against the surrounding phenomena.
When all is said, the most steadfast point of that nebula is our memory, which seems, on the
other hand, to be a somewhat external, a somewhat accessory faculty and, in any case, one of the
frailest faculties of our brain, one of those which disappear the most promptly at the least
disturbance of our health. As an English poet has very truly said, “That which cries aloud for
eternity is the very part of me that will perish.” 70
Maeterlinck was, however, falling into - or, rather, setting for himself - the same logical trap
that imprisons contemporary Mechanists: that memory is completely a product and construct of
OU interactions through the physical senses. Eliminating them eliminates it.
Implicit in this limitation is the assumption that OU-based, and presumably buttressed,
memory is the only “real” memory. Anything else is merely imaginative, and as such must be
kept carefully and strictly segregated from the “real”. If the two are confused, or worse yet
deliberately dignified with the same reality, the individual is “insane”.
The same holds true for time-assignments of memory events. If one remembers an event, it
may or may not be consciously or subconsciously dated. Remembering your date from your high
school prom associates that OU date with the memory creation. But remembering something not
so inherently fixed in time, such as a favorite location visited repeatedly over years, does not
carry a specific date. You may store enough short-term memory to be certain you haven’t seen it
within the last year or so, but that is merely external-exclusionary.
Also there is no reliable division in terms of precision between short-term and long-term
memory. It’s effortless to remember the multiplication table you learned in the third grade.
Yesterday’s credit-card charge at the supermarket? Not unless you gave it special “retentive”
attention at the time.
All of which is to say that memory is neither objective nor reliable, and that there is no
certain mechanism to ensure or correct either problem.
With Maeterlinck’s trust in memory-as-self undercut, the individual is reduced to
instantaneous sensation of separateness to establish conscious identity. This is René Descartes’
cogito ergo sum at its most fundamental. It is not thinking “of something”, whether real or
imaginary, that establishes individual consciousness; it is the exercise of thinking itself. 71
But confirming that one exists is only the smile of the Cheshire Cat. What distinguishes and
differentiates you from innumerable other separate consciousnesses? Again the Mechanist’s
habit is to default to his OU body. “I am what exists within and uses this machine.” Nevertheless,
as we have already seen, this is not at all a unitary relationship. Parts of the body can be
inactivated or removed without affecting the wholeness of consciousness, and during sleep or
anesthesia the consciousness disconnects from all of the body’s physical-sense interfaces.
We are left with an “essential self” which we thought we knew through a mixture of reliable
memories and constantly-reinforcing body sensations. We now realize that both are
fragmentary, imperfect, unreliable illusions. This wisdom survived the destruction of ancient
Khem as the Pythagorean/Platonic doctrine of transmigration of the psyche as evidenced by
anamnesis:
70 Ibid., pages #48-49.
71 Rejecting the “disincarnate origin” of thinking as establishment of personal existence and identity, Martin
Heidegger proposed that self-perception requires external displacement: “being there” ( Dasein) in order to
subsequently conceive itself through a composite of “what it isn’t” reflections. This may console those unnerved by
Descartes, but ultimately does not refute him. Something with the innate capacity to perceive must preexist any
external input.
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SOCRATES: Those who tell it are priests and priestess of the sort who make it their
business to be able to account for the functions which they perform. Pindar speaks of it too,
and many another of the poets who are divinely inspired. What they say is this - see whether
you think they are speaking the truth. They say that the soul of man is immortal. At one time it
comes to an end - that which is called death - and at another is born again, but is never finally
exterminated. On these grounds a man must live all his days as righteously as possible. For
those from whom
Persephone receives acquittal for ancient doom,
In the ninth year she restores again
Their souls to the Sun above.
From whom rise noble kings
And the swift in strength, greatest in wisdom,
And for the rest of time
They are called heroes and sanctified by men.
Thus the soul, since it is immortal and has been born many times, and has seen all things
both here and in the other world, has learned everything that is. So we need not be surprised if
it can recall the knowledge of virtue or anything else which, as we see, it once possessed. All
nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything, so that when a man has recalled a single
piece of knowledge - “learned” it, in ordinary language - there is no reason why he should not
find out the rest, if he keeps a stout heart and does not grow weary of the search, for seeking
and learning are in fact nothing but recollection.
- Plato, The Meno
When most people think about “immortality”, they imagine a simple continuation of their
immediate, conscious perceptions and impressions. That is, the moment-to-moment
“reinforcements” that we all experience daily, and which - by being “not ourselves” -
continuously form a kind of propping-up wall enclosing (hence “defining”) that amorphous
feeling we are accustomed to calling “ourself”.
