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 In The Gospel of Matthew Chapter 5, Verses 38 to 48, Jesus says:
Here we come to some of Jesus's best known and most easily ignored words. 

They are not easy words, and following this path is not easy. But I believe that what Jesus is teaching here is the very highest sort of spiritual development-- and spiritual warfare. Let's illustrate that point by example.

The Magical Battle of Britain

Beginning in 1939, the English Occultist Dion Fortune led a series of magical workings designed to ensure a British victory in World War II. Her method was fairly straightforward-- she and her circle would send out a letter and a theme for meditation once a week to all the members of their organization. On Sunday, the recipient was to open the letter and study its contents, and then, at 12:15-- that is, at high noon on the Day of the Sun-- to face London and enter into meditation on the theme indicated.

At one point, Fortune received a letter urging that she and her group carry out magical attacks on German leaders. Her response is worth careful study:


Fortune was not a pacifist and did not demand that the British lay down arms. She did insist, however, that the spiritual work to be done in aid of the war effort consist entirely in works of healing and blessing. And why?

Note her opening line: "Nothing and nobody is altogether evil." This is because-- to state the very obvious-- everything which exists is. That is, it has being. Being is derived from the One, which is the same as the Good and which we also call God. Therefore, to exist at all is to possess a kind of goodness. The work of the true initiate, then, is not to destroy things, because to destroy is, necessarily, to rebel against God. 

Healing is a very different thing. To heal literally means to make whole. Wholeness is another way of saying oneness; every whole consists of a unity of parts, and that unity is an expression of oneness and is therefore derived from the One. If Germany exists, it is because God wills that it exists, and God does not will evil. If Germany is acting evilly, then the solution is to heal Germany, not destroy it. A regenerated Germany rising up in strength and greatness is a Germany expressing Oneness, Goodness, and Godliness through a particular filter-- the filter of the German nation. 

The Magical Battle of America

I very often think of these lines with regard to the present political impasse in the United States. What would happen if partisans on either side of our divide were to say to one another, "We do not wish to destroy you, but to perfect you?" This country consists of many different subdivisions-- regional, ethnic, religious. What if we had a politics which said "Blacks, Jews, WASPs, Irish and Scots-Irish, Italians, Apaches, Germans, Mexicans and Scandinavians; New Englanders, Appalachians, New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians, High Southerners, Deep Southerners, Westerners, Mid-Westerners, Californians, Cascadians, and the Cubans of Miami; Protestants, Catholics, Jews again, Mormons, Pagans, Wizards and Radicals; Rednecks, Hippies, Yuppies, Cowboys-- each of these is a particular expression of Americanness, and America is a particular expression of Godliness. We are all in this together, like words in a sentence spoken by God. Without exception, all have sinned and fallen short and owe repentance to God and one another; all have triumphed and achieved greatness and are worthy of celebration. All have their own particular struggles, wounds of the past and besetting sins, but we can lean on one another, and all of us can lean on God. We will not force the values of Berkeley onto West Virginia or Charleston onto Minnesota, but we will instead support each in leading the life proper to it in its own proper place, so that each may achieve its own greatness."

How would that change our political discourse?

A Story

Some years ago I was living in a house with 4 or 5 roommates. We were all friends and got along well with one another. Then we had a very bad falling out, and we came to hate one another. It was so bad that I couldn't be in the house alone with them. I got off of work at 5:00, but my girlfriend, who lived with me at the time, got off at 7:00; I would wait downtown for her, so that we could go home together. 

One day I left work and I was feeling extremely angry. It was the kind of anger that doesn't go away, no matter what you do. And I tried everything-- think about something else, take deep breaths, you name it.

I wandered into a coffeeshop, thinking that a cup of chamomile tea might at least calm my nerves. I sat down with my tea, and I remembered that chamomile is a Solar herb and used in rituals of blessing and spiritual protection. That gave me an idea. 

