Descriptions:
Video Description
Satan has a job in the old stories, and it is nearly always the same: stand in the road and offer power for a price. Lyam Christopher begins this video there, with the blues singer who met the devil at the crossroads and the doctor named Faust who traded his soul for knowledge. But then he asks the question that changes everything. What if the real devil story is not about selling a soul, but about being trapped by rules that were never made for you?
From here the lesson turns toward wonder. He walks through the true names behind the scary mask, the adversary, the light-bringer, the Prometheus figure who steals fire from grasping powers. The hidden current of Satanism, in his telling, is not chaos for its own sake; it is the left-handed path, a road of liberation walked by those who use rules skillfully instead of obeying them blindly. It is a way of saying, in a voice both ancient and alive, that no system of control owns the sky above your head.
Then even this bright picture receives a gentle warning. The old trap is never evil itself but duality, the endless fight of us against them, light against dark, that keeps a person circling instead of waking. The true work, he suggests, is to feel that whole machine of division finally shut down, like a fire rising and then a quiet so deep it feels like release. What remains is not a lord of darkness but a sovereign self, powerful precisely because it no longer needs to be the enemy of anything.
Full Video Transcript
Okay kids, this week we are talking about Satanism. This topic was eventually going to come up, wasn’t it?
Alright, so it’s been a while. Welcome to the new year.
So, Satanism. The topic comes up mainly because magic is considered in many circles to be evil and transgressive.
And anybody who engages in it is pretty much in league with the devil.
And any magic that is attributed to God is not really magic.
It’s considered miracles.
It’s somehow different.
Okay, well, that’s the Christian interpretation.
Satan, is Satan a Christian entity?
Yeah, by definition, he’s an Abrahamic entity, mostly Christian in invention.
Okay, not really fair to say he was invented.
He was sort of developed in the Christian tradition for the most part, but also in the Muslim tradition and Islam and in Abrahamic faiths as well, where there’s the concept of the adversary.
So the idea is that the magician will sell his soul to the devil.
And in exchange for his soul, the magician gets magical powers.
This is a picture of not Robert Johnson, but Tommy Johnson, which is the original blues artist who attributed his incredible artistic talent and skill to a pact with the devil.
And supposedly he went to the crossroads at night and met the devil there and the devil tuned his guitar and he was off and then playing and became rich and famous.
and supposedly when he died a demon took his soul to hell this is very much like
we call it the Faustian bargain because it is the old morality tale from medieval times
the legend of Dr. Faustus or Faust Dr. Faustus was a physician not very good at his craft
uh so he had studied a lot of things and was not satisfied and decided to sell his soul to the
devil in exchange for magical power and adventure and being young again and uh in some stories he
in most of the tales he is uh he has lots of fun for a while like a rock star does right
like a blues artist might do and then uh but towards the end of his life though is he’s just
spending every moment in dread knowing that a demon is eventually going to come and drag his
soul to hell. And there he will suffer for all eternity. And the term the Faustian bargain now
is being used metaphorically a lot. When somebody basically sells out their future for a few fleeting
moments of pleasure, or they pretty much go against their ethical concerns in exchange for
just becoming super wealthy for a while but it originally harkens back to the Faustian bargain
where you sell your soul to the devil now this idea that you can sell your soul that in itself
when it comes to this perspective of an initiate to look at the soul in that way it already shows
that a position of ignorance in other words that it’s proposing that you have a soul that the soul
is somehow inside your body and then when you die this soul leaves the body and then goes somewhere
okay um so really from the perspective of somebody who’s an initiate the soul its quality of soul is
everywhere and uh so there isn’t a soul there’s simply soul we kind of know this to be true too
it’s like when we say something is soulful it has the quality of soul to it okay uh so this notion
that um it’s funny because this notion that you have a soul that’s trapped inside your body that’s
separate from everything else that in itself is a kind of hell existence and so in that sense
the devil already has his clutches in you if you buy into the idea that you have a soul that you
can sell okay so it’s kind of funny really i think from the perspective of an initiate
the devil represents a spirit of ignorance where you believe in such things that such things are
possible okay so you have wrong view of the universe or your life and that ignorant and
wrong view causes you a lot of suffering a lot of hell-like experiences because of that so in the
golden dawn system of magic that’s mostly what this channel talks about but it gives it to you
from the perspective of an initiate not from a scholar okay so yes people try to correct my
scholarship all the time that’s fine it’s not what we’re really doing here uh this comes from
the adeptus minor initiation the adeptus minor initiation is when the student has done a lot of
work in the out of order grades uh attempting to become a full initiate and eventually an adept
takes pity on him and says you’re ready let’s initiate you into the inner order of the golden
on okay and uh and they take them through this adeptus minor ritual uh that’s beautiful ritual
it’s kind of like uh it’s similar similar similar to a right that you might find in freemasonry
and it quotes a lot from the bible okay i think from the gospel of john i think i’m not really
sure um and also from revelation of of all things actually quote this this quote here comes from
revelation and you can see there’s a reference to hell there and behold i am alive forevermore and
hold the keys of hell and of death now this is what the what is what jesus says in the uh in
the book of revelation um but is now attributed to the risen adept so um in the adeptus minor ritual
supposedly now the higher self has arisen within the candidate and now can speak thusly can can
say aha i’ve finally made it through this process i’ve become enlightened i’m alive forevermore and
i hold the keys of hell and of death okay and in a sense when you reach a certain level of
initiation you can no longer die you can no longer be destroyed what that really means though is that
you simply recognize that you never were in such a predicament that what you are in your essence
cannot be destroyed okay and you also with that recognition now can see all the hell states around
you and how illusory they are okay whether or not those health states are here where you know people
living in this world going through you know tribulations and trouble and things like things
like that or whether you see you know what’s waiting for them okay so um apparently when
someone dies the the consciousness goes into a dream world somehow and a lot of the unresolved
traumas and unresolved things that they did they were afraid to deal with in the life they were
living now rise up and pounce on them and that’s that can be a hell-like experience okay this is
what it is experienced by people who take ayahuasca which i guess was pretty popular for a while might
still be popular? I don’t know. It’s an herbal concoction from South America that people can
take. It makes you sick, makes you throw up, but then it gives you a dose of DMT. And then you get
confronted. If it’s a strong dose, it produces a near-death experience. Or even if it’s a light
dose, it can bring you up face-to-face with your karma, so to speak. And then the spirit of the
earth or mother ayahuasca or whatever she is where it comes forth and scolds you for the things you
could be doing better in your life or some things like that um and for some people that experience
is hellish it’s horrifying they’re screaming and they think they’re being ripped apart and things
like that for other people it is um it is difficult it is uh there’s guilt and shame coming up that
they were afraid to deal with while they were in their normal state of consciousness right
and now it’s being presented to them naked full force right uh and that’s sort of difficult but
also um wonderful in a way that it promises uh a way out a way to be free of that and then um
and then there are some who have processed a lot of their karma that don’t have a lot of left
to deal with in this particular incarnation and the experience of ayahuasca is beautiful blissful
Okay, so in other words, it’s kind of like ayahuasca seems to produce an afterlife experience, or after death experience, right? Or a near death experience. And you can see that for some people, it’s a sort of hellish thing, because of all the stuff they failed to process while alive. But for yet others, it is more, it’s even a pleasant experience, because there’s, I guess there’s lots of good karma now, you know, that they can deal with.
