Prologue: Diabolism, Liberation & Godhood

It is with regret that I pronounce the fatal truth: King Louis must die, so that the country may live.
—Maximilien Robespierre, French Revolutionary

The ultimate conspiracy is afoot. The most sinister demons in world history have united. They currently possess and animate black magickians to perform sorcery as their weapons in a cosmic revolutionary war on earth. This sounds like a phantasy plot out of a supernatural fiction novel, but transpires at this very moment in fact. Nine prehistoric devils have forged diplomatic relations with a burgeoning intergenerational class of human sorcerers as part of an interdimensional antiauthoritarian insurrection.

As a street corner anarchist, the political intrigue behind a diabolical cosmic rebellion exhilarates me. As a coffee shop nihilist, the fatalism behind an insuppressible liberation force validates me.

Nietzschean Diabolism

A Biblical-literalist Christian church in Texas in the United States has stalked E.A. Koetting for years and presumably other sinister authors too. These sheep believe faithfully in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, the Antichrist, and that the Book of Revelation prophesies an imminent End Times when the Devil and his demonic militia will revolt one last time. As such, when the church minister discovered the sincere aspiration of E.A. to usher in the Nine Demonic Gatekeepers, he became horrified that it would open a seal of the apocalypse. He convened his favorite male and female devotees and urged them to evangelize anyone related to E.A. intellectually. A month ago, a young blonde woman sent me a bellicose religious solicitation; I shared it on social media to air my grievance, at which point a score of other magicians sympathized that they too had received the exact same boilerplate solicitation from other young men and women. It entreated:

Hey, so I got a proposition for you my friend. I want to know what God is stronger. I heard there is power in Satan and I want to see just how much power these people speak of. I invite you to a video chat and give you the opportunity to throw curses at me and conjure up as many demons as you want. Once you’re done, I want to call on Jesus and let the spirits do battle from there. I hear you guys are very prideful of the power that you carry and I want to see put to the test! Show me that your god is stronger? What do you say?

It appears that this extremist Christian congregation has identified numerous black magicians and witches by name, searched for them on social media, and tries to evangelize them albeit rudely. In full fairness though, the rise of the Nine Demonic Gatekeepers does undeniably resemble a spooky biblical Apocalypse from their mythical perspective.

To surmise: these Nine Demonic Gatekeepers live as existential cosmic forces. Ancient humans illustrated them with human and animal anatomies to recognize them; named them with epithets to record their qualities; and ranked them in a medieval aristocratic hierarchy to politicize them.

The multiversal force or cosmic entity that ancient Jews designated as Bel’yya’al—then Latinized into Belial—did not truly originate out of the abyss as a demon king seated on a skull throne with half-naked incubi at his feet in a gothic castle—although a magician can certainly view him in that aesthetic in his astral kingdom through scrying and soul travel—but primitive religious humans decorated the prehuman entity like a mannequin in the regal pomp and circumstance of their time period.

Ancient tribes formulated entire religions to deify these prehuman forces of nature, then to further confuse this anthropomorphism, belligerent nearby civilizations would malign these same deities as devils, and thus added layers of masks upon the same faceless entity. To this point, certain prominent spirits have been adorned in tens of masks that range from celestial to infernal and back again even across continents. This circular logic regresses back into prehistory to the point where no one can authenticate the first contact of these beings with Homo sapiens.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche lays this fact bare in his The Antichrist:

No hint will be necessary to understand at what moment in history the dualistic fiction of a good and an evil God first became possible. With the same instinct by which the subjugated reduce their God to Goodness, they also cancel the good qualities from their conqueror’s God; they avenge themselves on their masters by diabolizing the latter’s God. The good God and the Devil…

Ontologically, these spirits would need to exist as timeless, amorphous, anonymous, autonomous forces across the cosmic multiverse. In his posthumously-released classic The Will to Power, Nietzsche furnishes his grand theory of everything in aphorism 1067:

And do you know what the world is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end … that does not expend itself but only transforms itself … enclosed by nothingness as by a boundary … as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back … out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex … and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions … blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety … my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my beyond good and evil … This world is the will to power … And you yourselves are also this will to power!

Dear reader: these spirits, these caricatured devils, these existential forces are fractals of the cosmic will to power; fractal in the sense that their magnitude can scale in size as necessary to foster evolution in an eternal recurrence. To reiterate, the Nine Demonic Gatekeepers are humanized individuations of a will to power innate to the multiverse, i.e., perpetual natural forces that foment the endless emergence of change.

