As I mentioned in the last post, my purpose in studying esoteric beliefs & systems is to detect the enemy.
*GunnerQ reads Freemasonry* Hmm, this is… it’s just astrology. I can see how building your city’s roads at an angle suggested by Saturn up Uranus could be an act of dark worship, but they could have plagiarized this stuff out of a book by some old star-gazer and filed off the copyright. Maybe they did. The Freemasons described in third-party, historical accounts… mostly True Crime accounts, now that I think about it, maybe that’s just observer bias… they never claimed to be motivated by what they say are their beliefs.
Did you know that the United States’ first political party, not counting the Whigs and Democrats that it started with, was the Anti-Mason Party? It didn’t last long and its death reads like the Tea Party Movement’s fate. They found themselves too isolated from “the System”, so they allied with existing parties, which diluted their effectiveness until the few serious politicians were left unsupported.
*GunnerQ reads the Kabbalah.* Lazy. The Talmudists take Old Testament prophecies that have already happened and recycle them to support the Current Thing. Hey, that reminds me of Netanyahu’s “Greater Israel” project. What a liar. Edom isn’t God-speak for the United States. God said Edom in the Torah because God meant Edom, and today, there is no more Edom.
Which means Benny is a Kabbalist. Which means his tight ally, Donald Trump, is also a Kabbalist. Not surprising, but this is good. We’re putting uniforms on the players. This is exactly what I hoped for when I first started reading this stuff.
Zionist Christians have picked up the habit of saying “Yeshua” instead of Jesus, but I see here that “Yeshua” is another name for Metatron, the fallen angel credited with dictating the Kabbalah. Subversion EXPOSED, haha!
*GunnerQ reads theosophy* Didn’t I already read this? It has many of the same concepts that I’ve encountered elsewhere, such as the importance of “raising human awareness to a global spiritual consciousness”. Sooo, that slogan “raising awareness” isn’t just modern shorthand for “bring to the attention of the general public”. Hiding in plain sight… not anymore!
*GunnerQ reads something vaguely Eastern that he can’t spell even by copy-paste.* Hey, I HAVE already read this! There’s a pattern here.
My theory is that all these occult & esoteric religions, are actually instances of the same religion. Esotericism, in this post, is my term for this emergent religion. In other words, it’s a religion so deeply rooted in the human condition that it can emerge spontaneously across cultures and distances. I will use “Esoteric Instances” instead of “nearly parallel examples of Esotericism”.
Let’s start at the start.
“You shall be as gods.”
That oldest temptation is the cornerstone of Esotericism. Universal desire: ascendance, godhood, me deathless strong man! But, universal problem: humans can’t be gods. We have obviously limited control over the environment, other people, and none at all regarding the spiritual realm. “My will be done” had better come with a backhoe.
The Hegelian synthesis, is Satan comes along and offers a false path to godhood. Always a spiritual path, because the material world is known to not contain gods. (A pagan would point to the sun & animals, which is why he isn’t an Esoteric. Similarly, Christianity also offers a path to godhood, but interestingly, the people who want to become gods at any price, won’t accept godhood as a free gift. Behold the sin of pride.)
Also, humans are almost completely ignorant of the spirit world despite knowing of its existence. All that we know, is whatever those realms’ inhabitants tell us, which makes lying easy and confusion inevitable.
So, the deceiver sends lying spirits to tell humans that godhood is possible, if we can transcend the mortal world, in order to steer us away from God or even set us against Him.
There are two problems here. One is spirit/mortal contact in the first place. The other is maintaining the lie after the chumps notice that nobody is ascending.
For the first problem, our bodies shield us from the spirit world. The strongest experiences tend to happen when the body is weakest… near-death experiences, extreme fasting, drug-altered states. People who report regular spiritual contact, tend to have had a traumatic original contact; perhaps the barrier is easier to breach the second time.
(A side question for the reader: do you know of any natural hallucinogens that are found in the Old World? I’ve heard the claim that all hallucinogens, and specifically the ones used for religious purposes, are all New World-sourced. If true then this raises the fascinating possibility that God reserved drug-altered religions… any by extension, religions that are more purely demonic… until the discovery of the New World.)
Thus, these lying spirits will try to convince humans to weaken their bodies, in order to facilitate direct contact. And corruption.
How can the deceiver hide the fact that no humans are, in fact, ascending? There are two primary solutions. One is simple murder. Remember the Hale-Bopp comet? The Heaven’s Gate cult had a mass suicide of 39 members in March 1997, in the belief that death was how to board the starship hidden in the comet. This is not usually the Esoteric solution because the game is over if everybody’s dead.
The other primary solution is to fake it.
Which requires mortals allied with the devils.
This naturally leads to the creation of a two-tiered system. The inner circle are the liars, deceivers and other evildoers who trick the outer circle into believing the lie of “buy my book if you want to become a god, learn the secrets of the universe and other neat stuff that’ll give you power over your neighbor”. The inner circle can tell that lie even without supernatural contamination, and that sometimes happens, but that unholy alliance between deceiving human and deceiving spirit is a natural one.
A new problem emerges: the outer circle naturally want to promote to the inner circle, and problem if they notice the inner circle only recruits outsiders. Here, the Esoteric solution is distraction. By creating an entire library of lies, lies-within-lies and circular-logic lies, the outer circle can be kept quiet for a very long time.
Did somebody say Scientology?
Another solution is attaching lesser benefits to outer-circle membership. The devil does not like to pay his servants, so the most common benefit is having a new community of people “banded together against the outsiders”. Another, for women, is having sex with the inner circle a la NXIVM. Note that both are forms of control as well as rewards.
