Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Speaking of the Devil: Exorcism through Word Magic

Is there some less saturated (or mythological or premodern) way to think about who or what person or process people refer to when they use the noun "devil" or adjective "satanic?"

Because as things stand, they often just sound crazy, stupid, or ill-educated. It doesn't necessarily mean they are any of these things, for if this were the case, then many, if not the majority, of the most luminous minds in the history of western civilization would fall into these categories. And no concept could persist for so many centuries in the absence of a sufficient cause. But what is this cause?

Of course, most postmodern/secular types are happy to consign this topic to the fringe, but this simply results in the phenomena concealing itself under a cover of namelessness. In other words, you cannot make something disappear by dis-inventing the name for it. Indeed, this will only result in more, not less, of the phenomenon in question, since we won't be able to talk about it in any coherent way. It's like trying to eliminate illness by banning the word "sickness," or domesticate Islam by prohibiting the word "terror."

Alert readers will have noticed in an instant that this primitive word-magic is perhaps the most conspicuous strategy of the politically correct left -- and indeed why there is always a "virus in the left's PC." They are constantly shifting the meanings of words, either to disassociate themselves from one that has accumulated too many psychic toxins; or, conversely, to attach themselves to a bright shiny word that hasn't yet been spoiled. For example, the illiberal left first appropriated that noble word, "liberal," but then proceeded to spoil it, so they had to move on to "progressive."

But based upon the uncivilized behavior of the progressive bums, criminals, parasites, and sociopaths of the OWS movement, this word may soon suffer a similar fate. No one will want to be called "progressive," because it will imply an angry, inarticulate, lawless, and lice-ridden loser. In other words, it will have come too close to actually describing reality.

Rather than an ideological strategy, the Left is a lexicographical tactic (Don Colacho's Aphorisms).

Extra-alert readers who pay attention to the "Whatcha' Reading There, Bob?" links in the sidebar will have also noticed that Bob has been sort of immersing himself in the dark world of the satanic, trying to better understand its nature, e.g., Hitler, Mao, Inferno, Heaven on Earth, The Great Lie, etc.

At the same time, I have been balancing this effort by delousing myself under the stream of its exact cosmic counter-movement, as exemplified by souls such as Lincoln, Washington, Reagan, and John Paul II. In a way, these elevated souls are more difficult to account for than the monsters, since they are so much rarer -- rare indeed to the threshold of the miraculous. Think of the inconceivable destruction that can be wrought by one bad actor, compared to how little a single decent person can do.

For example, no matter how good I am, it will pretty much only effect my family, friends, and readers. But if I wanted to be bad -- say, become a mass murderer or television executive -- I could ruin the lives of thousands in an instant. And if I'm lucky enough to live in Norway, pay no price for it.

You might say that the Satanic -- who- or whatever it is -- embodies a kind of counter-movement to all the cosmic principles we've been discussing up to this point. Indeed, unKnown Friend says that this is the aracunum of counter-inspiration, which, interestingly, is not "expiration." In other words, as we've been saying in so many ways, genuine mysticism, gnosis, and magic come about as a result of the harmonious rhythm of (↑) and (↓), while counter-inspiration would have to be some sort of caricature or counterfeit version of this -- a kind of bad breath (spirit and breath both being derived from pneuma) or hellitosis.

As vision and inspiration involve tears and sweat (as explained in yesterday's post), this card introduces us "to the secrets of the electrical fire and the intoxication of counter-inspiration." What? Yes. This "electrical intoxication" would indeed account for the infamous Obama-tingle in Chris Matthews' hairless, pasty and corpulent thigh.

This is also the card of what I call Mind Parasites, which are the self-generated demons which then have power over those who create them -- which you will no doubt notice represents a kind of pathological (because closed) cycle of (↑) and (↓); more on which below.

But first, UF makes an extremely important point, that "the world of evil is a chaotic world." Which means, if you wish to create a world in which the Devil may operate with a "free hand," so to speak, you needn't necessarily engage in evil per se. Rather, all you have to do is disrupt the celestial order and sow chaos below.

