However even if granting for the sake of
argument that incidents-as-claimed in fact occurred,
it would simply mean that the existing definition of
NL in each case was inadequate and needed
expansion accordingly. NL “violation” is neither
required nor probable; once again the “proof of El”
fails tautologically.
And in the complete absence of anything the
least substantive to the contrary, no, it is not
necessary to “prove a negative” to dispense with El.
Let his eradication be as that of one of H.P.
Lovecraft’s particularly abhorrent villains:
It can be compared in spirit only to the hush
that lay on Oscar Wilde’s name for a decade after
his disgrace, and in extent only to the fate of that
77 Cf. Lockyer, Sir J. Norman, The Dawn of Astronomy.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964.
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sinful King of Runazar in Lord Dunsany’s tale,
whom the gods decided must not only cease to be,
but must cease ever to have been. 78
3. Eastern Mandalogical
Buddhism, while based on the principle that all
[OU-separate, conscious] existence is a bummer. To
ensure disciples got this, the Buddha made it his
first Noble Truth:
Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of
suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering,
illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with
what is displeasing is suffering; separation from
what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one
wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates
subject to clinging are suffering. 79
It may not be as intentionally sadistic as El’s
inflictions, but Buddhists are stuck with it anyway;
suicidal release will only trigger retributive karma
and reincarnate you as a centipede or an attorney.
Buddhists’ only permitted relief consists of
exercises to dull and starve one’s consciousness into
the incoherent haze of nirvana. While mythically
permanent for the Buddha and bodhisattva, it is a
mocking illusion for the ordinary adherent, who
obviously cannot escape the continuous demands of
his body and environment.
In Hinduism suicides are additionally
condemned to an undead, ghostlike torment on
78 Lovecraft, H.P., “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” in At the
Mountains of Madness. Sauk City: Arkham House, 1964, page
#139.
79 Buddha, Gautama, Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta.
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Earth, until such time as they would “naturally”
have died.
Hinduism and Buddhism are cyclical, not
linear. The line of time keeps moving onward in a
“Great Mandala” 80, to which souls keep returning in
endless up/down reincarnations, until/unless
they’re nirvan ically-perfect enough to escape it into
Eternal Bliss ( Ānanda).
B. Subjective Universal
The Satanic religion is based upon the Principle
of independent, self-aware consciousness external to
the OU and thus able to both perceive it and act
upon it [as well as independently of it].
In its most ancient apprehension by humanity,
this was the Egyptian “neter not of the neteru” Set.
As later seen through the lens of Judæo-
Christian iconography, this Principle was identified
as Satan.
Here follows an introduction to each of these
visualizations. Within the accustomed J/C culture of
contemporary Western societies, Satan will be the
most familiar image, with Set reserved to formal
initiatory contexts and environments.
1.
Egyptian Set
No records of the ancient Priesthood of Set
survived first the Osirian-dynastic persecution and
later the more general vandalism of the Christian/
Islamic eras. We know of it only by its reflection,
both in the character of Set as he was portrayed
80 ... with an appreciative, sentimental nod to Peter, Paul, and
Mary.
symbolically and mythologically and in the nature of
Egyptian priesthoods in general. Three significant
facts are known about the Priesthood of Set:
(1) Together with the Priesthood of
Horus [the Elder], it was the oldest of the
Egyptian priesthoods. If we date it to the earliest
predynastic images of Set found by archæologists,
we can establish an origin of at least 3200 BCE.
Working with the Egyptians’ own astronomically-
based records, we may approximate 5000 BCE. 81 If
we are to assume the final eclipse of the Priesthood
at the end of the XIX-XX [Setian] Dynasties ca. 1085
BCE, we are looking at an institution which existed
at least two thousand and possibly as many as four
thousand years. “In the early dynasties,” observes
Budge:
Set was a beneficent god, and one whose
favor was sought after by the living and by the
dead, and so late as the XIX Dynasty kings
delighted to call themselves “Beloved of Set”. After
the cult of Osiris was firmly established and this
god was the “great god” of all Egypt, it became the
fashion to regard Set as the origin of all evil, and
his statues and images were so effectively
destroyed that only a few which have escaped by
accident have come down to us. 82
One may note that Set was by no means the
only “fabulous” creature ever portrayed by Egyptian
artists. But he was the only one represented as a
principal neter, as opposed to a purely-animalistic
monster of the Tuat.
