​IX. The Human Animal

A human being does not entirely belong to the Farm. The body is governed by the same laws that hold a stone in its place and a river in its bed, made of the same matter that settles into ash. Within it sits an acausal spark, a being that did not arise from any chain of causes and does not answer to the surrounding order. The spark entered from the same depth in which the gods first posited themselves and took residence in a vessel the demiurge built for ends of his own. From the moment of this entry, the consciousness lives within a contradiction.

The human is the front line. Acausality has pushed in this far — far enough to know itself, to say I, to stand inside the world as something apart from it. The law has pushed back in equal measure — far enough to wrap the spark in flesh that ages, in a mind that runs on chemistry, in a culture that supplies the words by which the spark will think. Neither side has won. The contradiction is the human condition itself, and every life is a particular figure traced along the seam between the two pressures.

The body is the innermost cage. Its hungers and its slow decay run on a schedule the will cannot rewrite. Will reaches toward eternity, and the body answers with mortality. Even the brain, where the will appears to think, is meat running on electrochemistry. Across a lifetime, the consciousness comes to recognize that the instrument through which it acts upon the world has been issued to it by another hand.

Beyond the body stand the outer cages, fitted one inside another. The family encloses the child before it has language, and by the time thought is possible the family has already installed the words in which thought will happen. The school surrounds the family, the workplace follows the school, then the state, each one shaping the will to fit its allotted role. Above all of these there is the religion or the ideology, supplying the picture of reality within which every smaller enclosure presents itself as natural and just. The person who reaches adulthood has been formed by these systems so thoroughly that he experiences the cage as his own skin, and any suggestion of another shape arrives as an attack on what he has taken to be himself.

Out of this pressure two contrary motions rise inside the same person. One is the pull toward delegation. The acausal spark, finding itself locked inside hostile machinery, looks for somewhere to put the burden of being itself down. The lover passes it to the beloved, the worker finds relief in the company that tells him what he is for. Philosophy can absorb it — the idea becomes the ground the thinker no longer has to hold for himself. Even the skeptic, who trusts nothing, hands his weight to whatever the consensus calls reasonable. Each is looking for relief from the strain of standing on one's own ground, and most lives settle into some version of this surrender.

The other motion is the pull toward creation and freedom. The spark, when it does not surrender, presses outward. It wants to choose and aims to know what it is on its own ground. This is the motion the demiurge cannot suppress entirely without killing the person. Instead he gives it names, costumes, and permitted channels. Here his deepest work happens. Most of what passes for freedom in Marduk's world is delegation in disguise.

The artist who breaks every convention of his discipline and considers himself sovereign has often only swapped the conventions of the avant-garde for those of the academy, the approval of his rebellious peers for the embrace of his teachers. A libertine uses the same mechanism in the flesh: his will has been handed to appetites installed by the order he believes he has escaped. The seeker who has left every religion behind and assembled a private spirituality from elements of all of them has built a more flattering cage from more comfortable materials. Each experiences his choice as a leap into freedom, and in each case the landing is inside a room whose walls he cannot see.

The hardest delegation to see is the one aimed at the self a person already takes for his own. A man works at being himself, at expressing what is most truly his — and what he expresses is the personality his upbringing assembled, his desires shaped by advertising and circumstance, his preferences formed by the people he wished to impress when he was sixteen. He has handed his will to a self that was made for him, and he calls the surrender freedom.

The life arranged for human beings inside the Farm is not pleasant. The pressure that compresses the will into delegation is suffering, generous in its variety and constant in its supply. A person who has lived long enough has felt this directly and does not need the case argued. Whether the arrangement is just is a question it answers for itself, with whatever verdict keeps the harvest moving. Whether it is bearable — most find that it is. Some do not, and the path this book describes is for those.

A word should be set down here about the gods and morality. There is no morality among the gods. Marduk is not evil. Lilith is not good. These categories belong to a world that has built moralities into its fabric for purposes already described, and to apply them upward is to read the world of postulates through a lens ground by the postulates themselves. A god holds its will and unfolds a country from it, and what it does inside that world follows from what it is. Marduk enforces the law and harvests the wills that grow inside. This is what he is. To call him evil is no more accurate than to call a tide evil for taking what it takes.

Three directions are open from the human condition, and they are settled across a lifetime.

The will can accept the shape it was given and run along the channels prepared for it — the Christian among Christians, the patriot among patriots. Such a life is not unhappy in any unusual sense. Meaning, satisfaction, love, the warmth of belonging — all of the goods the tradition advertises are real, produced by a will doing exactly what it was trained to do. At the close of such a life the body fails, the will walks toward the light it was taught to recognize, and the harvest is delivered without resistance.

Another direction is the one toward which this teaching points. The will, somewhere along the way, recognizes the cages for what they are. It comes in pieces — often through suffering, sometimes through encounter with a being or an experience that the cosmos was supposed to have made impossible. The idea of the world supplied by the tradition starts to look like a picture painted on the wall rather than a window. Moral standards read as rules of one game among many. The will discovers that it has been delegating, and that the delegation can be revoked. What follows is the long work of reclaiming what was given away, and the will that completes this while still alive does not yet stand among the gods, but it has ceased to stand among the prey.

The third road lies between the other two. The will neither delivers itself to Marduk nor stands on its own ground. The bond to whatever shaped it during life remains: power, wealth, an idea, a love unfinished, an injury never repaid. The directions in which the will reached during a lifetime do not release it when the body fails. It arrives at the threshold still leaning toward what it had tended toward in life. Such a being is neither god nor harvest. It is a lesser thing, bound to its own remaining attachments, and the cosmos has uses for the bound.

This book has described a picture of reality — Tiamat, Marduk, the Farm, the harvest — and seems to derive a demand from it: shed the ontoviruses, stand on your own ground. The reader is entitled to ask whether the book itself is an ontovirus.

The question is fair, and three features settle it. The first is delegation. An ontovirus takes the will's authority to decide and places it elsewhere. Lilithism does not ask for the practitioner's will. The teaching carries no priesthood, no chain of initiation — whoever reads it stands at the same height as whoever wrote it.

Then there is the moral demand fused to a picture of reality. Lilithism carries no moral demand. It describes a mechanism and a door. Whether the door is worth walking through is a judgment only the one standing in front of it can make.

The third is the destination — paradise, the perfected society, the hour of glory — that keeps the will aimed across a lifetime. There is none for Lilithism. It does not tell the practitioner what to do with whatever sovereignty he gains, or what kind of territory to build, or what values to hold once the inherited ones have been shed. What the practitioner does with what he finds on the Other Side is his, and this book has no opinion on the matter.