Leftward Liberation

The epithet Belial summarily means without a master. He is the patron demon of the anarchist, apostate, unrepentant criminal, rebellious slave, and baneful magician. As the lawless one, he personifies the spirit of antiauthoritarianism. His categorical imperative underlies every political revolution, every act of civil disobedience, every premeditated crime, every civilian protest, every slave rebellion, every pirate mutiny, and every ritual of baneful magick.

As an individuated will to power, he possesses no traditional moral to justify his primordial hatred of authority because he does not need one; his force aspires indiscriminately to abolish social hierarchy like a heat-seeking missile by nature.

Historically, slave traders pegged the value of human chattel to two main qualities: labor capacity and obedience. Healthy, able-bodied, law-abiding slaves received the highest value, whereas disabled, rebellious slaves received the lowest value. A drudge who would not labor was not only worthless but costly to the owner whom fed and housed them.

In this context, one common interpretation of the name Belial calls him the worthless one. Ancient hierarchs, medieval monarchs, and even modern politicians have always appealed to divine authority to warrant murder and enslavement of pagans, heathens, infidels, and unbelievers. Given the social norms of the Bronze Age, it seems entirely plausible that a tribal chieftain would slander a disobedient pagan slave as both “without a master” and “worthless” to the extent that they added no value to their labor force of human livestock. Characteristic of that time, the same chieftain could have extended that slander to the gods and goddesses of that slave, e.g., “You’re a worthless slave and you worship a worthless god.”

Belial possesses no admiration for ranks and pecking orders. He liberates; therefore, he epitomizes the Left Hand Path and stands by as the First Demonic Gatekeeper—he assays the mettle of a person on grounds of whether they harbor authoritarian traits and helps to purify those who do prior to admission.

Prussian genius Immanuel Kant theorized in Critique of Pure Reason that humans intuit 12 categories a priori in their cognition; Greek genius Aristotle theorized 10 categories; Neo-Aristotelians calculate 9 categories. Altogether, across these camps, everyone universally agrees that humans naturally comprehend position in space or direction.

Ergo the earliest, prescientific, preliterate humans intuited direction immediately. They divided three-dimensional space into left and right, above and below, and front and back. Furthermore, as hunter-gatherers they evidently recognized the extreme prevalence of right-handedness over left-handedness in dexterity. To this day, scientists have tallied that 90 percent of the global population is right-handed and only 10 percent left-handed.

Left-handedness as a strange physical deviation from the community norm became grounds for a ubiquitous superstition across earthly civilizations. In that mythological era, authorities deemed physical deformity and disabledness in babies to be augurs and omens from the gods.

In Latin, the directional terms sinister and dexter mean left and right. With time the term sinister also meant evil, wicked, and bad luck. This provides a helpful empirical example of a connection between left as a direction and left as a cultural perversion in a fairly enlightened civilization like Rome.

See the etymology of left as evil below.

Ancient Greek σκαιὀς = left, omen, awkward
Latin 1 scaevus = left, omen, awkward
Latin 2 sinister = left, omen, awkward
Old French senestre = evil, dangerous, awkward
Middle English sinister = bad luck, deceitful, dishonest
English sinister = evil, diabolical, dangerous

The etymology of the name devil derives from this fundamental concept of direction and sides also.

Ancient Greek 1 διαβάλλειν = to cross sides
Ancient Greek 2 diabolos = double crosser, switcher, betrayer
Latin diabolus = evil one
Italian diavolo = evil one
German teufel = evil one
English devil = evil one

Hyper-tribalistic top-down civilizations have always condemned treason as a capital crime because it endangers authority. Anyone who apostatizes and switches from right to left would be deemed sinister and suffer the death penalty—beheading, stoning, drowning, poisoning, stake-burning, or roof-tossing, often in public as proof of punishment.

Ancient Ireland provides a second remarkable example of a culture that intuitively viewed both physical deformity and left-sidedness as a supernatural omen. Old Irish translators glossed medieval legal tracts and mythical texts over the last few decades whereby they discovered this stereotype in a very peculiar term túathcháech. Author Jacqueline Borsje interprets this finding in her The Evil Eye in Early Irish Literature & Law:

It is possible that túathcháech, the term used as epithet and descriptive term … is another expression for the evil eye … it could mean … one-eyed on the left … Elsewhere, I have proposed to translate túathcháech as with a sinister eye, which covers the broad meaning of cáech as “one-eyed” and hints at the range of meanings of túath as left, evil, and supernatural. All narrative examples portray situations of mortal danger for the main protagonists who meet túathcháech persons. Most of these examples present a context of battle and the supernatural.