It is this “self” that most people fear to lose in the event of bodily death. They simply don’t
know how else they could know themselves to exist. Take away the reinforcing “hits” from the
OU, and the “amorphous feeling” evaporates into nothingness, they fear, like going under a
general anesthetic (which also, but temporarily, “removes all hits”).
The Initiate, however, is challenged to first recognize, then differentiate, then identify his
immortal consciousness with those parts of the eightfold soul which are never connected to the
physical body’s functions, hence are not affected by its death or disintegration.
This is accomplished through reflective, non-reactive thinking. Thus the individual
becomes aware of his authentic self (soul); and upon activating this as the locus of his
consciousness, looks outward at phenomena at the same depth. In other words, the superficial
“self” looks out at its level and sees OU events - like bodily pleasure/pain, blue sky, ringing
telephones, time defined by clocks and calendars, and so forth. The core or true self, however,
exists as a neter and, when looking outward, sees a SU not of the works of other neteru, but of
those neteru themselves. One “machine” sees other “machinery”; one “creator/operator” sees
other “creator/operators”.
The Egyptians might describe such inward, reflective thinking as the accessing of the ba or
core-soul by the khat or body-soul: the Plat
onic phenomenon of anamnesis as the khat, which
normally exists and defines itself in an environment of bodily dimensions and sensations, not
only reaches beyond that environment but in some situations depends upon the ba for a more
accurate source of truth. To “deny one’s senses” is a familiar experience for most people in
certain situations, though they may not realize what such a gesture actually entails in terms of
mental coherence. When done, it is almost always brief and minimal, because the khat’s reliance
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upon bodily senses for its information and both definition and continuous reinforcement of
“reality” is so strong and ingrained. Unless the khat-ba connection is both a conscious and a
strong one, the individual may interpret such an experience as mere loss of coherence, or
“insanity”.
Immortality of the self is. Your ability to align your consciousness with your neter, rather
than your superficial, animal, illusion of “self” is Xeper.
These ancient initiatory keys to immortality were energetically attacked and suppressed by
Christianity, as that cruel religion correctly perceived that fear of death was one of the most
powerful weapons it could use to enslave humanity. It was important that death be taught as
something hideous and final, from which the only escape was surrender to Christ - by which, of
course, Christian churches really meant their institutions. Those areas of non-Christian Europe
which had escaped, at least for a time, domination by this numbing propaganda, continued to
preserve the truth. In For Freedom Destined Dr. Franz Winkler observes:
In ancient times the secrets of man’s true nature, and of the forces that determine his fate,
were contemplated in the great temple universities of paganism all over the civilized world.
Though men were fully aware of the important role that heredity plays in the shaping of the
physiological and psychological organism of a human being, they did not think that the
innermost core of the human being was the product of purely biological forces. This innermost
core, called by the Greeks the entelechy or dæmon of man, was credited with qualities unique
to the individual, apart from the characteristics of the body he inhabited. The concept of
entelechy corresponded roughly with the Judæo-Christian concept of an immortal soul.
Most pagan creeds held that the human entelechy neither begins nor ends with life on
Earth. Man’s ‘mortality’ referred merely to the fact that his self-awareness ceased with the
death of his body. The immortal gods differed from mortal man by the continuation of their
consciousness. Since ancient ideas on the mystery of birth cannot be separated from pagan
philosophies about the soul’s supersensible existence, certain concepts generally accepted in
the pre-Christian era should be mentioned. According to pagan theology, consciousness after
death could reach one of three levels. The first level was the one allotted to the average man:
dreamlike, with almost complete absence of memory and self-identification, called Hades in
Greek, Hel in Germanic mythology. The second was accessible to the true hero, the man whose
deeds of courage and creativeness distinguished him from ordinary mortals. The Greeks called
this state of consciousness the Elysian Fields, the Germans Walhalla. The third level was
reached by those who could soar beyond the narrow limits of Earth-bound consciousness and
thus bring new impulses into the world. Already while they still lived in a mortal body, their
awareness had assumed divine status. Their souls after death, in the language of mythology,
were lifted to the stars. 72
Is attainment of the immortality of the Ba or psyche a technique which the individual has to
“learn”? Must one hurry to do so, lest one’s body expire before the trick is mastered? Quite the
contrary, as the sage in Her-Bak emphasized, this immortality is innate in all conscious
beings. You have it already, by evidence of that same consciousness which enables you to read
and comprehend these words. It is nothing which the Temple of Set “confers” on you; rather it is
something which conventional churches have tried to trick you out of, and which materialistic
science has denied simply because it is an aspect of existence which transcends science [hence
is not subject to “scientific proof”]. Further from Winkler:
Life’s appearance as “meaningless” stems basically from man’s materialistic concept of
himself. If his innermost nature were merely biological, complete fulfillment of his appetites
and the acquiring of wealth would satisfy his longing for happiness. Since they do not, an
72 Winkler, Franz E., For Freedom Destined: Mysteries of Man’s Evolution in the Mythology of Wager’s Ring
Operas and Parsifal. Garden City, NY: Waldorf Press, 1974, pages #54-5.
