A Brief History of Satan and An Explanation On Why Group (Gang) Stalking May Be the Result of Inner-Group Conflict
“Remember, the subject of cosmic war between symbolic representations of “Good” (God) and Evil (Satan) serves primarily to interpret and order very real human relationships — especially the reality of all-too human conflict — in supernatural form.”
The ancient Egyptian word for Egyptian simply means “human”. The Greek word for non-Greeks, “barbarian,” resembles the broken linguistic accents of those who do not speak Greece’s native tongue — since they speak unintelligibly, as do many foreigners not born in the United States, the Greeks call them barbaroi.
Yet this virtually universal practice of calling one’s own people human and “dehumanizing” others does not necessarily mean that people actually doubt or deny others’ humanness. However, some behaviors and actions go way beyond the pale of perceived differences when it comes to disrespecting another person’s rights based solely on ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, cultural characteristics. For example, the actions of Anthony Sowell, Ted Bundy, Adolf Hitler, Andrew Cunanan are examples where one might actually consider these individuals as “outside of human relatedness”, or “other humanness” because of their actions which actively sought to destroy and annihilate another non-threatening person. The act of treating one as an outsider by excluding them from a social group may be something considered a bit antisocial but far less aggressive, in fact, more passive-aggressive, because one doesn’t practice the same customs. This is something altogether entirely different and to which the term “the Satan” is often deployed when analyzing ancient writings of religious theology. Unfortunately, this phenomenon of “the Satan” also gave rise to acts of mass delusional persecution and extermination (genocide). It is closely bound to the psychic splitting of object relations theorized by countless psychoanalysts from Anna Freud to Melanie Klein to Jacques Lacan to Heinz Kohut and Donald Winnicott and to which is most often associated with childhood trauma.
The New Testament gospels almost never identify Satan with the Romans, but in fact, they were. The New Testament consistently associates Satan with Jesus’ Jewish enemies, primarily Judas Iscariot and the chief priests and scribes known as the Pharisees. By placing the story of Jesus in the context of cosmic war, the gospel writers expressed, in varying ways, their identification with the embattled minority of Jews who believed in Jesus, and their distress at what they saw as the apostasy of the majority of their fellow Jews in Jesus’ time, as well as in their own. Jesus’ followers did not invent the practice of demonizing enemies within their own group, although Christians, and Muslims after them, carried this practice further than their Jewish predecessors had taken it, and with enormous consequences.
Josephus, writing from his Roman retirement villa no doubt hoped not only to express his anguish but also to exonerate himself for collaborating with those who destroyed Jerusalem when he wrote;
“O most wretched city, what misery so great as this did you suffer from the Romans, when they came to purify you from your internecine hatred!”
Might not one consider this very sentiment toward the Targeted Individual suffering electronic targeted physical assaults and psychotronic torture? Where one day, at my local grocer’s lunch meat counter, I uncounted a former acquaintance “Joe”. I was not very kind to “Joe” because he was a close friend of a former abusive boyfriend of mine and to which I still perceived “Joe” as abusive as well. What would soon follow for me was electronic targeting and psychotronic torture. Was my “internecine hatred” the cause of my targeting? Or is the phenomenon of Group (Gang) Stalking with electronic targeted physical assaults and psychotronic torture something entirely different. Is it more likely that the government is targeting me and a small population of others it perceives as enemies who have been placed on a “watchdog list”? Not likely. It’s more likely, that similar to the development of “the Satan” in the Old Testament, the phenomenon developed out of inner-group conflict. The Satan of the Old Testament was frequently represented as a cultural foreigner to the local region or native population. As Elaine Pagels, author of the Origins of Satan, writing on her analyzes of the written works of the Bible states:
“The apostle Mark himself, like the Essenes, viewed the war movement essentially as a conflict within one “house” — as I read it, the house of Israel. Even the images that Mark invokes to characterize the majority — images of Satan, Beelzebub, and the devil — paradoxically express the intimacy of Mark’s relationship with the Jewish community as a whole, for, as we shall see, the figure of Satan, as it emerged over the centuries in Jewish tradition, is not a hostile power assailing Israel from without, but the source and representation of conflict within the community. “From the beginning, then, Israelite tradition defines “us” in ethnic, political, and religious terms as “the people of Israel,” or “the people of God,” as against “them” — the (other) nations (in Hebrew, ha goyim), the alien enemies of Israel, often characterized as inferior, morally depraved, even potentially accursed.” . . .
