The Cold God pt. 1

On the Greater Malefic, Lord of the Archons

In the early hours of December 22nd 2021, the day which followed the first anniversary of our Aquarian Great Conjunction, I stood barefoot in the snow upon the shore of a frigid lake.

I wore nothing but a towel and I was of course alone. It was the morning after the winter solstice. Not beach weather for most people.

Confident in that, I disrobed and I stepped into the water. The shallows of that lake extend quite far, so I waded a good sixty feet out with the wind and waves against me.

Reaching sufficient depths, I took a deep breath and dove, resurfacing with a gasp. It was the wind, not the water, which gave me the worst of my discomfort. Cold like that is barely the same sensation as what I’d called “cold” before. I could never have imagined it until then.

Just the same, I made sure to return to shore without haste. I felt that if I gave in and lost my nerve for even a moment, it would all have been for nothing.

Though it tried, the cold did not kill me.

This was an act of theurgy symbolizing the conquest of the powers of Saturn; the demiurge and lord of the sign of the aeon.

The link between Saturn, winter and the cold in general is more than well established. Saturn is the ruler of Capricorn and Aquarius who preside together over a continuous period lasting from December to February. Beyond this, the Romans held the festival of Saturnalia in December on the 17th.

As the Greater Malefic, Saturn is associated with contraction, austerity and restriction.

The obvious point is that the cold causes matter to contract, but perhaps that’s too obvious. The cold causes reality itself to contract. To move inward, approaching the center.

In winter, animal populations bottleneck. Trees withdraw nourishment from their foliage, cutting off their fringes. Human beings hide from the cold in our houses, and as I stood in those December waters, my blood retreated from my skin and to my vital organs, making my body turn pale.

In this way, extremities and even whole limbs may be sacrificed to appease the cold. Such limbs will become black, gangrenous “dead weight.”

The cold also causes everything to slow down, from the vibration of atoms to the economy. This makes sense as Saturn is the slowest of the classical planets.

The spirit of Saturn is commonly seen as equivalent to Yaldabaoth, the petulant, savage creature who was said to have been born of the fallen Sophia. A cruel, dictatorial beast who proclaimed himself God — probably even believing it — and loosed a pantheon of horrors upon the world to dominate and enslave it.

This was what many Gnostics believed ruled the cosmos, and who Christ had come to oppose.

According to these sects, the gods of the masses were “archons.” Entities in on his vast conspiracy to breed and brainwash human beings and harvest and devour our souls.

The identification with Saturn makes sense. Saturn was the god of the harvest, who devoured his children so he might never be overthrown.

I began really thinking about this being during a relationship with an evangelical girl. I started to notice that the God I heard about at her church bore a greater resemblance to him than the one I imagined and perceived in scripture. He was a stern, moralistic god, whose gaze I could sometimes feel in their house and at their church. It felt like he was watching, judging. Waiting for a slip.

At first I thought the presence was her father; a stoic and intimidating man in his own right. I wasn’t “wrong” per-se. But it did not take long to perceive that it was not him. That it was everyone and no one, and it was there when he wasn’t.

You had to watch what you said around it. Certain things would offend that presence, and you knew when you had because you could see it in whatever eyes were in the room. Before very long, even some unspoken thoughts attracted the feeling of that chiding look, regardless of whether anyone else was there.

It’s important to say that this was a faint subtlety in the backdrop of my time with a welcoming, happy family and a lovely girl. But I can’t deny that it was there, and that that’s what it felt like.

There was a quiet but omnipresent anxiety in that community. A fear of that gaze and its judgments. They felt it too, but only saw each other when they looked for it. This is important, because anxiety is the weapon of that cold, Saturnine entity.

Frightened people tend to shrink, making themselves small and unthreatening. Freezing people do the same thing, contracting into themselves. A group of frightened people will huddle together as though for warmth. Children hiding from monsters bundle themselves up under blankets. Anxious adults hiding from monsters often become recluses, staying in as though it were winter. A person sufficiently anxious trembles as if shivering.

“Freeze!”

That is what a police officer will shout at a criminal — a rule breaker. It is also what a prey animal will do when frightened.

My ex-girlfriend’s father — a very interesting man, and one I deeply respected — was basically certain he was reading his religion the only right way, and very confidently advanced that reading. You could not change his mind about it. It was not possible.

I often found this interpretation inelegant. Always literal, rarely complex, never mysterious. He read the good book like the manual for a piece of machinery — as though all of its contents were technical descriptions. It had worked. What he’d built was impressive. But like a piece of machinery, it was impersonal, unconscious and had a kind of will of its own.

What I began to realize as I watched his imagined presence shape the behavior of his daughter, was that the Christian church is a woman. She is, indeed, “the bride of Christ.” But that woman has an animus. He, like all of them, is an imperfect image of her father. In this case, an imperfect image of the Father.

Furthermore, the Christian church, like a real woman, can become animus-possessed. And I figured out that that’s what fundamentalism is.

I also began to see the story of Eden in what was going on. I had of course, been glancing at Gnosticism, and I was getting interested in the occult. These I would bring up when she and I were alone and the cold phantom gaze was gone. They were heretical, taboo ideas which were neither dark nor evil, but were unfamiliar, provocative and often conjectural.

I eventually saw that I was like the serpent tempting Eve, although it was in no way obvious who the villain of the story was. Was her father the overbearing demiurge, or was I the meddling devil?

Theology aside, when the characters were human, the only good answer was “yes.”

This I think was really the birthplace of my Yaldabaoth/Lucifer dualism. I had those memories in mind as I made my cosmogram and fashioned the pair as yin and yang rather than God and Satan.

It seemed the wise and sober way to look back at that time.