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atmosphere of hopelessness is enveloping our generation, especially our youth. In an affluent
society where all material ways out of such frustration have been found wanting, drugs,
perversions, and the thrills of crime are now being used as desperate means of escape from the
intolerable boredom. Well-meaning efforts on the part of the authorities to stem the tidal wave
of juvenile delinquency and drug-addiction will therefore bring scant results, until the
following simple truth has been fully accepted by parents and teachers:
Happiness, love, and compassion are spiritual faculties that during centuries of neglect
man will despair of life and eventually throw it away in a mass suicide by nuclear destruction.
But how can we care for what we no longer comprehend? Modern science, admirable in its
achievements on a material plane, has proven ineffectual in the understanding of intangible
values. This limitation, while freely admitted by the small number of truly creative scientists,
seems to elude the average intellectual. And the failure to recognize this limitation adds to the
delusion that natural science in its present form can be the judge of religious or spiritual truth.
Making modern man’s plight even more serious is the fact that his materialistic delusion of
himself not only deprives him of wisdom and happiness, but acts also as a pattern in whose
dreary image he tends to reshape his nature. Consequently more and more personalities
emerge who think and act virtually like robots. They know no happiness and have no
perception of objective morality.
We have grown wise in the analysis of the material world, have expanded the scope of our
perception to outer space and to the world beneath the atom. But objective inner experience
has faded almost entirely away, and it has left us groping in the dark for the true image of
ourselves. 73
It is the function of the Temple of Set, as of the ancient Egyptian priesthoods, the
Pythagorean Brotherhood, and the Platonic Academy before it, to inspire its Initiates to awaken
to that knowledge which is latent within their consciousness and needs only to be appreciated as
such. Winkler rightly points out that, the more highly initiated one becomes, the more one can
experience such prerogatives of Xeper. But this is a matter of perspective and proportion, not of
the quality of immortality itself.
It is all too easy to
perceive “life” as only the active functioning of one’s material, OU-
constituted body. Such an attitude fosters a disease of the psyche far worse than any of the body.
It numbs you to that immortality which is inherent in the Gift of Set, and it makes you the prey
of everyone who, in the profane world, seeks to control your life by threats against your body.
O. The Prince of Darkness
So the non-natural MindStar - the personalized, subjective “reflection” of the “Devil” - has
proven its existence many times over, and in a variety of contexts and semblances. But what of
the Form behind all such particularized manifestations - a creative source or First Principle
of whose essence all non-natural souls partake? What of an actual, uniquely-existing “Devil”?
During its 1966-1975 CE existence, the Church of Satan regarded its own mythology with a
mixture of emotional fervor and intellectual uncertainty. The Church came into existence not as
the result of a philosophically-deduced need, but rather as a spontaneous gesture of exasperation
with and contempt for the hollowness and hypocrisy of conventional social and religious
morality. The Church was thus a “statement” - a glove thrown down - not of that morality per se,
but rather of humanity’s impudence in announcing goals and standards for itself which it had
neither capacity for nor intention of attaining. Satan, as the accuser and rebel, was the inevitable
symbol for this statement.
73 Ibid., pages #19-21.
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Having rejected conventional options, however, the Church found itself in the position of
having to construct an alternative approach to morality. The result was an imprecise blend of
personal hedonism with a rather cynical, Hobbesian attitude towards the rest of society. Those
able to achieve self-indulgent lifestyles - Satanists - should do so without qualms; ordinary
people should be coldly exploited as befits their unimaginative and conservative behavior- and
thought-patterns. [Cf. Aristotle’s doctrine of “natural slavery”.]
As for Satan himself, the Church began by making much of the sinister glamor of the Devil,
both in its early rituals and in media coverage. In the Satanic Bible Anton LaVey proposed a