The Eagle and The Ibex: The Natures of Paganism and Satanism

Neopaganism in Retrospect

I have been a long time apologist of Paganism and Neopaganism on the internet. It could even be considered an integral part of my internet persona, although my beliefs have gone through a lot of subtle change throughout the years. There was a time where I was a Catholic, but only by virtue of baptism. It almost feels hard to remember at this point. My family had long abandoned going to Church, and nowadays my parents have an unfair bitterness towards the church as many boomers and GenXers do. There was a brief period where I became a “TradCath” as a teenager, but I slowly distanced myself from Christianity, first towards perennialism, then towards Neopaganism, after many of my grievances with it were met with unsatisfying answers and cold shoulders.

Throughout it all, I have heard all of the major criticisms of Paganism in the book. Most of them are bad, because Christians do not typically engage with Pagans outside of niche corners of the internet. Christians won in the Pagan world through praxis, not through theory. Christians did not need to engage with the last generation of Pagan apologetics, for reasons which will become clear in this post. There are many arguments you will hear about Paganism, but today I want to discuss one of the better ones — that Paganism is a meaningless classification, because there is no underlying unifying feature of traditions that are largely agreed to be Pagan. Indeed, there are clearly many people today who call themselves Pagan, but are unalike past a certain layer. I have already made a post on what I consider the defining characteristics of the Abrahamic religions, and now I will create a similar post for two of the most recognizable enemies of the cross and the crescent alike. There are the Platonists and the closely related “Trads”, the Nietzscheans, the Himmlerites, the Thuleans, and lastly there are the progressive Pagans and the so-called Pagan occultists who sometimes appropriate the term. However, I think there are a few prominent features that could be considered core identifiers of Paganism, for they are both central to most ethnic and national religions of the world before being subsumed by “world-religions”, and they are seen in the reactionary sentiments of the final Pagan generations. Because “pagan” was only a term that was necessitated by the emergence of certain allegedly “Non-Pagan” religions, I think it is most fair to identify Paganism as something reactionary to these emergent faiths. Other discrepancies between Pagans can be considered to be non-compromising to the shared title. This notion of Paganism is especially applicable to Europe, where there was very little blending area between the ancestral religion and the new faith, but perhaps it can also be considered elsewhere. I also seek to characterize “Satanism” or “Left-Hand Occultism” as an entirely different, perhaps even diametrically opposed religious system, with its own long history and unifying traits. Lastly, I would like to offer a bit of an olive branch to the Christians I have bickered with for so very long.

The term ‘Pagan’ was but one of many terms used for practitioners of folk religions in the late Roman empire. Often, they were just referred to as “Hellenes”, for they practiced the traditional religion of the Greeks. The terms “gentile” and later “Heathen” (which is just a germanic term for Gentile) were also used, which says a lot about how Christians perceived themselves... But “Pagan” won out, and it meant something like “rural” or “provincial” or “hillbilly”. The final practitioners were mostly in the countryside. Their stories are lost to history. The last pagans whose written opinions survive to this day are the Pagan apologists among the Neoplatonists — Julian, Hypatia, Syrianus, Proclus, and Salutius, although it’s worth noting that Porphyry and Celsus also wrote critical pieces on Christianity before the religion became that much of a concern to Pagans. Only a fraction of the empire was Christian by the time Constantine converted.

By the time of Julian, the ascetic influence of Porphyry had waned, and everyone I mentioned was more along the line of Iamblichus and the Chaldeans. Iamblichus and Porphyry fell out over the matter of spiritual ascension, as Iamblichus considered the practice of theurgy necessary for henosis, while Plotinus only ever mentions meditation and contemplation as necessary, with perhaps certain physical renunciations being productive as well. This does not mean Plotinus didn’t see a use in ritual, but he doesn’t emphasize it. It is Porphyry who explicitly denounces Iamblichus’s focus on it. Theurgy refers to ceremonial magic, but to put it in layman’s terms, it is more or less the same as ritual. Iamblichus argues that, because the ultimate reality is fundamentally supra-rational, because it is supra-intellectual which itself precedes rationality, one cannot come to know it through reason alone. Furthermore, material is an element of the ultimate reality so interaction with it could be considered necessary for a full state of spiritual enlightenment. Reason certainly gets you close, but there must be something that works through subtle means, something that cannot be perfectly assessed, which is crucial to the ascension. In the traditional religion, this was the rite. The initiation, the sacrifice, the libation, the hymn, and the rites of legitimization (of adulthood, of marriage, and of death) all fall under this umbrella. Porphyry, on holding a much more rejective attitude towards matter and the body, views this necessary supra-rational element as something that must be achieved through renunciation and ascetic behavior, but recognizes ritual as a means to improve the soul for those who are perhaps not yet ready for the ascetic and contemplative state which comes chronologically directly before henosis¹. Iamblichus fortifies his case in a similar vein, mentioning that even in the case of renunciation, the headspace achieved by ritual is among the most unattached, as it is guided by pure devotion to action, without interfering thought or entitlement to an end result². There are parallels to this debate which play out in the eastern world, which I will get to later.

