The Counterfeit Mysteries of the Occult
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The first article of good news we find in the Gospels is this: GOD has finally revealed himself to us, and in his very own SON. That news continues to be daily news as the SON reaches out into time and space, touching us as Priest through the sacraments, touching us as Pastor in the person of his pope, and finally touching our listening and longing ears as Prophet through the living words of the Church's Magisterium.
And what has he revealed of himself? In the mystery of the Holy Trinity, he has dropped a curtain which has intrigued all adorers of the one true GOD, and given us a glimpse of his inner-divine love. And then in the mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption, he has shown us the way to enter into undreamt-of communion with that newly disclosed bosom of divine life. But still unfinished with these gifts of self-disclosure, he causes both the mystery of the Trinity and that of the Redemption to converge in one solemn moment, as the pastoral and prophetic priest of the Holy Church lifts the staff of life in his fingers, and says: "Take this and eat it: This is my Body." Through the Holy Eucharist, the first two mysteries are brought into the many moments of time, and into every corner of space where, moved by the HOLY SPIRIT, a priest offers the SON's Incarnate Flesh and Blood to the FATHER.
Although we cannot see these three mysteries — neither the Trinity, nor the Incarnation, nor the Real Presence — we believe in them, and the light of CHRIST proceeds to flood our minds and warm our hearts. To be sure, faith can often be dark in its trials, but even that darkness is but a purification for yet more of the light which the mystical Gifts of the SPIRIT progressively infuse into the first gift of faith. We move towards the bright light of glory, in eternity, through the dark light of faith, in time. But that dark light is still a light, and by faith, the hidden GOD becomes increasingly manifest.
But there is a shadowland to this sunshine of GOD's revelation. The work of GOD's enemies, the fallen angels, moves in a trajectory exactly opposite to the dawn-like unfolding of heaven's secrets. The Devil, you see, does not pledge revelation through loving faith, but instead pleasure, power and pride through instant knowledge. And the knowledge he offers is of the underside of reality, the lower regions of the world and of man — there where things are hidden away that cannot endure the definition and color of daylight. Sin's native landscape cannot but display the thousand twisted faces of the occult.
In his Modern Catholic Dictionary, Fr. John Hardon defines occultism as "the theory and practice of invoking superhuman, but not divine, powers in order to obtain results that are beyond the capacity of mere nature." A most significant part of that definition is the little phrase: "To obtain results." The fallen angels love to pander to our fallen nature's love for visible fact and immediate confirmation. We Americans are notoriously weak in this area. In fact, the only appreciable school of philosophy that has ever grown on American soil is that of pragmatism; and the pragmatist is precisely the man who insists on judging truth itself in terms of the results it brings.
Well, the demons are all pragmatists, and rather than boring us with the long, patient efforts required by faith, hope and charity, they dangle something else before our hungry eyes — something we can sink our teeth into here and now, as Eve did in the Garden. And the fruit hanging on the hook of every demonic fishing pole is the bait of knowledge, be it the carnal knowledge of illicit pleasure, or the "knowledge is power" of the magical arts and of disordered technology, or the illusory "knowledge of good and evil" which is the seed bed of pride.
So what is the occult? It is the attempt to obtain the quick results of carnal pleasure, power over nature and man, and a luxurious sense of self-importance and supremacy, and to do this by undergoing initiation into one or another of the "mysteries" of the fallen angels. Each such initiation begins by endowing you with some kind of demonic "knowledge." We will first take a brief look at this "knowledge" that lies at the heart of demonic temptation, contrasting it with the Christian act of faith, and then take a look at the three mock rewards of pleasure, power and pride, and how they conspire to frustrate our four principle duties as Christians: namely, to adore the Holy Trinity, to meditate GOD's revealed Word on the mystery of CHRIST, to expiate for sin by carrying the Cross, and to share in the Church's mission to proclaim the Gospel to all creation.
