Mosquito Meditation
On "Why did God make Mosquitoes?" and refuting Dualism, true understanding of Zoroaster.
We step out of the door in summer-time and behold the magnificence of God’s Creation: the blue skies adorned with the radiant sun, the green grass that softly cushions our feet, and for a moment or two we could even deceive ourselves into thinking that already we live in Eden and that Mankind never left it, never turned from The Way of The Creator. We inhale the breath of peace - God has provided for every need of Man and in His gratuitous love He has given so much more than we would ever even need. Our hearts swell with pious gratitude, but we hear an accursed buzzing noise and our Edenic reverie is shattered.
Along comes The Mosquito, and his cousin The Fly, and all the other wretched critters that torment our ears with their buzzing and our skin with the itchiness their bites leave behind. These grotesque little beasts have spindly hairs protruding out of their squishy wrinkly body with big bulging eyes. We, angered, go to crush these creatures but they swiftly avoid our hands. Resolved to return to our serenity we attempt to ignore these aerial insects, but the buzzing is too bitingly loud to ignore. It’s much worse than that because the buzzing noise is a harbinger of the itchiness it has already stealthily inflicted on our skin. Yes, as we were in raptures over the beauteous handiwork of God’s created world He so generously gave us to be our home, the mosquito has snuck in upon us and wounded us without our knowing like a skilled assassin, and now our skin will bear the maddeningly itchy wound for many days.
The Fly catches our eyes as it lands on a surface near us. The atmosphere breathes a short sigh of relief as its no longer pierced by the mosquito’s buzzing. We look at the stringy hairs on its back that stick out of it like filthy spikes, and see it’s mad bulging eyes that no human could look at with familiarity. The fly’s gaze is alien, devoid of feeling, just a mad drive to vampirically suck blood and leave itchy wounds behind in summer that steal away the peace of living creatures. Slowly and steadily our hands move towards this tiny loathsome beast and then - WHACK! Our hand swiftly crushes this little monster. Peace is restored at last. But as a final act of spitefulness, the fly’s guts have spilled on our hands, their sickly yellow colour disgusts us, and its spindly little legs agonizingly writhe as this insect’s nasty and short life is drawn to a close.
Peace is restored, but I cannot summon the sublime feeling out of me that I had before that insectoid invader had arrived. Why is this? The ghost of the fly whispers to me, in one final act of malevolence before its absurd and brief time on this mortal coil is ended: “You are NOT in eden, Son of Adam! You are in a fallen world!” and that is precisely the truth, and the fly’s plentiful presence in early summertime cuts short our time in what would otherwise feel like an Earthly Paradise.
Questions slowly begin to form in me as the sweat forms on my brow. The fly’s assault on my serenity has stuck with me long after it has passed away, but now the disturbance is psychological and not just physical: If God made this beautiful world, why too did He make the fly and the mosquito? Initially I considered that The Fly is not His creation but The Devil’s. The Fly is a kind of visible parallel to a Demon, in that it can torment us, and the itchiness it inflicts on our flesh resembles the irritance in our souls caused by the out-of-control passions that the demons tempt us into. A vice is like an itchiness of the soul, and it leaves a mark as visible and as ugly on the otherwise sublime purity of the soul as a fly-bite does on the healthiness of our skin. In its grotesque shape the fly resembles a demon as well, and its persistence in malevolence is also like that of the Hell-Spawned. I am lead in this moment to a Dualism of the kind that the Zoroastrians lapsed into, and I see my fly-swatting as an assault on the works of the Evil Spirit, The Angra-Mainyu that haunts our world.
