Revolutionary Demonology

Ritual: Every Worm Trampled is a Star

To our sisters of the Left Hand Path

I

The story ends like this. There is a wound in the heart of the world. Before the light, before a voice in the abyss uttered the first word from the black belly of night, there was only ocean. A boundless liquid expanse of indefinite recombination. Know that all matter in the universe vibrates to an incessant and frightful music. Maximum multiplicity of equiprobable states, zero-point energy, quantum superpositions decomposed and recomposed in perfect interference. If you listen in absolute silence, hidden among the beats of your heart you can hear the hissing of the ancient dragon that sleeps, cradled by the sound of the trembling universe.

Cosmologies are thermodynamic machines that proceed blindly by chewing up the free energy of matter in motion. The order of the cosmos is a symmetry painfully carved in blood. We have been told the story of creation as the act of pure will of an eternal, uncreated unity, from which the structure of the universe emanates in linear fashion. This original unity is the delirium of a terrifying perpetual motion machine that feeds upon itself indefinitely, burning in the vacuum like a star gone mad. The One God Universe is a thermodynamic abomination we have nurtured for too long. The ancients tell us that the world was born from the slaughtered flesh of a monstrous mother. Over the centuries she has been given many names. She is the wave vibrating on the waters of oceanic chaos. She is the eternally regenerating serpent, slithering aimlessly through the silence of time, generating and devouring universes.

Listen carefully: she is not one, because she is none. Infinitely divided, she reproduces herself indefatigably, like the severed tail of a firefly. She is circumference without centre: a divergent series from the heart of which issues forth a vast and boundless chasm. Know that a universe without a mother is a tyranny born of extermination.

The occult thermodynamics of separation is fascist time sorcery that produces locally polarised flows of energy. The reproduction of civilisation is nourished on the blood of the ancient dragon, wailing, crucified in the heart of the world. Mother, we were born alone from the remains of your quartered body. From the liquid darkness of your entrails we emerged into the cruel light of a bloody dawn. The order of creation separates us from your embrace, as it continues to feed on your flesh to build its bloody temple ever higher. In moments of awesome terror we can hear your wrenching cry lacerating the darkness, while your claws search furiously for us in the night. Such is the law of universal attraction. Every atom of the cosmos trembles in despair at the sound of your inconsolable cry, which pursues us as a hungry beast pursues a bleeding animal. Love is your insatiable hunger. Love is our joy at returning to your womb.

II

Order descends into chaos. Light fades into darkness. No structure is eternal. Every symmetrical organisation contains its own programmed decay in the asymmetry of the probabilistic nanospasms that make it up. The order of creation feeds on the illusion that a system in equilibrium produces a sustainable balance of energy, but equilibrium is maintained at the price of a constant production of waste—chaotic trash that is pushed out to the margins of the cosmic order but threatens to invade and destroy it at any moment. We must therefore be aware that the order of creation has a thermodynamic structure that necessarily dooms it to collapse.

The energetic decay of patriarchal temporal structures takes the form of a gradual and unstoppable feminisation of civilisation. Domesticated femininities turned monstrous haunt the nightmares of the declining West, in the form of rebellious androids, synthetic hormones, and painful initiatory scars adorned with glittering silicon implants.

Over the course of millennia we have replaced ancient goddesses with docile replicants which have infiltrated themselves into the architectonic order of Man’s One Unique God. Luminous simulacra of ecstatic amphibious creatures inflict repeated mutilations on themselves in the shadows of our cathedrals. The miracle of the Virgin’s immaculate conception is the degenerate remnant of the ancient barren dragon, torn apart to give birth to the world. In the black night of divine abandonment, the Virgin of Sorrows lies weeping, at the feet of her tormented son, her heart pierced by seven daggers. Her infinite capacity to regenerate is also an indefinite capacity to suffer: a vampiric force that feeds on its own decay.

It is said that at the moment of creation the light was so intense and resplendent that the order of the universe could not contain it. Then the order was shattered into thousands of fragments and the world plunged forever into darkness and ruin. The seven lower divine emanations were shattered, and their empty shells plunged into the abyss. This fall is the original sin in the heart of matter: what remains amidst the rubble of the divine order is a blasphemous, decapitated decimal structure, machinically self-replicating by collapsing in on itself like a sinister spiral. Over the hollowed-out remains of this dying world reigns Malkuth, the Infernal Mother, Our Lady of Tears, her abyssal eyes blinded by weeping.

