Cults of Runequest: Mythology and Eliade's Eternal Return

This is part two in a series of posts about the new Cults of RuneQuest: Mythology title. See part one here.

Glorantha, Tradition, and the Fantasy RPG Dilemma

The Gods World. HeroQuesting. Time. In its first twenty pages, Mythology tackles many of Glorantha's core concepts, but these three in particular are the trickiest for new players, and the most important to getting the most out of the setting. "Cults" are familiar to most newcomers, bearing rough similarity to character classes or the clans/tribes/traditions of settings like the World of Darkness (RuneQuest is referenced as an inspiration in both the first and second editions of Vampire: The Masquerade). "Magic" is familiar as well, though in Glorantha it has deeper meaning attached to it. Even "Runes" are somewhat relatable if one is at all familiar with the concept of elements (classical or chemical). "The Gods World," "Time," and "HeroQuesting" are different, however. They are firmly part of a world that the Enlightenment put a sword to, a world alien to modern minds. A world most fantasy RPGs have declined trying to engage with.

In writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien used the highly anachronistic Hobbits to ease the modern reader into pre-modern, or Traditional, reality. Bilbo lived in a world of clocks, schedules, and pocket watches. He wore waistcoats, was deeply concerned with middle class notions of respectability, and lived in a house called Bag End (quite literally the English for "cul-de-sac"). Seeing Middle-earth through his eyes softened the alienness of it. Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin later served the same function. One of the reasons The Silmarillion is more challenging for many readers is they do not have the Hobbits to serve as this bridge. It displays Middle-earth as the Traditional world, a world of living nature animated by spirits and inherent divinity. The sacred permeates Middle-earth, and where the setting's inhabitants work to acknowledge this and live with nature, they thrive. Where they reject the sacred, the inner, and turn to what Tolkien called "the Machine," setting themselves over nature, the world becomes a poisoned hellscape.  

By (the Machine) I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of the development of inherent inner powers or talents..the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world... 

Tolkien, 1951 

Fantasy RPGs, which owe so much to Tolkien, to Homer, to Virgil, did not have the luxury of point of view characters to ease modern players into Traditional settings. So instead, fantasy RPGs chose to simply toss the Traditional out of the setting. This in effect turned them into the dice and paper equivalent of a Renaissance Faire. Sure, they looked medieval or ancient, but this was a facade. Most were set on worlds that orbited suns, where the laws of physics, biology, and chemistry were mostly intact and magic conveniently operated like a science. It was a "force," an "energy," that like electricity or magnetism could be directed by repeatable procedures to produce reliable effects. The societies in these fantasy games were surprisingly egalitarian and firmly capitalistic. You adventured for coin so you could buy better and better things. "Danger? How much are we getting paid?" Nothing in these RPGs challenged players to try and look at the world the way that their actual characters would have. They could play Bilbo rather than Aragorn or Boromir. It wasn't roleplaying. It was a mirror.

If you are coming off of experiences like this, then, Glorantha can be a head-spinning one hundred and eighty degree turn.

Make no mistake, Glorantha has its own anachronisms. It is a fantasy game, not a slavish recreation of the Bronze Age. But is a setting and game that refuses to jettison the Traditional aspects of mythology and legend from the dragons and swordplay. 

That brings us back to the Gods World, Time, and HeroQuesting.

Mircea Eliade and Traditional Cosmology

We--like dear old Bilbo--live in a world of clocks, calendars, schedules, Time. Minute follows minute, day follows day, year follows year. It is a linear forced march. Our watches and alarm clocks provide the drum beat.

Yet imagine the point of view, for a moment, of a farmer or a shepherd 5000 years ago. 

Time is not a line, it's a circle, a wheel. The sun rises and sets. The moon waxes and wanes. Days grow shorter then longer again. Without clocks and calendars it isn't about numbers, it's about events. It isn't next winter, it is winter come again.

This is not to say the ancients were ignorant of the passage of time. There is a line in the Mahabharata that likens it to a chariot wheel. The wheel turns, and from our fixed vantage point the same spokes come and go and return again, but at the same time the chariot is moving down the road. 

But chariot wheels sometimes break. This was a constant danger in the minds of ancient peoples. The moon goes dark...but what guarantee is there she will wax full again? Winter comes and nature dies. Will it be reborn? Will the sun climb back out from the land of the dead? What is it that turns the wheel?

And a deeper question looms...why? Why does the sun set and rise? Why do the nights get longer? Why does the moon go black? 

The answer to both questions was clear. Something set the wheel in motion, something started it, and that something must be what keeps it in motion. That thing is outside the wheel, not turning with the wheel but instead turning it.

Romanian religious historian Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was among the first to formulate these observations. Eliade was--and remains--a titan in the field because he essentially helped to create it. It was an 18th and 19th century academic conceit to dismiss religious experience, to pass it off as something else. For anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) magic and religion were developmental phases, like childhood and adolescence. Magic was practiced by "primitive" humanity, followed by more mature religion, until both were replaced by mature science. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) predictably explained religion as the product of psychological complexes. Karl Marx (1818-1883) had economic and political explanations. Perhaps the closest we get to Eliade was Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), one of the founders of sociology, who at least saw religious experience as a natural aspect of human life. Cult, to his mind, was like culture, forming bonds between individuals and creating commonality. 

Eliade had a more radical notion. Perhaps religious experience was just that...religious experience. Perhaps it was an encounter with the transcendent. With the sacred. Durkheim wrote of the sacred, but he viewed it as a feeling of awe, devotion, respect. He was careful to skirt the supernatural. Eliade instead saw the sacred as a universal experience of something outside. He was careful not to assign it to any one religion or tradition. This all led him to one of his most famous concepts, eternal return.

To simplify, Eliade theorized Traditional humanity being conscious of two types of time, Profane and Sacred (Eliade used the term "sacred time" extensively, a phrase Greg Stafford would later adopt for Glorantha). Profane time was the wheel, the circle, we discussed above. This was the world inside of Time, the world that turned endlessly through days and seasons. 

Sacred time was what existed outside the wheel, the world outside of Time. It was what set the wheel in motion and what kept it turning. Outside of the wheel, it was a single, omnipresent now. This is where all the things that set the wheel in motion existed. Gods, heroes, sacred ancestors.