The coffeeshop had a single-use bathroom with a door that locked, and it was relatively clean inside. So I took my tea into the bathroom, locked the door, and did the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. Afterward, I stood in the light, surrounded by flaming pentagrams and the four archangels, and I felt compelled, I do not know by what, to say the Lord's Prayer. At the line "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us," I stopped, and found myself repeating the line over, and over, and over. Then I finished the prayer and took up the chamomile tea. I dipped my fingers in it, and drew crosses on my forehead and on the backs of my hands. 

Then I went back to my seat and entered into meditation, resolving to meditate until the tea on my head and hands dried completely.

In meditation, I visualized each of the roommates that I was angry with, one at a time. I pictured the entire conflict as clearly as I could from their perspective. Once I had a clear sense of their perspective, I called their image to mind again and said "I understand that you can only be who you are. I am sorry for my part in our conflict, and I forgive you for yours." I then thanked them for the friendship that we had at one time, released the image, and moved onto the next person.

When I entered the coffeeshop I was so angry I was shaking. By the time I left I felt like I was floating in an ocean of golden light.

Strangely enough, when I finally got home, my roommates greeted me politely, for the first time in weeks, as though nothing was wrong.

I won't tell you we became friends again after that-- We didn't and we couldn't. But the fight was over. 

Likeness

Jesus tells us to be perfect, as our father in Heaven is perfect; this is how we become children of God. Remember that he has used this term before, in the Beatitudes. And remember that, from our perspective, things are not like one another by coincidence. If something is like another thing, it is because it is participating in the very being of the thing that it is like. By becoming like God, we ourselves become Divine. "Therefore," says Plotinus, "Let each become godlike and beautiful who wishes to see God and Beauty."

The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 5, Verses 20 through 28 reads as follows:

Pharisees and Sadducees

Unless we are more righteous than the Pharisees and Sadducees, we shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. But who are the Pharisees and Sadducees?

Historically, these were two sects within Second Temple Judaism, the Judaism of Jesus's time. The Sadducees tended to come from the upper classes; the Chief Priest and the High Priests were Sadducees, and they had a majority in the Sanhedrin, the ruling court or parliament of Israel. The Pharisees also had power in the Sanhedrin, but came from a more modest social background; the First Century Jewish historian Josephus tells us that they were widely supported by the common people.

For our purposes, we are more concerned with the role of the Saducees and Pharisees in the myth that is the Gospel than in their historical reality. From that perspective, the important points are these: The Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife or in the existence of spirits of any kind. (Notice that they were members of the Upper Class, and had power within both the priesthood and government-- parallels to the modern world very obviously suggest themselves). The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed in the realty of the spiritual world. But they emphasized strict adherence to the rules of the Old Testament, especially the purity laws-- Later we'll find them condemning Jesus for performing miracles on the Sabbath, for example.

We can think of the Sadducees, upper-class materialists who controlled the priesthood and much of the government, as akin to today's atheist or non-religious upper class Social Justice liberals, and the Pharisees as akin to our middle-to-lower class right-wing religious fundamentalists. The parallel is not exact, but it is useful for our purposes, as we will see presently.

The Pythagorean and the Orphic

The late Platonic philosopher Proclus tells us that there are two methods of approaching theology in a symbolic manner, the Pythagorean and the Orphic:

In other words, the Orphics symbolize the divine through Myth, the Pythagoreans, through Math.

In the modern world, we probably aren't used to the idea that mathematics has any relationship to theology. Indeed, the two are often opposed to one another, with "Math" set alongside "Science" and the two together opposed to "Religion." From a Platonic perspective, this makes very little sense. After all, what do mathematical formulae describe, but immaterial realities which constantly shape and uphold the material world? In the physical world, no perfect right triangle exists; the perfect right triangle, whose dimensions are described exactly by the Pythagorean Theorem, exists in ideal form alone. And yet it constantly shapes the world of our experience, and knowledge of it gives us the ability to shape that world.

