Today’s topic will be a bit esoteric and a bit hard to follow for some. It will deep dive into some of the overarching similarities in worldview found between all Pagan belief systems of the ancient world, together with the Mystery schools, Hinduism, New Age beliefs systems and other smaller polytheistic faiths that carry on the ancient polytheistic conception of life. Now, at face value the uninformed may at first see a myriad of different Gods and Pantheons in the different Pagan religions that might lead one to conclude that they all have different theologies since their externalities tend to differ so radically. However, this view is deceptive as we will expound upon over a series of articles (that will be spaced out over a longer period of time unfortunately due to other writing projects).
The first aspect of this universal paganism that I would like to elucidate to my audience is that in Pagan societies there was a distinction between what the occultly initiated priesthood and elite class of society believed and what the “masses” of lower classes believed. The former believed that they had a special soul/personality that distinguished them from the lower classes and that in their afterlife they would achieve a type of immortality as “demi-gods” that radically differed from the path of the lower classes, whom frequently were viewed in afterlife to either be subsumed back into the panentheistic “all” or being reborn in an eternal cycle or a combination of both. Here is some further elaboration on these concepts by the (in)famous occultist and philosopher Julius Evola in his magnus opus “Revolt Against the Modern World”:
“The belief that everybody’s soul is immortal is rather odd; very little evidence of it can be found in the world of Tradition. In Tradition, a distinction was made between true immortality, which corresponded to participation in the Olympian nature of a god, and mere survival; also, various forms of possible survival came into play and the problem of the postmortem condition of each individual was analyzed, always taking into consideration the various elements present in the human aggregate, since man was far from being reduced to the simple binomial “soul-body”.
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As long as a person belongs to “nature,” the ultimate foundation of a human being is the daemon or “demon,” (δαίμων in Greek); in this context the term does not have the evil connotation Christianity bestowed upon it. When man is considered from a naturalistic point of view, the demon, could be defined as the deep force that originally produced consciousness in the finite form that is the body in which it lives during its residence in the visible world. This force eventually remains “behind” the individual, in the preconscious and in the subconscious dimensions, as the foundation of organic processes and subtle relations with the environment, other beings, and with past and future destiny; these relations usually elude any direct perception. In this regard, in many traditions the demon corresponds to the so-called double, which is perhaps a reference to the soul of the soul or the body itself; this “double” has also often been closely associated with the priomordial ancestor or with the totem conceived as the soul and the unitary life that generated a stock, a family, a gens, or a tribe, and therefore it has a broader sense than the one given to it by some schools of contemporary ethnology. The single individuals of a group appear as various incarnations or emanations of this demon or totem, which is the “spirit” pulsating in their blood; they live in it and it lives in them, through transcending them, just as the matrix transcends the particular forms it produces out of its own substance.
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The Roman and Greek belief that the genius or lar (demon) is the same procreating force without which a family would become extinct. It is also very significant that totems have often been associated with the “souls” of selected animal species, and that especially the snake, essentially a telluric animal, has been associated in the classical world with the idea of demon or of genius. These two instances bear witness to the fact that in its immediacy this force is essentially subpersonal, and belongs to nature and to the infernal world. Thus, according to the symbolism of the Roman tradition, the seat of the lares is underground; they are in the custody of a female principle, Mania, who is the Mater Larum.“
This idea of the serpent brings to mind a number of concepts. Most prominently, it brings about the idea of the Kundalini serpent, which is a representation of the Mother Godess/Divine feminine (something we are going to explore in the near future in sha Allah):
“In Hinduism, Kundalini (Sanskrit: कुण्डलिनी kuṇḍalinī, pronunciation(help·info), “coiled snake”) is a form of divine feminine energy (or shakti) believed to be located at the base of the spine, in the muladhara. It is an important concept in Śhaiva Tantra, where it is believed to be a force or power associated with the divine feminine or the formless aspect of the Goddess[1]. This energy[2] in the body, when cultivated and awakened through tantric practice, is believed to lead to spiritual liberation. Kuṇḍalinī is associated with Parvati or Adi Parashakti, the supreme being in Shaktism; and with the goddesses Bhairavi and Kubjika.[3][4] The term, along with practices associated with it, was adopted into Hatha yoga in the 9th century.[5] It has since then been adopted into other forms of Hinduism as well as modern spirituality and New age thought.”