Critical to all of this was Eliade's observation that in the Traditional mind, the essence of a thing resides in its origin. Its origin established the nature of a thing, formed the pattern of its existence, its identity. Thus creation stories, myths, contained tremendous power. If you knew the origin of thing, you could exert influence over it. And the way in which human beings learned these origin stories was hierophany, the "breakthrough" of the sacred into profane time. These revelations--like the sages who first heard the Vedas or Muhammad hearing Jibreel recite the Qur'an, gave humanity the origin stories of things so that they might use these stories to participate in the sacred.

The eternal return was made possible by these hierophanies. By having the origin story, one had the beginning of a thing, one could touch its source, which lay outside of profane time in the sacred:

In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.

In Glorantha

It is easier to see now how Greg seized on these ideas and digested them, re-interpreting and reweaving them. Hierophany is Myth, the revelation of sacred time to mortals. Sacred time is the Gods World;

The realm of eternity. Every deity who performed great immortal deeds is found here. Within this world of extremes lie the heavens and hells of the cults, where initiates and devotees go after death. Here, too, lie the great pools of creative material from which were made the primal oceans, ancient mountains, and first skies of the Mundane World.

Mythology, p. 14

New players often struggle to understand how the Gods World could have ages, sequences of events, cause and effect, if there was no Time. While a standard answer would be that "we" as beings inside of Time are imposing our perceptions on these stories, I would refer the reader back to the wheel. We think of time as a chain of events, but the Traditional viewpoint is to see it as the cycle. Before Arachne Solara birthed Time, there were no sunrises and sunsets, no seasons, therefore no wheel, no cycle, no Time. Events were fluid then, not fixed.

On the other hand, it is important to recognize that all of the Myths still exist, and can be accessed now. They can be experienced and visited. Through Myth you can enter the Golden Age and see the Spike, the cosmic mountain at the center of exist. Through a different story, you could enter the Greater Darkness and witness the Void, the hole in creation left when the Devil shattered that mountain. Then you could go back and visit the Spike again. This is not possible within Time. If your comrade dies you may attempt to bring them back, but you cannot go back to yesterday or last week to save them. We are trapped on the wheel, and the wheel turns in one direction only. 

Time as a Wheel

Myth, by contrast, can lead us anywhere in the ages of the Gods World, and these visits to the sacred, to the Gods World, are HeroQuests:

Heroquesting is a direct interaction by mortals with the divine realm of myth and archetypes. When heroquesting, participants enter the realm of legend and myth to interact with heroes and gods, gambling precious life force to gain miraculous powers and bring back magic, whether that be Rune spells, guardian spirits, a good harvest, something long forgotten and hidden, or other magical boons or curses.

Mythology, p. 14

In Tolkein's legendarium, which I would argue derives as much from the Traditional worldview as does Glorantha, the world was initially flat but bent into a circle to prevent humankind from ever sailing against the lands of the immortals again. Time, in Glorantha, is similar. The gods made the world, there was a golden age, then they began to war upon each other, the world collapsed and died. To save it, Arachne Solara and the gods bent the world again. That sequence of events was turned into a circle of constant creation and recreation. The Green Age became Sea Season. The Golden Age became Fire Season. Earth Season, harvest, is the first intrusion of Death into the world, the Lesser Darkness. Then Dark Season, the Greater Darkness, befalls the world. The Grey or Silver Age, when Orlanth quested to save creation, is Storm Season. 

Then comes the crucial moment.

In his theory of cyclic time, Eliade cites numerous examples of rites and rituals who's intent was to help the gods "recreate" the world. As mentioned above, there was always a fear that maybe the wheel would stop turning or break. Through myth, and ritual, humans could revisit the origins of things, the source, and help the gods recreate the world. Greg put this at the end of his Gloranthan year and called it--and I think Eliade might have been pleased--"Sacred Time."

Closing Notes

If you have never read Eliade, and are curious about some of Greg's influences, I strongly recommend The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion and The Myth of the Eternal Return. Both are very accessible. Eliade was a prolific writer and researcher, who also wrote on alchemy, yoga, and shamanism. I would heartily recommend these as well but they stray a bit from the main topic here.

I admit to being a bit of an Eliade fan boy. I blame Greg for this and all that RuneQuest in my adolescent years. While I never had the chance to study under him, I was able to study under two of his University of Chicago proteges, Alf Hiltebeitel and Wendy Doniger. While both focus primarily in the mythology of the Indian subcontinent (Alf taught me the Mahabharata), any of their works are also terrific and show a deep Eliade influence. 

 

WRITING RIDDLES: ILLUMINATION IN GLORANTHA, PART ONE

Note: This is the first of two (maybe even three) essays on Gloranthan Illumination. It is an overview, and sets up the theses for the future pieces.

In writing The Final Riddle, I realized I needed to start with the prickly subject of Illumination. Introduced way back in 1981's Cults of Terror, Illumination is a state of spiritual and mental transcendence, the Gloranthan equivalent of "enlightenment." Like many things Gloranthan, it has parallels to concepts in our own world, such as the Buddhist nirvana, Saint Symeon's "dying to the Self,", or the concept of moksha on the Indian subcontinent. Yet Illumination is not strictly speaking any of these. Like so much in Glorantha, a setting which resists the simple dualism of many fantasy worlds, the nature of Illumination is left up for individual gaming tables to decide. In doing so, we are weighing in on a subject that has been the source of much conflict in our own world.

On one hand, we have Nysalor, the "Bright One." This First Age deity introduced (or re-introduced, in later writings) Illumination into the world. For his disciples, it was an overwhelmingly positive force, elevating the Illuminate above all the harmful divisions caused by the Gods War. Illumination allows the individual to rise above dualities and definitions. Life and Death, Harmony and Disorder, Illusion and Truth, even Cosmos and Chaos can be seen as aspects of the same thing. Illumination effectively liberates the individual from religious strictures, such as joining opposing cults or facing spirits of reprisal. It all seems...good.

