The Truth About Magic by Richard Smoley

Author:Richard Smoley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: G&D Media
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

15

Evil

Once a man and woman came to God and said, “Hey, Lord, we’ve heard there’s this thing called good and evil. It sounds cool, and we’d like to see what it’s like.”

“That is not a good idea,” said God. “I do not suggest you do this.”

“Oh, come on. We want to.”

“All right,” said God. “You can have your way, but you’re going to have to go down into a realm where it hurts to have babies, and you have to work hard to earn your living.”

I’ve just retold the story of the Garden of Eden in a colloquial fashion. Viewed this way, the myth of the Fall in Genesis is not just a story but a profound statement of the human condition.

The universal human, who is both male and female, is all of us. We are all parts of that primordial being who wished to know good and evil. Created to live in the astral world, it figuratively fell down to earth, broke into little pieces, and became individuals such as you and me.

I have no idea of who you are. In all likelihood, I will never meet you. But I can make an absolutely irrefutable pronouncement about you. I’m going to tell you this with 100 percent certainty: you have known some good and some evil in your life. That is true of everybody. There is no one who has not experienced some good and some evil. Yes, it is the case that some people seem to experience far more of one than the other. Some people are fabulously lucky, happy, and healthy, and they go through their lives that way. Other people seem to be born to misfortune and sorrow. Nevertheless, everyone, from the most fortunate to the most wretched, has known both good and evil.

This answers the question of whether the world fundamentally good or fundamentally evil. The world is not fundamentally good. It’s not fundamentally evil. It is a mixture of good and evil. One ancient tradition calls this earth the mixtus orbis, the “mixed globe,” and the mixture is that of good and evil.

In fact, we can hardly conceive of a world that’s at all desirable without some evil in it. People often say that heaven sounds boring: you’re up there, playing a harp on a cloud. Another version, where you’re sitting in a garden, eating fruit and petting lions and tigers, may be a little more desirable, but in the end it sounds tiresome too.

Are those accurate representations of heaven? I don’t think so. But it means we can’t even conceive of a world that’s at all desirable without some evil in it to provide action or interest.

We are in this mixed world of good and evil, and we are going to experience it. This is the human condition. This is what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger called our Geworfenheit, “thrownness.” We often feel that we’ve been thrown into the world unwittingly. As some people say, “I didn’t ask to be born.” Evil is

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