Adam and Eve were asked to obey, and the test of their obedience was the divine injunction not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Once Eve had made her first slip by entering into dialogue with the serpent, her eyes got fixed onto the three-fold fruit hanging on that forbidden tree. "So when the woman saw that (1) the tree was good for food, and that (2) it was a delight to the eyes, and that (3) the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate" (Gen. 3:6). They both decided to follow the serpent's example (remember: he had gobbled up his own forbidden fruit aeons ago) and to insist on knowing before obeying. Indeed, faith and obedience seemed blasé and unpromising; but the adventure of complete independence looked interesting. "Know now, obey later," whispered the serpent, like a street-corner crook selling dope. GOD had warned them that death lie in wait for those who fail to obey. The serpent scoffed: "You will not die. For GOD knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened [knowledge!], and you will be like GOD, knowing good and evil." And then, like a TV game-show host, asking the girls to pull back the curtains and expose the prizes, he beams: "And all this can belong to you":
- pleasure in the FLESH: "the tree was good for food"; this is the "lust of the flesh" referred to by St. John (1 John 2:16).
- power over the WORLD: "it was a delight to the eyes"; this is the "lust of the eyes" St. John refers to (ib.), the greedy gaze upon all that you possess and control.
- DEVILISH pride in your own wisdom: "the tree was to be desired to make one wise"; St. John's "pride of life" (ib.), referring to the self-adoration in which the damned find the only wisdom they care for.
Let us take the lens of GOD's Word and see what these "prizes" look like up close.
1. The Sterilization of Pleasure
In the Christian universe, the ultimate purpose of creation is neither duty, nor toil, nor erudition, nor, for that matter, any accomplishment whatsoever; the purpose of creation is purely and simply beatitude. To be sure, GOD created us to glorify him, but he knew that glorifying him would make us everlastingly and helplessly happy, just as he is. My point here is simply that beatitude includes pleasure. Heaven will be very, very pleasant, although we have good reason to expect that the higher ecstasies of the spirit will far outsing the bodily joys of glorified Brother Ass. But still, GOD created bodily pleasure, and the healthy, Catholic attitude towards it has always been one of affirmation — providing only that it keep to its proper station. That proper station, determined by GOD's wisdom and providence, is that pleasure be always in the service of life: the joys of the dinner table, for instance, in the service of our own body's life; and the joys of the bedroom, in the service of a new body's life — that of the baby GOD might send. Pleasure, in GOD's scheme of things, is the glow of human gusto around any fruitful activity.
The devil's work is to sever the lifeline, and turn bodily pleasure into an empty spasm, an expenditure in the void. Witnessing procreation is painful to him, for it scrapes old scars of his, and makes them bleed again.
2. The Proliferation of Power
GOD placed us in his physical creation, and commissioned us to "till the ground." After commanding us to responsibly use the fruitful pleasures he invested in our bodies ("Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth . . . " Gen. 1:28), he went on to command us not only to fill the earth, but also to "subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."
After Eve had grabbed for those three prizes we mentioned above, the first prize ("the tree was good for food") decayed into a disordered sexual faculty, evoking the necessary restraints of shame ("they knew that they were naked"). The fruitfulness of pleasure became an august and often dreaded responsibility, and the joys of sex were henceforth mixed with the bittersweet pains of childbirth. The demon's work here was to teach man how to steal the pleasure without the fruit. All the crimes aimed at babies stand here in hideous review, from perversion to witchcraft, from self-abuse to sterilization, from contraception all the way to abortion and ritual infanticide.
The second prize (the fruit as "a delight to the eyes") likewise dilapidated into a disordered relationship to the world man was meant to steward. Now banished from the Garden (the graced state of nature), man is sent forth "to till the ground from which he was taken" (Gen. 3:23), and that ground is cursed because of him; as a result, his face begins to glisten with the sweat of toil. Here, the demon's subtle temptation has been to lure men away from the ennobling labors of subduing the earth, and turn them instead to the Satanic ambition of mastering the cosmos. By prying curiously into all the secrets of nature, they can learn to "make nature sit up and beg," as Bertrand Russel approvingly put it. There is little difference here between a society dominated by technological research and manipulation of nature, and one governed by the divinatory and magical arts of the occult. The inspiration is the same: the proliferation of man's power, independent of the plan of GOD.
