Jordan Peterson and the Occult, A Review of Vox Day's Jordanetics Part 3: Luciferianism

If you are new to the Band, occult imagery posts are shorter looks at the background and meaning of occult images. For more posts on occult symbolism, click here. For an introduction to the Band and the Dismantling Postmodernism series, click the featured post to the right or check out the archive.

Other links: The Band on Gab; The Band on Oneway

Part 3 of 3

Continuing the occult post review of Jordanetics by Vox Day. Click for Part 1. Click for Part 2.

In the last post we looked at the paradoxical idea of Balance as a path to a higher state. And how do we know what to balance? The answer is the same in reality and in Peterson - we make something up. It built on the gnostic pattern in Peterson's map of meaning uncovered in Part 1 - a spray of incoherent symbols, magic dreams, and wordplay where truth is whatever he wants it to be in the moment. This is the metaphysical lie behind all occult "enlightenment" - that limited, finite human beings can reach truth about absolute, ultimate reality by their own means. But balancing gnosis is a general pattern, and Day highlights one particular strand that runs through Peterson's occult like a diseased taproot:

The last of our three-part review:

1. Gnosis
2. Balance
3. Luciferianism

One thing that is always annoying about looking into the occult is how hard it is to find consistent definitions of terms. This is inevitable, because all forms of occult "knowledge" are based on the basic Satanic inversion of reality - that absolute metaphysical truth is knowable, or even subject to, finite physical humans. We've already seen this pattern in Peterson's subjective, gnostic, notion of "truth" as something that you generate internally. When reality is turned upside down, terms and ideas are by nature false. This means that anyone interested in researching the actual truth has to deal with what occultists claim and what was really going on. Oftentimes, the historical facts are unknown, making it easy for anyone to make up whatever story they want. This is why it is so important to look for the patterns behind the story.

Franz Stuck, Lucifer, 1890, oil on canvas, 152.5 x 161 cm, National Art Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria

Peterson's story - enlightenment through gnostic balance - follows a particular pattern that can be called Luciferian. 

This raises the question of who Lucifer is, and that sends us into the occult world of contradictory definitions, since this figure means different things from different perspectives. 

Focus on the pattern.

The relationship between Lucifer and Satan is is a good example of how this works. Many people just assume that they are the same thing - different names for the devil, like Old Scratch. Occultists like to point out that this is likely not the case historically, because it lets them claim not to be worshiping Evil. 

2nd century Roman marble altar with the moon-goddess Selene/Luna with Phosphoros (Morning Star) and Hesperos (Evening Star), marble altar, , 1.35 x 0.98 m, Louvre Museum

Lucifer is a Latin word meaning lightbearer. In Roman mythology, it was the name given to a celestial deity associated with the "morning star" or Venus at dawn. The Greeks called him  Phosphorus or Eosphoros, seen here on the left with his symbolic torch.




Roman mythology in the late Imperial period was a mixture of different sources, and the concept of "Lucifer" can be connected to ancient Middle Eastern myths around Venus as the Morning Star. The association with Satan is a later development, appearing first in the King James Version of The Bible:  

Lucas Emil Vorsterman after Peter Paul Rubens, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1621, engraving, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the  morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”                                                        Isaiah 14:12

The King James passage is an alteration of the Vulgate - the first Latin Bible that was authoritative in Medieval Europe. Here, the original Hebrew word הֵילֵל‎ was translated as the Latin "lucifer" without a capital L, meaning morning star, planet Venus, or light-bringer as a descriptor rather than a character. This tends to be the case in modern translations as well. But the importance of the KJV in forming modern English culture cemented an association between Satan and Lucifer, even if it doesn't hold up as literal history. Click for an overview of the passage from a Christian perspective. 

William Blake, Satan in his Original Glory: ‘Thou wast Perfect till Iniquity was Found in Thee’, c.1805, ink and watercolour on paper, 42.9 x 33.9 cm, Tate, London 

Blake captures this connection between Lucifer as the bringer of light and Satan in his angelic glory before his fall. The poet John Milton (1608–74) was as influential as anyone in fixing this idea with his portrayal of Lucifer/Satan in Paradise Lost.














