http://www.enemies.com/

an illustrated guide to Gnostic theology mixed in with a heavy dose of pantheism, shamanism, antinomianism and general anarchy.

Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge and absorbed some of Eve's divine force. The surge of living, intelligent energy in his nervous system triggered a spontaneous kundalini arousal, opening a direct channel between his reproductive organs and his brain and blowing his third eye open.

Suddenly able to see into non-ordinary reality, Adam could now perceive the archons for what they truly were - loathsome alien parasites dedicated to fear and oppression:

"You are the Tree of Knowledge, which is in Paradise, from which the first man ate and which opened his mind, so that he became enamored of his co-likeness, and condemned other alien likenesses, and loathed them."

The veil lifted from their minds, Adam and Eve were restored to sanity and could now voice their perceptions with humor and imagination:

"They assert... that Christ was the one called by our Scriptures the serpent, and they assure us that they have been given insight into this in order to open the eyes of knowledge and to distinguish between Good and Evil... God, who issued the Law through Moses, and who spoke through the Hebrew prophets, was not the true God but one of the Rulers of Darkness..."

So what is going on? I would suggest something very similar to what went on during the almost total breakdown and confusion of narratives during the Imperial and immediately post-Imperial “aeon” of the Roman world. This post-modern “breakdown” of narratives is akin to the “dispersion” associated with the Abyss in most traditional magical systems, and seems to have the same effect on perception, culturally, that this experience has on magicians personally. That is, from the perspective of the Abyss (and from the perspective of the “post-modern” aeon) it appears that all meta-narratives are equally true and false, therefore being neither true nor false – for this reason, it seems that the Abyss, and the “post-modern” aeon, are not really “aeons” (or in the case of the Qabalah, a “sphere”) at all – despite that they can still be related to the rest of the meta-narrative; any meta-narrative. The irony is that this realization actually allows a magician (or presumably, a culture) to create a new reference point according to Will, which is perhaps what the Gnostics were trying to do with their playfully heretical magical cosmologies. Or at least, what some of them were trying to do. If this analogy holds, however, it is also clear that just as individual magicians relate to the experience of dispersion of meaning, identity, and even consciousness in the Abyss, in different ways, so too do whole magical systems. I would go so far as to say that, from the perspective of “post-modern” magic, which itself recognizes the non-linear and even arbitrary nature of aeonic structure, but does not always recognize its own relationship thereto, that the Gnostic Demiurge serves exactly the same function as Coronzon when Coronzon is understood, from the Abyssal perspective, as being the sole mediating intelligence of the increasingly dispersive continuum of awareness. This means, of course, that if one wanted to conceive of “another” alien God beyond it, one could do so – but that such a God, like in the case of Iad Balta, would actually still be the Demiurge in another form. Likewise, one could understand the Coronzonic, abyssal entity to itself be an Alien God, intruding into the Ordered Cosmos – but it would, in such a case, still be manifest Demiurgically, within the Ordered Creation. Now, almost no Gnostic sects, except perhaps those that conceived of Abraxas as somehow partaking of both the alien gnosis and the power of the Demiurge, really recognized, themselves, that they were seeking either transcendental union with the Pleroma which originated the Demiurge as its only real manifestation, or likewise seeking union with or perhaps service of a magical force which could only emulate or replace the Demiurge, effectively being no different, except perhaps in that it manifested as their own personal “daimon,” possibly perceived as a kind of “true self,” or “divine redeemer.” Probably, one could analyse any magical system, not just the Gnostic ones, and detect some kind of polarity between the magician’s own Ego, and the “Alien Self,” or “Alien God” it either seeks to imitate or unite with (depending, perhaps, on the extent of the magician’s mysticism), and likewise between a kind of Primal Unity and an Abyssal “dispersion” of all from, through, or back into, the Void; this Unity, as the manifest, seems to function as a Demiurge. [+]

http://dreamflesh.com/essays/dionysusrisen/

an essay dealing with the strongly alienating dualistic mind/body split inherited from Christianity which still pervades our culture. it discusses how the prevailing mythical structure of a culture reflects its worldview, and how the separation of mind/spirit/good/light/reason and body/matter/bad/dark/sensation was mirrored in the forking of one integrated dying-and-rising god into the sharply divided Jesus and Satan. a sort of "marriage of heaven and hell" is a metaphor for the solution to this state, as are androgynous Dionysus, and his mother, the Goddess. the piece samples mysticism, gnosticism, paganism, buddhism, Blake, Nietzsche, LaVey, McKenna and more.

Christianity has taken the dying-and-rising godform and split it in two. One half is an ethereal, goody-goody shell; the other a virile beast, dwelling beneath the ground we walk on and utterly evil; both at war with each other. Redemption in Christianity is a puny cop-out. Their god is a man stripped of what we feel guilty about, all sex and visceral energy thrown into a reviled scapegoat called Satan.

If the West is to begin to heal this split, we must re-fuse these elements, and rediscover the whole. And as we experience the flesh and spirit coming together in the true body, so we must experience the union of Satan and Christ in a living archetype, a true dying-and-rising god, embodying the life and death of biological existence.

a somewhat unsettling synchronicity: some co-workers were discussing the upcoming movie, Snakes on a Plane. so i look up the movie on IMDB to check it out, and find the movie poster:



perhaps i am reading a little too much about Gnosticism and ayahuasca visions lately, but that thing just JUMPED out at me as a modern manifestation of Abraxas. the twin snakes of Earthly life are entwined, caduceus-like, as Abraxas' lower half, around an airplane pointed straight up: the mechanical analogue of the top half of Abraxas - the bird representing the Heavenly soul. never mind that ayahausceros report consistent meetings with snakes, and shamanic flights of the soul. the contrast of living snakes around an inanimate plane (or, snakes who represent death for the living people in that plane, depending on your viewpoint) is representative of a transcendence of duality. also, the movie comes out on my birthday, 08-18-06, which just kind of made the chance resemblence seem a little more...ominous, for some reason. then again, the other week as i was reading about alien abduction experiences, i encountered a guy with an extremely freaky Grey alien tattoo, which also seemed to radiate an ominious numinousity. i feel as though these symbols are trying to speak something to me.