Alchemy and Eschatology, Part 1: The Soul
An insight into the minds of those prepared for the end of history
Prophecies are built around sets of conditions, and one of those conditions frequently involves the awakening of a particular soul or number of souls. To understand where this idea comes from, there is a tale first told by a religion so ancient that its name has long since been lost. In the beginning, there was only the One, who created the Second, only for the Second to betray the One, shattering it into pieces, and trapping those pieces within a prison of the Second’s making. This prison is the world we live in, a base, material imitation of the real world, where the perfection of the spirits reside. Most people have neither soul nor spirit, but are instead creatures of pure flesh, driven by base desires. The chosen few possess a soul, a piece of the One, but cannot become enlightened and ascend until receiving the spirit as well. When all those who possess a soul also gain the spirit, the One shall be re-united leave behind the material plane, and then destroy the Second and its imperfect creations, completing the cycle.
You may recognise this story, as many religions have their own version of it, but for my purposes, I will continue to call it Gnosticism, since that was its first codification. The “creatures of pure flesh” are called hylics, who possess neither soul nor spirit, and therefore are little more than beasts. Others, the psychics, possess a soul but no spirit, and thus have potential to become enlightened. Those who have received the gift of the spirit are enlightened, the pneumatics, and it is their sacred duty to share this gift will all those who possess the capacity for it. When all of the spirits, fragments of God, inhabit living bodies, the enlightened will ascend into heaven as God lives again and knows Himself. The material world, meanwhile, will be destroyed along with its evil creator, the Demiurge, who had previously overthrown God, shattered His spirit, and imprisoned them within crude matter. Mind you, this is only one version of Gnosticism, as I’ll explain later.
Actually, I’ll explain another version now. This is what happens when I’m working on these articles while listening to Wendigoon in the background! Anyway, this alternate version is the “Bank of Souls” theory. According to this theory, the fruit of the Tree of Life is human souls, but the tree doesn’t produce fruit consistently, so children conceived during lean times might not receive a soul. Some people have used the hylic explanation for the NPC phenomenon in the modern day, after all, there is simply no way that the Tree of Life can produce enough souls for all of humanity, right? Mind you, there is an anti-Gnostic angle to this theory as well, because Christian theologians who entertain the Bank of Souls theory maintain that hylics are not the spawn of the devil, but are instead part of God’s grand design, a test for those who do possess a soul, and thus the potential for growth. There are a few other theories in this video which tie in with the idea of a fragmented God, so I’ll just leave this here for you:
Anyway, back to what I had written before listening to all of this!
As an aside, soul and spirit are not the same thing. Many aetheric concepts diverged over time, for example, the composition of the world. In many ancient cultures, spirits were believed to be made of air, hence “the breath of life.” In Greek, the word for “soul” is ψυχή (psuché, from which “psychic” is derived), and the word for “spirit,” at least in this context, is πνεύμα (pneúma, from which “pneumatic” is derived). There is another context in which the word for “spirit” is δαίμων (daimón, from which “daemon” and “eudaimonia” are derived). Anaximenes of Miletus believed that all matter was derived from spirits (something fairly common among “pagan” religions), and therefore that air was the First Principle. This was a departure from his mentor, Anaximander, who believed that the First Principle was ἄπειρον (apeiron), or “the boundless,” which would eventually become known as “aether” in later millennia, though it should be noted that apeiron was not synonymous with aether at the time. Anaximander’s own mentor, Thales, considered the father of philosophy, believed the First Principle to be water, which demonstrates that he was greatly influenced by Persian thought, itself influenced by Babylonian thought. Heraclitus, who came after Anaximenes and wasn’t from Miletus, believed fire to be the First Principle. The idea that earth is the First Principle is probably a much older belief, and there are some echoes of this idea within The Corpus Hermeticum, however, the Earth itself is said to sprang forth from the Great Void known as Chaos. Despite Chaos being “pre-material,” Anaximander’s apeiron is distinctly different. Don’t ask me how. There were many different ideas for a “prima materia” over the millennia, and none of them were quite the same.
Post-publication edit: here is an article about Thales written by Van Bryan and shared by
Kelly:
Anyway, the conflicting ideas behind the most basic matter of the world became compiled into the classical elements by Empedocles, and correspond to the four bodily humours per Hippocrates. Despite earth, air, fire, and water sometimes referred to as “Aristotelean elements,” the idea had already been around for at least several decades prior to Aristotle’s lifetime. Aristotle was the first to propose a “quintessence,” but it wasn’t until the mediaeval period that it became a popular idea and gained the name “aether.” Curiously, the idea of five material elements comes from Ancient China, and while there is some overlap with the Greek tradition, it definitely isn’t a derivative:
Oddly enough, metal corresponds to air (or, more specifically, wind) in east Asian mysticism. There are many ancient tales of magic swords being able to control the wind or even the weather in general. With this long and rambling tangent out of the way, back to talking about souls!
