Demon est Deus Inversus

This sentence is most dangerous and iconoclastic in the face of all the dualistic later religions, especially Christianity.

It is not just Christianity which has conceived and brought forth Satan:

• as an “Adversary” or the opposing Power required by the equilibrium and harmony of things in Nature
• as Shadow to make still brighter the light
• as Night to bring into greater relief the Day
• as Cold to make one appreciate the more the comfort of Heat

Homogeneity is one and indivisible.

Divine Homogeneity must contain in itself the essence of both good and evil.

If “God” is Absolute, Infinite, and the Universal Root of all, then Evil comes from the same Golden Womb of the Absolute.

Thus we are forced either to:

• accept the emanation of good and evil, of Agathodæmon and Kakodæmon, as offshoots from the same trunk of the Tree of Being, or
• resign ourselves to the absurdity of believing in two eternal Absolutes!

Antiquity knew of no isolated, thoroughly and absolutely bad “God of evil.”

Pagan thought represented good and evil as twin brothers, born from the same mother—Nature.

So soon as that thought ceased to be archaic, Wisdom passed into Philosophy.

In the beginning the symbols of good and evil were mere abstractions, Light and Darkness.

Later their types were chosen as Day and Night, or the Sun and Moon.

Then the Hosts of the Solar and Lunar Deities were made to represent them, and the Dragon of Darkness was contrasted with the Dragon of Light.

• The Host of Satan is a Son of God, no less than the Host of the B’ne Alhim
• The Children of God came to “present themselves before the Lord,” was their Father.665

“The Sons of God” become the “Fallen Angels” only after perceiving that the daughters of men were fair.* 666

In the Indian philosophy, the Suras are among the earliest and the brightest Gods. They become Asuras only when dethroned by Brâhmanical fancy.

Satan never assumed an anthropomorphic, individualized shape, until the creation by man, of a “one living personal God,” had been accomplished; and then merely as a matter of prime necessity.

A screen was needed, a scape-goat to explain the cruelty, blunders, and but too-evident injustice, perpetrated by him for whom absolute perfection, mercy and goodness were claimed.

This was the first Karmic effect of abandoning a philosophical and logical Pantheism, to build, as a prop for lazy man, “a merciful Father in Heaven,” whose daily and hourly actions, as Natura Naturans, the “comely Mother but stone cold,” belie the assumption.

This led to the primal twins, Osiris-Typhon, Ormazd-Ahriman, and finally Cain-Abel and the tutti quanti of contraries.

Having commenced by being synonymous with Nature, “God,” the Creator, ended by being made its author. Pascal settles the difficulty very cunningly by saying:

Nature has perfections, in order to show that she is the image of God; and defects, in order to show that she is only his image.

The further back one recedes into the darkness of the prehistoric ages, the more philosophical does the prototypic figure of the later Satan appear.

The first “Adversary,” in individual human form, that one meets with in old Purânic literature, is one of her greatest Rishis and Yogis—Nârada, surnamed the “Strife-maker.”

He is a Brahmaputra, a son of Brahmâ, the male.

But of him later on. Who the great “Deceiver” really is, one can ascertain by searching for him, with open eyes and an unprejudiced mind, in every old Cosmogony and Scripture.

It is the anthropomorphized Demiurge, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, when separated from the collective Hosts of his Fellow-Creators, whom, so to speak, he represents and synthesizes. It is now the God of Theologies.

“The wish is father to the thought.” Once upon a [pg 445]time, a philosophical symbol left to perverse human fancy; afterwards, fashioned into a fiendish, deceiving, cunning, and jealous God.

As the Dragons and other Fallen Angels are described in other parts of this work, a few words upon the much-slandered Satan will be sufficient.

The student will do well to remember that, with every people, except the Christian nations, the Devil is to this day no worse an entity than the opposite aspect, in the dual nature of the so-called Creator.

This is only natural. One cannot claim God as the synthesis of the whole Universe, as Omnipresent and Omniscient and Infinite, and then divorce him from Evil.

As there is far more Evil than Good in the world, it follows on logical grounds that either God must include Evil, or stand as the direct cause of it, or else surrender his claims to Absoluteness.

The Ancients understood this so well that their philosophers, now followed by the Kabalists, defined Evil as the “lining” of God or Good; Demon est Deus inversus, being a very old adage.

Evil is but an antagonizing blind force in Nature; it is reäction, opposition, and contrast—evil for some, good for others. There is no malum in se; only the Shadow of Light, without which Light could have no existence, even in our perceptions. If Evil disappeared, Good would disappear along with it from Earth.

The “Old Dragon” was pure Spirit before he became Matter, passive before he became active. In the Syro-Chaldean Magic both Ophis and Ophiomorphos are joined in the Zodiac in the sign of the Androgyne Virgo-Scorpio. Before its fall on earth the Serpent was Ophis-Christos, and after its fall it became Ophiomorphos-Chrestos.

Everywhere the speculations of the Kabalists treat of Evil as a Force, which is antagonistic, but at the same time essential, to Good, as giving it vitality and existence, which it could never have otherwise.

There would be no Life possible (in the mâyâvic sense) without Death; no regeneration and reconstruction without destruction. Plants would perish in eternal sunlight, and so would man, who would become an automaton without the exercise of his free will, and his aspiring towards that sunlight, which would lose its being and value for him had he nothing but light.

Good is infinite and eternal only in the eternally concealed from us, and this is why we imagine it eternal. On the manifested planes, one equilibrates the other.

Few are those Theists, believers in a Personal God, who do not make of Satan the shadow of God; or who, confounding both, do not believe they have a right to pray to their idol, asking its help and protection for the exercise of and immunity for [pg 446]their evil and cruel deeds. “Lead us not into temptation” is addressed daily to “our Father, in Heaven,” and not to the Devil, by millions of Christian hearts.

