Yesterday I had a reason to think about some of the presuppositions of Satanic ideology, namely Thelema (the Will). Essentially, they idolise the Will as if it were some kind of a cornerstone thing, not realising what smarter religions do instantly: that Will is merely the first derivative of one’s nature. The Buddhists would say that one’s Will, defined as a general force behind one’s desires, will be a vector sum of all the energetic momenta that make up his soul. Translated to English, after the different things that fight for supremacy within your soul cancel each other out, if there’s any of the momentum of force remaining, it will be directed at something, and you can call this remainder Will, if you like, and this vector always powers Samsara, investing energy into one’s further bondage. The Hindus would say that your Will is conditioned by both your past karma and the disorderly state of your mind, making your will essentially a result of your conditioning and limitations. This is why only God and liberated souls have free Will, while others are merely oxen bound to the plough of the forces that enslave and condition them. The Christians state this in a less analytical way, but with the same purport: a human soul is conditioned by both sin and the nature of the body, which condition the direction and quality of its will. Without God’s grace, or as they would say, without Holy Spirit, a human soul is destined to wallow in the mud of the world, being motivated by pain of existence to commit sin, which then causes further pain of existence, motivating it to further sin, until death, and without redemption such sinful soul falls into hell, which was originally meant as Gehena, which was a name of a pit outside Jerusalem where the Hebrews threw corpses of diseased cattle and other trash to rot – essentially meaning an endpoint of total destruction, death without a future or afterlife. So, essentially, what the Christians are saying is that unless the light of God is lit within one’s soul, his inner darkness and depravity will cause him to think the thoughts and do the deeds of further darkness and depravity, his nature bound in a vicious circle that ends in his doom.

So, what do I think, which of those three is right? I think they all are. All of them formulate the problem correctly, with various degrees of poeticism or mathematical exactness, where Buddhism looks like someone applied mathematical analysis to the problem, where you can literally work with vectors, matrices, function derivatives and so on, and use them to explain things, which has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is the analytical clarity that is not clouded by emotionality, and the disadvantage is that it’s easy to forget that the fundamental vector elements it’s explaining are emotional momenta of all kinds, and while this abstract interpretation is useful to an expert, a beginner who is completely bound into this snare of unclear emotions will hardly benefit from it, which makes the Hindu model more useful, and the Christian one more useful still, if you want to explain things to a complete beginner who might not care for the analytical exactness, and just wants to understand his problem and solve it. Unlike the foolish Satanists who say that this is your life, this is your Will and you need to live your life and impose your Will upon the world, in which others are either tools or obstacles, the Christianity makes a very radical statement: you are dead, rather than alive. What you see as your life and Will are merely death-throes of an empty, godless existence. Since everything that motivates your Will is either ignorance or suffering, everything you do will just shovel manure on the shitpile that is your life. The only way to get out of this doomed position is to stop trying to save yourself and impose yourself upon the world, but instead recognise your worthlessness and helplessness and reach out to God, who is the true Life, and the true Meaning, or Logos in Greek. Rather than wallow in darkness or curse it, one is saved by accepting light and meaning of God into their life, and only at this point can you truly see the darkness that was your former life; if there’s no light in your life, you can’t understand you’re in darkness, because darkness is all you know; it’s “normal”. Only after the light appears can you understand your former darkness in contrast. So, essentially, Buddhism explains things as they actually work, and Christianity explains things as they feel. Both are perfectly valid and accurate.

The further issue I have with Satanism is that it’s teenage rebellion against parental and societal authority that’s somehow codified into ideology. It’s basically a scream of a frustrated teenager who discovered that he is a person and wants to live his own life, and not be defined by external authorities. What this fails to understand is, of course, that this is not a valid model for interpreting the human condition. You are not an inherently free being that is being bound by external forces. You are an inherently conditioned being, bound by your past karma multiplied by your ignorance, and in this quagmire that defines your soul, the more energetically you move to free yourself, the deeper you sink. You are not a free being surrounded by things that limit you. You are a conditioned, ignorant and sinful being, surrounded by others of your kind, each wallowing in the mud of your inner depravity, interacting in selfish and sinful ways and causing each other further suffering and ignorance. So, basically, as much as others limit you and contribute to your suffering, you likely do the same to them, and this creates the collective mess of sin and depravity with very little redeeming light, if any.

So, the way out of this predicament is not found through attempts of emancipation or self-assertion, since that’s what everybody tries and invariably fails at, because you can’t pull yourself out of the mud by your hair. No; your salvation is not in your hands. Your salvation is possible only by identifying what light it is possible for you to perceive in your darkness, grasp at it and give it preference over whatever you think you are and over whatever you think is your Will and desires. As you feel the light and allow it to heal you, the fractures in your soul will heal, and its nature will improve, having been healed by the light of God. Your thoughts and emotions will then be more of the nature of God’s light, than of the darkness that preceded it, and, paradoxically, as you surrender your Will to God, your Will becomes more free, as conditioning upon it is removed; it’s a paradox, but the path of self-assertion and emancipation only strengthens the chains that bind you; as you let go of self, you gain insight, freedom and power, because you understand that “self” is not your miserable darkness, “self” is what you find only in God’s presence, in the light of truth, when you understand that emancipation of true self comes not from a struggle against Other, but through release from the bondage of spiritual darkness and depravity that defined your miserable existence.

So, no, you’re not a spark of light in the darkness of the world, where God is a limiting force that tries to make you conform to expectations, where you heroically rebel against bla bla bla. Nonsense. You’re a fool, ignorant and depraved, weak and cowardly, and God is the light you reject, and since this light is the necessary prerequisite of courage, heroism and virtue, you possess neither. God is not that one great being that wants to keep you small, as Satanist fools assume. No, God is the Force that can make you a Jedi. God is that greatness that makes all that embrace it great. Without God, there is nought but depravity and darkness.

So, no, Satanism isn’t a struggle of light against darkness, it’s a struggle of darkness against fictions of its own foolishness and delusion. It’s a struggle of darkness that sees the light as a terrible beast that threatens its existence and wants to dispel it, to which I say, good. Die, then, so that truth and virtue may be born.