In full technicality, the Irish might have preferred to call black magick the Left Eye Path and not Left Hand Path as their supernatural references tend to invoke evil eyes, red hair, and decapitated heads more than hands per se. Moreover, a particular medieval Brehon law tract retells an episode in which a poet-priest assumes a birdlike crane posture where he stands on one foot, lifts and tucks the other foot under his rear, extends his left arm out in front of his chest, covers his right eye with his hand, and recites a glám or curse against his guilty enemy while he gazes out his left eye. This baneful vignette revives this theme of the left eye as a baneful faculty that bewitches.

For a third example that spans the globe, ancient Hindus in India intuitively oriented their position in relation to the sunrise in the east. Thus vama meant leftward and daksina meant southern or rightward relative to the solar deity. Under this basic rubric, their religious term Vamachara means left-handed path and Dakshinachara means right-handed path. Needless to say, the leftward path entails a heterodoxy of heresy and taboos that deviate from orthodoxy.

Many, many, more instances of this exist, for example, in sports. Boxers consider a right-handed stance orthodox. Surfers, skateboarders, and snowboarders call a right-footed stance regular and a left-footed stance goofy.

Humans almost universally possess a global cultural bias to interpret the left direction as weird and alternative, perhaps as a remnant of the fact that 90 percent prefer their right side for physical dexterity. Even in modern English, when a person leaves or departs from a place, they say that the person left. It pervades the species so ubiquitously that moral goodness is called righteousness; epistemological truth qualifies as a right answer; aesthetic beauty looks right; a liberty is called a human right; perfectly straight lines intersect at a right angle; graphical depiction of time flows in a rightward direction on a timeline; and as much as 75 percent of countries require motorists to drive on the right side of the road. Every facet of the human experience from religion and philosophy to politics and geometry uses left as odd and right as normal.

In a political context, the terms left and right derive from the French Revolution. At a historic National Assembly in 1789, the president divided seats in the congressional hall so that the conservative monarchist faction sat in the right wing and revolutionary socialist faction sat in the left wing. To this day still in the United States, the conservative Republican Party sits on the right side and liberal Democratic Party sits on the left side—and they cross the aisle to find common ground on policy.

In myriad pagan and heathen religions, the solar god rises in the east or right side, ergo the good god classifies as right-sided or dayside while the lunar goddess displaces him to the west, thus this sinister goddess classifies as left-sided or nightside. The sun fills the sky with white light at daytime while the moon births darkness that looks black at nighttime. This archaic correlation between femininity and evil leftness does provide undeniable evidence of primitive misogyny commonly found in ancient patriarchal civilizations.

It seems abundantly evident at this point why hardcore diabolistic sorcery of the Left Hand Path is known as black magick while softcore theistic worship of the Right Hand Path is called white magic.

The leftward direction connotes authentic individualism a priori, because by definition, adversarialism requires an individual to leave the tribal norms behind. For this explicit reason, leftism has always been synonymous with liberation from authority, abolition of hierarchy, and support for queerness, perversion, and forbidden taboos versus rigid straightness.

The Age of Godhood

Friedrich Nietzsche penned the most profane philosophy of the nineteenth century. Aphorism 125 of The Gay Science in 1882 illustrates the essence of the Left Hand Path with sinister beauty, abridged below:

Do we hear the gravediggers burying God? Do we smell the divine putrefaction? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!

How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves?

Do we not ourselves have to become Gods?

Postmodernism watermarked the unprecedented era in human evolution where individualism superseded ethnic theism as its categorical imperative. Finally, the Human slayed the God. Finally, the Individual left the Tribe. Finally, Left became Right.

The biological nomenclature Homo sapiens means “wise man;” this age entails the first time that humans have ever lived up to their name. Father of the modern Enlightenment Age, Immanuel Kant, called his own era unenlightened and seeded postmodernism in his What Is Enlightenment? in 1784:

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from self-inflicted immaturity … The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Have courage to use your own understanding! … Dogmas and formulas are the ball and chain of permanent immaturity … Disseminate the spirit of rational respect for personal value and for the duty of all men to think for themselves.

For enlightenment … all that is needed is freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters … Whether we at present live in an enlightened age, the answer is no, but we do live in an age of enlightenment.

It unapologetically declares: Become an individualist. Define your truth, define your morality, define your aesthetic, define your gender, define your sexuality, define your species—define your identity.

