Hail and welcome to A Satanist Reads the Bible, a podcast about philosophy and religion. Today we’ll be tracing the influence of dualistic cosmologies on the development of religious thought. In examining these historical narratives, we’ll see how ancient beliefs influence modern religious thought. From there, we’ll pivot to an examination of the concept of mind as it is understood in both historical and modern contexts. Challenging the Cartesian notion of isolated, atomic egos, we’ll explore how the mind extends beyond the physical confines of the brain into the symbolic order of human interaction and language, mirroring the cosmic battles depicted in myths like the War in Heaven and positing a reevaluation of how ancient wisdom informs modern understanding.
You may recall from my episode on Ancient Egypt that Egyptian civilization lasted for a full three millennia, maintaining a consistent culture throughout almost the entire duration. But Egypt did not maintain its full strength for that entire period. After the Early Dynastic Period and the Old Kingdom, in which the pyramids were built, there was a period of decline in the late 3rd millennium BCE, the First Intermediate Period, which lasted for about 125 years. Little is known about this period; it is believed that centralized rule of Egypt failed and power became divided between Lower Egypt in the north and Upper Egypt in the south, as it had been before the unification under the first pharoah, Narmer.
Egypt was reunited by Mentuhotep II, initiating the Middle Kingdom, which lasted for several centuries before it fell to foreign rulers, the Hyksos, who ruled over what we call the Second Intermediate Period until the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE. Egypt rose up again with the founding of the Eighteenth Dynasty by Ahmose I, initiating the greatest of its three golden ages, the New Kingdom, which controlled territory in the south as far as the horn of Africa, in the west as far as Libya, and in the north across the Levant.
Across those two thousand years, the core organizing principle of Egyptian thought was ma’at, personified in the deity of that name, meaning simultaneously “truth,” “law,” “morality,” “justice,” and “order.” Ancient Egypt was a highly ordered society, with a clear social hierarchy oriented around the annual flooding of the Nile River. Contrasting with ma’at is isfet: chaos, disorder, injustice, and falsehood. These two concepts don’t equate neatly to good and evil as we understand them, but we can consider, perhaps a bit speculatively, about the role they may have played in Egyptian thought during the New Kingdom in particular. It would have been clear to them that an ordered society was not something preordained. The Egyptians were quite thorough in documenting their history and knew very well about past periods of ancient glory and decline. Maintaining order and balance was then a matter of constant struggle. This struggle played out in Egyptian religion, with Horus and Set battling for dominion after Set murders his brother Osiris.
The New Kingdom existed alongside, traded with, and sometimes battled with other civilizations in the region, including the Mitanni in the north, the Hittites in Anatolia, the Assyrians and Babylonians to the east in Mesopotamia, and the Mycenaeans across the Mediterranean Sea in what is now Greece. Each of these civilizations was quite powerful at the time, and so the Mediterranean and Ancient Near East existed in a state of ordered balance. Not that there weren’t conflicts, but it wasn’t anarchy. That changed at the end of the Bronze Age in the late 2nd millennium. For a variety of reasons, civilizations across the region either receded significantly or collapsed entirely. After the collapse of Mycenaean civilization, the people of the Peloponnesian region, what is now Greece, lost the art of writing. The script used by the Mycenaeans to write Greek, which we call Linear B, was not deciphered again until 1952. The Hittites and the Kassite Dynasty of Babylonia collapsed, and Assyria and Egypt entered periods of significant decline. The resulting power vacuum allowed new states to take control. In the Levant, Israelite tribes consolidated into the Kingdom of Israel. Far to the east, a new religion emerged among the nomadic Indo-Iranian peoples, a religion which came to be called Zoroastrianism, after Zoroaster, the Greek name of the religion’s central prophet, Zarathustra.