Back to Evola:
“According to esoteric teachings, at the death of the body an ordinary person usually loses his or her personality, which was an illusory thing even while that person was alive. The person is then reduced to a shadow that is itself destined to be dissolved after a more or less lengthy period culminating in what was called “the second death.” The essential vital principles of the deceased return to the totem, which is a primordial, perennial, and inexhaustible matter; life will again proceed from this matter and assume other individuals forms, all of which are subject to the same destiny. This is the reason why totems, manes, lares, or penates (the gods of the Roman people, “to whom we owe the breath within us and by whom we posses our bodies and our power of thought”) were identified with the dead; the cult of the ancestors, the demons, and the invisible generating force that is present in everybody was often confused with the cult of the dead. The “souls” of the deceased continued to exist in the dii manes into whom they were dissolved, but also in those forces of the stock, the race, or the family in which the life of these dii manes was manifested and perpetuated.
This teaching concerns the naturalistic order. There is, however, a second teaching relating to a higher order and a different, more privileged, aristocratic, and sacred solution to the problem of survival after death. It is possible to establish a connection here with the ideas expressed above concerning those ancestors who, through their “victory,” bestowed a sacred legacy upon the ensuing patrician generations that reenact and renew the rite.
The “heroes” or demigods to whom the higher castes and the noble families of traditional antiquity traced their lineage were beings who at death (unlike most people or unlike those who had been defeated in the trials of the afterlife) did not emanate a “shadow” or the larva of an ego that was eventually destined to die anyway; instead, they were beings who had achieved the self-subsistent, transcendent, and incorruptible life of a “god”. They were those who “had overcome the second death.” This was possible because they had more or less directly imposed upon their own vital force that change of nature I mentioned before when talking about the transcendent meaning of “sacrifice.” Ancient Egyptian traditions clearly articulated the task of creating out of the ka (another name for the “double” or the “demon”) some kind of new incorruptible body (sahu) that was supposed to replace the physical body and “stand on its own feet” in the invisible dimension. In other traditions it is possible to find the identical concept under the names of “immortal body,” “body of glory,” or “resurrection body.” Therefore, if in their traditions the Greeks of Homer’s time (as in the first Aryan period when the vedas were written) did not contemplate the survival of the soul alone, but instead, believed the survivors (those who had been “kidnapped” or “made invisible” by the gods and who had settled in the “island of the blessed,” where there is not death) retained soul and body in an indissoluble unity, this should not be understood as a coarse materialistic representation, as many historians of religion today are inclined to believe, but as the symbolic expression of the idea of an “immortal body” and the condition for immortality; this idea enjoyed its classical formulation in Far Eastern esotericism, and more specifically, in operative Taoism.
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In these instances death did not represent an end but a fulfillment. It was a “triumphal death” bestowing immortality and was the reason why in some Hellenic traditions the deceased was called “hero” and dying was called “generating demigods”; or why the deceased was portrayed wearing a crown (often put on his head by the goddesses of victory) made with the same myrtle that identified who were going to be initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries; or why in the Catholic liturgical language the day of death is called dies natalis (day of birth); or why in Egypt the tombs of the deceased who had been dedicated to Osiris were called “houses of immortality,” and the afterlife was conceived as “the land of triumph”; or why in ancient Rome the emperor’s “demon” was worshiped as divine…
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The sacred foundation of the authority the elders enjoyed in several ancient civilizations lies in similar ideas. People saw in the elders, who were closer to death, the manifestation of the divine force that was thought to achieve full liberation at death. “
It is easy to see how this perception of how human beings are divided into two (or more) different spiritual castes, were those spiritual elites that are initiated into the mysteries of what it takes to survive the “second death” and retain the individuality and personhood are viewed as a superior being to the common man. This also in many cases seems to be a hereditary status given to member of “patrician” families that claim lineage back to alleged demi-gods that achieved this demi-god status after death. Somehow they were able to get some spiritual virility imparted to them through their demi-god ancestor’s genes and are hence more likely to elevate themselves into demi-god hood after death like their demi-god predecessors. This category of people, from the Pagan vantage point, would be superior to the profane masses whose individuality and soul would be subsumed and consumed into the universal or tribal consciousness described by Evola.