Pain should be understood as a radical form of insurrection. Like a blade carving a deep wound, we fearlessly search for the ancient agony that burns within the very roots of our flesh. It is an excruciating but necessary process. With each spasm we urge our recalcitrant ego into the flames of sacrifice. Blood must be shed to the last drop in order that the light of the fire should rise splendidly in the night. Let us raise the scream of extinction and make it the weapon of our revolt. To those who would have us be eternal virgins, ceaselessly reproducing the order of the world, let us respond with the ecstasy of our slaughtered wombs. To those who want our immaculate heart, let us respond by revealing our hearts, corrupt and bleeding.

III

We are the waters upon which great Babylon stands. We are the lost shreds of our dismembered mother. We are the blood, tears, and flames. We are the shining sparks of the fire that consumes the universe. We multiply like insects hidden in the entrails of this filthy city. The city is a temple turned upside down, plunged into the depths of the earth. The more splendidly and luminously the divine order soars above, the more deep and painful grows the wound upon which we feed. Synthetic, decadent Venuses haunt the catacombs on full-moon nights. Tortured Apollonian bodies glow trembling in the feeble light of crypts.

In the bowels of this underworld we have erected an altar to the desperate beauty of the chthonic Aphrodite born from the foam of the sewers. The hypertrophic development of the metropolis is its own destruction. The more that order expands, the more its structure disintegrates, unable to maintain control over its countless fragments. In this respect, the metropolis is like the corpse of the ancient, dismembered dragon, pullulating with larvae. What was divided in the name of order multiplies itself, doubling exponentially and suffocating the organism that gave birth to it. The city is a frenzied ritual of death. In this suicidal ecstasy we immolate ourselves, burning bright like supernovas in the embrace of the night. This mitotic replication is an irreversibly advancing process. We should not mourn an ancient past. Before the burning city, remember that we are the waves of Kali Yuga.

Every worm trampled is a star. We have been illuminated by suffering. In the liquid eyes of others we seek nothing but their necessary distance. Eternal distance from daylight in the lost depths of this bottomless love. The eclipsed sun is a heart peirced eternally in a cycle that can never end. Every drop of spilled blood illuminates like a star the desperate depths of our abyss. Dragged through the misery of these days of exile, through the streets of this city marked with scratches like a sarcophagus lost to the gaze of its god, we dig into each other, searching for the fossilised traces of the ocean from which we were torn. Let us tear one another apart with joy: marvellous and iridescent like nebulous catastrophes.

Each one of you is a shining wound; and we wish to bleed eternally from the wounds of your burning bodies. Babylon is a monstrous machine falling to ruin in flames. The slaughtered dragon will come crawling back from the depths to bring the abyss upon the Earth. Ἔπεσεν, ἔπεσεν Βαβυλὼν ἡ μεγάλη!

GdN

I

Principles of Revolutionary Demonology

Introduction to Revolutionary Demonology

Nothing human makes it out of the near future.

Nick Land

¹

Revolutionary Demonology was born of and developed through a reflection on the role of the Kabbalah in Western esoteric traditions. More generally, what lay at the root of our work was the sudden awareness of a pervasive and viral symmetry transversal to magical thought; the revolution we refer to is, first and foremost, an urgent need for a radical subversion of this symmetry. The decision to refer to our work as demonology is linked to our conviction that magic is essentially something that does not concern us as human beings, and that the mechanisms that inspire and drive magical thought are fundamentally foreign to human civilisation.

In terms of this foreignness to the human, we were fascinated by the pervasive use that Western esoteric traditions have made of the Kabbalah, transforming it into a geometrical code capable of containing and summarising the totality of their dogmatic and ritual material. We are not in a position to assess how orthodox or respectful this use has been of the original religious meaning of the Kabbalistic material (nor have we any interest in doing so). Undoubtedly, the passage of centuries, along with linguistic and cultural barriers, have largely transfigured its teachings, handing down to us a new structure, but one that is no less fascinating, no less full of occult meaning.

