The devil and the Goddess

[Ulises]

"Both the cult of the sky gods and the cult of the earth deities require their offerings and their proper respect. Both the Goddess and the devil continue to exist even today, as secret lovers in the darkness of night, while God remains alone on his throne in heaven sexually frustrated. That is perhaps why he has been in such a bad h...um...or. These two slandered against deities, the Goddess and the Devil, exiled from heaven and the light of consciousness, need to be called back from the outer darkness to which they have been banished by Western consciousness and the churches of the celestial gods. Let them return to our day time world and take their rightful places in the sun and within the temples of humanity.

 

When the Goddess and the Devil return to the sunlit world of human consciousness and are again acknowledged with the proper cults and offerings, they will cease to be demons and the embodiments of evil, the role to which patriarchal religion and imperial monotheism now allots them. only then can the burdensome schism within humankind's psyche be healed., the split between spirit and nature. For both spirit and nature, masculinity and femininity, are part of human nature and they are complementary. The presence of both is necessary in order to realize our full potential. The one-sided exaltation of the spirit and the denial of the flesh is ultimately self-defeating because we are denying something that is part of our own being-- the external material world is not some alien planet and the physical body is not some prison of the spirit. Both the world and the body are manifestations of an inner principle that transcends the dichotomy of spirit and nature. The external is a manifestation of the internal. Monotheistic religions assert that evil and materiality will be overcome by a radical alienation-- there will be a cataclysmic end of the world, a resurrection, and a final judgment. For those judged worthy, they will thereafter abide in a purely sexless spiritual existence, in a new world of light without shadows, without evil, without matter, and without the feminine.

 

But this scenario is not possible because both light and shadow are created by the Nature of Mind. The light and the shadow require each other; otherwise there would be only stasis, an endless boredom and ennui for all eternity. In Buddhist terms, both Samsara, the world, and Nirvana, the celestial paradise, are ultimately of the same origin-- they both proceed out of the Nature of Mind. Not even the gods know this, for it is the Great Secret of Secrets. And that realization lies behind the teachings and the methods of the Tantra.

 

Tantra is the Way of the Serpent because the serpent is the archaic symbol of change and transformation and rebirth. It is the serpent who taught the Mysteries to the first woman in paradise at the beginning of the world. The serpent is the companion of the Earth Goddess, the Mother of all life. The serpent lives beneath the earth and in the dark waters of chaos. But it is from these same waters and the womb of the earth that all forms come forth into manifestation and enter the sunlit world of consciousness. The chthonic deities not infrequently manifest themselves in serpent form. The spirits of the dead may also appear as serpents.

 

Moreover, the serpent is the bearer of Wisdom and the Gnosis to humanity. Whereas the celestial God would have kept primitive humanity in ignorance within the gardens of paradise during the great summer time of the world before the ice ages descended, it was the serpent, called by the ancient Sumerians Enki, the lord of the earth, who gave humankind the Gnosis of self-knowledge, for only with self-knowledge could this walking hairless ape evolve into a god. And the transmission of this Gnosis was only possible because of the alliance between the serpent and the woman. It is only the Gnosis that can liberate humanity from bondage and servitude, for the slave shall neither be liberated by faith nor by obedience to the tyrant in heaven.

 

However, these are the images of myth and myth does not actually represent a factual chronology of events in profane history. Rather myth is a sacred history of the gods and their deeds at the very beginning of time, those creative acts which brought the world as we know it into manifestation. But at a higher level, myth tells us in narrative form something essential about the human condition. Myth is a primordial and fundamental way human beings organize their experience of the world and understand themselves. Theology and philosophy only came later; but religion and self-understanding began with vision and myth.

 

Characteristically, as exemplified by the dragon combat myth, the patriarchal sky gods overthrow and suppress the older chthonic gods worshipped by the mothers. The great sea serpent Yam, otherwise known as Lohan or Leviathan in Canaanite mythology, was driven back and bound beneath the earth or else slain by the young celestial hero god Baal, in the same way as did the Babylonian Marduk with the dragon Tiamet, or as did Zeus with the dragon Typhon and Apollo did with the serpent Python, or as did Indra with the great serpent Vritra, and so on. Yet in the later Biblical religion, mighty Baal himself became demonized and retired beneath the earth to become a chthonic god of sex and death, banished from human consciousness by the triumphant desert god Yahweh. The prophets commanded that the Old Gods be expelled from the temple and their idols destroyed, being ground in to dust, so that none might even know and remember their names. Yet the Old Gods have lived in the shadows for far too long, and now the stars have turned in their courses once more, and the priests in their temples shall have nightmares of their return."

John Myrdhin Reynolds

[phore]

Fantastic article.

I always saw the devil as the pagan alternative to the sun god.

[Vajrahridaya]

Ulises,

 

This is fantastic. Thanks for this. I've also come across the same information throughout my studies, but this is very well said.

 

Awesome!

[Ulises]

I'm glad we can meet here...

 

"...And I wished he would come back, my snake.

(...)

For he seemed to me again like a king,

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

Now due to be crowned again."

...

D. H. Lawrence

[ben]

[Easy]

Reynolds makes a nicely concise presentation. Joseph Campbell said essentially the same thing over 20 years ago and Aleister Crowley was saying the same thing 100 years ago.