“Thus, as far as the destiny of the soul after death is concerned, there are two opposite paths. The first is the “path of the gods,” also known as the “solar path” or Zeus’s path, which leads to the bright dwelling of the immortals. This dwelling was variously represented as a height, heaven, or an island, from the Nordic Valhalla and Asgard to the Aztec-Inca “House of the Sun” that was reserved for kings, heroes, and nobles. The other path is that trodden by those who do not survive in a real way, and who slowly yet inexorably dissolve back into their original stocks, into the “totems” that unlike single individuals, never die; this is the life of Hades, of the “infernals”, of Niflheim, of the chthonic deities. This teaching is found in the Hindu tradition where the expressions deva-yana and pitr-yana signify “path of the gods,” and path of the ancestors” (in the sense of manes), respectively. It is also said: “These two paths, one bright and the other dark, are considered eternal in the universe. In the former, man goes out and ten comes back; in the latter he keeps on returning.” The first path “leading to Brahman,” namely, to the uncodnitioned state, is analogically associated with fire, light, the day, and the six months of the solar ascent during the year; it leads to the region of thunderbolts, located beyond the “door of the sun.” The second path, which is related to smoke, night, and the six months of the sun’s descent leads to the moon, which is the symbol of the princple of change and becoming and which is manifested here as the principle regulating the cycle of finite beings who continuously come and go in many ephemeral incarnations of the ancestral forces. According to an interesting symbolism, those who follow the lunar path vecome the food of the manes and are “sacrificed” again by them in the semen of new mortal births.
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But here it is possible to penetrate deeper into the meaning of the existence in antiquity not only of two types of divinities, (the former Uranian and solar, the latter telluric and lunar), but also of the existence of two essentially distinct types (at times even opposed to each other) of rite and cult. A civilization’s degree of faithfulness to Tradition is determined by the degree of the predominance of cults and rituals of the first type over those of the second type.”
Know this is Evola’s thesis that he presents and argues for in his book “Revolt Against the Modern World”. The majority of religious scholars maintain the belief that the predominance of “chthonic deities and religions” characterized by belief and worship of the divine Mother Earth were the original religious and esoteric tradition that there was. Of course these people can only speculate about how the state was of the people’s before the great flood that occurred some 12-14000 years ago, with Evola making the case that most of the “Chthonic deities” and their cults were degenerated versions of the higher “Telluric” cults that had allegedly ruled the ante-deluvian era.
“A characteristic of what today goes by the name of the “science of religions” is that whenever by sheer chance it finds the right key to solve a “mystery,” it reaches the conclusion that this key is good to solve all mysteries. Thus, when some scholars learned about the idea of the totem, they began to see totems everywhere. The “totemic” interpretation was shamelessly applied to the forms found in great civilizations, since some scholars though that the best explanation for them could be derived from earlier studies on primitive tribes. Last but not least, a sexual theory of the totem eventually came to be formulated.