Yet at the same time, in the West, we see Nysalor's teachings abused and corrupted. His disciples use their liberation from normal ethics to create diseases just so they can spread them and cure them. The Vampire Lords of Tanisor go further. This gave rise to Arkat, Nysalor's great enemy, who himself became Illuminated to bring down the Bright One. They became mirrors of each other, each called the other Gbaji, the Deceiver. In the end of their cataclysmic struggle one emerged, but no one can be sure which.

Readers with a taste for South Asian history might see some parallels here. When the Buddha emerged, his teachings of self-liberation went completely against the Vedic priesthoods, who taught that personal salvation came only from the temples and their deities, and the practice of sacrifice to both. Buddhism was, in essence, an affront to the social order which kept the priests and the warrior castes in their lofty positions. The accusations then lay in charges that Buddhists were antagonistic to the Cosmic Order, rta. In this way they were associated with disorder, or to use a Greek-derived word, Chaos. As Glorantha fans all know, that is the primary charge against Illumination. It is a form of Chaos.

The socio-political tensions between early Buddhism and the Vedic tradition are not unique, however, they are nearly universal. We need to talk a moment about exoteric and esoteric spirituality. The first is communal, societal, and usually organized around group ceremonies, temples, and priesthoods. The later is internal, solitary (mostly), introspective, and subjective. Exoteric religion tells you "do this," or "believe this." Esoteric religion asks you to withdraw and look inward for answers.

In any given religious tradition, we see these two aspects. Judaism has kabbalah as an inner tradition, for example. Islam has sufism. Christianity has a strong mystical tradition early on that the Church slowly tapped down. There are, historically speaking, often tensions between these two sorts of faith. In the Sunni tradition, a fine example is the tension between Salafism (exoteric Islam based on the Qur'an, hadith, and performance of the Five Pillars) and Sufism (which is more meditative, contemplative, and inner). 

In Glorantha, theism is extremely exoteric. The Orlanth cults, for example, form the backbone of Orlanthi society. Worship revolves around lay people supporting temples, with priests and Rune Lords wielding a great deal of political influence and power. Theistic cults tend to hold society together. So too do many of the Western sorcerous traditions. Shamanistic societies are a bit less rigid, but still involve a specialist (the shaman) to deal with the spiritual world on your behalf.

Illumination throws all of this out the window. You must answer its Riddles for yourself, and the enlightenment liberates you from the restrictions of theistic (or sorcerous) faith. This makes it extremely dangerous from the exoteric position, because it cannot be controlled.

The Lunar Empire handles this in a clever way. They hand the exoteric reins of power to the Imperial state cults, while the Great Sister overseas Lunar esotericism. The exoteric state cults maintain order and Imperial unity, and the vast majority of the population may belong only to them. Further, the state cults are expansionistic, pushing the borders of the Empire outwards and seeking converts. Those citizens seeking to go deeper into the Lunar religion, however, can turn to the esoteric Illumination (or "Sevening") ways. These cults are centripetal, pulling the initiate inwards towards the heart of Lunarism. This unique dualism is inherent in Lunar Illumination, and will be the subject of Part Two of this series. Still, even though the Red Goddess embraces the esoteric path in a way most exoteric cults can't, she has her Examiners in service of the State that watch for Illuminates going "bad" ("Occluded," is the Lunar term).

It is worth noting, incidentally, that even the language we use suggests a tension between these two religious approaches. The Sanskrit word for "religion" is yoga, or "yoke." The English comes from the Latin re ligio, to be "bound" or "tied" (we get the related word "ligature" from the same root). Compare this to the word most closely associated with enlightenment..."liberation." To be "freed" from bonds. One binds, the other unties.

My suggestion here, then, is not that Greg Stafford was modeling any specific cultural conflict in the tension between Gloranthan religions and Illumination (Buddhist and Vedic, Salafism and Sufism, Christian and Gnostic, etc), but rather the inherent religious tension between these two approaches to Truth. Glorantha is about mythology, so too is religion, and the struggle between the two religious paths is often expressed in mythological terms. It is logical that one of the main struggles in the setting, then, is the tension between exoteric orthodoxy and esoteric heterodoxy. I would argue that it is indeed a main theme in Glorantha, maybe even its primary one. After all, the First Age was dominated by Arkat's struggle against Nysalor. The Second Age, meanwhile, was characterized by the rivalry between two Empires and philosophies, the extreme orthodoxy of the God Learners and their drive towards One Universal Truth, and the EWF's esoteric heterodoxy of Draconic Consciousness (a close cousin to Illumination). In the Third Age, it is repeated again, with the Lunar Empire struggling against the Theistic nation of Sartar (the twist being, of course, Argrath's own Illumination). 

Fantasy settings thrive on conflict. Tolkien's Middle-earth had Good versus Evil, Moorcock's Multiverse had Law versus Chaos, Howard's Hyborian Age had Barbarism versus Civilization. What we are looking at in Glorantha, I think, is a more nuanced theme about the Truth that is defined for you versus Truth that is defined by you, and the dangers inherent in both.   

The Final Riddle is coming soon to the Jonstown Compendium.       

YES VIRGINIA, THERE IS A THIRD SIDE

A CHILD'S QUESTION, A MAN'S ANSWER

IN 1897, Francis Pharcellus Church, an editor for the New York Sun, found himself in a difficult position.  An eight-year-old girl, whose father told her she could rely on anything printed in the Sun, had written in with a burning question.  Church's answer was a classic example of the "Third Side," a crucial element of the thought and life work later promoted by Anton LaVey (1930-1997).

"There are not always 'two sides to every issue,'" LaVey would later write.  "It is invariably a third side that is overlooked in every issue and endeavor, from abortion to gun control.  The third side can be the crackpot stuff of conspiracy theories, or it can be the most logical and simple, yet deliberately neglected conclusion." (1)

The question put to Church was whether or not Santa Claus existed.  Her friends, it seemed, had told her that he did not.  Suffering an existential crisis, she reached out to the newspaper for clarity.  

"Virginia, your little friends are wrong," Church answered.  He continued;  

They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge. 

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. 

