4. The Structure of Shadanakar: The Infraphysical Planes
4.1. The Demonic Base
One fact that our religious consciousness has failed to take into account to this day is that the Trinity intrinsic to God recurs or is duplicated in some of the monads He creates. The crude saying, «The Devil is the ape of God» has a profound and multifaceted meaning. The warped, inverted imitation of the Trinity, the inner mystery of the Divine Spirit, by the great demonic monads constitutes one of its most important senses. I cannot, of course, shed any light on the triune of Lucifer. It is on a level so infinitely beyond all the powers of our comprehension that it is scarcely possible to apprehend anything about it other than the very fact of its existence, the fact of its fall in times immemorial, and its continuous struggle against God.
Despite the tremendous gap between the dimensions of his being and ours, the nature of Gagtungr, the great demon of Shadanakar, may, under favorable circumstances, be apprehended to a somewhat greater extent. Most important, his triunity becomes evident, though the cause, origin, and purpose of that triunity (if it does indeed have a purpose) remain a mystery.
What comes to light first of all is that we are dealing with a kind of blasphemous parody of the hypostases of the Holy Trinity. But the nature of the Divine Triune-arguably the most complex issue in theology-will be discussed, if only briefly, in another section of the book. Thus, for now it is impossible to shed light on the nature of the parody I have just mentioned. I will only say that Gagtungr endeavors to counterpose his first person, the Great Torturer, to the First Hypostasis of the Divine Trinity; his second person, who could best be described by the name the Great Harlot, to the Second Hypostasis; and the antipode called Urparp to the Third Hypostasis of the Trinity. Urparp is the implementer of the demonic plan and in a certain sense might be called the principle of form. It is that aspect of the great demonic being that manifests itself in the life of various planes in Shadanakar as a power that actively works toward transforming their nature in accordance with the designs and purposes of the Torturer. It is the formative power. Fokerma, the Great Harlot, is that aspect of the demonic being that pulls and draws souls and fates within Gagtungr's compass. The first aspect, Gisturg, the Great Torturer, is the ultimate depth of the demonic self, the repository of its higher will, power, and desire.
His external appearance, as seen by the spiritual vision of those few humans who have gained entry to the dark heights of Digm, his abode, is dreadful beyond all description. Reclining, as it were, over a raging purple ocean, with black wings stretched from horizon to horizon, he raises his dark grey face up to where a blaze of infrapurple light pulses and flares, while above it all blazes a luminary of an inconceivable color vaguely reminiscent of violet. Woe to those whom Gagtungr fixes with his gaze and who return that gaze with open eyes. If I remember correctly, of all the human agents of dark missions later brought to Digm, only one, Torquemada, found the strength at that moment to call to mind the name of God. All the other monads became slaves to the devil for untold centuries to come.
Besides Gagtungr, the elect of evil also abide in Digm. They are the monads of a very few humans that have merged with their demonized shelts and the few souls of certain beings of a demonic nature, including the grand igvas, the dark leaders of antihumankind who have already completed their journey on various denser material planes. There they together devise the plan for the struggle against God; there they prostrate themselves before Gisturg, are intimate with the Great Harlot, and are initiated into depths of knowledge in contemplating the face of Urparp.
There is yet an even higher demonic plane in Shadanakar: multidimensional Shog, whose materiality was created by the
great demons of the macrobramfatura. Powerful currents of dark energy flow out of the depths of the Universe into the plane, and no one other than Gagtungr can enter it. All others are only able to see it from the outside, and even then only at rare moments. At those moments, they no longer perceive as spherical that same luminary of indescribable color that blazes over Digm. Rather, they perceive it as a pulsating arc stretching from one end of the plane to the other, with its light still akin to violet. It is the galactic anticosmos, the seat of power within the Galaxy of Lucifer himself. At times, the arc sags inward, as it were, and Lucifer's energy pours into Shog. Thereupon Gagtungr, imbibing it, raises his wings up to the black sky. That, at least, is how those who see Shog from the outside perceive it. The manifestations and forms of that world themselves are in actuality transcendental for us.
There are, however, other planes in Shadanakar from where the galactic anticosmos is visible, though in a different aspect. The anticosmos of all bramfaturas, Shadanakar included, are twodimensionaclass="underline" they are endless geometrical planes, as it were. They all intersect along the same line, which could be called the demonic axis of the Galaxy. To help the reader visualize it, I will employ a kind of structural model. Take a book, stand it up vertically on its spine, open it and spread its pages out, and in your mind imagine the two dimensional plane of each of its pages extending on to infinity. All the planes will intersect at different angles, but all along the same vertical line somewhere on the spine. The demonic axis of the Galaxy, its anticosmos, is the cosmic prototype for the line of intersection of all these planes. Naturally, it will be visible to any being abiding on any of these twodimensional worlds, including the corresponding plane in Shadanakar.
The two-dimensional plane in Shadanakar is sometimes called hell, but the term is not entirely appropriate. The plane is not where human souls suffer in the afterlife; rather, it is the abode of most of the demonic beings of our planet. It could be called the anticosmos of Shadanakar, but that is not quite correct either, because the anticosmos is not that one plane alone but all the demonic worlds that counterpose the Divine Cosmos. It is only, so to speak, the chief demonic stronghold. Its real name is Gashsharva.
One could, if one likes, consider the beings there to be incarnated. On the other hand, the concept of incarnation is extremely relative. Their monads always remain high up in Digm and Shog, while their shelts, for the most part, languish between incarnations in the Pit of Shadanakar, a horrible onedimensional world.
Gashsharva is the nucleus of the system of worlds created by the demonic powers of Shadanakar to counter the Divine Cosmos and eventually subvert it. No human being could help viewing that dismal yet awesome world as anything but horrific. The combination of a large number of time streams with only two dimensions produces a peculiar spiritually stifling atmosphere. Every monad experiences great pain when its shelt enters that world, a pain reminiscent of the sensation that would arise if a body were forced into a tight iron corset. The fewer the dimensions, the denser the materiality of the world. The atmosphere of that world, however, still resembles air, while the completely flat and uniform ground is harder than any matter in Enrof. There is no equivalent of our vegetation. The radiation of the beings themselves and certain mechanical devices serve as light sources. Blue and green are not visible here, though two kinds of infrared are. I will give one of them the provisional name of infrapurple, stressing as I do so that it has no relation to infraviolet. The impression it produces is like that of a very thick, dark, and intense purple.