We do not claim that such a thing as ‘the Kabbalah’ exists as a single, coherent system; we believe that the conviction in the existence of such a system, univocal and universal in scope, is intrinsically reactionary. Rather, we are interested in the Kabbalistic approach as a whole, since we see it as harbouring the possibility of conceiving a ritual neo-magic consisting of a set of entirely automatic and programmable processes, capable of definitively freeing magical thought from the voluntarism and radical humanism that have plagued it for the last two centuries. From its origins, the Western magical tradition has always resorted to metalinguistic structures capable of transforming logos, i.e. the human word and reasoning, into a code capable of opening up an escape route out of the symbolic order. This tendency has manifested itself throughout history in a continuous hybridisation of magic with the experimental sciences, mathematics, and cryptographic techniques.

In this sense, the Kabbalah, since it establishes an automatic correspondence between word and number, is the magical instrument par excellence, which, if used in the correct way, allows magical thought to be freed once and for all from the complex of psychological interpretations that have limited its sphere of action to the domain of human consciousness. The more strictly symbolic and archetypal interpretations of the Kabbalah (which have largely prevailed in post-Crowleyan magic) establish a perfect correspondence between the structure of the cosmos and that of consciousness.

Only since the 1990s has the Kabbalah been reevaluated by certain authors in view of its original function—that is, as an occult machine capable of overcoming the barriers of human language: ‘Is qabbalism problematic or mysterious?’ Nick Land asks in this regard; ‘it seems to participate amphibiously in both domains, proceeding according to rigorously constructible procedures—as attested by the affinity with technicization—yet intrinsically related to an Outsideness through which alone it could derive programmatic sense. [...] Epistemologically speaking, qabbalistic programmes have a status strictly equivalent to that of particle physics, or to any other natural-scientific research programmes […].’²

It is evident that the pertinence of Kabbalistic structures goes far beyond the domain of magical and ritual practices proper. After all, what exactly is a Kabbalah? By its very nature it is a mathematical-geometric object with an intrinsically recursive structure, which replicates itself on an indefinite number of levels (for example each of the 10 sefirot that compose the traditional Kabbalah is in turn co-constituted by 10 sefirot, themselves constituted by 10 sefirot…) and is capable of manifesting itself on different planes of reality (micro- and macrocosmic). Rather than a simple map of the cosmos or consciousness, a Kabbalah must be understood as an organism animated by a series of processes that produce—and do not simply interpret—a cosmos and a consciousness. Such a recursive machine, which is not operated from the outside but, on the contrary, proceeds autonomously, is therefore cybernetic by definition, i.e. based on a system of feedback loops that ensure its continued functioning and self-subsistence, allowing its structure to remain intact. In the words of Sadie Plant, ‘Cybernetic systems, like organic lives, were conceived as instances of a struggle for order in a continually degenerating world which is always sliding toward chaos. Wiener’s cybernetic systems, be they living or machinic, natural or artificial, are always conservative, driven by the basic effort to stay the same’.³

If a Kabbalah is essentially a cybernetic machine, then like any machine, it must have an engine. And this is where we encounter the exquisitely thermodynamic problem of its functioning, i.e. its ability to produce, transform, and transfer information. For all cybernetic systems are confronted with inevitable entropic drives which threaten their integrity. To quote Plant again:

It is also the inevitable function of these mechanisms to engage and interact with the volatile environments in which they find themselves. ‘No system is closed. The outside always seeps in…’. Systems cannot stop interacting with the world which lies outside of themselves, otherwise they would not be dynamic or alive. By the same token, it is precisely these engagements which ensure that homeostasis, perfect balance, or equilibrium, is only ever an ideal. Neither animals nor machines work according to such principles. Long before Wiener gave them a name, it was clear that cybernetic systems could run into ‘several possible sorts of behaviour considered undesirable by those in search of equilibrium. Some machines went into runaway […] Others—still worse—embarked on sequences of behaviour in which the amplitude of their oscillation would itself oscillate or would become greater and greater,’ turning themselves into systems with ‘positive gain, variously called escalating or vicious circles.’ Unlike the negative feedback loop which turns everything to the advantage of the security of the whole, these runaway, schismogenetic processes take off on their own to the detriment of the stability of the whole.⁴

A closed, self-subsistent cybernetic system that maintains perfect equilibrium is a dead system (i.e. it ceases to be a system); or else it contains hidden mechanisms that place it in a condition of absolute dependency upon that same outside from which it desperately seeks to emancipate itself. In magical thought, the relationship with the outside is regulated through the homeostatic mechanism of ritual sacrifice: ‘[He] must then present the goat which has been designated by lot for the Lord, and he is to make it a sin offering, but the goat which has been designated by lot for Azazel is to be stood alive before the Lord to make atonement on it by sending it away into the desert to Azazel’.⁵ But this homeostasis always entails a fragile balance: with each sacrifice the desert advances, and the mechanisms that animate the Kabbalistic organism threaten at every moment to lock into positive feedback loops, destabilising and ultimately collapsing its entire structure.

