Antares is visible in our latitudes low on the southern horizon in late spring and summer, and many may remember well its brightly pulsating wine-red rays. Neither the sun nor any other heavenly bodies are visible from the Pit of Shadanakar-only motionless Antares, on which one end of the Pit rests. In the Pit, it appears infrared. In the opposite direction, the one- dimensional world fades as it approaches the surface of the Earth.
Nothing is visible in that direction. That is where the cavity to the timeless Pit of the Galaxy lies concealed.
It is difficult to imagine how a body, denser than any other, could resemble the simplest thing we are capable of imagining: a kind of black line. It is even more difficult to conceive how it is that those beings retain the equivalent of sight and even touch. The most incomprehensible thing, I would think, is how they are able to see at all through that densest of atmospheres. It is from that atmosphere that they replenish their energy. Interaction between them is possible but extremely limited. Their suffering is beyond description.
Not only the Pit but all the worlds of the Demonic Base appeared, as I have mentioned, while the physical body of Shadanakar was cooling. Before the emergence of organic life in Enrof, Gagtungr centered his activities around attempts to establish a demonic plane on the surface of the Earth and, when that failed, to reinforce and expand Gashsharva and other planes connected with the lower layers of the crust, the magma, and the core of the planet. When organic life did emerge in Enrof, he focused his efforts on gaining sway over the animal realm-efforts that were in part successful-and on making the demiurges' laws more oppressive. The resultant of those two forces formed the basis for the laws of Nature and karma under which we live.
The Semitic religions are disposed to attribute to God responsibility for the severity of the laws. Surprising as it is, their severity itself, at least the severity of the laws of retribution, did not arouse any protest, and were not even recognized as overly harsh. Even the saints of Christian metacultures reconciled themselves with inscrutable calm to the idea of eternal suffering for sinners. Their minds were not troubled by the absurdity of eternal retribution for temporal evil, while their conscience- how I don't know-was appeased by the idea of everlasting immutability, that is, the inevitability of these laws. But that mode of reasoning and conscience is long past. The idea that the Law, in the form it has taken, was created according to God's will should seem blasphemous to us now.
Yes, not a hair of your head will be lost nor will a single leaf on a tree rustle except through the will of God. But we should understand that to mean not that the universal Law in its entirety is the manifestation of God's will but that the maturation of free wills that make up the Universe is sanctioned by God. The existence of a great many free wills gave rise to the possibility that some of them would deny God. Their denial led to their struggle with the forces of Light and to their creation of an anticosmos counterposed to the Cosmos of the Creator.
From the very moment life emerged in Enrof; Gagtungr and his horde left their imprint on the laws governing that life. They were unable to change the laws of the middle planes of Shadanakar, but many species and classes of animals and some planes of elementals fell under their sway, either wholly or in part. That is the origin of the duality of what we call Nature: beauty, spirituality, harmony, and peacefulness on the one hand; living beings killing each other on the other. Is it not obvious that both these aspects are equally real? Is there even one person with a brain and conscience, no matter how deeply he or she might love Nature, who would venture to say that its harmony eclipses and alleviates the boundless sea of suffering that is evident to the unprejudiced eye? And could even one person be found who, despite that sea of suffering-so glaring, so indisputable, so incessantly bombarding our ears with the groans and cries of living beings-has not even once in a while still experienced the inexplicable harmony and incomparable beauty of Nature? How is it that to this day people have failed to understand and resolve that crucial paradox? Is it not because in the West religious thought for more than twenty centuries has been held in thrall by the idea of God's absolute omnipotence and by consequent preconceptions about the oneness of Nature? And in the East, is it not because a deep-rooted philosophical monism has not permitted people to approach an understanding of Nature's duality?
4.2 The Worlds of Retribution
During the prehistoric era, the demonic powers were occupied with slowing human development and preparing the planes of transphysical magma and the core to receive millions of human souls in the future. Later, during historical times, the shrastrs and Witzraor sakwalas were created. The majority of purgatories appeared at even later times.
Our survey of the worlds of retribution begins with the purgatories, because they are closer to us than the other planes. They are more commensurate with our customary notions, and in the case of a descent after death, it is in the purgatories that the descent begins. In the majority of cases, it ends there as well.
The word purgatory is borrowed from Catholicism, but many of the Catholic beliefs invested in it do not coincide with the overall picture of what is to be described. The term sheol could also have been used in reference to those planes, but the Judaic images of those shadowy lands of the dead will also find no parallel in my description.
The purgatories of the various metacultures differ somewhat from each other. Taken separately, each of them also undergoes substantial changes over the course of centuries. In addition, they took shape in different historical periods. There were none at all in the metacultures of antiquity, the Byzantine metaculture included. To be more precise, worlds of eternal suffering existed in their place, and a distinct echo of the mystical knowledge about planes of eternal suffering can be heard in the majority of ancient religions.
The oldest of the purgatories belongs to the Indian metaculture. It was the Indian Synclite that first attained the power of
Light necessary to prevent Gagtungr's forces from turning into planes of torment their sakwala of afterlife atonement-a sakwala that the Indian metaculture had inherited from the daemons and Titans, the most ancient of humankind. Later some planes in the metacultures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were converted into purgatories. The key role in that was played by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, His descent into the demonic worlds, and the struggle that ensued over several centuries between the Christian Synclites and the demons over mitigation of the Law of Retribution. But the struggle did not end in victory in the Byzantine metaculture. The enemy camp offered stubborn resistance. As a result, the Byzantine metaculture broke away from Enrof.
I mentioned before, in passing, the implications of the Byzantine Orthodox Church's refusal to embrace the idea of purgatories when it arose in the Western Church. The horrifying prospect of the eternal torments awaiting the soul of a sinner should be regarded as the impulse for the extreme asceticism with which the Byzantine religious spirit burned to the very end of its history. Yes, the eschatological depths, with all the extremes of its demonic cruelty, unfolded before the eyes of Byzantine prophets. One can only be surprised not at the desperate ascetic excesses of that culture but at the fact that such excesses did not take place in all the metacultures that lacked purgatories.