Myths are the same. As Sallust wrote, they are stories which "Never happened, but always are." Saturn was never a real guy who sat down with a fork and a knife and ate his children; if he had, his story would simply be a horror, and there would be nothing we could learn from it. If we understand that Saturn is Time, and his children are the seconds, minutes, hours and days of our lives, then we can understand something about our world and the way it functions.

The same is true of Christian myth. The Garden of Eden, the Fall, and Noah's Flood; the entire saga of the Old Testament; and now the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, are all, whatever else they are, myths. As works of journalism or history, they may also be more or less accurate-- or they may not be. It doesn't matter: As myths, they describe the immaterial processes which shape our lives and our souls now, regardless of what happened 2,000 years ago. 

This is very important when it comes to passages like these, in which Jesus gives particular moral imperatives. From our perspective, the important thing about the Gospels is that they are myths. When Jesus gives teachings like these, he is playing the part of The Lawgiver, a particular form of a figure common to many mythologies.

The Pharisaic, The Sudducean

Both the Pythagorean and the Orphic methods of understanding the Divine can be debased, and when they are debased, they do an enormous amount of harm. In both cases, the cause of the debasement is the same, and we can call that cause Literalization. Pythagorean formulae or Orphic stories are taken by the Literalizer as descriptions of, or prescriptions for, life in the physical world, rather than descriptions of processes in the Eternal World.

We can call the degradation of the Pythagorean Method the Sadducean Method, and degradatation of the Orphic Method the Pharisaic Method. In the Sudducean Method, beings in the material world are mistaken for numbers in the ideal world; in the Pharisaic Method, myths from the ideal world are taken as descriptions of the physical world. In both cases, the Literalizer often attempts to force the physical world to conform to the Ideal World, often with dreadful consequences.

Knowing the Pythagorean Theorem will give you the measurement of a right triangle, but you will be incorrect if you expect any particular right triangle in the physical world to be perfect; all of them are off, even if by only the tiniest bit. That mistake won't cause much harm, but there are ways that Sadducean Method, applied to human beings, can be very harmful indeed. We see this especially in the reduction of individual human beings to statistical aggregates in modern political rhetoric. Indeed, this is the essence of modern identity politics, whether of the Left Wing (Communist, "Social Justice") or right-wing (Ethnonationalist, Nazi) varieties. 

The reduction of the human being to a statistical aggregate is one of the hallmarks of modern political ideology and, indeed, of modern politics in general. Its fruit is genocide. Nor are its worst features limited to the political Left. 

The Pharisaic Method is equally destructive. The Christian tradition, as we have said, has its own body of myth, beginning with the Garden of Eden and proceeding through the life of Jesus and his apostles, and his eventual return. But its stories about the fate of the soul after death are also myths. The traditional understanding of Hell as a prison in which unrepentant sinners are tormented by fire and demons is a very useful way of understanding what happens to our psyches when we wallow in our own bad behavior and evil thoughts. As a literal description of an actual place in which a supposedly good deity tortures people in a way that would gladden the heart of Ted Bundy, it is a moral abomination, and its promulgation is a form of psychological torture. 

Keep all this in mind when Jesus discusses punishments and hellfire.

A Story About A Bible

Before we continue I want to tell a story.

This happened about 4 years ago. One night I was lying awake reading Eliphas Levi's Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, and I came across his discussion of thoughts, and the way that our thoughts and feelings can affect others at a distance. Levi writes:


As I read this, I thought about the passage in the Gospel that we're discussing today. In particular, I was thinking about Jesus's insistence that even to think lustfully about a woman is to commit adultery with her. That always seemed a little over the top to me, and, of course, in my youth it was more or less a form of torture-- if there is a 14 year old heterosexual boy that doesn't look lustfully at women, I've never heard of him, but of course the priests insisted that God was going to send us to hell for it. (There's that Pharisaic Method again, in all its glory-- and it's not like the priests didn't do any lusting themselves; you can read the Grand Jury report here.)