The degree to which Zoroastrianism was originally dualistic is debated by scholars; it may have been founded as a much more monotheistic religion or may have taken on monotheistic interpretations later on, but at least during some periods of its history it had strongly dualistic tendencies, describing the cosmos in terms of a struggle between Ahura Mazda, god of order and moral goodness, and Ahriman, god of chaos and evil. This sort of dualism had not appeared in religious thought before; certainly Egyptian religion had its dualistic elements but the pantheon is quite complex, not merely two-sided, and their vision of the cosmic order was dominanted by ma’at with isfet as a kind of imperfection within that order rather than a symmetrical threat to it.
During a period of regional instability and uncertainty, it’s not difficult to see how the struggle between good and evil, order and chaos, could become a religion unto itself, especially with the influence of Egypt in the background.
Zoroastrianism was the state religion of the Achaemenid Empire, which ruled over the Israelite people for two centuries, centuries which also saw the transition in Israelite religion from the henotheistic worship of Yahweh to a pure monotheism. At approximately the same time, we see the transition of the term satan in Israelite religion from a generic noun meaning “adversary” to a specific figure (ha-satan, “the satan,” the adversary), and later to the malevolent entity of Satan the Deceiver depicted in the New Testament. Coincidence? Well, we don’t know for certain, but it seems highly probable that Zoroastrianism was a significant influence for the dualistic tendencies of both Judaism and Christianity.
Christianity is understood as a monotheistic religion but the degree to which it actually is is debatable. There is, on the one hand, the matter of the Trinity, which is far from being clearly polytheistic but which nevertheless understands God not as a simple unity but as something involving three distinct and separable persons united under a singular godhead. And on the other hand is the matter of Satan, who is not properly a deity but who is nevertheless a serious and threatening adversary of God, especially within folk Christianity and popular culture, though there is a canonical theology behind this as well, as we’ll see. My suspicion, which I want to emphasize is purely speculative and not to be taken as a matter of historical fact, is that the latent dualism of Christianity was proximally inspired by Zoroastrianism and ultimately rooted in the cultural chaos following the Late Bronze Age collapse. This is not to negate other possible influences on Judeo-Christian dualism, with the development of Judeo-Christian religion being driven primarily by internal forces, but the impact of Zoroastrianism is particularly significant due to the historical context of the Babylonian Exile and subsequent Persian rule over the Israelites.
I’ll be returning to that angle further on. For the moment, let’s turn to the Book of Revelation, chapter 12, wherein we find the biblical description of the War in Heaven.
The Book of Revelation is an apocalypse, a prophecy concerning the end of the world. The prophet John witnesses the heavenly opening of seven seals, each of which unleashes doom upon the world. Following the seven seals are the sounding of seven trumpets, each of which once again unleases some catastrophe. At the beginning of the twelfth chapter, a woman clothed with the sun appears in heaven along with a dragon with seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns. The dragon casts a third of the stars to earth and pursues the woman so as to devour her child.
And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
Revelation 12:7-9, KJV
This came to form the core backstory of the Christian narrative: Satan rebelled against God, was cast out of Heaven, and came to the Garden of Eden as a serpent in order to tempt Adam and Eve away from obedience to God.
Biblically, that interpretation doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. The Book of Revelation is a book of prophecy concerning the future, but those verses are read by Christians in light of contemporaneous verses in Luke 10, as well as verses in Isaiah 14 which were written about seven hundred years prior and then used to interpret a narrative from the Book of Genesis likely composed centuries before Isaiah, well prior to the understanding of Satan as a distinct entity. Nevertheless, that is now the canonical Christian narrative, establishing the Christian version of a common trope throughout historical religions, the War in Heaven.
A common theme among polytheistic religions is that the given world has been substantially shaped by struggles between the gods. Ancient Mesopotamian myth has the world created out of a conflict between Marduk and Tiamat. Ancient Egyptian religion centers on the murder of Horus by Set; Horus was resurrected by Isis and granted kingship over Egypt as the Pharaoh. Ancient Greek religion has the gods’ hierarchical power structure as emerging out of a war between the Olympian gods (led by Zeus) and the old gods, the Titans. And all of these myths would have entered the consciousness of the Israelites at different points in their history: the Exodus narrative is now considered pseudo-historical, but Egyptian history was nevertheless present during the early days of the twelve tribes in Canaan, which neighbored and saw frequent incursions from the New Kingdom of Egypt. They encountered Mesopotamian myth during the Babylonian captivity of the 7th century BC, and the Greeks, Romans, and Hellenized Jews of the post-Alexandrian Levant would certainly have encountered the mythology of Ancient Greece. However, it took some time after the founding of Christianity for the War in Heaven narrative to fully manifest.