The sin of this Lucifer is the Satanic inversion of placing personal desire above reality, whether you define that through Christianity or the Scientific Method. And when the fundamental basis of your belief system is a prideful lie - to set oneself up as master of reality - the path is clear for any depravity to feed personal appetites. 

Gnostics inverted the fall of Lucifer from the King James Bible by redefining this world as the creation of an evil divinity, making the light bringer a symbol of freedom through enlightenment. Modern Luciferianism generally takes Lucifer as metaphorical rather than an actual being, but shares the idea that he represents a self-guided path to empowerment through a personalized notion of truth. But the pattern is familiar. Here's a passage from Michael Ford, an Luciferian leader, that captures it nicely:

Looking at the Luciferian "church" logo, we see some familiar symbolism. The big symbol in the middle with crossing lines and a V at the bottom is the standard sign or sigil of Lucifer. The torch was associated with him since his appearance in ancient myths and represents the light of knowledge. The Eye of Horus symbolized the perception of deeper truth in a more general way, and gives the meaning of the torch an occult cast. The chains represent breaking the restrictions of culture and convention to free the will to search for enlightenment. 

Gustave Dore, engraving for Milton's Paradise Lost, 1866, "They heard, and were abasht, and up they sprung"

The Luciferian idea of endless "rebellion" as a form of personal liberation contributes to the connection between Lucifer and Satan, with Satan as the archetypal rebel. 

This is a good illustration of how occult definitions are slippery. Luciferians explicitly distinguish themselves from Satanists so they can deny devil worship. But on the pattern level, the idea of self-willed rebellion against moral or natural orders for personal aggrandizement is the same.

Gino De' Bini, Title page to Mario Rapisardi's Lucifero, 4th edition, Rome, Edoardo Perino, 1887

The combination of rebellion and enlightenment connects with the attack on culture by the Modernist avant-garde in the arts. Once you invert reality, he can be recast as a brave seeker of truth

















Occultists know this - quibbling over superficial definitions is a cloud of squid ink that obscures what these doctrines have in common. This way they can keep recycling the same dyscivic self-absorption behind different masks. Peterson is just the latest iteration, but if you have to see the pattern. 

Take a look at Theosophy, another path through occult symbolism with a murky history, but is most strongly associated with the Theosophical Society founded in 1875 in New York. 

The Theosophical Society emblem is typical for choosing symbols with clear associations that they pretend are innocent. The connotations of serpent images are overwhelmingly negative to the point that the relatively obscure figure of the oroboros is not sufficient reason for choosing it. They could have opted for any representation of infinity. Picking a clear symbol of evil and pretending it is something different is Satanic inversion.

As for the motto - its meaning depends on how you define truth. Misdirection.

Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott in 1888

These pictures of mental health and stability were two of the founders of the Theosophical Society. 

Blavatsky was the most prominent Theosophic writer, and was very open that their movement was just the latest of many attempts to reach enlightenment. It's this constant reshuffling of sources from the past that make occult symbolism so murky and inconsistent. 

For example, Blavatsky founded and edited this literary gem:

According to a letter to her sister, "...it is not the devil, into which the Catholics have falsified the name of the Morning Star, sacred to all the ancient world, of the ‘bringer of light,’ Phosphoros, as the Romans often called the Mother of God and Christ. And in St. John’s Revelation does it not say, ‘I, Jesus, the morning star’? I wish people would take this to mind, at least. It is possible that the rebellious angel was called Lucifer before his fall, but after his transformation he must not be called so...." 

Accepting a Christian account of reality then turning it upside down because you think it should be that way is just another instance of the pattern of Satanic inversion. Is Blavatsky technically Luciferian? Who cares. The pattern is the same. 








Even self-identified Luciferians are vague with their terms. This is because it isn't actually a set of "beliefs" as much as attitudes - elevating solipsistic will and desire above external realities and constraints. According to one source, their system can be called different things: "Adversarial Thought, Mercurial Consciousness, Left Hand Path or my personal favorite, The Complete Path." Peterson prefers the term "more perfect order" but the idea is the same. And his "pen of light"? Not too far off the lightbringer himself.

