HABEAS MENTEM ! λόγος! אוֹר! >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Of
Manure & Man
I. SATAN
S A T A N
or
B e e l z e b u b
“Guilt is become my nature and my joy ;
I breathe essential vice; and most I seek
for that selectest crime, which to conceive is luxury…”
Adamus Exul
Hugo Grotius
1601
Beelzebub
בעל (Baal):
The verb בעל means to dominate, be lord over, own, or rule something.
זבב (zebub):
The verb זבב means to move erratically like the fly.
Some think זבב (zebub) is related to the verb זבד (zabad)
which means to give, and to the noun זבד (zebed): gift.
Plainly, the name Beelzebub could be an old title used to define Satan because he moves like an erratic fly, a title adopted as long ago as our oldest book of the Bible, Job, in which Satan is described as “going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it” (Job. 1:7); he is commonly called “Lord of the Flies.” We know this enemy makes a full circuit stalking the earth, “seeking whom he may devour” (1 Pet. 5:8). Is it irrational to ask if Baalzebub could just as reasonably be defined (in spirit if not in letter) as “Lord of The Gift“, “Tyrant of The Gift,” “Master of Bait,” he who takes ownership and dominates by using the gifts he gives or by perverting God’s gifts?
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If heaven’s plumbing ever broke and spilled to the earth then Satan was the defilement that rained from above, and the working-class God in Christ is the hero that came to save the day. Touch not this unclean thing. It has the form of fertility but lacks the power of it, even though fertility cults spring up from it like hallucinogenic mushrooms from golden calf dung.
Arch-Sadducee
Arch-Communist Revolutionary
Satan is the chief royal dignitary over the vast empire of deceit, death, and eternal doom. He was the first government agent to attack the farmer and private property owner in his trade, long before Lenin, Stalin, and FDR; but he didn’t start that way.
In his beginning, he was “the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty” (Ezk. 28:12). He was “the anointed cherub who covers”; God “established [him]” “on the holy mountain of God….” (v14). However, his “heart was lifted up because of [his] beauty,” and he “corrupted [his] wisdom for the sake of [his] splendor” (v17). Arch-Sadducee that he is, Satan began to sing his own praise and redistribute God’s glory to himself and his comrades. While yet in heaven, he stole fire from the “consuming fire” that is God (Exodus 24:17).
Arch-Interstellar and International Merchant
Arch-International Banker who Inflates Inverted Values
We could speculate within reason that Satan acted as an arch-trader traveling from heaven to the new-born earth, consuming, collecting, and redistributing among his comrades forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He has long promised to attain good by evil means, and he sets the highest price on his evil tools while pretending to discount them into the unpriced category of “gifts.” “[B]y the abundance of [his] trading [Satan] became filled with violence within, and [he] sinned,” for which the Almighty “cast [him] as a profane thing out of the mountain of God” (Ezk. 28:16).
In 1601, at merely 18 years of age, the famed Dutchman named Hugo Grotius wrote (in Latin) with the stern gravity of a Hebrew prophet and force of Greek tragedy, and he gave the world an inspired drama based on Adam’s fall, titled Adamus Exul. The elite intellects of Europe heaped highest praise on the work. John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) was a rib taken from the side of Adamus Exul by Hugo the Great (“Grotius” is the Latinized version of the Dutch deGroot, which means “the Great”). In the play, Grotius depicted Satan speaking to himself thus as he blazed down asteroid-like to siege the family farm of Heaven’s first earth-born son:
“… Adam lives
No doubt, most genially, with his fair bride,
Rejoicing in safe wedlock: his whole soul
Is glorified within him, and he boasts
To fill my vacant throne, and be a god,
Or, like a god, among the immortals. I
Will work on his self-flattery. Not for this
Do I renounce my vengeance, till I wreak
My wrongs and griefs on him, whom to destroy
Shall vex the court of heaven. All peace forsworn
The unconquerable soul within me vows
Eternal war unsparing and unspared;
My violent heart o’ercharged with direst curse,
Burns to inflict the infliction. I will bring
His proud soul under, or be double damned.
Doth he not mock me, laugh to bitter scorn
My prowess and assaulting, while, with brow
Of worship and calm reverence, he pursues
The steep ascent to heaven. Satan, beware!
Beware in time; be watchful, else this butt
Of thy supreme chicanery shall assume
The post among the immortals, which he holds
With such propriety of lordly grace
Amid the earth-sprung legions. Then, indeed,
Unhappy Lucifer, thou might’st indulge
The crimson blush of impotent shame, to find
Thy vacant thrones and palaces on high
Filled by these dust-born insolents. Awake!
Arise! proud fiend; bestir thy battailous strength
O arm of power, unmatched of all but one
And crush the pitiful fools, who thus attempt
To ape, to insult their noblers; who, like dwarfs,
Would ride on prostrate giants, famed of old.
Hell! I invoke thee! Ye Tartarean powers
Lend me your blasting influence.
And ye, too, Chaos and Night, your emulous arms array;
Thrones, dominations, all from heaven accursed,
Therefore with me confederate and conjoined,
And hurl one mingled ruin on the foe.