it sort of shows you that the idea of going to hell or going to heaven has some kind of reality
to it okay and if you read the passages from the tibetan book of the dead and that tradition as
well what happens to you in the bardo after you die it’s very interesting okay they go through
various successions of hell states it’s almost like purgatory you know and you have this opportunity
to be completely and fully enlightened and then you don’t even you don’t even have to come back
you don’t even have to reincarnate interesting stuff uh but the interesting thing about these
uh these hell states from the perspective of the initiate is that they’re not permanent
and you might just look you know turn a suspicious eye towards the christian tradition
who uh which basically made hell into a permanent state of eternal punishment and torment
it’s trying to imagine a state of being tormented forever you might want to question the motive
for creating a universe uh in the mind of children to tell the children that if you’re not good
you’re going to burn in hell forever and so in the golden dawn tradition there really isn’t much
devil not really a satanic tradition okay um but you do get a little bit of it you get it at the
image of the devil in the tarot okay this is the rider weight tarot deck uh here and the the devil
in uh the golden non-system pretty much you know represents capricorn and if you’re a capricorn are
you satanic yes you are sort of um there are traits of the capricorn which are um devilish
in nature okay the ambition uh the constant need to level up those kinds of things and so here we
deal with the capricorn energy in the devil card okay and you can see the devil represents a state
of bondage a state of ignorance okay an inversion of what’s considered good let’s say we have the
inverted pentagram up above okay and that’s also a state of ignorance too because um you know for an
initiate the pentagram cannot be inverted kind of silly to say that oh the uh four elements are now
superior to uh the spirit the spirit element right like first of all if you regard spirit as an
element that’s already um a lack of knowledge of what spirit actually is so for those of you who
are unfamiliar with the pentagram pentagram represents the four elements plus the spirit
which is their essence okay so the spirit is not an element per se it is the essence of the elements
um if you think of the egyptian pyramid it has four sides on top at least facing outward right
and each of the four sides could represent one of the four elements or solid liquid air solid liquid
gas and plasma if you want to right and then the the substance of the pyramid itself is spirit it’s
not really one of those appearances it’s not really one of those outward appearances of the
elements there’s the essence of all the elements and therefore such a thing as the essence of
everything cannot be inferior since it is the mother of all of everything that
becomes visible out from it so is magic evil is magic satanic and my answer is a
little bit of a just to be provocative my answer is yes it is somewhat satanic
and evil because there is a redeeming element to the satanic tendency okay and
And so if you’re like me and you got to enjoy the rock and roll of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, even a little bit of the 90s,
and then during the 70s with Led Zeppelin and ACDC, you got a nice dose of that satanic element.
It started getting a little bit silly with the hair bands and with Motley Crue and things like that.
But you started to see that the legend of Tommy Johnson was alive and well because the Faustian bargain of selling your soul to the devil for a brief time of crazy fun, kind of like the rock star existence, that was alive and well.
That myth was still operating in the lives of these rock and roll musicians.
What does Def Leppard say?
It’s better to burn out than fade away, right?
it’s in a reference to let’s just let’s just burn up right now burn it all and have a great time and
then suffer later so there’s an element to that um because that sounds pretty irresponsible blah blah
blah right but there’s an element to the um to satanism that is inherent to all magic okay and
so there’s a reason why you know people in orthodox religions look at the practice of magic
can go, oh, that’s evil, because yes, there is a transgressive element to it, and we will talk
about what that is, okay? But first, let’s talk about how Satanism pretty much suffers from what
all the other magical traditions suffer from, okay? Satanism, in my assessment, is not a pretty
sight. It’s not really that appealing when you look at what people actually do. Many Satanists
claim to be on the left-handed path so supposedly those who are in orthodox religions are on the
right-handed path okay i think this originates maybe somebody can correct me on this i think
this originates from maybe in from the um from islam where where um people would eat with their
right hand which is good because you’re getting stuff right and they would wipe their butts with
their left hand and so the left hand was considered evil and the right hand was considered good and so
you would never really um grab your food with your left hand because that’s the hand you use to wipe
your butt so i don’t know is that what the left-handed path stuff comes from it’s funny
because i think uh there’s even a left-handed path in uh it from india from from the far east
i wonder if it’s for the same reason you know because people would wipe their butt with their
left-handed than even the right hand. Okay. People on cruise ships should probably adopt
that principle. But the left-handed path, if you look at it more in terms of the useful aspect of
it, there really is a left-handed path because there’s an orthodox way up to spirituality,
let’s say, and then there is a more transgressive way of spirituality. And one of the problems with
spirituality is that it promises to set you free love’s going to set you free right uh but what
happens is it gets subverted or it gets debased over time and it gets turned into a system of
control to make you work for the overlord of the city state so pretty much you’re a worker now and
you’re producing wealth for the people at the top okay so that this and they use uh spiritual
traditions they those people will appoint priests in certain positions to try to use spirituality
to get you into this sort of worker almost slave mindset okay so that’s something very real that
happens like politically and that’s what has been done to spirituality and so on the people on the
right-handed path the path of good supposedly are the ones who are be doing as they’re told oh yes
So I’m a very good citizen, right?
