Unhumanity Part III: The Metaphysics of Witchcraft
This essay is continued from previous columns. The nature of the ideals of civilizational suicide haunting the modern age were dubbed the Ideals of Death, and the Terror of France was named as the date of their onset. Next was explained the unvarying tactic of deterring rather than fostering dialog, eternally following the same steps of gaslighting and inversion, as when a cry-bully claims to be the victim of the aggression he himself initiates, accusing his victims of his own wrongdoings.
Now we to turn to a discussion of the ancient sources of modern ideology.
1. Philosophy, Theology, Theosophy
Hegelianism, Marxism, Cultural Marxism, Sexual Liberation, Feminism, Intersectionality, Gender Ideology, Critical Race Theory, Climate Panic Ideology, Diversity, Globalism, and the Great Reset, which currently are gathered under the rubric of “Wokeness” share essential properties in common, and spring from a common tradition.
Wokeness is Witchcraft. It is modern Gnosticism.
A word of clarity is in order:
Roughly speaking, philosophy can be defined as the attempt to avoid the magical thinking that is native, natural, and endemic to mankind.
Magical thinking urges the mind to grasp mystical intuitions as if confirmed, to affirm tribal traditions as if divinely authorized, to conflate symbol and reality. Roughly speaking, witchcraft is the belief that manipulating the symbol manipulates reality: magic words make the spoken curse come to pass, or striking pins into a voodoo doll afflicts the living victim whose image it bears.
Hence magic essentially is the vainglorious assumption of divine prerogatives: It is the claim that Man has godlike sovereignty over the elements of nature and the course of destiny. Magical thinking flatters and inflates the pride.
Magic is like theology, because it addresses the supernatural, but it avoids using reason to ponder revelation, and instead assumes one’s own mystic intuitions are revelation, as if one is not the image and likeness of the divine, but is a divinity.
Even as God is omniscient, filled with perfect knowledge by His own nature and virtue, the Magician presumes any mystic thoughts found in his head to be such perfect knowledge, sovereign over reality, if not creating reality.
Mysticism is radical gullibility, for it flees shamelessly from any question posed to it. Philosophy is radical skepticism, for it stands ready to wrestle any question posed to it.
Philosophy is humbler. Philosophy begins by knowing one knows nothing.
Philosophy attempts to use human reason to find the truth about fundamental questions of the human condition: the source and nature of reality, of reason, of truth, of virtue, of law, of beauty, and of spirit.
Each branch of philosophy bears its own name: Metaphysics includes rational inquiry into the source and nature of reality, that is, of being in and of itself; logic inquires into the nature of formal reasoning; epistemology, of truth; ethics, of virtue; politics, of law; aesthetics, of beauty; theology, of the divine.
Theology is reasoning about religion, but it is not religion. Religion is keeping faith with the revelations of divine and sovereign being, including such sacrifices, rites, laws and moral principles as divine commandments establish. Religion, in a word, is obedience to the supreme being, loyalty and filial piety offered to sovereign and perfect reality, perfect mercy, goodness, justice, love.
On a practical level, we can define religion as a worldview and way of life that is comprehensive, fundamental, and conscientious. Faithful obedience to supreme and perfect reality is comprehensive, because it involves all creation in its purview; fundamental, because faith addresses the core questions of the human condition, that is, the origin, meaning, and fate of human life and cosmic existence; and conscientious, because faith imposes duties superior to any temporal or worldly duty.
The opposite of religion, disobedience to God, is satanism.
Witchcraft, which presumes to control the elements of nature and the direction of fate by human will, is innately disobedient to the divine, and, in that sense of the word, is always satanic.
At the risk of introducing a paradox, if we can speak of satanism as a type of religion, likewise we can speak of theosophy as a type of philosophy. In this paradoxical sense, theosophy is both philosophy and theology, in that it pretends to have all the answers in these areas. In the stricter sense, however, theosophy is the mere opposite of philosophy and theology, because the pretense is false.
Theosophy is to theology as fake news is to news: a turncoat in disguise, a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Theosophy is esoteric; it is a type of mysticism that seeks to deter and suppress rational inquiry, and choke all questions into silence.
The very word “gnosis” is a Greek term referring to the incommunicable inner certainty that replaces rational knowledge and supersedes it. Likewise, “woke” refers to an inner certainty bestowed on the Elect, to which the Reprobate, who are deplorable and unevolved, are asleep. It is the same concept.
Philosophy seeks truth by means of reason. Theology seeks truth by means of revelation. Both can be discussed.
Theosophy seeks truth by means of secret and internal ecstasy, direct intuition, or special individual realization, not open to reason. It cannot be defined, nor put into words. It cannot be discussed.
