Relational Evil
In late 2022 I started a book project which I had to put on pause after approximately 100 pages and half a year of work. This project explores the notion of Radical Evil through the lens of Kabbalistic lore and my own lived experience.
Since then a lot has happened, in my life, in yours, and in the world around us. I am returning to this project slowly, gently, wandering the garden of its ideas, testing the soil and the buried seeds, by when they might be ready to sprout. This book might still take me years to finish, despite ending in a relatively compact and short body. Putting your heart's tongue onto evil is not a process that should be rushed or forced. Micro-dosing the touch of evil on ourself is a wise strategy, and one that according to my experience at least takes decades of careful straying, wondering, and roaming in its far periphery.
Because of the time it will take to finish this project, I decided to share a short sequence from it here. In this section, I am dealing with the notion of Relational Evil or evil as something that can only be experienced in a relationship, never in and out of itself. Given how tightly many of us feel encircled these days by agents of evil I hope this short sequence can shine a light on who these presences truly are. And how most of them could not exist without us.
Note: The context in which these explorations of evil as a relational category take place in the book is important: this is just one of several ways of approaching the phenomenology of evil. For example, in the final text we will also consider evil as a residue or as part of a cosmic symmetry.
If you choose to read the following paragraphs, please consider them a gift passing from my hands to yours. This gift might be as insignificant as a pebble you picked up during a hike in the mountains. Yet, despite its insignificant material value, I am handing it over to you as a healing gift, infused with the spirit of tikkun (תיקון). That is, with the calm spirit of drawing out the Divine from all the places that seem the furthest removed from it. Take good care.
LVX,
Frater Acher
May the serpent bite its tail.
Relational Evil
The question of Evil is a question of relationship.
In a dream I once lived in a house and discovered a door that led to steps down into a cellar. It went down and down until the cellar narrowed into a cave-like passage that led further into the depths. The passage was propped up with plywood boards and offered just enough space for me to squeeze through on all fours. Finally, I reached a ladder that led down into a shaft.
Suddenly, I remembered that this was a place I had been before, only I had lost all memory of it. I was on my way, it dawned on me, to my old temple, deep beneath the house in which I now lived. And the memories that dimly returned with it were not good ones. On the contrary, although I could not clearly grasp the memories of this place, I felt the quivering, deep-seated fear that I had buried with them. It was down here that had cost me great effort to forget, and probably to escape. Something was buried here, imprisoned, locked away, that was in no way compatible with my life up there.
I put my foot on the ladder and descended. Arriving at the end of the ladder, I found myself in a round, high cave, about 60 feet wide, made of dark, hewn stone. In the center, occupying almost the entire width of the cave, was a heavy, ancient, cathedral-like metal dome. In the shimmering light, it glowed silently, a gateway to the place that had to remain buried at all costs. Fear was now in my mouth, like a hand reaching into my throat. And with it, there was the memory of something filthy, evil, devastating, locked under that dome. What my senses felt of the presence of this evil down here was profoundly terrifying. It was shapeless and yet the most concrete, clear threat to myself that I remembered ever feeling. It was invisible, yet vast, sprawling, and all-consuming.
I turned back from that place. Climbed back up the ladder, through the narrow passage back into the first cave, from here into the cellar, steadily upward to the surface. At each threshold I remembered to close the doors behind me, to turn off the light behind it, to bury every foot of way in the corridors in darkness. And during the ascent from the corridors of this ancient temple, I swore never to return to this place again, and to forget it completely. For what I now understood was that in the presence of this being under the metal dome there was no place for my own. What I understood now was that this being would annihilate me completely, with skin and hair, with heart and tongue. If only I came too close to it once again, it would swallow me like a stone is swallowed by the sea. All that defines me, that smells, tastes, and feels like me, would be gone upon coming any closer to this being. Not even my bones would remain, not a trace of my hand in the corridors that led to it, not a cloud of my breath. Everything and everyone who had ever known me would instantly forget me, if I made contact again with that something under the black dome.
Evil is a matter of relationship. A desert is evil incarnate to an ocean, and vice versa. And yet desert and ocean are the foundation of life to entire species living within and from them. Evil is not much of an ontological description, but a judgement born from a particular standpoint. This perspective again is defined by a purpose. Evil, then, is not only that which destroys the ability to achieve that purpose, but the being that once held that purpose. Evil leaves no trace of what once was. Evil extinguishes hope by destroying the vessel in which hope would have been delivered.
In my dream above, my dream-self’s purpose was to continue to flourish in the way I was known to myself; and contact with the being underneath the dome would have led to the exact opposite. It would not only have led to death, but to complete extinction of what I once had been, of what I was at that moment in time, or would ever become. Evil was not the end of my story, but the burning of the book of my life.
Evil only exists as an encounter. It is not an independent natural force, but describes the impact upon something. Evil is a relational quality. To speak of evil, thus, we have to speak of ourselves. Not necessarily as a psychological construct or sociological identity, but as a species, as a spirit, or a spark. To understand evil we have to look into the mirror of our self; so we can travel through that flame, into the realm beyond.
But let’s tone it down a little. As we know, it’s the doses that makes the poison, and it is the nature of embodied life that it is mixed up with all shades of evil. If all encounters with evil would lead to our annihilation, none of us would be here any longer. To be precise, nothing, in that case, would be here any longer. Evil, considered in a less radical form, is an experience of everyday life. Still, we can only observe it at work on any given object. For its essential nature remains the same: it can only exist as an impact upon something, never in and out of itself.
