Satan Is the Embodiment of Envy and of Cunning

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 132 pages

A hundred and thirty-two pages, the longest document in this section and one of the longest in the library, in two parts drawn from Isis Unveiled, volume II. Part 1 takes chapter IV, pages 167 to 211, and keeps the title of the file; part 2, "Satan is the prop and mainstay of Christian sacerdotalism", takes chapter X, pages 473 to 528, and opens on the words of Jesus to Peter at Matthew xvi, 23. The subtitle on the cover explains what the title means: he is the union of all that is most base in matter with the hate, envy and craft of a spiritual intelligence. The frontispiece is Ashmogh, the two-footed serpent of lies. An abstract of central ideas runs to several pages.

Part 1 is a sustained exposition of the Ophite cosmogony, and it is the most coherent account of that system anywhere in this library. Ialdabaoth, the son of darkness, creates the world of matter and produces from himself six stellar spirits in his own image, each darker and more material as it recedes from its father. With their help he fabricates man, and the attempt fails: the creature is soulless and ignorant and crawls on all fours. Sophia-Akhamoth, the feminine Wisdom who had animated him and loves him, sends her own genius in the form of a serpent to induce him to eat the fruit Ialdabaoth had forbidden out of fear it would reveal the superior world. The revenge is imprisonment in a body unworthy of his nature. Around that narrative sit the historical sections: the Ophites rejecting the Mosaic Bible entirely, the Pythagorean Monas as nameless Wisdom and Ennoia as light itself, the Ebionites and early Nazarenes identified as the first Christians, Peter and Paul as archetypes of opposing powers, and Jerome's zeal against heretics explained by what accepting the original Gospel of Matthew would have cost the established church. Part 2 turns from cosmogony to use, and its thesis is given in four words quoted from its own opening — no Devil, no Christ. The argument is that the Devil is the patron genius of theological Christianity rather than an embarrassment to it, because an institution built on deliverance requires something to be delivered from. The later pages move to India and the reception of Christian missionaries there, which is handled as contemporary reportage rather than doctrine. Both parts end in the series' suggested reading, and the motto, she being dead, yet speaketh.

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