served to highlight the Element even more: Magister James and Priestess Carmel Severson have expanded Arkte
beyond the Temple of Set as a legal entity in the mundane world, affording Arkte Warriors an additional means for
carrying on their work before the general public.
Nevertheless a day does not pass without fresh news of horrors perpetrated against animals, often all the more
terrible because they are done as though the animals in question are mere commodities or trash - just as Arkas was
so casually willing to slay his own mother until Zeus gave him the initiatory sight of a bear himself.
Thus the Work of an awakened Arkte Warrior is fraught with both great love and great pain. This Work is
something with which we have all become familiar these many years. It is a difficult and strenuous Working to
sustain, but we have all continued to do it.
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I have been asked whether there is a central magical principle underlying Arkte. I would first emphasize that the
Work of this Element is not mere compassion or “kindness to dumb animals” as advocated by traditional humane
organizations. Rather it calls upon the initiatory capacity of humankind to realize that animal intelligence must be
measured against its own benchmark, not ours, and that as such it goes beyond mere “instinct” to various forms of
metaphysical awareness pertinent to each species.
Beyond this new initiation into and participation in different kinds of Self-aware high intelligence I see a new
and greater evolutionary transformation of Setians into magical beings unlimited to their own animal species.
Potentially we may recapture that esoteric bond with our animal fellows which the ancient Egyptian priesthoods had
attained, and which so awed Diodorus. And then we will have lifted the Gift of Set to an entirely new level of nœsis.
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A93: On the Left Hand of Religion
- by Vesa Iitti III°
“Karhun Hampaan Kantaja”
Scroll of Set #XXV-5, October 1999
In our own writings there is often mention of the Temple of Set as “a religion”. What exactly do we mean by
this? Clearly if we are a religion, we are not one in the common sense of the word.
This short article focuses on the issues of what is “religion” and how the Temple of Set can be viewed as a
“religious organization”. The article is not meant to be any final word on the issue; rather I intend to express what I
currently think about the issue, and to further discussion about the subject in the Temple.
What is “religion”?
Scholars of comparative religious studies have not arrived at a consensus on the question of what religion is
during the discipline’s 150 years of academic history. Such scholars as Otto, Eliade, James, Durkheim, Douglas, and
Söderblom seem to have something substantially in common in the focus of their work, but still their definitions of
“religion” vary considerably.
Etymologically in Roman Catholicism the word “religion” is derived from the Latin word religio.
In other Indo-European languages there was no word to signify “religion” before Christianity’s influence. The
same can be said about Finno-Ugrian languages. Thus the word/concept of “religion” has a very limited cultural
sphere of etymological and contextual origin, which creates certain difficulties in attempting to apply it to other
cultures and their “religious” aspects.
There are two different etymological views concerning the word religio. Some scholars of Indo-European
languages have suggested, based on Cicero’s work De Natura Deorum, that the word derives from verb legere,
which means “to collect”. According to that view, religio means actions that are used to re-collect (re- legere)
everything that is needed in order to worship gods.
On the other hand Christian author Lactantius proposed the verb ligare, which means “to bind”. He thought
that religio means a “bond” which re-binds (re- ligare) people to divinity.
The ways in which the word religio has been used from classical antiquity through today are complex and
contradictory. Meanings of the word religio have varied in the course of history according to several contexts in
which the word has been used.
Historically it is noteworthy that the concept of “religion”, in the sense we generally understand it today,
didn’t exist before the 18th century C.E. There were, of course, “religions” throughout the world before the 18th
century, but the way they were approached was very different from the way we in the Western world are accustomed
to thinking about “religions” in our 20th century.
The concept of “religion” was formed in 18th century as a part of great social and epistemological changes in
European culture. Previously humankind didn’t have in its cultures and languages a special category of “religion” - a
category that could be conceptually separated from the rest of the culture and considered from a comparative,
scientific, non-religious perspective.
From this perspective the category of “religion” is a result of development of a language. The “birth” of that
category came from a social and cultural need to create a general concept to describe and to differentiate Christian
and non-Christian traditions, practices, and experiences of a “religious” nature.
Thus “religion” is a concept that is bound to a general Western cultural system of categories of existence. This
culturally-bound system is the conceptual base still used to categorize things like “new religious movements”.
This cultural background is good to remember when we consider what generally is thought to be “religious” in
the Western world, and to what cultural fabric that word is historically bound.