But then I remember what St. Augustine, that Ex-Manichean, had taught, namely that The Devil has power to corrupt but not to create, as the power to truly create belongs to God alone. Human creativity is a pale shadow of God’s ability to create ex nihilo: when a man creates, he is only combining or shifting or modifying God’s Creation, an act which, when done rightly, God approves of. But only God can truly create. A man sees a tree and then paints one, for instance, but only God can create trees where once there was not even the concept of a tree, only nothingness. The Devil works not by creating evil things from scratch, but by corrupting good things, and getting them to betray the goodness that is innate to themselves. A being can be evil in proportion to the goodness that was meant to be proper for it, and thus every great villain is a hero gone wrong, and every great hero can lapse into a great villain. The Devil himself was once God’s finest and brightest angel. There is a Latin Saying, Corruptio Optimi Pessima: The corruption of the best is the worst of all. Saint Augustine’s deep realization of the fact that Evil has no ontological existence in-and-of-itself caused him to abandon Dualistic faiths like Manichaeism.
There are a number of problems with Ex Nihilo that perennialists and really anyone with a degree of intellect has picked up on, and we can’t cover all of them here, but the most serious is that it posits a radical separation between The Creator and The Creation. If there is such a gap how can God and His Creation ever relate to each other? Thus, the most sophisticated metaphysical thinkers, The Vedantists and The Neo-Platonists, have asserted ultimately that All is God. Sometimes when people hear this, they think that is is an assertion of egalitarianism but this is not true, as though all things are emanated panentheistically from God yet not all things are God equally. The degree to which a thing is good, true, and beautiful is the degree to which it approaches God qualitatively, with God as He is in Himself having the infinitely highest levels of all positive qualities. Yes, it was a severe metaphysical error that most of the ancient Iranic Faiths fell from the affirmation of a Transcendentally Good Deity and posited two equal entities as the creators of the good and evil in the universe, each wholly independent of the other and existing purely of themselves: Ahura Mazda created all that is good and Angra Mainyu created all that is evil. Ahura Mazda created the universe originally wholly good, and then Angra Mainyu appears unexpectedly to create evil things within it. This whole universe is their battlefield, and the followers of Ahura Mazda ward off the presence of Angra Mainyu through worshipping him in the ways prescribed in the Zoroastrian religion as well as following the ethical precepts taught by its eponymous prophet, Zoroaster (or Zarathustra)1.
The great snare of Dualism, which many unconsciously believe in, was thought up of by The Dark Powers themselves so that they could fool people into thinking that they are God’s Equals and to hide their true origin. All the spiritual warriors throughout history have known that to summon or banish a Spirit they must be properly named, and you can’t do that if you don’t know their true nature. So while Dualism is a “fighting faith”2 that posits an immortal struggle between good and evil at the centre of existence, in its metaphysical errors it actually winds up empowering evil and thus makes it harder to properly fight.
Augustine’s realization was picked up by the great mystic sage of the British Branch of the Aryan Race, J.R.R. Tolkien, who in his stories demonstrates that true relationship of Good to Evil in his stories. Morgoth, a Satan analogue, is enraged that he cannot create as the God analogue Eru Iluvatar can. So instead he corrupts, making orcs from elves, and Trolls, and Goblins, by tormenting and maiming and dirtying the creations of God. Morgoth loves to corrupt as an insult to his creator. His spiritual impotence in being unable to create is expressed by corruption.
The Tradition of Zoroastrianism is correct in asserting that worship and ethical behaviour is a form of warfare against evil spirits, but the simplicity of the dualism they fell into over time is refuted by considering God’s goodness and taking it to its logical conclusion. There is but one metaphysical cause, one Divine Being without an equal, and not either a plurality of conflicting divine beings as most pagans taught or just two as the Zoroastrian Magi taught, but just one Divine Omnipotent Will behind Nature and the Destiny of Man. God’s enemies are not His equals, though in their delusory diabolical arrogance they will claim this.
For the record, Zoroastrianism did not originally teach Dualism, but this is a corruption of that faith that crept in over time. The Prophet Zoroaster believed in, taught, and had revealed to him a strict Primeval Panentheistic Monotheism, making certain branches of the Indo-Aryan peoples perhaps the first monotheists that we know of in history and not the Abrahamic Israelites. The dualism that became a hallmark of Zoroastrianism and remains so today in most of its “orthodox” expressions is a misunderstanding, an accretion of this ancient Iranic faith that came much later that was snuck in by priests who had misunderstood their own prophet’s teaching. Throughout recorded history, ignorant priestcraft has always been the enemy of real spirituality.