And I’m doing the work I’m supposed to be doing, making money for you, my king.
I’m loyal.
I’m a good subject, and you will reward me, right?
So that is sort of the right-handed path of spirituality, okay, which is kind of not spiritual, okay?
Now, there’s the idea of obedience to God that could become spiritual, okay?
But that’s, this is where it becomes radical because somebody who really answers that inner calling to, you know, listen to the voice of God or whatever it is, they become more and more truly themselves.
Okay, so on the left handed path, it’s about hearkening to the actual liberation, the self liberation of a spiritual practice.
so you’re engaging in a spiritual practice to set yourself free not to become a worker or a slave
for somebody it doesn’t mean you don’t you know have a responsible job and do you know pay your
taxes and things like that okay um but people in the left-handed path are secretly setting their
souls free setting their minds free right um it’s already dissolving this idea that they have a soul
that that’s you know stuck and trapped inside the body and things can be done to it um they are
learning how to disidentify with the body actually so let’s look at some of the um left-handed path
attributes i get these from joseph campbell um from his book creative mythology joseph campbell
is not easy to read so i’ve done some work for you here okay um so the left-handed path tends
to involve nature and the senses people leave the church they go i go out into the groves and into
the fields and into the forests and sense the divine or spirit world in the natural world okay
and they can feel it through sensuality even through sex you know things like that all these
things that they are told are irresponsible they turn and look at those things and say no those
These are all brought into this world.
Everything is from God, or everything is from the gods.
And they no longer need the priest to be the middleman between them and the divine.
They simply use nature and their senses and inner senses, too.
The left-handed path often involves the feminine, okay?
Usually because the feminine has been so repressed in the religion of civilization.
the religions of civilization tend to be male dominated ever since the abrahamic faiths
well ever since the akkadians i guess i don’t know sumerians um there’s evidence that before
the time of the sumerians that there was a lot of goddess worship going on which is more akin to
the way things actually are we did not come into this world from some heavenly realm we came out
of this world and we are her children children of the earth right whereas the um the the abrahamic
faiths or the patriarchal faiths would say, no, we are spirits trapped in matter and matter is evil
and we must, I don’t know, torture ourselves and whip ourselves to get free of it, something like
that. But you have to remember the left-handed path can be radically male as well. And we’re
going to talk about that in a bit. Okay. The main thing about left-handed path is it kind of
goes places where it’s not supposed to go, where you’re not supposed to go. It’s transgressive.
And if the female aspects of the divine are being repressed, then the left handed path is going to go there. And so you could say even that the Wiccan religion is sort of a left handed path practice because they worship a goddess, that the feminine aspect of God is all important. It’s kind of true.
uh it’s non-conformist left-handed path is non-conformist it’s if if you’re going to be
setting yourself free you’re breaking yourself out of patterns that are keeping you stuck
keeping you asleep keeping you a slave all right so non-conformity is a way of breaking those
patterns okay is it difficult yes is it problematic yes does it work yes sort of okay but yeah
so it’s an alchemical process yeah you make a lot of mistakes as you do it and eventually you get
right some people do some people actually kind of uh emerge enlightened uh and that’s because
of the alchemy and the transformation so the left-handed path is individual it’s an individual
experience you kind of and it’s kind of like um in the movie excalibur when merlin has arranged
for arthur and guinevere to get married merlin is a magician okay and but um now that they’re
getting married he’s like good satisfied and then he walks out of the he walks out of the wedding
and of course arthur is his best friend pretty much right but he just walks out of the wedding
because this is like he’s not interested in these orthodox ceremonies okay and he goes out and
leaves by himself because his experience of the divine is not in the church you know it’s not
it’s it’s basically out in the groves and in the forests and in nature and things like that and
who follows him out of the church morgana which we could say is the evil wizard who
eventually learns his magical arts and uses them for evil coincidence of opposites
so the left-handed path tends to combine opposites okay but combined is not the right word combined
would be from um isn’t would be an ignorant way of saying it okay but it’s usually easier to under
easier to understand when when we say in alchemy they combine fire and water or sulfur and mercury
the combined opposites right um what’s actually happening though in true left-handed path
practices is that we recognize that opposites are part of the same thing combining them is the error
that people make and this is the error that satanists make too combining the opposites
talk about that a bit the actual practice of let’s say tantra or whatever or these left-handed path
traditions is to recognize that they are part of the same thing okay and we’ll talk about that in
a little bit tantra is worldly so you don’t have to become a monk you can live in the world you
can do business you can go out dancing you can drink alcohol and all of these things all of these
work experiences and pleasurable experiences are considered vehicles towards enlightenment
okay let’s uh let’s say you can even see how that’s a bit transgressive to say i don’t need
to become a monk i can do this within any activity whatsoever yes and that’s true any activity at all
but you have to have some good teaching some good discipline and you have to have right view
yeah there’s all kinds of conditions necessary for left-handed path practices to actually work
because they’re quite dangerous and they can stir up a lot of trouble as some of you have
been discovering as you do the lesser banishing ritual to pentagram and of course the left-handed
path values transgression because it’s mainly about restoring a spiritual discipline to a way
of freeing oneself from unconsciousness it’s a way of waking up okay and and what has happened
to these spiritual traditions is that they have been corrupted into systems of control
and so the left-handed path is an attempt to restore the spiritual traditions to what they
actually supposedly were meant to do so am i left-handed path absolutely i am right so i’m
not interested in being Orthodox or falling asleep in a nice, comfortable church. But at the same
time, I value everything that goes on in those churches and, you know, in all the Orthodox