According to Iamblichus, the means by which theurgy worked was that it was an imitation of cosmogonical events, and by participating in such a crafty imitation one was achieving a state of active union with the divine. The improvement of character that previous Platonists stressed was still important to Iamblichus, but were insufficient. I think this old documentary on the Japanese Shinto religion briefly exemplifies this:

Religio in latin means something more like ‘observance’ or ‘adherence [to rite]’ rather than ‘belief’. You see this sort of thought process in the remnants of folk religion in modern-day East Asia, but it is certainly not correct to say that Paganism is only the rites, and not the beliefs. It is pretty well-known at this point that Japanese Shinto is often practiced by people who self-identify as Buddhists and Atheists. It is not that Shinto promotes Atheism, it is certainly a conservative religion at its heart, but it is the rites and ceremonies that comprise it. The beliefs are supplementary and are contained or “hidden” within the rites and the myths.

The description of sacrifice in The Aryan Household (Aryan as in, Indo-European) by William Hearn is similarly described as a sharing of the meal, at least sharing of the “essence of the meal”, with the clan genius or the household ancestors:

“On this hearth, where, in his lifetime, he had himself so often sacrificed, the departed House Father received at the hands of his successor his share of every meal, and heard from his lips, in his own honour, those familiar words of prayer and praise that were the heirlooms of his race. Every meal was in effect a sacrifice, and the Aryan House Father, when he reverently asked a blessing upon his liumble board, felt that he was not only seeking a continuance of the divine protection, but that he was securing the happiness of those who were literally his fathers and his gods.”

This belief in ritual initiation as a necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) condition for spiritual ascendancy was already the cornerstone of many Greco-Roman mystery religions, most famously the Orphic Mysteries. Many people confuse “mystery religion” for “heterodox religion”. In reality, mysteries were everywhere in the Greek world and integrated into the local religious structure. The relationship between Orphico-Pythagoreanism and Platonism (from Plato himself all the way to Proclus) is worth a post in itself, but to put it briefly, the Theogony described in the Timaeus is immediately recognizable to anyone who is familiar with the Orphic Theogony. Iamblichus is pretty clear that his writings on Theurgy are also defenses of traditional religion. He elaborates most on Theurgy in Di Mysteriis, which is a book on religions of the ancient East more than it is a philosophical treatise.

Anyways, the sentiments of the Theurgists are occasionally echoed in Christian mystical defenses of the necessity of the eucharist and baptism, but are especially prevalent in the work of the Traditionalists. Mercia Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane says the following:

One essential difference between these two qualities of time strikes us immediately: by its very nature sacred time is reversible in the sense that, properly speaking, it is a primordial mythical time made present. Every religious festival, any liturgical time, represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, "in the beginning." Religious participation in a festival implies emerging from ordinary temporal duration and reintegration of the mythical time reactualized by the festival itself. Hence sacred time is indefinitely recoverable, indefinitely repeatable. From one point of view it could be said that it does not "pass," that it does not constitute an irreversible duration. It is an ontological, Parmenidean time; it always remains equal to itself, it neither changes nor is exhausted. With each periodical festival, the participants find the same sacred time--the same that had been manifested in the festival of the previous year or in the festival of a century earlier; it is the time that was created and sanctified by the gods at the period of their gesta, of which the festival is precisely a reactualization. In other words the participants in the festival meet in it the first appearance of sacred time, as it appeared ab origine, in illo tempore. For the sacred time in which the festival runs its course did not exist before the divine gesta that the festival commemorates. By creating the various realities that today constitute the world, the gods also founded sacred time, for the time contemporary with a creation was necessarily sanctified by the presence and activity of the gods.

