OEITH #110 Evil, Be Thou My Good

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).