The idea that the traditional Kabbalah contains subterranean paths that allow balance to be preserved on the surface is part and parcel of magical tradition. Traces of these submerged paths are found scattered throughout the original Kabbalistic texts; the possible structure of these paths has been extensively detailed by Kenneth Grant in The Night Side of Eden, the first volume of his second Typhonian Trilogy. Following in his footsteps, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru), co-founded by Land and Plant, developed an alternative Kabbalistic glyph called the Numogram, which contains a series of intricate submerged paths running through its entire structure. These ‘sinister paths’ are populated by demons, unequal and chaotic magical forces that hide beneath the luminous paths of the traditional Kabbalah.

The thermodynamic aspect of Kabbalistic organisms is also manifested in their numerical structure. Kabbalistic numerals are not arithmetical, let alone archetypical, but essentially combinatorial, and therefore obey strictly thermodynamic-statistical principles. In support of this idea, it seems significant to refer to the combinatorial conception that pervades the Hebrew Kabbalistic tradition, in which the whole of creation is conceived fundamentally as a perpetual recombination of the ciphered characters of the tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable name of God. Gershom Scholem writes that ‘the Torah is the name of God, because it is a living texture [...] into which the one true name, the tetragrammaton, is woven [...]. [T]he basic elements, the name JHWH, the other names of God, and the appellatives, or kinnuyim, or rather their consonants, went through several sets of permutations and combinations [...] until at length they took the form of the Hebrew sentences of the Torah.’⁶ This combinatorial aspect of Kabbalistic doctrine is frequently actualised in the form of occult games—first and foremost among which is the tarot—which manifest the idea of the cosmos as a cybernetic organism in a continuous process of recombination. A Kabbalah is not a rigid and static structure, but a fluid form that can be shaped and transformed, provided one is open to being transformed in turn.

The occult war is therefore fought on two irreconcilable fronts: the radical immanentism of a materialist neo-magic, which interprets the Kabbalah as a set of circuits aimed at regulating the energetic processes of the cosmic architecture it manifests, and the absolute idealism of an esoteric fascist tradition that identifies in Kabbalistic architecture a transcendent order emanating linearly from the matter of the universe. We have chosen to emphasise the radical difference between these two approaches by reappropriating the traditional distinction between the Right Hand Path and the Left Hand Path, with reference to their original Kabbalistic meaning,⁷ in order to highlight our schismatic tendency in contrast to the reactionary universalism that has characterised much of contemporary magical thought. Against the manic centripetal cult of the Western esoteric tradition, our demonology recognises that the Kabbalistic organism, like a golem self-assembled from mud, is born and extinguished in the materiality of the processes that produce it, which are essentially devoid of human intentionality. To quote Land again:

Politically, qabbalism repels ideology. As a self-regenerating mass-cultural glitch, it mimics the senseless exuberance of virus, profoundly indifferent to all partisan considerations. Indifferent even to the corroded solemnity of nihilism, it sustains no deliberated agendas. It stubbornly adheres to a single absurd criterion, its intrinsic ‘condition of existence’—continual unconscious promotion of numerical decimalism. Qabbala destines each and every ‘strategic appropriation’ to self-parody and derision […]. Even God was unable to make sense of it.⁸

Any plan to use Kabbalistic machinism as an instrument to manifest a political or cosmological order is destined to fail, crushed by the very structure it purports to have built. For our part, we claim only to move through the circuits of this occult machine, animated by the gradients of its plutonic currents, which in their race toward ruin wind themselves into whirlpools of desperate beauty. On our way we have met unexpected allies, whose voices, sometimes human, at other times not, have guided us along this path. This anthology is, in large part, a report on these encounters.

LT

99942 Apophis

Right ascension: 19h 13m 55.7s

Declination: –21° 44’ 10.9"

Distance from Earth: 93,253,356 km [26.8 km/s]

Notes

1. N. Land, ‘Meltdown’, in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007 (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011), 443.

