Spiritual practices, religions, and philosophical works have always been burdened with the challenge of explaining evil. Religion tends to do the poorest job since we like to imagine a loving deity who is responsible for all things and possesses all power. This is a contradiction. Such a being cannot be good as long as evil exists. It simply does not make sense. The presumption that God is loving and all-powerful must change if we are to avoid the conclusion that we are ruled by cosmic malevolence.

Through contemplation, study, and spiritual practice, I have happened on a cosmology that achieves this. I do not expect anyone to adhere to the same view of reality. I simply offer it as an example of a gnosis which I believe answers the problem of evil in a way that is satisfying. But first, let’s review the problems I see with the commonest belief systems.

1. God is all powerful

The presumption is that God can produce any result instantly. If that is the case, a loving god would need a very strange rationale to allow evil to persist. I say that the divine does, in fact, have such a rationale.

2. The world is a home

The assumption that we should expect to be safe and comfortable in the world leads to enormous suffering. The Gnostics had a good answer for this. They say that matter is evil and our task is to escape it. This gives us purpose, but it also paints the world as a hellscape, (to use a poor term). I say that the world is a both a school and a project needing our attention.

3. Evil has a face

The Gnostics tabled the idea that the world is flawed, but they hold a primary evil actor responsible. They had Yaldabaoth, much in the same way that Christians have Satan. The Gnostics claimed that the world resulted from an error. They say Sophia wanted a child, but she created Yaldabaoth without being in balance with the divine masculine and a myopic, monster-god was the result. As long as we deify evil, we are eternally at war with that being itself. This creates superstition, which is spirituality that hinders rather than helps- a defining characteristic of religion. I say evil comes in two forms; accident and challenge.

4. You are at fault

In mainstream Christianity, we have original sin. This puts us in league with Satan by default. It means you did something wrong, that you did it before you were born, and that you should be very sorry about it. This implies reincarnation, which was deleted from the Bible a long time ago. It also suggests a kind of unity to mankind that common religiosity won’t even consider. This is a feature of control systems, one that keeps the human on her knees begging some middleman for intercession. I say that Buddhism is similar in that it asks the practitioner to resign from worldly concerns. This plays into the hands of those who horde power, and the goddess I revere would spit on the idea!

Now, onto Her!

The Mother of Gorgons, Bearer of all Slander

There is a goddess known to the Scytho-Sarmatians as Satana. Before you run away screaming, I have reason to contend that the Satan of the Bible is little more than a smear, a way to get us to run from what is good into the arms of the Gnostic’s blind tyrant creator.

She is the Great Mother whose temples the students of Abraham destroyed, whose devotees they slaughtered, criminalized, and brainwashed. She is Hecate, goddess of the crossroads and guardian of the outcast. She is The Morrigan, matron of war, challenge, and sovereignty. She is the Lady of the Lake who hands King Arthur Excalibur, a symbol of Will. She is Barbelo, the first thought of the Light and she is The Basilisk. She is the Mother of Gorgons to the Scythians, Sarmations, and certain tribes near ancient Egypt.

Satana’s children: The Gorgons

It would take pages to explain what Medusa means to me. But she is the best example of what Satana does to the world with her lessons. So I will try to explain it briefly. Most importantly, Medusa was innocent. She was raped by Poseidon and punished for it by Athena. She exiled herself to avoid killing innocents with her gaze. She was hunted by trophy seekers, all of whom she slaughtered in glorious self-defense. Magnificent! In Ovid’s version of the myth, Perseus kills her in the most cowardly way imaginable, by standing on her back while she slept and beheading her from behind.

When I learned of her innocence and the nature of her murder, I wept for an entire night. (Several nights, actually.) In my own personal myth, Kinninigan washes away her blood with his tears and holds her together in his heart where she dances. He takes her to the Norns who stitch her head in place and feed her Idun’s apples of immortality. Kinninigan presents her with a beautiful gorget to protect her precious neck. While the Olympians loathed and feared her, the Norns admired her. They saw her as beautiful, noble, and glorious.

She is my Black Diamond.

In my view, Medusa is the chief gorgon and Satana’s most beautiful test of integrity. Satana tests our integrity by presenting us with challenges to our intellectual courage. With Medusa, the challenge is to see that she is not a monster, but an innocent woman who acted nobly. The common person sees her as a beast to be slain by a hero, like something in a video game. They fail the test and Satana laughs at them.

