Thirty: The Dark Side of Light
ABML examines the dangerously seductive nature of binary thinking
“The recently discovered Essene Dead Sea Scroll known as "The War of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness," for example, is a classic instance of Zoroastrian ethical dualism, fused, however, with the Jewish tribal notion of themselves as the one and only people of God.” - mythologist Joseph Campbell in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, 1986
“This is a war between the children of light and the children of darkness.” - Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant at the Gaza border, October 15, 2023
It all goes back to Zarathustra, otherwise known as Zoraster, who is thought to have lived somewhere between 1200 and 600 BC. The Persian prophet believed there are two creator gods: Ahura Mazda, a lord of light, truth and justice, and Angra Mainyu, a lord of darkness, falseness, and injustice.
Ahura had created a virtuous universe of light, which Angra set about corrupting. As a result we now live in a confusing, maddening mix of good and evil, light and darkness.
It was said that Mazda’s great prophet, Zarathustra, had come into the world born of a virgin. He taught the way of virtue which was to play a part in the vanquishing of Angra Mainya’s corrupted world.
In a prodigious final battle, the powers of light and justice, led by a radiant reincarnation, Saoshyant, of the seed of the prophet Zarathustra, born again of a virgin, will engage, overwhelm, and destroy the whole production of Angra Mainyu, indeed even Angra Mainyu himself. The universe will be cleared of darkness, and the dead, now purged of death, will be resurrected as bodies radiant of uncorrupted being. - Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space
The elements within Zoroastrianism that are echoed in Judaic and Christian scripture hardly need emphasizing.
A cosmic battle
Zoroastrianism’s influence over time is much greater than its current demographics might suggest. As an organized religion, it’s thought to have no more than 100,000 to 200,000 followers, mostly in the region of Iran and India.
The idea of a constant cosmic battle between the forces of light and darkness - an apparently relatively new trope in human thinking at the time of Zarathustra - turned out to be a very seductive conceit, stretching from religious texts of the remote past to the secular headlines of the present. With its Zoroastrian beginnings long forgotten, this binary opposition lingers on today as an accelerant in flame wars - of both the figurative kind in social media and the literal kind in war zones.
There is “no question” that the “Zoroastrian patterns of thought and verbal stereotypes were absorbed into Pharasaic as well as into Essene Judaism,” Joseph Campbell observed.
As the "Sons of Light," at the end of time, in a holy war of exactly thirty-five years with a year of rest every seventh, they are to attack and overcome in programmed stages, with timely help from the great hand of God, all the Gentile nations, the "Sons of Darkness," of this earth.
An inside group in league with light and goodness invariably requires an outside group in league with darkness and evil, as surely as up requires down, and front requires back.
Ergo, a belief in moral absolutes fronted by discarnate cosmic entities, and represented literally or metaphorically by light and darkness, requires believers maintain a permanent, heavily defended border between “good” and “evil”- a border can never be reconciled and must be battled over and at to the very end.
And when such borders are confused with real-world geographic borders, the people on either side will invariably be seen as angels or devils.
The current horrors of Gaza are just the most recent and noteworthy expressions of this seductively binary viewpoint (see journalist Abbie Hoffman’s interview here, suggesting the sentiment of the Israeli general above hardly represents a minority opinion in Israel). It’s reflective of what the Zen philosopher Alan Watts once called the “game of black and white,” in which which white must always prevail at all costs. Everything is permitted, and nothing is prohibited - if it helps white win.
Watts and Jung
Watts once spoke appreciately of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, and what he found most compelling in his thinking: “…his resistance to what is in my mind the disastrous and absurd hypothesis that there is in this universe a radical and absolute conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, that can never, never be harmonized.”
Watts acknowledged there are ghastly humans who do horrific things - he gave the example of Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann, and added he would consider it a duty to resist with all his might a similar figure on the modern landscape:
“I would oppose those sorts of villainies with all the energy I have and if I were trapped in such a situation I would fight to the end. But at the same time I would recognize the relativity of my own emotional involvement. I wold know that I was fighting a man like Eichmann in the same way, shall we say, like a spider and a wasp, insects that naturally prey on each other and fight each other, but as a human being I could not be able to regard my adversary as a metaphysical devil. That is to say, as someone who represented the principle of absolute and irresolvable evil. And I think this is the most important thing in Jung ,that he was able to point out that to the degree that you condemn others and find evil in others, you are like that degree unconscious of the same in yourself, or at least of the potentiality of it.”
