K. So this blog post is my first, and it’s about how I stumbled upon the Temple of Set simply by the the act of trying to come up with an ironically narcissistic header for a new Twitter account.
I’m not kidding. Over the past year and a half, I’ve been moving further and further away from my old path of Zen Buddhism. I broke down the sum total of this transformation into a bite-size block of text when I was thinking about what my typical-of-my-age-group narcissistic Millennial “About Me” sections might look like if I tried to condense my identity and write it into a single text-box. I’ll start there, working backward from the last words in the description to the first, and tell you how the sum total of my life is all compatible with the Temple of Set.
One of the steps along the way is balancing your internal archetypal (abstract, universally accessible to everyone) masculinity and femininity. Men balance themselves by finding the divine femininity, the anima, and stop actively suppressing it. I learned about this in a roundabout way during my auxiliary study of Taoism, when Zen training became too intense and I needed a secondary, gentler focus. Taoism introduced me to Yin and Yang, the balancing “feminine and masculine” principles of nature.
I carried around a copy of the Tao Te Ching in my pocket after being kicked out of a Zen monastery, Great Vow Zen Monastery in Clatskanie, Oregon, for showing signs of clinical psychosis, later confirmed by specialists after 36-hour-a-week intensive therapy. I was given a copy of the pocket Tao Te Ching by a man in Powell’s Bookstore in downtown Portland, Oregon. He randomly approached me as I was walking around in a stupor of acute psychosis in the spirituality aisle, completely disenfranchised from my previous faith and homeless in a huge rain poncho (Portland is hella rainy).
We talked, and he told me he had to quit Zen because it aggravated his Bipolar Disorder. I was diagnosed as Bipolar 5 years prior to our encounter, and was currently medicated by the intensive therapy team. The man working in Powell’s was on the same medication, and was diagnosed with the same subtype of Bipolar Disorder (Type 2) AND the same sub-subtype (Most Recent Mixed Episode).
He told me to come back the next day, and that he’d give me a book of his because his wife had just gone to a flea market A WEEK BEFOREHAND and accidentally purchased him a second copy of the same book. Needless to say, I deeply trusted Taoism as something God-sent for me, because I came back and received his copy of the Tao Te Ching that he took solace in after Zen stopped working for him.
Not kidding. I don’t read it anymore, but it’s sitting on my dresser in my little spiritual-totem pile I keep.
Now the Temple of Set, or ToS, is focused on the Jungian’esque pursuit of finding your true essence, your wise one – balanced in anima and animus (yin and yang) – and aligning it with your life. This process is powered by the archetype of the Egyptian god Khepri (from “khepher”, the act of becoming), which is very Jungian. ToS is described as “psyche-centric self-deification”.
Anyway, last summer, I was walking the last portion – didn’t know it would be the last – of my Yin-based path. I was practicing Reiki and receiving Reiki healing myself, to get over latent childhood trauma stemming from parental issues exacerbated by the way my parents handled their divorce.
My dad had taught me that my mom was a robot growing up. I distanced myself from her and demonized her, becoming extremely neurotic and troubled and even paranoid since she was the one with sole custody. This wreaked a lot of havoc on my childhood: I villified her, my sense of what a mother is “supposed to” do was constantly being skewed by my father’s feedback on everything she did.
And he told me to never tell her he said these things. “Cold”, “practically inhuman”, “more emotionally cut-off than anyone he had ever met”, “sometimes frighteningly distant, like I swore sometimes she must have been raped as a child or something”, “Son, it pains me to say it, but during my darker moments I had almost hoped she had been molested as a child so I could fathom why she is the way she is.”
All that from age 7 (SEVEN) until my father died in 2012 (the day before I was kicked out of the monastery in Oregon).
I chose to remain homeless as a squatter in Portland, 70-ish miles SE of Great Vow Monastery, because my psychosis had warped my dad’s projected misgivings about my mother into a clinical delusion that she was a spiritual void akin to a Devil in my schizophrenic Buddhist cosmological worldview. I came back to live with my mom again after being placed on an anti-psychotic – by that time I was in a homeless shelter working with social workers to establish transitional housing and never go home to my Robot Devil Mom.
This whole experience warped my view of masculinity and femininity. I clung to women whom my dad approved of, over the phone from 2000 miles away, as my “NEW SURROGATE MOTHER”s. This drove me into dependent insecurely-attached (platonic) relationships with older women, and even went as far as me clinging to the moms of my choir-mates in high school, some of whom were Christian.
I became a devout confirmed Methodist, lead singer of their praise band, and mentor-in-training for youth group Bible Study and fellowship.
All because I wanted a surrogate mother that lived to my dad’s view of a real woman.
A real mother.
A true femininity the way it’s supposed to be done. I became immersed in a neurotic relationship with Yin that drove my Zen practice into a state of unbalance, trying to find the most feminine form of enlightenment possible. To find in myself what I learned could never be found in my mother.
And it can’t be found anywhere. It was a caricature of femininity rooted in the sexist views of a Catholic man raised in the 1950s and 60s, who was scorned my his wife who he believed in the eyes of God never left her because they never got their marriage annulled.
I ran away from home several times during adolescence, my dad on the other end of the phone ‘warning’ me more and more that ‘this is just what happens if you try and get close to a robot’. He wanted to prevent me from getting hurt like he did. Even after I was Baker Act’d – compulsory commitment to a psychiatric hospital ward for a minimum of 72 hours – three times and dropped out of high school for a year, was horribly depressed, on SEVEN PSYCHIATRIC MEDICATIONS by age 15.
