Faust is a tragic play/epic poem of the early 19th Century, which contemporary readers might find too alien and obscure for modern taste, but it massively rewards a patient and thoughtful reader. The story is fantastical, full of symbolism, illusion and allusion. The basic story is outlined below, with notes about some of the coded meanings, but there are many layers that we have deliberately not unpeeled. Those who have the necessary dedication and insight can attempt to fathom the myriad secrets of Faust by themselves.Goethe's hero, Dr Heinrich Faust, a great scholar and physician, obsessively seeks knowledge and wastes no time on trivial pursuits. He has studied philosophy, science, medicine, law and theology, and everyone regards him as a good, worthy man, an exemplar to the rest of humanity. Naturally, he has come to the attention of the Devil (known in the story as Mephistopheles). The Devil wishes to corrupt the good, to take the souls of those most beloved by God. He cares nothing for the zombie masses; they already belong to him.In a discussion between God and Mephistopheles, God specifically mentions Faust as a good man burning with passion for the truth and says, "I will one day lead him to the place of heavenly light." But Mephistopheles sees Faust's obsession with ultimate knowledge as his greatest vulnerability and declares that he can win Faust's soul.God accepts the challenge, since he considers that Faust, even in his moments of darkest despair, will still recognise the path of righteousness, and he grants Mephistopheles permission to tempt Faust.Faust, despite his immense knowledge, is all too aware that he knows next to nothing about the great secrets of the universe. Even by turning to magic, he has been unable to shed significant light. His despair has been so profound that he has contemplated suicide.Wagner, Faust's loyal assistant, is also a disciple of knowledge and believes that if he could know an encyclopedia inside out, he would be the wisest of men. (Wagner represents the scientific rationalist, dazzled by "facts".) Faust knows that all of the information in all of the books in the world still wouldn't draw back the veils concealing the universe's innermost workings. Modern science, despite its great power and many successes, still hasn't come anywhere near providing answers to any of the great philosophical and religious mysteries.Mephistopheles first appears to Faust in the guise of a black dog (symbolising the attachment of humans to their lower nature). When Faust reads from the Bible, the dog barks, snaps and howls and Faust realises that it's possessed. He uses magic to release the true form of Mephistopheles, who appears in the typical garb of a scholar. (This symbolises that the Devil is no crude force of evil but, rather, is an expert in high learning, sophistry and can deploy any number of cunning and meretricious arguments that would satisfy most people. It must always be emphasised that the Devil is not a comic-book caricature of evil. Many Devil worshippers in this world would consider themselves anything but that, so subtly have they been enmeshed in Satanic deception.)In return for Faust's immortal soul, Mephistopheles offers to reveal to him the secrets of creation. Also, he will act as Faust's servant on earth but, if he triumphs, Faust must be his servant in hell. Faust insists on one condition: before he dies, he must experience the most exquisite pleasure that any human can attain, so overwhelming that he will long for time to stand still. Mephistopheles agrees and the pact is signed in blood (to symbolise that the pact must be lived body and soul).Mephistopheles teaches Faust to fly. They visit a tavern where Mephistopheles plays tricks on some revellers who are enjoying a carefree existence of basic pleasure seeking (like most people in our contemporary world).Later, Mephistopheles, with the help of a witch's magic potion, gives Faust back his youth, transforming him into a handsome and rich young nobleman (this miraculous potion alludes to the alchemist's fabled elixir of youth). Also, Mephistopheles promises that from then on every woman Faust meets will seem to him to have the beauty of Helen of Troy. (All of the carnal pleasures of the world are opened to Faust.) Faust seduces a beautiful maiden called Gretchen (who likes to sing songs about legendary Thule), makes her pregnant then deserts her as he goes in search of other hedonistic experiences. However, he ends up in a duel with Gretchen's brother, who regards him as a vile man who has stolen his sister's virginity and ruined her life, and kills him.
Faust, still entranced by new experiences and the desire for knowledge of all things, travels everywhere in the country and takes part in the annual Walpurgis Night celebrations of 30 April, mixing with sorcerers, witches and evil spirits. There, he has a vision that Gretchen has been imprisoned. It transpires that she has drowned her newborn baby (fathered by Faust) because she thought it was evil, and has been driven insane with guilt. Sentenced to death for murder, she is awaiting execution. She recovers her sanity when Faust visits her in her cell. Faust promises to rescue her, but, though she is terrified of what awaits her, she won't leave, knowing she must pay for her terrible crime. When she sees Mephistopheles, she recognises him as the Devil and begs for God's mercy. Later, as she is hanged, a voice from on high announces that she has been redeemed and will be granted a place in heaven. There, she prays for Faust's soul, knowing that underneath it all he is a good and virtuous man.In Part 2 of Faust, Mephistopheles acts as the court jester to the Emperor and solves a financial crisis by instructing the Emperor to issue paper money that will be guaranteed by unmined gold reserves (there is an implication that Mephistopheles will produce abundant gold via alchemical means). This scene symbolises how the Devil can act the fool yet still be pulling all the strings and conjuring miraculous rescues for the powers that be. (In the present day, the rich have been bailed out of the financial crisis by printing money and getting hard-pressed taxpayers to come to the rescue of bankrupt banks, where the rich fools who caused the financial crisis are still happily treating themselves to massive bonuses.)