(I actually prefer the word "disorder," since chaos now has a scientific meaning; from the perspective of chaos theory, things that superficially look chaotic, such as the free market or my desk, may exhibit extremely deep order, but that's the topic for another post. We'll just stick with "chaos" in its colloquial sense.)

A most obvious example of cosmic order is the distinction between male and female. To blend these categories is not just foolish and unwise, but evil. Or, soon enough it will lead to evil. I don't want to get sidetracked, but here is a depressing article by Kay Hymowitz on the contemporary state of male-female relations, Love in the Time of Darwinism. The take-away point is that the chaos engendered by feminism and other postmodern neopagan idiolatries has hardly been "liberating." Rather, in taking a wrecking ball to the nonlocal celestial hierarchy, the vaginocracy "ironically" reduces human beings to a state of pure animality in their mating habits. Ladies, be careful what you whine for.

In turn, this is why the homosexual and heterophobic activists clamoring for the redefinition of marriage are promoting evil, pure and simple. It is usually unwitting, to be sure, but no less destructive for being so. In no way am I suggesting that this or that homosexual is evil. That's an entirely different subject.

Rather, what I am saying is that I do not want a handful of privileged white male judges to impose their diabolical values on the rest of us, just because they do not understand that marriage exists as a divine archetype, and that it is not for us to tamper with, any more than it is up to a judge to redefine the laws of physics. You cannot turn my aunt into a Maserati by judicial Fiat.

As Dennis Prager always says, we live in the "age of stupidity," meaning that we live in an age that is devoid of wisdom -- or in which wisdom is not honored at the center but consigned to the periphery. But the accumulated spiritual wisdom of the centuries is no less vital to our survival then the "biological wisdom" embodied in our genes. Genes encode information about how to deal with the physical environment, just as religious memes (archetypes) teach us how to adapt to the spiritual environment.

And why do we live in an age of stupidity? Because liberals have spent the last fifty years undermining the legitimacy of the divine-human order, and therefore sowing chaos. And once you have chaos, then you have successfully destroyed any standards by which we may objectively guide our lives.

This is what I mean when I gently inform uncomprehending "integralists" that the left is not the complement of conservative liberalism, but its very negation. A true political complementarity would have to share the same first principles, which was more or less the case in America until the 1960s. Today, the problem is not that we differ with the left over this or that policy issue. Rather, they have entirely different first principles, principles which are not rooted in the Constitution, in American tradition, and certainly not in transcendent reality (i.e., the vertical).

Even leaving spirituality to the side, the anti-vertical activists express such an astonishing naivete about the power of human sexuality, that it is not even childlike, because children are well aware of such fundamental categories as Father and Mother, man and child, boy and girl. Only a certified leftist could be so dense as to deny such a primordial reality and call it "progress." As a classical liberal, I do not believe it is the business of the state to tell a couple of men or women what sort of erotic partnership they wish to have. Just don't pretend that it is marriage, which it can never, ever be.

Notice that their only possible counter-argument will be a strictly horizontal one, thereby denying the very context of marriage, i.e., the sacred. By the nature of their arguments, one can tell that they have no idea what marriage actually is, in that they see it only in terms of an arbitrary "right" which some people supposedly have but others don't.

Anyway, the main point is that if you want to engender evil, all you have to do is promote disorder by denying or blending categories which must remain separate in order for there to be civilization at all. This is why the Creator's very first act is one of separation amidst chaos.

Back to the card. UF notes that it evokes the idea of slavery, in that it depicts two people "who are attached to the pedestal of a monstrous demon." It suggests "an eminently practical lesson as to how it happens that beings can forfeit their freedom and become slaves of a monstrous entity which makes them degenerate by rendering them similar to it."

With regard to these parasitic entities, the analogy with biology is apt, for we know that there are "helpful" and "harmful" bacteria. Some parasites will kill us, while others live symbiotically in us, for example, in our digestive tract to help maintain health.

