Diablerie for Dummies
The House of Forbidden Knowledge's Associate Professor of Opposition and Defiance introduces the concept of diablerie for interested freshmen and provides a few pointers on how to get started.
I like to watch occultists start fist-fights over what this word means. People call up the etymologies for all kinds of diablo-related concepts, then someone else points out that the languages from which the term devil is derived are Latin and Greek, which had little use for an anti-God type of construct culturally speaking. The oldest form, in Greek, just meant something similar to “slanderer” or “one who speaks against,” which I guess could kind of cover its use in Greek translations of a Hebrew word for Accuser or Adversary, as possibly referring to the one who has brought (possibly false) charges against you to the magistrate for you to defend yourself against.
The Hebrew reference in question is from one of the oldest known texts in the Semitic traditions, from back when it was popular knowledge that Satan was a treasured employee on God’s payroll, in daily communication and even allowed to argue and talk back—generally accepted as authored somewhere between 700 and 600 BCE. All of this is about a thousand years before Augustine of Hippo introduced his Manichean/Gnostic taint to the popular Christian branch of the theology in question, establishing as canon a nonsensical polar duality that has done much in the millennia following to muddy the waters of a supposedly monotheistic setup in a misguided attempt to offload the creation and daily maintenance of all of the evil in the world to God’s detached Jungian Shadow and bolstering the strong start to the “this world is shit so it’s okay to destroy it” theology that is still going strong today.
He also declared Mary to be a perpetual virgin despite Jesus’s numerous brothers and sisters who did not claim to share his divine provenance. And he also installed as canon a mysterious thirteenth apostle that claimed that Jesus visited him privately just after Jesus told his own disciples (shortly prior to his ascension) that he wasn’t coming back for anybody until he came back for everybody. And also this thirteenth apostle coincidentally exhibited the same levels of malignant misogyny that Augustine himself had, who, according to his own diaries, had never had a healthy relationship with a woman his entire life, starting with his own mother.
But now we’re finally in the late 300s CE, perhaps early 400s, and we finally have a Devil with a capital D, where previously we may have had only God’s own dutifully subordinate if somewhat mouthy prosecuting attorney—as opposed to possibly a collection of annoyances that live in the deserts and secret places and torment wanderers and unwise adventurers. Devils with a lowercase d, as it were, inherited from other neighboring traditions, to be joined over the next thousand years or so by a slew of captured and demoted deities from discredited religions.
So, to many, diablerie is some sort of compact with the Devil, this Augustine-endorsed Johnny-come-lately and largely nonsensical Platonic ideal of evil, and absolutely nothing will change their mind. And that’s fine, because on a number of levels there’s some truth in the result, and that’s what counts, isn’t it? A compact with the Devil and/or one or more of his minions in exchange for the ability to break a few laws of nature, all according to the scope and duration of the compact.
Which all brings us, to my mind, to the meat of the matter: a certain kind of practical contra-naturality.
In my experience the compact business is optional and has a kind of “Dumbo’s magic feather” feel to it. But some people seem to need permission, and I guess some need a layer of insulation between themselves and the evil of it all, and the compact provides a bit of a cutout. Someone or something else to blame if it all goes wrong. And maybe a good lawyer can pry you loose from the consequences if they seem to be getting out of hand.
I get it, and on one level I’m a bit jealous of those who seem to benefit. But it can’t work for me because I know exactly where that feather came from, and I’m literally older than the Devil, and I don’t particularly feel that I need his help to break a few rules. Nor do I feel like I need to try to weasel out of any hard-earned consequences.
The consequences are what I’m in this for.
—
Here’s the secret I’ve learned: nothing that can happen is in any way against some kind of natural law. But it can sure as hell be against what people believe is a natural law, and they will happily burn you for it and sell popcorn to the spectators, because that’s how little they appreciate learning that what they’ve been taught all their lives is wrong.
They’ve been taught that there were consequences for flouting the natural ordering of things, and, by God, they’ll provide the consequences themselves if they have to before they consider accepting that they were duped, even if it was an innocent mistake or simple ignorance.
For instance, close to a billion people on Earth are homosexual, and just about all of them have figured out by sometime in early adulthood that absolutely nothing bad happens to them as a consequence of homosexual thoughts or activities until some other human being finds out about it and gets all offended that neither Nature nor God seems to be bothered to take any action to punish the alleged misbehavior.
