THE MEANING OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONS IN SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT

Chapter II, part I

“Satan must be one of the most beautiful and wise at the council table of gods because He had taken onto his shoulders that difficult commission to teach human beings, those beings who have come to solve the problem of good, of evil. What means to that being is a tremendous austerity. He may not show His own self at all; He must give His great power for human beings to use and cover Himself with something like a mask. If He is presented in any other way, it is like poetry; the fact is that as a divine being, He has taken to bear an unspeakable austerity. And what is this austerity? It is that He may not immediately use his own goodness and wisdom, but He must give both the goodness and the wisdom for others to manifest and His power for others to use. At the moment, we cannot find an analog for this from our everyday life because our everyday life is actually not able to depict so lofty a stage of ethical holiness.”

– Ervast: Pahan voittaminen

As a rule of thumb, we may anticipate problems to follow at the point when we give the energies in ourselves a form that is channeled towards lesser possibilities: downwards, into entropy and matter. This is a profanation of truth, an omission of the sacred, which will avenge itself – for the innermost being of a human being lives in sacredness and weighs one’s actions according to it. For example, in regards to spiritual killing¹: thus born manifestation of wrath must not be allowed to be lessening, but widening, and the same goes with the other forms of “sin.”² What this concretely means for an individual naturally varies, and absolute decrees should not even be attempted to be presented. The direction is clear, however, and it should advance from seeming to more perfect, from a form to an idea.

The above quotation from Ervast states a very interesting and telling fact about the problem of evil: Satan can be divided into two sides, mask and being. Human beings in their diminutive state are usually not able to see anything but the first one, the one that makes evil fascinating and wrongs seemingly justified, encourages the wrong direction and creates resistance for every character, apt to turn one’s development into twisted partial truths. And still, this is just the surface. It is philosophically impossible to presume the theological idea of the essential wrongness of evil in a cosmos that gave birth to it, just like it is impossible to consider evil as good in its undesirable, downward forms. From such a basis, we come to understand that the so-called evil is part of a perfect system, but to this evolutive development belongs the drastic part – a concentration point of the human mind – where the idea of evil must be conquered by individual striving. Not because this evil would be meaningless in the world, but because the soul must outgrow it to realize the more spiritual nature of evil. 

The same process can be seen in the development of theology: the adoration of a human-shaped God the Creator must give way to the respect of the Idea of Divinity; this always has been the religion of the advanced human souls. No ritual, no dogma, no theological pedantry can give knowledge – not even demarcating knowledge – of the Divinity; only the true opening of one’s soul can give such enlightenment. The same also goes for Satan, who, as I have claimed, is the most perfect presentation of the Absolute and sole God in His total paradoxicality and all-encompassiveness that belongs to it. To search truth directly from the first, from the so-called God in the traditional context – as “Life” – is “the Right Hand Path”; to approach the same process from the side of its shadow, by immersing into Satan and adoring Him, is “the Left hand Path.” Very little, extremely little, is understood today of the latter³, as far as I know, even among those walking this path. And without this insight, understanding of the first path will always be left incomplete.

I say this because against me will undoubtedly be criticism from the two sides: What right or what ability might I have to interpret lofty, mystic philosophy if I am a Satan worshipper? Or: How can the idea of self-sacrifice and relinquishment of one’s self-centeredness belong to Satanism? And I presume that both of these parties will reject my ideas as aberrant. This is regrettable but unavoidable. Should I remain silent about the one or other part of my viewpoints, I would be a hypocrite either in “good” or in “evil” and betray the demands of the integrated whole. For it is a mistake to imagine that there would be self-delusion only in one’s belief in God: in the same way, there is a danger to slide into hypocrisy in Satanism (!) and false devotion to certain aspects of Satan. This is most easy for ignorant and ignoble people, who understand of Satan nothing but the part of aesthetical pleasure; but there is a danger as well for the intelligent people, who are not willing to give up those the viewpoints that make them prostrate before an image they have created of an anti-god of some sort. Such servants of the face receive inspiration through the “mask,” and because it is true in a way, this is enough for them to hold on to their devotion, and they ignore any talk of a noble inner essence of the Master. “There is no such thing,” they claim, paying no attention to the testimonies of reason and wholesome inspection. In such a senseless evil, they are as respectable and as limited as the people who avow to the lighter side of the exoteric religions because of their different set of emotional reactions. 

For it is not – or should not be – the reason to be turned away from the theology of the form-cast religions that the gods they speak of would not exist, but the fact that such little divinities are so diminutive in their anthropomorphic pettiness that every understanding human being can see their poor quality as the idols of devotion. The same is true concerning those demonic powers, which allure certain temperaments by their extraordinary nature, or with other means inspire or coerce adoration: they are real enough, but poor idols compared to truth, that giving oneself up to them is not fit for the dignity of one’s soul. The both of these – gods and spirits of matter – we may love, but we should not hastily act on their sublunar impulses. At the time, being the spark of consciousness of humanity is concealed in such deep waters that even the weakest spirits in our great cosmos seem worthy of adoration to the numb and materialist age; but this is ultimately just a glamour of astral prestidigitation, a partial truth at best. And to be satiated with partial truths will bind a human mind into the cyclical rotation of nature and ceaselessly changing extremities in a way that, in the long run, is extremely tedious and dull – to say nothing about the hindrance which a human soul acquiesced with this kind of compromise will, unnoticed by oneself, bring about globally.

1. [As it is instructed to be used, e.g., in The Voice of the Silence]
2. [Not only spiritual wrath, but also lust, pride, and so on]
3. [The text was written in 2005]