Let Pride, o’erwhelming and invincible Pride,
Marshal our ranks; and infidel Blasphemy,
And Error’s pitchy shade; Ambition, Strife,
The insatiable avarice of new gains; the lust
Of riotous appetites, the faith of lies
And levity, credulous of things unknown,
These be our ministry, our harbingers
Of Victory. Pests and plagues, ye snaky train,
Ye clinging curses, ye soul-blistering stings,
Burst your infernal gaol; come one, come all,
In your black pomp of horrors, and invade
This Paradise of Earth. With venomous frauds
Stir the clear soul of man; with goading thoughts
And carking cares assault him. Let no art
Of malice be forgot. In Eden’s bound
Hath God two trees, of Life and Knowledge, placed.
The first, of faith symbolic, he permits
Adam to eat; the other he denies,
Lest eating, he grow wise in that sad lore,
Knowledge of good and ill, and good by ill ,
Which we have proved full bitter, for with this
Is death inseparably linked…”
“[F]illed with violence,” Satan is the arch-suicide, murderer, and ever exiled “wandering Jew.”
Just as God loved Himself perfectly before any other being existed for Him to lovingly give life to– and just as we are commanded to love our neighbor, based on the presumption that we love ourselves– in the same way, Satan hatefully lied to and killed himself before he lied to and led his fellow angels and mankind into spiritual-material self-murder. Now, marked for irresistible doom, he wanders like the muse of Cain that he is.
“Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.“
–John Milton–
Paradise Lost
book. 4, line 73
(1667)
Arch-Feminist
With women’s liberation propaganda, Satan kindled a communist lust in the heart of Eve (his first recruit beguiled into feminism). Eve immediately inverted gender roles and submitted her husband to the persuasive power of her will. What Hesiod said about Pandora is surely a fractured but preserved remnant of the Edenic history. This epic fall from divine femininity into the diabolical left its mark on the ancient world; it is a birthmark still visible today. What Hesiod said about Pandora is true of the original Eve:
“[T]he woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these [ie, ‘ills and hard toil and heavy sickness’] and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men.”
WORKS AND DAYS
Hesiod
8th century B.C.
Satan traded his “perfect…beauty” (Ezk. 28;12) in his “first estate” of heaven (Jude 1:6) for the beauties of earth (Gen. 6:2), and so God “brought fire from [his] midst; It devoured [him]. And [God] turned [him] to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all who saw [him].” He who covered the Most High was flung to crawl on the dust, beneath the feet of and among the manure of man and beast. What devastating debasement, to think that mere beasts of burden may inherit heaven where angels once stood in a celestial dignity that is terrible to behold, before which stout men collapse like they’re dead!
God cast Satan down to earth,
and this world proved to be a Grave of Craving
for both Adam and the demons,
but even from beneath the mud,
with his bones buried
under centuries of dung and blood,
there is hope for Adam and the family farm,
hope of resurrection and eternal life,
hope of migrating to heaven
and taking the place of the fallen devils!
Better yet, there is hope of heaven
migrating to earth!
This Reality of The Fall –both angelic and humane– left its mark on the ancient world: What Hesiod recorded about Prometheus is no myth but an absolute Fact as regards Satan and the fallen angels:
“[Y]ou are glad that you have… stolen fire — a great plague to you yourself and to men that shall be. But I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.”
ibid
God made dust and ashes into Adam, and reduced glorious Lucifer to ashes. Even though he now clothes himself in lightning and speaks like thunder, he is self-consumed. Confidence!
Soon Satan (who is this world’s glittering god), and the upside down laws of his house, will be overturned like the tables of the Jewish bankers that turned God’s House of Prayer into a den of thieves. Christ will set things straight; but first, the few that refuse to bow to Baal will face a time of trouble the likes of which the world has never seen. Babylon’s false gods of gold and silver, over which the soul of the nation stumbled, will be thrown in the streets like dung heaps; but Prayerful worthy Saints that are unstained by the flesh will escape the Dragon, and the fertile manured earth shall sustain them and be more valuable to them than gold. They will have the Spirit which walked with Adam in the cool of the day in Eden, when gold was yet outside his experience, outside in the world of the fallen. They have true gold. They have Christ. In unequalled tribulation and distress, these few will eat, sustained without the soul-slaying mark of the beast. The Divine Pillar of Fire is fixed in the center of their lives, and they know Yeshua the Messiah who is bread from heaven. With confidence, they eat and live both now and forever.
Each will get his perfect payment for good or evil. Those rich men, encastled in the high places of the earth, who have long shielded the reddest murderers in their cruel plots to steal the world, to attack and steal the family farm of Adam’s sons: all such wolves will return to their mothers, riding on their shields into the soul-withering ovens of God’s last laugh. This is the terminal fate of all the tyrants who attempt to steal the inheritance of the just; but, the meek, helpful, and God-loving beloved of God will inherit the universe and abide in the heart of its Temple rejoicing in peace forever.
——————- SALT——————–
Master Dongguo asked Zhuangzi, “This thing called the Way—where does it exist?”
Zhuangzi said, “There’s no place it doesn’t exist.”
“Come,” said Master Dongguo, “you must be more specific!”
“It is in the ant.”
“As low a thing as that?”
“It is in the panic grass.”
“But that’s lower still!”
“It is in the tiles and shards.”
“How can it be so low?”
“It is in the piss and shit.”
— Zhaungzi (476-221 BC)
The Complete Works of Zhuangzi
“Knowledge Wandered North” (sec. 22)
NEW PURITAN 