LIGHT FORCES (plural)
AND THE DARK FORCE (singular)
BUT NOT DARK FORCES (plural)

By Philip Marsh

Some people, when hearing of "a dark, hidden force that permeates and motivates all of nature" as a definition of Satan, get confused. Obviously, they don't feel it. Many are then inclined to ask certain types of questions. Notably, all those who can't feel this tend to ask the SAME TYPES of questions. I shall try to cover three typical questions asked by one of the more intellectual types of such people by elaborating on just what Light Forces (plural) are.

Here is one example of a very succinct and organized yet nonetheless confused paragraphical question which contains three separate questions. The intellectual asks:

"Looking at this Satan as a dark force that permeates all of nature [they often leave off part of what COS said, such as the words "and motivates" - "dark force that permeates and motivates all of nature"]: a) Is there a light force as well permeating and perhaps motivating all of nature? b) If there is, what's the difference between the two forces? c) If there isn't, then what is it about the Satan you see that makes it dark?

I cannot answer this stacked triple-question for someone else. But I'll try to sort it out as if the question is a general one since it does tend to be the KIND of question that is asked both by those who can't feel this force and by "dualists."

In (a) it is asked if there is a "light force AS WELL" (my emphasis here), as if one suspects there is or "ought to be" (logically or scientifically) some sort of parallel between the participation in the cosmos of a proposed pair of light and dark forces. This is a completely unwarranted assumption, called for ONLY by some sort of philosophical "Manichaean equality" of light and dark forces, i.e. called for by someone with an innately Christian-like mind-set. (As such, the same Christians misinterpret the Tao symbol to be a duality of this Manichaean sort when it is NOT. They are not LOOKING AT the glyph, perhaps are unable to SEE it.) Though there are those that would ask such a thing as some sort of rhetorical "trap," most often this is asked because the person really and truly has no clues whatsoever as to what is meant by "THE Dark Force in Nature...etc." I am not going to answer this in a way that Dr. LaVey has already answered it directly or indirectly or by resorting to creative explanations. Such answers already fell on many deaf ears. Dr. LaVey asked in "C.O.S.": "Can't they read?" Yes, they can read but they "cannot know." Similarly, a tone-deaf person can not know harmony! Dualists (alexithymics) are "deaf" to the direct feeling of very real forces of nature not only around them, but in them.

A very good, scientific and precise answer to (a) is this: after the first three minutes or so after the "Big Bang," i.e. when there was - at least - ordered time (a requisite for physical theory as it is presented, developed and practiced today), there was a form of symmetry known to mathematicians of set theory as "global." This does not mean "global" in the common sense of "world-wide" or "all encompassing." "Global" here is a technical term from the study of what mathematicians call Group Theory and Lie Groups. It means roughly a very high degree of symmetry. I'll make this more clear: what is the highest degree of symmetry you can think of? Certainly not a playing card: take the Jack of Spades and you can turn it upside down and it looks exactly the same so it is symmetric in one way at least, but if you turn it ninety degrees the shape of the card does not even line up. Not only that, but you can look at it edge-on and it looks like a toothpick. Or you can flip it over and you can no longer even see what card it is: now it looks exactly like the other 51 cards. Not very symmetric overall! How about a perfect sphere. Very symmetric indeed! No matter how you turn it, or what angle you look at it from, it looks the same. Perhaps the sphere is the most symmetric thing you can think of - and it is highly (and beautifully!) symmetric indeed! But it still has "flaws" to perfect symmetry: it looks different if I get inside it; it looks different if I get farther away from it ("smaller"); etc. One can imagine - at least theoretically - symmetries so great that even these differences never appear. And mathematicians and physicists and philosophers have done so. Symmetries can range from the complete lack of symmetry (it would seem) of the alphabetized message on this page, to a playing card, to a sphere, to strange and exotic things and ideas entertained by many mathematicians and some creative fantasists.

Physical theory about the origin of the cosmos shows that the earliest time of which we can speak very clearly is about one one-hundredth of a second. Before that, there is disordered time in which the present ASYMMETRICAL temporal nature of "before" versus "after" has not yet appeared! The universe was still too symmetrical then. Modern physical theory regards this "coming into being of ordered time" ("ordered," i.e., before and after) as just one of a series of symmetry-breakings that occurred and continued to occur for about three- or four-hundred thousand years after ordered time came into being. The very "first" symmetry-breaking, which occurred when the universe was in its now lost state of maximum supersymmetry, was, of course, the "Big Bang." This occurred before ordered time came into being, i. e. before the one one- hundredth of a second I just mentioned. You can see that I must be using the word "before" in a different sense in the last sentence, because I just said that the asymmetry we observe in the cosmos today of "before versus after" did not yet exist. The cosmos was still too symmetrical before one one-hundredth of a second, so you can see the difficulty and pitfalls of using non- specialized terminology here, or the difficulty someone with a poor imagination or plebeian mind will have with this entire subject. Some may find it astounding, but there are some people who have little problem with these things. These people usually find their way into scientific subjects or write creative fiction for entertainment. They are the people (the mathematikoi) I mentioned in my article on Plato and Pythagoras (versus the akousmatikoi, who are fully equipped to "hear" these things, but their belief or disbelief in them is a matter of faith, gullibility, or etc.) Some may recognize that this physics is the same as Eastern ESOTERIC Doctrine, what Tani Jantsang refers to in lump sum as The Dark Doctrine. It is! Anyway, for the first three measurable minutes or so into the universe's "life" (the metaphor here is that the universe has just been "born"), its contents consisted almost entirely of what you would recognize to be "light," i. e. the universe was still too symmetrical for there to be two kinds of "things" in it: light-energy versus matter. Scientifically untrained people are correct to regard light as "energy," but they seem thrown by the idea from modern physical theory that matter is also "energy." This is known as the "mass-energy equivalency" principle of modern physics. The reason people have this difficulty is that during the first three-hundred thousand or so years after the first three minutes, many other symmetries of the early cosmos were broken, so what was once a universe full of what one might call "photon-like" (light) particles of very high symmetry (what Dark Doctrine refers to as Vajre or Hochmah, note that regular photon light is not called "Vajre" or "Hochmah"), there came into being - through one symmetry downfall after another - a veritable "zoo" of elementary particles, some forming the first atoms of hydrogen, now the most abundant elementary matter formation in the cosmos aside from light itself (which consists of particle-like wave-packets today called "photons"). There IS a duality now - due to a broken symmetry - of "matter and energy," but BOTH are STILL what would be called "LIGHT FORCES." But even today, certain symmetries still exist, one of which was the one Albert Einstein discovered and termed the "mass-energy equivalency." Symmetries still exist: if they did not, we would have no formulable laws of physical science other than stochastic or statistical ones. The random element in the cosmos prevails, but symmetries remain.

I am just now getting to the point of answering question (a), and I do not see how this can really be answered any other way than to give "religious" answers, which appeal not to the mind, but rather to the human "belief faculty" and pander to the stupid. The "light force" asked about in (a) does NOT "permeate and perhaps motivate all of nature...[as well]," to answer the question (a) directly. The "light force" did not come into existence until the "explosion" of the Big Bang. This was not an "explosion" as is commonly conceived, which is why I put the word in quotation marks. It was an explosion unlike those seen on earth, or even what you would hypothetically witness if you could withstand the temperatures on the sun or stand at ground- zero during a nuclear explosion. This explosion, which brought the "light force" into being for the first time, did not start from a definite center and spread out and engulf things the way explosions on earth or even in stars engulf circumambient air, etc. This "explosion," which gave birth to the "light force," occurred "simultaneously" (I use the word advisedly, as I indicated above) "everywhere" (also used advisedly.) These words are used advisedly because the SPACE AND TIME "IN" which the new-born light force came into existence is ITSELF a new-born result of this first symmetry-breaking called "the Big Bang!" The "light force" filled all of space, and WAS all of what there was then OF SPACE (AND TIME) - JUST AS THE LIGHT FORCES (any matter or energy) ARE NOW. If you cannot understand this but at least have a feel for it and always did, then I'd simply say that you are creatively inclined or have "Gnosis" or Knowledge (the Greek word Gnosis is not to be confused by the dualist "gnostics" who co-opted the word), or Dharma, the Tantrik word. Precise mathematical formulations of this process are not necessary for grasping Satanism! But then there are those that can not understand it or feel it in any way and if you are this type, then most of what I am saying here will mean nothing to you despite the fact that your OWN CARNAL BODY IS "LIGHT FORCES PERMEATED BY THE DARK FORCE" and despite the fact that the growth, change and Becoming your carnal body has been doing since you were a zygote was motivated by THE DARK FORCE! One only needs to FEEL! That is what it means to "KNOW the Mystery of Your Being."

For example, if you really understand what I am saying here, i. e. what the standard model of the "Big Bang" is saying here, then you will know instantly that it does not matter, e. g. whether the universe is finite or infinite, i. e. one might wish to know the answer to this "unanswerable, eternal" question, but this answer does not affect the standard model of the Big Bang I have just given you. If you suspect it does, you and I are "not on the same wavelength" here. In this early universe of the first light of the first three minutes, particles called electrons, positrons, neutrinos and photons were continually created out of energy and then, after a very short life, annihilated again. As more symmetries vanished, the single force-energy of this primal light began to look more and more like the "zoo" of elementary particles that make visible tracks in modern day laboratories' particle accelerators; the single force-energy of the primal light began to look like light versus matter. As time went by, the original light force became less and less like its original form: not only did some of it get "condensed" into matter, there began to appear - due to further symmetry-breakings - to be more than one force: not just the "light force," but gravity, electricity, magnetism, optical light, momentum, etc. One can use this model to measure for you and tell you the various densities of matter in the cosmos both at very early times and today, a theoretical calculation that agrees remarkably with the actually observable matter density that some astronomers have come up with through independent observations of nearby galaxies and interstellar dust, an agreement which shows the superiority of this theory over others. This "cosmogenesis" is clearly like the Eastern "emanation" doctrines which are technically theologically atheistic. Emanation is NOT the same as "creation," the choice of Western Christian minds. Eastern Doctrines all say that this all happened out of NECESSITY.

