OEITH #110 Evil, Be Thou My Good

Occult Experiments in the Home

We plummet deep into the fundamental nature of reality in this episode, examining the necessary association of magick with evil: the premise of John Milton's Paradise Lost; Satan and the possible origin of evil; Satan as the archetype of the rebel; our relationship as magicians to this archetype; the absence of a moral framework from magick; the suggestion that magick needs to be kept "evil"; understanding evil in contrast to the good; Neoplatonist approaches to the good; the good as the aspiration of all beings; the misidentification of the good; the Platonic ideals as a guide to goodness; beauty, truth, goodness, and the One (wholeness); Proclus on the separation of being and goodness; wholeness as better than goodness; wholeness as the mystical state, as union with goodness; evil as a consequence of the separation of being from the good; evil as a characteristic of wholeness; evil as a consequence of the actions of beings versus evil as transcendent; Satan as the origin of evil versus Satan as a participant in evil; evil as an attribute of the Divine; the relationship of the Divine to goodness; a Divine wholly good as necessarily imperfect; evil as a bug versus evil as a feature; Nishida Kitaro on the self-negation of the Divine; how the Divine by its nature contradicts itself; Satan as the pawn of God; how Milton glosses over the evil in God; the perfect as perfect only if it includes the imperfect; Nishida's ideas as observations, not theories; the experience of emptiness as the experience of the self-negation of the Divine; how emptiness gives rise to form by standing in a relationship of self-negation to itself; how we have no relationship to the Divine; Creation proceeding not from any relationship to the Divine but by the Divine negating itself; the Heart Sutra and the nature of the Divine; (summary and an emergence from the metaphysical deep-end); Lionel Snell on art, science, religion and magick, and their corresponding principles of beauty, truth, goodness, and wholeness; magick as the aspiration to wholeness rather than to goodness; how magick rejects only the principle of rejection itself; how and why magick rejects neither untruth nor evil; how magick necessarily has a relationship to evil, yet not necessarily an answer to it; the mystery and elusiveness of evil; evil as unfixable, as the universe operating as designed; Jung on Job: humanity as morally superior to the Divine; Christ (God in human form) as the epitome of morality; accepting our moral superiority to God as a magician's response to evil; how there is no escape from evil or morality.

Ramsey Dukes (2000). SSOTBME Revised: An Essay on Magic. El-Cheapo.

Carl Gustav Jung (2002). Answer to Job. New York: Routledge.

Nishida Kitaro (1987). Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview. Honolulu: University of Hawaii.

John Milton (2008). Paradise Lost. New York: Modern Library.

Proclus (2017). The Elements of Theology, translated by Juan and Maria Balboa, https://tinyurl.com/73bxtxsd (archive.org).