Ahura Mazda is just a more primordially Aryan expression of The Panentheistic Supreme Being worshipped by the original Christians and in The Bhagavad Gita. There are some among the Zoroastrians who believe this, even among very Traditionalist ones, because The Gathas (the foundational text of Zoroastrianism) make no mention of Ahura Mazda having an equal-but-opposite rival, but rather extoll the omnipotence of their deity. A Deity can’t be omnipotent but have an equal rival, because omnipotence means being all-powerful and you can’t be all powerful if you have an equal rival because if your rival is your equal that would imply the ability to interfere with their will, and thus they would not be omnipotent, not all-powerful. For a being to be truly omnipotent they would have to be absolutely and uniquely singular, without an equal. This doesn’t mean they couldn’t have a great deal in common with other beings, and indeed they do. While scholars of religious history, and unfortunately most other Perennialists, cannot recognize it, the truth is that Zoroaster is the first propagator of a universalistic Monotheistic religion in this epoch of recorded history and he has had a decisive unacknowledged impact on what we think of as Abrahamism. The Three Magi who came to visit The Christ Child were Zoroastrian Priests who had preserved the purity of Zoroaster’s original doctrine before it was corrupted by an imperial orthodoxy. These Magi recognized His Divinity and had discerned His Incarnation. Christ’s religion too would be corrupted by an imperial orthodoxy, but though religions are established by God’s Avatars like Christ or His Prophets like Zoroaster only to be corrupted by sly priests and ignorant despots, yet God continues to establish religions out of His Love for Man and desire to draw poor spirits lost in this world like us back to Him.
In many ways, The Gathas are a much better presentation of God than what is even in The Holy Bible because they present a Noble Faith free from the grovelling of the weary Israelites. It’s clear from The Gathas that God loves the warrior, that He loves the courageous Aryan.
Saint Augustine was able to overcome the dangerous error of Dualism, which makes one unable to fully banish evil spirits by attributing more power to them than what they really possess, in huge part due to his exposure to Platonism. Plato was able to conceive of The Transcendent Good but seemingly did not take this to its logical conclusion by understanding that The Transcendent Good is a person, God, and not just an impersonal abstraction. God being a Person is more Good than Him being an impersonal abstraction, so naturally The Transcendent Good would have to be a Person in order for it to be The Transcendent Good. Saint Augustine merged Platonism with Biblical Revelation, as many others did before him, and the merger of these two systems of thought was Providential, a part of God’s Plan to gradually reveal Himself to the lost souls who incarnate continually in this world. The syncretism of Indo-European/Aryan Thought and Israelite Revelation represented by Christian Platonism was always God’s plan, and the fact that people didn’t take it far enough by syncretizing much further, and syncretizing with all of the aspects of the Indo-European Pagan Warrior Cultures of Northern Europe is squarely the fault of Man’s falling for demonic tricks and not of from any laxity on the part of God.
Christianity rightly practiced is a religion of spiritual love, and love is always a type of syncretism because it merges two different things to create a third that is a mixture of the two yet also its own separate and unique thing. So authentic Christian Faith could not be but Syncretic, and those who try to “strip” Christianity from foreign elements are actually denying it of its logical conclusions. The mystical truths revealed by Christian Platonism and the lifestyle of pious virility practiced by Medieval Knights are but two of the high fruits of syncretizing Biblical Revelation with Aryan Culture. The Dark Powers were always working behind the scenes in innumerable ways to prevent this divinely-intended syncretism from happening, usually by encouraging knuckleheaded dogmatism in Clergy who lead the church - the blind leading the blind. Christianity was not meant to “replace” the indigenous religions of the world so much as it was meant to purify them and help people better understand who they were already connected to: The Supreme God. Nonetheless, in spite of the ignorance of our age, God will triumph in the end. As the Satya Yuga approaches, all false religion will vanish and the pure light of God’s Truth will banish all the darkness of error in the minds of men.