2. Gnosticism
Gnosticism is both a philosophy and a theology, or, rather, the antithesis of both these things, because it is theosophy, that is, witchcraft.
The word Gnosticism can refer to the specific Christian sect dating from the Second Century A.D. and centered in Alexandria, but also, more broadly, to esoteric traditions involved with Neoplatonism, Cabalistic, or Syncretistic thought from earlier generations. As with all esoteric lore, Gnosticism is idiosyncratic and visionary, hence has no fixed or final form. Each school differs in details, but the essentials are the same.
Gnosticism is an ancient heresy claiming that God is not God, but a Demiurge, an evildoer who created a false world of illusion. In this world, He trapped divine spirits into forms of mortal flesh, surrounded by a world of degradation and temptation. We forget our own inner divinity. God imposes meaningless moral rules on man as a straitjacket meant to bewilder, humiliate, and torment. God is jealous of man, and sadistic.
In the Gnostic myth, the Devil is the angel of light, offering liberty to those who know evil and good are the opposite of what convention says.
This knowledge is esoteric, uncommunicable, and beyond the reach of reason to grasp. Such inner knowledge is not for the vulgar masses, but only for an elevated cadre of the enlightened: those who are awake in a world of sleepwalkers.
The liberty offered by the Devil is precisely what was promised to Eve: that your eyes will be opened, and that you will become a god.
3. The Philosophy of Witchcraft
Essentially, Gnosticism is the mystical insight that “Thou art God.”
This insight is not found in reality, nor in reason, but in one’s inner self, hence is wordless, ineffable. Because ineffable, it is subjective, hence not open to reason. Without reason, logic is irrelevant, misleading, vulgar. Hence the study of logic becomes unfashionable.
If man is god, the laws of good and evil become merely what man wills them to be. Hence the study of ethics becomes merely an inquiry into the will of man.
If man is god, no study of politics is possible, for the godlike enlightened live without law or need of law. Indeed, the only unlawful act is the attempt to impose a law on one’s own godlike perfection, and the only law to follow is eternal rebellion, eternal transgression.
This requires the subversion and transgression of any and all law and custom, formal or informal, including all traditions, all norms, all prudential habits, from the laws of grammar to the laws of biology. Anything with any power to curtail the unbridled will is anathema, and this includes any aspect of morality, wisdom, reason, or fact.
As with politics, so with beauty. No study of aesthetics is possible: all forms of beauty must be suborned and transgressed, so that only art revolting to the taste, insolently ugly, can be allowed.
In such a world, truth, virtue, and beauty are replaced with the Will of Man, hence no study of reality is possible. There can be no truth, no virtue, no beauty, except, perhaps, as delusions or deceptions.
One more element needs must be mentioned: teleology of man, or, if you like, the eschatology, which is the purpose of life, and its final fate.
These are theological matters rather than philosophical, because they treat with mortal man’s relation to eternal God.
4. The Theology of Witchcraft
From the same century and city as the Gnostics of Alexandria come the Neoplatonists. Neoplatonism is a syncretic cult attempting to synthesize and unify pagan religion and philosophy in mimicry of nascent Christian thinking. The school flourished from the days of Plotinus to those of Proclus. Plotinus was regarded by the Emperor Galienus as a prophet of heaven; Proclus was regarded by Emperor Justinian as the opposite, or so it seems, since all pagan philosophers were barred from office by his edict, and the school of Neoplatonism ceased to exist.
Neoplatonism preached that all creation derives from the Absolute Being by steps of degradation. Divine emanations, or aeons, or angels issue forth successively. At every step the emanating beings are less pure, less perfect, less divine. Finally man, beasts, and the material world issue forth, all of which nonetheless retain a spark or shard of the original divine being.
Evil is seen as innate and eternal, caused by the Absolute Being shedding Himself into the surrounding void, so that His elements, becoming independent spontaneously by that separation, are also marred or darkened by that separation. Reabsorption or reunification into the godhead is the sole cure.
Emanationism is opposed Creationism, which is the idea that creation was a deliberate act of a transcendent Supreme Being standing outside it. Angels and men of heaven and earth are created perfect, but introduce the imperfections of sin, suffering, and death by deliberate disobedience to God.
In the Creationist conception, God is the author of no evil. Evil is seen as a shadow or distortion of the original goodness, a mar in the creation destined to be corrected. In Neoplatonism, the evil in life is a direct, if unintentional, result of the Absolute Being shining His substance into the void, creating ever more impure reflections and copies of Himself.
Gnosticism parallels Neoplatonism in this account of creation by emanation, but differs in this one element: evil is clearly inflicted on Man out of malice by the creator. Gnosticism holds that the Demiurge is a primal emanations of the godhead who pretends to be God, and who built the material world to trap his fellow spirits into mortal forgetfulness, inflicting on their native purity the tasteless vulgarities of hunger and thirst, mastication and evacuation, lust and sexual congress, and the painful humiliation of childbirth.