So if Jesus wasn't just being a jerk or control freak, what could this passage mean? Could it be that he was saying just what Levi was saying-- that our thoughts and feelings can affect others at a distance? If so, the passages about having already committed adultery with a woman you're lusting after are completely literal.

Well, anyway, I thought these things, and then I fell asleep.

The next morning I left the house to walk to work, my work being only a few blocks from my apartment in those days. As I stepped onto the street I kissed my hand and held it toward the Sun, saying a small prayer of gratitude to him for the light of the day. I continued on. After another block or so I came across a book, lying open, face down in the street. 

The book was a Bible.

I picked it up, and in rapid succession, my eyes fell upon the following two passages:

I can't imagine that even the most thoroughgoing Pharisaic fundamentalist could believe that the second passage refers to actual birds flying through the air and telling the king that you're mad at him. No-- King Solomon is teaching the same principle which Jesus is teaching here, and which will later be discussed in detail by people like Eliphas Levi. Our thoughts can affect people at a distance, and we must be very careful with them, lest we become murderers or adulterers, with all the consequences that entails. 

Occult Anatomy

We have bodies which are not made of matter. Contemporary occult theory, which is ultimately an elaboration of ancient Platonism (which is itself an elaboration of still older traditions), recognizes between 2 and 6 levels of existence above the physical, depending on how you divide them. We exist on all these levels, and have fully formed bodies on three of them. 

The physical body you know. Occult theory recognizes the subtle body or etheric body, which consists of the vital energies; you can find details on this in any text on Ayurveda or Traditional Chinese Medicine. Above the etheric body is the the astral body, which consists of the thoughts, emotions, and mental representations. The astral body is also what is known as the soul. 

Above the astral body is what is sometimes called the "mental sheath." This is what is called the nous in Platonic thought, and it is what Jesus and John are telling us to change, that we may dwell in the Kingdom of Heaven. Somewhat confusingly, the mental body isn't a body of thought; thought is astral. It exists at a higher level than than thought. Why is it called a "sheath," rather than a body? Because at our current stage of spiritual evolution, we don't have a fully-functioning body on this level. Saints do, though, and that's why they are able to affect change in our material world. The idea that they "pray to God for us" is mythic language; it means that, at the level of nous, which is also called Intellect or Divine Mind in the texts we've been looking at, they are always united to God, the First Cause, and it is ultimately through the First Cause that any change happens. 

Space, distance, and time exist at the material level. At the highest level, the level of the One or God, there is no space, and there is no time; this is what is meant by Eternity. Between the physical and Eternity, time and distance become less and less relevant. Our thoughts and feelings, existing at the astral level, are only affected by distance to a limited degree. Thus a strongly formulated thought, charged with passion, can affect another person. When Jesus says that you have already committed adultery with a woman by lusting after her, he isn't being metaphorical; when he tells you that anyone who is angry with his brother is already guilty of murder, he's just telling it like it is. To direct evil thoughts at others is to curse them, and curses always carry their own consequences. We can understand those consequences as imprisonment and hellfire: the soul addicted to sin becomes hardened against the outside, and trapped in the burning heat of its own negativity.

These are fundamental principles of magic and of magical ethics in particular, and this is what Jesus is teaching us here.

The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 5, Verses 13-16 reads

Matthew, Chapter 5, Verse 9 reads as follows:

The seventh Beatitude contains a powerful promise: They shall be called children of God. Let's talk about what this might mean, and then attend to the prescription. 

In His Image

The Book of Genesis tells us this about the creation of humankind:


God is the Creator; His name is "He brings into being all that exists." He is referred to as the Father or First Father in both ancient Jewish and Platonic writings. Moreover, the Biblical tradition is clear that humans are, in some sense, created in the image of God Himself-- an idea which we'll return to shortly.

Given that, it's impossible for any of us not to be children of God. So we don't suddenly become children of God by becoming peacemakers. What's going on here, then?