Monotheism in a sense is far from being “foreign” to the various strands of Indo-European culture as they always tended towards Monotheism as they became more sophisticated. We see this with Plato righly exulting The Transcendent Good above even the gods, and The Vedic Aryans saying that even the gods are just a part of one Ultimate Reality that even they serve. The Iranic Zoroastrians were explicitly Monotheistic and in a noble and virile manner, though they deviated from that pure revelation as time went on. Ultimately, the Biblical Revelations are far less “foreign” to Indo-European culture than we realize, and the Israelites are not nearly so far removed from such peoples as The Hellenes and The Indo-Aryans as we assume. We reject fully the notion that Monotheism is “Semitic” whereas Polytheism is “Indo-European/Aryan”. The truth of Monotheism was realized by Aryans before any Semite. True panentheistic Monotheism is Aryan, whereas the type of legalistic Monotheism that posits a radical separation between Creator and Created is Semitic.
Still, the idea of evil as an alien intrusion into our world not intended by its creator as The Dualists believe is an attractive one because it absolves God of all the responsibility He may seemingly bear for the evil happenings that plainly happen everywhere. There are things of much greater wickedness out there than mere mosquitoes, and as humans we are driven to demand an answer for this. All the enemies of God were once His creations, and it could not but be otherwise, because the God who is Good made His whole created universe “very good” as per Genesis. It was good for them to have free will because this is necessary for them to meaningfully love, and to be able to meaningfully love is very good indeed. But with the capacity for free will comes the ability to act differently than what God wants, and from this flows “evil” which is not something which exists in-and-of-itself but which is merely a corruption of good. Thus some of God’s creatures have rebelled, and of their freely chosen volition chosen to be less-than-good, which is all that evil is. As existence itself is Good because derived from the God who is goodness itself while yet transcending it, the things that are “Evil” are not really that but are rather corrupted goods. Evil strictly speaking has no ontological existence in and of itself. The more good something is the more it exists: the less good something is the less it exists. Most modern theologians fail to understand the problem of Evil because they are deceived by egalitarianism: they assume apriori that all things have an “equal” ontological status, whereas the truth is that some things exist in a qualitatively higher grade or level than others. God exists most of all, and something exists to the degree it is good. “Evilness” is just lack-of-being, something not posessing the degree of being meant for it. To ascend high up the hierarchy of being and exist on a qualitatively higher level is the purpose of life. We do this by following God’s Will: By aligning ourselves with The One Who Is Being Itself, we ourselves possess increasingly greater degrees of Being.
But now behold, what to make of the fly? The Bible says Bal is their Lord, that he is the Lord of the Lies, so if Bal cannot create as he is a demon, he must corrupt. Surely the restored Heaven and Earth promised in the Book of Revelations, the New Jerusalem and the New Eden, cannot have flies in it lest it be less than paradise. But God will redeem the whole creation that fell along with Man; and He loves His creations, so what does The Fly’s redemption look like? Perhaps before the Fall and the takeover of this Material Realm by a rebel faction led by the Devil, the fly was a delightsome and gentle creature, a pleasant guest on a summer evening instead of an intruder. Perhaps the characteristic buzzing, so irksome to the ears, was once a pleasant melody that added to the enjoyment of the outdoors as does the chirping of the birds. Perhaps its ability to inflict itchiness was once an ability to heal. Perhaps their mad gaze was a friendly one, and there grotesque body was once as gentle and light as a will o’ the wisp from Celtic lore. It’s clear enough from reading The Bible that the World does not fall all at once: it takes many generations from the first murder to the corrupt city of Babel. The spread of fallenness is gradual, and perhaps it took millenia for The Fly to become corrupted and it was once a gentler creature our ancestors remembered as The Will o’ The Wisp. Many mythological tales are actual stories of things that happened when our world was much purer than it is today which were handed down from one generation to the next.