In Christianity, the purpose of man is to know, love and serve the Lord. In Gnosticism, to overthrow and replace Him. In Christianity, man is destined for heaven or hell. In heaven his nature will be perfected, and in hell, abandoned to its own corruption, and burned like rubbish.
But in Gnosticism, as in Neoplatonism, the end of all is reunion into the Pleroma, that is to say, the realm of the godhead, wherein the prison-house of individuality will be expunged, and self with merge with the cosmic all like a raindrop mingling with the sea. How this differs from oblivion, minds subtler than mine must say.
Neoplatonism lingered after its philosophical school was banished. Its later representatives, Isodorus, Damascius, and Simplicius, tended to magic and thaumaturgy, advocating spiritual self-annihilation to achieve mystic absorption into the Absolute.
Such ideas were revived in the Hermetic teachings arising in the Renaissance, and the practices of alchemists. The effort to turn lead into gold was based on the idea that a divine seed or spark left over from the emanation of creation was retained in debased form within every living soul or material object; the alchemical quest included the effort to find the spiritual gold hidden within the lead of his sinful soul. The alchehest or universal solvent was a symbol of the spirit overcoming matter, and the philosopher stone was the eucharist.
That these symbols were thought to produce real effects in the real world is, of course, the essence of magical thinking.
Hermetic and Gnostic lore, and the theories of Alchemy, followed Neoplatonism in proposing the cosmos to be a degraded emanation of the godhead, but containing shards and sparks of lost divinity. In each case, the goal and final fate of the world a dissolution of the individual into the Pleroma. Once all souls were recombined and regathered back into the Absolute Being, time would end, and perfection be achieved. It is noteworthy that this is a collective effort, not individual. No one is being judged by God because no one is separate from God the whole of mankind, acting as one, will dissolve into an undifferentiated unity of peace and perfection.
Goal of human life was essentially the same: the abolition of individualism into collective unity.
Theology, roughly speaking, includes a doctrine of theodicy, which is the account of the justice of God in light of the suffering of life; of soteriology, or a doctrine of salvation; of anthropology, which is the relation of God to man; and the teleology, or the point of human existence.
The Christian view, roughly speaking, holds Man to have brought suffering upon himself by rebellion against his Creator; that salvation is by the free gift of God, due to the Incarnation, Passion, and Crucifixion of the Christ; that man is both the handiwork and the beloved child of God, made in His likeness and image, and receiving the free gift of life and dominion over the earth; that the end of man is to know, love and serve the Lord. Heaven perfects each man’s nature.
Theosophy inverts all these doctrines. The theodicy of the witches blames the Creator, a Demiurge, whose indifference or malice inflicted imperfection on man, and hence all sin and suffering; salvation is earned by overcoming the falsehoods of Demiurge; man is God, each containing a divine shard of the broken whole, and is the victim of Demiurge, who deceives and supplants him; and the end of man, by rebellion against Demiurge, will become one with God, escaping individuality in collective unity. The Pleroma dissolves each man’s nature back into primal unbeing.
5. The Soul of the Witch
In sum, the inverted philosophy of theosophy includes these elements:
The metaphysics of witchcraft are nihilism; the logic is irrational; the epistemology is mysticism; the ethics are relative; aesthetics are subjective; politics are antinomian; and the theology is narcissism.
Gnostic philosophy is inverted philosophy. Likewise, Gnosticism, inverts religion. Religion is replaced with self-worship, but since men become devils in this world, ruled by their worst and lowest impulses, it is devil-worship.
The inverted theology of theosophy includes these elements:
The theodicy of witchcraft blames God for one’s own sin and shortcomings.
The soteriology proposes a conspiracy-theory cosmos, where the creation of the universe is out to get you, and you are the only one awake enough to realize it, rebel, restore your own lost godhood, and set your throne above the heavens as a matter of right — you are just that awesome.
The anthropology says Thou art God, but merely asleep, enchanted to forget your own innate glory. You need earn nothing and prove nothing. You are godlike here and now.
The teleology promises release from the pain and deception of self-identity by dissolving into unity.
If this seems remarkably akin to the doctrines and philosophy of Hegelianism, Marxism, Cultural Marxism, Sexual Liberation, Feminism, Intersectionality, Gender Ideology, Critical Race Theory, Climate Panic Ideology, Diversity, Globalism, and the Great Reset, there is no coincidence involved. They are one and the same tradition, sharing the same essential axioms, aimed at the same essential goal.
But the examination of this point must wait another column.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