The Emperor, taking Faust for a great magician, wants him to conjure the spirits of Paris and Helen of Troy. "We made the Emperor rich, and now we must amuse him," Faust tells Mephistopheles. With Mephistopheles' help, Faust performs the task, causing the images of Paris, Helen, and a Greek temple to appear. Helen's beauty overwhelms Faust.Later, Faust is back home. His assistant Wagner has been busy conducting an experiment in the laboratory and has created a tiny artificial man - small enough to fit into a phial - named Homunculus. This creature, like the android Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, craves to be fully human. (The Homunculus is symbolic of the scientist's craving, like that of Dr Frankenstein, to create life.) When the Homunculus, via magic, consults two ancient Greek sages, they advise him that nature and the passing of time will achieve this aim for him. Hearing this, he elects to hurl himself into the sea, expecting to evolve in the same manner as the primordial life forms that eventually gave birth to humanity. This resembles an early version of the Theory Of Evolution: the Homunculus will become human not through an act of divine creation (as in the case of Adam and Eve), but through natural processes. (Goethe wrote Faust before Evolutionary Theory had been formulated by Darwin.)
Via magic, Faust traverses space and time, travelling to ancient Greece to meet the spirit of Helen of Troy. He woos and wins her and they have a son Euphorion. The son is brilliant and can walk and talk from the moment he is born. He thinks he can surpass his human limitations and fly, but, like Icarus before him, he plunges to his death. (Euphorion represents the spirit of recklessness and impatience that impels some people to go too far, too fast, with disastrous consequences. The search for the divine spark must be slow and steady, not a crazy dash for all of the answers all at once. Those seekers who failed to achieve the Grail often did so because of impetuosity; because they had failed to learn the value of patience and careful preparation. The search for the Grail is not a task to which you decide to allocate a few months before growing bored and moving onto something else. Rather, it's the very essence and purpose of your life. Only when you have understood that do you stand any chance of success in your quest for the Grail.)Helen and Faust part after their son's death. While Faust grieves, Mephistopheles tries to tempt him with a final grand adventure, one filled with the promise of ultimate pleasure. But Faust no longer has any interest in sensual pleasures. Instead, he invents a scheme to reclaim land from the sea and put it to good use for the people. (Reclaiming the sea is symbolic of the conscious mind extending into the dark, unexplored regions of the unconscious and bringing to light the secrets of the unconscious that dictate so much of human behaviour.)
Faust is now dying. Despite his many wondrous experiences with Mephistopheles and all the incredible things he has learned, he is coming to the realisation that man will never know everything about life's ultimate mysteries. He grows blind (symbolising his inability to see the final, great truths), but strives to continue with his reclamation project.Mephistopheles orders spirits to dig a grave for Faust, but Faust thinks the sounds of digging show that his project is going forward and will always go forward. At that moment, he experiences sublime joy, the divine moment he has always sought. He utters his last words and dies, at age 100. Mephistopheles is delighted, believing he can now rightfully claim Faust's soul. But, while he is distracted, angels carry away Faust's soul to heaven. God has claimed Faust's soul on the grounds that Faust wasn't experiencing a moment of selfish joy, but rather the transcendent ecstasy of benefiting others. Faust's deliverance came from his altruism triumphing over his hedonism.
The Old World Order, the Power Elite, those who do everything to secure wealth, fame and power are those who will never achieve the Holy Grail. The elusiveness of the Grail is due to the simplest reason of all - the selfish can never possess it, and most people are incapable of overcoming their selfishness. The Grail will always remain hidden from those who seek it as an end in itself rather than as an instrument to bring divine gifts to all of humanity.People should have two objectives - to perfect themselves and perfect the community of which they are part. The vast majority of people fail in both regards. They simply want to glorify themselves and gain power over others. They are Mephistopheles' creatures, destined to remain locked forever in his world, permanently cut off from gnosis.