The Alexandrian theologian Origen, writing in the 3rd century, is the first I’ve been able to find who wrote about Christian spirituality in terms of angels and human souls falling away from or returning to the divine fire of God. This is not without its scriptural backing:
For… God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment.
2 Peter 2:4
There’s also the non-canonical (in most traditions) Book of Enoch, written during the intertestamental period some time between 300 and 100 BC, which describes beings called the Watchers who fall from glory after becoming enamored with human women.
We’ve discussed how polytheistic religion often sees the world as having been shaped by conflicts among the gods, but given what we covered regarding Zoroastrianism, it seems likely that the mechanism of action actually operates in the other direction, with human conflict being written retrospectively into myth and legend.
In the year 410, the Visigoths, a Germanic tribe who had rebelled against Roman rule and invaded the Italian peninsula, sacked Rome, no longer the capital of the Roman Empire at that time but still a spiritual capital of Christian religion in the world. This precipitated the fall of the Roman Empire in 476, when Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by the barbarian king Odoacer.
After the sack of Rome, the theologian Augustine wrote his monumental work On the City of God Against the Pagans, which synthesizes various sources into a formal theological description of the rebellion of the angel Lucifer against God. Called The City of God for short, its aim was to argue for Christianity in the face of criticisms that the religion was responsible for the failure of Rome’s defenses. Augustine argues that the conflicts of human history reflect a greater spiritual conflict between God and Satan. Rome fell to the Visigoths in 410 not because of Christianity, Augustine wrote, but because the Romans had fallen away from it, allowing the forces of Satan to win an (ultimately temporary) victory. Once again, we see human conflict “read in” to theology and myth: the sack of Rome inspired a retrospective re-interpretation of the various raw materials of scripture.
That said, I think there’s an element of truth to the idea that human conflict manifests a deeper spiritual reality, that the War in Heaven is in fact something real, although not in the sense understood in Christianity. And it’s not a singular event which occurred at some point in time but rather something eternally present and constitutive of human experience, something that manifests materially in human social reality.
To understand this, let’s turn back yet again to Ancient Egypt. Anyone familiar with polytheistic religion, even if only in passing, knows that their deities are typically associated with particular concepts, natural phenomena, or aspects of human life. Zeus, in ancient Greek religion, is associated with the sky and thunder; Athena is associated with wisdom and warfare. I haven’t been able to find a standard term for these sorts of associations, but “divine dominion” seems appropriate so I’m going with that.
Deities in Ancient Egyptian religion are called netjer, but it’s actually not clear that the word netjer means “god” or “goddess” or “deity” in the way we normally understand those terms. I mentioned the Egyptian concept of ma’at earlier, the cosmic principle of order and truth, but from what we understand of Egyptian religion, it wouldn’t be quite right to say that the goddess Ma’at is the goddess of ma’at the concept and principle the way that Zeus is the god of the sky, with Zeus and the sky being separate things and the sky functioning as Zeus’s domain of power and authority. Rather, it doesn’t seem that goddess and principle are at all separate in Egyptian thought, and this seems true as well of other netjer.
The episode from this point forward is probably going to sound a bit strange and esoteric to most of my listeners; the framework I’m presenting here is the product of ideas I’ve developed over the course of many episodes. I’ll do my best to keep everything clear and contained. We’ve got a few steps to go through before this comes back around to the War in Heaven, so bear with me.
Let’s begin with how we think of mind. I have a mind, you have a mind, everybody has a mind, and we normally think of these minds as being discrete, self-contained, and atomic: my mind is something completely separate and distinct from your mind and from everyone else’s mind. We understand minds as being the product of brains, and certainly brains are separate and distinct from one another, so it makes sense to think of minds as being separable in the same way, but on investigation, we find that that’s not really the case.