Is fairly obvious that one person’s evil is another person’s evangelism. The more we are willing to ascribe metaphysical evil to others, the more we are unable to recognize the darkness within ourselves:
“….There can be Eichmanns and Hitlers and Himmlers just because there are people who are unconscious of their own dark sides and project that darkness outwards onto say Jews, or communists or whatever the enemy may be, and say, ‘there is the the darkness is not in me and therefore because the darkness is not in me I am justified in annihilating this enemy either with atomic bombs or gas chambers or whatnot.’”
Hitler and his henchman took the Judaic/Christian trope of the chosen people and flipped it on its head. The Nazis decided the Germans were the master race - identified less through scripture than through the pseudoscientific concepts of Aryanism and social Darwinism.
In this twisted view, hereditarily correct German people represented the solar consciousness of an angelic higher race - ubermenschen - while international Jewry represented the scheming dark consciousness of a demonic, lower race - untermenschen.
Not incidentally, Hitler and his henchman knew a thing or two about the propagandistic uses of light and darkness. They used the two in tandem, literally and to great effect, in gripping the German people with a sense of the sublime.
Good and evil, as abstract nouns, never fail to leave messy, complicated individual human far behind, leaving in their place two-dimensional cardboard cutouts that can be easily displayed, numbered…or burned. From Aushwitz to Gaza and all the way stops in between - Vietnam, Chile, Guatemala, Iraq, Libya - some dollop of metaphysical evil is required for the pot of hatred to simmer. And if this evil can’t be believably attached to an entire people, a state leader will do just fine as a proxy for foreign darkness (Mossadegh, Allende, Noriega, Saddam, Putin, et al.)
Sometimes these caricatures of evil have a comic book quality. In his unintentionally entertaining 2003 book, Tales from the Time Loop, British writer David Icke introduces the idea of a world under the spell of shape-shifting reptilians from the fourth dimension, whose bloodline is carried by wealthy dynasties. Based on anonymous witness testimony, the author identified The House of Windsor as swarming with reptilians - one of the worst being the late Queen Mother, who occasionally transformed into a particularly gargantuan reptilian whose favourite delicacy was human infants.
Icke apparently didn’t mean this in any metaphorical sense, but literally. This is no mean feat: as modern demonology it’s even more bonkers than the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or the purported spectre of Islamofascism.
“Not peace, but a sword”
It complicates matters when we have to acknowledge a divided aspect within our society or, worse yet, within ourselves. “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts,” the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago. “This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”
Solzynetisn’s “small bridgehead for good” rejects moral absolutism while refusing to embrace a relativism that negates the existence of good and evil outright. I’m reminded of the flowing yin/yang symbol of Taoism, with two dots of light and dark representing the seed of transformation - of one thing shading into its opposite.
Zoroastrianism was among the first systems of thought to abandon the cyclical models of the universe common to the Near East and Asia minor (from Hinduism to Buddhism to Taoism) for a linear, progressive model of human liberation, with God’s redemption of a corrupt world postponed to an indefinite future. Later, without its theological baggage, this notion of an upward climb for humanity supplied the template for political and even scientific concepts of human advancement across history.
Thus a completely new mythology arose, and instead of the ancient Sumero-Babylonian contemplation of the disappearances and reappearances of planets as revelatory of an order of nature with which society was to be held in accord, an idea of good and evil, light and dark, even of life and death as separable took hold, and the prophecy was announced of a progressive restoration to righteousness of the order of nature. Where formerly there had been the planetary cycles, marking days and nights, the months, years, and eons of unending time, there was now to be a straight line of progressive world history with a beginning, a middle, and a prophesied end… Where formerly there had been, as the ideal, harmony with the whole, there was now discrimination, a decision to be made, "not peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34), effort, struggle, and zeal, in the name of a universal reform. - Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space
Across the world, millions of thinking adults continue to mistake archetypal narratives of eternal good versus eternal evil, of light versus darkness, for documentary fact and historical truth. Will we learn to grow up as a species before the first brilliant sign of ‘liberation’ arrives, in the form of a thermonuclear flash?
(Cross-posted here.)
I recently re-read Carl Jung's "Memories, Dreams, Reflections", a great book and easily one of the most profound and meaningful I've ever read. At a certain point in his youth he is assailed by the troubling image of God taking a crap on the Christian Church; an image so troubling to him from his conservative and wholesome background because he recognizes it as a direct communication from what we might call "the mind at large." This revelation of the amoral nature of the universe is reflected in the Shakespeare line "there's nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". Or Pink Floyd's "We all have a dark side to say the least, and dealing in death is the nature of the beast." Always good articles Geoff, great food for thought.