Faust is the Gnostic seeker of truth who experiences the fall of the soul and then redemption. He achieves the alchemical task of converting base metal (his fallen state) into gold (his admission to the realm of light). Faust is a reflection of Goethe himself, and, going further back, of Simon Magus. To understand Faust, Goethe and Simon Magus is to understand the Illuminati.Christian Lepinte said of Goethe: "[His] thinking is dominated by the idea of a society of initiates perpetuating a sacred myth … The poem Geheimnisse (Secrets) haunts his spirit. The monastic order, whose mysteries are revealed in the fragments of the poem, shares in the Order of the Templars, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry and the mystic quest for the Holy Grail."
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh said, "Western Man - from the dawn of the Christian era, as much as before - has aspired to an imitation of Simon Magus; and he has used Hermetic thought in a fashion that makes not Jesus, but Faust, his 'role model'."Faust has had a huge influence on the German mind and culture. Germany is the archetypal Faustian nation and Goethe is arguably its holiest prophet. Of all people, it was Goethe who came closest to Nietzsche's conception of the Superman. Every great German of the last two centuries has revered Goethe.
Mephistopheles is the Demiurge, seeking to ensnare the soul in the petty pleasures of the world. Mephistopheles means "not a lover of light" (as opposed to Lucifer, the Angel of Light, the light bearer). As well as being an external source of corruption, Mephistopheles represents Faust's primitive side, the aspect that holds him back from attaining his higher self. Mephistopheles comes across as sophisticated and intelligent, witty and urbane. He takes on numerous guises, reflecting the many temptations that beset humanity. Though these temptations may seem desirable and seductive, they are ruinous if allowed to run out of control.
The Devil is not the figure of pure evil that haunts the popular imagination, with horns, a tail, goat's legs and a pitchfork, but rather an ingenious psychologist whose self-appointed task was to create a realm that he would rule without interference, and in which he could trap souls, permanently denying them the chance to be with the True God. In Faust, Mephistopheles knows he is subservient to God, but this was merely a plot device Goethe used for the play. The Devil, in reality, completely denies the existence of the True God. Indeed, he styles himself as "God" (Jehovah/Allah) and even harbours the notion that he is good, and a benefactor for humanity, such is the extent of his self-delusion. Rather than as a demon of nightmare appearance, intent on gorging on evil, Satan should be thought of as a sharp-suited, clever but deluded, selfish egotist not unlike the self-serving captains of Wall Street of today, except on a much grander and more grotesque scale.
The True God is not all around us, as the false religions claim. Rather, it is the influence of the false God, Satan, that is all around us - hence why the earth is no place of goodness, justice, equality, peace, tranquillity and self-fulfilment but rather a cruel, savage, greedy, unjust prison world and veritable hell.
However, the soul, the divine spark, the higher self - a fragment of the divine order - is within us and is our path to salvation. It is via our inner divinity that we will achieve gnosis, not through engagement with the external Satanic world. "As above, so below," is the ancient wisdom. The divine spark is the divine order "below" while the realm of the True God is the divine order above. By focusing on the "below" we can find our way to the "above". The essence of the Gnostic message is that the place to look for God is not outside but inside.
Nietzsche's concept of the Superman, if properly understood, is one means for allowing us to gain access to our higher self. If wrongly understood, it can be its Satanic opposite and lead to an outpouring of barbaric, unsublimated will to power and the tyranny of the strong over the weak. All means of accessing the higher self are invariably double-edged, and the greatest caution must always be exercised for fear of producing the opposite of the desired outcome.
Humanity is separated from God by so-called Creation, the handiwork of Satan, a minefield of obstacles placed between a soul and its true home. The soul is in an entirely alien, hostile and bewildering landscape. It's unsure where it is, what its purpose is, and where it's going. The test for the human soul in a sense could not be simpler - to get home.
Faust, accompanied by Mephistopheles, is given a personal guided tour of Satan's creation and everything it has to offer. It often has superficial attractions (which is why so many are seduced by it), but provides no proper sustenance for the soul and proves first of all unsatisfying and ultimately horrific. Satan's creation is characterised by selfishness and the kingdom of light by altruism. The choice is clear. Which path will you choose?
The greedy captains of Wall Street are damned to hell, while those people, like Faust, who come to their senses and work for the good of others are redeemed. Selfishness is reflected in our society most clearly by money. A few - the Old World Order - want as much of it as possible so that they can have power over the rest of us and indulge their selfishness to the maximum degree. To abolish selfishness, the first step is to remove the absurd disparities in the amount of wealth that people have. All creeds that worship Mammon - like free market capitalism, the libertarianism of Ayn Rand, and Christianity (especially Protestantism) - are the root of evil. The disgraceful slave trade upon which much of Western wealth is based was a product of Christianity (especially that of the Protestant USA and the Protestant British Empire) and free market capitalism. Why have these vile systems still not been overthrown? It beggars belief.
