A surprise final essay written as my residency at ChaosMagick.Com came to a close, the following article saw digital print in late summer 2023. Quite possibly the single most nihilistic thing I have ever created, it is a venomous critique of our dependence on the idea of deity. Admittedly lacking some of the usual nuance and polish of my other work there, I still find value in arguing that we are slaves to the religious accretions that have been laid down by our forefathers. And that as a result everything about modern occulture is little better than the fruits of that historical action repackaged for the internet age.

Jealous Gods
Autonomy Betrayed in the Land of the Faithful
By Gavin Fox

Science has long argued that God resides in the mind. Humanity has a reputation for being hardwired for religion, a quirk of imagination which also sees them personifying universal forces and elemental effects in an effort to barter with the unknown and live another day. Many, perhaps rightly, recognize said desire as nothing more complex than a mental release valve for the pent up angst that comes with being a lone point of light in an otherwise dark and rudderless universe. They argue that society creates its own gods in a desperate attempt to find someone, anyone willing to listen to their pleas for mercy as the realization dawns that we will likely never comprehend the meaning of it all.

Humanity is as nothing so it scrambles to create anything that might drop from on high to wrap its arms around them, shepherding the weary home with hazy promises of peace and redemption. An innate need to follow is buried somewhere deep in the very soul, should we really have one, and even those who claim to be fee of the stain of worship miss the fact that all that they do is still based almost entirely upon that very thing. It is not just the presence of deities that unify the major occult systems, but also their roots in mainstream religious practice. Indeed, many supposedly unique mystery schools actually formed as a mist shrouded companion, or in a few notable cases the shadow cloaked antithesis, to the organized priesthood of the time and region.

Thus Kabbalistic and Goetic systems are allied to esoteric Judaism, Thelema has its roots in flawed 19th Century ideas about ancient Egypt as well as Crowley’s burning hatred of Christianity, and Sufism takes the core teachings of Islam and adds a personal, mystical element to the mix. An oversimplification perhaps, but a valid point nonetheless. Even the modern Neopagan revival falls back heavily on the pseudo-history committed to paper by religious zealots during the anti witch craze, a mass hysteria still felt to this day in some African nations where being born different remains a capitol crime.

All that you now are, the research and path working, libraries of knowledge and leaps of faith, only exist because your forefathers developed the initial ideas under the ever watchful eye of the spirituality of the time. In so many ways modern magickians are just vultures picking over the desiccated corpses of those original paradigms, afraid to add anything of value to the mix in our new, godless age. And as researchers travel back along the rotting veins of esoteric spirituality they inevitably find all routes leading to mainstream religion. Even those paradigms such as Atheistic Satanism, who aim to reject their God’s laws and embrace the seven deadly sins, still require the presence of Christianity to exist in the first place for their founding terminology to have any context.

As such, everything that the magickian does, including the actions of heretics who vehemently deny the existence of a spiritual dimension to their lives, can be seen as either embracing or denying the religious thought and feeling that saturates our very reality. It is literally the at the heart of the human condition, and the foundation stone for modern culture. The most Atheistic of people are still forced to bathe in it, drown in it, gulp it down with their first breath and carry it on their shoulders until they cross the Veil. Society is so deeply based upon ancient spiritual ideas that to imagine another way of living at this point would be impossible.

There are those that have tried of course, Humanists for example, but their man as a moral animal argument is yet another reactionary counterpoint to the presence of the gods, and as such falls into a similar category as the others listed here. Even when doggedly fighting the hold that the concept of deity has over culture, society is hamstrung by the fact that the very weapons which may be able to make a difference are forged from the substance of a world that was created by religious men and sculpted from spiritual ideas. This is not a fight that can ever be won, for language itself knows only the gods and mankind’s very minds unknowingly betray them.

If the default setting is one of belief then no matter how hard the species tries to become something more than children of their forefather’s superstitions, said rebellion can only be reactionary at best. In actively fighting against this aspect of themselves humanity is doomed to feed those vary fantasies, even in opposition. Victory is impossible, and the seeds of our loss were sown thousands of years ago when the last shaman became the first priest. Even the paradigm shifting of chaos magick is not immune from this drift towards incarceration, allowing only for a change of yoke but never a final release. And whether that ultimately matters to you or not is one of the few personal choices that still remain in a culture ruled by the followers of jealous gods.