The Djinn have a positive function in creation. This is gnostic anti-earthness at work again. The older gods also have an important function.
Not having been able to finish an essay I’m trying to write on this subject, I just wanted to say a couple of things for people to chew on about the nature of ‘demons’, ‘gods’, whatever… there has been disinformation on this subject for far too long. This is what caused the idea of the ‘Luciferian mistake’ as Michael calls it, which is a divisive duality that has plagued the West ever since the 1st centuries ‘AD’, and which has contributed a great deal to the lack of earth-centredness in our spiritual culture in this hemisphere.
It’s been half a century since the cultural revolution in China, but people have not forgotten how the country was embroiled in unspeakable destruction – for members of this site I’m sure I don’t have to retail how they treated Taoist temples. I bring this up because the behaviour of the Red Guard at that time was absolutely the same as the behaviour of the Christians, when they first appeared.
In 386 the orator Libanius appealed to the Emperor to restrain them:
“They [the monks] are spreading out like torrents across the countryside; and in ruining the temples, they are also ruining the countryside itself at one and the same time. For to snatch from a region the temple which protects it is like tearing out its eye, killing it, annihilating it.”
The tide of annihilation could not in the end be stemmed, but there was an old guard of wisdom who kept up the pagan stream for a while before it at last went under – the Platonic lineage. I have been investigating a man named Iamblichus, who was one of these Platonists. We don’t know his name much now, and even until recently he was being more or less completely ignored by scholars, but at the time he lived he was called the ‘benefactor of the entire world’.
The reason he has been ignored until recently is that, unlike the other Greeks, he saw ritual and magic as central to philosophy and wisdom. This has made him beneath the dignity of our modern scholars to investigate.
He had arguments with other Platonists who insisted that a more theoretical approach alone was sufficient. For example, he excoriated a fellow-Platonist, Porphyry, who had achieved ‘Henosis’ (what would be called in this site ‘union with the Tao’) but who was still subject to bouts of depression; Iamblichus accused him of ignoring the reality of material existence.
According to Iamblichus, there was a hierarhcy in nature, *all* of which had to be respected. Not only the One and All, but the many gods, the angels, the heroes (which is a whole separate and very interesting subject) – and, importantly for the present discussion, daimons (what Morgan is calling Djinn), had to be worked with and understood. Simply to dismiss them was to dismiss the earth itself.
Thus one could have union with ‘God’ and still not be a true part of nature, which was the reason for Porphyry’s depression – his personal material existence had no meaning. I relate this strongly to the distinction Michael makes between ‘head enlightenment’ and ‘whole-body enlightenment’.
The methods of Iamblichus were Western and descended from the Greek mysteries and Egyptian religion. They involved western means as such – the use of herbs, theurgic rituals, magic, and so forth, as well as meditation. But interestingly, Iamblichus (like people on this site) treated *immortality* as the goal of spiritual development – and his definition of immortality was VERY VERY SIMILAR to Michael Winn’s.
Gregory Shaw describes the meaning Iamblichus gave to the word ‘Immortality’ in his book ‘Theurgy and the Soul’. This is a purely academic work really, so apologies if the language is a touch stilted, but I rejoice that an academic can write these things.
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By means of appropriate rites the theurgist directed the powers of his particular soul (mikros kosmos) into alignment with the powers of the World Soul, which gave him direct participation in the “whole”. He became a theios aner, universal and divine yet particular and mortal; in somatic terms this was the result of having filled the measures of his immortal augoeides soma, the soul’s “star body”…
The doctrine of the “soul vehicle” (ochema) in the Platonic tradition is essential… Referred to by Iamblichus as a vehicle or breath (pneuma), the perfection of this aetheric and luminous body effected the soul’s immortalization…
To the degree that a theurgist was divinized and assimilated to the Demiurge he necessarily shared the benign interest of the Demiurge in generated life, including his own. Any aversion he may have felt toward his mortal existence was therefore overcome by his experience of the “whole”, and his physical body became the nexus through which he expressed this divine benevolence…. In his person, he preserved a continuity between the “whole” and its “parts”, between the gods and man.
Iamblichus specifically faults the view of those who defined catharsis [spiritual progression – NN] as a withdrawal from matter. He says: “Some give greater value to freedom from material bonds, liberation from mortality, release from generation and similar *lesser goals* of catharsis.” The greater goals that followed were… unification with the creative cause, the demiurgic acitivity of joining parts of wholes, and the subsequent reinvestment of parts with the vitality of their universal sources….
By entering into the community of the gods as one of its bodies of light, the embodied soul was no longer alienated by matter – nor passionately drawn to it.
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Notice here the use of the word 'demiurge'; Christian Gnosticism uses this word and that is where most who now know it will know it from.
The Gnostics were early Christians and they contrasted the the 'evil demiurge' responsible for the creation of matter with the 'Good God' who lay outside of it. They created a separation, a duality, which influenced many Platonists but by which Iamblichus refused to be tempted. To him nature and earth were still paramount, the very index of spiritual development. The daimons were important functionaries in creation, moving their individual pieces of it as they must; neither they nor the material world they made should be ignored – on the contrary, the greater one's enlightenment the more one would celebrate and parttake of it.
The idea of the Demiurge as a good being would have been incomprehensible to the Gnostics; the idea of daimons as positive likewise; the idea of nature and the body as good likewise.
Iamblichus may have been hailed as a saviour, but the gnostic doctrine of matter-as-evil won out. It just won, and it eradicated all that had come before. The temples were burned, and the connection of spirituality with earthly things, with daimons, spirits-of-place, and so forth, came to be seen in the west either as pathetic supersition (when it was deemed harmless) or else as evil and a matter for being burned at the stake (when it empowered the individual against the political church hierarchy).
All earth-based spiritualities went into hiding. Natural magic was anathema. Daimons became demons, to be shunned. The lesser goals of catharsis were pursued, the greater forgotten. One may find in Iamblichus' list of 'lesser' cathartic goals all the aims of conventional Buddhism, for example. Buddhism, like Islam and Christianity, is a revisionist religion, designed to turn people away from living with nature. That the way might *follow* nature, as Taoists feel, is to such systems abhorrent. There is accordingly, in the eyes of such religions, no good reason for a human being to be born or to exist. The best that can be done is to correct the mistake.
All this is in the past. The old gods and demons are returning – I am not the only one to think so, and they are not at all as political propaganda has led us to believe. The Djinns are amongst them. They do not in the least wish free will to fail – they do not have the power to do so, not the ones I have met. It is *human* abuse of contact with them that led to the problems of power and dominion with which they have become associated – for humans are more powerful than demons and always have been.
The perpetuation of the worldview in which nature, daimons, the body, sex, and the material dimension are seen as evils which must be escaped is something that anyone who believes in being both human and happy should condemn. Our own illusions are all we must escape. As Michael Winn says, the Life Force gives us what we ask of it. If we ask for this material dimension to be a barren and hopeless prison which we must exploit to survive whilst we find a way to escape it, that is what it will surely become. But we don't have to believe this. Looking at the news any day of the week surely gives us information as to where such beliefs lead.
Phew! An essay in itself I guess, sorry about that…. Anyhow, hope it provides some food for thought.
Best to all, NN