Dikaios and Diabolos

Remember what we said about Plato's concept of Justice a few entries back. In the Republic, Justice, or Dikaois, is that virtue by which each part of our soul attends to its own proper work and that alone, not interfering with the others. As he writes,


Now Justice in a kingdom is analogous to Justice within the soul-- each individual part does its own work, does not interfere with the others, and there is peace in the kingdom. The opposite of Justice, then, both in the soul and in the kingdom, is injustice-- division, conflict, and war.

Here it's worth noting that the word "Devil" comes from the Greek "Diabolos," which means "To Divide." The Devil is the divider and the source of division, conflict, and war.

God, as we know, is a unity-- THE Unity, the source of all unity.

To bring about Peace, either within oneself or the world, then, is to be God-like. Remember that, in the Platonic universe, which is the Magical  universe, things don't ever resemble one another by happenstance. If one thing is like another, it is because they participate in the same underlying reality. To be God-like is to participate in the very being of God, and to manifest God upon the Earth. When we do the work of God, the part of us which is an Image of God becomes visible, and we are called "children of God."

Create Peace in your heart, and peace in the world, and you will manifest the Will of God upon the Earth, and you will become like God.

Create conflict, sew division, or participate in the group conflicts (tribal, racial, class, gender) which are the primary means of social control in our day, and you do the work of the Devil. 

 Dreamwidth helpfully deleted my original draft for this post, so we'll have to begin again at the beginning. The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 5, Verse 7 reads:

With the Fifth Beatitude, we start to see the explicit applications of Jesus's spiritual path in terms of practical magic. We are given a specific promise here: If we are merciful, we will obtain mercy. We'll discuss that in a moment, but first let's attend to the general principle here.

Magic, Revisited

To do that, it may be helpful to back up for a moment, and remind ourselves what magic is, and how it works. The definition of magic that I like best comes from Dion Fortune. According to Fortune, magic is


Notice three things:

First, magic has to do with consciousness. Now consciousness consists of 100% of the mental phenomena we experience. And it only takes a moment's reflection to realize that that means that consciousness means 100% of everything we experience. Indeed, the word "experience" itself really only means "conscious activity." When you look out the window at the street outside, the image of the street is just that: an image, assembled by your conscious mind; it is, in that sense, no different from an image seen in a dream. The facts that the image has a relative permanence, and that it is more-or-less shared with others, does not make it not an image-- rather, the facts of permanence and "sharedness"* are the two qualities that an image must possess for us to describe it as "matter" or "material."

(*Does your mind ever blank in such a way that you can't come up with a common word? Mine does. What is the word I'm looking for here, anyone?)

Second, magic has to do with consciousness-- and everything has to do with consciousness, as we've just seen. Therefore, according to this definition, magic isn't something especially unusual; to the extent that we're always changing our consciousness, we can say that we're all doing magic, all the time-- 

At least, in a sense. Because-- and this is the third point-- to do magic properly is to change consciousness by means of the will. Suppose that I look out the window at the street outside and see something which causes a reaction in me. Say that it's an American flag on my neighbor's lawn, and that this causes a chain of thoughts and feelings in me, something like "That's good-- I want to live in a neighborhood like this-- I'm glad I don't see BLM flags here-- I trust my neighbors." Or suppose it's one of those leftwing Credos that go on about how "IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE BLACK LIVES MATTER, NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL, LOVE IS LOVE," etc, etc, etc, and I think something like "Oh no, not them, we moved out of the city to get away from those people, I hope it never comes to a fight..." In either case, my consciousness has been changed-- but not by an act of my will; rather, by an act of someone else's will. (That's one of the best reasons to learn magic, by the way-- magic is being done to you, all the time, without your consent.)

In order to do effective magic, then, we have to first master our own wills; then we can use them to create changes in the world of experience. 