And my desperately hurt dad still didn’t realize how much he needed me to validate why my mother fell out of love with him and broke God’s sacred matrimony. All his crap about “the breakdown of the nuclear family in America.”
He had me believing in the Illuminati’s threat to humanity, the alien coldness of my emotionally-absent mother, how her father “may have raped her”, and the true patriotism of the Conservative Tea Party.
I was a registered member of the Tea Party Republicans. I’m not shitting you.
I got visions and messages during treatment that led me to believe that my Yin-identifying version of my sense of self, cultivated during Zen, was simply to overcompensate for the love I cut myself off from against my mother because my dad essentially coached me to have narrow proscriptions of what gestures to accept from her as “the real love of a mother”. I identified more as a Yang individual who needed to both embrace my inherent masculinity (animus) and reestablish what my balancing-femininity (anima) truly looked like when stripped of my father’s expectations of feminine people.
I had an intense meditation session after a while of Reiki healing, in my closet in my room, where I was working on establishing an altar. I lit a candle from a Neopagan group full-moon ritual that was supposed to be lit the following weekend during the coming Summer Solstice. I didn’t wait. I had the overwhelming urge to use it because a friend’s mom, present at the ritual, had told me that candles were for releasing pent-up stuff and connecting with higher energies. I just wanted to make all the upheaval of resurgent trauma go away.
I sat from the moment the stick candle was lit until it burned down completely, in silence, for hours. I even reached back into my Zen training even though it scarred me a bit emotionally with the whole psychotic homeless thing. I don’t really care if this next occurrence was schizophrenic in nature, because I’m Jungian AND Panentheist, so I believe visions and spiritual experiences are either legit and a part of a pervasive Godhead archetype that can be accessed by anyone through communion and rites (pan-en-theist, god-in-everything – but God is still separate from Nature; he created it and infused his creation with it)
OR during my more skeptical times, God and the many views of divinity, pantheons of polytheistsic (multiple gods-/-desses) religions, etc. are all part of the Collective Unconscious, a part of everyone engrained in us as humans that can find the same abstract meaning and patterns in things as others can, without even contacting or communicating with these other people. It’s somewhat similar to Plato’s view of form, a sort of primordial True Self.
SO, in my meditation, I had a vision of a particular god, that I saw as related to Yang masculinity, saying that I needed to reevaluate my idea of “your mother’s Anima” and find my own anima separate of the idea fabricated by my “father who was wrong about her”.
ToS follows this journey of using Xeper (Khepri, scarab god, energy of Becoming) to integrate true self the essential, undefiled divinity inherent in us all. And that has meant to me, since starting away from Zen – and when I was neopagan – to discover and reconcile divine masculinity with divine femininity, animus with anima.
KHEPRI, ARBITER OF XEPER, is the Egyptian god of death and rebirth and carries a staff OF THE MORNING SUN (dawn). Believe what you will, theistically or psychoanalytically, about my message from an unidentified solar deity of the dawn that reversed overnight my misconceptions of my mother and years of trauma, and brought me closer to her than I’ve ever been so I can truly embrace my masculinity since I don’t need to overcompensate femininity anymore. It’s real to me. (I thought the deity might have been the Greek Astræus at first, so I’m very openminded about multiple interpretations. Khepri just happens to be one of them.)
Also, during the same time I was receiving Reiki, dung beetles kept coming into the hallways of my apartment building. My mom freaked out and got grossed out by it, but I thought it was cool because I had just watched a movie about Carl Jung and did research on his theory of synchronicity (meaningful coincidences that guide us through life as “signs”, like the dude in Powell’s Bookstore with the same mental illness and spiritual background, whose wife had just happened to by a copy of the same book that helped him transition from Zen to Taoism). Carl Jung coined the term in a famous seminar that was later included in The Collected Works of Carl Jung.
In his lecture on synchronicity, Jung spoke of a mental patient of his who was extremely unstable and neurotic. Working on dream interpretation therapy with her, she mentioned a jewelry box shaped like a scarab beetle (also called dung beetles), inside which was some vague notion of her truth relevant to her therapeutic progress.
As young records, during this session, something hit the window to the office and startled him and the patient. He opened the window and found a now-dead dung beetle killed by its impact with the window.
He told his famous case that this was “her scarab” and from that point on, her therapeutic progress skyrocketed. This is all in his collected works, and transformed his career as well.
So, we never had scarabs in our hallway except for last summer. Turns out that all the roadwork the apartment complex was doing repaving the roads and stirring up the summer wildlife, had scared the beetles out of their regular habitat and into the hallways.
I had three instances of encountering a scarab during this same summer when I received a vision from an unidentified god related to the morning sun. Physically, in real life, confirmed by my mother who freaked out because bugs are gross, I ran into a scarab beetle ON THE SAME NIGHT I WENT HOME FROM THE FULL-MOON RITUAL and did the meditation thing with the candle thing, and the aforementioned vision of a dawn god thing.
You know- the whole life-changing thing I talked about. Reversed 10 years of trauma and delusional thinking.
Well, when I couldn’t accept this new truth after the meditation, I started avoiding my mother, and I ran away from home and stayed with a local neopagan woman. A surrogate mother again. Sheesh.
When I realized I couldn’t stay at her place another night, I went home, she parked across the road from my newly-paved block of the apartment complex, and I cried and walked to my apartment, cursing life.
Something was there at the door, literally ON THE DOOR, TRYING TO CRAWL INTO MY APARTMENT.
A scarab beetle.
I stood, mouth agape as it flipped over on its back and struggled. A frog was staring at it, too. I had read about frogs in a spirit animal book before; they symbolize a great life change. I had the cryptic thought that snapped me out of my stupor:
I’m incredibly grateful for their discernment and compassion.
During my Zen years, I fancied myself a “militant Zennie”. I found all other Buddhist meditation styles too gentle. I had a horrible headcase childhood, and just wanted to break my ego and wipe the slate clean and start over. Deep-breathing Meditation Retreats were weak sauce that people did one time at some cushy mountain lodge with a bunch of middle-aged middle-class White people, and talked about for months afterwards at every gentle yoga class I went to.
I also did Power Yoga three times a weak – for the sake of playing savior to my Militant Zen image, I gotta point out that I also did high-intensity almost-pilates Yoga.
I didn’t just breathe deep for a weekend.
I destroyed my entire sense of self, brick by boring brick, by sitting on a zafu (Zen seating cushion, round, stuffed with only the coarsest, least accommodating buckwheat hulls for maximum discomfort… purchased it online along with a zabuton, the large square cushion that goes under the zafu)… sitting on it for 45 minutes in the morning upon waking, and 25 at night before bed, in complete stillness and silence, positioned directly with eyes half-open – never closed except to blink – at a blank wall in my room that I’d stripped of all decoration. Back completely straight, taking any thoughts and fizzling them out to return to the sensation of breathing, numb legs wrapped each-foot-on-top-of-opposite-thigh, posture, pressure of buckwheat under my ass, itches I refused to scratch, hands touching gently at the tips of the thumbs, unmoving until the alarm rang and I got up to do walking meditation for 10 minutes.
Every day for two years while working two jobs I chose specifically because they grated my nerves and challenged my ego, and going to college full-time. That kind of prolonged pressure sent me into chronic psychosis that I thought was just a “step toward enlightenment”. I sold everything in my room other than my mattress and dresser, and was accepted into two monasteries back-to-back: Great Vow in Oregon and Green Gulch Farm in California, for two months each. I was on track to start at Green Gulch and work to move on to their mountain monastery for committed monks, Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery.
Hating my mom, delusional, unknowingly psychotic, I was ready to dedicate my life to the continued destruction of my ego and complete coalescence with Nature That Doesn’t Suck Like Humans Do With Their Cancerous Egos.
Until I found out that I was only doing Zen out of fear of falling back into my childhood ego, which did indeed suck. But egos don’t suck in general.
“Right-Hand Paths” desire a communion with nature through the process of diminishing the ego’s influence on human perceptions. Nature is seen as immutable, objective. The ego is superficial, subjective. They reject the idea of increasing the power of one’s enmeshment with spirituality if that power is gained by building the self up and increasing distance between the immutable state of nature. I did that until it killed me.
In the intensive therapy program in Portland, I was creatively diagnosed with a “spiritual emergency” and “annihilated sense of self“.
Right-Hand Paths did bring joy and richness to many people’s lives. They’re not inherently bad or good- I just thought they were the only way. They’re everywhere: Abrahamic religions other than their gnostic and mystic offshoots, most Hindu and Buddhist paths other than Tantra (sex-magick), Pagan nature-based religions, most Neopagan outcroppings, even Scientology if you count that.
Left-Hand Paths are right for me because I need to retrain my ability to build a sense of subjective self, an empowered, integrated, unabashedly self-centered meaning in life. I’m glad I wiped my slate clean with Zen – human constructs like shame or rejection of “selfishness” don’t phase me. I know the self will always reassert its influence even with the most diligent or even militant ego-diminishing RHP practices. That’s common knowledge when you’re practicing Zen, and it’s experienced every time you sit in silence in front of a blank wall. Every urge to follow a train of thought, shift position to relieve discomfort, scratch an itch, daydream, ruminate, plan, philosophize, stew in anger, revel in ecstasy, fantasize, catastrophize, attach, desire, fear….
It’s not going away, so I’m going to use it to empower myself. Psyche-centric (self-centered) practices do not equate to lacking concern for others, or being anti-nature. LHPs like he Temple of Set and Satanism are not morally bankrupt or without ethics.
In my switch to asserting myself as a form of spirituality, I moved through Neopaganism after Reiki cleared up my trauma, and started spontaneously identifying as Luciferian even though I didn’t really know the official definition. I just knew the Lucifer archetype and preferred it to the materialistic Satan archetype. I watch Ancient Aliens when my mom has it on in the living room- they talk about that shit.
Well, during the last bit of remnant Right-Hand practice, I received Reiki level One certification from my healer, and in the little primer we went over that’s now sitting in a folder in my cabinet, she explained that channeling is generally done outward from the right hand.
When we were giving me a feel for what it’s like for an initiate to channel, we discovered mine channeled from my left hand.
I didn’t think much of it then. I didn’t even know what the Left-Hand Path was until The Temple of Satan started getting a lot of attention in mainstream news on social media with their litigation and Baphomet statues and campaigns advocating for the separation of church and state in America. I thought they were pretty cool, and my pagan friend had just given me a tarot reading that I’d have to confront my ideas of who I think I am to discover who I am underneath it all, and that my teacher would be archetypal masculine. I first thought it would me my friend themself, that was doing the reading, to be my teacher in a passive way, because they reminded me of my old Yang (archetypal masculine) self, despite them being socially feminine-aesthetic and a typically-beautiful female.
Scarab flips and reversed mommy issues, and gender ideas being revamped on spiritual and social levels, I was completely open to someone so socially feminine to be my ambassador into spiritual masculinity.
