I know I said I wouldn’t make the focus of KeithGoode.com religious discussion, but I saw something in the news this weekend that I wanted to comment on. As part of the launch of their new television channel, NET, the Catholic dioceses has invoked an old adversary to help them promote it. “Satan” appears in their commercial asking his minions to go to StopGoodTV.com and help keep people watching unholy television programming.
Also this weekend, I visited some friends and watched a couple of episodes of “True Blood,” an HBO fictional series about vampires coming out into the open and the way people receive these predators into their midst. In one episode, Lettie Mae, the mother of one of the main characters, asks her daughter for $445.00, which she intends to use to exorcise a demon from her body and finally overcome her alcoholism.
I thought these two references to the Devil and his minions in one day was too coincidental for me to avoid talking about, so here I am, writing out my thoughts on the subject. Here’s a Gnostic’s take (note the singular possessive — I don’t claim to speak for all Gnostics) on Satan.
The Origins of Satan
First of all, I find it interesting that the institution that created the concept of Satan as a single entity whose sole purpose is to thwart humanity’s salvation is using this character as a spokesperson. “Wait a second!” you may be saying. “What do you mean the Catholic Church created the concept of Satan? What about those references to him in the Book of Genesis and the Book of Job?”
Hebrew tradition, at the time of the writing of the Torah and the other books of the Old Testament, never had an individual entity known as a hasatan. This was a title, not a person.
Hebrew storytellers often attribute misfortune to human sin. Some, however, also invoke this supernatural character, the satan, who, by God’s own order or permission, blocks or opposes human plans and desires. But this messenger is not necessarily malevolent. God sends him … to perform a specific task, although one that human beings may not appreciate; as the literary scholar Neil Forsyth says of the satan, “If the path is bad, an obstruction is good.” 1
What about the serpent in the Garden? you may be wondering. Well, read Genesis, and tell me where in the actual text, the Bible refers to the serpent as anything other than a serpent. In truth, our own human institutions have turned a servant of God (equivalent to a prosecutor in a court of law) into a goat-legged, bat-winged enemy of God and man. Even reading about Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, you can see how this prosecutor was merely trying to verify that Jesus was ready to enter in to his ministry, and this was confirmed when Jesus finally said, “Away from me hasatan! [my emphasis added] For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, serve him only.’”2
I’ve always found it interesting that Satan looked a lot like Pan, the Greek god of nature (also known as Faunus in Roman mythology). He had the upper torso of a man, and the horns and hind quarters of a goat. What few realize is that, at the time of Christianity’s beginnings in Rome, there were still a majority of followers of Rome’s “pagan” religions. Households were being torn apart due to some converting to this new religion. What better way to discredit the standing religion than to evolve your own mythology to incorporate one of their major figures as an evil entity? I don’t have the scholarship to support that question, but it makes sense.
The Devil Inside
I don’t claim to know everything, so I can’t say for certain that there are no malevolent forces in the universe. However, I am 100% certain that most of the problems that people in encounter are the result of one poor decision after another. The rest can be accounted for in the Buddhist premise that “Life is suffering.” Whomever has told you that Life is supposed to be all milk and honey lied to you. You are neither guaranteed a single breath of life nor are you guaranteed happiness while you breathe.
If you have a tendency to act in an unsatisfactory manner toward yourself or your fellow human, I would doubt very seriously that you are demon-possessed as much as you lack discipline and compassion. These are character traits, not demonic forces, and character traits are developed over time through successive decisions to react to life in certain ways.
In the Tarot deck, The Devil trump card represents “Blind impulse. Irresistibly strong and unscrupulous person. Ambition. Temptation. Obsession. Secret plan about to be executed. Hard work. Endurance. Aching discontent. Materialism. Fate.”3 What you don’t see in that list is “archonic forces at work against you” or “evil spirits attack you.” That is because the serious practitioners of magic have always realized that the process of magic is about personifying character traits and bringing those traits under the higher authority of the practitioner.
Israel Regardie, one of the 20th Century’s most noted practitioners of magic, wrote in his book The Middle Pillar:
Analytical psychology and magic comprise in my estimation two halves or aspects of a single technical system. Just as the body and mind are not two separate units, but are simply the dual manifestations of an interior dynamic “something,” so psychology and magic comprise similarly a single system whose goal is the integration of the human personality. 4
The practice of encouraging a religion’s practitioners to externalize all of their woes onto the image of a supreme adversary only encourages hatred, violence, and aggression on all perceived enemies, and it locks those followers into a blind dependence on the overarching religious institutions to help them fight these external forces. As soon as you begin to realize that you are your own worst enemy, that your demons are your own personality traits, and that you can begin to control your external circumstances, you can suddenly find and develop the “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
I don’t want to take a completely humanistic view of the universe. That would be arrogant of me. But I do believe that our society’s dependence on a supreme arch-enemy has taken control of our lives out of our own hands. The essence of the world’s religions is the same: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Love the Lord God with all of your heart and mind. … And I would append to that “and you do that by fulfilling the potential you have been given in Life, respecting your fellow travelers, and taking responsibility for making the world a better place.”
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1Pagel, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. New York, NY. First Vintage Books edition, May 1996. pp. 39-40.
2Matt. 4:10. The Holy Bible. New International Version.
3Wasserman, James. Instructions for Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot Deck. U.S. Games Systems, Inc. Stamford, CT. 1983. p. 9.
4Regardie, Israel. The Middle Pillar: The Balance Between Mind and Magic. Edited by Chic Cicero and Sandra Tabitha Cicero. Llewellyn Publications. St. Paul, Minnesota. 3rd edition, edited and annotated. 3rd printing, 2003. p. 5.
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