Many enemies of the Illuminati's New World Order are precisely those Protestant Christian Fundamentalists whose ancestors fought for the Confederacy to maintain the slave trade. (The notorious Albert Pike was such a person: it is insane that he has ever been linked to the Illuminati.) It is never any surprise to us to be attacked and reviled by such people. They are right to oppose the Illuminati because we certainly oppose them. Which side would you rather be on? - Illumination or those who hanker after the old Protestant, free-market capitalist Confederate States of America based on slavery?
Freemasons erected a statue of Albert Pike, a high-ranking Freemason, in Washington D.C. He is the only Confederate soldier to have an outdoor statue in the American capital. Pike was a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan (although Freemasons try to deny this). He was a member of the Know Nothing Party that despised the arrival of large numbers of Irish Catholics in America (a hatred that was still palpable a century later when Irish American John F. Kennedy ran for the Presidency.) All of the groups to which Pike belonged were pro-slavery, anti-immigration, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, racist, pro-free market capitalism. (All of these elements appear in the propaganda that they spew out against the Illuminati and the New World Order.) They were white supremacists whose heartland lay in the Confederates States of America. It is the descendants of Pike and co who now form the core support of the Republican Party, who vote into power leaders of the Old World Order such as George Bush, father and son.
The Republican Party is the political power base of the Old World Order. The most vocal opponents of the Illuminati and the New World Order are usually Republicans from the American South. They are terrified of a one-world government because it would involve "foreigners", terrified of a single global currency because it is "foreign", terrified of anything at all that aims at unifying humanity. Who in their right mind would oppose the sort of society envisaged by Star Trek: a one-world government, New World Order, global economic system based on meritocracy?
Returning to Faust, Gretchen symbolises the Gnostic goddess of wisdom - Sophia. Gretchen starts as a paragon of virtue but there is something condescending and off-putting about her. It is only when she has become fallen, thanks to Faust's seduction, and a murderer, by killing their baby, that she is able to see how arrogant and insufferable she was as a sinless person. "Sin" is what makes us human. Wisdom, if it is cut off from the Reality Principle, is a kind of madness. Gretchen, as an immaculate maiden, represents blind wisdom - wisdom based on dogmatic definitions of right and wrong i.e. no wisdom at all. Only when she is fallen does she gain true wisdom and knowledge (gnosis), bringing her to salvation.Helen of Troy is another manifestation of Sophia, and she too must be removed from the pedestal of her perfect beauty to live in the real world of suffering and disappointment. True Wisdom is born in suffering and doubt. When the Buddhists attempt to cut themselves off from suffering, they reveal how far they are from wisdom.
Faust, since he rejected the limits imposed on him by the Bible and the stifling teachings of the Church, would certainly have been damned to hell by Christianity. He was willing for his search for knowledge to take him anywhere. He was a great individual, not a member of a common herd.
Which Historical Figures Provide The Basis of Goethe's Faust?
The original model for Faust was said to be Dr Johann Georg Faust, a German alchemist, astrologer and magician. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, a contemporary of Dr Faust, also supplied inspiration for Goethe's fictitious Faust. Agrippa, the "Prince of Magicians", often described as founding father of occult philosophy, was a secret Illuminatus. He was accompanied everywhere by a black dog, which was regarded by his enemies as his "familiar".
Simon Magus, who lived at the same time as Jesus Christ, often used the name Faustus - the "favoured one". His beautiful lover was Helena, a Greek prostitute whom Simon Magus said was the reincarnation of Helen of Troy. Like Christ, Simon Magus was associated with many miracles such as healing the sick, raising the dead, flying, making himself invisible, walking through fire, feeding thousands from stones that he turned into loaves of bread, making trees bear fruit at any time of the year, creating great illusions such as phantom banquets, shape-shifting, bringing statues to life, controlling demons and creating living human beings. To learn the secrets of Christianity, he was baptised as a Christian, but he soon discovered the corruption and deceit that lie at the heart of that religion. To show his contempt, he offered to buy the secrets of Christianity (to show that he considered them mere tricks that could be purchased in the marketplace like anything else). This is the origin of the word simony - buying religious favours, powers, benefits, artefacts or knowledge.Simon Magus travelled to Persia, Arabia and Egypt to delve into the mysteries known to the high priests and wise men of those places.