What is a mind in the first place? There are a few different ways we can look at that question. One is to look at our experience of mind and say that that experience is definitive and constitutive of mind, that mind is a bundle of processes—attention, conceptualization, computation, imagination, reason, and so forth—which we experience consciously, and that conscious experience is itself necessary for mind. But if mind is something we’re not just trying to name but also trying to understand, then that’s a very restrictive and actually quite artificial way of looking at it.
Imagine if, early on in human history, people are going around figuring out the names for animals, and they come across some white swans, and say, “Okay, we’re going to call these animals ‘swans.’ Swans are hereby birds with all of the features that these particular birds have in common.” And then later on they run into black swans and will have to come up with some other name that doesn’t use the word “swan,” because the animals they’ve encountered lacked a feature that they’ve arbitrarily decided is necessary to the category of swan. And if we’re just worried about making sure everything has a label, this isn’t really a problem, but that sort of mindset isn’t going to lead us to any sort of authentic understanding of what swans are as a genus and how different species of swan relate to that category. If we take this approach with everything, we’re going to miss out on a critical aspect of how the world is structured.
I think we do better for ourselves by starting from a funcionalist account of mental processes, categories of mental content, and mind itself. Mind is what it does; thought and emotion and reason and experience are what they do. As soon as we take that stance, we realize that mind is not something isolated and restricted to the insides of our skulls, but rather something that is happening everywhere in different forms. I mean this quite literally. Most people find this intuitively implausible because mind seems like such a privileged thing that couldn’t possibly be happening apart from brains. The big hurdle, it seems to me, is that all of our mental processes come bundled with conscious experience, to the point that we don’t habitually separate mental processes from the experience thereof. In Kantian philosophy, this awareness and experience of thought is called apperception, and it’s treated as a distinct faculty, separable from what it is that is being experienced. There’s really no reason to say that phenomenal conscious experience is necessary to the mental process of calculation, for example. In fact, with regards to calculation, consciousness seems entirely epiphenomenal, just “along for the ride,” so to speak. So I’m entirely comfortable saying that computers can think, calculate, know, believe, remember, and so forth, even though they don’t have any feelings about or conscious experience of such things.
The next big implication of the functionalist account of mind is that our view of minds as being discrete and atomic is not exactly arbitrary but, at the least, unnecessary to what mind actually is. Our experiences of mind are discrete, but consider that mental processes are broadly discursive and conceptual in nature. Concepts are the medium of thought. Where do these concepts come from? That’s a thorny philosophical question but for our purposes today it’s sufficient to recognize that they’re not self-generated. Let’s take as an example the concept PLANTING FLOWERS IN SPRINGTIME. If you understand what I meant by those words, both individually and as a unity, it’s because of your interactions with the world and with other people. I realize that this probably seems like a rather obvious point, but combined with our functionalist account of mind, we get a sense of what Lacan called the symbolic order, a term which has seen frequent use in recent episodes, the authoritative field of conceptual reality under which we go about our lives in relationship with one another.
Putting it all together, we begin to see mind not as discrete objects but as a continuity that extends beyond our brains, into the abstract substance of human language and interaction and even into the material world. Thought, as we experience it, is merely representation, and the world is also representing itself to itself, always and everywhere. We experience our thoughts, yes, but that doesn’t amount to any functional difference between my thoughts and the general representational activity of the world.
The next step is to realize that, if mind is a continuity rather than a discrete set, then there may be alternative ways partitioning and analyzing its structure than the default 1 brain = 1 mind. What if we looked at the basic unit of mind as being not the brain but the concept? Suppose we take the concept JUSTICE as an example. As a human concept, JUSTICE has a material structure in the form of “instances” (to borrow a term from object-oriented computer programing) of the understanding of the concept particular to individual humans. I have an understanding of justice, you have an understanding of justice, everyone has some understanding of justice (basic concepts of fairness exist even among animals so I’m comfortable taking justice as a universal, even if most humans ignore it), and what JUSTICE really is, is that distributed understanding.