religions, because everything that we conjure up in imagination is always representative of what’s
going on with our psyches, with our psyche. And, and, but of course I work, I prefer to work with
in a tantric way i don’t take any of it literally as true nor do i need to follow any rules that are
given to me okay so a tantric practitioner or a left-handed path practitioner does not follow your
rules however he or she will use rules and hopefully use them very well to achieve enlightenment
okay and they might appear to be following rules for a while but then you’ll notice that they’ll
suddenly they’ve changed the rules. What are you doing? You’re a hypocrite. What you don’t realize
is that they have switched to a different engine and now they’re doing something different because
it’s part of their ongoing process of liberation. Okay. I think you can begin to see how that’s
the real spiritual path. Because if you just follow one way of doing things forever and ever
and ever and ever, it’s kind of like a mode of insanity. This is why it’s good to have a teacher
because a teacher can see when you’re stuck in a mode of insanity okay and most of the stuff that
happens in religions is mildly or extremely insane okay but you have to remember that the
way an initiate sees almost every human being on the planet almost every human being on the planet
is insane yeah suffering from psychosis anywhere from mild to severe and the point of a left-handed
path discipline is to free yourself from that psychosis these are various manifestations of
satanism so we have the church of satan which supposedly started in 1966 very auspicious year
anton levee is the founder of the church of satan anybody who reads how that unfolded can easily
see it was majorly a publicity stunt i once took a class in college of on modern art and was
surprised to discover that basically the whole class was about how to get famous by doing
ridiculous outrageous things and then having people notice and then you appear in the newspapers
or on the news right and you get your your 10 minutes of fame and it’s sort of like you can
see that uh anton levay was doing that he was being sensationalistic he was being transgressive
okay it doesn’t mean that um the church of satan didn’t have any value it was certainly plugging
into a left-handed path vibe sort of transgressive vibe okay um and it was also feeding off of a lot
of the paranoia about witchcraft and you know from from the burning times and things like that too
all right and then the temple of set came after that uh akino i think is the last name of the
guy who founded that he was originally a member of the church of satan and he i guess suddenly
got the idea that um well this evil entity that we are sort of revaluing here is not necessarily
the christian devil it’s just some kind of evil entity maybe the older form of that is like the
egyptian god set god of the desert god of evil god of chaos okay and uh so is satanism pagan
um so many scholars would say no it’s not it can’t be because christianity is a monotheistic religion
and satan is primarily a christian entity okay well we have to remember that everything pagan
was pretty much um thrown into a dustbin and then that dustbin is now ruled by the devil
so all the pagan idols and gods and things like that that the christians
without that was not christian was pretty much discarded and regarded as demonic and the devil
was the ruler of all of those things so in that in that sense um satanism is pagan sorry guys
sorry scholars and uh the cool thing is about the temple of set is that he’s simply restoring
restoring um the evil entity to a pagan god an egyptian pagan god okay it’s funny because the
the various characters that exist within a monotheistic tradition i see them as gods
essentially because the idea of the one god um is a misnomer really that if you go back to
you know the way the greeks saw divinity the various gods were entities or personas that had
particular virtues and powers and personalities and perspectives but all of those gods came forth
from the ultimate ground of being which the greeks called the one and the good they didn’t call it
god to call it god would be an offense to the ultimate ground of being saying it’s this limited
thing, right? It’s just one entity. And that really becomes a problem too, because when you
say, oh, the ultimate ground of being is God, suddenly that ultimate ground of being gets
crammed into some kind of personality, usually male with a white beard sitting on a throne,
right? And then everything has to be subsumed underneath that one personality or that one
religion or that one true belief system. And all the other stuff goes out to the wayside and gets
regarded as not correct as evil okay and even the um the gnostics if you look at gnosticism
there were sects of the gnostics who regarded the one god as actually the devil because the one god
pretty much says i’m in charge i’m the one i’m the i’m the ultimate ground of being you must follow
me now and if you follow any others that’s evil whereas for a you know a true pagan any any entity
that they follow is a representative of the ultimate ground of being it doesn’t really matter
so this but this one god pretty much takes over as the as the claiming to be the ultimate ground
of being you can see that’s a major power play a major egotism thing it’s kind of a devilish thing
or demonic thing to do and so yeah the gnostics had a good point there they basically said that
the abrahamic god was himself pretty much the adversary the devil okay i’m simplifying it a bit
Okay, there’s a whole vast scholarship and exploration to be done in the realm of Gnosticism
in regard to what is called the Demiurge.
The Demiurge is pretty much the evil entity that has us trapped in matter.
So for that, for some of the Gnostics, that Demiurge was pretty much the adversary, the
devil figure for them.
And it’s a good point, I think.
Then there’s the Order of the Nine Angles, which I think emerged in the 80s and the 90s, the 80s, I guess.
And this is a truly evil order.
And they even acknowledge that they worship an evil entity, Satan.
And there are several murders attributed to members of the Order of the Nine Angles and church burnings.
and the Order of the Nine Angles is quite interesting because what you can see happening
is there’s a lot of really cool insights in it that have been subverted, distorted, corrupted
into a sort of a hostile worldview and we’re going to talk about the Order of the Nine Angles
i think suffers the most from what has happened to almost all systems of magic okay they suffer
pretty bad from it kind of making this world into a hell world okay um the order of nine angles i
don’t think it exists anymore but of course there are many people right now who espouse its philosophy
and um and we’ll talk about that in a bit and uh satanic temple that’s another manifestation
That’s not really magic, though.
Satanic Temple is more secular humanism, and it is more philosophical.
And they are famous for the statue of Baphomet, which we’ll talk about in a bit.