The Gnostics will undoubtedly screech like Ringwraiths that what I described “isn’t real Gnosticism,” as some have done before, because there are more sects of this ancient religion than I can count. They can’t even agree on the name of the Demiurge, as I have seen various Gnostic texts use the names Saklas, Yaldabaoth, and Yahweh. Yes, Yahweh. There are Gnostics who believe in the divinity of Christ Jesus, but you cannot call them Christians, for they reject His Father, the God of Abraham. While the idea that Jews are a bunch of devil-worshippers is not unique to the Gnostics, a hatred of Jews is something an awful lot of them share. This is where it is necessary to differentiate between Gnostics and gnostics, the latter of which is a broader group that includes nominally Christian meso-gnostics (a.k.a. neo-Hermeticists) such as Jakob Böhme and Georg Hegel, and atheistic neo-gnostics like Karl Marx and Giovanni Gentile. Nonetheless, when it comes to the “enlightenment” needed to leave behind this doomed mortal realm, you can certainly see the pattern applying to a number of nominally Christian doomsday cults. It is for this reason that I’m not shy about saying certain Christian denominations “reek of gnosticism.” Most of them are Protestant, incidentally. It’s less of an issue in Roman Catholicism (despite that I once claimed Catholicism itself to have gnostic components), and seems virtually nonexistent within Orthodoxy, but maybe that’s just my Russo-Classicist bias.
However, Christianity is not the only religion to be infiltrated by “the gnostic parasite.” All three of the Abrahamic religions have been infiltrated and corrupted to an extent, in fact as I am writing this, the fattest book currently sitting on my desk is The Gnostic Bible, a collection of Gnostic scriptures from early sects wearing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as skinsuits. Adherents of even these early sects, e.g. Marcionism, are still around, albeit probably not in any significant numbers.
Now then, not all doomsday preppers believe in the gnostic prophecies or even eschatology in general. Some (like yours truly) understand that the globalist ruling elite believe in some weird shit, and if the rest of us are not prepared to live outside of the terrariums that they wish to prepare for us, then humanity as a whole may well be doomed. That was the whole reasoning behind my rebuttal to
on the subject of degrowth.
Mind you, I don’t accept that everything has proceeded as “they” have planned, because the elites are neither smart nor of one mind; they are constantly stabbing each other in the back while their plans keep falling apart, after all. Furthermore, there is an argument that I love bringing up against gun control that also applies to utopian thinking; not everyone who wants to disarm the populace intends to commit mass murder, but disarmament always paves the way for those who do wish to commit mass murder. On the same token, maybe the people peddling fifteen-minute cities don’t intend to seal everyone in a tiny bubble for ease of disposal, but it certainly makes the liquidation process a lot easier for the people who do wish to dispose of “ze uzeless eaterz.”
Waking people up by distributing red pills will actually prevent the end of history, not bring it about as the gnostics seem to believe. This makes sense if you view history as the study of the human condition, rather than the study of the past. The “end of history” means the end of humanity. In other words, it is the devolution of humanity into useless eaters that will doom us all. “Do nothing, remain passive, voot for the politicians we approve of and consoom products by companies who share our politics” is exactly the message I would propagate if I wanted to make the intelligentsia so disgusted with humanity that a global genocide seems palatable. The consoomer subsists on blue pills, and the demoralised intelligentsia subsists on black pills. However, the red pill alone is not enough, and this is where the dissident is vulnerable; the two-pronged attack of blue pill and black pill is the oldest trick in the book. Should the manipulator fail to get someone to believe their lies, then the next best thing will be to get that person to believe there is nothing they can do about it. “I don’t care if you never believe me, because you can’t stop me from lying” is the message. This works at the level of a single individual as well as wider society, and so the single greatest thing a person can do to avoid the end of history is to refuse to believe that history is coming to an end. Existential dread is the single greatest enemy of the psyche. The cure is the white pill.
The white pill, in short, is optimism. It can take the form of a moment that restores one’s faith in humanity, but more important is its composition. The prima materia of the white is a rising fire, spreading outward. Is it any wonder that the history enders want to get rid of all the trees?
Fire needs fuel, as does the pysche, and for the psyche, that fuel is beauty. Without beauty in one’s life, the psyche withers. Beauty comes from creation, ugliness comes from destruction, and this why deconstruction lies at the heart of demoralisation. However, lest I spoil part two, I’ll wrap it up here. Political alchemy is considerably darker than spiritual alchemy.
My mind is zinging after reading this Sasha. I'm glad we played a part in inspiring this. I especially appreciate what you said about the elites. Doomers gives these idiots too much credit and misjudge their intelligence. They can be subverted as long as we live outside their experimental conditions, as you said. Thank you!!!