Luciferian for Me, Satanic For Thee: On the Cabal's Sinister Expression of the Left Hand Archetypes
This piece is another attempt at what William Irwin Thompson called “mind jazz.” An earlier piece of mine exploring the relationship between Hegel’s idealist philosophy and the UFO phenomenon and how each helped interpret the other was an earlier version of some mind jazz.
In this piece however I want to explore the proliferation of archetypes of the demonic/left-hand path as they apply to contemporary world events. This thread will involve some conspiracist thought mixed with some philosophical and theological speculation.
The principal focus of the piece will be exploring the strange merger of two distinct archetypes—the Luciferian and the Satanic—among the elites and how those symbols may be manifesting in sinister (literally left-hand) ways. I’ll reflect on this tendency through some recent film depictions in both The Lord of the Rings and The Infinity War Saga of The Avengers.
In order to get a sense of what is involved here we first need to explore the initial distinction and later fusion of the Lucferian archetype and the Satanic one.
Chris Knowles’ exploration of Luciferian technology is an incredibly rich source of reflection. I can’t even pretend to summarize it here. Read it for yourself but it does influence a lot of thinking in this piece.
The Lucifer archetype (or impulse) is one of rebellion. Rebellion against mortality, against finitude, against the incompleteness of material creation. The Christian orthodox tradition has it’s own rebellion against finitude, mortality, and creation but in a slightly different way, which I've covered previously. Or rather the orthodox Christian tradition believes in a different mechanism (God) by which that fallen reality is overcome.
In contrast, with the Luciferian impulse mortality and finitude is overcome through self-willed assertion of power. The self-willed aspect creates the link between Milton’s Satan (Paradise Regained) and Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein. Lucifer is Prometheus Unbound. Many elements of transhumanism—as I’ve written about before—partake of this very tendency.
Nevertheless the whole field gets confusing very quickly. For example, Anton LeVay’s Church of Satan was actually a Church of Lucifer. LeVay’s theology was masculine, Nietzschean angst and heavy metal-fueled rebellion against the bourgeoisie suburban world of American Protestant morality. It’s about magic as the assertion of power and control over outer events and other people.
In contradiction to LeVay’s Satanism, The Satan (Shaitan) is originally the prosecutor in the Divine Court. To understand the symbol it’s important to know the greater background of theology in the ancient Near East—this includes the ancient Jewish tradition but is by no means unique to it. It includes the Babylonians, Persians, Assyrians, Egyptians, and many other people groups in that area and time.
The commonly held view was that there was a high God—mostly mysterious and arguably pretty absent—known typically as El Elyon (The Highest). There were then a series of divine beings (gods) known collectively as the “sons of God” or The Elohim. Each people group had it’s corresponding god in the divine pantheon. Adonai Elohim (i.e. Yahweh of the Elohim) was the god of the Israelites while Assur (Assur of the Elohim) was the god of the Assyrians, Marduk for the Babylonians, and so on and so forth. The collective relationship between these various gods was imaged as either a divine council/boardroom or as a divine court. The Satan (Shaitan) was the Prosecutor in The Divine Court.
In this sense The Satan was not originally considered evil so much as, in the vernacular, we might call “him” a hardass. The Satan was a stickler for the rules and was punitive in nature. This divine prosecutor role is the root of what would much later become the tradition of The Devil’s Advocate (Lawyer) in the Roman Catholic tradition, though it too is a bit of a misnomer as it should be known as Satan’s Advocate because the energy is Satanic rather than Luciferian. The Devil’s Advocate is a lawyer arguing the case against the divine cause in a potential candidate for sainthood. Basically The Devil’s Advocate argues that the person isn’t a saint; they point to all the flaws, their sins, their inadequacies as a human. Again the symbol is not of evil per se but rather playing the part of a prosecutor.
This Satan is the same one that shows up in The Book of Job out to prove that Job is no true believer in God. God allows the Satan to persecute and impoverish Job to see if Job would curse God (which Job does not).