There are several definitions of “religion” offered by scholars of comparative religious studies. Here are just
some of them:
(A) Definition via Supernatural
Edward Burnett Tylor: “It seems that it is best to use this source and to simply base the belief in
spiritual beings as a minimum definition of religion.”
Sir James Frazer: “By religion I understand appeasing of and arbitration with higher powers than
man. Those powers are believed to direct and to control the course of nature and the life of man.
With this definition religion is formed from two components, theoretical and practical, that is
belief in powers that are higher than man and the efforts to appease and to please them.”
Anthony Wallace: “Religion is a group of rituals that are rationalized with myths, and which are
used to mobilize supernatural powers to bring or to prevent changes in the world of man or in the
nature.”
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Roland Robertson: “Religion is a group of beliefs and symbols (and values that are derived from
those) that deal with separation between empirical and non-empirical, transcendent reality, in
which empirical issues are subordinated to non-empirical issues.”
Melford Spiro: “I define religion as institution which consists of culturally conditioned interaction
with culturally expressed supernatural beings.”
Rodney Stark & William S. Bainbridge: “There is some kind of idea about supernatural being,
world, or power in religions and an idea that this supernatural is active and that it effects activities
and situations here on earth.”
(B) Definition via Sacred vs. Profane - Separation
William
James: “Religion ... will here signify emotions, actions and experiences of individuals in
their solitude, as they understand themselves in relation to something that they consider the
divine.”
Emile Durkheim: “Religion is solidary system of sacred things, that is special and forbidden - a
system of beliefs and customs that unites all of those who believe in them as a moral unit that is
called a church.”
Nathan Soderblom: “A religious people is such that holds something as sacred.”
Mircea Eliade: “Religion can still be considered as a useful term if we remember, that it does not
necessarily imply belief in god, gods, or spirits, but which refers to experience of the sacred and is
thus related to the ideas of being, meaning, and truth.”
Roy Rappaport: “The term ‘religion’ refers to public discourse that includes at least one sacred
proposition and those conventional social functions, that are done according to the discourse.
‘Sacred’ is a quality of unquestionable truth that believers give to a proposition that can’t be
verified.”
(C) Definition via “Perennial Concern”
Paul Tillich: “Religion is a state of mind where one has a sense of perennial concern, a concern
that sets all other concerns subordinate to it and which itself includes an answer to the question
about the meaning of life.”
Robert Bellah: “Here presented, the concept of religion - which is most general common
mechanism that integrifies the meaning and motivation in the system - applies to all kinds of
systems, not only to whole society or its groups.”
Clifford Geertz: “Religion is (1) a system of symbols that functions to (2) bring forth powerful,
broad, and long-duration moods and motivations in human beings (3) by forming ideas about the
general order of existence, and (4) by giving those ideas such reliable nature (5) that those moods
and motivations seem specially realistic.”
Jacques Waardenburg: “We consider religion as orientation and religions as specific systems of
orientation. System of orientation helps human beings to find his way in his life and in the world
with certain context that gives meaning to it and which helps one to navigate in it.”
While all of the above definitions are interesting perspectives of the phenomenon of religion, I think they do
not quite address the essence of the issue from the Setian point of view.
For example, the theory of Durkheim (“religion is utterly social and collective”) explains quite well the world’s
religions (the most popular religions) and Right-Hand Path religions and approaches to existence in general, be they
called “religions”, “philosophies”, “ideologies”, etc.
But it doesn’t apply that well to the Left-Hand Path approach to existence, nor to its concepts of “sacred” and
other “religious” issues.
Going a bit deeper into the “Left-Hand of religion”, I now consider what generally makes human beings
“religious” in the first place, or rather what is categorically a necessary condition for a human being to be a homo
religiosus.
Whether one can be defined to be a “religious” or “unreligious” person is a matter of perspective, and is also
greatly dependent upon the social context of the traditions of thought and world context into which one has grown
up and learned to use. Meanings of words and concepts are not completely independent of time and society - like
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language in general. Also those meanings vary to some degree in relation to changes in other areas of culture and
society.
To conceptually define “religious” and “unreligious” is a philosophical and scientific problem. In everyday life
that problem is of course solved rather easily: A “religious” person says he is such and an “unreligious” person says
he is not such.
If religions are based on human beings’ innate tendency to create meaning and order to one’s existence, we
can ask what qualities in human beings make some of us “religious” and some of us not.