Not believe In Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

...A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

A WORLD OF GODS AND SANTAS

I think of Francis Church--and Anton LaVey--whenever I am asked if I "believe" in God.  For starters I try not to "believe" anything, especially in the sense of "accepting something is true without proof."  However, if you are asking if I think God exists, of course I do.  I am not an idiot.  Yahweh, Satan, Allah, Krishna, Thor, Osiris, et al are every bit as real as Santa Claus, Hamlet, and Sherlock Holmes.  To deny any of these exist is to fall into a trap laid by "vested interests and...minds of limited scope," (2) people who want to frame the definitions of the conversation into either/or propositions to force you to either side with or against them.  

Yes, gods exist and Santa exists.  They exert measurable and demonstrative influence on the lives and behaviors of billions. You might as well deny the existence of capitalism or liberal democracy.  Thus I am categorically not an atheist; "a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods."  That definition has that ugly "believe" word in it again.  I know the gods exist.  So rather than play the game of getting forced into one side or the other of this tedious debate (and therefore by default ceding the right to define its terms to the person asking me, who all too often has an agenda), I embrace the Third Side alternative that Anton LaVey synthesized.  The question is not whether gods exist or not, the question is who created whom.

"It is a popular misconception that the Satanist does not believe in God," LaVey wrote in his (in)famous Satanic Bible. "...Man has always created his gods, rather than his gods creating him."  It is clear from the way that LaVey wrote of gods and devils that he regarded them in much the same way as Francis Church regarded Santa Claus.  These are real ideas, real things, that motivate human behavior, and they have manifested in every human civilization we know of.  This indicates to my mind that they are somehow necessary--or at least useful--to us.  All too often, the use to which they are put is control; bullying other people into thinking and acting how we might wish them to, but LaVey had answer for this as well.  "If man needs such a god and recognizes that god, then he is worshiping an entity that a human being invented...(is) it not more sensible to worship a god that he, himself, has created, in accordance with his own emotional needs?" (3)  The Theism/Atheism debate tries to force us into either submitting to other people's gods or to throw the baby out with the bathwater and reject gods of our own.    

LaVey put forward the convincing theory that humanity is an amphibious species that needs to swim the waters of dreams and ideals as much as crawl out and walk the hard bedrock of reality.  This explains the dramatic and romantic dimensions of his otherwise brutal, pragmatic philosophy.  Like Church's Santa Claus or fairies, how drab and dreary existence would be without Count Dracula, Superman, Daenerys Targaryen, or Zeus.  How impossible to imagine.  Yes, atheists are right to point out we can find awe and wonder and beauty in looking at the stars and the sunsets, but this doesn't mean I would want to live in a world without myths and fairy tales. I daresay I needn't have to, because there is a need for these things deeply buried in the human psyche.  So long as we remain human, the need for gods and Santas will always be there.    

1. and 2. from "The Third Side: An Uncomfortable Alternative," published in Satan Speaks!

3. The Satanic Bible   

CAROLE SATYAMURTI'S "MAHABHARATA," A REVIEW

Despite the availability of various versions of the Mahabharata, on page, screen, and in live performance, I am assuming that it will be less familiar to the average American or European reader than the Iliad or the Aeneid, for instance. I have seen my task as one of trying to open the reader's eyes--as my own were opened--to the richness of a literary masterpiece they may hardly have heard of until now...

Carole Satyamurti, from her Preface

FIFTEEN TIMES THE LENGTH OF THE BIBLE, the Mahabharata is a sprawling saga of gods and mortals, demons and monsters, comedy and tragedy. It is the story of Kuruksetra, a cosmological war that ended the previous Golden Age and gave rise to our Age, the fallen Kali Yuga. On on side, divine beings incarnated in mortal form as Lord Krishna and the five Pandava brothers. On the other, demonic powers incarnated as Duryodhana and his ninety-nine Kaurava brothers. Disguised as a dynastic struggle between human cousins, it is actually a fight for the destiny of the Earth.

Composed around two thousand years ago, but with an oral tradition stretching back a millennium before that, the Mahabhrata is as familiar to the people of India and South Asia as the stories of Adam and Eve or Moses and Pharoah are to most Westerners. Usually compared to the Iliad and Odyssey, it certainly shares much in common with them; Sanskrit and classical Greek are close cousins, with vocabulary and grammatical structures strikingly similar. Both descend from an earlier Indo-European ancestor, and it is easy to see the linguistic and thematic relations between Greek and Vedic mythologies (a clear example is the god Uranus and the god Varuna, both lords of the night sky). But the Mahabhrata differs sharply from its classical Greek cousins in that for hundreds of millions it remains a religious scripture, and enjoys a position in Indian culture that is more Biblical than Homeric. The Bhaghavad Gita, the section Westerners are most likely to have heard of, is still a source of moral, ethical, and spiritual teachings to many on the subcontinent, and indeed has inspired people far beyond. Because it is such a significant text, people have been attempting English translations since the 19th century. The best known is probably KM Ganguli's, but despite being the most complete translation in English, its stilted Victorian prose is nearly as alien to modern readers as the Sanskrit. Several others, among them William Buck, R.K. Naryan, and C. Rajagopalachari, have published condensed versions also in prose. All seem to be missing something.

The problem seems to be that its very heart, the Mahabharata is a poem. Traditionally, audiences would have experienced it in song or chant (indeed Bhaghavad Gita means "the song of God"). The English retellings, concentrating on making it clear and comprehensible for modern audiences, have generally ignored this, opting for prose instead. This isn't necessarily a bad decision; any attempt to directly imitate the metrical form of the shlokas (the stanzas used in classical Sanskrit literature) in English would sound jarring anyway. But undeniably something is lost by changing it to prose, and these Mahabhratas all seem drier and dustier for it. So while there are certainly good translations to be had in terms of accuracy and keeping alive the stories, no one has really been able to make the epic sing in English as it must have sung to its audiences so very long ago.

No one until Carole Satyamurti, that is.

Mahabhrata, a Modern Retelling is glorious, and like so many brilliant ideas you are dumbfounded no one ever got around to thinking of it before. It starts with the realization that retelling the Mahabharata isn't a job for scholars, it's work that requires a poet. Satyamurti, an award-winning poet with several published collections under her belt, comes at the work not as a Sanskritist would--primarily concerned with hewing close to the original language--but as an artist who paints pictures with English verse. Since she does not, by her own admission, read Sanskrit, she allows herself to trust the most respected translations of those who do, soaking them up and respinning them in a way that sings to the English ear. The result is the Mahabharata I first longed for twenty years ago, when I read it in Sanskrit, and desperately wanted to share it with my English-speaking friends and family. It's the retelling you can hand to English speakers and say "this is why it has been loved for two thousand years."

