THE ORIGIN OF THE DEITY MYTH

“The only gods are between your ears”. When this statement first appeared in Dark Lily, it caused great shock to many Occultists. Every religion, orthodox and unorthodox, teaches that there are external powers, to be invoked, propitiated or exorcised. Almost everyone on Earth has been brainwashed into believing that he or she is weak, fallible, dependant upon an external source of power for everything up to and including life itself. And this is the greatest con-trick in the history of the world.

Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in thrall to a myth? Especially a myth which has as many or more human failings than you yourself possess. Consider those quarrelsome, jealous, back-stabbing, greedy, inadequate beings, so desperately in need of worship [reassurance]. Can you think of even one deity who has never behaved in an uncivilised manner? Would you behave so badly? And that god/goddess is supposed to be more powerful, more advanced, more enlightened than you.

Even when we accept that the gods are the products of human minds, we are still aware of a need to believe in them. Over the millennia, the human race has been so thoroughly indoctrinated in its own impotency.

The process began because there have always been a few men (and women) of higher intelligence than the average. So let us take on example. The caveman with the highest IQ knew that he was better than his companions. He was cleverer at figuring out where to hunt the tribe’s food and showing the others how to protect themselves from the elements. But maybe he could not run so fast in pursuit of their dinner, maybe he could not swing his club with as much vigour. So he would never get to be chief of the tribe. He was tolerated because he was useful, but physical prowess was all that primitive man respected. And the clever one wanted to be admired. He could not win the admiration by his reasoning ability, but he could use his mental powers for his advantage.

Because primitive man knew so little of the world, there were many things that terrified him. He was aware of his own powerlessness against disease or injury, the elements, abnormal occurrences such as storms, earthquakes and eclipses. Imagine how you would feel watching a mushroom cloud on the horizon, even though you know what caused it. Primitive man did not know what caused the Sun to disappear from the sky, he did not know whether it would return. So naturally he pleaded with the Sun to return, lent his own tiny strength to the struggle against the Sun’s enemies. The Sun and the Storm and other phenomena were more powerful than Man, and primitive man could not conceive of any form of energy other than his own, so he personified them as gods.

Super-Intelligent Caveman knew that these were natural forces, not reasoning entities, and this knowledge gave him the power he craved. Because he alone in the tribe understood something of the processes of nature, he could pose and be accepted as the mouthpiece of the gods. It would be centuries before Super-Intelligent Caveman’s descendants figured out how to forecast an eclipse, but even the first High Priest could reassure his terrified flock that the Sun would soon return to them.

Eventually the con-trick backfired on the High Priest’s descendants and they also began to believe that the Sun and the Storm and the Ocean and the Wind were superhuman beings. Inevitably their human representatives’ faults and failings were projected on to the “gods”. The process continues today. Doesn’t it seem strange to realise that the putative anti-hero of our tale, Super-Intelligent Caveman, was actually more intelligent than most of the people now living on Earth.

The “gods” are within you. Your own subconscious contains all the power of the Universe. The difficulty is in accessing that power. There is no easy route, because that is the path of the Adept, and that has to be the most difficult quest on Earth or anywhere else.

Anonymous article taken from the Dark Lily Journal No 5, Society of Dark Lily (London 1988).