At the beginning of The Exorcist, the old priest is at an archeological dig in northern Iraq. I’m guessing this is because northern Iraq is where the Yezidis (reputedly devil-worshipers) flourished…Does anyone know if the artifacts, statuary, etc. are authentic, or based on authentic, Yezidi art?
here’s a fascinating piece on the devil worshippers and their artifacts written in the 1800s and describing them in sociological and anthropological terms with great sympathy. It’s very readable. I recommend it to you.
The chief divine figure of the Yazidi is Malak Taus (‘Peacock Angel’), worshipped in the form of a peacock. He
rules the universe with six other angels, but all seven are subordinate to the supreme God, who has had no direct
interest in the universe since he created it. The seven angels are worshipped by the Yazidi in the form of seven
bronze or iron peacock figures called sanjaq, the largest of which weighs nearly 700 pounds.
This was gleaned from an article at
http://www.ozemail.com.au/~zarathus/deen33f.html
which asks the immortal question, “Are the Yezidis of Kurdistan really Zoroastrians?”
They believe that satan repented and was returned to his former position as chief of the angels. He was lucky. A lot of companies won’t hire you back after a serious transgression and, if they do, won’t let you return to your previous level of responsibility. I’m guessing he was union.
For what it’s worth, from http://www.namru.com/Necro/nec1.htm
…the God of the Moon was called NANNA by the Sumerians. By the later Sumerians and Assyrians, he was called SIN. In both cases, he was the Father of the Gods (of the planetary realm, the zonei), and was depicted as wearing horns, a symbol familiar to the Witches as representative of their God. The horn shaped crown is illustrative of the crescent phases of the Moon, and were symbolic of divinity in many cultures around the world, and were also thought to represent certain animals who were horned, and worshipped for their particular qualities, such as the goat and bull. They also represent sexual power.
The fact that, in ancient Sumeria and Egypt, horns were solely representative of evil gods, but of many different deities, was used by the Christian Church in their attempt to eradicate pagan faiths. It was a simple enough symbol to identify with the Author of Evil, Satan, which the Church depicted as a half-animal, half-human creature with horns, claws, and sometimes a tail. The Church’s use of the horns as a sort of archetype of Evil is quite similar to the feeling many people have today with regards to the swastika used by the Nazis, a symbol which has become the archetype of an evil sigil in the West. The fact that it is a highly valued mystical and religious symbol in the East is something that is not well-known. What is worse, the image of the Devil as perpetrated by the Church is simultaneously representative of sexual energy, and can be safely compared to Jung’s archetype of the Shadow, the psychic repository of a man’s innate maleness, as the anima represents that part of a man which is feminine. Truly, the pictures painted of a Satanic ritual by the pious Catholic clergymen was one of sexual orgies and “perversions”, and the handbook of the Inquisitors, the Malleus Maleficarum - which has been responsible for the deaths of many more people than even Hitler’s Mein Kampf - is full of detailed sexual imagery and reveals the nature of the souls of the monks who wrote it, rather than of the innocents it was used to massacre. Eventually, Satanism, Protestantism and Judaism were inextricably woven together to form a patchwork quilt of Evil that the Church attempted to destroy during the Middle Ages, with fire and sword.
As a matter of fact, a certain type of devil worship did exist during those times but, ironically, the acolytes of Hell were usually never brought to trial; something which stems from the fact that many of those who celebrated and attended the infamous Black Masses of the period were Roman Catholic clergymen, many of whom has been pressed into His Service at a young age by their parents, who wished to see their sons brought up well-fed and educated in those uncertain times, where the Church was the sole power and refuge. The frustration at being “condemned” to a life that demanded the abandonment of society and a “normal” life led many priests to express their hostilities through the Office of the Demon, the Black Mass. Often, this was also a means of political demonstration, as the Church controlled virtually all the political life of the period. In a way, as though in a test tube at a philosophical laboratory, Aleister Crowley was brought up under similar circumstances - although very far removed in time from the days of the Church’s immense temporal power. Coming from a fanatically religious Christian family, and suddenly freed upon the neighbourhood of Cambridge, Crowley did, in a sense, turn Satanist. He identified strongly with the underdog, politically as well as spiritually, and came eventually to take the Name of the Beast as his own, and expound a philosophy that he hoped would rip apart the worn tapestry of the established moral Christian atmosphere of Victorian England, and expose it for what it really was, a carpet made of many ingenious threads and not God - or eternal happiness - at all; only nap.
Therefore, it seemed almost logical that he should seek in the defeated, Old Religions of the world for the basis of his new philosophy and, some say, his new “religion”. He raised the female aspect back up to one of equality with the male, as it was in the rites of Egypt, and of Eleusis. “Our Lady Babalon” (his spelling) became a theme of many of his magickal writings, and he received he Credo, the Book of the Law, through a Woman, his wife Rose Kelly. The lunar element, as well as the Venusian, are certainly accessible in his works. It has even been said in occult circles that he had a hand in putting together the grimoire of one Gerald Gardner, founder of a contemporary Witchcraft movement, called the Book of Shadows.
The Moon has an extremely important, indeed indispensable, role in the tantrick sex magick rites that so preoccupied Crowley and the O.T.O. There can be no true magick without woman, nor without man, and in the symbolic language of the occult there can be no Sun without the Moon. In alchemy, ceremonial magick, and Witchcraft, the formula is the same, for they all deal with identical properties; whether they are called the Sun and Moon of the Elixir Vitae, the male and female participants in a rite of Indian or Chinese tantricism, or the Shadow and the Anima of Jungian depth psychology.