While The Satan is here still playing the prosecutorial role we can also see a subtle shift to a position of becoming the enemy of human nature. The Satan sees humans the way a city prosecutor or a cop whose spent a life having to deal with drug lords, rapists, and child molesters would view humanity as a whole. There’s a dark view of the human and ultimately a desire for humanity to be genocidally wiped out.
With the Luciferian energy there is emphasis on overcoming death, the assertion of self-will, and the desire to seize immortality. The Satanic energy, by contrast, is a vengeance against humanity by a (semi?)divine being, i.e. an enemy of human nature, an opponent to human flourishing and well being. See the parallel temptations of Christ by Satan and of Buddha by the demon Mara on that point. Both Buddha and Christ are tempted to give into the darker or weaker aspects of their humanity.
Eventually in the Jewish and Christian traditions these two archetypes fuse together so that the Luciferian energy and the Satanic energy become one in the figure of The Devil. It becomes very complex and confusing in the Jewish-Christian Western construct as the Lucifer-Satan combination is also mixed with the serpent figure in the Garden of Eden who is actually a third archetype altogether, i.e. The Trickster (think Loki in Norse mythology). The Trickster is not inherently evil but rather enigmatic, shadowy, a being who upsets the apple cart (much like the paranormal as analyzed here). The Devil as Trickster lives on in the Western imaginary in magical European folkloric tradition, as well as the later magical/hoodoo/blues tradition of the Southern US, e.g. the devil went down to Georgia, Robert Johnson selling his soul to the Devil at the crossroads, etc.
In fact a fourth archetype brought into the Western construct of The Devil would be the Lord of the Underworld—Hades in Greek, Shiva in India. The orthodox Christian tradition which dominates the Western imaginary ended up with this bizarre fourfold hybrid Lord of the Underworld-Trickster-Satan-Lucifer dynamic, all of which are distinct energies. As a result of the orthodox conflation of them, the taboo against the entirety of that construct came immediately into being. That in turn drove these energies underground and into their more unconscious expression. That is to say the suppression “darkened” (shrouded) the energies, turning them into their shadow and problematic forms.
For the Satanic it went from the a**hole prosecutor to the cop breaking bad and going rogue.
For the Trickster it went from enigmatic to manipulative and deceitful and “stealing souls”.
For the Lord of the Underworld it went from Death as the counterpoint to Life to Death as piggybacking upon sin in the form of cruelty and hellish torture.
For the Luciferian it went from the Light-Bringer to the desire to control and remake life through technological domination.
This suppression (rather than transmutation) left the energies also open to be exploited only by those wiling to break the taboo of communing with this conflated Devilish reality in its shadow form. The conflation of these four archetypal energies into one construct (The Devil) created mass confusion and suffering. One version of that suffering is the focus of this piece: the strange overlap between Luciferianism and Satanic energies in the cabal/elite.*
From the Luciferian side, The Devil is seen as the fallen angel, cast down into the underworld after the war in heaven, who from his hellish realm sets about to undermine humanity through temptation and cursing (Satanic energy) turning into an anti-human terrorist, a vigilante against the human race.
Tolkien’s depiction of Morgoth (aka Melkor) in The Silmarillion and later Morgoth’s servant Sauron in the Lord of the Rings shows this fusion of otherwise contradictory energies of The Satanic and Luciferian energies that play out in the cabal/elite.
Morgoth was the chief of the Ainur who are the divine angels/sons and daughters of god aka The Elohim, the first offspring of The Creator, known as Illuvatar in Tolkien’s cosmology. Illuvatar begins singing a song and invites the Ainur to join in. Eventually Morgoth (originally known as Melkor) introduces a discordant tune, singing on his own—there’s the Trickster energetic as well as the Luciferian self-assertion. Morgoth falls to earth (Lucifer) and goes about systematically undermining and corrupting the earth (Satanic).