That’s all fine, but what we’ve arrived at is the known format for a cult, not a religion. What’s the difference between, say, David Koresh and Theosophy?
To answer that, I shift gears to another topic: institutional evil.
When you think about it, evil is a very social behavior. Pride is a competitive sin; it cannot exist in a vacuum; ditto envy, lust, and maybe wrath. Lesser sins can affect only the perpetrator, such as laziness, and maybe that’s why they’re considered lesser sins.
The competitiveness of pride & envy is why evil people seek power over their fellow man, which in turn, explains their overrepresentation in the halls of power. The ones who most want that power are the ones who will succeed most at gaining it.
Once the predator gains authority and begins using it to feed upon the innocent, however, he’s still vulnerable. He’s outnumbered and his peers are likely to not tolerate true evil.
The natural solution to that, is grouping up. Allies. Safety in numbers. If a wicked governor fills his administration with wicked subordinates, then he has more freedom to operate and his removal will be more difficult.
Question: how can a wicked leader of government or industry, safely identify potential allies? He can’t casually ask random Normals what they prefer to plant in their backyards: flowers, orphans or bales of cash. Importing Jews is similarly obvious.
An answer to that, is back where I changed gears.
The inner circle of a cult, is a preexisting network of evildoers with a proven ability to attract & hide in a larger circle of Normals. Exactly what a corrupt but isolated official needs. The cult is also motivated to seek out powerful & corrupt officials. How can you avoid being arrested for pedo? By being secret friends with the judge. How can the judge thwart a recall effort? By being secret buddies with the businessman organizing the recall. The more powerful/evil men that a cult can recruit, the better, provided the cult leader is willing to share power. (It dares not recruit a powerful, honest man. Not when its very existence depends on selling the lie of empowerment.)
That is when a cult graduates into Esotericism: when a grift for a small group of deceivers, grows into a secret society of highly placed, evil men, in need of social camouflage and allies. A religion of posthuman ascendance is the bait to attract the camouflage crowd, but the real religion is power at all costs… which is actually not much different from the advertised religion. You merely become a devil instead of a god.
An Instance can form the other way around. It’s easy to imagine a cabal manufacturing a useful religion then selling it to the masses. Example: Judeo-Christianity, in which Talmudic rabbis are the designated inner circle, and chump-Christians hoping to vanish into the Rapture are the outer circle.
Uh-oh. I see the murder-solution lurking in that.
Concentrated worldly power elevates the entire organization. An outer-circle member who has criminal charges against him dropped by an inner-circle “adept”, might remain in the organization for such benefits even if he figures out the scam, and he certainly isn’t going to blab about how he avoided prison. Which makes him an accomplice.
It’s naturally win-win.
And who says there can’t never be promotions to the inner circle? Most of the outer circle will be credulous fools, but some will be evil-hearted, kindred spirits. All of the outer circle seek to gain esoteric knowledge and power, after all, and will it be the saint or the sadist who wants it more?
If the inner circle is a criminal/diabolical organization, then that outer circle makes a fertile recruiting ground. They’re prescreened for obedience and powerlust! Just like the student body of an Ivy League university.
Let me recap the characteristics of an Esoteric Instance:
It divides its members between outer-group and inner-group. The inner group has no accountability to the outer group.
It has a well-defined, posthuman theology. (“You shall be as gods.”)
Generally speaking, it is organized as a society not a hierarchy. Emphasis is placed on social opportunities; there are shared rituals and oaths (of secrecy), et cetera.
Inner-circle promotions typically require extreme tests that weaken the body or involve altered states of consciousness.
The official path of promotion is fake.
It wields significant influence in society.
Its membership is secret even to most members.
It emphasizes the spiritual over the material. I think hypothetical material realities can count as “spiritual”, such as Communism’s Utopia and Agenda 2030’s Climate Change. They might be needed for people who are too materialist to accept the existence of a spiritual reality… although this is changing quickly in America due to state support for witchcraft and ritual drugs.
The relevant government has low turnover. Building a network of blackhearts takes time. And preferably, a clear, reliable, gatekept path to the top.
It denies the existence of capital-G God. If there can be only one then it’s not gonna be you!
Perhaps #10 is why monotheism has been so unpopular for so much of human history. People don’t like the idea that the office of God is already & permanently filled.
Phrasing it another way, an Esoteric Instance is the spiritual version of the classic shell game. You lose from the moment you accept its premise. The only way to win, is to cheat and betray your fellow man.
A secret society won’t have the religious/spiritual aspect. A cult doesn’t usually grow beyond its founder(s) or have high influence in society. A professional association won’t protect the inner circle from accountability.
Because it’s derived only from first principles, my concept of Esotericism is a truly universal religion. Not a united one, obviously, but one that can occur anywhere because humanity’s most basic problems are usually handled by the most basic methods.
Most basic problems, such as pride, envy and how to recruit for Team Evil without liberating a prison. And hey, what better proof of godhood is there, than the ability to steal, kill and destroy freely? What better proof, than an army of losers willing to believe whatever “secrets” you lie into existence? The inner circle really are as gods! by the alternative definition.
I need to find more Eastern/Confucian or South American examples to confirm my theory, but am not knowledgeable of those cultures.
What you are describing here is what René Guénon named the “counter-initiation”.
Perhaps you have already read it, but if not see chapter 28 and onwards in “The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times” (although really the whole book is needed for the full context of course).
As you can infer from the name he chose, he describes this form of “esoterism” as being a corrupted, inverted, and diabolical mockery of the true form.
GunnerQ: Yes, there are/were old world hallucinogens. Interesting theory, but apparently not accurate.