The Great Adversary

I don’t think Satan is an autonomous creature who dwells inside every seedy, sultry, or squirrelly thought. I don’t think Satan is an infernal despot who is looking to construct an army of wrongdoers, harlots, charlatans, and lawyers. This is like saying Santa is a jolly, overweight, bearded dude who manages to reach all the longitudinal and latitudinal points on this planet in the course of one blessed day. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that Santa and Satan even exist. There is mythological evidence, however. But this mythological evidence must be analyzed from the level of conceptualization and imagination, not from the level of materiality and concrete facts. To bring Satan down to the level of materiality is to create a grave error, for Satan is only a mythological construct we project our fears and guilt onto. Because this “mythological construct” is psychically charged, it manages to live on in our collective mental space as that which we are opposed to, or that which we care to disown. Arguably, The Great Adversary is shaped by psychic skin that is inevitably jettisoned by The Great Persona of Mankind.

The conquistadors thought they bravely embodied this “Great Persona of Mankind”. When their monotheistic outlook clashed with the pantheistic outlook of the indigenous people of North and South America, the conquistadors disowned aspects of themselves that saw a paucity of legitimacy in the practices and creeds of the pantheistic natives. For them, monotheism was the grail, and everything outside the grail was abominable. This is why all hell broke loose during those days. The conquistadors projected their ecclesiastical shadow onto the humble animist traditions, and then they saw this shadow they projected as only the enemy, The Great Adversary.

In Ross Heaven’s “The Hummingbird’s Journey To God,” there is a quote from Father Olivia that seems apt to mention. This quote regards Christianity’s denouncement of the spiritual practices of the native animist traditions. In regards to a San Pedro ceremony he witnessed, Father Olivia commented:

“After they drink it they (participants in San Pedro ceremonies) remain without judgment and deprived of their senses and they see visions that the devil represents to them and consistent with them they judge their suspicions and the intentions of others.”

But of course a proponent of monotheism would say this when watching a ceremony devised by a “heretical tradition”. Of course a follower of an immaterial, wrathful deity (God) would denigrate the ways of the animists, or those who live close to nature. To the intractable monotheist, nature is a temptress that intoxicates the ignoble people of the land with devilish visions of delusion. To the monotheist, Nature herself is the Great Adversary.

Straying away from the ire of the conquistadors, it seems applicable to mention the existence of the pentagram in relation to the Great Adversary. It seems to me that the upside-down pentagram has been wedded to the idea of malevolence, and only the idea of malevolence. This seems a little strange to me. Since the pentagram facing up represents an auspicious star, why it is assumed that the inversion of this star represents something entirely evil? In reality, I think this inverted pentagram represents the descending course of a cosmic process. If the star facing upwards represents the movement of the five elements—water, fire, earth, air, and ether—to a state of “universal voidness,” then the movement downwards represents the state of “universal fullness,” where all the elements are diffuse and propagated throughout the vast expanse of creation. This only seems legitimate. Now, how could we possibly posit that this symbolic inversion of the pentagram is oriented towards the realm of the purely infernal? Is it not simply a symbol that stands for the descent of the five principles behind all creation?

As we can see, certain practices and geometric configurations have been distorted through the lens of monotheist history and the lens of simple misinterpretation. The Great Adversary is not really hiding in an indigenous sacrament of healing or the pentagram. The Great Adversary is simply a vast assemblage of neglected potentials and dreams created by all the inhabitants of the cosmos at all times. As soon as we no longer neglect these things, the whole notion of the Adversary will melt into a giant puddle. The puddle can then be used for divinatory purposes.