And so they can be quite amusing to watch as they try to do various publicity stunts
and in an attempt to teach the Orthodox religions a lesson, that kind of thing.
um yeah luciferian witchcraft i don’t know much about that but i know it’s out there
okay and um it’s nice because then we have the idea of satan as also being lucifer which is the
fallen angel okay so lucifer was a i guess the most righteous of the divine’s angels and but
through pride he fell there are many myths about it one myth is that God asked him told him to bow
down before his creation man humans and Lucifer refused to do that because humans were pretty much
weak and pathetic and made of clay right made from clay and for he didn’t think he could should bow
down to such a lowly creature and for that he was cast out of heaven supposedly and then of course
he’s now trapped in hell um but as that figure he represents the ultimate rebellion against a sort
of control freakish orthodox authority and so we’ll talk about that in a bit so the ultimate
transgression lucifer was like the first magician okay or the first heretic for the first sorcerer
to come into existence because of that act of transgression it’s like rather than just doing
as i’m told and blah blah i’m gonna chart my own path uh-oh and then stuff happens because of that
okay and we’re going to talk about that in a bit there is in the luciferian uh sort of mythos
is the key to the real value of satanism okay most satanism is yeah crap um but the reason it thrives
is because there’s an underlying value to it, which we will get to, okay? And there’s folk
witchcraft, which is a new favorite topic of mine. I have this book called The Witch’s Devil
by Robert J. Horn. It’s a fantastic book. It’s a glare on that. Fantastic book. And it’s interesting
because it kind of takes a lot of the sort of coerced testimony from the burning times, from
the spanish inquisition and so on and of course from well mostly from the interrogation of
supposed witches uh in the colonial times and looking through those records and looking at what
these men and women mostly women um were coming up with while they were being tortured or threatened
if they’re being accused of being witches right and then so well in order to sort of like get out
the torture or just leave me alone okay i’ll tell you i’ll tell you whatever you want and they start
they started making up um ideas of what their their supposed satanic practice was like and uh
so a lot of the ideas that come out of that some of them apparently were real because they were
taken from folk traditions that already existed around that time but some of them were also just
represented representations of what the people thought would go on if there were some kind of
a um a witch tradition where there’s a worshipping of the devil and stuff like that right
um he finds a lot of roger horn finds a lot of value in those uh those testimonials if you
i guess if you want to say it that way because a lot of the fear of witches and a lot of the
material that appears in the confessions whether it is from whether it is echoing the accounts of
actual pagan traditions that existed at the time or whether it’s simply made up it doesn’t quite
matter because the power there is that um all these things were being conjured up um from the
psyche as that happened and they are powerful and useful gosh i hope i’m conveying that correctly
okay um so if you make a big to do about witchcraft that big to do that you make of it is
powerful right there okay it doesn’t matter that it has some kind of roots in some kind of ancient
you know egyptian god or something like that the fact that you sense it there and try to give a
shape and a name to it already has you doing magic and so this is what folk witchcraft is kind of
diving into i’m not sure it i’m not sure that roger horn realizes he’s doing that okay he
probably does uh so there’s not really an authentic tradition of witchcraft that comes from
sometime in egypt or sometime in samaria or sometime in siberia or who knows right
or from you know the depths of africa other than shamanism really itself so the interesting thing
is that a lot of the traditions that came up in the american south like among the cunning folk
were all based on all kinds of things are based on the bible they’re based on old pagan practices
that were sort of echoing through the culture from europe uh and some of these things were not
too clear many of them were superstitious but they are all representations of the sort of mythological
powers in the psyche all right so let’s talk about the the order of the nine angles um the
interesting thing is that the the order of the nine angles it right now what goes on there is
it seems to revalue what’s going on in men’s mysteries, okay? And men, from a feminist point
of view, are regarded in many ways as evil, or at least the patriarchy is considered evil, right?
And so remember that patriarchy is the system of control imposed by the many male kings who have
used religion to control the you know masses and things around them right so um as feminism
developed and began criticizing that and you know setting women free and other people free from
patriarchy um apparently they’ve done a lot of damage to the male psyche kind of they kind of
threw out the baby with the bathwater when they were dealing with you know what it is to be male
or a man and the interesting thing about the um order of the nine angles it very often seems to
be a very much a man’s uh a reaffirmation or it’s an attempt to reaffirm the aggressiveness
and the um the transgressiveness and i don’t know the um so and it attempts it attempts very much
to demolish the sort of um progressive feministic um um sort of awakening that has happened in
in in uh culture okay but it’s also even against the old patriarchy too because there’s church
burnings and stuff like that going on in the order of the nine angles okay and i bring up
fight club here because if you want to get a good feeling for what the order of the nine angles is
like um apparently so you read this book i mean i don’t i’m not saying chuck palahniuk is a satanist
i don’t really know uh sorry charles uh but um but if you want to get a good feeling for
what um what the philosophy of the order of nine angles is like and how seductive it is
it’s almost like 99 99 truths and one lie in other words there’s a lot of insight going on there
but you get to see how it gets taken to such a dark place and subverted and pretty much makes
the world potentially into a living hell okay it’s a good book for showing that now i can say
this because i’ve known a couple of people who were affiliated with the order of the nine angles
okay these were great people by the way um one of them i consider to be one of the few enlightened
people that i have met he was completely uninhibited step free um very interesting
that he would harmonize with the order of the nine angles right um certainly wasn’t um buying
into their belief systems or he didn’t really much even like their followers either but anyway
his take on the order of the nine angles was much more like the what’s happening in fight club yeah
so it’s a revaluing of violence it’s not hard to understand that you know people will people will
say that sometimes violence is justified or you know things like that right and or sometimes the
destruction of a system that’s corrupt is required sometimes revolution is necessary
kind of what’s happening here okay um but the problem is um we’ll talk about the problem with
that system in a bit then we have the satanic temple where um they just try to push uh the sort
of um progressive liberal ideas out there by making fun of the conservatives okay and here’s
this infamous stunt that they did where they attempted to put a statue of Baphomet, which
looks like the devil, which basically is the devil. They wanted to put that outside of a
Capitol building in some state in the United States. And because they’re challenging the idea
of separation between church and state, there was a monument to the Ten Commandments there,
and they said well satanism is religion so we were going we want to put we want to have this religion
also represented in front of the capital and somehow they almost pulled it off and in the
process you get this sort of uh impression that they’re just being sort of smug and superior and
making fun of all the conservatives and the you know this the um archaic thinking around them
um and they don’t really realize that they’re sort of being assholes you know as they as they
do this stuff it’s very fun to watch their antics you know as they as they make fun of the um
conservative patriarchal establishment but many of the things many of the things that the
the satanic temple that they represent are not magical they’re mostly just philosophical
and um just basically liberal values you know inclusiveness and uh feminism and all that all
that stuff because all those things fly in the face of the patriarchy and of course the power
sources that these satanic traditions draw upon are that of lucifer the transgressor the first
heretic right um prometheus uh which is the uh the greek god or the greek titan that
brought the fire of knowledge let’s say science or learning to humans but he did in order to do
that he defied zeus zeus found out and then punished him he bound him to a stone in tartarus
and had an eagle come chew out his liver every day and then every day his liver grew back not
Not sure what the symbolism of that is, but he’s supposedly going to be punished for all eternity for having done that,
for having given humans knowledge and learning and fire.
