The Truth about the
Occult
How it both is and is
not compatible with other faiths,
And the dangers
thereof.
By Michael Trudeau
[Note: A few years ago I was asked to write an article about the occult for a magazine-length tract on the Coexist stickers, because of my former life as a satanist. This draft was as far as it went until it was revealed that the project would have to be abandoned. And so it has been sitting around in a box all this time waiting for me to decide what ought to be done with it. If it were possible the subject might well become a book, but there are already too many books in the world, and numerous that treat with this one. (And we know that the western attention span has been reduced to roughly the equivalence of a goldfish's.) But there is still much that it needs: explanations, evidence, references, and most of all, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, including a discussion of its uniqueness among all the religions of the world, with which it is not only mutually incompatible but diametrically opposed. Perhaps in time those absent necessaries can be included and a decent work made of this; but for now it is good for it to be here, that the Holy Spirit can use it as He will.]
Background and premise.
There was a time, a period of about six
years, in which I called myself a Satanist; and apart from my studies in
Freemasonry and some casual reading in traditional witchcraft and demonology,
as well as a brief time that I considered myself a Gnostic Christian, this was
the whole of my personal experience in the occult. And I speak of the larger subject of the occult
because this is the tree upon which is the branch of modern paganism – in all
of its expressions of faith – and it is paganism to which I must attempt to
relate.
And this is not so much a
stretch of reasoning as certain philosophers would like to have us assume; for
the occult is the occult, and it matters not a wit into which of its cults one
places oneself, for to separate them at all from one another is to split hairs. Many neopagans and other occultists will try
to deny this. To admit any relationship
with the Satanist would, in many eyes, cast their craft under a bad light. Yet it is a relatively simple matter to show
on three levels how they are the same.
At the same time, there is today a
movement called the New Age (or the Age of Aquarius) which would like to
convince us that the pagan and occult spiritual expressions are indeed in-line
with all the other world faiths, including Christianity – the holy book of
which expressly and emphatically prohibits the practices engaged in by these
cults. This new
metaphysical-theophilosophical theory of everything is an absolute reversal of
the truth. And this New Age movement with
all of the cults under its umbrella is, in fact, not new at all, but merely a
recrudescence of old-world devil worship.
Modern day Satanism (as popularly recognized).
Now there are generally recognized two
basic varieties of Satanism. The first
is called “Spiritual Satanism”. Under
this faith, the adherent literally worships the Biblical angelic being,
Lucifer.
The most common reason that a person
becomes convinced this is the proper form of religion, is because they are
deceived into believing the exact opposite of what the Bible teaches: in a
clause, that Lucifer is really a good god who wants to help mankind and that
Jehovah is the deceitful enemy who wants to enslave us. This is the creed that such famous Masons as
Albert Pike and Manly P. Hall have believed in and espoused in their extensive
writings. The only other reason for
spiritual Satanism that I am able to discover is sheer insanity of the
participant.
Now this branch of spiritual Satanism is
practiced in the following ways, depending upon the means and brazenness of the
cult. Most of the small groups,
comprised of “common” folk will worship with ceremonies that may or may not be
supposed to reflect traditional witchcraft, but invariably contain some
rendition of the medieval Black Mass, in which blasphemies are spoken and
performed, favors are asked, drugs (and often blood) are consumed, and deviant
sexual practices take place. But then
there are also the more dangerous elite, particularly the Illuminati and their
brethren agents within the Catholic Church, who, because they are able, will go
to such extremes as sacrificing children or abducted girls sold into slavery. The focus of these rituals is always upon one
of three things: gratifying the self in diverse ways, assuming magical power to
the self, or initiating others to be used in the ranks to further empower the
self.
But most groups and individuals fall under
the second kind of Satanism, which is called “Symbolic Satanism”. The symbolic Satanists are then divided into
two categories: First, there are those who do not truly believe in Satan, but
use (sometimes only the word) “Satanism” as an act of rebellion against our
societal institutions and norms, as a means to worship the self, and often as a
[broke-down] vehicle for their spiritual/intellectual evolution. Under this division falls the Church of Satan,
the Church of Thelema,
the Ordo Templi Orientis and its Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, the Temple of Set, the Ordo Draconis et Atri Adamantis. Also under this division grows a plague of
misguided individuals who – having been deceived in their reasoning just as
those spiritual Satanists outlined above – have concluded that the God they
don’t believe in is a tyrant and the devil they don’t believe in is their only
ally. They see the story of Lucifer’s
fall as a metaphor that they can relate to – usually because they have come to
feel personally alienated from their culture and take a dim view of
authority. Thus they look upon Satan as
the grand underdog of mythology, the leader of those who had the courage to
stand up to the established authority, even though he must have known he could
not prevail. These symbolic Satanists
live as hedonists, only to please themselves.