Pagels goes on further to tell us,
“Satan’s presence in stories could help account for unexpected obstacles or reversals of fortune. Hebrew storytellers often attribute misfortunes to human sin. Some, however, also invoke this supernatural character, the Satan, who, by God’s own order or permission, blocks or opposes human plans and desires. But this messenger is not necessarily malevolent. God sends him, like the angel of death, to perform a specific task, although one that human beings may not appreciate; as the literary scholar Neil Forsyth says of the Satan, “If the path is bad, an obstruction is good.” Thus, the Satan may simply have been sent by the Lord to protect a person from worse harm. The story of Balaam in the biblical book of Numbers, for example, tells of a man who decided to go where God had ordered him not to go. Balaam saddled his ass and set off, “but God’s anger was kindled because he went; and the angel of the Lord took his stand in the road as his Satan” [le-satan-lo] — that is, as his adversary, or his obstructor. This supernatural messenger remained invisible to Balaam, but the she-ass saw him and stopped in her tracks:
And the ass saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road, with a drawn sword in his hand; and the ass turned aside out of the road, and went into the field; and Balaam struck the ass, to turn her onto the road. Then the angel of the Lord stood in a narrow path between the vineyards, with a wall on each side. And when the ass saw the angel of the Lord, she pushed against the wall, so he struck her again (22:23–25).”
God is the Evil One and Satan is the Savior or the Christ
The Testimony of Truth and Hypostasis of the Archons or sometimes called the Reality of the Rulers are ancient Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi Library in 1945. This library consisted of various Gnostic texts that were stashed away and hidden probably with the purpose to protect and preserve them so they wouldn’t be lost, confiscated, or worse, destroyed. These books may have been known to father Ignasius, an early Catholic Church father. Although I’m not absolutely certain whether or not these two books were in fact known to him. However, what is known to me is there were various other Gnostic texts circling about during Ignasius’ time, of which the early Catholic father labeled “heretical” and/or “gnostic” and excluded them from what was compiled to what we now know today as the Bible.
The teachers of the Testimony of Truth convinced that Christ’s message is precisely the opposite of “the law” — that is, the law laid out in the Hebrew Bible — raises radical questions:
What is the light? And what is the darkness? And who is the one who created the world? And who is God? And who are the angels? … And what is the governance (of the world)? And why are some lame, and some blind, and some rich, and some poor, some powerful rulers and some not?
Approaching the Genesis story with questions like these, a teacher of the Testimony of Truth may discover that it reveals truth only when one reads it in reverse, recognizing that God is actually the villain, and the serpent the holy one! A teacher may point out to a student, for example, that in Genesis 2:17, God commands Adam not to eat from the fruit of the tree in the midst of Paradise, warning that “on that day that you shall eat of it, you shall die.” But the serpent tells Eve the opposite: “You will not die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (3:4–5). Who, asks the Testimony, told the Truth? When Adam and Eve obeyed the serpent, “then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked (3:7). They did not die “on that day,” as God had warned; instead, their eyes were opened to knowledge, as the serpent had promised. But when God realized what had happened, “he cursed the serpent, and called him ’devil’” (Gen. 3:14–15). Now that Adam had attained godlike knowledge, God decided to evict him from Paradise, “lest he reaches out his hand and eat of the tree of life and live forever” (Gen. 3:22), attaining eternal life along with knowledge.
What kind of God is this god? Surely, he has shown himself to be a malicious envier,” says the author of the Testimony. Not only is this god jealous of his own creation, but he is also ignorant and vindictive. And what of the serpent, whom God cursed and called “devil”? According to the Testimony of Truth, the serpent who led Adam and Eve to spiritual enlightenment is actually Christ, appearing in this disguise in Paradise to release Adam and Eve from “the error of the angels” — that is, error induced by malevolent supernatural “rulers,” who masquerade as God in this world.
This philosophical rendering may make absolute sense since, through the study of object relations in psychoanalysis, delusions of Satan are actually represented as marginalized, vulnerable, minority groups and to which Christ and his followers were members. And that God, the ruler of the Jewish Old Testament, would have been represented as the Pharisees, a member of an ancient Jewish sect distinguished by strict observance of the traditional and written law, and commonly held to have pretensions to superior sanctity.
