NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/alt/magick/6585

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-01 | 6.3 KB

From: [e-mail] (Colin Low)
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 13:10:19 GMT
Subject: Re: My answers (was Re: ... Definitions of "evil")
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Le Grand asks:

>Is it possible that one could have a non-a non-b black
>magic, one that would not seek a forbidden end or use
>forbidden means, but that might itself, in some eldritch
>way, be .... That Which Ought Not Be?

The initial post defined evil in a sociological context, and defined it
in terms of acts and intentions which are harmful to one's (personal,
parochial) interests. Thyagi mentioned the Cthulhu mythos, but didn't
explore the theme of metaphysical evil much further. Le Grand doesn't
quite bring himself to open the can (of worms) at which he is so clearly
pointing......

I've spent part of the Xmas vacation (quite coincidentally) reading a
variety of Kabbalistic views on the nature of evil, views which, even
if you aren't into Kabbalah, are sophisticated, and a good deal
more interesting than modern philosophical works (eg. Mary Midgeley's book
about evil).

I'm not a scholar in the sense that I'm prepared to make a scholarly
presentation on what those Kabbalistic views might be, but I'd like to
discuss some of the thoughts that have been running through my head.

Firstly, although Kabbalists do personify metaphysical evil from time
to time (e.g. Samael), the general approach is more abstract, more
mechanistic, and attempts to account for evil as a necessary part of the
cosmogenic process. Some views:

Catastrophic:
   The creation is a fuck-up. The quality of evil (i.e. being able to
   oppose others intentions) was introduced accidentally,
   and as a result the universe is now in a "fallen" state. E.g. the
   story of the Garden of Eden, the Zoharic myth of the Kingdoms of
   Unbalanced Force, Isaac Luria's shevirah ("the breaking of the vessels").
   Because "countenance beholdeth not countenance", we are ignorant of the
   essential unity of the creation, and thus it is possible for the right
   hand to act against the purposes of the left hand.

Free-Will:
   God wanted created beings to have free-will, to be able to choose between
   one act and another, to be able to comprehend what is good and what
   is evil. Although we have free-will, there is an absolute good (God's
   Will) which has been translated into human terms (the Torah and
   commandments)

Deterministic:
   The cosmogenic process is simply not possible without the quality of
   Din (strict Judgement). Evil is a natural outcome of our ability to
   delineate things, our ability to separate one thing from another, in
   the very "thingyness" of our perception of reality (this relates to
   the thread on implicate order - our models of reality are constrained
   by the thingyness of our perception). In this view the sephira Binah
   introduces the thingyness of reality, and all evil flows from that.

Oppositional:
   The  En Soph (the infinite abstract unmanifest God of Kabbalah) contains
   two currents; that is, the germ of the creative act created duality
   in terms of creating and not creating. This marvellous idea is attributed
   to one of my favourite Kabbalists, Nathan of Gaza, philosopher royal to
   the heretic Shabbatai Zevi. He calls the two currents "the light which
   contains thought" and "the light which does not contain thought". The
   light with thought contained the creative germ, the light without thought
   tried to keep things as they are and can be looked at as mechanically
   opposed to creation. Dion Fortune developed exactly these ideas in some
   detail in "The Cosmic Doctrine", and called the two currents "Ring Cosmos"
   and "Ring Chaos". Fortune distinguished between two forms of evil, which
   she called "negative evil" and "positive evil". Negative evil is the
   mechanistic opposition by Ring Chaos to any form of structure, a kind
   of metaphysical friction which grinds everything back into the
   Unmanifest. Positive evil is something which happens when human beings
   *align* their outlook with that of Ring Chaos and use its power actively.

There is much,much more than this. What interests me is not so much the
history, as the general flavour of ideas that people develop intuitively.
I develop my own intuitions of "why the universe is the way that it is", and
I like to compare them with those of other people. At an inner level
(intuitive, gnostic, not intellectual) some of these ideas have
extraordinary numinosity. This brings me back to Le Grand's question. I am
going to open the can of worms and attempt to drag out the hypothesised
black magic.

Suppose we adopt the framework of Nathan of Gaza, and Dion Fortune, that
creation contains uncreation as a necessary opposition, that both are
aspects of the same Light, that neither is subordinate. Sound familiar?
The Light Which Thinks creates, the Light Which Does Not Think uncreates.
The unfolding of Creation, its purpose, its goal, is aligned with the
Light Which Thinks.

Now let us extend the myth by supposing that there are and have always
been beings aligned with the Light Wot Finks Not. Sometime, thousands of
billions of years ago, around the time when the globular clusters were
being created, a race of beings on a planet (let us call it Atlantis)
explored the dark side of the force, blew themselves to bits, and left
behind a legacy of forms on the inner planes. What they tried to do was
to take the Light That Thinks and use it for their own ends (the story
of Adam). Anyone trying to pervert the Light That Thinks and oppose
its natural unfolding is naturally aligned to the Light Wot Finks Not, and
end up uncreating themselves, which they discovered in the fullness of time,
but not before they had perverted the Light.

Anyway.....your black magick is the perversion of the natural unfolding
of the Light That Thinks into The Light that Thought it Thought but Got
Thought Instead......

Obvious, Innit? Naturally, I don't believe any of this stuff, except
when grey aliens orbiting the Earth beam evil thoughts into my head.

A belated Happy Whatever-Is-That-You-Have-At-This-Time-Of-Year, and
a Happy New Year to those blinded by the samsaric illusion of calendar
systems.

Colin