The second division of symbolic Satanists is made up of extraordinary
individuals that DO believe in the Biblical Satan, and DO revere him as an
important and benign character, and yet (as far as we can know without rising
to their upper echelons) DO NOT worship him.
Under this division falls the Rosicrucians, the Theosophical Society,
the Order of the Golden Dawn, and (even though several of them may best be
placed as out-and-out Lucifer worshippers) the ever popular Freemasons. There must be other infamous groups that
belong with this category, though the lines blur with the ebb and flow of
complicated individuals, making classification difficult to determine. Doubtless there are members of groups named
above who would object to being placed where I have them.
Now let me conclude the matter by saying
that there is, in essence, only one functional difference that separates the
Spiritual from the Symbolic Satanist: one believes in the power he is serving,
and the other does not. This is also the
only difference between a Satanist and a pagan.
The first connection: gnosis to apotheosis.
Now as a Satanist, I did not myself
realize that I had much in common with the pagan (of whatever cult). One reason for this illusory degree of
separation is language. The pagan may
call out in a different name to his deity than does his fellow pagan, but in
truth they are both calling upon demons of Hell, the same as was I. (This will be discussed in the following
segment.)
Another reason for the confusion is
intent. A practitioner of Wicca may have
noble intentions of improving their life, helping their neighbor, and doing all
things to make the world a better place; or a Freemason may have the intention
of acquiring “Light” (or knowledge about the divine); or a psychic may intend
to help the police solve a crime; all of which are perfectly fine intentions on
their surface. Nevertheless, all of
these are seeking in their pride to become more powerful, to solve their own
problems supernaturally, apart from the total reliance upon God characterized
in devout monotheism; in essence, to be their own god, even to the point of
resolving the problem of death.
They may know intellectually, and
consciously accept the fact that some day they will die; but to boil down the
matter to its most basic naked fact, all of these spiritual approaches to life
are in the end approaches to solving the issue of death by their own power; and as natural human power is insufficient,
they all seek to acquire for themselves an higher power. [Should we wonder at the explosion of
interest in comic book super heroes?]
This is an attempt at apotheosis (or deification), and this is the
common thread that weaves throughout the occult in all its manifestations, and
ties all forms of paganism inextricably to Satanism; for true Satanism (or
Luciferianism, as it has oft been termed) is nothing if not the exaltation of
the human will above the will of God. It
is commonly recognized that this is portrayed in Genesis 3:5, when the tempting
serpent said to Eve, “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then
your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and
evil.” Is it a coincidence that the
serpent figures prominently in most pagan mythologies, and is venerated by
some? And does the modern day witches’
and warlocks’ creed “To know, to will, to dare, to keep silent,” sound so very
out of step with the original sin and the heart of Satanism?
Thus, outwardly persons of occult
spirituality may differ in their intentions and nomenclature, but inwardly they
are seeking to make themselves worthy (enlightened enough) to continue their
existence in the afterlife, in which they might perhaps even continue evolving
toward godhood. [Note that this is also
comparable to Mormon doctrine, and that Joseph Smith was himself involved in
the occult even apart from his Masonic membership.] At the heart of it, as in Satanism, the focus
is on the self.
But where does the power come from? Some would like to think that it comes from
within, by the proper exercising of the “limitless human potential” to tap and
utilize the “infinite ethereal resources” of the cosmos; (which would mean that
humans are gods). Some would say that
the spirits/gods/what-supernatural-power-have-you are willing to do the bidding
of man if properly worshipped, or that these same can be forced to do the
bidding of man if properly evoked or incanted.
And these which say these things will attest that the spirits or an
“ascended master” told them it was so, or that their master said it was so, or
that there own spirit senses it is so.
But is it impossible that they should be deceived by any of these:
spirits, masters, or their own desires?