We might go on further to refer to the work by Donald Capps who wrote for the journal Pastoral Psychology the article entitled, “God Has Been Diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” The abstract to this article reads:
“This article endorses the contention that God suffers from a mental disorder, but challenges J. Henry Jurgens’ diagnosis of bipolar disorder as reported in The Onion (“God diagnosed with bipolar disorder”, 2001) and proposes narcissistic personality disorder instead. It uses the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, Washington, DC, 1994) and various biblical citations in support of this diagnosis. It rejects the idea that a major personality change is reflected in the New Testament and claims that God did not experience a major transformation of his narcissistic personality structure as described by Heinz Kohut (Forms and transformations of narcissism, in A. P. Morrison, Ed., Essential papers on narcissism, pp. 61–87, New York University Press, New York, 1966/1986). However, it concludes that God’s creativity accounts for the stability of his narcissistic personality structure and helps to explain his lack of empathy toward human beings.”
Remember, the subject of cosmic war between symbolic representations of “Good” (god) and Evil (Satan) serves primarily to interpret and order very real human relationships — especially the reality of all-too-human conflict — in supernatural form. In this light, we might view the bible as nothing more than DC Comic Book or Marvel Super Heroes' interpretation of how abusive leadership powers inflict pain and suffering on marginalized, minority groups who are both vulnerable and powerless.
In yet another vein, ancient affiliates known as the “Eye of the King” discussed by Livius.org in Articles of Ancient History state the Greek researcher Herodotus of Halicarnassus suggests that the Median leader Astyages had several courtiers, one of them being the “eye of the king”. This is the first time this official, which is better known from the Achaemenid empire, is mentioned.
On Livius.org the following is written:
“Persian Eyes” were appointed by the king to inform him of what was going on in the empire. They supervised the payment of tribute, oversaw how rebellions were suppressed, and reported evils to the king. Inside their well-defined regions, they had more powers than the satraps. (According to the Athenian writer Xenophon, the Eyes also commanded armies to check satraps.) Even when the monarch was not present, people knew that he would be informed of their actions and anxieties.
The Greeks knew the office. In his comedy Acharnians (first staged in 425), the Athenian playwright Aristophanes puts an Eye on the stage; the actor must have worn a mask that was painted with one big eye so that he looked a bit like a cyclops. Almost a century later, Aristotle of Stagira was still impressed by the efficiency of the office:
“The pomp of Cambyses and Xerxes and Darius was ordered on a grand scale and touched the heights of majesty and magnificence. The king himself, they say, lived in Susa or Ecbatana, invisible to all, in a marvelous palace […]. Outside these the leaders and most eminent men were drawn up in order, some […] called “guards” and the “listening-watch”, so that the king himself […] might see everything and hear everything (Balcer, 1977).”
When the Athenians founded their empire in the early fifth century, they copied this institution, calling their inspectors episkopoi or “overseers”. This title may have been a word-play because this word sounds like the (probable) Persian name of the Eye: spasaka or “seer”. However, this is hypothetical.
The functions of the episkopos and the Eye were broadly similar: every town in the Athenian empire was supervised by an episkopos, who controlled the payment of the tributes, was supposed to prevent insurrections, and had to investigate evils and report them to the Athenian government. Usually, the episkopos were chosen by the sovereign body in Athens, the people’s assembly. The similarities are remarkable.
It should be stressed, however, that every ruler uses officials like the Eyes to know what is happening. The names of these inspectors may be different, but there are some primitive tasks that have to be executed anyway. For example, Charlemagne employed missi dominici. The Athenian government needed to send out inspectors like all rulers had to do. Nevertheless, because the job responsibilities of the Eye and the episkopos are so very similar, we must seriously entertain the possibility that the Athenians copied a Persian function.”
Here we can imagine that modern-day equivalent of police officers, detectives, secret service men, central intelligent agents, and spies may fall into this category of what has historically been called “the Eye”, “the Satan” or “God” depending upon whichever perspective you agree with; the Old Testament or The Testimony of Truth.
And here we might ask again;
“What is the light? And what is the darkness? And who is the one who created the world? And who is God? And who are the angels? Who is Satan? ….And what is the governance (of the world)? And why are some lame, and some blind, and some rich, and some poor, some powerful rulers and some not?”
Sources:
Pagels, Elaine. (1995). The Origins of Satan. New York. Random House.
“The Eye of the King.” Livius.org. Retrieved online October 9, 2021 https://www.livius.org/articles/concept/eye-of-the-king/
J. Balcer. “The Athenian episkopos and the Achaemenid King’s Eye” in: American Journal of Philology 98 (1977) 252–263.
Capps, D. (2008). God Diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Pastoral Psychology, 58(2), 193–206. Abstract quoted from the following webpage:
