Conspiracy of the Artifex
Moloch, Fallen Angels, the Oscars and the God of the Maze
I have been accused of falsifying scripture to substantiate my heresy.
Apparently this quote from Theophany 2022 was problematic:
Some Bibles translate the passage in this way, but most do not and none of the most popular ones do. Most English versions read something like:
“And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the LORD, and the other lot for the scapegoat.“
But a look at the Hebrew quickly clears up this whole affair. The word translated as scapegoat in Leviticus 16:8 is “לַעֲזָאזֵ֖ל“ or “la’azazel” which says: “to Azazel.“
A lot of the English words are inserted by the translators. The Hebrew is simpler. A more literal translation would be:
“Aaron casts lots for two goats. One to YHWH, one to Azazel.“
The Angel of Technology
Azazel is a fallen angel in the book of Enoch. Leviticus identifies him as the one to whom scapegoats are sent.
We can pry deeper thanks to a sigil scrawled in some old grimoires.
A spirit called “Zazel” is named the malefic spirit of the planet Saturn, alongside “Agiel,” the benefic “intelligence” of Saturn. In Hebrew, Zazel is identical to Azazel except for a missing ayin (ע) at the beginning.
Was this name originally a corruption of “Azazel?” It really doesn’t matter. In our field, authorial intent should rarely be more than a footnote. In matters such as these, the author is never the author.
Of primary significance to us is the fact that in the course of time, Zazel and Azazel have been conflated, and Agrippa’s planetary seal recast as a sigil of Azazel. Such developments must be investigated for symbolic coherence before any credible conclusion is possible.
The sigil seems to be related to the 3x3 magic square which is indeed associated with Saturn. It is an array of each number from 1 to 9. The configuration of these numbers makes it so that the sum of each row and column is 15.
When the sigil is transposed on top of the square, it does something similar:
Path 1 connects: 9 to 8 to 7 | (9 + 8 + 7 = 24) | Digital root: 6
Path 2 connects: 4 to 5 to 6 | (4 + 5 + 6 = 15) | Digital root: 6
Path 3 connects: 3 to 2 to 1 | (3 + 2 + 1 = 6) | Digital root: 6
Saturn and the number 6 are often found in association. But what, if anything, might connect Saturn to Azazel?
In the book of Enoch, Azazel instructs humanity in the fabrication of weaponry, cosmetics, ornamentation and mirrors. He also bore knowledge of metals and metalwork. He is an angel of technology.
Technical knowledge is not evil, but it provides instruments of spiritual self-destruction. It is not the use of technology, but the use of us by it, which blights the soul. The sin of Azazel is not giving technology to humans, the sin of Azazel is giving guns to monkeys.
The Black Box
In engineering and computing, a black box is a system that can be used with little knowledge of its mechanical anatomy. When I press a key on my keyboard for example, the corresponding letter appears on my screen, but I have almost no idea what’s going on between my input and the output. That’s a black box.
What defines Azazel’s technologies is their tendency to use the user. The sword wants to kill. Makeup wants to be worn. The mirror wants your gaze. These things will eat you if you let them. Metaphysically speaking, they are spiritual black boxes because we are, as a rule, blind to the forces working through them and inherent in them.
It calls to mind the image of the black cube, a popular symbol of Saturn. But it also evokes Pandora’s box; a mysterious container filled with horrific curses which are unleashed when the box is opened.
The black box technology symbolically “contains” curses because it contains an aspect of the unconscious which is “released” when the opaque technology is interacted with.
Pandora was the wife of Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus. Hesiod frames the story of Pandora as a direct consequence of Prometheus’s gift of fire, which he stole from Hephaestus, the god of craftsmen. Today, unfortunately, these two stories are usually retold apart from one another.
One finds greater elegance and symbolic exactitude in the Biblical story of the fall, but here too, the same theme unfolds: the premature attainment of godlike powers leads to the cursing of humanity.
Saturn is often identified with the demiourgos of the early Christian Gnostics and I have already explained that the meaning of this Greek word is “craftsman,” so a symbolic resonance between Saturn and Azazel is already in evidence.
Let us examine other motifs which resemble Saturn’s seal.
I don’t want to jump to hasty conclusions, I just want to observe variations on a theme. The square and compass, an infamous insignia of freemasonry cannot easily be discounted from our analysis, as it very directly alludes to artisanry.
The unicursal hexagram is similarly resonant. Blaise Pascal, the discoverer of the symbol was an inventor credited with creating the mechanical calculator — the precursor to a lineage of machines which would eventually birth the computer.