But I was wrong. The person who did my reading is Right-Hand Path, total nature’y transcendental basically-just-wants-to-be-a-merperson-forever-in-the-sea-in-a-shiny-grotto-forever. Masculine-yang, but right-handy.
I simply took their cues and admired their outward yang power. It reminded me of how I was. But this wasn’t my teacher.
In simply looking up “Luciferianism” on Wikipedia today to make an ironically-narcissistic Twitter header-text About Me section, I wanted to make sure I was using this “Luciferian” word correctly.
I wasn’t. Luciferians are LHP, but they are more nature-conserving than Satanists of other practices. I’ve always been sensorily detached. I like thinking about societal ethics and thinking in abstractions about feelings and nuances and shit.
(My personality test since childhood, developed ironically from Jungian ideas, always pegged me as an “INFJ”, an I.ntroverted, iN.tuitive, F.eeling-based(ethics, not emotions) J.udgment-oriented personality.)
Luciferianism doesn’t jive too well with that because INFJ-gloss-personality generally doesn’t connect to the sensory world too much. Each type isn’t just a combo of letters – they come with a systematized ascription of cognitive-emotional functions common to each type. INFJ’s weakest function is Extraverted Sensing, and only because I believe the tests throughout my entire life correctly typed my personality despite everything I went through as INFJ, I don’t mind using what amounts to pseudoscience to explain my proclivities in choosing a spiritual path. The nature-concern portion of Luciferianism, downplaying the psyche (not diminishing it – it’s still a LHP, but you build yourself up by helping others AND acting as protectors of nature, above nature as guardians), doesn’t vibe with me. I’m too much of a headcase – and I genuinely enjoy that – to force my external sensing strong enough to give a crap about nature. And I’m too left-handed spiritually to devote that much self-countering energy to force a connection. Forcing extroverted sensing in spite of my ego would fall under Right-Hand Path practice.
Luciferians just happen to like nature more than me. They don’t venerate it or worship it.
When I saw under the Luciferianism section of Comparison of Theistic Satanism Branches – I was still just looking up socially-correct terminology for my Twitter - I saw the Templev of Set, and checked it out because I grew up WANTING TO BE AN EGYPTOLOGIST (my mom and stepdad would literally by me books about Egypt to read on plane flights to visit my dad).
I read that Set is the Egyptian God who is the father of Anubis, and I always loved Anubis as a child. I even named some of my first Internet handles “WrathOfAnubis”. So, being the Jungian sign-follower that I’ve become over the past year, I read down the page, through the parts about Psyche-centric self-empowerment, Xeper being the power rooted in Khepri the scarab God…
Flipped THE FUCK OUT because I still have the dehydrated dead scarab from my apartment hallway in a plastic container filled with salt, sitting on my dresser everyday, next to the Pocket Tao Te Ching from Powell’s Bookstore, and ask my stones from my neopagan days.
but the past-life was likely influenced by Carl Jung, hence my affinity for Jungian archetypes. Jung was also considered an INFJ himself, and he invented the system. Black Bear is just a fun factoid – I hibernate to recharge (a yin action), and go out and play (black bears are the least aggressive)
and the great thing about being an Androphilic male (dude who likes dudes) who’s Neurologically and Psychologically Atypical (and diagnosed, on the record, non-attention-seeking, Saw The Specialists Got The TShirt, with two psychotic disorders… TWO- I can show you the records)….
I can believe all of this or none of this, and flip into skeptical mode or type all of this self-identification and publish the text…
And being called crazy won’t affect me. I’m already insulated from any shame or self-judgment about my superstitious pseusoscientific unsubstantiated beliefs, because I am crazy. I’m a honey badger and I don’t give a shit. And I could be wrong and made all these connections up to suit me.
But making meaning out of my self is totally what I intended to do when I switched to Left-Hand Path, so if crazy makes me feel happy and balanced and powerful, then fuck yea, sledge – bring on the ritual satanist magicks.
My astral body is ready.
Hail Set, pass me the Lucifer to the left-hand side, tell Satan I said “What’s shakin’?”, invite that shit-roller dung-beetle Khepri along. I’m down to ride.
I WANT TO BELIEVE.
SET IS A FOX.
I’M SCULLY AND I LIKE FOXES. SMOLDERING FOXES.
ASK QUESTIONS.
TRUST NO ONE.
I’m not kidding. Over the past year and a half, I’ve been moving further and further away from my old path of Zen Buddhism. I broke down the sum total of this transformation into a bite-size block of text when I was thinking about what my typical-of-my-age-group narcissistic Millennial “About Me” sections might look like if I tried to condense my identity and write it into a single text-box. I’ll start there, working backward from the last words in the description to the first, and tell you how the sum total of my life is all compatible with the Temple of Set.
From a .txt document I saved on my computer, literally and flippantly, as “so_tumblr_rite_nao.txt“:
twitter account description
Panentheistic Jungian Luciferian INFJ, Past-life Early-20th-century Upper-Germanic Metaphysicist, Black-Bear-spirited, White, Assigned-Male-at-birth, Cisgender Nonheteronormative Dude, Neuroatypical Androphilic Demisexual Homoromantic, Yang-archetype, Dual-psyche, Anima-balanced, College-abandoning, Unemployed, Pop-punk Tenor Singer-in-training
- Pop-punk tenor singer-in-training
- Dual-psyche, Anima-balanced
One of the steps along the way is balancing your internal archetypal (abstract, universally accessible to everyone) masculinity and femininity. Men balance themselves by finding the divine femininity, the anima, and stop actively suppressing it. I learned about this in a roundabout way during my auxiliary study of Taoism, when Zen training became too intense and I needed a secondary, gentler focus. Taoism introduced me to Yin and Yang, the balancing “feminine and masculine” principles of nature.