What if these spirits are not truly benevolent? What if they are all demons? If that is the case, then the pagans are
serving the same entities as was I.
The second connection: parallel pantheons.
The basic underlying reason that most
neopagans will adamantly deny any connection between their cult (and/or coven)
and Satanism, may be that they simply do not want anything to do with the
“Abrahamic religions”, which – the general consensus indicates – were foisted
upon their ancestors, primarily by Catholicism.
They will say that this or that system and pantheon is original to their
ethnic background, but their claim to originality goes to nothing more than
ancestral tradition; and those pagans who have studied other mythologies must
(and frequently do) turn and admit that their myths and legends are nearly
identical to those of dozens of other ancient cultures. Now if, for example, Celtic, Teutonic, Roman,
Greek, Egyptian, Canaanite, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Akkadian paganism can be
shown to share so many common factors that they would appear to be virtual
copies of each other (and they can), then an empirically-minded student would
be forced to conclude that they must have had a common influence, a common
ancestor, or both, and therefore it is impossible that more than one of them
can correctly be said to be original.
There is not space in this
article to properly show by certain proofs the ties that unite the
aforementioned groups and other mystics.
One must examine the famous figures of the occult and read their
teachings, and one must carefully compare the symbolism, folklore, and
mythology of the various “spiritist” faiths; otherwise it is a simple matter to
be misled.
But to make some attempt, in so small a
space, to show that Satanism and the varieties of paganism are indeed calling
upon the same powers of darkness, let us look at the example of one myth common
to various ancient cultures, which still has much truck within our societies today.
I hold up for your examination the cults
of Easter…
Supposedly, in Babylonian times, King
Nimrod took a certain Semiramis as queen.
Efforts have been made to show that after Nimrod was slain in battle,
Semiramis labored to identify her husband with their god of the earth and
creator of mankind, Bel). Naturally, if
her husband was Bel then she must have been Ishtar, the Queen of Heaven and
mother of mankind (and hence a fertility goddess). She was a moon goddess. He was a sun god. And their child, Tammuz (Duzu to the
Akkadians and Dumuzid to the Sumerians), the god of food and vegetation, was
observed to die and resurrect with the changing seasons.
Now I have read several
different versions of the story of Ishtar: In one she descends to the Euphrates
River from the moon in a giant egg; in another, after descending she
demonstrates her power by causing a rabbit to lay eggs; in another, her
worshippers dye these eggs in the blood of the children they have sacrificed to
Bel; in another, she is impregnated by the sun god’s rays of light and gives
birth to Tammuz; and in still another, Tammuz is not her son but her brother
and lover, and he dies every autumn equinox and is resurrected at the spring
equinox. Whichever of these claims hold a
kernel of historic truth, I cannot say, but I do know that the cults of Ishtar
and Bel represent an ancient form of worship that has been played out in
numerous cultures.
Ishtar has been identified with Aphrodite
of the Greeks, Astarte of the Philistines and Sidonians, Atargatis of the
Syrians, Demeter (also) of the Greeks, Eostre of the Anglo-Saxons, Freyja of
the Norse, Inanna of the Sumerians, Isis of the Egyptians, Ostara of the
Germans, and Venus of the Romans, to name but a few. A statuette of Astarte has even been found
near Granada,
dating back to the Sixth or Seventh Century BC. Bel has been identified with the many Baals
of the Semitic cultures, Mars of the Romans, Molech (under various spellings)
of several Semitic cultures, both Poseidon and Zeus of the Greeks, and some would
astutely say Marduk. Tammuz has been
identified with Iacchus: the “morning star” and the “dog star”, the
light-bearing “divine child” of the Goddess, born in the underworld, who
correlates with Sirius, Sothis, Set, Horus, Bacchus, Bromius, and Dionysus; but
Christians would identify him either as Lucifer or perhaps as Lucifer’s coming anti-Christ
child.
In the old pagan faiths, these
deities were commonly worshipped as follows: In the sundry temples of Ishtar, women
performed the function of priestess-prostitutes, and were supposed to embody
their queen and receive worship. Men who
would come to worship the deity incarnated would also receive carnal worship
from the priestesses as the embodiment the “divine male principal” symbolized
by the bull. In the Canaanite cities,
women were required to go to the temple and serve during the spring
festival. In Babylon
a young woman was required to go to the Temple of Ishtar
and lie with a stranger before her marriage. In several cultures, children of these unions
were sacrificed in fire to the Bel deity in honor of the Tammuz deity.