Eliade is describing the Theurgic event in a temporal sense, where the participant of the festival returns to the “once-upon-a-time” of myth, the time before time itself which is actually the initial causal state of the world. The myths themselves, like the idols of the gods, are symbols of their characteristics projected into our world. Jove is associated with the sky because the sky is the natural symbol of heaven. This is similarly why the gods are said to reside on Olympus, or in the Roman case Etna. The thunderbolt is the natural symbol of his creative destruction, it is the symbol of overwhelming force. The association with natural symbols is necessary because it is the natural symbols which have been present during the development of human intuition. According to Guenon, it is the nature of the symbol as a double index that makes it fit for the role as a bridge between the divine world and the physical world. Symbols also had much more of a capability to permeate across human institutions and cultures than words. Guenon is not necessarily saying that the symbols exist to instigate thoughts, though, because the process is supposed to be a supra-rational event. He even goes as far as to suggest that the knowledge of the participant as to the deeper meaning of the ritual is not necessarily relevant to the efficacy of the ritual, so long as they perform it correctly. Guenon’s notion of symbols is reminiscent of Proclus’s idea of seirai (series). They are described as “causal chains”, which disseminate the intellectual principles that the gods contemplate, down through the spheres of existence into the physical realm. The final links in these chains are those symbols which we use to represent the gods, but phenomenon are mostly composite, so multiple chains can lead to the same form just as physical objects can be comprised of many different types of matter. It is these chains of symbols that theurgy is meant to associate with, but the same could be said about heroic demiurgy.

Because human beings are different from one another, both individually and on the ethnic and familial levels, it is only natural for different groups to require different myths and rites. This is Julian’s justification for the differences of pantheons and religious practices between nations.

On the topic of demiurgy, and on what I consider to be the general cosmology of pagan religions across at least Eurasia, see this post. It is my longest and my favorite thing I have ever written:

This post roughly describes the mythicized cosmology of Eurasian Pagan religions, which tend to center around a masculine, heavenly deity organizing the formless material — the “abyss” or some titanic primordial entity, according to a proper order or rank. Human beings, by shaping the world to reflect this order, are participating in this demiurgy. The Pagan understanding of the world is vertical, represented by the Axis Mundi which penetrates the entire world.

The third component strongly associated with paganism is the worship of multiple gods, and this is probably the one everyone associates with the term “paganism”. But I think calling paganism “polytheistic” is unproductive. The term “gods” originally meant a being that one calls on in an offering. Gods are defined by the rite, but the actual qualities of these beings varies heavily. Certain texts seem to provide a kathenotheistic interpretation of the gods, similar to Proclus’s interpretation, such as the Vedas, which ascribe Godlike qualities to many different gods, but only in the context of worship of said gods. Yet at the same time, the gods in both Hinduism and Germanic Paganism are treated as not completely immortal, or at least not immortal in the way that, say, the Roman gods are. The di manes are clearly of a far inferior rank than Jove, but both are worshipped. Certain gods even existed as an epithet of a superior god. The Yazatas are of an inferior rank to Ohrmuzd. The angels are of an inferior rank to Jehovah, but Christians do not worship angels because the purpose of worship in Christianity is different than the purpose of worship in Paganism, and what is also different is the concept of an absolute God. As I discussed in the Chaoskampf post, the existence of an absolute God is subtly implied within Pagan religions across Eurasia, but this being is hidden from us, it is subtle, because by viewing it from the position of the relative you are in fact only observing a quality of it. The absolute as perceived by the absolute is still hidden. Back to the purpose of worship, the Pagan veneration of gods is seen in the same light as the veneration of people of higher rank on earth. You may give veneration to your father, your duke, and your king, but the veneration of one’s father does not contradict their veneration of their king. So for those reasons, I do not consider “polytheism” to be a productive or necessary axiom in characterizing paganism.