I carried around a copy of the Tao Te Ching in my pocket after being kicked out of a Zen monastery, Great Vow Zen Monastery in Clatskanie, Oregon, for showing signs of clinical psychosis, later confirmed by specialists after 36-hour-a-week intensive therapy. I was given a copy of the pocket Tao Te Ching by a man in Powell’s Bookstore in downtown Portland, Oregon. He randomly approached me as I was walking around in a stupor of acute psychosis in the spirituality aisle, completely disenfranchised from my previous faith and homeless in a huge rain poncho (Portland is hella rainy).
We talked, and he told me he had to quit Zen because it aggravated his Bipolar Disorder. I was diagnosed as Bipolar 5 years prior to our encounter, and was currently medicated by the intensive therapy team. The man working in Powell’s was on the same medication, and was diagnosed with the same subtype of Bipolar Disorder (Type 2) AND the same sub-subtype (Most Recent Mixed Episode).
He told me to come back the next day, and that he’d give me a book of his because his wife had just gone to a flea market A WEEK BEFOREHAND and accidentally purchased him a second copy of the same book. Needless to say, I deeply trusted Taoism as something God-sent for me, because I came back and received his copy of the Tao Te Ching that he took solace in after Zen stopped working for him.
Not kidding. I don’t read it anymore, but it’s sitting on my dresser in my little spiritual-totem pile I keep.
Now the Temple of Set, or ToS, is focused on the Jungian’esque pursuit of finding your true essence, your wise one – balanced in anima and animus (yin and yang) – and aligning it with your life. This process is powered by the archetype of the Egyptian god Khepri (from “khepher”, the act of becoming), which is very Jungian. ToS is described as “psyche-centric self-deification”.
- Yang-archetype
Anyway, last summer, I was walking the last portion – didn’t know it would be the last – of my Yin-based path. I was practicing Reiki and receiving Reiki healing myself, to get over latent childhood trauma stemming from parental issues exacerbated by the way my parents handled their divorce.
My dad had taught me that my mom was a robot growing up. I distanced myself from her and demonized her, becoming extremely neurotic and troubled and even paranoid since she was the one with sole custody. This wreaked a lot of havoc on my childhood: I villified her, my sense of what a mother is “supposed to” do was constantly being skewed by my father’s feedback on everything she did.
And he told me to never tell her he said these things. “Cold”, “practically inhuman”, “more emotionally cut-off than anyone he had ever met”, “sometimes frighteningly distant, like I swore sometimes she must have been raped as a child or something”, “Son, it pains me to say it, but during my darker moments I had almost hoped she had been molested as a child so I could fathom why she is the way she is.”
All that from age 7 (SEVEN) until my father died in 2012 (the day before I was kicked out of the monastery in Oregon).
I chose to remain homeless as a squatter in Portland, 70-ish miles SE of Great Vow Monastery, because my psychosis had warped my dad’s projected misgivings about my mother into a clinical delusion that she was a spiritual void akin to a Devil in my schizophrenic Buddhist cosmological worldview. I came back to live with my mom again after being placed on an anti-psychotic – by that time I was in a homeless shelter working with social workers to establish transitional housing and never go home to my Robot Devil Mom.
This whole experience warped my view of masculinity and femininity. I clung to women whom my dad approved of, over the phone from 2000 miles away, as my “NEW SURROGATE MOTHER”s. This drove me into dependent insecurely-attached (platonic) relationships with older women, and even went as far as me clinging to the moms of my choir-mates in high school, some of whom were Christian.
I became a devout confirmed Methodist, lead singer of their praise band, and mentor-in-training for youth group Bible Study and fellowship.
All because I wanted a surrogate mother that lived to my dad’s view of a real woman.
A real mother.
A true femininity the way it’s supposed to be done. I became immersed in a neurotic relationship with Yin that drove my Zen practice into a state of unbalance, trying to find the most feminine form of enlightenment possible. To find in myself what I learned could never be found in my mother.
And it can’t be found anywhere. It was a caricature of femininity rooted in the sexist views of a Catholic man raised in the 1950s and 60s, who was scorned my his wife who he believed in the eyes of God never left her because they never got their marriage annulled.
I ran away from home several times during adolescence, my dad on the other end of the phone ‘warning’ me more and more that ‘this is just what happens if you try and get close to a robot’. He wanted to prevent me from getting hurt like he did. Even after I was Baker Act’d – compulsory commitment to a psychiatric hospital ward for a minimum of 72 hours – three times and dropped out of high school for a year, was horribly depressed, on SEVEN PSYCHIATRIC MEDICATIONS by age 15.
And my desperately hurt dad still didn’t realize how much he needed me to validate why my mother fell out of love with him and broke God’s sacred matrimony. All his crap about “the breakdown of the nuclear family in America.”
He had me believing in the Illuminati’s threat to humanity, the alien coldness of my emotionally-absent mother, how her father “may have raped her”, and the true patriotism of the Conservative Tea Party.
I was a registered member of the Tea Party Republicans. I’m not shitting you.
- Anyway, Temple of Set and re-embracing my masculinity and revamping all my views on gender, socially and spiritually:
I got visions and messages during treatment that led me to believe that my Yin-identifying version of my sense of self, cultivated during Zen, was simply to overcompensate for the love I cut myself off from against my mother because my dad essentially coached me to have narrow proscriptions of what gestures to accept from her as “the real love of a mother”. I identified more as a Yang individual who needed to both embrace my inherent masculinity (animus) and reestablish what my balancing-femininity (anima) truly looked like when stripped of my father’s expectations of feminine people.