Many clever secret murderers have figured out the same thing. Please keep in mind that all of our sophisticated personality profiling for murderers and serial killers and spree killers and such is fueled 100% by selection bias. We have profile data only for those we have discovered—the slow and the stupid and the ones with compulsions that betray them, that make them do something predictable. Which means we also only have data in cases where anyone cared about whoever was missing, where a body could be found, where the cause of death was determined to be human action, where any suspect could be identified, etc.
How can you know how many murder cases were solved when you can’t really know how many actual murders there have been? As a global society, we do a truly shitty job keeping track of every human life from start to finish. But even for the murders we know about. the rates for solves is lower than one might hope, and even worse for convictions.
What I’m saying is that nobody ever spontaneously combusts on the street because they’ve hidden a stack of bodies somewhere. Lightning strikes and cancer rates aren’t higher among those with criminal histories once you’ve corrected for certain kinds of substance abuse.
But we really don’t need diablerie to help define and refine what we know of natural laws, because we have science for that. Though there are a few people who confuse science and diablerie now and then, especially in election years. No, we need diablerie to rub people’s faces in the fact that they’re hilariously wrong about how the world works. We need these wrong people off balance and unhinged and frothing at the mouth in rage and terror, because for many of these people, that’s the best way to attempt to educate them.
And even so, it still only works on a small percentage. At least directly. It’s the next generation that tends to see their parents’ and grandparents’ freaking out and frothing as something not to emulate.
That’s only half of the charm, however, and not without its risks. The other half is advancing one’s goals by availing oneself of the opportunities that others overlook or actively shun. Not for the sheer perversity, mind you, but because sometimes those methods are effective or efficient.
Well, okay. Sometimes also for the sheer perversity.
—
So let’s go with the idea that diablerie starts with being diabolical—that is to say being at least provisionally in opposition to what people think of as natural or divinely ordained or ordered. This usually takes the form of deciding that some taboo is possibly pointless, or at least not fully understood, and then testing it.
One shouldn’t talk to demons? Talk to one and find out why.
Handling the dead should be done with ritual and respect? What happens if you don’t?
Blood is icky? Really? Some people think blood is food. Where do you draw the line?
What’s the whole deal with blasphemy? Why would a god care what a human thinks or says or does?
It’s okay if you don’t just go nuts and start trying things. A number of taboos have been studied in detail already. Cannibalism carries a risk of a few extra diseases you’re not likely to get from a hamburger. Raw flesh might be tasty, but proper cooking temperatures have been established for killing off microbes in animal tissues prior to consumption. Breeding with close relatives, for instance, tends to cause health concerns and physical deformations in the offspring. Fecal matter needs significant chemical treatment or biological remediation before it’s safe to handle or incorporate into recipes or arts and crafts projects. I’m not saying you shouldn’t challenge the established findings too, but there’s no reason to be completely insane about it. At least review the current research. Maybe try to replicate some findings. Be smart about it.
—
I think one of the reasons demonic compacts are popular with diabolists is that the compacts themselves are taboo even before you consider what goods or services are being promised for trade, supposedly on the grounds that one’s soul could be irretrievably corrupted by interactions with these entities. This position assumes that opportunities for this kind of corruption are entirely the reason that these entities are open to transactions in the first place.
It helps that we have a concrete and quantifiable definition of the human soul’s anatomy to look at, doesn’t it? From a previous class, we know that the soul is a set of tendencies and behaviors—some innate, some innate and refined socially, some acquired socially in toto—and all weighed in the aggregate by anyone and everyone who meets you. These include the depth of your capacity for empathy and sympathy, the strength with which you try to apply the concepts of justice and fairness and reciprocity to others, and the breadth of criteria you apply to decide whether others are eligible for any of the above, with greater values for all three being symptomatic of a larger, stronger, or more valuable soul.
In these terms, any activity which breeds callousness or insensitivity to the suffering of others, or willingness to cheat or exploit others for one’s own gain or for mere spite, or a redefinition of one’s self-perceived identity to put one in a category above or outside of others in terms of bigotries or predator/prey relationships degrades or destroys one’s soul.