The ritual focus of Paganism is self-evident when looking at the policies that were put in place during the religious transformation of Rome. When Christians were persecuted in Rome, they were usually persecuted for refusing to participate in rites and oaths associated with allegiance to the divine Roman Emperor. It was not because of what they believed, it was because they were failing to complete certain responsibilities they had under the Pagan religion. When Julian famously attempted to rebuild the Jewish temple, he did not do it out of a desire to “pwn the Christcucks”, he did it because he believed the sacrificial rituals which once took place in it were superior to the ritual of the Eucharist which the Christians had taken up, even though he didn’t really like either denomination of Judaism. When the Christians assumed control of Rome, they did not ban the belief in Paganism. They banned the sacrifices, the Idols, the libations, and they smashed the temples or converted them into Churches. This was sufficient in destroying the Pagan religion. Those pagans who had been so devoted to their sacrifices and their libations and their festivals fled to the next best thing — the baptismal pool, the eucharist, and the holy day. This hesitant conversion was seen among many of the modern Traditionalists as well — Guenon, obviously, but also Devi. They did not believe in the Neopagan project, so they believed the only solution was to convert to a living tradition which was most expressive of Tradition. I have come to realize over the years, that there is a necessarily institutional element to ritual. Iamblichus describes it, as does Guenon. You can’t go it alone. It has to be above the individual. For this reason, while I consider myself a believer in the veracity of Paganism, and support the Neopagan project, there are certain things missing from my life that constitute true, full Paganism.

As I said earlier, I don’t believe the “Pagan Reactionaryism” being described here is limited to late Rome. You see it in East Asia, but in the Buddhist context there is much more room for synthesis. Both the Shintoists and the Confucians were far more focused on ritual hygiene than the incoming religions. Confucius was referred to by his contemporaries as a teacher of ritual rather than a philosopher, and lamented the failure of his generation to adhere to ancestral rites. There were definitely novel characteristics of Confucian philosophy, the Great Sage was supportive of the traditional Chinese Heaven-Worship. Offerings to the deities and especially to Heaven were necessary in the Confucian context to achieve self-mastery, and Confucius made nightly offerings to his ancestors in a similar fashion that Hearn describes with respect to the Indo-Europeans. Neo-Confucianism revived the more social and institutional elements of classic Confucianism in medieval China, but it was heavily influenced by Buddhism. I don’t think the return of Confucianism was necessarily seen as a resurgence of focus on rite, as Chinese Buddhism had already adopted many of the rituals that preceded it and introduced some new ones. It was more that the Chinese viewed monasticism as a drain on their resources. The development of a reactionary Shinto tradition in Japan, with certain Confucian elements, is more analogous to the sort of arguments for Paganism that Julian was making. It began under Yoshida Kanetomo, who first codified Shinto doctrine and suggested that Shinto actually underlaid Buddhism rather than the other way around. It was his successor, Yoshikawa Koretaru, who clarified that the traditional rites of Shinto were the most concrete paths to what is essentially henosis. Throughout this resurgence of the shrine over the monastery, many Buddhist practices (which themselves may have originally been Shinto) and Buddhist metaphysics were adopted just like what occurred in China. Some Buddhist groups focused heavily on the practice of rituals on the path to salvation. I quite enjoy this translation of Evola’s review of Zen and the Art of Archery.

Between Ritual and Art: The Zen Path in Eastern Tradition

The way it describes the Zen Tea Ceremony feels somewhere in between the sort of space-time-transforming festival of Eliade, and ritual as healthy mental exercise as described by Porphyry. Archery is also described as eliciting this feeling, and Evola talks quite a bit about the initiatic elements of medieval European guilds as well (it makes the rise of Freemasonry make more sense). It’s a feeling I have felt at least partially playing sports and games, this sort of total awareness coupled with a clarity of mind. I have heard from a sagacious man many of you likely once knew, that it is the feeling of “the hunt”. Porphyry’s description of rite as a valuable tool for those not in the correct position or mentality to ascend through contemplation and renunciation is more strongly reflected in Pure Land Buddhism, which offers people the hand of the Buddha and his “Buddha Fields” in assistance on the path to enlightenment. I do find Pure Land quite cozy, but I suspect it was manufactured by a religious elite that didn’t fully believe in it. Who knows what the highest Buddhists truly believe… They are barely in this world, they are hanging on by a thread. They are hiding in those giant Chinese sinkholes filled with lush forests… 800 year old Sogdian monks. The Buddha could fart tornadoes did you know that?