Sauron—Morgoth’s lieutenant—forges the rings of power including of course the one ring to rule them all. Morgoth continues the tradition whereby the demons, i.e. the Luciferian brings in technology. For Tolkien all machinery and technology (rather than magic) is corrupted and corrupting. It’s both Luciferian—in that it’s a self-willed rebellion against the Divine—and Satanic—it’s meant to play upon the corruption of the human race and reduce them to servile orc status, slaves of dark intent. Here we see a clue of how a Luciferian and Satanic combination could play out among a cabal in our world—they take on the posture of a Sauron, i.e. Luciferian in their own being and Satanic in relation to the masses. Saruman’s genetic hybrid program of orcs would be it’s own form of a transhumanist Luciferian/Satanic impulse, which Tolkien would call a “foul magic."
Morgoth-Sauron’s vision of power involves control of the world and the reduction of the masses to bestial enslavement. What if that was a clue to the workings of the world and not simply some fantasy tale? What if it was precisely fairy lore as Tolkien meant it—remembering that the fairy folk are intimately tied to the UFO phenomenon? There’s a strong flavor of technocracy about this vision, whereby the elite claim transhumanist techno-utopianism for themselves but then in turn use that same technology to create control grids for the masses—digital IDs, mass surveillance, etc.*
Morgoth (and later Sauron and Saruman’s) technologies unleash horrors on the environment. The Ents (Tree Shepherds) rebel against Saruman, for his destruction of the trees in order to build his machinery of war and fuel his genetic hybrid experiments. This environmental angle is very important and points us to the second depiction of this tendency I want to explore. For Tolkien, the Ents are part of the forces of goodness but what if an otherwise noble endeavor (care for the earth) was itself twisted to support an ultimately anti-life or demonic agenda? What if environmentalism became clothed in the garb of an angel of light but was, like Lucifer, actually now darkened?
To explore that possibility we need to examine a different film franchise, that of The Avengers. In The Infinity War Saga however there’s a similar (though importantly different in one respect) merger of Satanic and Luciferian energies in the villain Thanos.
In the cinematic Infinity War Saga Thanos seeks out of the Infinity Stones in order to create a mass depopulation event across the Universe.** As Thanos shares to Dr. Strange in Infinity War, Thanos’ home planet of Titan was originally a place of beauty. But eventually the population outgrew the pace of agriculture leading to a social crisis. Thanos proposed what he terms, rather sociopathically, a "solution”: a lottery that would kill 50% of the population regardless of social class (shades of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and later The Hunger Games). The denizens of Titan reject Thanos’ plan and then suffer the consequences of a societal collapse.
As a result of his "failure", Thanos proceeds to travel from planet to planet mercilessly enacting this 50% massacre rule across the galaxy. He desires the Infinity Stones in order to do the deed at one time across the universe in one snap of the finger. He believes then that life will flourish once it has been culled.
[Partial Sidebar: The Titans, in Greek mythology, are the offspring of Gaia who fought against the Olympian gods. This Greek mythological war in heaven, known as The Gigantomachy, eerily parallels the Biblical war in heaven, from whom, of course Lucifer derives. Consequently, Thanos' fighting on behalf of Gaia (Mother Earth) is the source of his desire to wipe out much of humanity. Remember that Thanos was born on Titan.]
In this early phase Thanos is very Satanic. He is the (self-appointed) prosecutor of the Universe. He wraps himself in the mantle of an eco-terrorist anti-hero. He is ultimately seeking to balance Life by a ritualistic cleansing. The eco-warrior/terrorist portion is a very important tell as it reflects a potential justification for Satanic energy towards the masses by an elite in our own timeline. (More on that in a bit).
In Infinity War Thanos actually achieves his goal—he acquires all the infinity stones in victory over the Avengers and then snaps, killing half of all life across the Universe. Thanos—as per an earlier promise—then puts down his armor in order to become a farmer. He is a kind of eco-galactic Cincinnatus, retiring to his life as custodian of the land, establishing his “cred”. He doesn’t desire to become master of the universe.
Without explicitly naming him, Thanos echoes the philosophy of Thomas Malthus. Malthus argued that population growth was exponential while food production was linear, and therefore population would inevitably outstrip food leading to calamity. Malthus argued specifically for preventing marriage and reproduction among the lower economic classes and those he deemed “defective.” There’s a straight line from Malthus to eugenics (and from eugenics to transhumanism as I've argued previously). See for example California’s forced sterilization program against those deemed “retarded” or “imbecilic” as a later follow through of Malthus. For the record, those "progressive" policies of the eugenicists in "liberal" California of the time were heavily influential on the Nazis.