This they do, repeating the very words put into the mouth of their Saviour, and yet do not give one thought to the fact that their meaning is contradicted point blank by James, “the brother of the Lord”:

Let do man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man.667

Why, then, say that it is the Devil who tempts us, when the Church teaches us, on the authority of Christ, that it is God who does so? Open any pious volume in which the word “temptation” is defined in its theological sense, and forthwith you find two definitions:

(1) Those afflictions and troubles whereby God tries his people; (2) Those means and enticements which the Devil makes use of to ensnare and allure mankind.668

Accepted literally, the teachings of Christ and James contradict each other, and what dogma can reconcile the two if the Occult meaning is rejected?

Between the alternative allurements, wise will be that philosopher who will be able to decide where God disappears to make room for the Devil! Therefore, when we read that “the Devil is a liar and the father of it,” that is an incarnate lie, and are also told in the same breath that Satan, the Devil, was a Son of God and the most beautiful of his Archangels, rather than believe that Father and Son are a gigantic, personified and eternal Lie, we prefer to turn to Pantheism and to Pagan philosophy for information.

Once that the key to Genesis is in our hands, the scientific and symbolical Kabalah unveils the secret. The Great Serpent of the Garden of Eden and the “Lord God” are identical, and so are Jehovah and Cain—that Cain who is referred to in Theology as the “murderer” and the Liar to God! Jehovah tempts the King of Israel to number the people, and Satan tempts him to do the same in another place. Jehovah turns into the Fiery Serpents to bite those he is displeased with; and Jehovah informs the Brazen Serpent that heals them.

These short, and seemingly contradictory, statements in the Old Testament—contradictory because the two Powers are separated instead of being regarded as the two faces of one and the same thing—are the echoes, distorted out of recognition by exotericism and theology, of the universal and philosophical dogmas in Nature, so well understood [pg 447]by the primitive Sages. We find the same groundwork in several personifications in the Purânas, only far more ample and philosophically suggestive.

Thus Pulastya, a “Son of God,” one of the first progeny, is made the progenitor of Demons, the Râkshasas, the tempters and the devourers of men. Pishâchâ, a female Demon, is a daughter of Daksha, a “Son of God” too, and a God, and the mother of all the Pishâchas.669

The Demons, so-called in the Purânas, are very extraordinary Devils when judged from the standpoint of European and orthodox views, since all of them, Dânavas, Daityas, Pishâchas, and Râkshasas, are represented as extremely pious, following the precepts of the Vedas, some of them even being great Yogins.

But they oppose the clergy and ritualism, sacrifices and forms, just as the head Yogins do to this day in India, and are no less respected for it, though they are permitted to follow neither caste nor ritual; hence all those Purânic Giants and Titans are called Devils.

The missionaries, ever on the watch to show, if they can, that the Hindû traditions are nothing better than a reflection of the Jewish Bible, have evolved a whole romance on the alleged identity of Pulastya with Cain, and of the Râkshasas with the Cainites, the “Accursed,” the cause of the “Noachian” Deluge.

(See the work of Abbé Gorresio, who “etymologizes” Pulastya’s name as meaning the “rejected,” hence Cain, if you please). Pulastya dwells in Kedara, he says, which means a “dug-up place,” a “mine,” and Cain is shown, in tradition and the Bible, as the first worker in metals and a miner thereof!

While it is very probable that the Gibborim, or Giants, of the Bible are the Râkshasas of the Hindûs, it is still more certain that both are Atlanteans, and belong to the submerged races. However it may be, no Satan could be more persistent in slandering his enemy, or more spiteful in his hatred, than the Christian Theologians are in cursing him as the father of every evil.

Compare their vituperation and their opinions about the Devil with the philosophical views of the Purânic Sages and their Christ-like mansuetude.

When Parâshara, whose father was devoured by a Râkshasa, was preparing himself to destroy, by magic arts, the whole race, his grandsire, Vasishtha, after showing the irate Sage, on his own confession, that there is Evil and Karma, but no “evil Spirits” speaks the following suggestive words:

Let thy wrath be appeased: the Râkshasas are not culpable; thy father’s death [pg 448]was the work of Destiny [Karma]. Anger is the passion of fools; it becometh not a wise man.

By whom, it may be asked, is any one killed? Every man reaps the consequences of his own acts. Anger, my son, is the destruction of all that man obtains … and prevents the attainment … of emancipation.

The … sages shun wrath: be not thou, my child, subject to its influence. Let no more of those unoffending spirits of darkness be consumed; let this thy sacrifice cease. Mercy is the might of the righteous.670

Thus, every such “sacrifice” or prayer to God for help is no better than an act of Black Magic. That which Parâshara prayed for, was the destruction of the Spirits of Darkness, for his personal revenge. He is called a Pagan, and the Christians have doomed him, as such, to Eternal Hell.

Yet, in what respect is the prayer of sovereigns and generals, who pray before every battle for the destruction of their enemy, any better? Such a prayer is in every case Black Magic of the worst kind, concealed like a demon “Mr. Hyde” under a sanctimonious “Dr. Jekyll.”

In human nature, evil denotes only:

• the polarity of Matter and Spirit
• a “struggle for life” between the 2 manifested Principles in Space and Time, which Principles are one, rooted in the Absolute.

In Cosmos, the equilibrium must be preserved. The operations of the two contraries produce harmony, like the centripetal and centrifugal forces, which, being mutually inter-dependent, are necessary to each other, “in order that both should live.”

If one should be arrested, the action of the other would become immediately self-destructive.

The personification called Satan has been amply analyzed from its triple aspect, in:

• the Old Testament
• Christian Theology
• the ancient Gentile thought

The subject is here touched upon, and fresh explanations are attempted, for a very good reason.