Excursion into Hell
Now, if we consider evil as a relational experience, we should also ask ourselves what is the experience of hell? If evil is the annihilation of self as I know it, then the abode of evil itself is the following experience: it’s the radical expulsion from the circle of the living, a segregation into the utmost banishment of solitude, a freezing into the ice of isolation. Here we experience a complete standstill, buried alive, eternally removed from telling our story to the end, from completing our form, from falling from today into the ashes of tomorrow and becoming the soil of the future. Hell, then, is the end of time without the end of our own physicality.
Hell might have also been the place I visited in my dream. This forgotten old temple, deep under the earth of my waking consciousness. Whatever was caged under that steel dome, that something I was so bone-deep afraid of was in hell itself. Whatever was there – and however terrible and final the encounter with it would have been for the version of me that feared it so – that something was equally desperate, wild and panicked on its side of the dome... So in that momentary encounter in my dream, who of us was deeper in hell? Me, in the threat to my individual existence, or that something under the dome, in its complete seclusion of my dream memory?
Hell, we realise, is the end of transience without the end of life. Sickness, dying, even looking into the face of evil itself are all experiences that take place within the fabric of creation. They all rest like stones in the river of time and we wash over them on our journey from here to there, from the eternal before to the eternal after. Hell, in the sense of evil as a relational aspect, is the end of experience without the end of embodiment. The eternal undead in its grave. Or that something buried alive in my dream. These are the places of ultimate exile. Here we have cut out a piece of the web of life from the body of creation and kept it alive artificially, without any contact with the rest of creation. Without before or after, welded into an unchanging presence of solitude. Hell is thus the opposite of the grave as a place of rot and decay. Hell is the place where neither death nor life can reach us anymore. It is the iron dome itself, shutting the atavistic impulse of life underneath it away. And it is the dreamer’s fear preventing them from releasing this something, back into the fabric of life and death. Hell is a dungeon in which we are denied not only daylight and contact, but ageing itself.
“The word of Sin is Restriction.”
Possibly the most archaic and ancient way of becoming aware of the presence of evil is when we act against the advice of our inner voice. No matter which time and place, humans (and possibly some animals as well) hold the magical capacity to sense an inner voice that gives them moral clues about what might be right or wrong. This is not a function of philosophical or religious education, but a fact of life. Let me give a personal example.
I remember stealing matches from the kitchen once when I was a little boy. I was standing in the overgrown lot that bordered the house. I had rolled aside one of the heavy stones that marked the fireplace, exposing a large ant’s nest underneath. Fascinated, I watched the wild work of the little creatures as they shouldered larvae and tried to carry them to safety. I struck a match and lowered it burning into the middle of the ants. The little black bodies melted together like plastic, leaving grotesque, charred shapes; empty shells of the creatures they had been a second ago…
I still recall that moment vividly, even though it is now almost forty years ago. What fascinated me so much about this experience was not only my sudden power over life and death, but the distinct, instinctive feeling of crossing over a threshold. A voice inside me called out loudly that this was wrong in a way that required no justification. A hand reached out from my heart, trying to stop my own hand from lowering the burning match onto the ants. But lo! Here I was. So small and yet so mighty. In a split second, I was able to break the grip of the inner hand. I could turn my own hand against the inner voice. If nothing else in this world, I had the power to overcome what made me human.
If we follow Immanuel Kant, it is the clarity of our rational mind that conditions the clarity of our inner voice. The voice is always present, but the sharpness and training of our mind determines how nuanced, detailed and precise we sense it. Therefore, for Kant, education and enlightenment were the central means to contain evil and expand the responsible human being. In the kind of goêtic magic, which I am exploring in my recent books, we follow exactly the same logic. Only here the place of the rational mind is taken by those beings and spirits that we commune with. In this kind of magic, it is the quality and presence of the spirits we cohabit with that decide the hue of our consciousness. Even a thoroughly uneducated person can, under these circumstances, have a very high level of heart education (German: Herzensbildung). And their ability to sense the nuances of their inner voice may far exceed that of their academic brothers and sisters.
If one follows this view further, one recognises evil – at least in this low-threshold dosage – as that which counteracts inner coherence. Evil, then, is that which fragments and threatens unity. Now we also recognize evil as an essential function in nature. In low doses, it does not completely extinguish, but fragments, tears apart, dissolves, and in conjunction with other forces of this surging cosmos, stimulates new growth… My own ability to hear my inner voice so clearly today is also based, at least in part, on the lived experience of choosing to go against it. The growth I have experienced as a human being comes at least equally from the good I have done as well as from the evil.
So we are all in bed with evil. At every step and at every moment. But mostly by the limitations with which we are able to hear our inner voice. The more subtle, clear, complex our inner voice reaches us, the less we are bound to evil - that is, to the desire to destroy ourselves or others.
And that is the paradox of evil: To overcome it, we must first overcome the urge to dominate. The primal urge to assert ourselves against this inner voice that seems to curtail our freedom so drastically… To act free of one’s conscience can be seen as the ultimate self-assertion – and thus the ultimate certainty that we actually exist. It is precisely this primordial fear of not being here, of not feeling ourselves, of not knowing ourselves, of sinking unseen into the waves of the world, that leads us in final desperation to rebel against ourselves. This is also what makes it so daring to give space to the inner voice. Because in the space I give my inner voice, there is no more I, Me, Mine, no more Having, Holding, Knowing. There is only listening and surrender.
Now, whether that is a foolish thing, a naïve thing, a dangerous thing, to surrender to this voice, that depends entirely on the spirits we have surrounded ourselves with.
[…]
“Woe, woe therefore to him the unchaste who shirks scornful the seeming-trivial, or flees fearful the desperate, adventure. And woe, thrice woe, and four times woe be to him who is allured by the adventure, slacking his Will and demitted from his Way: for as the laggard and the dastard are lost, so is the toy of circumstance dragged down to nethermost Hell.”