You might say here that our respective understandings of justice may be quite different. I might have an understanding based in classical liberalism, for example, and you might say, like Thrasymachus in The Republic, that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger. But here’s the thing: assuming that’s the case, we’re both still talking about justice; we’re just disagreeing as to its nature, and that disagreement, that conflict, that antagonism, is itself constitutive of JUSTICE. Concepts of sufficient complexity—perhaps of any complexity—contain within them their own antagonisms.
What this leads us to is a picture of mind that is quite different from our everyday understanding, and it’s not that one is more correct than the other; it’s just a matter of perspective, and key for our purposes is the inherent antagonism that this alternative perspective reveals within mind: a discursive struggle between mental entities which are at the same time mutually constitutive of one another. Our actions and discursive judgments about our actions are the material reality of conceptual warfare within the domain of the symbolic order, and this reality is, I believe, the underlying truth to which the War in Heaven narrative is pointing.
There are presently widespread protests at universities in the United States concerning the ongoing Palestinian genocide. What we see in these protests is JUSTICE operating in distribution across individual student protestors in what is both a material struggle against the injustice of the genocide and a conceptual struggle against INJUSTICE itself. Whether you agree with the protestors is irrelevant, although I believe they warrant our support and praise. In any case, you’re witnessing the material reality of what is, to put it somewhat poetically, a spiritual struggle. The fall of Rome in the 5th century and the Late Bronze Age collapse would, similarly, reflect and materialize this kind of conceptual conflict.
What this means is that the substance of JUSTICE is mental. We might say that JUSTICE “is a mind” or “has a mind,” but this doesn’t quite capture what I’m saying. If you’ve got the impression that JUSTICE is out there somewhere thinking about how to make the world more just, you’ve misunderstood me. Your conceptual participation in JUSTICE—thinking about it, talking about it, enacting it, applying normative judgments, and so forth—is itself constitutive of the mind of JUSTICE. You might consider the internet as a helpful metaphor (actually it’s less a metaphor and more an example, but we won’t worry about that distinction at the moment): the internet is not to be found on any one computer but is rather an entity which emerges in distribution across many computers and from the interactions between them, and we can conceptually break it down into components in multiple different ways which are at the same time mutually constitutive: different protocols, different subnetworks, different backbones, the different languages of the content, and so forth. The internet isn’t “out there;” your various devices are a part of it and the internet manifests itself fully through those devices.
For another helpful example, consider a library and the ideas contained within it. Say you go to the library to research Ancient Egyptian religion. Every book in the library is a discrete physical object, but the concepts of Ancient Egyptian religion exist in distribution across multiple books with widely differeing content. Some of that information may even be contradictory, but that information still collectively constitutes the subject of Ancient Egyptian religion, which contains within itself conflicts and contradictions. It’s possible and legitimate to look at a library as a collection of books; it’s equally possible and equally legitimate to look at it as a collection of subjects, or a collection of genres, or a collection of media formats (books, magazines, DVDs, microfiche). One particular partition of the library’s contents is physically discrete; others are abstract and continuous.
What I find especially interesting about all this is the light it sheds on religious concepts. Deities, divinities, spirits, angels, demons, and all manner of “spiritual” beings can be seen as archetypal configurations of the distributed substance of mind, and in fact I think that this is what they are in essence. The Greek god Zeus is, under this understanding, the conceptual system of Zeus’s divine dominion: sky, lightning, patriarchal headship; and ZEUS is then a mental entity, a mind, not in any way separate from your own mind or from mine but constituted by them and by the mind of everyone for whom “Zeus” is a concept. And the being of ZEUS overlaps with but is not identical to that of, for example, ODIN. And if you’re thinking of sky and weather in a more scientific way, that too overlaps with ZEUS but also extends beyond it.