Of course Peterson doesn't call himself a Luciferian, despite presenting his inward-driven search for "truth" as a blend of gnostic balance and solipsism. He prefers psychologist, probably because it hides his deception behind a veneer of "Science!" But this is more definitional squid ink, because there is nothing addressed in Jordanetics that conforms to any system of analysis. He hints at Jung and Freud without engaging or presenting them in a coherent way because he isn't actually Jungian or Freudian. His writing exhibits no real understanding of the names and ideas he drops. These are just pre-existing theories consciousness - absurd ones, but that isn't the point - that he can add to the spray of symbols to make it seem more substantial. It isn't.

Freud wrote hundreds of pages - mostly nonsense, but he did write them - to explain and justify the interpretation of dreams as a path to self-knowledge. But Peterson never addresses this, either to summarize or critique, before using his own magic dreams as a path to meaning. A Freudian might point out that analysis needs an analyst - a second party who can take a more objective look at the patient and contextualize the dream within his overall mental state. Interpreting your own dreams like Peterson does maintains your Luciferian authority over yourself and lets your dreams be whatever you want them to be. 

In case it wasn't clear yet  - here's a Peterson moneymaker.

Occultists use their symbols openly. You just have to recognize the patterns. 







The psychologist most strongly associated with Peterson is mystical fraud Carl Jung, although there is no engagement with his thought either, beyond a general notion of truth as "archetypes" or a "collective unconscious" that can be reached through symbols. Peterson is "Jungian" the way he's "Christian" - he uses bits and pieces that you can recognize, but without any grasp of the system of belief that he is referring to. This is part of how he engages in his tactic of what Day has referred to as "preemptive mirroring", or presenting in a way that lets people see what they want to see in his words. Little tidbits that hint at larger beliefs resonate with listeners that actually hold those beliefs, allowing them to imagine that Peterson must share them as well. He doesn't.

What he actually shares with Jung is a pattern. Jung was himself an occultist, and promoted a similar inward journey towards enlightenment through the gnostic balance of symbols.

Oh look, a serpent in a tree, only this one isn't an evil turn into solipsism and self-aggrandizement. It's the path to higher consciousness!

You know the world is a fallen place when people keep falling for this.








It isn't that Peterson, Jung, or a self-identified Luciferian like Michael Ford have to influence each other directly. Why would they? They're liars, so the details are irrelevant. They make more sense when you think of them as expressions or iterations of the same pattern - your thoughts, your words, your desires, and your will mark the path to truth. Not much place for external reality beyond inert material to speak into existence. 

So what's wrong with the Luciferian perspective? Shouldn't everyone strive to be their best? Before continuing, look at those questions. That's the sort of sophistry that occultists love to use - the second "answers" the first with a characterization of Luciferianism that is incomplete to the point of misrepresentation. In classical rhetoric, this is an example of synecdoche - where a part represents the whole - but it is being used to deceive rather than highlight. Striving to be your best isn't the problem with Luciferianism - the problem is elevating your will above natural or moral constraint. 

The world of Conan the Barbarian takes do what thou wilt to a violent extreme. The woman's will is uncertain, and we can be sure that the other guys would prefer pretty much any other outcome.  




















One test of a moral system is whether it can be taken to an extreme without falling apart. For example, every person in a society can follow basic Christian beliefs without coming into conflict with each other. But Luciferianism and other such beliefs don't accept external limits beyond vague blandishments to not harm things. The actual structure places the will over everything, which raises the question: what happens when wills collide?

Day identifies the answer when he observes how Peterson doesn't actually propose Luciferian ascent for his followers. Instead he encourages them to remain in the middle of the lobster pack where their wills can't come into conflict with his own. 