This is no mean feat. Satyamurti has distilled 100,000 Sanskrit shloka couplets into 27,000 lines of English blank verse, keeping the structure of the original 18 books largely intact. Her choice of blank verse, with nine to eleven syllables per line and an average of five stresses, is perfect. The Sanskrit shloka, consisting of 32 syllables in two 16 syllable lines, was a widespread and well known form in ancient and classical India, just as blank verse--the meter of Shakespeare's plays and Milton's Paradise Lost--is for modern English speakers. Reading Mahabharata in this form is a subconscious cue that we are reading a classic.

It is also vibrant. With all due respect to Ganguli, his 5000 page retelling is often numbingly dull to even devoted Sanskritists and scholars. Satyamurti's poem by contrast is nearly impossible to put down, racing through the massive storyline with lithe, economical verse. On the crucial scenes she slows to focus attention, then picking up pace to speed through the less vital sections of the narrative. In addition to her story-telling skills her sense of character is pitch-perfect. Each of the twenty four or so principal figures she portrays in all their multiple dimensions, and the secondary characters are consistently distinct and memorable. This is the work of an artist just as devoted to her craft as she clearly is the Mahabharata, and the fact that this is a retelling should never detract from the fact that Satyamurti has composed one of the longest narrative poems In English history, and is it masterful.

I simply cannot recommend this retelling enough.

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GOTHIC and GOTHICKA: A Look at Victoira Nelson's New Book

Gothic [ˈgɒθɪk]

adj

3. (Literary & Literary Critical Movements) (sometimes not capital) of or relating to a literary style characterized by gloom, the grotesque, and the supernatural, popular esp in the late 18th century: when used of modern literature, films, etc., sometimes spelt: Gothic

For the last twenty-five years of my life I have been playing with a dark jigsaw puzzle.  Perhaps you have seen the pieces strewn across the entries of this blog; religion, occultism, dreams, horror, imagination, the fantastic, the macabre.  I've never met Victoria Nelson, but having just finished her fascinating new Gothicka (Harvard University Press, 2012), it is clear that she has been playing with the same puzzle.  Gothicka shifts back and forth between literary criticism and spirituality, tracing the origin of "Gothick" (her spelling) as a post-Enlightenment genre of fiction and following its shadowy trail through Western society into the present.  She leaves no stone unturned as she tries to understand how the genre came to be, how it has grown into a thriving subculture, and where it might be leading us.     

Generally said to have all started with Horace Walpole's 1764 The Castle of Otranto, Gothic fiction is the precursor of the modern horror tale.  Like all genre fiction it is littered with certain tropes; the innocent young heroine, a dark and menacing stranger, grim family secrets, brooding and ancient architecture, and the power of the past to act upon the present.  But the black heart of the Gothic isn't these trappings.  It is about the intrusion of the supernatural into a rational and ordered world.  I think it is important to emphasize this because it is what separates Gothic from fantasy fiction.  In fantasy, the supernatural belongs.  It is part of the fabric of the setting.  In the Gothic, the supernatural is the iceberg and rational reality the Titanic.

Nelson clearly places the Gothic into historical context.  It appears during the Enlightenment, a period in which the earlier, medieval view of the world--a supernatural hierarchy ruled by God, administered by angels, and seeped in magic and miracles--has by and large been shattered.  To the medieval mind the world was supernatural and mysterious; to the minds of the Enlightenment it was something ordered and rational.  Reality could be studied and understood.  The Gothic emerges to preserve that earlier world view.  It seems to suggest that maybe we are wrong...maybe the world is irrational after all.  This is why we call it Gothic, a name that conjures up the Dark Ages.  In the Gothic story, scratch the surface of the modern world and the medieval is there looking back at us.

Which, of course, explains the disproportionate presence of Catholicism in the Gothic tale.  Roman Catholicism and medievalism are inextricably linked in the Western mind.  The Church dominated that era.  Thus whether it is The Amityville Horror, The Conjuring, The Rite, The Exorcist, The Last Exorcism, or even the classic vampire tale ('Salem's Lot, Fright Night), it is to Catholicism and the trappings of Catholicism that people automatically turn in the face of the supernatural.  When was the last horror film in which you saw a Baptist minister summoned to cleanse a haunted house?  A Lutheran pastor?  Deep inside, we understand that these newer protestant sects have no power over the intrusion of the Dark Ages back into our lives.  It has to be the Church that was there.

Gothic fiction thrived in the 19th and 20th centuries in the vacuum created when the supernatural was banished from daily life.  People now continued to experience the supernatural in the pages of fiction or on the silver screen.  But as we drew closer to the 21st century, something unexpected began to happen to the Gothic, and this is the core of Victoria Nelson's book.  Since the 1960s the monsters have been undergoing a transformation.  The Witch became the beautiful Samantha Stevens, the feisty Willow Rosenberg, the ladies from Charmed.  The Werewolf became sexy hunks like Jacob Black and True Blood's Alcide Herveaux.  And the Vampire, from True Blood to The Vampire Diaries and Twilight, is the brooding heartthrob.  And across the board they all had one thing in common...the transformation of the human being into something larger, greater, "higher."  The monsters of Gothic fiction stopped representing states of damnation and became instead paths to ascension.

None of which is as strange as it seems.  Again, we must remind ourselves that in the medieval imagination nothing, not even Satan, was as terrifying as God.  It was God who sent the Black Death, it was God who watched you at all times, it was God who would punish you if you disobeyed.  God, as the ultimate representative of the supernatural was terrible, awful, and inexplicable.  It was wise to be "God fearing."  But at the same time, God was the gateway to the numinous, to transformation, to becoming something greater than your self.  Horror and awe go hand-in-hand.  