3. Pride: The School of Satanic Illusion
The third prize offered by the Serpent on the Tree of Knowledge was that "the tree was to be desired to make one wise . . ." The flaunted demonic "wisdom" of knowing good and evil is the biggest joke in heaven. If the holy angels had a sense of sarcasm (which they don't), what a library of satires they could compose of the stupid fallen angels and all their human prey, and how they lift their noses high and boast of their encyclopedic "wisdom." Having one's Ph.D. in such satanic science is like winning an Olympic prize for lifting styrofoam dumbbells. Evil is a hole, and the more wicked a creature is, the more riddled he is with these vacuities. The more one "knows" such evil, the more exhaustively stupid one becomes. But make no mistake about it, the evil person is very real indeed, and all the positive effects of evil we experience are due to these very real persons who are the devils and the damned. All their holes make them very nasty indeed, and we should not underestimate their malice. But neither should we miss the colossal joke which they fail to see. Like the emperor with his new clothes, the fatuous demons actually fancy their holes to be a many-splendored garment.
The thing we must grasp about all this is that the demons, in their present state, have absolutely nothing to be proud of at all, and yet they are consumed by a complete and insuperable illusion of perfected pride. This is their silly predicament. The holy angels and saints are really the only ones who have a reason to be extremely and vociferously proud; and, as a matter of fact, they all are! They are radiantly proud of their GOD! And the more we advance in holiness, the more we will appreciate the abysmal joke of a creature taking pride in himself. It is supremely ridiculous. But the damned — all absorbed in self-reflection — are not amused.
This is not to say that the proffered "wisdom" of the occult will not bristle with all sorts of truths, pilfered from the primordial traditions of mankind, and that not a few of them will be legitimate and insightful. But as we shall presently see, the occult initiations must rest upon a travesty of the genuine wisdom of GOD, and finally, the devils must burglarize the City of GOD in order to make Satan's kingdom into something even a devil could pretend to be proud of.
Each of these three twisted treats of Satanic "knowledge" works in its own way to upset the order of GOD's universe. As we examine the major categories of occultic and demonic activities, we shall see each one come to the fore in turn, and only in the last category will the quintessential "knowledge of good and evil" itself be offered in its own right.
But, finally, there is no true order in the empire of darkness — only an order of shadows, plagiarizing its outline from the skyline of Jerusalem. Indeed, the best way to approach an understanding of the occult would be to begin with the four major bearings of the compass of Christian sanity, and see if Satan has not lined up his own dark arts in the penumbra of these pillars of GOD.
I. Idolatry vs. Adoration
Our highest duty as creatures of GOD, and even more, as Christians, is to adore GOD as our Source, our Benefactor and our ultimate Goal. Our very being should stand in a perpetual attitude of adoration in acknowledgment of the sovereign holiness of the FATHER, the SON and the HOLY SPIRIT. And indeed, GOD's first commandment enjoins: "You shall have no gods before me."
Satan's simple strategy against this commandment is also his oldest: brazen idolatry. Of course, he avoids this word, and can even hold on to the formulation of the divine commandment, because the idol is by definition a creature who puts himself in the place of GOD and demands the adoration due to GOD. Most Western manifestations of the occult have shied short of statue-worship, and similarly outward forms of idolatry. Even today, the highly publicized Satanists are a very small group, and perhaps more even than other cults, are riddled with interior divisions.