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A regal or an aristocratic tradition arises wherever there is dominion over the totems and not dominion of the totems, and wherever the bond is inverted and the deep forces of the stock are given superbiological orientation by a supernatural principle in the direction of an Olympian “victory” and immortality. To establish ambiguous promiscuities that make individuals more vulnerable to the powers on which they depend as natural beings, thus allowing the center of their being to fall deeper and deeper into the collective and into the prepersonal dimensions and to “placate” or to propitiate certain infernal influences, granting them their wish to become incarnated in the souls and in the world of men — this is the essence of an inferior cult that is only an extension of the way of being of those who have no cult and no rite at all. In other words, it is the characteristic if the extreme degeneration of higher traditional forms. To free human beings from the dominion of the totems; to strengthen them; to address them to the fulfillment of a spiritual forma nd a limit; and to bring them in an invisible way to the line of influences capable of creating a destiny of heroic and liberating immortality — this was the task of the aristocratic cult. When human beings persevered in this cult, the fate of Hades was averted and the “way of the Mother” was barred. once the divine rites were neglected, however this destiny was reconfirmed and the power of the inferior nature became omnipotent again. In this way, the meaning of the abovementioned Oriental teaching is made manifest, namely, that those who neglect the rites cannot escape “hell,” this word meaning both a way of being in this life and a destiny in the next. In its deepest sense, the duty to preserve, nourish, and develop the mystical fire (which was considered to be the body of the god of the families, cities, and empires, as well as, according to a Vedic expression, the “custodian of immortality”) without any interruption concealed the ritual promise to preserve, nourish, and develop the principle of a higher destiny and contact with the overworld that were created by the ancestor. In this way this fire is most intimately related to the fire, which especially in the Hindu and in the Greek view and, more generally speaking, in the Olympian-Aryan ritual of cremation, burns in the funeral pyre; this fire was the symbol of the power that consumes the last remains of the earthly nature of the deceased until it generates beyond it the “fulgurating form” of an immortal. (Revolt Against the Modern World 47-53)
So what is the purpose of studying all of this? Firstly, it is always beneficial to stay educated about the beliefs of others so that you don’t make a fool out of yourself when discussing/debating with the polytheists on their points of creed in case of doing dawah. Secondly, it is important to know of these esoteric doctrines so that one can identify the threat from ideological subversion that the Mystery schools in particular tend to attempt to bring into the Muslim Ummah and society at large. Naive people without any background knowledge of these doctrines might be easily misled and misguided into accepting these ideologies as being true, in particular as these Mystery schools are selective in whom they initiate into their groups and present an air of intellectual superiority vis-a-vis “exoteric” belief systems that are for the profane masses. This threat is real and has infiltrated the Muslim Ummah in the past through the Hermetic philosophers of the past as well as through the Alchemical Transhumanist movement of the present that woos many IT professionals in the present day.
In particular we see the Esoteric elite initiates of the Mystery schools still maintain their spiritual supremacist beliefs. They retain the Pagan belief in the differentiation between souls in individuals, viewing themselves as being superior to us profane from the common masses. What does it matter to them, unless it bring them karmic harm, to insult, hurt or take advantage of human beings whose souls are anyways going to be subsumed spiritually after death? After all, the elites won’t be seeing them in the afterlife, so why care about the commoners? And is that not what we see from the actions of these “elites” towards us?
This supremacist belief is found amongst Freemasons (whom call non-masons “Cowans” derogatorily) , Jews (amongst Kabbalist in particular but even Talmudic Jews), etc. These supremacist beliefs will be explored in the future in longer articles in sha Allah.
In conclusion; We ought to educate ourselves on these esoteric practices to make ourselves aware of the beliefs of these people to prevent u from being taken advantaged off, being injured or potentially killed by predatory elites that view us as spiritually “sub-human”. Likewise, understanding of the basic these beliefs allow us to better make dawah to these people and to design counter arguments to their beliefs. Needless to say, Islam is not a spiritually supremacist religion that gives some souls an innately higher capacity than others. Nay, it clearly states that all souls are equal and will all stand in front of Allah on the day of judgement to receive our scorecard for what we have done in this life. May Allah increase us in knowledge, stabilize our faith and to accept and have patience upon following the truth when it comes to us.
Salafinsight 