Why did the young Pascal invent the calculator? It was to assist in his father’s line of work: collecting taxes. Though conceived as liberatory, calculating machines were weapons of accelerated centralization from the very beginning. The sickles of the state.
This Saturn/Azazel duality substantiates my cosmogram’s Yaldabaoth/Lucifer dualism as the two-sided sigil is equally applicable to either of the twin serpents illustrating the underlying unity of the pair. Lucifer is Azazel, Yaldabaoth is Saturn. Pandora’s box and the black cube.
The Apocalypse
[Azazel] made known to [humanity] the metals and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures.
Book of Enoch, Chapter 8
And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls.
Revelation 17:4
Antimony, known in alchemy as lupus metallorum — “the metal of the wolf” — was an ancient mascara, singled out as Azazelian. Alchemically, antimony represents animality.
The wolf was a symbol of Rome, who crucified the “lamb of God.”
Mentions of wolves abound in the Bible: false prophets described as “ravening wolves” and disciples as “sheep in the midst of wolves.“
“Thēríon” the word translated as “the Beast” in the Bible was the name given by the Greeks to the constellation of Lupus, the wolf. This is why the seven heads of the Beast upon which the woman sits are identified with seven “mountains;” the seven hills of Rome.
The Latin word for she-wolf, “lupa,“ was an ancient slang term for “prostitute” which is why a Roman brothel was called a “lupanar” or “wolf den.”
Also significant is the fact that “prostitute” is one of the epithets most frequently applied to idolaters in the Bible.
The foundation of Rome, despite coming later, directly mirrors the story of Cain and Abel. Both Romulus and Cain murder their younger brothers and then found a city.
The city built by Cain is called “Enoch” in Genesis and is the symbolic city which is spiritually manifest in Sodom, Egypt, Babylon and Rome.
The Labyrinth
These two images are symbolic representations of teleological objects interacting with time and space. In the second image, time is represented as a labyrinth.
Here on the left is the seal of Saturn. On the right is the entity called “Leviathan” which appears in the second Hellraiser film. When I created the two previous images, I had never seen those films.
After posting my sketch of the messenger and watchtower as a story on Instagram, somebody told me that the messenger reminded him of “Leviathan from Hellraiser,” the god of a Hellish alien dimension called “the Labyrinth.”
We cannot impose too much upon mere resemblances. What is important is meaningful resemblance — but this too is here in abundance: Both labyrinths are places of anguish and illusion and both are ruled by “demons.”
And the resemblance goes even deeper…
They [messengers] “land” at kairotic loci [watchtowers], and where they land, they project images of the transtemporal superstructure onto spacetime which you can manage to spot if you’re lucky or just paying attention.
Seduction is an important morphological feature of the archetype we’re uncovering. Lucifer is the enticer of Eve. Azazel and the watchers seduce human women, siring hybrid offspring and the whore of Babylon is the mistress of the kings of the Earth.
The same pattern characterizes addiction: entice, then ensnare.
It’s all a big honey trap, isn’t it? Remind you of anyone?
The Artifex
I haven’t written about this yet, but during the constellation experience while I was hovering above the maze, I witnessed something else up there with me. It was represented to me as an enormous stone tower with millions of bridges stretching out from its trunk. The entity was using unconscious humans to construct its labyrinth and using its labyrinth to enfeeble human consciousness.
My intuition, grasping at it called it the Artifex.
Understand it like this: man is Abraxas, the demiurge. Therefore, every human being is a participant in the ongoing co-creation of reality. But most of us aren’t dreaming our reality very lucidly, so the Artifex is increasingly the one in control of the dream.
It is a parasitic mass trying to invade and colonize your mind at all times and in all places and it will do everything in its power to convince you that it does not exist.
“I was just waiting for the next movie to happen. I was just watching the movie for the movie. I wasn’t constellating anything”…
… After ascending the pyramid, the time I had spent further down was illustrated to me as a red ribbon like a reel of film.
In my Hallucination video, I mentioned the similarity between Plato’s allegory of the cave and the modern cinema. That resemblance is not coincidental.
The word Artifex is Latin and has a myriad of meanings. It can mean: artist, actor, craftsman or mastermind.
Symbolically, the word Artifex unifies the traits of both Lucifer and Yaldabaoth and so the Artifex is really identical with the Biblical Leviathan who is the unconscious, self-devouring ouroboros — both serpents at once.
