skies and the oceans, to the lands and the seas, to the days and the nights, to sun and the stars, to the fish and birds, etc. Every act of creation is one of an inherent binary, to define or create one thing, first its opposite must be defined. It follows then that if creation is an act of division, then destruction is an act of unity.
Another point of note in Genesis is the story of the serpent tempting Eve. To eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is to become aware of the intrinsic binary; the division needed to create. What is most notable to me as an adult interpreting this book in a new light, is that it isn’t stated, not once, that the serpent lied to or deceived Eve. Instead, God confirmed the serpent’s testimony by not only cursing the serpent against Woman, but also by banishing mankind from the Garden in an effort to prevent them from eating of the Tree of Life as well; so that they could not gain everlasting life upon their newfound ability to create, and truly become like Him.
It is my theory, that if you were to read Genesis from the perspective of those who spoke it; nomadic Semites, it’s clear that civilization was the Original Sin. At the time, the division between peoples was largely between the nomadic and the settled. Invasions and battles were commonplace between this dichotomy in the Agricultural Revolution. From a nomad’s perspective, Genesis reads clearly as a warning against civilization. Once men begin to create the walls of their cities, and have to work in fields for the fruit that should’ve been given freely, suddenly man turns on man, Cain kills Abel.
Civilization is, in essence, mankind’s Magnum Opus. It is a reflection of our collective egos, our fear of suffering and need to escape the natural order of the world and the suffering that is inherent to division, and thus creation.
Once the Amoritic peoples settled in Babylon, and Babylon went from being a lowly Sumerian city-state to being its own proper kingdom, a particular man of note came into power: King Hammurabi. With King Hammurabi in power, an interesting text was publicized and largely popularized. I believe that the king himself commissioned its release, though that is up for debate in the anthropological community. It was titled the Enuma Elish, and I for one, believe it to be the most impactful piece of literature ever produced, and we see its stark effects to this very day. If you have not read it, I highly recommend that you do. In summary, it was the origin for the trope that consumed the world; child killing parent, and the deification of the child. In this story, a god named Marduk, or if given his proper title, Bel-Marduk, defeated the primordial gods Tiamat and Apsu. He was then granted kingship among the gods. This story is reflected well in Greek mythology, with Zeus defeating Cronos, and being hailed among the gods.
Many interesting things happened in Babylon’s culture with the release of this text, as well as in the wider Mesopotamian and Mediterranean regions. In Babylon, Bel-Marduk superceded the fertility goddess Ishtar as the patron god of the city. The city went from relying on the archetypal feminine intuition of priests and priestesses, who interpreted signs of the highly unstable gods, to being run by the archetypal logic of men and kings.
The release of the Enuma Elish, which demonized the unpredictable forces of nature as “chaos” and deified the secondary gods as harbingers of “order”, made a major shift in society, from matriarchy to patriarchy. In essence, we began vilifying the natural order of the world and deifying our own egos, our own ideas of how and why the world should operate; thus, civilization.
I think the original cities reflected our egos well, with large, ornate walls to defend and protect people from outside influence. The cultures within reflected that which people could collectively agree upon, and which objectively worthless material had arbitrary value – silk, gold, gems: useless outside of their walls, but suddenly priceless. Suddenly, we as a species went from worshipping primary constructs to deifying secondary and tertiary constructs. We went from praising the primordial fundamentals of nature to looking towards gods of constructs such as masonry, shepherding, etc. A notable god of this sort was Yahweh, a god of metallurgy. With the release of a single text, we lost sight of what holds true objective value, and the question of value became human-centric; what has value to us and us alone? Despite the divinity of life, we separated ourselves from the world, and placed value in our own creations.
As a separate thought, per this rough draft, Yahweh being synchratized with El in Canaan by Yahwehists, is of extreme note. I think there is substantial symbolism there. Yahweh, a god of metallurgy; of war and suffering. What is it that a metallurgist does? He places impure material into a crucible, then heats it into dividing purities from impurities, and by repeating this cycle, he turns a simple stone into strong and resiliant bronze. A god of metallurgy, is in essence, a god of alchemical transmutation, and a god of value in a Bronze Age society.
I think this deification of Yahweh by the Hebrews reflects the essence of existence well; and even reflects the Hindu constructs of Samsara and Moksha. Life itself is growth and change; matter in motion. Suffering is the aforementioned fire to the crucible; the catalyst. Put into metaphorical terms, Yahweh is the alchemist and we are his material, and throughout the aeons, throughout repeated cycles of suffering, repeated separation and unification, life and death, a purified, powerful, and resiliant product is produced; the philosopher’s stone. In this sense, think of the fundamental law of alchemy, which is etched into Baphomet’s forearms, “Solve et Coagula”, Solution and Coagulation."
"I had this thought some time ago, and this draft seems the perfect spot to preserve it.
If God is pure white light, Satan is the material; the prism through which the light divides into infinite variation. Satan is everything that makes you, you; and them, them. Satan is the timespace between you and every blade of grass.
