simple identification of the Devil with any and all forms of pleasurable indulgence. Together with
a lampooning and debunking of conventional religious dogma, this identification constitutes the
principal theme of that volume’s “Book of Satan (authored by Ragnar Redbeard)” and “Book of
Lucifer (authored by LaVey)”.
But then the Satanic Bible becomes oddly vague. Satan himself is never really defined, save
as an allegory, semantic term, and/or symbol of the subjective, creative self. On page #62 it is
said that “most Satanists [think that Satan] merely represents a force of nature - the powers of
darkness”. It is then implied that these “powers of darkness” are simply natural forces which
neither religion nor science has yet identified or attempted to employ. The Satanic Bible
advocates using them for Indulgence - and that is where the discussion of Satan stops. The
reader is then thrown somewhat off the track, because the phraseology of the rituals that follow
recasts the Devil into one or more of his traditional, anthropomorphic molds.
The paradox of conventional Satanism was that the Devil was understood to be a force of
nature, thus being derived from and ultimately dependent upon “God” in some way. He may
make a lot of noise, but in the final analysis he is part of the same all-inclusive machinery of the
Universe/God; even his “rebellion” is part of God’s Universal scheme. Satanists, accordingly,
might be able to play a good game - but ultimately the deck is stacked against them. They cannot
win.
The Church of Satan avoided this paradox by the simple technique of procrastinating
confronting it. An atmosphere of psychodramatic atheism prevailed. Satan was ceremonially
invoked with great fervor, but in non-ceremonial surroundings even the most diehard Satanists
hesitated to take a position concerning his reality. If references to his existence were made, they
were vague, cautious, and hypothetical.
This attitude prevailed throughout all levels and branches of the Church. Even Anton
LaVey, when speaking of the Devil, was wont to employ such euphemisms as “the Man
Downstairs”, or to speak more cryptically of “forces”, “vibrations”, “angles”, and “atmospheres”.
In addition to the “stacked deck” paradox, there was a second motive for this reluctance to
grapple with the issue of the Devil’s existence: the unspoken acknowledgment that atheism is
ultimately untenable. Throughout the OU there exists rigid adherence to principles of physical
and natural behavior; we may call this “order” or “consistency”. It is because of this consistency
that we can predict events in the physical, chemical, biological, and mathematical sciences.
Scientists term such predictive patterns “laws”.
[There is a school of philosophy called subjective or voluntaristic idealism, in which
an effort is made to define nature as merely a creation of the mind, an objectification of the will
(Fichte, Schopenhauer), but the subjective idealists have not been able to prove that the OU is
in fact a mental construct - for precisely the same reasons that they can challenge the
assumption that it does not enjoy objective existence apart from perception. Like their
predecessor Descartes, they are ultimately forced to the assumption that one must accept the
evidence of the senses as reliable and to some extent impersonal.]
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Recalling Thomas Aquinas’ failure to demonstrate the existence of God through logic, and
the consequent relapse of Christianity into a faith-based system, rational minds of the
Enlightenment era approached this “ordering” of the OU in two significant ways:
First there is pantheism (sometimes called monistic idealism), whose most noted
advocate was the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). According to pantheism, God
and the universe are one and the same substance; everything that exists or occurs is an aspect of
God. Being neither separate from nor independent of the universe, God has no personal
qualities. [It should not be supposed that Spinoza meant this as an “attack” on God after the
fashion of Nietzsche. Spinoza’s recommended attitude for human beings was what he termed the
“intellectual love of God” through a generalized appreciation of nature.]
however, led some philosophers to induce the necessary existence of something external and
superior to that universe. Conceptually the OU cannot “regulate” or “order” itself. Hence another
school of thought - deism - arose, its most noted proponent being Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646-1716) of Leipzig. Deists differed from pantheists by postulating a superior and
independent God, but one who, after creating the OU and its laws, refrains from tampering with
them. Hence such a God never intervenes in human affairs or fortunes, whether or not he is
interested in them.
The Church of Satan adopted an essentially deistic attitude towards cosmology: “God”
probably exists, but since he doesn’t involve himself in human affairs, there is no reason to court
his approval. Opening the door to the existence of “God”, however, opens the same door to the
existence of another intelligent entity apart from the OU. The Devil can thus exist in theory. Is
there any evidence that he does in actuality?
