The Infernal Seduction

Specter and the Deadly Sins (§169-175)

(§1-7; §8-14; §15-21; §22-28; §29-35, §36-42; §43-49; §50-56; §57-63, §64-70; §71-77; §78-84, §85-91, §92-98, §99-105; §106-112; §113-119, §120-126; §127-133; §134-140, §141-147; §148-154; §155-161; §162-168)

§169. Pride—Crown

The true Devil would have to be the Nothing itself, the uncreated entropic Abyss, the source of both freedom and evil. Satan would then merely be Gmork (if you know, you know), the created chief lieutenant of the Nothing. Tradition has rightly understood Satan as the spirit of pride; and as we have noted, he mirrors the power of human reason itself, being glorious when he serves and hideous when he rebels. The same power that enables us to penetrate and clarify the depths of presence—it can also invert and begin building castles in the sky, rootless and alienated from life. Specter first and foremost calls to us by way of our pride: our rejection of the parameters of the Lord’s Creation, our hatred of clay finitude, our disdain for standing in any need of grace or resurrection. It is also a matter of turning away from love; for if we were in love with Zoe, the Woman behind the world, then it would not occur to us to reject the Syzygy of the Real and to go whoring after phantasms instead. All sin involves succumbing to the lure of specter, and at the root of it all is the pride that incessantly whispers that the Real isn’t good enough for us.

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§170. Envy—Third Eye

To hate the clay realm of flesh, the reality of incarnation: this could also be framed as an envy of the angels and their bloodless condition. If pride closes the crown chakra, then envy blinds the third eye, rendering us incapable of seeing the correctly ordered harmony of things. In God’s reality, the incarnation is holy, a completion of the creative process; and angels are the ones who stand in awe of humans—to the point that some may even opt to become us. Specter also calls through envy to those among us who resent other people for having (or appearing to have) what we do not possess, seeing in every joy or success only an insult against our own misery. Resentment always breeds a false scale of values, antithetical to the key of the musical spheres; and we spiral from dark unto deeper dark, as confirmation bias has its way with us. And if envy between humans in general is that bad, it gets worse when we consider the growing modern envy between Eve and Adam, which cuts to the very heart of the Creation’s romantic structure. People could well wander around in this sorry state indefinitely, even as the Lord is always telling us to sit still for a second so that He can rub some mud and spit into our foreheads, restore the subtle vision.

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§171. Greed—Throat

The desire for money is the simplest, most pathetic form of greed. But money is only the physical sign of a certain type of psychical power: the ability to project one’s will out into the world, bend the wills of others into conformity with one’s own. At the rotting core of greed, we thus discern the lust for power, the will to expand the force of one’s throat. There is a basic nexus between greed and black magic, a man’s distrustful desire to override the Lord’s will with his own; and in this context, it is entirely possible to be greedy for knowledge as well. To a sorcerer of this sort, the gist of the Apostle’s warning about becoming a loveless noisy gong is totally lost—for to him, being noisy is simply the point of it all. Specter calls to us through greed by suggesting to us that God has done a shoddy job with His Work, and that we could do better if we had the right resources, knew the needed things. The true theurgical destiny of humankind—to work in cooperation with the Lord to make incarnate His transfiguring energies—is turned on its head, degrades into a petty antagonism that can end in nowhere but the Abyss.

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§172. Wrath—Heart

Social media is a veritable theater of wrath; one would be inclined to compare it to a sort of gladiatorial bloodsport, if it weren’t so pitifully detached from the flesh. Specter seduces us via wrath by pulling us out of our mundane lives and their attendant tedious moral complexities, prosaically woven into the fabric of everyday living. Wrath instead makes us feel poetic, elevating us onto a spectral stage where the stakes are nothing less than a cosmic showdown between final good and evil. This can be intoxicating; it can make a man feel important and meaningful, despite the rest of his ordinary life telling him that this probably isn’t so. And so it is that those who are most vacant in their hearts are also the ones who are most deeply seduced by wrath—for the vessel demands to be filled, and those who cannot find the living water will go with undead tar instead. Wrath short-circuits a man’s self-awareness of being a sinful and limited creature, complete in neither virtue nor knowledge, sometimes doing his best and often finding it not good enough; it persuades him that his strong feeling has transfigured him, made him perfect. It is a generous illusion, and all the more fatal to the soul for that.

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§173. Gluttony—Solar Plexus

In its most essential form, gluttony involves consuming more than one can properly digest. People consume in defiance of their created parameters and limits, whether physical or mental or otherwise. The problem of eating too much food—well, that is low-hanging fruit, probably driven by an almost naive category error, an attempt to fill a psychical hole in the soul with physical stuff. But there are also more insidious forms of gluttony. Specter grabs us here by flooding us with more information than we could possibly know what to do with, including white noise from across the four ends of the earth that has not and could never become existentially salient to us. Carrying around all this undigestable trash within our psyches, we go about our lives as sleepwalkers, either lost in phantasms having nothing to do with our physical vicinities, or even hallucinating said spooks onto the screen of the world that we do see, imagining that everything always already has the readymade meaning that the politicos have beamed into our poor besotted heads. We would feel a lot better after an old-fashioned purge of just vomiting it all up, clearing the organs of digestion across all levels of our being, restoring sane ratios of consumption in relation to metabolism. Then we’ll feel more at home again within our flesh.

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§174. Lust—Genitals

We’re getting farther down the chakra chain now. For all the big fuss that people make of it, lust in itself is almost benign among the seven deadlies—for there are surely worse things than the warm mammalian desire to just touch each other. The problem, of course, is that lust as we humans experience it is almost invariably wrapped up with its more nefarious sisters, notably envy and wrath. Past that, there is also a subtler meaning to lust, having to do with the basic problem of valuing things wrongly and wanting what we should know better than to want. There is, for exemplar, the (mostly male) philosophical horror of the flesh, a wish to escape from the Woman behind the world—which, in turn, inverts into a practically homosexual positive desire for Satan instead of Zoe, for specter instead of presence. Such unfortunates have clearly never become familiar in their hearts with one of the Bard’s greatest songs: “Love, my fate got luckily / Teaches with no telling / That the phoenix’ bid for heaven and the desire after / Death in the carved nunnery / Both shall fail if I bow not to your blessing / Nor walk in the cool of your mortal garden / With immortality at my side like Christ the sky.” Glory be to the cosmic Syzygy, now and forever, world without end, amen.

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§175. Sloth—Root

And now we’re at the root of the subtle rope, the nexus of final entropy versus the basic possibility of existence. Sloth is the paralysis of soul and flesh, the incapacity of the person to make a move or come into being, as if struggling to walk through a swimming pool of nuclear amber jello. Modern entertainment, perpetually mediated by digital screens—it is a perfect machine for hypnotizing the flesh into submission, even as the imagination is shot into a dream state and bombarded with nonstop phantasmagoria. We thus see a dialectical reversal: namely, that the hyperactivity of dissociated mind is also sloth, insofar as it is all lost like a nocturnal dewy film upon contact with the waking state and light of dawn. Men hustle and grind for fictional achievements in video games while not having even a fraction of that morale when it comes to the work of building an actual life—a most peculiar state of affairs. The energy of soul, having nowhere to go, rebounds into specter, with flesh left unquickened and imagination rendered unreal. In this way does sloth seduce us, and such in these times is the preferred stratagem of the archons to draw us into the Abyss: for we’ve turned ourselves into easy pickings. The time for vigilance was years ago, but there’s also no time like the present.