In religion what damned error but some sober brow will bless it, and approve it with a text.
SHAKESPEARE.
As a molder of religious thought, the third chapter of Genesis has been, perhaps, the greatest influence of any in the Old Testament. From it we get the idea of “original sin,” “the fall of man,” the belief that we are “lost” and therefore in need of “salvation.” Because of this, we need to know something about the alleged cause of it all.
In this chapter a new character is introduced—Satan, the priestly alibi of all religions. Here, however, this mighty fellow is only a talking snake. Later, we will meet a talking ass— Balaam’s. In this case the author, knowing our weakness, tells us in five different places that this is a fable. Then why not the snake story also? Most people today accept it as such, yet even these do not see in it the all-important point, namely, that it has nothing whatever to do with us. This is a Creation myth, and whatever happens in it happens to the Creator, not man.
Throughout the ancient world the serpent was the symbol of the Creative Principle, and an excellent symbol it is, for the male germ of both man and animal is a microscopic serpent, “armed forward with a piercer and propelled by the violent lashing of a formidable length of tail.” Julian Huxley. This is the Creative Principle in biologic forms. In this myth it has not reached that stage yet; it is still within the earth. Here it is “that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan” of Revelation. And so the serpent, Satan, the devil and the Creator are all one. According to the Kabbalah the true name of Satan is Yahveh reversed,1 the Deus inversus of the Romans. This is the all-explaining truth a cunning priesthood hid from us.
In ancient Egypt, the symbol of the Creator was a snake, Kneph, encircling a water vase; the snake was breathing on the waters (space), and its breath, impregnating the water, produced matter and life. In the Mayan Naacl cosmology we find a seven-headed serpent called Naga, guarding its eggs beneath the ground—the germinal Life Principle, “the worm that never dies.” In the Orient we find this identical symbol, a seven-headed serpent there called Nârâyana, the seven heads representing the seven planes and elements. The Hebrew idea of God moving on the waters came from this story of Nârâyana, called by the Hindus “The Mover on the waters.” The name of these waters was Amriti, from which the Hebrews took the name of Jonah’s father. In the Buddhist version the serpent was called Naga, a name identical with that of the Mayans in America. This itself is a hint of the once universal knowledge. According to the myth, as Buddha (genetic consciousness) sat under the Bodhi tree, that is, “tree of life,” he attained enlightenment, “tree of knowledge,” and Naga, perceiving that a Savior had been born, arose from Amriti and surrounding him with seven coils, auras, covered and protected him with its seven heads. And for seven days and seven nights (evolution) he sat thus protected by the royal snake. The legend ends thus: “These fearful serpents by the influence of Buddha’s law (enlightenment) became the blessers of mankind.” These seven serpents are identical with “the seven angels,” “the seven spirits before the throne,” etc., all symbols of the seven energies. When, in Evolution, these are qualified by epigenetic consciousness, they become “blessers of mankind.”
As the creative process is both downward and upward, the Greeks had a symbol of both. This is the Caduceus of Hermes, the messenger (active agent) of the gods. The serpent on the left hand is Involution; that on the right is Evolution. As the creative force returns to its source, the Hindus gave it another twist, a serpent swallowing its tail. And the zodiac, beginning with Aquarius2 and returning to Aquarius, embodies the same idea.
Thus the whole creative process is symbolized by the serpent, or Satan, rather than Divinity creating by divine fiat, as the priest would have us believe. Satan, or a satanic power, whichever you like, is the Creator of this world; this alone explains its satanic nature and without which it cannot be explained. The devil is but this involutionary power in evolutionary forms, the planetary Satan biologized. Thus in religion, the devil is but the priestly alibi for the Creator’s diabolism.