I had an intense meditation session after a while of Reiki healing, in my closet in my room, where I was working on establishing an altar. I lit a candle from a Neopagan group full-moon ritual that was supposed to be lit the following weekend during the coming Summer Solstice. I didn’t wait. I had the overwhelming urge to use it because a friend’s mom, present at the ritual, had told me that candles were for releasing pent-up stuff and connecting with higher energies. I just wanted to make all the upheaval of resurgent trauma go away.
I sat from the moment the stick candle was lit until it burned down completely, in silence, for hours. I even reached back into my Zen training even though it scarred me a bit emotionally with the whole psychotic homeless thing. I don’t really care if this next occurrence was schizophrenic in nature, because I’m Jungian AND Panentheist, so I believe visions and spiritual experiences are either legit and a part of a pervasive Godhead archetype that can be accessed by anyone through communion and rites (pan-en-theist, god-in-everything – but God is still separate from Nature; he created it and infused his creation with it)
OR during my more skeptical times, God and the many views of divinity, pantheons of polytheistsic (multiple gods-/-desses) religions, etc. are all part of the Collective Unconscious, a part of everyone engrained in us as humans that can find the same abstract meaning and patterns in things as others can, without even contacting or communicating with these other people. It’s somewhat similar to Plato’s view of form, a sort of primordial True Self.
SO, in my meditation, I had a vision of a particular god, that I saw as related to Yang masculinity, saying that I needed to reevaluate my idea of “your mother’s Anima” and find my own anima separate of the idea fabricated by my “father who was wrong about her”.
ToS follows this journey of using Xeper (Khepri, scarab god, energy of Becoming) to integrate true self the essential, undefiled divinity inherent in us all. And that has meant to me, since starting away from Zen – and when I was neopagan – to discover and reconcile divine masculinity with divine femininity, animus with anima.
KHEPRI, ARBITER OF XEPER, is the Egyptian god of death and rebirth and carries a staff OF THE MORNING SUN (dawn). Believe what you will, theistically or psychoanalytically, about my message from an unidentified solar deity of the dawn that reversed overnight my misconceptions of my mother and years of trauma, and brought me closer to her than I’ve ever been so I can truly embrace my masculinity since I don’t need to overcompensate femininity anymore. It’s real to me. (I thought the deity might have been the Greek Astræus at first, so I’m very openminded about multiple interpretations. Khepri just happens to be one of them.)
Also, during the same time I was receiving Reiki, dung beetles kept coming into the hallways of my apartment building. My mom freaked out and got grossed out by it, but I thought it was cool because I had just watched a movie about Carl Jung and did research on his theory of synchronicity (meaningful coincidences that guide us through life as “signs”, like the dude in Powell’s Bookstore with the same mental illness and spiritual background, whose wife had just happened to by a copy of the same book that helped him transition from Zen to Taoism). Carl Jung coined the term in a famous seminar that was later included in The Collected Works of Carl Jung.
In his lecture on synchronicity, Jung spoke of a mental patient of his who was extremely unstable and neurotic. Working on dream interpretation therapy with her, she mentioned a jewelry box shaped like a scarab beetle (also called dung beetles), inside which was some vague notion of her truth relevant to her therapeutic progress.
As young records, during this session, something hit the window to the office and startled him and the patient. He opened the window and found a now-dead dung beetle killed by its impact with the window.
He told his famous case that this was “her scarab” and from that point on, her therapeutic progress skyrocketed. This is all in his collected works, and transformed his career as well.
So, we never had scarabs in our hallway except for last summer. Turns out that all the roadwork the apartment complex was doing repaving the roads and stirring up the summer wildlife, had scared the beetles out of their regular habitat and into the hallways.
I had three instances of encountering a scarab during this same summer when I received a vision from an unidentified god related to the morning sun. Physically, in real life, confirmed by my mother who freaked out because bugs are gross, I ran into a scarab beetle ON THE SAME NIGHT I WENT HOME FROM THE FULL-MOON RITUAL and did the meditation thing with the candle thing, and the aforementioned vision of a dawn god thing.
You know- the whole life-changing thing I talked about. Reversed 10 years of trauma and delusional thinking.
Well, when I couldn’t accept this new truth after the meditation, I started avoiding my mother, and I ran away from home and stayed with a local neopagan woman. A surrogate mother again. Sheesh.
When I realized I couldn’t stay at her place another night, I went home, she parked across the road from my newly-paved block of the apartment complex, and I cried and walked to my apartment, cursing life.
Something was there at the door, literally ON THE DOOR, TRYING TO CRAWL INTO MY APARTMENT.
A scarab beetle.
I stood, mouth agape as it flipped over on its back and struggled. A frog was staring at it, too. I had read about frogs in a spirit animal book before; they symbolize a great life change. I had the cryptic thought that snapped me out of my stupor:
- “You have to flip the scarab.”
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FOR SOMEONE AS BIG ON GENDER-FLUIDITY AND BREAKING EXPECTATIONS AS YOU ARE, STARTING UP TWO CLUBS IN COLLEGE ADVOCATING FOR EQUALITY AND TOLERANCE OF EVERYONE REGARDLESS OF HOW GENDER INFLUENCES THEIR SEXUALITY AND THEIR SELF-EXPRESSION, WHY AM I THE ONLY ONE YOU STILL FORCE THESE GENDERED IDEAS OF WOMANHOOD AND BEING A GOOD MOTHER ON? I never said a word about your father growing up – and I know we talked about why it would be horrible for a child to ever hear one divorced parent talk badly about the other – and to think he was feeding you this bullshit about me and telling you I was a damaging mother just because he couldn’t admit that, no, it wasn’t that I’m incapable of love, but that I was incapable of LOVING **HIM**… Your father did much more damage to you than he convinced you I had done.