In the Acts of the Apostles, it says: "Now there was a certain man named Simon, who before had been a magician in that city [Samaria], seducing the people of Samaria, giving out that he was some great one. To whom they all gave ear, from the least to the greatest, saying: 'This man is the power of God, which is called great.' And they were attentive to him, because, for a long time, he had bewitched them with his magical practices."
The importance of Simon Magus to the Illuminati is highlighted in The Armageddon Conspiracy.
The "Magic" Religion
Humanity cannot proceed to the next stage of its development until the ancient wrong has been righted and Simon Magus assumes his rightful place, or a new religion is established that promotes similar values. Goethe's Faust is, in effect, the gospel of Simon Magus. It encapsulates the central idea of Gnosticism that souls find themselves under the power of the Demiurge (they have "sold" their soul to him, so to speak), and they then have to undertake the arduous task of finding the mystical knowledge that will lead them back to their home: the realm of light. It's a deeply spiritual text, without being in any way conventionally religious. It's a message for which the world is crying out: one that awakens the human spirit while avoiding the horrific dogmas of the world's mainstream faiths. These Satanic religions seek to control people rather than liberating their minds and souls.
A true religion that suits the needs of humanity must be one that grows and evolves with humanity. It cannot be one that was cast in stone thousands of years ago in the deserts of the Middle East. There is nothing whatever in common between the contemporary world and the worlds of Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. The distance between the mainstream religions and today's world grows greater every day, and with each passing day the spiritual side of humanity dies just a little more and the hedonism and trivia grow just a little stronger.
Nothing is more important than the creation of a non-dogmatic religion that suits the times and, above all, helps each person to find their spiritual self in a way tailored to their own individuality. Each soul is unique. We each have to find it in our own way: not by being lectured by someone in a pulpit demanding that we do such and such or we're going to hell. Those preachers are psychotic.
Simon Magus's religion - Illumination - was a religion designed for those who wanted to find God in their own way, but even Illumination was a product of its time and used a vocabulary alien to modern ears. This website strives to convert the ancient teachings of Simon Magus into words with which the people of today can readily identify. It would be no contradiction of Simon Magus's teachings for an entirely new religion to evolve, provided that it emphasised the profound mystery of religion and the personal nature of the search for the divine. The Holy Grail can be attained by anyone, but never via dogmatism and the ancient, dead texts of false prophets. Goethe's Faust rejected all such teachings, Simon Magus did too, and so should we all.
If you have read most of the articles on this website, you yourself are probably a Faustian character, overwhelmed by the desire to know the secret of life, to unlock the door to the greatest mystery, to finally gaze upon God in the expectation of catching a glimpse of your own reflection.
Many people, especially the people of "faith", drift through life in a kind of daze, taking things for granted, never challenging the powers that be, spending their time in endlessly trivial pursuits. The clock ticks down and they have nothing to show for their time on earth. On their gravestones, you could carve the words, "I watched every show of American Idol." Would any dignified human being want that as their epitaph? Is that what human life is all about - watching junk TV? Yet if you examined the lives of the vast majority of the people in the West you would see that watching rubbish on TV, playing computer games, spending hours on Facebook, buying gadgets and eating junk food is how they choose to spend their free time. How you use your free time defines you and most people are therefore defined as spiritually and intellectually dead.
In Britain, one of the world's leading nations, the great debate of the hour is whether to watch Strictly Come Dancing or X-Factor on Saturday night because the two shows are on at the same time. Britain is a joke of a nation. There is nothing "Great" about it.
Conspiracy theorists talk about the horrors of a New World Order, or One World Government or whatever, as if there is some great nightmare to come in the future. But the nightmare is already here. What could be worse than the zombie world we currently inhabit?
The triumph of the Old World Order is already close to completion. What we see all around us is their vision of how things should be. Capitalist democracy - the "freedom" to shop, the opportunity to lavish your free time on mind-numbing garbage, the "freedom" to elect carefully chosen candidates who promise to give you more of what you've been brainwashed into thinking you want - is what underpins their Satanic control.
They need no soldiers, microchips in the head, concentration camps or whatever other paranoid fantasies are summoned up, to control the people. They understand the great and simple secret of how to manipulate the people: give them a tedious job to occupy them for most of the week, then endless ways to fritter away the time they have when they're not at work. Result? - a zombie population, docile, blinded by glitter and bling, with neither the ability nor motivation to resist. "Shall we start a Revolution?" we say. "No, we'd rather watch American Idol and eat popcorn, thank you very much," they reply. That's the world of today.