Certainly every single aspect of the fly, so loaded with gross qualities, would be different from top to bottom if it was present when the Lord said of His Creation that it is all very good, for at present the fly is certainly Not Very Good and is in fact Quite Annoying, so it must have been a different creature altogether back then. How can animals become corrupt? God permits it to punish Man, and to remind him that it is in Him alone and not in this transient world of corruptibility that he can find his satisfaction and ultimate bliss. Many things were different before they fell: Satan was once the most beautiful angel, and Man was once immortal. But The Fly has no Free Will like Men or Angels: so surely The Devil made something different of these creatures by maiming them as Morgoth made Orcs out of Elves. We can hardly recognize what something was meant to be once it is warped by betraying the goodness that it was intended for, but we have Faith in the Promise that God will redeem this world and restore the paradise that was lost. When the Doomed Rulers of this Fallen World are defeated at last as they inevitably will be, then this world will be restored to the dominion of the Empire of the God who is Love and who Is What He Is. This Earth will then know peace. But that Golden Age to come will itself pass away again to make way for more Dark Ages like the one we are in now, so we do not stake our spirituality on the return of this earth to its native paradiscal glory but rather in the permanent transformation of our innermost heart in spiritual enlightenment so we can ascend out of this world of cyclicality altogether and dwell with Him in His Abode.
In our Fallenness, this condition of spiritual ignorance, Sin and Death are so much a factor in who we are we will never fully understand what an unfallen world is like or even what we are like without those things. But we need not speculate, because if we turn away from our wicked ways and devote ourselves to God we will get flashes of insight like lightning from God Above that will reveal to us what it is like, and we will spend eternity discovering what the unfallen world is like when we are restored to Our Creator. God in His gratuitous love will make the restored world more than make up for the horrors of this fallen one and it will be even better than the original Eden. To serve Him in His Abode as a god who serves God is superior to the state that Adam and Eve fell from.
The Transcendent Good exists eternally, as it must to be truly good. If we are good, so we, being joined to God, shall outlast this world and anything in it that is “evil” if we are united to Him. The “judgment day” is merely a grand shaking wherein all the things that do not exist to a sufficient degree are removed from the Creation to be recycled, and the things that exist on a high enough level will then progress to ever-higher levels of exalted existence forevermore. Yes, then on that glorious day we will be able to enjoy a perfect summer afternoon without any mosquitoes, and yet more, we will enjoy the direct transcendental intellection of God who is beyond all of our present imagination, consideration, and perception.
Do you think it is “worldly” for us to long for such a lovely summer afternoon in Paradise? We do not think that sensuality is ever completely forsaken even by those who have attained the very summits of transcendental intellection. God did not create this material universe only to be a kind of spiritual obstacle course for ascetics, nor is sense pleasure evil in itself - nothing is, after all. Rather, sensuality must be renounced at times for the sake of transformative inner knowledge only for it to return to us in an enhanced way. Yes, in God’s Eternal Abode you will enjoy an Edenically pure wilderness untouched by sin. Can you even imagine breathing in air on a planet never even once touched by even so much as an impure thought? God’s servants enjoy wholesome sensual delights greatly enhanced by their perpetual ecstatic intellection of The Perfect Lord. The beauty, and yes indeed also the smells and tastes, of Paradise so far surpass what you can experience in the dark age of this world that you must be situated in Higher Consciousness to even process them. The God whose nature is bliss loves to make us happy with Him, and at His Hand we will enjoy both spiritual and sensual pleasures forevermore.
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The founder of the “Zoroastrian” faith is actually named Zarathustra, and “Zoroaster” is just what The Greeks called him. The religion he founded is properly called Mazdayasna, The Way of Mazda. But we will use the terms Zoroaster and Zoroastrianism as these are the terms people are familiar with. We will discuss Zoroastrianism more in The Future.
C.S. Lewis, a great sage of the British branch of the Aryan Race, says in chapter 2 of book 2 of Mere Christianity that Dualism is sympathetic due to it being a “fighting faith” and we agree with this fully. In fact, any faith to be sincere must be a fighting faith, a Warrior Faith. But we must understand that God’s Enemies are nowhere near His Equals. The closest one can get to being God’s Equal is by being exalted in His Service.