Malthus’ ideas had a profound impact on Charles Darwin. Darwin’s survival of the fittest notion has its direct ancestral root in Malthus’ pessimism. This connection shows the much deeper and original link between evolutionary theory and eugenics than contemporary defenders of biological evolution care to admit. Malthus was a staunch defender of the British elite and their “noble obligation” to “have to” control the masses and cull them like sheep—either in Malthus’ view intentionally through eugenics or to allow the forces of war, famine, and bloodshed to do the work instead. We see here another hint towards a Satanic element at play in human history among the elite: the need to control population numbers, including campaigns to actively reduce population. Thanos is the embodiment of this view.
In Avengers: Endgame The Avengers locate Thanos and Thor decapitates him but the damage is already done. Thanos has used the stones to destroy the stones and prevent the snap from being undone. The Avengers then use a time travel mechanism (“time heist”) to recover all the infinity stones and reverse the “snappening”, bringing all life back that was wiped in Thanos’ original use of the stones.
From an earlier point in the timeline Thanos learns of his later decapitation and the reverse snap. He uses a portal mechanism to jump forward in the timeline in an attempt to (re)capture the stones and (re)snap. Except this time an important shift has happened. Here’s Thanos’ statement to Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor:
“I thought by eliminating half of life, the other half would thrive, but you have shown me that’s impossible. As long as there are those that remember what was, there will always be those that are unable to accept what can be. They will resist. Now I know what I must do. I will shred the universe down to it’s last atom and then, with the stones you’ve collected for me, create a new one, that knows not what it has lost but only what its been given….a grateful universe.”
This moment represents a shift to a more Luciferian energy mixed in with the Satanic. Whereas before Thanos saw himself as a cosmic force of balance in his cold, emotionless posture here in this scene we see a rejection of the natural order and a rebellious assertion to self-will and power to control destiny and reform it in his own image—this is Luciferianism at it’s core. It’s Satanic towards the masses (extinction) but Promethean-Luciferian towards his own being (assertion of self-will).
What unites Thanos and Morgoth/Sauron is technocracy—rule by technological control. Both deploy advanced technology which seek to “encircle” or “en-ring” reality in their control (what Heidgger called “enframing”). Note the strange overlap between stones and rings, both amulets of dark magic/technology placed within the hand (symbol of extended power). Both Sauron/Morgoth and Thanos seek to enslave the masses (Satanic) while, for themselves, transcending the “rules of the game.” Each of these villains seeks to usurp a godlike or creator-like status (Luciferian).
The Luciferian and the Satanic both ultimately end up in the same place, though by different means. The destination or ultimate goal of both is the abolition of human reality. The Satanic energy seeks to reach that goal by the desecration and devolution of humanity to servile status. The Luciferian seeks to reach an abolition of humanity by transcending humanity into a trans-humanist future. Technocracy affords the perfect foil for an elite set on those twin goals—Luciferian for themselves as they “transcend” to a post-human techno-future and Satanic for the masses as they seek to enslave them into a sub-human expression.
As Heidegger said technology enframes or encircles. Technology also “de-worlds” according to Heidegger. The environment will be one of, if not the, key mechanisms by which technocracy has been sold and will be sold. The environment in the form of ecological destruction or—as we see recently via viruses & pandemics—will be used as the tip of the technocratic spear. Technology run amuck, particularly in service to scientism, is what has created ecological destruction. Technology—as in technocracy—is what is pitching itself as the salvation to the damnation it has created. Not unlike a certain Devilish energy that is the source of damnation yet seeking to promote itself as the true path of redemption.
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* Other films that point along this line would be Gattaca, Elysium, and Blade Runner 2049.
** This narrative is different than the Infinity War Saga in the original Marvel comics whereby Thanos was in love with Hela (Lady Death) and sought to offer her the greatest gift of mass annihilation to prove his love. In this sequence Thanos is much more specifically Thanatos, what Freud named as the desire to annihilate oneself (the death drive).