Goethe's play shows that God is tolerant towards Faust's craving to understand the universe, that God has no requirement of churches, organised religions or sacred texts. It's your individual actions and your personal relationship with God that matter. Even an action such as selling your soul to the Devil in the search of divine knowledge is preferable to doing nothing spiritually. God does not punish effort, striving and mistakes; he rejects those who take no steps towards him, those who are passive and who suck up the easy nostrums of false prophets, those who live their lives stuck in ancient dusty words of "holy" books. There are no such books.
Faust, in order to learn and grow, knows he must make errors and go down wrong paths. It is from all of those experiences that he gains the ability to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong, selfish and altruistic. If he had rigidly obeyed some prophet's instruction manual - like Muslims, Jews or Christians - he would have learned nothing. The people who allow themselves to be guided by ancient words are automatons, slaves, incapable of independent thought. What makes such people think that God is interested in any way in those whose only skill in life is following orders?
An individual such as Faust is always preferred over an unthinking robot that has mindlessly memorised someone else's words and never once dared challenge them. God can forgive those who have erred provided they choose the path of goodness. Robots don't choose; they simply follow their programming. God places no value at all on all of those who are wedded to sacred texts. Imagine the earth a billion years from now on. It is inconceivable that any human alive then will want his religious ideas to be based on texts that are a billion years old. They would be meaningless to him. Life moves on. Humanity moves on. Religion moves on. Religion, to be meaningful, must be right for its time. A religion that is incapable of moving on is a religion that is already dead. Christianity, Islam and Judaism died long ago. Their followers are too stupid, blind and brainwashed to realise it.
The concept of "Sin for Salvation" is consistent with the Faustian worldview. Everyone must experiment, challenge conventionality, flout old, outdated rules and regulations.
Freedom is the preserve of those who struggle for it and work for it daily; not those who take it for granted and never exercise it except in the most trivial of ways. You cannot be free if you choose to follow a restrictive creed that demands slavish obedience to ancient customs and commandments. All organised religion is deadly for human freedom and spirituality, which is why Satan loves the mainstream religions.
A true religion is one that concerns personal growth in a personal context. Others can assist you, but ultimately you are on your own spiritual odyssey, not theirs. Only you can take your path. To truly grow, you must stretch the boundaries, try to break out of the limitations of your normal self to find your higher self.
The IgnaviNear the beginning of Dante's Inferno (Canto III), Dante encounters a vile group of damned souls, a group that represents most of the people in the contemporary world. Dante and his guide, the ancient Roman poet Virgil, pass through the great gate of hell that bears the chilling warning, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." All around them, they can hear the screams of torment and anguish of the souls of the damned. They find themselves in a dark, dismal landscape, the vestibule of hell, reserved for people who are rejected by both heaven and hell. Hell itself lies across the River Acheron, and Charon, the infernal boatman, is charged with ferrying the damned across the dreadful river. (The River Styx lies deeper within the circles of hell.) But here, in the waiting room of hell, a great host is permanently trapped. They will never escape through hell's gate, and nor will they ever cross the river. They are in an eternal nowhere.
This is the Vestibule of the Indifferent, the Indecisive, the Neutrals. They are called the "Ignavi" - the lukewarm or cowardly souls who never committed themselves to any cause. They refused to make a choice in life. They were apathetic neutrals, those who remained on the sidelines while great events transpired. They were too weak, feeble and pathetic to reach a conclusion about anything.The Ignavi are those who leave no mark on the world. They drift through life: non-committal, half-hearted, bland, dreary and grey. They make no meaningful contribution. There are billions of such people. They have never been truly alive; they have never explored their potential and have no concept of living life to the full. They are the anti-Faustians. Most people in the world of this type - zombie consumerists and office workers whose most difficult task each day is shuffling a piece of paper from the in-tray to the out-tray, or deciding what meaningless trinket they will purchase to make them feel good about themselves. They neither know nor care about great causes, about heroic struggles and campaigns to change the world. They would rather watch American Idol.
The Ignavi are condemned to eternally follow a banner (representing the type of cause they always rejected in life), at a furious pace and which is constantly buffeted by a great wind, causing its direction to change continually (just as the Ignavi could never follow a straight, sure path in a noble cause). The banner has no discernible features and can never take a stand, just as those who follow it never could. It is aimless, directionless, vague, anonymous, unspecified, just as they were. They are those who have made the Great Refusal to be anything and anyone because it would take too much effort. Even the powers of hell are repelled by them and want nothing to do with them.Hornets and wasps continually sting them (to try to provoke them into action because they could never make up their minds to act one way or the other on earth). Their non-lives are relentlessly parodied by the punishment they receive. This is true justice. It is the law of "contrapasso" - the punishment exactly reflects the crime. These souls, in life, chose no banner to follow and now they must run after one forever, desperate to attach themselves to something meaningful. The banner symbolizes the pointless, aimless existence of those who make no moral judgments in life, those who stand aside from the great issues of their time.