I'm thinking, for example, of the conscience, which opposes us and can at times feel like a parasitic entity that is there to spoil our fun, when its real purpose is to allow for vertical growth -- and to prevent a horizontal death. Recall, for example, how in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is punished by his "parasitic" conscience. The conscience can indeed burn, but this is the method God is reduced to when you have ignored more subtle messages.

To be continued....

21 comments:

julie said...

Now that the boy is napping, I can throw my 2¢ in. Lots to think about in this one.

...if you wish to create a world in which the Devil may operate with a "free hand," so to speak, you needn't necessarily engage in evil per se. Rather, all you have to do is disrupt the celestial order and sow chaos below.

Indeed; for a good example, see most of the internet. Or better yet, don't, given that there is a near-infinite amount of content that can't be unseen.

And of course, the other good example is the ongoing divorce not just between the sexes, but between sex and procreation, which gives people the illusion that they can put off maturity by playing with themselves with other people forever.

Anonymous said...

Lincoln, Washington, Reagan, and John Paul II.

"one of these things just doesn't belong here"

Hint: it's the one responsible for the biggest perversion of the constitutional system in our time.

Although I guess JPII has been implicated in the sexual scandals of the church, so maybe he also belongs in the roster of criminal "great souls"

Anonymous said...

Also, Washington was a slaveholder and Lincoln was a self-hating homosexual, so that makes you 0 for 4. Devils one and all.

Eliot Ness said...

Someone said the OC was a failed cult but I think it is simply mistaken.

There is no compassion here.

Old Fart said...

Anon @ 1:52, yes, just what I was thinking. To the politically correct, none of those men had anything to offer the human race.

Eliot, really? That whole post rich with things to either consider or complain about, and all you've got is the banal observation that OC is not even a failed cult, and a whine about a lack of compassion? I don't think that word means what you think it means.

John Lien said...

Thanks Old Fart.

Anonymous said...

The Devil is also known as the accuser.

Eliot Ness said...

OF:

You are one of the compassionate one's here.

You know your BA writes about a large segment of our population as if they were vermin. His "party line" is implacable and devoid of any mercy or compassion.

He has written them off. He makes no bones about it, to him they are trash.

You contaminate yourself when you buy in. So much of what he says is beautiful, but it is simply the lovely package surrounding a spiritually bankrupt Weltanshaung.

Read AH's MK and then decide if birds of a feather flock together.

Even for all that the BA is still a good egg but has gone off the rails because his father hurt him. Such are the sad tales of life.

John Lien said...

Evil, disorder, entropy, chaos. You would think under this, there would be more freedom to think and do what one pleases but instead slavery is grouped with these.

Whereas, under goodness, order, and creation, the term freedom is grouped, yet one's actions and thoughts become more restricted because there is more order.

Is it because at the evil end of the continuum you end up being enslaved by that evil you freely chose to go to? Whereas, if you choose to go up, so to speak, you will always be free to change directions?

mushroom said...

For example, no matter how good I am, it will pretty much only effect my family, friends, and readers.

That's true on one level, but your goodness has far-reaching consequences, in eternity as well as in the temporal world. You are salt and light, preserving and illuminating. The darker the night, the more visible a single candle.

Anonymous said...

"So much of what he says is beautiful"

Just to clarify, I mean Hitler, not Bob.

mushroom said...

Iran-Contra pales in comparison to the Gunwalker fiasco perpetrated by Holder and Obama. At least Iran-Contra was not an attempt to violate the rights of American citizens, but, as Ollie said in his testimony, a "neat idea" to get around the Congressional injunction against funding the Contras and handcuffing a Communist government on our doorstep.

For those too young or too liberal to remember, at the time, the Berlin Wall was still standing, and we were locked in a battle of wills with the Soviet Union and its satellites.

