Anthony Testa - The Key of the Abyss.pdf

Chapter 24 : Abomination of Desolation
“This same Lucifer, the Old Serpent, was cast out upon the Earth,
where he became the arch-enemy of mankind in order to avenge
himself on his exilers”
This sort of hermeneutic makes human history of magical myth. There
is no conflict between the Elder Gods and the Great Old Ones; they
are opposite terminals of a single current. 240
As Kenneth Grant points out in the quote from Hecate’s Fountain
above, the difficulty that we have reconciling the nature of Babalon to
human thought disappears once we recognize the schism of man and
nature, as well as God and man, is within the psyche of humanity, not
phenomenal reality. It is therefore shown that the tension so apparent
in contemporary America is the false dichotomy spawned by this very
misunderstanding, advanced by the slaves of Choronzon 241 that have
infested the Earth like flies on a fresh corpse. To put it anther way,
recalling that when we looked at Choronzon and the “Ordeal of the
Abyss” previously, the fundamental issue was, and is, the nature of the
individuated psyche which, in contrast to the materialist paradigm that
underlies Western culture posits the existence of a spiritual being that
dwells within each being, for Every man and every woman is a star 242 .
The issue is, as we have seen, the struggle of the Ego, which is the
inner reflection of Choronzon within the microcosm of humanity,
against the manifestation of the greater being that dwells within. Thus
the seemingly suicidal yearning for the Apocalypse is revealed for
what is. The ego knows, apriori as it were, that it cannot abide; it has
beginning (birth) and an end (death). Nevertheless, it has an aversion
to this fact, and seeks to extend itself – impossibly – into Eternity. In
order to accomplish this, the ego (and this can be seen as a
phenomenon that can become greater than the individual) attempts to
make a “pact” with the Devil, ignoring the fact that it (the Ego) is itself
that very Demon, and would sacrifice the entire universe and every
240
Kenneth Grant, Hecate’s Fountain, pp 177, Skoob
241
i.e. religious fundamentalists of every stripe, but most especially the particularly virulent
strains of fundamentalist Christianity which are the deformed children of Puritanism.
242
Al vel Legis, I : 3
151