Only cabalists and wizards get to craft 

"the more perfect order"

The question of Peterson's own occult practices is an interesting one, but outside the scope of this review. It is enough for now to point out the specific patterns identified in Jordanetics, because these are what this charlatan is pushing on a gullible audience. Take a closer look, and we see the same inverted, dishonest, Satanic crap that has plagued humanity from the beginning. Fake gnosis, fake balance, and fake enlightenment all the way down. Ignore this sickly, smug, quick-talking liar, and take charge of youself in a way that doesn't need magic dreams and incoherent semiotics. Day provides a far healthier set of rules at the end of his book that would serve you in much better stead. Then again, Day isn't a Luciferian power-seeker with prophetic delusions, and actually appears to care about the validity of the advice he offers.

Final recommendation: buy Jordanetics and give the Lobster Pope a pass.

Jordan Peterson and the Occult, A Review of Vox Day's Jordanetics Part 2: Balance

If you are new to the Band, occult imagery posts are shorter looks at the background and meaning of occult images. For more posts on occult symbolism, click here. For an introduction to the Band and the Dismantling Postmodernism series, click the featured post to the right or check out the archive.

Other links: The Band on Gab; The Band on Oneway

Part 2 of 3

Continuing the occult post review of Jordanetics by Vox Day. Click for Part 1.

In the last post we looked at the Gnostic structure of Peterson's "truth" as something that is produced internally, by you, rather than something real that we all share. Day lays bare Peterson's continual problem with truth - telling it and defining it. Pretending to ponder the same basic questions over and over, as if for the first time, reveals how fake his intellectual posture really is. But it's the inability to define truth conceptually that is directly pertinent to occult thought. Because when you cut through the fog, the one recurring theme in his rambling prevarications on truth is that truth is internally defined. If you ignore the incoherence of the spray of symbols and just look at the form, the only authority for the conclusions - the cartographer of the map of meaning - is him. Truth as a self-generated symbolic path isn't just solipsistic, it's gnostic.



Time for the second in our trifecta of occult ideas:

1. Gnosis 
2. Balance
3. Lucifarianism

Hunefer's judgement, Book of the Dead of Hunefer, frame 3, 19th Dynasty, circa 1300 BC,  papyrus, 40 x  87.5, British Museum, London
The symbol of balance is the scale, and the ancient Egyptians belief in the weighing of the soul by the gods Thoth and Anubis is one of the best known examples in history. Egypt has always been important in occult thought because of how old it is, so these scales are often used as an image of occult balance. 

Johfra Bosschart, Libra, 2015

Note the basic gnostic structure of mingling and repurposing symbols. Libra isn't Egyptian in origin, but a Latin name for a Babylonian constellation. There's Thoth, but the matched cobras are a new edition, and Isis wasn't involved with the scale. See how everything is balanced? The weighing of the soul literally points to the eternal and an infinite cycle of balance. But is this what the weighing of the soul was about?















Balance is a word that gets used a lot in occult circles and it is deceptive because it sounds positive. A load that is unbalanced tips over, an unbalanced person can spiral. Think about how many fables and maxims have moderation as the moral. But this is where it is easy to fall for a way-to-common deception - taking something that is circumstantial, specific, and/or personal as a universal principle. Principles are absolutes - the have to be applicable in any circumstance or else they aren't principles. They can be observations, preferences, or rough guidelines, all of which can be true without being universals. 

So what about balance? Too little water and you die of thirst, too much and you drown - here, the right balance is optimal. But what is the right balance? It varies depending on circumstances - how much water is available, what claims are on it, etc. 

You set the terms 

Remember the gnostic pattern: you are the ultimate guide. 

You can even balance more than one thing!

"Balance" is the balance of your priorities - things you define in terms of your needs and desires, meaning the actual relationships change from person to person. The more you think beyond empty categories and consider what balancing actually means, the more obvious it becomes that your talking personal choices, not principles. 

Then there are things where balance is negative. Take your return on an investment portfolio for example. There is balancing with risk factors and time-frames, but the goal is still to maximize the rate of return. How would one even set up "balance" - positive and negative yeilds? Low vs. high yields? Balance is simply aligning a clear goal with individual circumstances in an uncertain environment.

Frank Dicksee, Victory, A Knight Being Crowned With A Laurel-Wreath, late 19th or early 20th century, oil on board, 29 × 21.5 cm, Private collection

But there is a goal. 