"This miserable state [Virgil informs Dante] is endured by the dreary souls of those who lived without blame and without praise. They are mixed with the cowardly choir of angels who were not rebellious, nor were loyal to God, but were for themselves. Heaven drove them forth to keep its splendour from being sullied; and the depths of hell receives them not, for the wicked would thus have some glory over them…The world allows no report of them to exist. Mercy and justice disdain them. Do not speak of them, but look and pass on.""And [Dante says] I looked and saw a whirling banner that went by so quickly that it seemed it would never pause; and behind it came so long a train of people that I should never have believed death had undone so many…These wretches, who were never truly alive, were naked and viciously stung by wasps and hornets that made their faces stream with blood, which, mixed with their tears, dripped to their feet, and disgusting maggots collected in the pus."
These souls of the damned have no names. The world did not record that they ever existed. They made no impression on life whatever. The world's graveyards are overflowing with them. They are barely distinguishable from animals. They never exercised their free will, never made the choices that are demanded of all human beings.
Agnostics - those who can't or won't make up their minds about whether God exists - are in danger of becoming Ignavi. Agnosticism, as a phase, is fine. If that phase endures for a whole lifetime it's a catastrophe. Who would want it written on their gravestone that they couldn't make up their mind? That's the fate of every lifelong agnostic. They are too skeptical, too cynical, too indecisive to seize a banner. The whole point of life is to take a stand despite having insufficient data. If all of the answers were readily available, we would have no stand to make. Everything would be easy. The information we need comes to us after we've made our stand, not before.In terms of David Riesman's method for classifying people in The Lonely Crowd, the Ignavi are the "Other-directed", those who always look to others for their cues, those who do not have the courage to act independently of the opinions of those around them. 6,000 people control the world, fewer than one in a million, precisely because the vast majority of people on earth are other-directed and cannot move without the say-so of the crowd or the "leaders". Nietzsche derisively referred to these people as the "common herd". The 6,000 order the common herd to obey and that's exactly what the herd does. Never have so many cows trotted so willingly into the abattoir.
The characters in Beckett's Waiting for Godot are Ignavi. Why are they forever waiting? Why don't they act? Why don't they make a choice? They will wait forever for someone else - Godot - to choose for them. But Godot is never coming. These are the modern and postmodern damned. How many of us are waiting? The clock is ticking and our lives are rushing by, yet still we wait. What are we waiting for? Isn't it time to act? Most of humanity has spent its time awaiting the Messiah - Godot - yet, as Kafka pointed out, he always arrives too late, a day too late. There is no time left for waiting.The great issue of our time is whether or not we will resist the Old World Order. Will you be neutral, indifferent, apathetic? Or will you make a stand? The Power Elite will never be overthrown unless people take actual steps to bring about their downfall. In the last year, the world has endured a financial catastrophe and yet, with the exception of a few sacrificial victims thrown to the lions to appease the mob, all of the same people, institutions and systems of government and economics, are still in place. Why were the whole lot of them not thrown out? Why did everything not change? Why do we refuse the call of justice? Too lazy, too stupid, too brainwashed, too comfortable? Why does "boom and bust" happen? Because nothing changes. The same systems that caused busts centuries ago are still in place now. Why do we never learn? Never has there been a better hour to change the world than now, and yet still no one moves a muscle.
So, what are you doing? Do you have a name, or are you just one of the legions of nameless Ignavi who shrug their shoulders and take neither side? You know the fate that awaits you.
The religion of Faust is the antidote to the Ignavi. The Faustian knows that no one is coming to save him. He must save himself. He will try anything, go anywhere, in his quest for the Holy Grail. He commits himself unreservedly to the greatest cause of all - to discover the innermost secrets of creation. And only one person possesses those secrets: God. And that is Faust's sacred and infinitely inspiring quest - to become God himself. He is the Nietzschean Superman. He has no limits, he bows to no false prophets, he needs no ancient books full of rules and commandments and silly parables and stories.
Goethe's Faust presents the framework for an alternative to traditional religion. Faust serves as a symbol of the soul striving for ultimate knowledge, power and spiritual satisfaction. Keep striving. Keep seeking knowledge. The quest for understanding will take you higher and higher on the ladder of truth and moral development, to heights that are forever denied to the likes of Christians, Jews and Muslims with their silly prophets and ancient holy books full of dead and disproved teachings.