Finally, to briefly mention but a few
other points of connection to familiar things: In the Celtic traditions, druids
dyed eggs red to honor the Sun (the Bel deity).
This is likely for the same reason as in the Semitic mystery religions:
because it impregnates the moon that gives birth to the morning star. It was the tradition of Anglo-Saxons to give
colored eggs as offerings to Eostre during their Spring Equinox. And in many of these traditions you will find
Ishtar and Tammuz appearing in their various incarnations as the Madonna with
child archetype, seen today in Catholic temples.
Libraries could be filled with the stories
of these entities, but as they are all similar in so many ways, volumes of
material have been written to show their correlations. And I think that would be very hard for an
honest pagan of even modest intelligence to make any claim to originality on
behalf of their ancestors.
Finally, considering the deep connections
that exist between the figures of Lucifer, Sirius, Iacchus, and others, it
should be difficult for anyone to argue that Satanism has no connection with
paganism.
The third connection: theological foundation.
Perhaps better than any particular proof
by example is the proof of principle.
And at the heart of all paganism is one underlying, all-pervasive
principle: pantheism. Pantheism is the
idea that literally everything is a
part of the divine, or that anything
can correctly be worshipped as divine.
This is summarized by the common phrase, “All is god and god is all.”
Now I know that I can (because I have, in
the days prior to my descent into Satanism) enter a pagan chat room and make it
known that I am a Gnostic “Christian”, and I will be treated with the same
respect as a Wiccan or a worshipper of Marduk; and then begin sharing the
particulars of my brand of occultism. One
might think that this is an ideal circumstance for peace and harmony, but the
principle which props it up is nothing short of dangerous. You see, in order for pantheism to work, all
human judgment must be forestalled. The
outmoded concepts of right and wrong must be eradicated from the conscious
mind. The notions of truth and lie must
be abolished; otherwise, sectarianism would return and someone might be
offended. This is the work of the
world-class New Age philosophers utilizing the political correctness trend; and
the pagan communities have swallowed it, whether they realize it or not. Because they have accepted pantheism as
truth, in the spirit of tolerance, all the pagan faiths are, in reality,
laboring toward the same end.
With the doctrine of pantheism firmly in
place, by an incredible hypocrisy of logic, it is assumed that if there is no
right or wrong answer, then everyone is right and no one is wrong; and if any
intolerant fundamentalist Christian, Jew, or Moslem dared say that theirs’ is
the only right religion, then they are wrong.
This is the spirit of the New Age, which seeks to “elevate” all creeds
to the lowest common denominator. This
is spiritual communism.
It’s a nonsensical philosophy that recalls
one’s memory to the credos of Big Brother’s party. “WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE
IS STRENGTH,” wrote Orwell. Or in this
case, no truth is truth.
Now if the distinction between true and
false is removed, if two plus two is equal to any number one wishes to put in
place of four, does this state elevate the human spirit or dampen it? What about morality? Does the absence of truth leave us with any
support for morals, or do they too become subjective? The Satanist knows the answer, for he
intentionally abandons all morality, thinking to spit in God’s eye.
[If a society were to adopt this mode of
thinking, might we rationally suppose that it would destroy itself? This is exactly what is happening. Day by day, the entire western world is unwittingly
joining the life of the Symbolic Satanist, telling God to “take a hike” and
seeking only to please themselves.]
One religion to rule them all … and in the darkness bind them.
The slogans all say peace and harmony, but
the truth is that the movers and shakers of the New Age are seeking to bring
about a global religion with which to rule humanity. They say coexist, but what they mean is:
coalescence. In order to achieve this
end, they promote pantheism thinly disguised as “tolerance”. Getting the majority of people on earth to
accept this misnamed tolerance isn’t easy; it requires a good measure of
duplicity and duality.
This work is so important to them that
they are ready to rewrite history, philosophize endlessly about the hidden
“nature” of reality, and even bring into question the validity of our moral
traditions for as long as is necessary to so confound the average person that
they feel they must abandon all hope of ever knowing the truth. And they manipulate not only history and
philosophy, but also the media [note that “holly wood” was once used by witches
to make magic wands] and even our language itself, to thereby erode the
foundations of the paradigms of human moral thought.