The Greek tale of Theseus tells of a great labyrinth in Crete, constructed at the palace of King Minos to contain the Minotaur, a legendary creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull.
To sustain this beast, the ancient Minoans offered human sacrifices until the Minotaur was killed by the Athenian hero, Theseus.
This is Moloch, a Canaanite fertility god ardently reviled in the Old Testament. The idol of Moloch had the body of a man and the head of a bull, and to it, children were burned alive as sacrifices.
Archaeological evidence has borne out Greek and Roman reports of such rites in ancient Carthage, a colony of the Canaanite Phoenicians in North Africa.
No concrete historical link has yet been made between the pair. However, according to Greek myth, the mother of King Minos, the minotaur’s namesake, was Europa; a princess of the Phoenicians.
Moloch or Baal Hammon was identified by ancient syncretists with Cronus, the Greek Saturn, who devoured his own children.
Moloch has enjoyed a recent surge in publicity. This in part due to a newly popularized game-theoretic concept named after the god.
In game theory, Moloch is synonymous with the force which impels the multipolar trap. It animates situations where the rules, incentives and constraints of a system drive the system towards lose-lose or negative sum outcomes.
An example of a Moloch problem is a nuclear arms race, in which hostile superpowers “must” develop increasingly devastating arsenals of WMDs to avoid a hypothetical disadvantage in the event that we vaporize civilization.
Other examples include the use of smartphones, cosmetics and fiat currency. Any well-constructed cost/benefit analysis will show that these are net-negatives in the long run. But not using them results in serious disadvantages here and now.
Like taking a drug to medicate withdrawal, our attempts to liberate ourselves from the harsh constraints of reality tend to create even more extreme and severe conditions than the ones we sought to escape.
Azazel creates new disruptive technologies which Saturn then integrates into a growing battery of centralizing control mechanisms.
Wash, rinse and repeat ad-infinitum.
A perfect and deeply symbolic case study can be found in Apple, whose personal computers are the distant descendants of Pascal’s mechanical calculators.
Apple emerged out of humble beginnings — the project of a pair of bright and creative college dropouts. At its genesis it was a liberatory project: Give technology to humanity. Make the power of the computer accessible to the many.
Steve Jobs was famously fond of LSD and the company’s emblematic logo is the bitten apple. How on the nose can the Gnosticism get?
Fast forward to the present day and the same company under new management is effectively an arm of the American plutocracy, manufacturing dopaminergically mediated surveillance infrastructure for the most invasive system of control ever conceived.
I could not ask for a more illustrative microcosm: from the fruit of knowledge to the mark of the beast in under half a century.
The Molochian arms race here represented then races toward an inescapable attractor state aptly called “the technological singularity.” Azazel supplies the technology, Saturn supplies the gravitational well.
The circle closes and the serpent swallows itself.
The Artifex builds the labyrinth by pornographizing the archetypes of the collective unconscious. By crafting idols, filling human heads with gratifying delusions and escapist fantasies which the poor souls toil in vain to realize, all the while engineering their own destruction.
All our labors for utopian dreams, mercenary schemes and technofuturist prophecies; all our sacrifices to delusions of grandeur and masturbatory illusions; that tragically mountainous sum of misguided striving and wasted potential — it’s all part of one infinitely compartmentalized construction project. It all builds the walls of the maze higher and casts its corridors into ever-deepening darkness.
We are slaves digging graves.
If you’re wondering, that’s why the Oscar Award is an Artifex.
Don’t misunderstand me. Christ clothed the truth in picturesque little parables, because to tell a good story is divine. But escapism is something else, and upon close inspection, it reveals itself to be not just a perversion but the perversion.
The very first escapist was the devil himself.
Magnificent work, as always.
Are you familiar in any way with Matthieu Pageau? (Jonathan Pageau's brother)
I feel your works are quite complementary and interactions between the two of you could possibly bear great fruits.
The only Hellraiser I watched was the latest one by Hulu. I dont know if these patterns show up anywhere else in the series, but (spoiler alert) the two patterns that stuck out to me in this film were this:
Firstly, that the main character used the blades of the puzzle box to stab the Cenobites themselves, and that they were forced to destroy themselves according to their own rules.
Extending this, could it be possible to turn the strengths of the escapist temptations these black boxes offer us, against the temptor himself?
Secondly, that when presented with everything the Leviathan Configuration could offer, the main character recognizes that everything it offers only ends in suffering, and thus chooses to bear the full weight of her life and sins with no external help, effectively taking up her own cross.
Extending this, is it fair to ask if the only way to win, is not to play?