From the point of comparative religious studies, it can be said that the same things that create culture and
humanity create religion.
If we try to conceive conditions in which religiosity could be impossible, we would presume human being who
could not be conscious of a difference between “I” and “others”, who would not be conscious about coming physical
death, and who would not be able to create visions of the future world and of that which would Come Into Being.
Accordingly a situation where religiosity would be impossible would also be impossible for the existence of
culture. That condition would be a “state of nature”, wherein human beings would not be creatures who consciously
recognized borders to their existence and could manipulate the OU via different symbolic systems (languages). In
that condition we would be mere brutes, having direct, instinctive responses to all external stimuli.
Religions exist because humans are more or less self-conscious beings who are able to use symbolic systems to
conceptualize existence and to communicate it from a perspective that is separate from nature. As such we are
beings who create values and meanings.
We do not have only mind; we also have consciousness. We do not have only natural needs, but also values
and non-natural needs. We do not just act, but also have ideas about “right” and “wrong” action. We have not only a
past but a history and a future. We not only see, but also recognize whether something is beautiful.
Apparently “religious” experience is, in very general terms, a common human experience of “there’s more to
life than what there superficially seems to be”. It is generally an experience that there is some higher meaning in
existence, and that one’s self is more than mere flesh and blood and culturally conditioned persona.
In his classic work Das Heilige ( The Idea of the Holy), philosopher of religion and theologian Rudolf Otto
called religious experience as “numinous” (from the Latin numen, meaning “dynamic, spirit-filled trans-human
energy or force”). He described this experience as “mysterium tremendum” - experience of “something wholly
other”; of profound awe, majesty, energy, and urgency that at the same time fascinates and terrifies.
I think that this experience has its roots in the conscious experience of one’s separate self.
“Religion” and the Temple of Set
Religions are usually certain kinds of symbolic systems that are shared by their practitioners and that try to
act as a means between different supposed realms of existence, providing some kind of profound meaning, order,
morality, and general perspective to it.
Religions can generally be seen as a different kind of unconscious and distorted outer reflection of the
inherent non-nature of one’s conscious self.
At best Right-Hand Path religions can be quite harmless and also useful for society at large. But at worst they
can also be truly horrible. If we compare the way that the source of all religions - the conscious, separate self - is
approached in Right-Hand Path religions to that of the Temple of Set’s approach to the same thing, we can’t help
but note that if we are a religion, we are completely different from most if not all of the other religions that have
existed and that now exist in the world.
If we are talking about religion in the layman’s sense of
the word, then the Temple of Set is not really a
religion. We are certainly an initiatory school (or “tool”).
Likewise we have a “Setian philosophy” instead of a “Setian religion” as a methodological base in our pursuit
of Xeper. One might very well have “religious tones” in one’s Xeper, but a mere sense of “sacred” as such is not the
focus of the Temple; instead it is clearly and more precisely an individual Xeper.
Magister Roger Whitaker wrote once so well about the subject of “religious Setianism” on the Setian-l Internet
mailing list that I’ll include a lengthy quote from him here:
I think it is vital to distinguish religious Setians - such as myself, Balanone, Magister Kelly, and others
- as particular aspects of the process of self improvement and individual growth we call Xeper.
It was as a result of my Xeper that I became a religious Setian; that is where my work led me. However
what constitutes the elements which manifest as this “religious understanding” for me may very well not
work for anyone else, nor ideally should it (except for those wondrous cases of synchronicity).
There is no single path, and no sure destination where that path may lead you. The important
considerations: Are you experiencing Xeper? Do you continue to grow?
Now you can Xeper and not be a religious Setian, but you can’t be a truly religious Setian without
Xeper if the term is to have any substantive meaning.
Each of us follows a path of our own making; where this path inevitably leads the individual is indeed a grand
mystery, one which constitutes the wonder, beauty, and artistry of the Left-Hand Path.
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It is important for Adepts II° and Setians I° to understand that religious Setians do not expect nor desire you
to join them. It is something which will or will not happen as a result of your work, study, and magic. It has no
bearing on how far you will Xeper, for there is no organizational privilege attached to crossing over into religious
Setianism. It is something each must decide for himself based upon individual experience in the active process of
Xeper.As a Setians we are first of all focused to Xeper - an individual process of Coming Into Being. To that end we
apply rational inquiry, logic, initiatory philosophy, and magic - not prayers nor unquestionable beliefs, nor dogma,
The Temple of Set II Page 111