Still, one needn't look far to spot a group of Hare Krishna choreographers, although — to our great disappointment — they have recently doffed their saffron robes (the one feature that made them at least poetically engaging). With them you find the whole apparatus of genuine idolatry, complete with statues of various reputed incarnations of Krishna and which are daily bathed, clothed and fed. Other examples of cults demanding adoration of some creature as means to spiritual perfection are the Meher Baba movement and the Divine Light Mission.
Also the less explicitly cultic sects, such as the practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, also practice idolatry, for the "mantras" ritually communicated to the candidates, and which they are required to recite for a prescribed daily period, are the names of Hindu gods, and the chanting is a form of adoration. By the way, most Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist "spiritual" practices (including Yoga and Zen) are likewise enmeshed in an elaborate system of demonological invocation; but discussing this would take us too far, as our present concern is only with Western occultic practices. It goes without saying, however, that the Eastern disciplines, together with their underlying worldviews, are rapidly making themselves a new home in the West.
Such direct, no-nonsense adoration of what normally turns out to be a fallen angel (or often a possessed, or "channelled," human) brings as a rule a kind of refined version of the pleasure, power and pride we referred to above; for here, one has given the demon his most cherished prize: outright adoration. One may be rewarded with certain powers by your "god," but what one usually witnesses is a sort of eerie joy glaring out of the glassy eyes of the adepts. They may bubble over with silly laughter about you know not what, and just repeat "yes, yes, yes . . ." or pick up their little drum and strike up another refrain of "Hare Krishna." It is finally better for us if we never learn what they are so giggly about. If we can pray and expiate our loved ones out of such cults, with the help of a good priest, they may give us, as some have already done, lurid accounts of the inner life of an idolator. But initiations do serious things to your soul. And for those who refuse to leave, or cannot . . . they have their reward.
II. The Divinatory Arts vs. Divine Revelation
The second great duty of the Christian regards the use of his mind; not so much the orientation of his very being, as in adoration, but rather the way he directs his thought and how he comes into the acquisition of truth. Since our original sin involved a certain disordered appetite for "knowledge," GOD has ordained that our way "back to the Godhead" (to borrow, and purify, a Hare Krishna motto), be a way of faith and love, rather than one of immediate knowledge. After all, the only revelation he granted at the beginning was simply that he is the only GOD — period; then followed five books of laws (the Pentateuch). Our wills must be trained to walk again in the way of virtue, long before our minds will be able to endure the light of GOD's truth.
Nonetheless, in the fullness of time, GOD did give us a fullness of words, and did so through the mouth of his only-begotten SON, himself the WORD made Flesh. In Holy Scripture, and especially in the Gospel, our believing mind can slowly re-approach the fullness of divine truth by meditating the revealed Word of GOD. But still, that Word is full of mysteries we cannot master, and our minds must bend in humility in the face of truths that tower beyond its grasp.
The Devil decided to continue his strategy of offering us quick and easy "knowledge," and nowhere is this more evident than in his array of divinatory arts. These are all the ways in which, by bending the knee before him, all kinds of otherwise hidden knowledge are opened to our minds. The fallen angels are still in possession of their powers, and one of these is a fund of natural knowledge that far outstrips all the Einsteins we can produce.
It may not always be evident that you are bending the knee before the Devil just by engaging in a little table turning, or by consulting the newspaper horoscope. But you are. Any pursuit of knowledge about the future, about yourself, or about others that is not obtained by the use of our ordinary faculties, but turns instead to an art which promises to read mystic signs (be they astral positions, folds in the palm, the way a deck of cards is ordered, or any of the other encoded sources), and thus give us cognitions otherwise inaccessible, is an appeal to demons.
The king of divinatory arts, astrology, is a case in point. Let me first say that the careful assessment of genuine rays emitted from celestial bodies (with their combinations, intersections, etc.), and how they contribute to the environmental pluses or minuses we might calculate before undertaking any major endeavor, is not divination. That such influences exist need not be denied when one indicts astrological divination. All major traditional cultures have acknowledged this, including the Christian, although the danger of divinatory infection of legitimate astral investigation has frequently argued against the latter.