It is a fact that there are entities that thrive on the idea that they might encourage you to damage, devalue, or discard your soul. I think you’ll find that in every case they are other human beings, and their motivations are almost always that they will feel better about the state of their own withered souls if they can show (to themselves or to others or to the world in general) that the souls of others are also weak and fragile things and that it’s therefore not so important for one to keep one’s soul strong and generous and tidy, or to value those who do so highly.
I suppose I could have just said “self-hatred expressed as spite” but you’re talking to an academician, not a poet. But for clarity’s sake, these are of the “people are animals, so I’m an animal and you’re an animal, so why should any of us behave any better?” set.
Dealing with entities who aren’t humans does have risks to one’s soul. Clearly. They have different kinds of souls that value different kinds of things, and interacting on favorable terms with them, as a peer, may encourage your or require you to cross certain lines that you will not be able to uncross, even if you never transgress these boundaries with other humans. And also any abilities or knowledge granted to you may change the way you think of what counts as harm to others, or even how you value death, if you know that these harms can be temporary or reversible and that any agonies or interventions you might inflict could have a payoff for your victim that they might not understand.
These issues come up in how even the most well-meaning demons deal with inexperienced humans, so obviously these conditions are transmissible to humans who are granted demonic abilities or insights.
They can also taint your sense of humor. This can do more damage to your soul in the eyes of others than any of the above, frankly.
If you want to defend your soul from harm, you must 1) understand what your soul is and establish a baseline assessment, and 2) stay aware of any interactions that might alter it and accept or reject those alterations based on your own values. You may also 3) employ a friend or therapist to double-check your judgment on these matters and see that things don’t drift too much. It can’t hurt.
But in these ways it’s precisely the same as falling in with any new crowd, isn’t it? There’s always a danger of losing yourself if you’re a bit insecure and trying too hard to fit in.
Or, if you’re done living in human society or don’t mind the occasional group of visitors carrying pitchforks and torches, you could consider the viewpoint that a soul is more valuable to other people than to yourself—not as a trade good, but the fact that you have a soul in good condition and maintain it, as it were—and decide whether keeping it in good shape with respect to human values is actually of benefit to you.
—
There are some for whom diablerie is a lifestyle choice. As in, they’ve adopted a wardrobe and, for those capable of growing facial hair, facies hermetica. (Feel free to refer to Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum for context for that term). Perhaps there are also tattoos and piercings. A fancy hat, a walking stick, or other accouterments and affectations suitable for the esoteric edgelord. You can laugh if you like, but many appreciate the aposematic coloration.
For others, there’s just a more quiet and occasional sauntering across the grain when nobody is looking, only betrayed by the fact that they don’t seem to take anything, anything at all, very seriously. That may indeed be the only outward sign. There’s no tell-tale whiff of brimstone when they walk past because they make the effort to launder the smell out of their hair and clothes before heading out.
Here I’ll point out that long robes with deep cowls are great for keeping the smell of whatever you made your candles or incense out of this week off your skin and clothes and out of your hair. But that’s just tradition. Lab coats are fine—and inexpensive—but they raise quite the hue and cry when the neighbors find them soiled or damaged beyond repair among your weekly trash by the curb. Painters’ smocks are about right, supplemented by disposable face masks (now de rigueur) and bouffant caps for the hair and those little paper booties for the shoes.
To get back on topic, I’m just saying that it’s fine if your approach is entirely your own. You aren’t required to join a Satanic temple (although you can if it seems to make sense to you). If you find yourself attempting to discover a Platonic pole of opposition to the Catholic Church (to pick a popular source of dogma at random) you’ll soon find that such a thing doesn’t exist—or, rather, that if there is an opposite pole, it is also necessarily contained by the original source and embedded deep within. This is akin to discovering that a theoretical source of everything good that is also a creator of all is, by that very definition, also a creator of all evil. You’ll run in circles forever with that approach.
In the end I believe you’ll find that schema like these can be picked up and put on like clothes and then discarded when they’ve served their purpose—or, like as not, have failed to serve any purpose. It’s the process that has value, that serves a purpose, and that purpose is an increase in knowledge and experience—and then using that knowledge and experience to make changes in things that serve one’s own whim.