The ancient Israelite god Yahweh can be understood this way as well, but capital-G God—the one God of monotheistic religion—is not a deity among other deities, not a mind among other minds. An attempt at the explication of God is outside the scope of this episode, but let’s turn our attention for the time being to a matter more central to the themes of this project: Satan. The Satanic, as I understand it, is not a deity or an entity of any sort but rather the generative antagonism that conditions being. Nothing can exist without this fundamental antagonism. Think about matter and gravity: without gravity, matter would never cohere into substance, and without the resistance of matter, gravity would collapse everything into a black hole. The two must be set against each other for there to be anything at all, and the Satanic is the essential principle of that antagonism and of all antagonism, which manifests conceptually in the form of various deities and archetypes. Satan, properly understood, is not a single entity, but many different ones which are at the same time mutually constitutive: Loki, the trickster god of the Norse pantheon; Ahriman, the Zoroastrian god of evil; and the various Satanic archetypes I’ve discussed throughout the history of this project, including Satan the Accuser and Satan the Adversary, but also Satan the Deceiver, the modern Christian understanding of Satan as the enemy of God and humanity, the Father of Lies who “deceiveth the whole world.” You may be surprised to hear from me that this understanding is entirely legitimate, as much a manifestation of the Satanic as Satan the Adversary, the Miltonian champion of freedom and opposition to tyranny. But the frameworks we adopt for understanding the world have consequences. When Satan is understood as being Satan the Deceiver, then televangelists like Kenneth Copeland and Joel Osteen, and Christian nationalist politicians like Mike Johnson and Mike Pence, are Satanists, and I become a kind of heretical Christian. If you say that Satan is the icon of deceiving the world, and then proceed to deceive the world, then you are, in the words of William Blake, of the Devil’s party without knowing it.
An important consequence here is that the attempt by Christians to exclude conflict, to bring the entire world together under the Cross, is doomed to fail and to cause immense suffering in the process. It is utterly paradoxical: Christianity itself is conditioned by the Satanic, which is a necessary condition for there being any such thing as Christianity at all.
To review, the naïve understanding of mind as being atomic, self-contained Cartesian egos is far too restrictive to capture what mind actually is. When we understand mind in terms of its function, it becomes apparent that it is something that extends beyond the confines of our skulls into the symbolic order of human language and interaction, even into the material world. The constituent mental processes of mind are likewise not isolated but function in distribution across individuals, and are as much mind as the entities we casually refer to as my mind, your mind, and so forth. These conceptual entities possess, as with all things, an inherent antagonism that drives their continual transformation, and this antagonism manifests as the War in Heaven.
To be clear, I’m not saying that the authors of the various War in Heaven myths had any of this in mind. I think that the author of Revelation was mainly just trying to write an entertaining apocalypse that would get peoples’ attention and express something meaningful about the unstable, conflicted, and chaotic world that he lived in. I don’t think movies like Constantine or The Prophecy or Stigmata are really all that different from the Apocalypse of John, and I think that what these different media are reflecting about the world is conditioned by the underlying antagonism of the Satanic and the War in Heaven.
I’m also aware that this all sounds quite speculative and more than a little fanciful. I’m completely fine with that and I’m not expecting anyone to listen to this and buy in to this whole model of mind and spirit. There’s additional support and context for what I’m saying in other recent episodes, and many of the component ideas have been expressed by other thinkers, many of whom have directly influenced my thought. The notion of the historical transformation of concepts as the result of an internal antagonism is quite overtly Hegelian; my analysis of the structure of concepts is indebted to Robert Brandom; the notion of a “minded world” and of mind as the material reality of concepts shows up in Husserl, Peirce, and the book How Forests Think by anthropologist Eduardo Kohn; my functionalist account of mind and the idea of mind extending into material reality is inspired by Kohn, Reza Negarestani, the concept of machine functionalism, the distributed cognition of Edwin Hutchins, the active externalism of Andy Clark and David Chalmers; and the symbolic order and its dominating role in our lives comes from Jacques Lacan… but I’m limited in how much I can present at once given the format of this project so I’m not expecting any one thing to come across as conclusive. I hope it at least gives you new options for thinking about things.