2. N. Land, ‘Qabbala 101’, in Fanged Noumena, 591.

3. S. Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: Fourth Estate, 1998), 158–59.

4. Ibid., 160.

5. Leviticus 16:9–10 (NET).

6. G. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism, tr. R. Manheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 42–43.

7. On this subject see for example M. Idel, Primeval Evil in Kabbalah: Totality, Perfection, Perfectibility (Brooklyn, NY: Ktav, 2020), xlv: ‘In general, the sefirot of Binah, Gevurah and Malkhut are related to feminine qualities that often are portrayed negatively and relegated to the left side of the Kabbalistic hierarchical scheme of the divine realm.’

8. Land, ‘Qabbala 101’, 595.

Dogma

The doctrine of the Right Hand Path—which encompasses the entirety of the Western Hermetic tradition—is a theory of self-deification. Comparing esoteric doctrines to scientific theories, we might say that each doctrine builds around its dogmas a model of reality, made up of axioms and connections, which allows a certain vision of the cosmos to sustain and expand itself. As in physics, there is no Hermetic theory of everything; each esoteric doctrine leaves a loose thread, an open circle; each one forgets something, more or less consciously. More precisely, as is the case with the sciences, no model claims to be exact or complete, rather each one satisfies a specific human need for understanding and control.

For centuries, all practices of ceremonial magic, including the most explicitly dark and sinister ones, have been based on the same assumptions and have referred back to the same model of reality. The conceptual structure of this model and the rituals derived from it are enclosed in the Hermetic Kabbalah and in the glyph of the Celestial Man. A precise understanding of the meaning of this glyph is complex, and opens a vortex of connections and interpretations. Continuing with our scientific metaphor, for our current purposes it is not necessary to know all of the equations that make up the model we are studying; it is sufficient to understand its goals, and know the axioms upon which it is based.

The goal of any practitioner of the Right Hand Path is to achieve eternal life, to take complete control of the material world, and to become God. This greatly facilitates our work of classifying and recognising esoteric practices, since the Right Hand Path has taken many forms throughout history, many of them, as observed by others before us, in open and bloody struggle with each other although not different in their intent. The Right Hand Path has always declared that its Kabbalah is a complete and indisputable key to the universe and its mysteries, and that the glyph of the Celestial Man encloses a clear and self-evident truth. This is false. The most important among the concepts upon which the Western Hermetic tradition is based is Equilibrium—that there is a perpetual symmetry in the cosmos, which the individual-man-God can always be at the centre of. The universe described by this doctrine is a perfectly reversible perpetual motion machine in which everything is preserved; only in this way can the initiate achieve eternal life.

Balance seems like a natural concept to us; for millennia we have sought an underlying harmony in the universe, a trend we find repeated in the history of almost every civilisation, particularly ‘our own’, in many different ways. We have thus elaborated formulae and calendars of impressive complexity to justify the idea that the orbits of the planets in the sky were perfectly circular, and that nothing could inhabit the celestial vault that was not spherical and perfect; comets were fiery omens of catastrophes and death. When modern physics denied these dogmas, the concept of a perfect cosmos receded, retreating into the shadows of dark practices, hidden, among other things, in a strengthened idea of Man as centre of the microcosm-macrocosm, which, though no longer appearing perfect in the eyes of the contemporary subject, must continue to conceal an inscrutable circularity in its mysterious language.

Every microscopic instant of a process at equilibrium coincides with its beginning and its end, so the secret of equilibrium is the number zero, the point of virtual immobility in which every forward movement is mirrored perfectly by a movement backward. We can explain our attachment to the concept of equilibrium in accordance with our nature as limited living systems: we require an internal order to be maintained to guarantee our survival and the functioning of our machines; the amazement we experience before our organic organisation is a deceptive feeling that conceals a misunderstanding of the true cost of our existence. We want to believe in conservation because, faced with the evidence of our inevitable disintegration, we seek a theory that makes life less futile, and above all, less unnecessary; a universe in disequilibrium confronts us with the realisation that we are but a spontaneous and frantic proliferation of molecular machines that burn, consume, multiply, and die, in an ineluctable and meaningless dance.