The Enlightenment philosophers assumed mankind to be compatible with, hence included
in the order of the OU. Human behavior was just another kind of science to be explored and
mastered. [It is no accident that the Enlightenment saw the birth of “social contract” theories of
government, based on speculations about the “natural ordering” of human society.] But, while
social contract approaches to government and politics have enjoyed some measure of success in
the subsequent centuries, they have by no means demonstrated their inclusion of individual
creative power and the force of will. At the close of the 20th century, most of the great social
contract experiments, if they have survived at all, have mutated into a kind of technological
Machiavellianism in which individual drive, leadership, and fortune determine the shape of the
present and the direction of the future.
We confront, therefore, a scenario in which the OU is increasingly exposed as a consistent,
interrelated machine - and in which the human intellect is increasingly exposed as something
which has defied all attempts to relegate it to a function of this machine. Mankind displays a
potential for intellectual external-perspective and willful creation that is in sharp contrast to
everything else that is known concerning this OU.
Consider the vast intellectual gap between mankind and every other species on the planet.
One has only to walk into a major library to sense the extent of this gap. Much is made about the
relatively high intelligence of chimpanzees, dolphins, etc.; yet the most intelligent of their
number cannot remotely compare with even the most primitive examples of homo sapiens.
Moreover, say physiologists, even the most exalted levels of human intelligence and knowledge
have been attained with only 10-20% of the reasoning potential of the human cerebrum. How
and why did humanity acquire this freakishly high intelligence potential?
While anthrop
ologists can chart the stages of prehistoric human evolution to the limits of
available data, they remain unable to explain why the entire phenomenon should have occurred
at all. The best they can do, in textbook after textbook, is to say that “man developed high
intelligence because he needed it to survive”. According to this theory, proto-men were lacking in
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speed, strength, fighting teeth & claws, and other physical attributes necessary for survival.
Mutants with greater intelligence tended to survive through cunning, sustaining their
descendants, while less-intelligent groups died out. This process, repeated over some five million
years, resulted in homo sapiens, the prototype of Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, and Modern Man.
The escape clause in this theory is the time factor: Five million years is plenty of time for
almost anything to evolve into almost anything else. Besides, the anthropologist will say, the
entire primate development process can be traced to origins some fifty millions of years ago.
Hence the condition of Modern Man isn’t as startling as it would be had it happened “overnight”.
All well and good, but there are at least two problems with this proposition. One is that
proto-man was just one of many animal species fighting for survival over the millennia. If his
brain could evolve through processes of natural selection, then why did the brains of other
creatures not similarly evolve - at least a little? The fact is that the brains of other creatures have
remained practically the same size while man’s has “evolved”. This is inconsistent, and it will
be recalled that the hallmark of the OU - and deistic proof of God - is its consistency. By the
law of averages - which applies to natural selection as much as to anything else - there should
have been at least some species other than man evolving in intelligence at least partway to the
human level. There is none.
The second problem arises through application of one of the bastion theories of Darwinian
natural selection. It is that nature always takes the easiest way out - that selection favors the less-
complicated adaptation over a more complex alternative. When a time of famine favors species
able to reach higher for herbal food, longer-necked giraffes survive. We do not see short-necked
giraffes with wings. A more-or-less easy physical modification must first accidentally occur in
a species; thereafter selection takes place against those who do not possess the characteristic.
That is the way evolution actually works.
But there is no explanation for human brain evolution in the laws of natural selection. The
biophysical factors of a sophisticated brain are far too intricate. A proto-man trying to adapt to
hostile environments through brain modification would have died out long before such external
stress as he could bring to bear on his brain would have any effect upon that organ [if indeed
they would have any physiological effect at all]. In the case of proto-man, natural selection would
occur in favor of almost anything else besides the brain. He would become stronger, hairier,
tougher, meaner, and faster. According to natural selection, you and I should be gorillas.
But we are not gorillas. Indeed, as our intelligence has made life progressively easier for us,
we have become weaker and more vulnerable physically. We are healthier and more long-lived
only because our intelligence has enabled us to produce medicines to stave off diseases, and
dietary standards to maximize our health and growth potential. We have controlled
environments to fend off the elements, and have developed weapons to fend off other creatures.
Take away our abnormal intelligence and mankind would die out or be killed off within a few
generations. Because of our brain, then, the natural evolution of the rest of our body [which
would normally operate in favor of an unaided tougher, more disease-free physiology] has
actually operated in reverse. Once more this is inconsistent.