Such was the teaching of a rival sect in the Dark Ages, but the Church put an end to that. It did not succeed, however, in extinguishing the idea. There is, even today, in Mosul, a people whom the Christians would call devil worshipers. These are the Kizelbash—the word means “red head.” If you ask them why they worship an evil god rather than a good one, they will explain it thus: There were in the beginning two gods, a good one and a bad one. They went to war over the newly created world and the bad god won. He is now the devil and the Lord of this world—the Hebrews said “prince.” The good god is now so far away it is useless to pray to him—and some theologians tell us God withdrew after the age of miracles. So why not pray to the god close at hand, the devil? The great mistake these people make is believing there ever was a good god in the moral sense. This is the mistake the Hebrews made and so endowed their murderous Jehovah with divinity. And how many of us know this word comes from the same root as the word devil? It is derived from the Sanskrit deva, and from it we get devil, and the Greek demon. The devas were nature spirits, thus creative only.
The Bible calls Satan “the Prince of this world”; it should be King, for King he is until man takes over. As Evolution proceeds, man raises up this fallen King and, at its close, sets him free. His labors now ended, he returns to his former kingdom and “The Sorrows of Satan” are over. His “sorrows” today are due to the fact that man, by clinging to matter, denies him his rightful throne. All this has been hidden from us by religion; in Christianity it is Christ who is going to lift us up, the devil can go to hell. We must now learn that we rise only as we raise the devil. This may sound like what we are doing, but we mean a cosmic process not an idiom.
As the creative force rises and its energies are used benignly, the serpent becomes also the symbol of wisdom: “Be ye wise as serpents,” said Christ. It was in the knowledge of this the ancient Midianites called themselves “sons of the snake.” The Egyptian hierophant said, “I am a serpent, I am a snake,” and the Druid, “I am a serpent,” meaning “I am a student and exemplar of the wisdom-knowledge.”
Someone much deeper in this wisdom-knowledge than the Catholic Church suspects has left us a legend based on this. It tells us St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, and he surely did. It was he who brought Christianity to Ireland, and by so doing drove out the Druid serpents and their wisdom-knowledge. St. Patrick was thorough to say the least, for wisdom-knowledge has never returned; on the contrary, Catholicism reigns supreme. This is the curse of Ireland, but sunk in the depths of their Christian ignorance its people cannot see it. It is tragic indeed that a people so potentially fine should be literally damned by their religion. If, as has been said, they are not mature emotionally and politically, the reason is obvious: two thousand years of religious error plus seven hundred of racial hatred. If the Irish would overcome this, they must bring back to Erin the ancient wisdom. With this, they would realize that the thing that’s bedivilin’ them now is not the Satan of religion but the religion of Satan, Catholicism. See p. 438.
Its teachers need this wisdom-knowledge that they may understand the book they preach from. According to that book Satan is one of the “Sons of God,” “Lucifer, bright star of the morning,” and as Virgil tells us, “Lucifer antevolent” leads on ahead. He is the actor, the doer, the primum mobile. It was he who, “in the beginning,” aroused the genetic consciousness asleep in the Absolute, and eons later aroused it from sleep in the earth. All this the Jhwhist saw clearly and stated it plainly for those who can read occult literature. He described its nature as bloodthirsty Jehovah, murderous Joshua and dishonest Jacob, all Causation symbols. Perhaps he thought it not in the interest of the common people to openly attribute such qualities to its rightful source, and so used personification. He also made a distinction between consciousness, God, and energy, Satan, the one to warn, the other to disobey. He knew quite well the spiritually wise would see through the subterfuge, but what he did not know was that there would come a time when there are no spiritually wise, an age of materialism in which mankind could not distinguish truth from error or mythology from history. But now, having acquired some knowledge of Causation and Creation, let us see what the Jhwhist is trying to tell us.
1 Not in letters but in numbers, see p. 154.
2 There are two Zodiacs: (1) The Zodiac of Signs, beginning with Aries. This is the Zodiac of astrology. (2) The Zodiac of Constellations, a symbol of the Creative Process. This begins with Aquarius, pouring out the primordial waters and returning to Aquarius at the end of Evolution. This is the Zodiac of occult cosmology, the concealed theme of the Bible.