On Satanism

Okay, this post is getting pretty long, so I think it’s about time I talked about the “Ibex” in “The Eagle and the Ibex”. Many people conflate Satanism with, well, everything they don’t like. After all, God is the source of all good, and Satan is the adversary of God, so anything that is not true, good, and beautiful must be Satanic. But, I’m not asking what is “Satanic”. I’m asking what is “Satanist”. As in, those who revere Satan. Someone who unknowingly does the bidding of Satan by worshipping idols is not worshipping or revering Satan. You have to have a pretty damn good reason to worship a being that is implied to be the adversary of all that is good. A lot of Satanists are borderline mentally disabled and do not have a good reason, but usually they will gravitate towards a handful of categories.

Firstly, there are the Nietzschean Satanists. They are the closest in nature to Anton LaVey, who is erroneously credited with the founding of modern Satanism. They do not actually believe in Satan, they view Nietzsche as analogous to the Overman and idolize him for that reason. LaVey was a Fascist who collaborated with Neo-Nazi organizations and possibly engaged in cannibalism, he was not really similar at all to the pozzed humanist satanism that we are all familiar with. I get it, he’s Jewish, people like to say Jews are Satanists, but it’s dumb. The modern Church of Satan is a complete one-eighty from the eugenicist, social-darwinist, dressed-up Nietzschean caricature that LaVey was.

Secondly, there are the Gnostic Satanists. These are the people who believe that the serpent was actually a message of the true God or the Sophia or something along those lines into the artificial and evil world that the devilish Jehovah made and trapped us in. This is probably the oldest and most traditional form of Satanism, as there are Gnostic texts describing this to be the case very far back. A lot of these people love Satan, hate Jehovah, love Jesus, which is strange. The third form is Theistic Satanism, which is sort of a mish-mash of the aforementioned two forms. They believe in the Gnostic origin narrative, but unlike most Gnostics who preach a more ascetic path, these types go for the “left-hand path” of destruction and chaos in order to tear down and disassociate with the evil order of Yahweh. These types are often also Nazis (or at least they claim to be) and a good example of them is the Order of the Nine Angles. Very sinister people, very infamous, but it is for this reason that they are probably the most legitimately Satanistic of the bunch.

The final branch is the “Secular Humanist” Satanists, who are the most popular group. They are woke Shitlibs and are basically secular humanists. They claim to participate in “Self-Worship” but they are perhaps the most self-humiliating of them all. Their worship of the self amounts to watching gay porn and cutting their penis off. These are the sort of people who go around saying “Hell would be full of all the interesting people” and that sort of thing.

All forms of Satanism are united by antinomianism. The Satanic human sacrifice is not analogous to the Pagan sacrifice, as the latter is a ritualization of something that is already necessary — the slaughter of animals — while the former exists only as a means to go against the rules of the Christian rites as much as possible. It is like Tantrism, except the practicioners of Tantra know what they’re doing is extremely risky and would be nothing but extremely unwholesome for the vast majority of people. Even if Atheistic Satanists do not believe it, they are Gnostics, because no normal Atheist would become this obsessed with Satan. Maybe they only believe in the “Sky Daddy” as some sort of Jungian psychological geist, but they do believe in it, and they blame all of the suffering in the world on it. Those too cowardly to admit that they are self-worshippers, a ridiculous thing to say, will claim they are “humanity-worshippers”, by which they mean they worship the mundane human urges and emotions and scorn the systems of authority that humans naturally adopt and adhere to. All of these ideas, they’re getting the way of the true perfect reality of fully simulated 24/7 weedporn that runs until the hawking radiation stops powering my penrose process computer… Pagans who belong to the political left tend to be, in reality, closer to Satanists. They hate Jehovah because they hate the “sky daddy”, and are too stupid to realize that the religion they claim to be practicing is even more “SkyDaddy” than Christianity.

1. 1 De Regressu Animae, fr. 2, 19, 21‑28

2. de Mysteriis II.11.96,14