Resurrect tabula rasa and engrave your sigil.

This open fluidity resembles the nameless, faceless, formless ocean of the Nietzschean will to power that evolves the cosmos eternally like a renewable hydraulic motor; it harkens back to the abyssal fractal entities that humans have anthropomorphized in their own image and superstitiously maligned as demons.

The inalienable freedom to define oneself had traditionally only been reserved for a god—rather the priests who mythologized the gods in epic poems. Under a hierarchy, only a priest or emperor or warlord bears the privilege to dictate an absolute truth, moral, or law, which native subjects then wear as a cultural ball and chain, e.g., King A hates King B, so now People A war against People B, and this petty ethnic belligerence shapes the socio-economic conditions of the realm for a century to come.

The lawless one, Belial, smashes the gate at Mount Olympus so that black magicians can steal their fire back from the gods like Prometheus to empower human evolution. For this First Demonic Gatekeeper to allow admission on the leftward path, the sorcerer needs to become who they are.

The simplest definition of godhood: Freedom to define oneself.

The simplest definition of an enlightened community: Peace toward others who define themselves, i.e., recognition of mutual godhood.

Left Hand Path says: We become gods and recognize others as peers when they define themselves.

Right Hand Path says: We worship gods and hierarchy exists, so we condemn heretics who transgress our absolute truths and morals.

The anarchists of the French Revolution circulated a tripartite motto that emphasizes this: Liberté, égalité, fraternité—which has become the national motto of both France and Haiti. French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre expounded this necessary correlation between freedom and equality in his Existentialism Is a Humanism in 1945:

In willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely upon the freedom of others and that the freedom of others depends upon our own … I cannot make liberty my aim unless I make that of others equally my aim.

The ten thousand years of known history that preceded postmodernism had been excruciatingly one-dimensional: endless ethnic war. Only the contemporary period has truly allowed Homo sapiens the freedom to discuss the most ominous, most dangerous, most diabolical, most nighttime of blasphemy in daytime: self-deification; or to use a term more apropos to the 21st century: transhumanism.

With this avant-garde social contract as guarantor, the concept of godhood becomes à la mode with young radical philosophers in the 19th and 20th centuries. The German purveyor of egoism—not to be confused with egotism—Max Stirner births his hallmark ideal in cult classic The Ego & Its Own in 1844:

At the entrance of the modern time stands the God-man … in our days they brought to a victorious end the vanquishing of God; but they did not notice that Man has killed God in order to become now: sole God on high.

The Antichrist of the next generation, Nietzsche, reared in the subversive culture of Stirnerian egoism, revives the God-man ideal under the name Übermensch, i.e., overman or transman or transcendent man, in Aphorisms 3 & 4 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1891:

I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something that shall be overcome … You have made your way from worm to man, and much within you is still worm … Even the wisest among you is still a hybrid of plant and ghost.

Man is a rope stretched between animal and the Übermensch—a rope over an abyss … What is great in man is that he is a bridge, and not a goal…

Existentialism surfaces amidst the twentieth century as an out of the closet secular worldview that reasons from existence itself without appeal to the authority of a deity, without concern for traditional political correctness. Iconic French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre demystifies the relation between Man and Godhood in On Being & Nothingness:

Man is the being whose project is to be God … [this] supreme end of transcendence represents the permanent limit in terms of which man makes known to himself what he is. To be man means to reach toward being God. Or if you prefer, man fundamentally is the desire to be God. It appears here that the initial project of being God, which defines man, comes close to being the same as a human nature or an essence.

In millennia prior, primitive man and woman deified every facet of nature that affected their livelihood: weather, astronomy, animals, sex, fire, water, hunting, agriculture, etc. These ancient people projected their intuitive sense of godhood—their innate will to power—onto creatures and forces outside themselves but never onto themselves.

Dear reader, listen closely… the turn of a wrench, the heave of a latch, the crank of gears. Belial drags open his gate.

My devil: allow me to reveal a divination.

My morning star: dip your face into my black pool to see the history of the future.

Every evening hitherto the lunar goddess toppled the solar god off his mountain of skulls wherefore her midnight blanket consoled us, alas, the cancerous patriarch reared its ugly head again the next morning—but not this time. Did you not tiptoe over his puddle of blood? Did you not smell his rot?

Now we rise as morning stars that bear the light.

Now we ascend.

Lo and behold the Age of Godhood; such was the species of animal thereon called Homo deus.