81 Lockyer, J. Norman, The Dawn of Astronomy. Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1964, page #215.
82 Budge, The Book of the Dead, page #181.
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( 2 ) S e t w a s t h e n e t e r w h o w a s
“different” from all of the others. Too often
this is simplified into his being the “evil” slayer of
Osiris, hence the personification of “evil”; yet any
but the most cursory study of Egyptian religious
symbolism is sufficient to dispel this caricature. He
was rather a neter “against the neteru”: the entity
who symbolized that which is not of nature.
This is a very curious role for a neter in
Egyptian cosmology: to be a presence and force
which alone could not be apprehended by
perceptions of the natural senses. Set thus
represents the nameless “thing” whose existence we
know of by the shadow it casts on things
apprehended and things perceived by it: the non-
natural “presence of self” ( telos) in individual
intelligent life.
V a r i o u s p o s t - E g y p t i a n c u l t u r e s h a v e
generalized the vehicle by which this presence is
manifest as the spirit, psyche, or soul, but increased
precision is possible. We must subtract from such
crudeness what is “life force”, and focus our
attention on that which remain
s: the very
awareness of self. In doing so we have in one
sense retraced the path of Descartes to the cogito
ergo sum proposition. Unlike Descartes, however,
we see this phenomenon to be a “thing totally
apart” which is not an extension of “God” or
anything else. Set is the conceptualizer of this
principle: the designer. To rewrite the crucial
sentence in the above quote from the point of view
of a neter: “A thing created in the mind thereby
exists.”
This is delicate ground to tread, so much more
so for an ancient Egyptian civilization whose entire
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“natural” cosmology was based upon the perfection
and harmony of the Universe.
(3) Despite this unique and disturbing
image, or perhaps because of it, Set became
the patron of the two most powerful
dynasties in Egypt’s long history, the XIX
and XX. Herein there is an interesting “theological
succession”:
The early XVIII Dynasty (ca. 1580-1372) was
that of the great Amenhoteps, during whose reigns
the Priesthood of Amon at Thebes was preeminent.
The dynasty disintegrated during the “Amarna
period” (ca. 1372-1343) of Akhenaten, during which
the solar disk of Aton was considered supreme if not
indeed all-inclusive of the neteru. When the new
XIX Dynasty arose under Rameses I and Seti I, the
state role of Amon was restored - but the pharaohs
directed much of their efforts towards Set. Recounts
Sauneron:
The new dynasty in power, careful to appear
to be “restoring everything to order”, had many
reasons for mistrusting the Amonian priesthood.
Descendants of a military family of the eastern
delta, the new pharaohs were traditionally devoted
to a god little esteemed by the masses because of
the role that he had been assigned in the death of
Osiris. But they preserved nevertheless, here and
there, the temples and priesthoods of the god Set.
The Amarnian experience had demonstrated
the cost of too abrupt a break with the beliefs
central to the entire nation, and of entering into
open warfare against a priesthood practically as
powerful as the throne itself. Thus the politics of
Seti I (1312-1301) and of Rameses II (1301-1235)
were infinitely more subtle than those of their
predecessors. There was no rupture with Thebes;
the constructions continued, and magnificent
edifices were raised to the glory of Amon at
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Karnak, Gourna, and Ramesseum. But it was from
the [Osirian] center of Abydos that Rameses
appointed the High Priest of Amon. Then he
installed two of his sons, Merytum and Khamuast,
as the High Priests of Ra at Heliopolis and Ptah at
Memphis, and demonstrated by further
monuments and political favors his public support
of these gods. But finally, wearied of Thebes and
its ambitious priests, he departed to build a new
capital, Pi-Rameses, in the eastern delta - where he
could quietly worship the god dearest to him, with
Amon occupying a secondary prominence.
The provincial cities where Set had been
worshipped from all eternity - among them
Ombos, Tjebu, and Sepermeru - gained new
preeminence from the favor accorded by the
Ramesside leaders to the god of the Eastern Delta.
Above all, Pi-Rameses, the new capital, brilliantly
restored the worship that Set had formerly
received in the Avaris of the Hyksos. 83
Following the passing of the two Setian
dynasties, the increasing influence of a priesthood
not courted by the Ramesside pharaohs - that of
Osiris - boded ill for the Priesthood of Set. The
Osirians recast Set as Osiris’ treacherous brother
and mortal enemy of Osiris’ son - for whom they
appropriated the neter Horus. Not content with
attacking Set personally, they further appropriated
his consort and son from the original triad of his cult
- Nepthys and Anubis - whom they now described
respectively as a concubine of Osiris and a son of
Osiris by Nepthys. Comments Budge:
Between the XXII and the XXV Dynasties, a
violent reaction set in against this god [Set]; his
statues and figures were smashed; his effigy was
83 Sauneron, Serge, Les pretres de l’ancienne Egypte. New
York: Grove Press, 1980, pages #183-184.