They really are master magicians. They use their right hand to attempt to
remove the occult from any negative connotations (namely Luciferianism) in
public opinion, while with the left hand they attempt to remove the line
between good and evil. So for example,
with the right hand they bring back Celtic paganism by popularizing Wicca,
marketing it as a peaceful, earth friendly spirituality that pays homage to the
forces of nature. The only trouble is
that Wicca has something that traditional Celtic religion does not: witches. Here we see how with their left hand they
were also popularizing the false idea (largely with the help of fellow
Freemason, Walt Disney) that there is some distinction between “white” and
“black” magic; making it possible for witches to be okay.
They’ve been working a similar trick with
the promotion of positive thinking. With
the right hand they popularize the power of the mind, teaching that you can
think your way to health and wealth through “visualization techniques”. [Spirit healers have been made from faith
healers by telling them that when they pray for the sick, they should visualize
them well, and send out the visualization to them as a “good vibration”. One can almost imagine a teacher of this
discipline saying, “And by the way, here’s a crystal to help you focus those
vibrations. And by the way, it also
helps to visualize a spirit guide who can assist by directing you where to
focus those vibrations. And by the way,
you are now an honorary pagan; welcome to Mystery Babylon.”] Meanwhile with the left hand, they give
currency to the idea that because we can supposedly change reality by changing
our mind, everything that exists is therefore only relative, each observer
creates his own parallel universe, and so there’s actually no such thing as
reality. There cannot, therefore, be
anything morally wrong with shaping the “matrix” to suit ourselves. This is to give mind control (sorcery) a pass
as well.
Since Carl Jung’s day the neoplatonist
thinkers have been steadily using a not so dissimilar replacement philosophy
tactic among New Age devotees and the curious.
To them they have promoted the idea that the character of Satan is but
an archetype (an innate essential idea inherited from the race) of the
collective unconscious, which represents a great, esoteric human truth, and
which we need not be afraid of and dare not suppress if we are going to
transcend our current state of being and evolve to higher planes of
consciousness to become New Age christs.
No matter the cult or the example, the
same efforts are made across the board: the lines are blurred, black and white
becomes grey, good becomes evil, evil becomes subjective, and the truth is
always pushed further into the realm of myth.
As evidenced by their writings, the elite
New Agers know that there is no difference between the ritual degree work of
the good Freemason (who, by the way, are at the hub of all the New Age), the
necromancy of the medium, the card reading of the fortune teller, the nativity
casting of the astrologer, the positive visualization of the sorcerer, the juju
making of the witchdoctor, the wanga making of the hungan, and the overt
worship of Satan, etcetera, because at their heart they share a central theme,
and in their practice they are all pulling together in the same direction, as
planned out long in advance: namely, toward the pantheistic anything-goes
religion of the New Age.
Can they coexist?
In my experiences speaking to people about
Jesus, it seems like one out of every two will tell me what a great moral
teacher or guru Jesus was, sometimes even what a great christ He was [lower case
c intentional]. Right up there next to
Buddha, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and Barack Obama. They’re comfortable with Jesus the man.
But obviously, they are talking about a
different Jesus than Him of the Bible; for regarding the Biblical Jesus, the apostle
Luke writes, “Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name
under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” [Acts 4:12]
However harmonious it may sound to say
that everyone is right about the most important subject in the world, it is
nevertheless a great deception that the pagan can coexist with all of the other
religions, because if there is but one thing the committed pantheist cannot
tolerate, it is that the fundamentalist monotheist should practice his faith. The pantheist may profess that the Christian
God is as valid as Gaia or dharma or ancestor worship … as long as the
Christian will change his idea of his God to conform to theirs. In other words, the Christian too must
believe that the truth is found in everything except his own Bible! For if he conforms then he is indeed
worshipping another god, another christ, another Jehovah than the deity of the
Bible, and he might as well worship at every alter just as the Freemason, for
he has entirely abandoned his faith. It
is the same for the Jew who actually believes that God is not a liar, and I
suspect the situation is the same for the devout Muslim.
So long as there are still fundamentalist
believers from the three large monotheistic faiths who refuse to fold under peer
pressure, the argument with pantheism will continue; they are irreconcilable
and cannot be merged.
