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