For many years, the Moon remained the prime deity of the Sumerians, constituting the essential Personum of a religious and mystical drama that was performed roughly 3000 B.C. amid the deserts and marshes of Mesopotamia. Side by side with the worship of the Moon, NANNA, there was fear of the Demon, PAZUZU, a genie so amply recreated in the book and the movie by Blatty, The Exorcist, and similarly recognised as the Devil Himself by the Church. PAZUZU, the Beast, was brought to life by Aleister Crowley, and the Demon walked the Earth once more.
With publicity provided by H.P. Lovecraft.
The Devil
PAZUZU was a prime example of the type of Devil of which the Sumerians were particularly aware, and which they depicted constantly in their carvings and statues. The purpose of this iconography was to ward off the spiritual - and psychic - circumstances which would precipitate a plague, or some other evil. “Evil to destroy evil.” Although the ancient people of the world were conscious of an entity we might call the “Author of all Evil”, the Devil or Satan, as evident in the Sumerian Creation Epic and the rumoured existences of the Cult of Set of the Egyptians, the more pressing concern was usually the exorcism of TIAMAT, she exists, somehow, just as the Abyss exists and is perhaps indispensable to human life if we think of Her as typifying the female quality of Energy. Although MARDUK was responsible for halving the Monster from the Sea, the Sumerian Tradition has it that the Monster is not dead, but dreaming, asleep below the surface of the Earth, strong, potent, dangerous, and very real. her powers can be tapped by the knowledgeable, “who are skilful to rouse Leviathan.”
Although the Christian religion has gone to great lengths to prove that the Devil is inferior to God and exists solely for His purpose, as the Tempter of Man - surely a dubious raison d’etre - the Sumerian Tradition acknowledges that the Person of “Evil” is actually the oldest, most Ancient of the Gods. Whereas Christianity states that Lucifer was a rebel in heaven, and fell from God’s grace to ignominy below, the original story was that MARDUK was the rebel, and severed the Body of the Ancient of Ancient Ones to create the Cosmos in other words, the precise reverse of the Judeo-Christian dogma. The Elder Gods evidently possessed a certain Wisdom that was not held by their Parents, yet their Parents held the Power, the Primal Strength, the First Magick, that the Elder Ones tapped to their own advantage, for they were begotten of Her.
It generally accepted in the Halls of Magick that all of the Wisdom in the world is useless without the necessary adjunct of Power. This Power has gone by many names, as the Goddess and the Devil have, but the Chinese symbolise It by the Dragon. It is the force of Will, and relies heavily upon the biochemical matter that makes up the human body, and hence, the human consciousness, to give it existence. Science is coming around to accept the fact that the Will does exist, just at the point where Psychology has determined it does not - in the behaviourists vain attempt to eradicate what has always been known to constitute vital parts of the psyche from their consideration in pseudo scientific experimentation, leaving us with the “white mice and pigeons” of Koestler’s The Ghost In The Machine. Science, ancient Sister of Magick, has begun to realize the human potential that resides, inconspicuously, in the spiral-mapped matter of the brain. Just as the magicians, accused of trafficking with the Devil, were said to have developed tremendous power over natural phenomena, Science has ascended to that realm unblamed, and guiltless. The Pope has ridden in aircraft. Cardinals have flown in ‘choppers’ over battlefields in Southeast Asia, urging technological eco-cide, invoking Christ; pronouncing damnation and the Devil on the industrially inferior man. Ecce Qui Tollit Peccata Mundi.
And a rock group from England, home of the Anglican heresy, sings of “sympathy” for the Devil. PAZUZU. TIAMAT. The Seven Deadly Sins. The fear of Lovecraft. The pride of Crowley.
The lunar landing was the symbolic manifestation of man’s newly acquired potential power to alter the nature - and perhaps, via nuclear weapons, the course - of the heavenly bodies, the zonei, the Elder Gods. It has a power the Ancient Ones have been waiting for, for millennia, and it is now within their grasp. The next century may deliver unto mankind this awesome power and responsibility, and will leave him knocking on the dread doors of the azonei, the IGIGI, approaching the barrier that keeps out the ABSU.
And one day, without the benefit of NECRONOMICON, the Race of Man will smash the barrier and the Ancient Ones will rule once more.
An alternative possibility exists: that, by landing on the Moon, we have come to reinstate the ancient Covenant and thereby assure our protection against the Outside. Since “the gods are forgetful”, by treading on their celestial spheres we are reminding them of their ancient obligations to us, their created ones. For, as it is said in one of man’s most ancient of Covenants, the Emerald Table, “As Above, So Below”. Man’s power to alter the nature of his environment must develop simultaneously with his ability to master his inner environment, his own mind his psyche, soul, spirit. Perhaps, then, the lunar landing was the first collective initiation for humanity, which will bring it one step closer to a beneficial Force that resides beyond the race of the “cruel celestial spirits”, past the Abyss of Knowledge. Yet, he must remember that the
occult powers that accompany magickal attainment are ornamental only, indications of obstacles overcome on the Path to Perfection, and are not to be sought after in themselves, for therein lies the truth Death. Lovecraft saw this Evil, as the world passed from one War and moved menacingly towards another. Crowley prepared for it, and provided us with the formulae. The Mad Arab saw it all, in a vision, and wrote it down. He was, perhaps, one of the most advanced adepts of his time, and her certainly has something to say to us, today, in a language the Intuition understands. Yet they called him “Mad.”
Accompanied in the ranks of the “insane” by such “madmen” as Neitzsche, Artaud, and Reich, the Mad Arab makes a Fourth, in a life-and-death game of cosmic bridge. They are all voices crying in that wilderness of madness that men call Society, and as such were ostracised, stoned, and deemed mentally unfit for life. But, for them, Justice will come when we have realised that the Ship of State and the Ship of St Peter have become mere Ships of Fools - with Captains who course the seas by stars, ignoring the eternal Ocean - and then, we will have to look to the Prisoners in the Hold for navigational guidance.