Éliphas Lévi’s (Bonœ Memoriœ) creed, and that of his disciples.
“We believe in a God-Principle, the essence of all existence, of all good and of all justice, inseparable from nature which is its law and which reveals itself through intelligence and love.
We believe in Humanity, daughter of God, of which all the members are indissolubly connected one with the other so that all must co-operate in the salvation of each, and each in the salvation of all.
We believe that to serve the Divine essence it is necessary to serve Humanity.
We believe in the reparation of evil, and in the triumph of good in the life eternal.”
“To practice magic is to be a quack; to know magic is to be a sage.”-from The Threshold of Magical Science
My Comment
Some believe these teachings to be pure evil, since they deny the divinity of Christ, but then, so do Islam and Hinduism.
But Jesus said “Other sheep have I that are not of this flock” and “In my house there are many mansions”, so at least, from the promise of those words, I don’t think the denial of the unique salvation of Christ damns a teaching.
Hinduism also denies it. Islam only calls Jesus a great prophet.
There’s error in the Bible, except in the eyes of the most fanatical fundamentalists, or for people whose interpretations are so elastic they can read anything into anything.
To those people who say that many of the theosophists were unscrupulous, I say perhaps they were. So were many in orthodox faiths. And many occultists were not unscrupulous.
Many of the great problems in modernity have arisen because of its tendency to see “evil” everywhere. Where the eastern mind sees human error, the modern mind sees devilry. By looking for too many devils in nature, the mind itself becomes devilish
Nothing in Levi’s credo contradicts anything in the gospel, if one reads both of them with an open mind.
Who is not against me is for me, said the protagonist of the gospel. It is not the belief that damns anyone. It is the practice.
Christians have used the words of the gospel to castrate themselves (Origen) and enslave others (Conquistadors). Should we blame Jesus for that?
Everyone receives according to his capacity. Jesus himself spoke in parables so he would reach the most artless peasant and the most learned rabbi, both spiritual novices and the tried and tested.
Just as man’ s technological prowess has outstripped his spiritual development, making every technological advance an equal advance in the science of death, so also religious dogmas in the hands of selfish and immature people have been more destructive than life-giving.
Intellectual studies have to keep pace with personal growth.
Knowledge itself is not evil, any more than nuclear fission or guns. What is evil is the ends to which knowledge is used.
[Note: I added a good bit of explanation to the original post, because of the danger that someone unfamiliar with these texts would think I was endorsing “devil worship” as most people understand it. Not so. But the figure of the devil varies from tradition to tradition, and even within a tradition. And one needs to have an understanding of the context of the quotation I cited.]