And Azazel is another figure like that.
And in the Book of Enoch, he is basically portrayed as teaching science to humans, as well as the art of makeup,
teaching women how to make their faces beautiful is that science i don’t know the science to that
and so these uh these are sort of the mythical power sources there are others of course like set
and things like that um but you can see that it’s the the original heretic the disobedient one
who cares a lot about humanity and defies authority to help them okay and the one who
basically teaches knowledge and science you know in other words knowledge from the uh from the tree
of knowledge not the tree of life but the tree of knowledge in the garden of eden and that’s uh
azazel is also um at least in the book of enoch um azazel is portrayed that way so what’s the upside
to satanism well those are kind of the upsides in other words um if you want to derive um progress
on your spiritual path from transgression and disobedience then these mythical figures of
lucifer and prometheus and even azazel offer some guidance okay and they the their examples can be
very helpful um and as warning signs too because of what happened to prometheus how can you engage
what prometheus did without ending up like him they kind of serve as lessons the downside what’s
the downside of satanism the downside of satanism is that is pretty much the downside of all of the
magical traditions and is that they are misunderstood the secrets of magic are leaked
out into the general population and people don’t know what to make of them and they make something
really silly out of them okay in other words and they those systems have become corrupted
basically into systems of control okay primarily though the downside of satanism is it is that it
falls for duality it falls for this idea of this versus that and if you remember when i mentioned
alchemy uh earlier alchemy is supposedly is the combination of opposites not right not really
in true alchemy we simply recognize that what the things that appear to be opposite okay
are really just part of the same thing that recognition amounts to a combination of them
but they see they don’t need to be combined because they already are part of the same thing
okay now the problem with that is that if you if you so if you look at everything from the outside
and just sort of the external mindset this exoteric mindset then if everything is surfaces
then of course i well i know these things are part of the same thing therefore i need to jam
them together in order to make so and i need to so i need to go out i’m a man i need to go out and
find a woman and then merge with her to become divine right no it just feels that way okay and
and of course when it comes to the two sexes there are two sexes what on earth has convinced anyone
that these two sexes are opposite how can look at that notion that’s actually quite absurd
a man is opposite a woman no now the way that that opposition arose can be very interesting to talk
about and very disturbing to talk about which we’re not going to talk about here so the downside
the main downside of all of the traditions including satanism is the duality and the
basically the idea that i need to combine the opposites to to produce some kind of unity okay
and this combining of opposites you can see it’s kind of potentially violent potentially all kinds
of suffering actually and so the the main problem with all magic and with satanism as well is the
debasement of a system of magic that could be used to set you free but because it you use it to enter
a world of this versus that endless this versus that it keeps you it keeps you stuck and the same
thing goes for religion most religion is pretty much keeping you stuck in that realm of duality
of good versus evil god versus satan etc etc and so if we want to look at this debasement or this
corruption that happens in satanism we can go to the nine satanic statements this is just an
example of how to do this okay um so there are nine satanic statements i just quoted just four
of them out of here to make examples um satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence
okay now this is just pulled from the left-handed path because the left-handed path um the attitude
is that anything at all can be used as a vehicle towards my liberation my to my enlightenment okay
which means that i’m always doing the work i don’t reserve a special time like
every sunday to do my spiritual practice whatever i’m doing is my spiritual practice okay
it’s tantric idea it’s a left-handed path idea okay but in these in the um the church of satan
this was not understood clearly by lave apparently um he represents indulgence instead of abstinence
so in other words a gratification of desires we already know that engaging in endless
self-gratification that causes problems for us it causes suffering so this is kind of a silly
juvenile rebellion without really knowing what you’re saying all right satanic statement number
four satan represents kindness to those who deserve it instead of love wasted on ingrates
so you notice that that duality that set up this is this person here is uh deserves kindness and
this person down here does not and then we have this sort of like of course we have like well i
need to get into position where i deserve kindness right and then to hell with everybody else right
this sets up this whole idea of let’s let i need to get on top and then forget about everybody else
yeah and satan represents uh this satanic um statements also uh are all about the self
selfishness it’s a religion of selfishness i need to get to the top and to hell with everyone else
that kind of thinking causes a lot of suffering as we already know so once again we can see that
this statement is very exoteric very ignorant okay however tantrically it could be quite useful
don’t cast pearl before don’t pass don’t cast pearls before swine really is more like those
who aren’t for those who aren’t ready don’t dispense this wisdom you know those there’s
some there’s some useful ways of interpreting number four satan represents vengeance instead
of turning the other cheek this comes about from not understanding that reference of turning the
the other cheek okay um we could criticize turning the other cheek as the ultimate and
passive aggressive behavior right but you will have to think of what what um what when when
jesus says um if somebody slaps you across the hits you in the face or hits you in one of your
cheeks then offer him the other okay you have to engage in that imagery to see what he’s saying
okay when somebody’s reflexively punishing you and then you offer yourself for some more
punishment you can see how that’s going to be very striking to the person who’s dealing out
the punishment okay because you are you’re presenting them as you’re presenting to them
look what you are doing and then so you turn the other cheek toward them and say go ahead
hit me again just i want you to see what you are doing and then of course it might work you know
that they basically are powerless to hit you because they can’t stand what you’ve just shown
them about themselves okay that is what turning the other cheek means okay and so this idea of
you know if somebody hits you hit them back uh nothing wrong with that either necessarily as
long as you’re willing to accept you know the consequences of escalating violence all that
stupidity that follows right once again statement number five very juvenile not understanding what
turn the other cheek means okay and of course the idea of turning the other cheek as something you