If there is a principle here, it isn't balance, it's optimize your preferred outcome

But balance in the occult is not a personal juggling act, it's a guiding principle. This brings it to the level of universal or absolute - something that is timeless or outside of our personal existence. Take another look at the Bosschart poster:

It's the usual occult progression from the earthly to "enlightenment". We start with the bestial creatures with balanced opposite qualities on the ground, move through the pyramid of light to the level of the souls, then on to infinity - literally the endless and eternal. And how is this absolute qualified? Balanced "opposites" - sun and moon, light and dark. 

Note how each transition between stages on the progression is symbolized by a human hand. Then remember that the infinite and the finite are absolutely, utterly different. A path through human knowledge to the absolute is literally impossible. The truth is that the only possible knowledge claim about the absolute, eternal level reality is a faith-based one. Presenting faith as accessible human knowledge is the basic category error of gnosis  

This poster is great because it captures the fundamental lie of the occult in visual form. 

We now have a clear picture of what balance as a principle is - a hidden faith in a particular claim about an absolute principle beyond scientific verification. So what can we say about absolutes from our limited perspective?

Note the difference between complex terms and Peterson's deceptive word salad when reading the next paragraph. It uses technical words because it is addressing abstract concepts, but if the words are unfamiliar and you look them up, you'll find they are being used in ways that are consistent with how they are defined. It is straightforward and truthful - technical knowledge used to explain rather than befuddle:

The only alternative to believing something about ultimate reality is to admit that the answer is unknown. That is intellectually honest, but ontologically reductive, leading to existentialism, Postmodernism and nihilism. Not to say dishonest - claiming there is nothing beyond animal struggle in an indifferent universe is itself an act of faith. 😲

Poof.



Many occultists believe in multiple entities, as do polytheists, animists, and spiritualists of all sorts. But this isn't relevant to absolutes or ultimate reality, since these beings exist in or around the world(s).  Notions of timeless truth, meaning, or principle take different forms, depending on the faith of the believer. If there is a transcendent unity that gives meaning and order to the universe, is it impersonal as in Buddhism, or is it a conscious God as in Christianity or Islam? This is huge question theologically, but we don't have to go into it here, because all of them accept a higher reality and attempt to move us towards it. Different things have to be balanced along the way, but that is just calibration to bring about a clearly defined outcome. 

How would balance work as a universal principle? 

Chart from the web showing a collection of caregorically different pairs rising to the spiritual. But we're still on the level of personal preference. What principle is being applied? Astronomical bodies? Optical metaphors? Adjectives?

Let's keep going. Male/Female is chromosonal coin toss, Light/Dark are optical metaphors, Good/Evil are "opposites" in the way presence and absence are, Matter/Spirit are inherently asymmetrical, etc.


The sheer stupidity of declaring one pair of adjectives the guiding axis of reality means that people advocating a notion of universal "balance" don't go too deeply into the metaphysics.

The Light/Dark pairing was made famous by the Force in Star Wars. From the perspective of traditional Western morality, this correlates to what would have been called Good and Evil, but avoiding these terms softens the value judgement. It isn't Evil that has to be included in the Balance - its the "dark side" in us all.

See how natural the balance seems? Light and dark, sun and moon, day and night... What could be clearer?

The better question is what are you balancing? 

Fire and water?

Cats?

 

















Evil exposes the insanity of Balance as a principle. If Good is the alignment with truth, reality, and/or God, and Evil the opposite, by what reason should it be embraced in equal measure and not opposed as a perversion? This argument is actually that that a certain amount of depravity and falsehood should exist! Let's find the right balance of strychnine in the soup... 

So what about the Dungeons and Dragons Peterson's morality of Law Order and Chaos? Peterson likes this one because it sets up a false dichotomy that will have to have a fake fulcrum. His primal motivating driver is fear of socio-political chaos in a nuclear world, so to have Balance, he needs a socio-political "opposite". He declares tyranny to be an excess of order, except there's a category switch here. Ideologically, totalitarian systems are orderly, in that they are restrictive and inflexible, but the reality is that they run on the subjective desires of a tyrant(s). Marxists systems are absurd in their disregard of human nature, and monarchies and dictatorships are literally government by whim. Where's the order?

