Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge/Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge.iso/OCCULT/TWILITE.TXT

Text File | 1991-01-28 | 22KB | 398 lines

Twilight Crossing

Twilight Crossing is a magical assembly dedicated to assisting its
members in the pursuit of their artistic and spiritual satisfaction.

0. Legends

A.  Thirty centuries ago, dark crossroads were haunted by Hekati, earth
goddess (or demon) of magic and sorcery.  Hekati was far older than the
"classical" gods of the Greeks.  She was one of that band of primeval
deities known as Titans who were deposed by the patriarchal conquerors
of the Grecian lands.  The myths were rewritten to parallel politics:
the Titans were cast down from Heaven to the pits of Tartarus by Zeus,
the God-King; yet Hekati had always lived there beneath the ground.
Alone of the Titans she retained her status in later myth.  Of the
elder goddesses of the region, she was one of many retained by the
invaders, but the only one not reduced to a pretty ankle and a
breeder.  Every home in Athens was fronted by an altar to Hekati: her
worship was strongest in the Greek city-state with the smallest amount
of centralized control and with the least power given over to a King.

B.  Ghost-herding Hekati, with her hair wound with snakes, dogs howling
about her heels, and a guttering torch borne in one hand, represented a
vital current of underworld power too strong for the force of arms to
suppress.  Her old Colchian sorceresses, Medea and Circe, became oddly
sympathetic villainesses: their old herbal drugs were fermented to
poisons, their sex magics were retold as child murders, their
shamanistic animal transmutations were reduced to spells that waylaid
careless adventurers; yet as a token of "respect", each became the
lover and helpmate of great heroes -- Jason over Medea, and Odysseus
over Circe.  Hekati's great sorceresses were thus degraded more than
the goddess herself.  In the West's Middle Ages, these legendary
sorceresses became the models of those most feared women, the witches,
and Hekati was degraded to their unholy Queen.  Those dead who were
refused the sacraments were buried at crossroads, where once sacrifices
to Hekati were held.  And all without any change in their basic
attributes, representing those qualities sacred to paganism which
despots abhor in any hands but their own :-- will, beauty, immortality,
knowledge, power, mystery, ecstasy, love.  In middle Christendom all
these became crimes.

C.  In middle and modern times, this current of dark power has come to
be known as "Satanic" by analogy to Satan, the chief demon of the
monotheistic triad.  Like Hekati, Satan represents the underworld,
sorcery, and opposition to the ruling gods.  Satan's name is the Hebrew
word for "enemy"; he is identified with the Serpent that brought
humanity to ruin, and in legend he was cast down to Hell from Heaven.
In the Zoroastrian religion a similar devil was known as Ahriman, a
name which also means "enemy".  Zoroastrianism, endorsed and enforced
by the Persian Kings, saw all existence as a war between Ahura Mazda,
the god of light and the Sun, and Ahriman, the dark god of evil and
snakes.  The ancient Egyptians feared Set, an earlier form of Satan,
dweller in the demon-haunted land beneath the earth through which the
Sun-King fought his way each night.  Set was aided by his serpentine
ally, the monstrous Apep, and a host of magical snakes.  Set had been
one of the greatest and most ancient gods of Egypt, but his people were
conquered.  For a long while he enjoyed a Hekatian status as the
necessary ruler of the darker aspects of life, and he was degraded into
more and more a demon as time wore on.  By the time of the mythical
Exodus, Set was a generic enemy, and glorious tales of battle became
tales of victory of the Sun over Set and his minions.  Just so the
early Hebrew scriptures use "satan" as a generic term for their
military enemies in Palestine.

D.  A pattern emerges from the "anti-gods" of history.  Time and again,
serpent deities representing both the underworld and magic have been
declared inconvenient and driven from their status by official
violence, figured in myth by a Sun-God who is also the King.  It is not
enough to forget them as most deposed deities are forgotten; they must
be demonized.

E.  How does this demonization serve the needs of those in power?
Authority feeds on enmity.  The exercise of power is easiest to justify
against an absolutely evil enemy who plainly demands the strictest
opposition.  Once this license for power against evil is obtained by
consent of the people, it is easily applied against the people
themselves.  Most will never object to the ferreting out of "agents of
evil" in their midst, will indeed gleefully support such a campaign of
persecution.  By supporting the authorities they vicariously exercise
the same unfettered power.  It is very comforting to be one of the
agents of shining good standing firm against unimaginable depravity.
But reality is not obliging in providing absolute evils for the use of
Kings; all enemies are more understandable and sympathetic when more is
known about their motives and history.  Imaginary enemies do not evoke
this difficulty, and once the belief in imaginary enemies -- Satan, the
International Communist Conspiracy, whatever -- is established, it is
easy to represent real people as agents of these ultimate enemies.
Hekati would hardly have found a friendly home in Sparta.  The common
beliefs about Hekati, Ahriman, Marx, and the rest serve a vital
political purpose.

F.  But why are underworld and sorcerous deities especially demonized?
Officialdom is chiefly opposed to the individual will: the power that
authority delights in exercising is the power of imposing its will on
others.  The opposition to this authoritarian will is the individual
fount of creativity and unpredictability.  In psychology, this fount is
called the unconscious mind, the obscure and unseen intelligence which
motivates us all to seek our own paths.  The unconscious mind, the dark
side of the psyche, is the symbolic meaning of the mythical underworld
or "Hell".  Tyrants are right to fear this deep well of power and to
frighten their subjects away from it.  Sorcery is a symbol of
independent action, unauthorized and unregulable, obeying only the laws
of the dark side and scorning the workings of temporal power.  Tyrants
who believe in its "magical" power fear it for pragmatic reasons, but
these mundane concerns reflect the nature of the sorcerous myth.  The
individual sorceress could, like Medea, shatter the structures of
authority if they became intolerably alienating.  Sorcery is the
mythological face of art.  All good artists are sorcerors;
spell-weavers; subversives; Satanists.

G.  The veneration of demons is not, as is commonly believed, the
"worship of evil", but an escape from the authoritarian mentality of
"us vs. them", of allies and enemies, of repressive and arbitrary
regulations expressed for power itself rather than for the general
interest, of good and evil as absolute forces in the world rather than
as subjective judgments applied to human behavior.  All these naive or
corrupt political influences are banished from the crossroads at
twilight by the irresistible, but subtle, influence of Hekati,
snake-woman, Medea's muse, friend and mistress of the hounds of Hell;
they are cracked and ruined by this sorceress behind and beyond all
sorcery.

H.  Among the major exponents of this "Satanism" or "Diabolism" have
been poets and playwrights, musicians and magicians: such as Rabelais,
Blake, Shelley, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Shaw, Crowley, and (most
recently) Galas.  The assembly known as Twilight Crossing has an
interest in continuing and expanding on this tradition, known as the
"Satanic school" in the Oxford English Dictionary, without dogmatically
adhering to any one creator's conception of it.

I.  The symbol of the crossing is significant beyond its Hekatian
correspondence (but in ways that reflect on that symbolism).
Conventional magical orders, covens, and the like, teach a path, a
sequence of initiations or similar steps, more or less fixed in
structure and adap