always do when you’re being hurt of course not why would we get that it’s just showing you a very
powerful principle number eight satan represents all of the so-called sins as they all lead to
physical mental or emotional gratification another very short-sighted myopic statement uh yes
so suppose it’s sins of they are sins because they’re basically um instant gratification but
they’re gratuitous right and then of course they are sinful because in the long run they just bring
more suffering and so once again a very ignorant statement to make it’s like all these sins are
wonderful because they make you feel good yeah for a little bit and of course the kind of good
feeling you get from indulging in these so-called like you know eating sweets or or masturbating to
pornography or something like that these aren’t really the kind of joy you joys that you can get
from um that you can discover in a spiritual practice okay a lot of the things that we think
are joy are not joy they’re simply the relaxation or the alleviation of suffering yeah so always
trying to get out of suffering or always trying to feel okay is always making an effort to try
to feel okay this is what perpetuates the suffering itself and statement number eight
see fails to recognize that however you can see how it attempts to delve into that tantric mystery
of like whatever you’re doing can be used for your spiritual practice okay yeah so even if you are
masturbating to porn that can be used in your spiritual practice but of course you have to
know what you’re doing you have to have good instruction you have to have a good teacher
i guess i don’t know what that would look like exactly and so the ultimate problem with satanism
and with any other spiritual tradition is against-ism this is actually a word i thought i
had made up the word then i looked it up and apparently it’s being used by other people so
Againstism is simply the way that you respond to any kind of stress or calamity is by being against it.
And it can be quite shocking that an initiate might not be able to steer clear of againstism all the time,
but an initiate already knows that being against anything at all never works.
the againstism itself always leads to more more more trouble because it’s reinforcing that
dualistic relationship something bad comes up push it away okay or something comes up that i really
like but then i feel inadequate because i don’t have it once again the same kind of problem of
the duality if a spiritual tradition is not trying to dissolve this againstism thing then it’s not a
spiritual tradition it’s just a tradition that’s going to keep you trapped in that exoteric
external world mindset it’s from the new testament i think i think when uh jesus was attempting to
cast out demons from somebody the the demon that was inside a man um screamed back i am legion
when i think uh jesus says tell me your name and then he can command that spirit out of the body
or something like that right it’s an exorcism um and instead of giving a name at first the demon
says i am legion of every demon we could say this about the devil as an entity okay um the reason
i’m bringing this up is because when as you walk around in the world and see lots of things around
you to be against oh i won’t stand for that oh i’m totally against that i certainly won’t do that
you know um that uh duality that you set up um all of those representations of things that you
don’t like okay those are all demons okay and the and the reason they are offshoots of the one demon
i am legion right they’re like the one satan right it’s because within you is that monster maker
with within you is that targeting apparatus when something is irritating your nervous system
habitually creates a monster out of it a demon right and um makes it into something makes it
into a problem which must be now pushed away or destroyed or dealt with harshly okay also much
more subtle when it becomes a demon of desire because then the trouble is that it arises out
here and you need it so badly and you’re suffering because you need it so badly it’s the same problem
to um so this devil force is legion in all of the images of fear and desire that your nervous system
creates around and so when you recognize that that can be quite interesting because then the whole
idea of confronting demons conjuring them making them tell you their name things like that right
It all takes on a different light because then you can actually make progress, spiritual progress, and you now are on a left-handed path pursuit, okay?
So if you’re running around in the world and your targeting apparatus is simply creating monsters all around you and your only response to those monsters is to beat them up and blow them up and yell at them, okay, or chase after them because you want them so badly, you are lost.
You are basically a tool of the devil, okay?
But then as that’s happening, eventually you begin to notice the monster maker within.
It’s like, what is this thing in my nervous system that keeps doing this?
It doesn’t need to do that.
I don’t need to make an enemy out of anything ever.
I can shut that down forever.
And then suddenly no more suffering.
I still live in the world and I have challenges that I face, but they’re no longer a problem
for me.
That is a possibility anyway.
To shut down that monster maker, to shut down the Satan within pretty much, the thing inside you that keeps creating those monsters out there or those objects of desire out there, okay?
Shut it down or no?
Shut it down or become more aware of it and make friends with it, okay?
because a world a life without desire and fear not really possible while you’re living in a human
body but a life in which you make friends with those fear and desire tendencies and you don’t
take them so seriously anymore wow that involves getting on friendly terms with the devil so there
is a value to satanism right and just hearkening back to an earlier video um azazel is also i think
it literally it just means the um the demon of the wilderness the demon in the wilderness who’s
going to devour you if you should wander out there okay so if you leave the group if you go off on
your own then some lion it’s going to come eat you because you’re by yourself or if you if you’re
swimming in a group of free divers and you swim off by yourself and don’t have a buddy maybe a
shark’s going to come along and eat you now because you’re easy pickings okay that’s kind of what the
original Azazel was. Because the scapegoat was the sins of the people were all heaped upon the
scapegoat and the scapegoat was sent out into the wilderness as an offering to Azazel, which would
then eat it and then eat the sins of all the people. This comes from a time when we were
hunter-gatherers and a predator would pick off one of us, would pretty much attack, but then take one
the weakest among us either a child or an elderly person or somebody who was injured who couldn’t
get away and then of course the lions or whatever they were would eat that tribe member and then
suddenly everything was fine because the lions have their kill they don’t want anything else
and they leave us alone now we feel okay it’s like oh that person who was weak and injured had to die
so that the rest of us could live okay so just pointing out that that demon out there also is a
that Azazel demon, the devil can also be seen as a mouth of the predator, mouth of hell,
mouth into the underworld of death. This is very important. So if the devil represents duality,
you can see that in the tradition of Kabbalah, that in the creation of the universe, first,
the light and the darkness were separated from each other. In Kabbalah, this is called Tzimtzum.