But what about the Temple of Set? I get their actual transformational symbol is a scarab, and scarabs represent your Jungian philosophy, and maybe you’re saying that Khepri the Egyptian god of the Dawn and death and rebirth actually helped you eliminate trauma before you even knew who Khepri was; and yea you ran into two scarabs directly in front of your door- What does that have to do with the rest of your stupid Twitter description, like…
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Panentheistic Jungian Luciferiam INFJ…??
- Luciferian INFJ
I’m incredibly grateful for their discernment and compassion.
During my Zen years, I fancied myself a “militant Zennie”. I found all other Buddhist meditation styles too gentle. I had a horrible headcase childhood, and just wanted to break my ego and wipe the slate clean and start over. Deep-breathing Meditation Retreats were weak sauce that people did one time at some cushy mountain lodge with a bunch of middle-aged middle-class White people, and talked about for months afterwards at every gentle yoga class I went to.
I also did Power Yoga three times a weak – for the sake of playing savior to my Militant Zen image, I gotta point out that I also did high-intensity almost-pilates Yoga.
I didn’t just breathe deep for a weekend.
I destroyed my entire sense of self, brick by boring brick, by sitting on a zafu (Zen seating cushion, round, stuffed with only the coarsest, least accommodating buckwheat hulls for maximum discomfort… purchased it online along with a zabuton, the large square cushion that goes under the zafu)… sitting on it for 45 minutes in the morning upon waking, and 25 at night before bed, in complete stillness and silence, positioned directly with eyes half-open – never closed except to blink – at a blank wall in my room that I’d stripped of all decoration. Back completely straight, taking any thoughts and fizzling them out to return to the sensation of breathing, numb legs wrapped each-foot-on-top-of-opposite-thigh, posture, pressure of buckwheat under my ass, itches I refused to scratch, hands touching gently at the tips of the thumbs, unmoving until the alarm rang and I got up to do walking meditation for 10 minutes.
Every day for two years while working two jobs I chose specifically because they grated my nerves and challenged my ego, and going to college full-time. That kind of prolonged pressure sent me into chronic psychosis that I thought was just a “step toward enlightenment”. I sold everything in my room other than my mattress and dresser, and was accepted into two monasteries back-to-back: Great Vow in Oregon and Green Gulch Farm in California, for two months each. I was on track to start at Green Gulch and work to move on to their mountain monastery for committed monks, Tassajara Zen Mountain Monastery.
Hating my mom, delusional, unknowingly psychotic, I was ready to dedicate my life to the continued destruction of my ego and complete coalescence with Nature That Doesn’t Suck Like Humans Do With Their Cancerous Egos.
Until I found out that I was only doing Zen out of fear of falling back into my childhood ego, which did indeed suck. But egos don’t suck in general.
“Right-Hand Paths” desire a communion with nature through the process of diminishing the ego’s influence on human perceptions. Nature is seen as immutable, objective. The ego is superficial, subjective. They reject the idea of increasing the power of one’s enmeshment with spirituality if that power is gained by building the self up and increasing distance between the immutable state of nature. I did that until it killed me.
In the intensive therapy program in Portland, I was creatively diagnosed with a “spiritual emergency” and “annihilated sense of self“.
Right-Hand Paths did bring joy and richness to many people’s lives. They’re not inherently bad or good- I just thought they were the only way. They’re everywhere: Abrahamic religions other than their gnostic and mystic offshoots, most Hindu and Buddhist paths other than Tantra (sex-magick), Pagan nature-based religions, most Neopagan outcroppings, even Scientology if you count that.
Left-Hand Paths are right for me because I need to retrain my ability to build a sense of subjective self, an empowered, integrated, unabashedly self-centered meaning in life. I’m glad I wiped my slate clean with Zen – human constructs like shame or rejection of “selfishness” don’t phase me. I know the self will always reassert its influence even with the most diligent or even militant ego-diminishing RHP practices. That’s common knowledge when you’re practicing Zen, and it’s experienced every time you sit in silence in front of a blank wall. Every urge to follow a train of thought, shift position to relieve discomfort, scratch an itch, daydream, ruminate, plan, philosophize, stew in anger, revel in ecstasy, fantasize, catastrophize, attach, desire, fear….
It’s not going away, so I’m going to use it to empower myself. Psyche-centric (self-centered) practices do not equate to lacking concern for others, or being anti-nature. LHPs like he Temple of Set and Satanism are not morally bankrupt or without ethics.
In my switch to asserting myself as a form of spirituality, I moved through Neopaganism after Reiki cleared up my trauma, and started spontaneously identifying as Luciferian even though I didn’t really know the official definition. I just knew the Lucifer archetype and preferred it to the materialistic Satan archetype. I watch Ancient Aliens when my mom has it on in the living room- they talk about that shit.
Well, during the last bit of remnant Right-Hand practice, I received Reiki level One certification from my healer, and in the little primer we went over that’s now sitting in a folder in my cabinet, she explained that channeling is generally done outward from the right hand.
When we were giving me a feel for what it’s like for an initiate to channel, we discovered mine channeled from my left hand.