Divinatory astrology draws upon a huge fund of occultic lore, with often demonic symbolism, and the drawing up of horoscopes is, when performed seriously and properly, the assemblage of a carefully stated demonic invocation, through which a given demon is invited (or even coerced) to yield information available to him about a certain person. All kinds of dangers are involved here, not the least of which is that the demon will have an obvious investment in seeing to it that his prophecy is realized, even if it means that he himself intervene violently in the given person's life. The fact that astrology is so popular is witness to the large-scale success of the fallen angels in delivering on their forecasts.
The other divinatory arts are likewise based on one or the other of a thousand webs of correspondences between the cosmos, the human body, human language, numbers and the like. Cheiromancy, geomancy, numerology, oneiromancy, physiognomy, spiritism, Tarot cards, skrying, augury and ouija boards are among the better known. The knowledge given to us by these illicit channels can be readily used — and usually is — to secure forbidden pleasures, to wield increased power over others, and to pride oneself on having access to secrets which place one on par with the gods.
III. The Magical Arts vs. Christian Apostolate
Worshipping GOD with all our being, and meditating his revealed Word leave us restless; we feel driven to follow in the steps of the Messiah we read about and to bring his message to others. The apostolate and the missionary mandate naturally emerge from Christian worship and meditation. With the Sacraments, and also with the sacramentals, we go forth with GOD's Word to transform creatures, through the Paschal Mystery of CHRIST, into building blocks for the future City of GOD.
The Devil has mimicked this one too. It did not take him long to discover that the Christian's attempt to build a successful Christian civilization was going to be just as successful as CHRIST's attempt to convert his fellow Jews; that is to say, both Christian reformers end up on the Cross. And like Judas, the Christians will be tempted to reach for more "efficient" means to make things right. So the Devil offers man the chance of becoming master and possessor of nature; to take the elements by the throat, making them minister to man's every need. That will be way to make a heavenly city!
Unlike the divinatory arts, these practices are not principally concerned with knowledge, but rather with power. Pleasure, too, is usually in the cards. These practices can be generally designated as the magical arts, and include both white and black magic, witchcraft, voodoo, sorcery, and much that goes by the name of Tantrism. There are frequent overlappings between the divinatory and magical disciplines, but the fundamental purposes are distinct. The magical artist endeavors to reach out into nature, or into the lives of other human beings, and bring about some concrete change. He also may, as is often the case with witches, be equally concerned with procuring some intense carnal pleasure in his own body; but here as in the other cases, the undisputed and unfailing mediary will be the fallen angel, and the expensive commodity will be power in human hands.
It will seem strange to some, and outrageous to others, that I should include much of our modern preoccupation with technology under this heading. But it should not take long to at least see the connection that moves me to do so. Certain technology as such is morally neutral. But both the measure of its use, and the way it is used are subject to moral judgment. In the modern, post-Reformation world, the vertiginous and snowballing growth of industry and technology, all spearheaded by the first nation which severed its umbilical cord with traditional Catholic culture (England), along with the exportation of that new mania along the lines of the geographically largest empire the world has known (the British) — with one of its offshoots becoming the leading cultural and technological influence in the secular 20th Century (America) — well, in this brave new world, both the measure of technology in our lives, and the way it is used, have obviously gone wildly and disastrously wrong.
What was meant to be a mere means has become an end in itself. The new make of car, the improved computer, the faster jet — all these things were once regarded as tools, but now their constant enhancement has become our time-consuming end. "Ask the hands that serve the machines of America," enjoined a comedian of the 1960s counterculture. Power over nature, over other men, has become a sovereign goal shouldering out of view the values our faith once held supreme. In many ways, our physicists and engineers stand in league with the wizards and witches of the occult.