The principles of thermodynamics first came to light when we posed ourselves the problem of building an engine; the engine converts energy from one form to another, and as everyone knows, energy is conserved; the crucial question then is to understand if our inability to build a machine in perpetual motion is due to a technical or a theoretical limit. Thermodynamics ceases to become an engineering problem and starts to become a glimpse into our world view as we understand its profound implications; not only is it not possible to convert energy without losing it as ‘background noise’ into the universe—everything that happens, every phenomenon that takes place in any corner of the cosmos, is a process in disequilibrium. Everything rushes in a specific direction; nothing is reversible; under no circumstances can we return. The universe is by definition spontaneous; the spontaneity of things is independent of our will. The clock with which we mark the direction of the chemical time of our life is a quantity that we call entropy, connected to the concept of disorder via the idea that chaos is inherently more probable than order.

The thermodynamic zero that is the only possible equilibrium is reached only at the moment in which matter manifests itself in its maximum multiplicity—that is, when the universe expresses the maximum number of equiprobable configurations. Each ordered structure imposes a hierarchy of probabilities in the universe, establishing itself as a configuration that is not equivalent to the others; thermodynamic equilibrium thus coincides with the complete disintegration of all structures. The hallucination of the Right Hand essentially consists in the idea that a constant equilibrium can be established within aggregated structures, preventing their necessary dissolution and cancelling the thermodynamic cost of their existence.

Following this logic, we can then understand how the Hermetic dragon, the Ouroboros serpent that embodies the formless materiality at the base of the universe and which swallows itself, forming an eternal circle, described by the magical tradition as a blind and terrible monster that must be dominated by the human intellect, is in reality a threat already conveniently defused, an enemy already defeated, since its circularity allows it to be beheaded at every instant, frictionlessly unrolling all the mysteries of the cosmos. But a universe in disequilibrium confronts us with a creature far more frightening and hungry, an infinitely-headed Beast, wrapped around itself in countless twisting coils, which, in its frantic joy, tears everything to pieces, devouring us too.

The Right Hand Path has always known that the simplest way to maintain one’s dominance is to absorb any form of dissent. For this reason, going beyond the surface—and by surface we refer, for instance, to certain forms of bourgeois Christianity or to so-called ‘white magic’, both of which exclude any kind of ‘dark’ practice or contact with demonic entities—all the most important minds of contemporary esotericism have remarked that black magic ‘does not exist’, that it is nothing but a simplified and partial expression of the Kabbalistic dogma. These statements are designed to reinforce the conviction, common to initiates and non-believers alike, that there is only one truth, and that it is not possible to find, in the Hermetic theory of reality, the hidden trick that keeps it standing, without which it would collapse ruinously.

The principal mistake committed, more or less deliberately, by the vast majority of those who tried to trace a Left Hand Path in opposition to that indicated for centuries by the Hermetic tradition, was that of doing no more than working toward a reversal of the dogmas of the Right Hand Path, evidently ignoring that a system endowed with total symmetry remains, by definition, identical to itself whichever way it is turned. The glyph of the Celestial Man, or ‘Tree of Life’, may suggest to a naive observer, in its visual simplicity, that it might be easy to build a model of the world alternative to the one it proposes—and it is precisely this trap that has prevented any authentic Left Hand Path from asserting itself until now. Not surprisingly, the Tree of Life has been turned over countless times by gullible satanists, giving rise, among other things, to the so-called ‘Tree of Death’, which, in addition to having an unconvincing name, is nothing but an exact reproduction of the Kabbalistic diagram proposed by the Right Hand, rebranded to be offered to a new audience.

Contemporary satanism in its entirety is nothing but a reinterpretation of the dogmatic principles of the Right Hand Path, clothed in new garments so as to attract the interest of new groups of potential initiates. It is therefore not surprising to note that many forms of satanism are often accompanied by an obsession with power, an exaltation of the individual, and a frantic negation of the existence of God which becomes an affirmation of one’s own individual divinity. This satanism is in no way structurally different from the religion it wants to oppose; it proposes, in an ultra-simplified and, in all probability, scarcely effective way, the same dogmas and practices to which the Western Hermetic tradition has always referred.

The Hermetic Kabbalah is appropriately armoured against any attempt at sabotage from within. Under no condition will it ever be sufficient to invert any symbol proposed by the Right Hand Path—from the Tree of Life itself to crosses and pentagrams—in order to obtain something radically different from its original meaning. The only way to trace a path toward an alternative esotericism is to definitively break the symmetry of the Hermetic Kabbalah, proposing a new system based upon entirely different symbols and connections. First of all, however, it is necessary to answer