I didn’t think much of it then. I didn’t even know what the Left-Hand Path was until The Temple of Satan started getting a lot of attention in mainstream news on social media with their litigation and Baphomet statues and campaigns advocating for the separation of church and state in America. I thought they were pretty cool, and my pagan friend had just given me a tarot reading that I’d have to confront my ideas of who I think I am to discover who I am underneath it all, and that my teacher would be archetypal masculine. I first thought it would me my friend themself, that was doing the reading, to be my teacher in a passive way, because they reminded me of my old Yang (archetypal masculine) self, despite them being socially feminine-aesthetic and a typically-beautiful female.
Scarab flips and reversed mommy issues, and gender ideas being revamped on spiritual and social levels, I was completely open to someone so socially feminine to be my ambassador into spiritual masculinity.
But I was wrong. The person who did my reading is Right-Hand Path, total nature’y transcendental basically-just-wants-to-be-a-merperson-forever-in-the-sea-in-a-shiny-grotto-forever. Masculine-yang, but right-handy.
I simply took their cues and admired their outward yang power. It reminded me of how I was. But this wasn’t my teacher.
In simply looking up “Luciferianism” on Wikipedia today to make an ironically-narcissistic Twitter header-text About Me section, I wanted to make sure I was using this “Luciferian” word correctly.
I wasn’t. Luciferians are LHP, but they are more nature-conserving than Satanists of other practices. I’ve always been sensorily detached. I like thinking about societal ethics and thinking in abstractions about feelings and nuances and shit.
(My personality test since childhood, developed ironically from Jungian ideas, always pegged me as an “INFJ”, an I.ntroverted, iN.tuitive, F.eeling-based(ethics, not emotions) J.udgment-oriented personality.)
Luciferianism doesn’t jive too well with that because INFJ-gloss-personality generally doesn’t connect to the sensory world too much. Each type isn’t just a combo of letters – they come with a systematized ascription of cognitive-emotional functions common to each type. INFJ’s weakest function is Extraverted Sensing, and only because I believe the tests throughout my entire life correctly typed my personality despite everything I went through as INFJ, I don’t mind using what amounts to pseudoscience to explain my proclivities in choosing a spiritual path. The nature-concern portion of Luciferianism, downplaying the psyche (not diminishing it – it’s still a LHP, but you build yourself up by helping others AND acting as protectors of nature, above nature as guardians), doesn’t vibe with me. I’m too much of a headcase – and I genuinely enjoy that – to force my external sensing strong enough to give a crap about nature. And I’m too left-handed spiritually to devote that much self-countering energy to force a connection. Forcing extroverted sensing in spite of my ego would fall under Right-Hand Path practice.
Luciferians just happen to like nature more than me. They don’t venerate it or worship it.
When I saw under the Luciferianism section of Comparison of Theistic Satanism Branches – I was still just looking up socially-correct terminology for my Twitter - I saw the Templev of Set, and checked it out because I grew up WANTING TO BE AN EGYPTOLOGIST (my mom and stepdad would literally by me books about Egypt to read on plane flights to visit my dad).
I read that Set is the Egyptian God who is the father of Anubis, and I always loved Anubis as a child. I even named some of my first Internet handles “WrathOfAnubis”. So, being the Jungian sign-follower that I’ve become over the past year, I read down the page, through the parts about Psyche-centric self-empowerment, Xeper being the power rooted in Khepri the scarab God…
Flipped THE FUCK OUT because I still have the dehydrated dead scarab from my apartment hallway in a plastic container filled with salt, sitting on my dresser everyday, next to the Pocket Tao Te Ching from Powell’s Bookstore, and ask my stones from my neopagan days.
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And the whole morning star staff of Khepri thing, and scarabs moving the sun across the sky everyday thing, and Egypt, and this whole wordpress postv for posterity. And self-validation. And Left-Hand empowerment. Lucifer and Satan are rad as hecky, but socially-speaking, I’m considering more in line with Set.
- And I just found out Lucifer translates to “light-bringer” and in Greek “bringer of dawn”, and I already called my Left-Hand Path initiate ring that I wear my “Ring of the Dawn”, so more synchronicity and I’m gonna be a Jungian Setian who still draws upon the Lucifer archetype when I wear my Lucifer Ring.
but the past-life was likely influenced by Carl Jung, hence my affinity for Jungian archetypes. Jung was also considered an INFJ himself, and he invented the system. Black Bear is just a fun factoid – I hibernate to recharge (a yin action), and go out and play (black bears are the least aggressive)
and the great thing about being an Androphilic male (dude who likes dudes) who’s Neurologically and Psychologically Atypical (and diagnosed, on the record, non-attention-seeking, Saw The Specialists Got The TShirt, with two psychotic disorders… TWO- I can show you the records)….
I can believe all of this or none of this, and flip into skeptical mode or type all of this self-identification and publish the text…
And being called crazy won’t affect me. I’m already insulated from any shame or self-judgment about my superstitious pseusoscientific unsubstantiated beliefs, because I am crazy. I’m a honey badger and I don’t give a shit. And I could be wrong and made all these connections up to suit me.
But making meaning out of my self is totally what I intended to do when I switched to Left-Hand Path, so if crazy makes me feel happy and balanced and powerful, then fuck yea, sledge – bring on the ritual satanist magicks.
My astral body is ready.
Hail Set, pass me the Lucifer to the left-hand side, tell Satan I said “What’s shakin’?”, invite that shit-roller dung-beetle Khepri along. I’m down to ride.
I WANT TO BELIEVE.
SET IS A FOX.
I’M SCULLY AND I LIKE FOXES. SMOLDERING FOXES.
ASK QUESTIONS.
TRUST NO ONE.