Modern religions have been increasingly about the evolution of the self into a state of godhood.  The doctrine of salvation from above has become one of self-transformation.  We see this in Scientology, Mormonism, and Christian Science.  We see it in newer occult movements like Thelema, Satanism, or some schools of Wicca.  And we see it happening in the heart of the Gothic.  The shock and terror of the supernatural breaking down the walls of ordered reality has given way to possibility...to the notion of escaping the rational world into a higher state of potential and power.  Where once the Vampire was the ultimate state of damnation, cast forever from the grace of God, in the absence of God he becomes a transformative savior figure who offers liberation from human frailty and death.

It is clear that in the Gothic genre and the subculture it has spawned, Nelson sees a kind of emerging spirituality.  Though she mentions Anton LaVey several times in the book, in many ways she echoes exactly what he envisioned.  This is particularly the case when she discusses "Primary Believers" (religious practitioners who inhabit an ultimately supernatural world) and "Secondary Believers" (people who suspend disbelief and enter into a supernatural world temporarily).  This is exactly what LaVey believed his new religion to be, a society of Secondary Believers who experience the supernatural as self-created and self-transformational psychodrama.  I suspect the Church of Satan is a precursor of the kind of experience she sees Gothic heading for.

There is a lot going on in this book, too much to sum up here.  For me, reading it was a sort of validation for things I've been trying to express for years.  I would strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the Gothic, in horror, or the supernatural. It was a gripping, highly informative and provocative read.              

  

   

ZEALOT: Some Thoughts on Reza Aslan's Book

It would have been impossible to have written a book like Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, without it generating a bit of controversy.  For starters, there is that title.  Today, we hear the word "zealot" and think of Osama bin Laden.  It has landed in the same category as "fundamentalist," "fanatic," and "extremist."  Sure enough, the dictionary tells us a zealot is a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their religious, political, or other ideals.  If you read a bit further down, however, you come across the older, original meaning of the word;

a member of an ancient Jewish sect aiming at a world Jewish theocracy and resisting the Romans until ad 70.   

Hmm.  Someone advocating a universal "Kingdom of God" who challenged the might of the Romans.  Sound like any biblical figures you know?

But here is where it gets really controversial...for some people, at least.  Aslan's book is a meticulously researched, highly readable study of 1st century Roman Judea and the historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth.  It is not, however, about Jesus the Christ.  This is not to say that Aslan sets out to prove Christianity is all wrong or that Jesus was just an ordinary man.  He is very careful not to do that.  Rather, he is trying to write a modern history of Jesus, a concept that did not exist when the Gospels were written.  He points out that the authors of the Gospels had no intention of relaying historical facts, but rather were attempting to convey spiritual Truths as they understood them.  The question of his birthplace is a good example.

All four Gospels call him "Jesus of Nazareth," and agree he was a Nazarene.  It was common practice in an age when people lacked surnames to specify your birthplace in this way  to avoid confusion (in fact, of the many 1st century charismatic leaders in Judea who claimed to be the messiah there was even another "Jesus," Jesus of Ananias).  The author of Luke, however, tells us Jesus was actually from Bethlehem, and concocts a story that his contemporary readers would all have known was absurd.  In this tale, the Romans call for a census that requires families to uproot and return to the place where the head of the household was born to wait there and be counted.  It is ridiculous of course, and the Romans never did anything of the sort (how can you take count of persons and property when the property was left behind?).  But the point is Luke's Roman audience would have known it was not factually accurate, but it did explain how Jesus was born in Bethlehem in fulfilment of prophecy (Micah 5:2).  Matthew goes even further and adds another absurdity, having the family flee soon after into Egypt to escape Herod, who is killing infants in the area.  This also never happened, but in fulfils yet another conflicting prophecy that the messiah would come out of Egypt like Moses (Hosea 11:1).  Contemporary readers would likely have also known this was not a description of real events, but the ancients were not as unsophisticated as we like to think.  They understood that something could be inaccurate but also reveal a Truth.

Aslan's book, then, is not an attempt to reveal that Truth but rather to be factual accurate.  It is not debunking the biblical narrative, but relating the facts as we known them.  There is the Jesus that people accept as Truth--the Son of God, the peacemaker who died for our sins--and there is also Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew who existed before Christianity, and of whom all written accounts we have come from decades after his death.  By sticking to the facts that all accounts agree on, and comparing them to what we know of the period, a very interesting figure emerges.

1st century Roman Judea was a volatile, violent place about to be completely and literally wiped off the map in 70 C.E.  Under the Roman occupation, the local peoples saw their culture and values under assault by foreigners and foreign ideas.  Essentially a theocracy (the word was actually invented to describe the ancient Jewish state), it was a land divinely ordained, giving to the Hebrews by their God.  How then could something ordained by God be taken away from them?  The answer was, it couldn't.  A messiah would emerge and drive the Romans out.

Interesting word, that.  Messiah in ancient times meant a "king."  David, for example, was a messiah.  Under the Roman occupation it came to mean the "true king" rather than the false puppets the Romans had installed, a king anointed by God who would restore the old Jewish state (the "Kingdom of God").  Under Roman rule there were literally dozens of men claiming to be that messiah, and nearly all of them met with the same fate.

It is a simple fact that the Romans reserved crucifixion for one crime and one crime only; sedition or treason.  It is also a fact that they placed a sign over the victim's head to announce the nature of his treason.  Though the English translation for those who died alongside Jesus is "thieves," this is in fact a mistranslation.  A closer word would be "bandit," and it meant people who hid in the hills like modern Al Qaeda fanatics, robbing passerbys to fund their campaign against the state.  The Romans never crucified simple "thieves."  Nor was the charge levelled against Jesus a joke.  To the Romans, at least, "I.N.R.I" was his crime.  He had claimed to be King of the Jews.

Given that fact, it becomes clear that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the Romans for the crime of defying Caesar.  The bit about Pontius Pilate being reluctant to kill Jesus and forced into it by the Jewish establishment is almost comical.  The historical Pilate had nothing but contempt for the Jews and ordered hundreds of crucifixions, and actually had to be scolded by the Emperor Tiberius for going out of his way to antagonise the Jewish people.  He was eventually recalled for his treatment of them.  After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., however, Christianity was fast becoming a Roman religion, and it became necessary to soften the Roman involvement in his death.