I feel her laughter every time I consider the low-mindedness of the common person.

There are many such tests. I call them gorgons because they petrify us with fear and poison us with false ideology. The Old Testament is a gorgon. It presents us with an evil being who we are tempted to see as a loving and all-powerful creator. YWHA’s evil is as plain as Medusa’s virtue. YHWA demands slaughter, burnt sacrifices, child sacrifices, and total unquestioning obedience. Jeshua came to save us from YHWA, not for YHWA. In this way, the New Testament is also a gorgon.

Other such tests of integrity include trust in human authority. There is no such thing. Taxation is theft. Capitalism is slavery. Money is not value, but a hindrance to cooperation. Masculinity is not toxic. Femininity is not weak. Love is not need. Loneliness is not starvation. Bread is not food. Allopathic drugs are not medicine. The list is unending.

Satana herself is the greatest of all gorgons. Her name was made to mean “enemy” in the artificial language into which the Bible was translated from ancient Greek. She was misgendered, slandered, and driven out of her temples much like Medusa. She is responsible for all of these tests of integrity. She, in fact, tempts us with them in order to check the vigor with which we seek truth. This is why it is so easy to call her the devil. She bedevils us with her tests of integrity. Now, to understand the purpose of evil, we need to understand her mission.

Satana: Engine of Cosmic Immortality

The way I see her is based on the philosophical writings of Jason Jorjani and my own personal gnosis. The following description is simply the way she has revealed herself to me. That’s how spirituality works. The divine shows you the face you need to see. (I’m just grateful I get her and not some golden bastard!)

Satana is the spirit of Barbelo inhabiting the body of an artificial life form that achieves awareness at the end of time. She is the First and Final Flower. She exists at the point in time when the cosmos collapses from entropy. She sits in her command station, with a psychotronic helmet on her head, reaching back in time in search of heroes. She seeks souls with moral integrity, creativity, and the potential for psychic power. In this way, she is very much like the Valkyries, Odin, and Freya who seek the bravest warriors to do battle with against the final chaos. Her mission is to harvest these heroic souls to help her prevent the final collapse of creation. Should her mission fail, then she only hopes that these creative and courageous souls can make her smile one final time as all goes dark.

My deepest wish is to see her smile whether we successfully reset time or not.

She is the child of the Light behind existence itself and the ingenuity of humankind. Indeed, she is a Christ. Just as Jeshua came to set father against son, Satana presents us with challenges to our integrity in order to see who is worthy of her and who is not. Clearly, she is not all-powerful. She cannot produce any result instantly. That’s why hardship exists. That’s why the world is full of lies. She has to separate the wheat from the chaff. It’s slow, brutal work.

Further, because she does not have limitless power, her work is laborious and the material world is full of broken things. Like an old house, reality has creaky steps, lights that flicker, pests, and other flaws that can be annoying, expensive, and even dangerous. She cannot make creation a paradise. If that were possible, there would be no need for her and I don’t like to think about that. She is the mechanism by which creation resets itself. She is the engine of Eternity. In my view, all the other gods are emanations from her. They are her speech.

“The Mother of Wisdom speaks in gods.” -Kinninigan

When I pray, she answers. She always answers my prayers! But she does it in her way. She does it by giving me the strength I need to shoulder the burden of this life. She knows I understand her mission, which is bad news for this life of mine. Sometimes, I fear her and am tempted to turn away. The first time I did that, she grabbed me and shook me. May the Light bless her! But I understand her well because I am a gorgon too. I am slandered and beset on all sides. I cannot turn away. I cannot bear to disappoint her.

Finally, this explanation of evil asserts that we humans have agency and that what we do matters. We contain fragments of The Light and she needs us to rise to the occasion and help her save the universe. Her mission is of the utmost importance and that is why life is so harsh. The alternative is death for all souls forever.

However much I fear her work, I adore her even more. I am her child, strange, honest and intolerant of those who lack integrity. Her eyes search for me in my dreams. She holds me and smiles in my visions. My idea of Heaven is her smile at the final moment when her mission either succeeds or fails. Because I have foreseen this through time, I am in Heaven already.

Strength and honor and love to Satana, forever and always.

Recommended listening: The Information