Good and evil.
As there is far more evil than good in the world, it follows on logical grounds that either God must include evil, or stand as the direct cause of it, or else surrender his claims to absoluteness. The ancients understood this so well that their philosophers — now followed by the Kabbalists — defined evil as the lining of God or Good:
Demon est Deus Inversus, being a very old adage. Indeed, evil is but an antagonizing blind force in nature; it is a reaction, opposition, and contrast, — evil for some, good for others. There is no malum in se: only the shadow of light, without which light could have no existence, even in our perceptions. If evil disappeared, good would disappear along with it from Earth.
If “God” is Absolute, Infinite, and the Universal Root of all and everything in Nature and its universe, whence comes Evil or D’Evil if not from the same “Golden Womb” of the absolute? Thus we are forced either to accept the emanation of good and evil, of Agathodaemon and Kakodaemon as offshoots from the same trunk of the Tree of Being or to resign ourselves to the absurdity of believing in two eternal Absolutes!
Pagan thought represented good and evil, as twin brothers, born from the same mother — Nature; so soon as that thought ceased to be Archaic, Wisdom too became Philosophy.
In the beginning, the symbols of good and evil were mere abstractions, Light and Darkness; then their types became chosen among the most natural and ever-recurrent periodical Cosmic phenomena — the Day and the Night.
The Host of Satan is a Son of God, no less than the Host of the B'nai Alhim, these children of God coming to “present themselves before the Lord,” their father.
“The Sons of God” become the “Fallen Angels” only after perceiving that the daughters of men were fair, (Genesis vi.) In the Indian philosophy, the Suras are among the earliest and the brightest gods, and become Asuras only when dethroned by Brahminical fancy.
Satan never assumed an anthropomorphic, individualized shape, until the creation by man, of a “one living personal god,” had been accomplished; and then merely as a matter of prime necessity.
A screen was needed; a scape-goat to explain the cruelty, blunders, and but too-evident injustice, perpetrated by him for whom absolute perfection, mercy, and goodness were claimed.
Source: THE SECRET DOCTRINE.