How do relative attitudes towards object relations become fundamental principles? They don't. 

We owe an apology to Dungeons and Dragons for the earlier crack. Law and Chaos were only two of a number of character alignments. This is a much more realistic diagram of human behavior. 

It still isn't a universal principle. 











Balance isn't a moral goal, it's a way of optimizing conflicting circumstances on an individual basis. It's a tool to move us in a preferred direction. And how do we decide which calibration of variables gets us there ? With the thing scales are actually used for: 

Judgment

The point of weighing something isn't the act of weighing, it's to determine the weight or value of something relative to something else. 


Let's take another look at Hunefer. 

There are three episodes here from the Egyptian myth of the weighing of the soul. In the first, Anubis leads Hunefer to the test. Right from the beginning, he is on a journey that goes in a specific direction. This is not balance.

Here's the scale. Hunefer's heart is weighed against the Feather of Truth. If the heart was heavier, crocodile-headed Ammut devoured the soul. But if the feather was heavier, the soul continued the journey and passed into the afterworld kingdom of Osiris. The fulcrum of the scale is Maat, goddess of balance, but she is a process, not a goal. The goal is not balance but a clear outcome one way or the other. 

Hunefer passes the test and Horus leads him on to the next stage. 

He reaches his metaphysical goal because his life wasn't "balanced"

The Bosschart poster one more time. Look at the scale. In the Hunefer papyrus, the scale pivots on Maat, the goddess of balance. The point is that the tool of balance is supernaturally accurate. Its judgments are perfect so that every outcome is correct. Bosschart replaces with Maat with a pointing finger - about as clear a symbol of a clear direction that you can find. 

This changes the fundamental meaning of the scale. The tool of balance is not a tool of discernment but a path in itself. The pyramid and the hand are both directional i ndicators, but the feather and heart are in perfect balance instead of one being testes against the other like scales do. 












It is an inversion of the actual myth. The Egyptology is fake. It's taking symbols that will impress people because they know they are really old, and using them to tell the story that they want. But we've seen that Balance as a universal principle is absurd. Where is the mythologically inaccurate balancing of forces supposed to take you?

Baphomet has been a symbol of occult balance since the 19th century, although occultists claim older origins. It goes further though, moving from balancing opposites to combining them. This isn't about calibrating opposites, but tearing down the distinctions between them and merging them into a monstrous fusion.


















Balanced opposites becoming something new is a common path in occult magic. It allows evil to attack reality in the name of a universal principle, even though that principle is fake, and the balanced objects arbitrary choices. Note the androgyny - balancing gender somehow morphs into the rejection of natural distinction. This is similar to the blending of opposites in the Hegelian dialectic favored by Marx, because it allows you reimagine the world around any parameters you want. You can guess where this leads.

Note the androgyny of the Baphomet. Tearing down nature for a fake sexual hybrid sounds a lot like the perverse attack on biological reality  in the name of "gender."

Broken puppet Celine Dion's "clothing line" does as good a job as anything to reveal the connection between the fake path from balanced opposites to an new occult order, demonic evil - note the creatures in the satanic cribs - and the media-entertainment complex. The link is worth clicking if you are interested in how brazen this symbolism has become.











The purpose isn't to find deeper truth, it is to tear down traditions under a veneer of fake profundity and free personal desire. In other words:

Peterson follows the same pattern through his fake balance to what he actually calls a "more perfect order". Brazen. This is the occult dialectic that pretends words are reality, and that objective structures can be lied into a meaningless soup where you are empowered to create the new reality that pleases you. When this mastery of reality extends to the point where violating children is openly celebrated, it becomes obvious how repulsive and dangerous this path is. 

Now think about bringing balance to the Force. The idea is that a person, through their choices, actually effects metaphysical reality on a universal level. In other words, reality is rewritten  according to whim. What sort of religion gives the individual the power to rewrite reality?













The answer to this occultist evil is to pursue truth over your feelings without compromise. The alternative is terrible.

Part 3 will wrap this up with a look at Peterson and Lucifarianism.

Click for part 3.