and once that was accomplished then the divine or god injected light into the darkness and that
itself could be the first transgressive act that’s very interesting too because as the universe is
created you have a whole realm of existence that exists now between the light and the dark
and any conscious act of entering into that space between the light and the dark any conscious
living that you do is then an action of the sorcerer okay you could just emerge in the world
and be unconscious and not know what you’re doing and just live like an animal you know pretty much
follow your instincts or do as you’re told right or you could wake up and say no i’m going to do
things differently i’m going to follow a different path so you wake up and you decide i i think i
have some free will here or something or something like that’s going on right and so between the
light and the darkness we have this figure emerge which is the sorcerer and of course the devil
remembers like the first sorcerer the first transgressor the first person to go against the
plan to sort of wake up and say what the hell i don’t need to do what’s going on here i’m not
got to follow this plan i’m not going to listen to you you know that that kind of entity uh is
problematic to be sure but it also seems to be part of the divine plan and so um in the book
the witch’s devil by roger horn he mentions that the light between the horns is very important
because between the light and the dark between spirit and matter is the realm of the soul and
The soul is the realm where you can wake up and do things as a magician and play.
It’s where your authenticity and your freedom can emerge from a system of being controlled
by instincts and just being unconscious all the time.
And at the whim of all kinds of demons, you have the opportunity to wake up from all those
demons.
And that happens in the realm of the soul between the horns.
or like uh if you look at the temple of solomon you have the black pillar and the white pillar
between the light and the dark that’s where the magic happens that’s where the grace emerges
that’s where the rose blooms that’s where the sun rises and as you can see here in the image
of the baphomet that’s where the fire that’s where the real fire is right what does the soul do the
soul burns does that fire hurt yes sometimes it’s a hellfire sometimes though it’s in light of heaven
or a mixture of both and if it’s a mixture of both it’s definitely soul material okay so in
yeah i’ve already talked about this with you have let there be light so you have the separation of
the light from the dark and so in the interplay between the light and the dark we have the left
handed path the tantric path where somebody’s trying to wake up okay if you don’t want to wake
up you just want to play along with the game then you’re sort of on the right-handed path
and you might wake up maybe but everything’s kind of an accident then the left-handed path
is a deliberate attempt to wake up go down here and so you find yourself in this world where you
can play along with the instincts that are going along or then you can basically say wait a second
i don’t have to do what these instincts are telling me to do but i don’t know what i don’t
know what to do with them and suddenly you begin to wake up and you begin to sort of make an
orchestra out of all of the chaotic noises that are around you. All right. So the idea of Azazel
out in the wilderness, like the devil as the mouth of hell. Okay. Now you have to remember the monster
maker inside you that’s creating all these images of fear and desire all around you. A lot of you
guys, when you are doing your demon summoning stuff, you tend to regard the trigger image out
there that’s causing you trouble let’s say as the real cause of your trouble it’s like oh the demon
has arisen out there and now i need to deal with this thing but it’s so scary to look at it’s like
guys that’s not the real demon the real demon is the one inside you that’s generating that image
projecting it out there and when you turn around and look at the thing that is that’s inside you
that has arisen to create this dichotomy this duality then you begin to see what’s really
happening and then when that duality dissolves that’s like a death experience without any duality
it’s like i don’t even exist and so the mouth of hell exists like inside you or the mouth into
death okay so once you realize that i don’t need to generate monsters out there anymore or objects
of desire that system shuts down and it seems as though you’re going to die and you begin to descend
into this oblivion this nothingness into the mouth of hell okay and that’s that is the experience
that magic will eventually lead you to the death of the ego which feels like you’re descending into
oblivion or you’re being eaten by a monster or this energy from down below because you have to
remember that we evolved sort of up from the enteric nervous system into the cardiac nervous
system and then into the cranial nervous system which is the brain right there are actually three
brains and so as we evolved up into our brilliant brains we also got stuck up so we identify now
with what’s going on here and we think of everything intellectually we try to control
everything from our control tower perspective when our whole body is still operating in terms
of more primitive systems down below but what’s going on up here has now sort of distanced itself
from what’s down below and this is why we there’s one of the reasons why we suffer okay and what
magic is going to do if you practice it it’s going to basically set free it’s going to that
separation between this control tower mentality and the forces of nature down below it’s going
to dissolve that control and you can feel like there’s fire rising from below to consume you
and destroy you okay so that mouth of hell imagery like it’s almost like being eaten by a predator
feet first you know being and then eventually being destroyed okay um but you can emerge on
the other side of that destruction as somebody who no longer has an ego you still have a persona
okay and you still have fears and desires but now you are aware of them all as they come up
and it’s like that’s not me that’s not me none of this is me i don’t know what am i i don’t know
but this whole duality engine has been shut down now i’m free i’m not sure what that means
but i’m not doing it anymore i’m not subject to all of these problems anymore there are no problems
they’re all challenges for lack of a better way of putting it all right i’m not sure how that
came across but see what we’re trying to do is look at the essence of uh the value of the satanic
viewpoint we know that these traditions derive their momentum from something from there must
be something of value in them and i’m hopefully i can convey that to you in terms of left-handed
path and what tantra and magic actually is or what it actually should be and you know also to
point out how it has become corrupted and debased by people who don’t understand, you know,
what’s possible with it. All right, then until next time.
Source: Lyam Christopher