The devil card of the tarot depicts the crowned adversary upon a pedestal, to which two figures are chained. The adversary shows androgyny in the literally minded medieval fashion, all genitals at once, often with additional equipment such as a hungering face on the belly or wings from the back. Chained to it are a male and female human figure, both humiliated and naked.
From this image of the devil, the two descend - in what fashion is clear - the play of duality and unity in the figure. The appetites ultimately source to one figure, that of the ultimate “Other” the adversary or the accuser, as pre-Satan christians imagined sin’s king. The division of the sexes is in reference to an original source, both in terms of the past, with the interpretation of the devil as the origin of the sex organs and appetites, or in terms of the future, with the interpretation of the devil as the ultimate teleology of the desires of both opposites, their ending being in the figure to which they’re chained.
The origin of evil in christianity is clear - difference. The original sin of christianity refers to the origin of the world as being something more than the egg-unity of Eden, where the human encounter with the serpent caused the pure sphere to be burst open, casting all things into the world of difference, the wilderness without God’s direct oversight. Older theologians, still believing in pre-Miltonian ideas, will hold that Hell is not a place of fire and torment as commonly drawn, but a state of exile, to simply be without God’s constant grace. This interpretation holds far more water than the usual, with reference to the nature of the original sin, a repetition of that first exile being self-inflicted by the sinner in exiling themselves from the wilderness between God and the infinite, into being forever removed into the infinite.
It’s this dualistic thinking which Christianity finds itself again and again attracted to, with most amateur theologians being gravitated to the easy answers of a sort of moralistic Platonism, where the good of the world is in the Edenic created-image of things and all Earthly things are chaotic divergences from that.
As much as christians make fools of themselves with this sort of hyperfragile thinking (the recent controversy of a priest engaging in S&M desecration on an altar requiring the archbishop to see it personally burned in order to wipe away the sin of e-girl pussy juice), there’s a way in which none of this is unique to christians, only their moralism of it. This sort of dualistic thinking, far from being an aberration of its moralizers and totalitarian followers, forms the foundation for thought.
In two anecdotes of creation stories. In the Daodejing, division into a binary of presence and absence generates all things. After there is anything at all, the ten thousand things - that is, all motion and thus all of the world - is born. Difference in itself creates two things which are in conflict and thus generates motion, and it is from motion, that all the things of the world emerge. In the bible, God creates the world by taking first void of unform and creating the world via a process of dividing, the same motion of creating difference and from thus, creating the motion from which all things emerge.
Mirrored here is the way thought itself works. As much as escaping it must be a political imperative to evade the kind of pathetic slave-moralism of christianity and communism, thought itself can never. This basic act of separation always works in pairs and it’s this mechanic that enables the perception of things at all, the creation of the world in the eye of the beholder.
The creative act of the self’s eye is the satanic impulsion of all humans. Capable of the same act of dividing that is attributed to God, humanity has the root of its sin and through it, the root of humanity’s will-to-power in the linguistic and systemic realm. It’s this ability to divide that enables the eye to be the speartip of any act of a pagan master, the true dealing with the devil being to look inwardly and trust the self and ones own eye.
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