To Master the Will Is to Become Divine

Plotinus, discussing the nature of the First Principle, which is variously called the Supreme, the One, the Good, or God, says this:

Because God is a unity, His will is not separate from his being; therefore, it can be said that God is a will: the Supreme Will. By acting under our own wills, we come to resemble God. And remember that, in the Platonic universe-- which is the universe of Magical Philosophy-- things do not resemble each other by chance. If we come to resemble God, it is only by participating in the very being of God. As Plotinus says, "self possession must belong to it [that is, to God], so that through It others in their turn may be self-belonging."

Now, herein lies a trap, and we must spring it before we move on. When we start talking about the will, about self-mastery, and so on, the temptation is to visualize a kind of Neitzchean super-man, unbound by any constraint, dominating himself and others by his own power. Not only is that not what we are talking about, that is the exact opposite of what we are talking about. We have already seen that to ascend to the level of God by raising ourselves up is precisely the sin of Lucifer, the cause of his fall from grace. We ascend not by pride but by humility; by humbling ourselves, realizing the limitations of what appears to be our human will, and opening ourselves entirely to God.

The truth is that, if God is Will, then no one, acting under their Will, can ever do an act of evil, because Will is derived entirely from God, the Good. 

The program of the Beatitudes leads us to this point. Recall the process: We start by the realization that we are nothing without God, and opening our souls totally to Him; we continue by turning away from the things of the world, which pass away and die, toward Eternal Things, which always live; we tame and gentle the feral desires of our animal nature; and we turn our desiring power entirely toward the Good. It is only at this point that our true wills and our true nature, which is the Will and Nature of God manifested in a particular being, can begin to shine through us, and we can begin to create change in the world. 

...So Shall He Reap.

And so this is why I say that Jesus is beginning to teach us practical magic, here. His first lesson is this: Whatever you put out into the world will return to you. 

If you desire mercy, you must be merciful. If you are merciful, you will receive mercy.

And the corollaries: If you hate, you will be hated. If you love, you will be loved. If you are cruel, 

Another name for this is karma, and there is no escaping it. But if we can understand it, we can use it to our advantage, and the advantage of the whole world-- which is the same thing.

The Gospel of Matthew 5:5 

The Who Shall Do What?

In order to understand this verse, we need to know the word being translated into English as "meek." Let's find out what it is; consider its meaning from a more-or-less orthodox or traditional perspective; and then see what additional light we can shed on it by the way of Occult Philosophy. 

μακάριοι πραεῖς

Let's start with the translation. The Greek word here is πραεῖς "praeis." The word does indeed connote gentleness, but it has a larger meaning-- as usual. The word doesn't necessarily mean mere weakness, but, rather, the sort of gentleness that comes from self-control. Keep in mind that "gentleness" itself is only possible for those who also possess strength. Weaklings cannot be admonished to be gentle; they have no other choice.

Jesus is praeis, when he faces down his accusers in the Sanhedrin, and goes willingly to his execution. Mahatma Gandhi, who greatly admired the Sermon on the Mount, was similarly praeis when he faced violence and arrest at the hands of British soldiers and police.

Notice that Jesus could have fought, and Gandhi could have fought. Fighting, they might have won-- but what kind of victory would it have been? Only the victory that one dog gains over another when they fight for supremacy in a dog pack. The top dog in any dog pack is still a dog. 

Tellingly, "praeis" was used to describe wild animals that had been tamed. 

Psychic Anatomy, Again

As we've discussed more than once in these pages, the soul can be seen as having three parts, which we can call the nous, thymos, and epithymia. 

The Nous is the reasoning part, but it's more than that. At its highest, the nous extends beyond mere discursive reason into the higher, spiritual realm, and interacts directly with spiritual reality. In fact, this is its proper function; when it is operating properly, the nous sees and knows directly, without any sort of intermediary. Proclus has it that nous has three parts: the highest is nous proper; the next down is dianoia, or discursive reasoning; the lowest is doxa, mere opinion. 

The Thymos is the spirited part. We could think of it as the aggression, or the energy, or the will. I think the best translation of it is "heart," exactly as that word is used by (say) high school football coaches. 

Finally, the Epithymia is the appetite. All of the base drives and desires, whether for food or for sex or for another quarter to put in a slot machine can be found here.