IV. Initiatic Societies vs. The Way of the Cross
The last duty of the Christian is the hardest. Adoration, meditation and mission needn't hurt. But our Christian compass is missing its most cardinal point if it lack the duty that does hurt: expiation. The ultimate test in the following of CHRIST is in loving in the way that he loved. And the innermost mystery in the Catholic universe is not hidden away in a sealed book, or whispered under candlelight in a remote initiatic chamber. The whole full revelation of the deepest dimensions of GOD is stretched four painful ways in the spectacle of the crucified Savior.
The demons have seldom tried to imitate this one. The mystery of sacrificial love is completely beyond their grasp, so they have no idea of what the Cross is really about. Feeling sure there must be some other, hidden arcanum that lies behind it all, they proceeded to offer their own secrets, and to stylize them as the "real thing," mocking all the bluster about "love" as a huge put-on. They offer instead the dignity and distinction of belonging to an elite society, not open (as is Christianity) to just anybody, but only to the select few who are chosen to engage in the special "initiations."
Here we find a whole list of such groups, all the way from the more loosely organized movements to tightly-knit organizations with dogmas, temples, rites and moral codes. Gnosticism, some branches of the Cabala, Hermetism, Alchemy, Rosicrucianism, Swedenborgianism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and the most noted and influential of them all: Freemasonry. I would even include the serious users of psychedelic drugs in this group, as those substances, unlike the narcotic drugs, do constitute a kind of "initiation" into a disordered state of consciousness which is easy prey to the most superb demonic illusion.
In any case, the central Christian mystery, the Cross of CHRIST, is a mystery of love and expiation for sin, and the "science of the Cross" it offers is given only to the humble and loving heart of the believer. In contrast, the Masonic "secret," and all the feigned wisdom of initiatic societies, rests on the well-bred demonic illusion that you can put Truth in a corner and force it to speak. But the secrets they think they hear are only the echoes of Satan's unending soliloquy.
To begin with, we must avoid making the mistake of becoming preoccupied with Satan's activity. We needn't start reading a library of books on occultism and the fallen angels; one or two will do. Our best strategy of protection against any occultic practice directed against us or our loved ones is to intensify our Christian practice. Since the fallen angels blasphemously inverted GOD's order, we, in opposition, need only piously follow GOD's order, right side up; and that means
against the temptation of:
- fruitless pleasure
- preoccupation with power
- demonic pride
the Christian practice of:
- fasting (works of penance) and the virtue of chastity
- almsgiving (works of charity) and poverty in spirit
- prayer and a spirit of obedience
and to counteract:
- the sacrilege of idolatry
- divinatory curiosity
- the mischief worked through magic
- the infiltrations of initiatic societies
we should practice:
- Eucharistic adoration
- the meditation of GOD's revealed Word
- sacramental devotion and an active apostolate
- prayers and sacrifices of reparation
In a word, the Christian answer to the occult is to stay well within the light of CHRIST. By following the authentic guidance of his Church (and today that means listening to the pope and reading the documents of the councils yourself!), and endeavoring to grow on a proven path in the spiritual life through fervent devotion to Our Lady, veneration of the angels and saints, and above all, holding close to our Eucharistic Lord — by these means, we conquer Satan by blissfully ignoring him. We have better things to attend to.
For those readers who have loved ones involved in the occult, or in one of the bizarre sects now growing in our country, I must emphasize that sacerdotal power is needed to free a soul from these webworks of demonic influence. Entrust such a one to the prayers, blessing and exorcistic effort of a pious and orthodox priest; then, continue to pray for a never-ending ring of Rosaries around the endangered soul. If your love refuses to relent, your prayers will be answered, and the priest will at long last break the spell.
Just as the prayers of St. Monica finally made a St. Augustine out of her seemingly hopeless son, your prayers will work the kind of wonders that drive fallen angels to despair. And even if it only be in the hour of death, your lost child, like so many others, will emerge from the deceptive fascination of Satan's multiple traps, and be brought back to the one solid Rock on which shines the unconquerable Light of CHRIST.
This item 7605 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