Looking back at Jesus as one of the men crucified for the crime of claiming to be the messiah, Aslan examines his life and doings in this light.  What emerges is a fascinating picture of a revolutionary, quite possibly a disciple of John the Baptist who would eventually take over and expand his movement after John's arrest.  From his birth (possibly as an illegitimate child--when he first returns to Nazareth the locals call him son of Mary, which meant only one thing in a culture where "son of" was followed by the father's name) to his terrible death, Aslan retraces his steps, and it is a gripping account.

In the end, the most controversial thing about Zealot is how uncontroversial it really is.  There is little in this book that I was not taught twenty years ago studying the history of early Christianity. It does disturb some sacred cows, but doesn't attempt to butcher them as Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens night have.  Aslan is not out to rob you of your faith.  He simply presenting the facts as academics have done time and time again before him.  But Aslan has a knack for breathing life and passion into what otherwise might be dry and dusty history, and Zealot is a surprising page turner.  Further, its theme--a fundamentalist religion that feels it is under attack by foreign influences and changing times--is as relevant now as it was twenty centuries ago.

Highly recommended for those interested in the historical Jesus, believer or non-believer alike.     

  

THE ANGEL MOST HIGH, PART 3, The Fifth Article on the work of Andrew Chumbley

...again we come face to face with the magical theme of the mask and the mirror; if you look into the face of the Devil and see only wickedness and sin, that is because you are seeing your own wickedness and sin reflected...

The Yezidi people of Iraq's Nineveh province have long been accused of being "Devil worshipers."  In a sense they are.  The Yezidi religion, which is neither an off-shoot of Christianity nor of Islam but a parallel tradition in its own right, teaches that God left the task of creation--and governing the universe--to seven angels, emanations of Himself (a very Qabalistic concept).  The leader of these angels, the Angel Most High, is Tawuse Melek, the "Peacock Angel."  He rules creation on God's behalf.  What gets the Yezidi into trouble with their Muslim neighbors are the parallels between Tawuse Melek and the Islamic Shaytan (aka Iblis).  Both are the highest of God's angels, and both--in nearly identical stories--are brought before Adam after his creation and told to bow before him by God.  In the version told in the Quran, Shaytan refuses to kneel and asks why a creature of air and fire should bow before one formed of water and clay.  For that, he is condemned by Allah, and falls.  But in the Yezidi telling, Tawuse Melek refuses because it is lawful to bow before only one being; God himself, and for this he is praised rather than condemned.  The Yezidi acknowledge that Iblis and Tawuse Melek are one in the same, but they no not call him "Shaytan" and deny that he is evil.  He is Lucifer Unfallen.  And here again we come face to face with the magical theme of the mask and the mirror; if you look into the face of the Devil and see only wickedness and sin, that is because you are seeing your own wickedness and sin reflected.  As the Buddhists point out, one who is enlightened can find the Buddha nature in anything.  The Yezidi understanding of the Angel Most High embraces this.  And so, apparently, does the work of Andrew Chumbley, who refers to the Peacock Angel throughout Qutub, and for whom the Angel Most High represents something other than temptation.

We have spent nearly three essays now on Chumbley's own version of why the Angel Most High refused to bow, and it should be clear that his Crooked Path is taking us in a direction different from either the Islamic or Yezidi stories. In all three versions, God orders the Highest Angel to bow before Adam, signifying of course that mankind is his second-in-command, the divine vice-regent of God.  The Muslim Angel refuses out of wounded pride, the Yezidi Angel refuses out of love for God. Chumbley's Angel refuses because he knows a secret even the One God doesn't; Man has the capacity to rise higher than the One himself.  He is not God's subordinate...God is man's subordinate.

And now the final veil is lifted from this fable, and reveals the deepest truth of all.

...from the Adept's point of view, these believers have counted down to "One" and forgotten to go all the way to "Zero."  They have forgotten the Buddhist exhortation "if on the road to Enlightenment you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha."  This applies to Allah and Yahweh too...

Nearly all men--one could comfortably say 99%--are mainly atheists.  Even the most pious Christian, Muslim, or Jew disbelieves in far more gods that he believes in.  The Muslim or Christian denies a million gods; the 'total' atheist denies just one more god than them.  But all will agree that mankind has invented countless deities throughout history to satisfy his needs.    The only difference between the believer and the atheist is that the former have convinced themselves that of countless false gods, only the one they believe in is true.  The believer is an atheist 99 times out of a hundred.  From Chumbley's point of view, indeed from the Adept's point of view, these believers have counted down to "One" and forgotten to go all the way to "Zero."  They have forgotten the Buddhist exhortation "if on the road to Enlightenment you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha."  This applies to Allah and Yahweh too.

Now, this is not to say that there isn't a "God," an ultimate reality, out there, but in the words of the Egyptian Sufi saint Dhu'l Nun, "God is the Opposite of anything you can imagine."  The parade of gods marched out by organized religions are all of human manufacture, and any God the priests, imams, or rabbis can tell you about is not really God at all; because the divine is ineffable.  God cannot be communicated by others.  God can only be experienced directly.  And by "God" we don't mean his false anthropomorphic face, "the One that men have named falsely," but the Qabalitsic Zero.

Magical power radiates from the center, and to find it, the Adept must seek the center first. 

Aleister Crowley, in his Eight Lectures on Yoga, asks us to consider what the Buddha, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad all had in common.  The answer is surprisingly simple.  All of them went alone into the wilderness for a period of isolation, mediation, fasting, and concentration.  All of them rid themselves of distractions.  All of them became emptied.  All of them reached "Zero."  After their withdrawal from the world they return to it different, changed by their contact with the highest levels of reality.  Because for knowledge to flow in, an empty space must first be made.  Magical power radiates from the center, and to find it, the Adept must seek the center first.  He 'concentrates.'  He reaches the point or Qutub that exists yet has no dimension or form.  The point that is "without form and void."

Which brings us at last to our final destination: Genesis 1:1-2, with a brief detour first through Job.

In the Book of Job, Yahweh unashamedly launches into an extended rant about just how wonderful he is, and produces Leviathan as "Exhibit A" of his ultimate badassness...