In the soul of the animal, only Thymos and Epithymia are present. An animal desires, and it moves towards its desires. In the natural man, the situation is exactly the same-- the difference is that he possesses a nous. He has opinions, he can understand language. In theory, he is capable of reasoning, and of that which is higher than reason-- but only in theory. In the natural man, Thymos and Epithymia-- the animal parts of the soul-- overwhelm the Nous and subjugate it. Insofar as reason is used at all, it is used only in service of desire and appetite; the higher nous is entirely clouded. (Modern Western languages have no proper translation of nous, and in fact deny its existence; this should tell us all we need to know about the degeneracy of our civilization.)

Taming the Beast Within

In the Phaedrus, Plato writes:


The charioteer is the nous; the noble horse is the thymos; the ignoble, the epithymia.

To gain mastery over the epithymia, to tame and gentle it and subject it to the rule of the nous, is the ultimate aim of philosophy and of the spiritual life. This is the definition of the virtue of Justice in Plato's Republic-- every part of the state performs its proper task; the rulers rule, the workers work, and the warriors submit to the rulers. The rulers, here, represent the nous; the warriors, the thymos; the workers, the epithymia. Every one of us has Plato's ideal kingdom within our souls. As it is said, the kingdom of God is within us.

The Divine Council

Jesus doesn't just tell his followers to be meek or praeis, he makes a specific promise. By meekness, they shall inherit the Earth.

What does this mean?

In one of the most important developments in the last decade, many American Christians have finally gotten around to noticing just how weird their Bible actually is. 

This began-- as far as I can tell-- with the work of an Evangelical Protestant theologian named Michael Heiser. It's not really clear to me why it took until the 21st century for us to get here, but at some point Heiser, who is a very capable Biblical scholar, got down to reading passages like Psalm 82:1


Or Psalm 136:2


Or Deuteronomy 32:8



...and wondering who the "gods" that the Bible continually references are. They aren't the most high-- if so, it would say so, but it doesn't; they are described as "sons of the most high" and they are said to rule over the nations (that's the meaning of Deuteronomy 32. I had to go rather far afield to find an honest translation of that passage, by the way; it was traditional to translate it "children of Israel" and obscure the real meaning).

Once you see it, you can't unsee it. The Bible is full of references like this, which show an understanding of the spiritual world as basically henotheistic-- that is, many lesser deities under the one Most High God.

It is also full of references to a cosmic rebellion. According to this view, some number of the lesser gods-- perhaps a third, perhaps all of them-- have rebelled against YHVH, the true God, as we saw with Lucifer two entries back. These gods are now demons, ruling over the nations but doing it badly and for their own ends, so that, as Psalm 82 continues:

From here, it isn't a very long jump to the traditional Christian understanding of the saints. What are they, after all, but subordinate deities, who rule over particular matters (their "patronage") by the will and through the power of the Most High. As St. Athanasius said, 


And the view of those who hold to "Divine Council" theology is exactly this: The ultimate aim of Christianity is the replacement of the Fallen Angels with Exalted Human Beings.

For the last year or so, a pair of American Orthodox priests have been discussing these issues regularly on a podcast called Lord of Spirits, which I'd recommend to anyone, Christian or otherwise.

Who Shall Inherit the Earth?

Let's bring the discussion back to meekness, or praeis. If we take this view, suddenly it all comes into focus. By taming and subordinating the animal parts of ourselves, we are already, in a sense, taking on the rule of gods. What are gods, but centers of conscious reason and spiritual power that rule over the material world and its lesser inhabitants? And this earthly work becomes a preparation for and an initiation to our ultimate destiny.

In the Phaedrus, Plato continues, concerning the soul and its proper nature:


By meekness, praeis, as Jesus understands it, we step on the path of divinization, through which our soul can regain its wings (in Plato's metaphor), return to its proper home in the Heavenly Realm, and take its own place in the Council of the Gods.