Faust, like great Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey, is willing to go on the most of perilous journeys in pursuit of knowledge. Both men represent the Jungian archetype of the wandering man seeking supreme, transcendent knowledge.
The Old World Order are terrified of Faust. In a world of Fausts, they could not exist. The Fausts would never swallow their propaganda. They would see right through their lies, right through the illusion of their power. The only power the OWO have is that which we allow them to have because we are are too craven to stand up to them. That can change at any time we choose.No one needs Christ, Mohammed or Moses to enter heaven. This is the biggest lie ever perpetrated against the human race. The purpose of Christianity, Islam and Judaism is to control every aspect of a believer's life, to prevent them from exploring life and experiencing gnosis. These are the religions of the damned. Faust's religion is the antidote. There are no rules and no boundaries. You shape yourself, you make yourself. There is no one to save you other than yourself. It's not Christ, Mohammed or Moses who's responsible for your life, it's you. In the end, souls judge themselves.
Those who follow the Faustian religion are those with an insatiable desire for the unattainable, the perfect, the absolute. Christians, Muslims and Jews condemn Faustians to hell, but it is they who will never achieve gnosis and salvation. The Torah, Bible and Koran are the books of the damned.
The quest for higher knowledge through conventional channels is futile. If you wish to quench your thirst for knowledge, you must be bold and adventurous, willing to search in many places. You must not be committed to dogma that blind you to other ideas and experiences. Look at Islam, Orthodox Judaism and Christian Fundamentalism. They are intolerant in the extreme. You can be confident that the followers of these religions have never read the holy texts of their rivals, so how can they be so sure they are right and their opponents wrong? The truth is they are in the grip of fanaticism and are blind and deaf to all other influences. These are the most closed-minded, blinkered bigots on earth and yet they claim to be on the side of the True God. How disgraceful. The True God wants nothing to do with them. He wants only those who set their sights on the highest goals and pursue them with open minds and brave hearts.
We absolutely encourage everyone to read every last word of the Torah, the Koran and the Bible. By the time you are finished, you will be sick to the stomach, incredulous that such poison has ever flourished, certain that these are Satanically inspired works. The best case against Judaism, Islam and Christianity lies in their own holiest books.To show his disregard for Judeo-Christianity, Goethe, in Faust, often makes incorrect references to the Bible, and sometimes twists the references to make them blasphemous. Judeo-Christianity is portrayed as just another myth. Goethe makes many mythological references to show that Faust is no longer a Christian and has turned to pagan lore, alchemy, Hermeticism and Gnosticism for the truth of existence. Everyone else should do likewise.
Isn't it time for the secret religion of Goethe, Simon Magus, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Weishaupt, Leibniz and Hegel? Isn't it time to become Faust? Isn't it time for Illumination?Salvation comes to those who strive for the divine, not those who pick a holy book from the many available and slavishly follow it like robots. Nothing is more disgusting than to see the masses of Christian, Jewish and Muslim androids, believing themselves to be human when they are merely machines. Anyone who seeks an instruction manual craves to be instructed. That is not the road to salvation. Salvation doesn't lie in a rulebook. What matters is whether you have lived in the right way, with the right priorities and, above all, as an individual rather than a machine. Reject all sacred texts. Reject all prophets. God is inside you. You need no one and nothing else. You contain your own salvation. The righteous always save themselves.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
This too is a coded Gnostic tale. The rats that infest the town are symbolic of all the sins, corruption and false beliefs that plague the people. The Pied Piper is an Illuminatus who comes to show the people the path to the light. He asks for a vast reward since he knows that this is the supreme test of the townspeople. If they have listened to his message, they will have no more need of their gold because they will have lost their materialistic greed and they will no longer worship money. They will be happy to pay him the agreed sum (symbolising that they have progressed from the materialistic to the spiritual plane).
The Piper succeeds in driving out the rats (the moral pollution) from the community, but it is a short-term success. When the time comes for the townspeople to pay the Piper, they are still wedded to their old greed and materialism and they don't give him his due. The Pied Piper realises that these adults are incapable of changing their wicked ways, so he leads the children to salvation instead, ensuring that they are cut off forever from the malignant influence of the adults. This is symbolised by the magic mountain opening, the children going inside and then vanishing forever from the knowledge of the townspeople. The only child who fails to gain admission to paradise is the crippled boy (symbolising that he has been too badly injured by the beliefs and corruption of the townspeople to take the decisive step to gnosis).
There are many other coded Gnostic stories, paintings, poems, sculptures, fairytales, operas, myths and legends. They are all around you. Can you see? Can you hear?