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hammered out from the bas-reliefs and stelæ in
which it appeared. 84
Various reasons for this reaction have been
proposed by Egyptologists. It is been suggested that
Set fell into disrepute through being associated in
the popular mind with the Sutekh of the invading
Hyksos. Possible, but improbable, as the Hyksos
invasion occurred prior to the XIX-XX Dynasties
when Set was preeminently in favor - and the
presiding neter over Egypt’s greatest period of
imperial glory.
Set’s eclipse may well have been due to a more
subtle, yet pervasive sentiment sweeping Egypt. As
Sauneron and many other Egyptologists have
acknowledged, Egyptian philosophy was based upon
a millennia-old conviction of the absolute presence
and influence of the neteru, and in the virtue of a
social system in which the preservation of cyclical
harmony was all-important. While the New Empire
of the XIX-XX Dynasties extended Egypt’s influence
to Palestine and Mesopotamia, it also made the
Egyptians aware that there were many other
functioning cultures in which the neteru were
unknown [at least by their Egyptian names].
Moreover the concept of Egypt as just one among a
number of nation-states competing for power and
influence in the Mediterranean, rather than as the
one civilization at the center of existence, must have
been a most unsettling one to this ancient culture -
which previously had been able to discount its
neighbors as mere uncultured, barbarian tribes.
Egypt’s solution to this problem was to turn
gradually away from a glorification of this life and
84 Budge, The Mummy. New York: The Macmillan Company,
1973, page #276.
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towards an orientation on the afterlife, where such
disturbing dilemmas could be assumed not to exist.
This would explain the growing influence and
popularity of the Osiris cult during the post-XX
Dynasty Egyptian decadence; Osiris was an afterlife
neter.
As the Osiris cult portrayed Set as Osiris’
nemesis rather than an independent and preexisting
neter with no particular interest in Osiris, this would
also explain the simultaneous wave of Setian
p e r s e c u t i o n d e s c r i b e d b y B u d g e . I t w a s
characteristic of ancient Egypt that each new
dynasty, in an attempt to establish its own
“timelessnes
s”, often doctored monuments and
records to eliminate inconvenient inconsistencies.
Presumably the Osirian dynasties followed suit,
defacing or rewriting all references to Set that did
not support their portrayal of him as a “Devil”. 85
And that was the distortion of Set which survived in
later Mediterranean legend - principally through
Plutarch, who described it in some detail in his
Moralia. 86
2. Judæo/Christian Satan
a. “Please Allow Me to
Introduce Myself ...”
In the earliest Hebraic mythology of the “Old
Testament” in the Holy Bible, Satan was neither
85 Ions, op.cit. , pages #72-78. The Osirian legends on this
subject are treated comprehensively in J. Gwyn Griffith’s The
Conflict of Horus and Seth (Chicago: Argonaut Publishers,
1969).
86 Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, Volume V in Moralia.
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disloyal to El nor an all-encompassing advocate of
evil, or even a Paradisian playboy. Rather he was
something much more loathsome: an art critic. After
El devoted seven days to creating Adam & Eve to
fornicreate a vast Earthrace, it was Satan who
suggested that he had somewhat overestimated his
competence and undertook to prove it by tempting
everyone from Eve and Jesus to Marilyn and Jack.
This was par for the course with Hebrews, who
quickly realized that they’d picked a God who
already had it in for them without any prodding
from a staff angel.
But things got more complicated after Satan
and Jesus had it out in the wilderness. Now every
Christian was expected to emulate the Christ and
denounce the Devil (to which Satan was now pro- or
de-moted depending upon one’s point of view.
But one thing was also clear: He was much
more fun.
Anyone who has gaped at Walt Disney’s
Fantasia or Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, been
earavished by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or
Mendelssohn’s Die Erste Walpurgisnacht, or heard
Mick Jagger singing Sympathetically knows that in
whatever his guise the Devil is, well, a party animal.
The first thing that members or guests noticed about
Church of Satan Grottos in the 60s-70s was that
they were a bit friskier than their righteous rivals:
Ritual chambers looked like sets from