Many of the myths in the Old Testament echo even earlier stories from Mesopotamia. The story of the ark and the flood, for example, was well known in Mesopotamia and India before Noah took it over; it is even mentioned in Gilgamesh, which precedes Genesis by many centuries.  Gilgamesh also contains an earlier version of the Garden of Eden, with a man created from the dust and a woman who tempts him.  Once again he accepts food from her, covers up his nakedness, and is exiled.  Gilgamesh even has a snake that cheats mankind of immortality.  But one of the most interesting echoes of older mythology is found in Job, and involves another serpent.  And for this tale, "we are going to need a bigger boat."

We are talking about the titanic sea serpent Leviathan.  In the Book of Job, Yahweh unashamedly launches into an extended rant about just how wonderful he is, and produces Leviathan as "Exhibit A" of his ultimate badassness;

"Can you pull in the Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down his tongue with a rope?  Can you put a cord through his nose or pierce his jaw with a hook?  Will he keep begging you for mercy?  Will he speak to you with gentle words?  Will he make an agreement with you for you to take him as your slave for life?  Can you make a pet of him like a bird or put him on a leash for your girls?"  (Job 41)

...aside from the comical imagery of God leading his pet dragon around on a leash to impress girls, we might well be asking ourselves why exactly we are expected to be impressed with this feat...

Basically, the Lord God is pleased with himself for having made Leviathan his bitch.  Now aside from the comical imagery of God leading his pet dragon around on a leash to impress girls, we might well be asking ourselves why exactly we are expected to be impressed with this feat.  After all, in Psalm 104 we are told God made all things, including Leviathan.  Are we really supposed to praise God for beating up on something he himself created?  It's a bit like a father swaggering around patting himself on the back for smacking down his five-year-old.  The whole episode is absurd.

Unless you look at it in the light of earlier versions.

In the Babylonian creation epic, for example, the titanic sea serpent is the cosmic dragon goddess Tiamat, the embodiment of the Primordial Chaos that exists before Creation.  Tiamat is before all things, the oldest of all that exists, and gives birth to the other gods.  Another of her forms is the ocean, the ultimate symbol in ancient times for the "negative existence" the universe arose from.  One of Tiamat's children is the warrior chief Marduk, who rises up and defeats her, and from her immense body fashions the universe.  He splits her corpse into two halves to fashion heaven and earth.  Marduk becomes the creator of the universe by defeating his dragon and shaping her Primal Chaos.

Before receiving the ultimate promotion Yahweh was neither the only god nor the first.  It took the Babylonian Captivity, and prolonged exposure to Zoroastrianism, to put that idea into Hebrew-speaking heads.

Yahweh's boast makes a lot more sense if we step back and remind ourselves that monotheism is a late comer to his party.  He wasn't always the One God; he started out as just one god.  He was a very typical Near Eastern "divine warrior chief," like Marduk, Ninurta, or Indra, all of whom conquer dragons to prove their might.  In the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, Yahweh was the patron of the royal court and the leader of a pantheon that included El, Baal, and his consort Asherah.  Over time (from about the tenth century BC forward) his cult became increasingly intolerant of rivals, until finally in the sixth century BC the authors of Isaiah proclaimed Yahweh as the sole deity and creator of the universe.  Before receiving the ultimate promotion Yahweh was neither the only god nor the first.  It took the Babylonian Captivity, and prolonged exposure to Zoroastrianism, to put that idea into Hebrew-speaking heads.

If Yahweh did not create Leviathan, if the dragon was there before him like Tiamat and Marduk, his boast suddenly starts to make sense.  Indeed, there is some indication of this right there in the very beginning of Genesis;  "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.  And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep."  The Hebrew word for "the deep" in that sentence was tehom, derived from the same source as "Tiamat."  Read with this in mind, Yahweh, like Marduk, becomes the creator when he fashions heaven and earth from her body.  He becomes the Creator by shaping the Primordial Chaos that comes before him.

...in order to do this he needs to ignore the One and go on to Zero; he cannot stop and worship any god invented by man, but push forward into that ineffable silence which exists before all things.  

And if Yahweh can become God by shaping Primal Chaos, surely the being that invented him is capable of the same.

Chumbley very explicitly tells us all this.  "... in the Fullness of Time Man would claim for Himself the substance of his own Creation and Know Himself as the One True-born of the Elder Gods."  But in order to do this he needs to ignore the One and go on to Zero; he cannot stop and worship any god invented by man, but push forward into that ineffable silence which exists before all things.  This is what the Indians called samadhi, and what Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, Mohammad, and others seem to have achieved by becoming empty in the wilderness.  It is what transforms the substance of a man into an Adept.  It is what modern Chaos Magicians refer to as "Gnosis."  Chumbley's Angel Most High is telling us not to make idols and of those who achieve this state, but rather to seek it ourselves.

In this he echoes Aleister Crowley again. In his Confessions he writes;

"I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do to me. I do not regret this. All I ask is that my results should convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine. I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle."

Crowley was adamant about this.  His Book of the Law, which he conspired a piece of "divinely inspired writing," came with the warning that every reader had to interpret it for themselves.  It was forbidden for anyone to preach about its meaning.  This is because the Adept knows that truth must be won, it can not be echoed and passed down.  Again it is a core way that Magick differs from religion, which claims not only to be able to interpret scriptures for you, but to have the accurate interpretation of their meaning.

Chumbley's Angel Most High is thus a Shadow, a dark reflection that is, in fact, Nothing.  It is the emissary of emptiness.  But it leads us towards emptiness--samadhi--Gnosis with a very specific purpose.  Again, from Chumbley's Commentary on the Qutub;

The aim of the Adept is union with the Absolute; this is the summit of True Mysticism, and yet, for the Adept, this height of attainment has a distinct interpretation. Rather than his own identity dissolving within the Absolute State of Being, merging and unifying like the droplet within the ocean, the Adept realises himself as Absolute: a Perfected Unique Being, and thus as an Active Principle of New Creation. Taking Himself to be the Hand of Fate, the struggle of the Adept is that of Lucifer: a War against That which resists or denies his Will to become the Sole and Unique One, a Singularity of Unique Power, the Polestar of his own Universe: QUTUB.

Or in the words of famed artists and magician Austin Spare; "Demand equality of God--usurp!"