The actions of North and his associates was also used as a means to prolong the Iran-Iraq war and weaken two potential threats to security in the Middle East.

"Fast and Furious" was a government-sponsored, government-enabled gunrunning scheme designed to provide cover to Democrat legislators who favor new anti-gun laws. As such, it was not a "botched sting" -- though the damn revenuers have botched plenty. This one was a purposeful, intentional action to support the ridiculous contention that Mexican drug cartels were getting their full-auto rifles and RPGs from the Wal-Marts and gunshows of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico rather than Venezuela, Colombia, and China.

A few dead Border Patrol agents and a few hundred more dead Mexicans were considered acceptable collateral damage by Holder and Obama. To call such people vermin is an insult to the entire vermin community.

BA said...

I pity the fool who goes out tryin' a' take over da world, then runs home cryin' to his momma!

Van Harvey said...

"Anyway, the main point is that if you want to engender evil, all you have to do is promote disorder by denying or blending categories which must remain separate in order for there to be civilization at all. This is why the Creator's very first act is one of separation amidst chaos"

.Promote disorder & blend what should be separate... not surprisingly that ounds familiar... Dropping the context, and Equivocation, are the ol' one-two of every leftist intellectual hack out there

Anonymous said...

Iran-Contra pales in comparison to the Gunwalker fiasco perpetrated by Holder and Obama.

Hahahahah. I suppose you actually believe that.

Iran-Contra was an illegal seizure of power by the executive, in direct violation of the Constitution you people claim to worship.

The thing you cite is a fuckup at worst, despite the efforts of the wingnut press to elevate it into something world historical.

I don't know who you think you're fooling -- yourselves I guess.

Skully said...

Eliot Ness said...

"Someone said the OC was a failed cult but I think it is simply mistaken.

There is no compassion here."

If you want compassiion cut up some raw onions in front of your mirror.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"Back to the card. UF notes that it evokes the idea of slavery, in that it depicts two people "who are attached to the pedestal of a monstrous demon." It suggests "an eminently practical lesson as to how it happens that beings can forfeit their freedom and become slaves of a monstrous entity which makes them degenerate by rendering them similar to it.""

Aye! Reminds me of our trolls who are enslaved to lies...and thus The Lie.
But they are free of the truth so there is that.
I believe they call it "independent" thinking.

Collectively independent, or group think (although there is little to no thinking actually taking place as our trolls so aptly demonstrate).

I'm sure our trolls consider themselves creative as well. Just because they all say and do the same things ad nauseaum doesn't mean they ain't creative.

Magnus Itland said...

Compassion must flow freely from the heart. It is not something you can ask for, anymore than you can ask someone to fall in love with you or instruct them to weep in your funeral.

What you can ask for, as an outsider to another's heart, is either justice or mercy. Choose carefully.

Anonymous said...

Anon,
Bob et al use the constitution in the same way they do Schuon, or the Pope, or anything else. It is a plaything. If they agree, it is quotable, but if they disagree, it is disregarded, avoided, denied.
So, when Schuon blasts the modern world, it's a blind spot, and when the constitution severely limits the executive, it is disregarded, or when the Pope enables kiddy fiddlers, it is denied. And so on.

Anonymous said...

I mean, it takes some kind of mental contortionist to praise Catholic theology while criticizing homosexual priests, or to write about Schuon on the internet while not condemning computers. And if he really believes in constitutional conservatism, how come he never criticizes the left? What a hypocrite!

Van Harvey said...

Dear aninnymouse and aninnydunce, since Teddy Roosevelt, no president, with the possible exception of Coolidge (a little niggle is telling me he had a glitch or two as well, though minor), has abided by the constitution in regards to their powers.

No congress has stopped or objected to them... except as politically advantageous.

No voting public has been too stirred up about it either... except as politically advantageous.

Is that a problem? Hell yes. How did the problem come about? Through the proregressive creation of, and takeover of, the educational system. And even you can guess which way the teacher's lessons lean.

Theme Song

Theme Song