In many cases, I would define our post-modern idea of Satan as simply timespace. In Western Mysticism, Satan is defined as the Self, the ego. Personally, I see that as just a symptom of Satan’s greater role.
In Greece, Cronos was demonized, and in Rome, it was Saturn who was vilified and first created the idea of a Satan or devil that is inherently separate to God. Prior to Roman Catholicism, the Jewish idea of Satan was not separate to God, but rather seen as any number of things that opposed God’s order. There was no singular, defined Devil.
Cronos and Saturn in their respective mythologies were gods of time. On this basis, I see our modern idea of Satan being a deciever, Bel’ial being the Demon of Lies, as timespace being illusory. Timespace is the essence of the cycle we find ourselves in, the underlying substance of suffering.
Satan is the essence of the infinite diversity and awe-inspiring variation we find ourselves in. He is what makes me separate from the very keys I type on; the space between every word, sentence, and paragraph.
Satan is the personification and demonization of complexity, while God is the personification and deification of simplicity. I for one, as a pantheist, consider these highly abstract concepts of “God” and “Satan” as essentially two sides of the same coin. They are two faces of the same head. I worship in my own reverence the All, or the equalization of division and unification, life and death, fear and love, matter and spirit. When I am asked what it means to be a pantheistic Satanist, my response is always the same: it means to see the Self in the All, and the All in the Self. In other words, I consider myself being separate from you, or the very technology that I filter my thoughts through, as being inherently illusory and worthless. The truth is that there is nothing that separates me from the stars over my head aside from my personal perception of spacetime.
You can consider it in this sense – the Universe, or whatever you wish to call it is, objectively, a massive soup of information. We as individuals can do our best to translate this soup with the tools we’ve been granted; our senses and perception that have been evolved specifically for the means of maintaining division and individuality. But what is in front of us; what we see, feel, hear, are all constructs of our mind – our best attempt at understanding this incomprehensible soup. But at the end of the day, at the end of the cycle, we are not separate from said soup, and we never were. It is a dream-state that we find ourselves in, a false belief that we perpetuate that I am not simply the same universal and mathematical information as a simple stone or dose of water.
This soup is also entirely undefined. It’s us who divides and defines everything, our own minds and egos acting as filters, that tell us a rock is separate from a stream, and that the inanimate and animate are not the same thing. We have a term for everything, and the further we get into definition, the more complex the language becomes."
"I have personally been heavily drawn to Western Mystical practices such as Hermeticism and Kabbalah, solely because these practices put my ideas into consumable terms. But Western and Eastern practices are the same essence, passed through the filter of culture. The fundamentals; the truisms, lessons, goals are the same. They are only different in form and practice. Judaism and Hinduism carry far more commonality than expected once one can see past literal dogmatism."
"In my current form of spirituality, I have divided Satan into two aspects, and consider his essence multifaceted. I have divided him between masculine and feminine archetypes, and work with each in accordance to my needs and introspection.
I have termed Satan as both the primary Daemon of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Bel’ial, and the modernized thelemic concept of the divine feminine, Babalon. I see these as the quintessential dichotomy of existence; the ebb and flow, push and pull, fear and love, give and take. I have conceptualized these two archetypes as the basis of holding on and letting go, be it of material, people, or life. True fear is to hold on in desperation, true love is letting go in faith. Put simply, when your only options left are fight or flight, choose acceptance.
The Beast and the Harlot, Binah and Chokmah, Adam and Eve, Saturn and Venus, Space and Time, it does not matter what names you give to the essence of division, it matters only how you manage to unify them."
"I believe, in my misanthropy, that human intelligence and an increase in cognition is not the blessing of the “wise man”, rather, it is the curse of a foolish species. Due in large part to our complex and nuanced neurology, we seek in a very simple natural state, complexity and nuance. We seek to stuff every minute detail of our world into tiny, well-defined boxes, and when we are out of boxes, we only need to create more. We have, over the course of our cognitive dominion, found an immense number of tiny boxes of nuance and definition, of which was once an ultimately simple existence, and with which we have created our civilizations; definitions may vary, and so too do cultures.
We have taken this awe-inspiring limitless and incomprehensible plane that we find ourselves on, and limited it; made it consumable for our own cognitive pleasure. We have invented fluid, ever-evolving languages, maths, sciences, etc to aid ourselves in mastering a world that only ever wished to provide.
In our grandeur we have culturally deified figureheads such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan as genius men with the capacity to reign in on what is beyond the layman, but they are in their own right, extremely limited. They have tried only to further the fruitless aims of mankind; of distinguishing the truth from the lie, of once more dividing what was always whole.
I care little for people in this current state of my life, let alone for secondary and tertiary constructs such as morality and money. Humanity has become largely enslaved by cultures; the boxes with which they are accustomed to agree with by means of influence and social pressures. There is no such division between Good and Evil, Rich and Poor – only an illusion, a prison of our own design."