There is a corollary to the second problem. It is that natural selection, when it does occur,
does not overcompensate. If conditions allow all giraffes with four-foot necks to survive, there is
no reason for the species to evolve in the direction of forty-foot necks. If the human brain were
presumed to be the product of natural selection, why should it possess intelligence greater than
that required to raise man to stone-age culture? More than than, why should it possess the
capacity to be ten times smarter than it is today?
If human high intelligence is a violation of OU law, how did it occur? There are two possible
explanations: accident or deliberate cause. If accidental cause is assumed, then the accident
would have had to be both a major violation of the law and one which sustained itself over
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several millennia. And if there were one such accident, the laws of probability would necessitate
others in lesser degrees [and greater numbers]. In all of the many manifestations of life and
evolution with which we are familiar, we know of no other such accidents. Natural law’s grip on
everything else besides ourselves appears total and inescapable. We are left with the second
explanation: deliberate cause.
During the Age of Satan (1966-1975 CE) a certain “racial memory” of some prehistoric
change to the natural course of human evolution seemed to be asserting itself. 74 The most
spectacular and explicit example was the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke’s
variation on the theme of his earlier novel Childhood’s End. In 2001 proto-man’s intelligence
was artificially boosted by a rectangular monolith. In Childhood’s End the same operation was
performed by an extraterrestrial creature looking precisely like the traditional Devil. Presumably
the spectacle of a tribe of man-apes thronging around Satan would have been a bit too shocking
for audiences; hence the substitution of the more abstract monolith in the film. Intriguingly the
monolithic Satan-symbol provoked no adverse criticism from viewers, religious or otherwise.
Once the religious myths are removed, the “fall” of man is seen as his rise.
Such a 2001-style tinkering with human intellectual evolution would have had to occur at
the genetic level, and presumably [so as to be sustained by normal reproduction] over an
extended period of time. So we are looking at a subtle process, not a sudden, dramatic event [as
in Adam & Eve’s apple-munching or Prometheus’ fire-giving]. We do not have sufficient
knowledge of genetics or of the brain’s physiology to know precisely how such tinkering might
have taken place - though we can estimate it. 75 That it did in fact take place is indicated only -
but inescapably - by the presence of the fait accompli.
The “ancient astronaut” theories of van Däniken et al. may be dispensed with peremptorily.
The human body displays an organic constitution completely compatible with those of other
Earthly species, and alien astronauts could not have taught anything to a proto-man whose
intelligence had not already developed to a high level.
There are a great many genuine curiosities of antiquity which suggest that mankind’s
advanced intelligence made its presence known long before the recorded civilizations of Egypt,
Sumer, China, etc. But, despite torturous efforts to interpret toys or Meso-American murals as
“spaces
hips”, evidence of alien astronauts on Earth remains conspicuous for its absence.
Mankind’s inability to detect the author of our “high intelligence experiment” should not be
considered as evidence that he does not exist, but simply that he has not been discovered and
identified. Nor, one may add, has mankind been actively looking for him. Instead it has been off
first on the wild-goose chase of religious-creationism, then on the wild-goose chase of natural
selection [as applied to the brain]. Nevertheless he exists; the conclusive evidence exists. To
quote Walt Kelly’s Pogo: “Us is it.”
To sum up: We know that there is evidence for the existence of an intelligent entity distinct
from the OU and thus in incidental, if not deliberate conflict with its laws. For whatever its
reasons, it has instilled in humanity the potential to enjoy the same external perspective, as well
as the intelligence to do so with deliberate, creative purpose. Some humans sense this potential
and thrill to it; we call them the Elect. Most others do not think precisely and rigorously enough
to detect it in themselves; or, if they do, they fear it and try to sublimate, repress, or destroy it.
Hence they have represented our Mysterious Stranger as the Devil. We know him by his most
ancient name of Set.
The Temple of Set is thus an association of the Elect to honor Set, exalt his Gift to ourselves,
and exercise it with the greatest possible wisdom. As Set is a metaphysical entity, apart from the
74 See Appendix #95.
75 See Appendix #96.
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OU, he may be likened to a “god” as conventional society employs the term. In this sense the
Temple of Set is a religion - not one which is based on irrational faith, but one which derives its
core principles from exercise of the evident and conspicuous Gift of its neter.
P. Historical OU/SU Interpretations
The cosmological premise of the Temple of Set is that there is one multiverse, consisting
of the totality of existence. Within it are the OU [whose components occupy space and are
related by time] and each sentient being’s SU. The SU may be thought of [at least during one’s
OU-bodily incarnation] as one’s personal perspective on the OU, together with any self-created