If the "dualists" could understand anything I have said, they'd be able to see (or at least infer logically) how the light force, and the other forces it became, does not "permeate" the cosmos (as does the Dark Force). The "Light Forces" ARE the cosmos: the light force which emerged in the "Big Bang" - through one symmetry-breaking after another - BECAME your body, the sun, and the forces which act to pull together or push apart particles and massive clumps of matter - all you see and can detect. It is these light forces which ARE the clump of matter which is your desk, the trees, the planet, the sun, yourself. People are correct to regard light as "energy," but what they seem to have trouble with is that matter and energy are equivalent. So your table is also "light," composed of "Light Forces," but supremely condensed according to the mass-energy equivalency principle (E = mc-squared). The Light Forces do not "motivate" anything here: they ARE the very substance of the cosmos, but by "substance" you must include many of the non-tangibles of physical theory: space, time, gravity, etc.

What caused these symmetries to break? Another way of asking this is: what "pushes" or "motivates" THEM to break? It is not the light force itself. It cannot be. The light force is the RESULT of the "earliest" symmetry-breaking called the "Big Bang." The light force is "created" or emanated thereby, and "comes out" thereby, i. e. begins to emerge "into" a space in which newly formed particles rush rapidly away from one another, particles which are themselves composed of this light force, into a space which is also composed of this light force! When one begins to reflect on space, however, and especially on time, one begins to see that space and time have something a little more to do with the force which causes these symmetries to break, i. e. not the light force, but the "other one," the one dualists have a problem understanding, feeling, grasping, or identifying even when it's spelled out for them. But I can see that they don't have clear concepts of what the light force is either, which I have tried to give here, and this holds them back or bars them from seeing what the Dark Force is! If you cannot see or intuit or know the Dark Force directly, it might help - I thought - to clarify what the light force or forces are so as to see what is "missing." Once you see that the light force encompasses all of the known universe, not in the sense of permeating it, but in the sense of BEING the very stuff of which all of it is made, and once you see the way the light force came into being, e. g. through symmetry-breaking, then I think you will be in a better position to understand what the "other" force is that we Satanists talk about: the force which push-starts all of this, which breaks the symmetries, which "scatters" the original super-symmetrical thing, which makes it explode, which causes the random, chance combinings which we observe even today in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the so-called "law of entropy," which is different from other physical laws and operates apart - as if separate - from all the other laws which govern things made up of this light force. You may know that for many years, apart from any cosmogonical studies, which is what I have been discussing here, the laws of thermodynamics and entropy constituted a separate field of physical study, so different is this force from the light forces which govern physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, etc. Even today, the study of entropy and random systems is a very separate field of intellectual pursuit. It does not surprise a not otherwise naive Satanist to find this out when he bothers to look into the history of science in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries because someone who knows what the Dark Force is in his own (call it intuitive) way immediately associates the concept of entropy, when it is explained to him, with the "very first thing or principle" that cosmogony is talking about, the one from which the light comes through symmetry-downfall, the one against which the "arrogant light," as Goethe's Faust called it, seeks and seems to vie, because this light force composes and makes up all of the universe (though it does not permeate or motivate it). I think you can see from all of this the answer to the question (c): the light force IS the substance and entelechy of all we see: all matter and energy. But the part which is left over, the first part which was once all and now permeates all, drowned out behind the bombast of the light you yourself can see, is not light at all, not in any way like it: it composes nothing we can see, it makes up no matter or energy in the cosmos now, yet it exists WITHOUT light, BEFORE AND APART from it all, pushing and breaking and mixing from the very beginning. I loathe what Aristotle called mystikos logos, i. e. obscurantist mumblings like "the light force is the child of the thing which always was and always will be." You may be more use to this kind of "thinking" or "formulation" than I am, having my background in the sciences, and, in point of fact, if I said this like that I would mean the same thing as I mean by saying it technically. And it is true that, perhaps, such a way of saying it would explain all of this to a creative person with no training in the sciences. But the real trouble with "ideas" or "magical- lingo" like this is that it leads to the confusions and false inferences or "clue-less questions" like the triple-question I am addressing here. If you are speaking in a kind of "lingo jargon" amongst people who know these things and "just talk that way," there is no problem and such "lingo" would be like "slang" or "short-cut talk." But when those who can not know or feel this hear such talk, it leads to the types of questions I addressed here and to "Christian-like" ideas; it leads to what we know happened: Christian-like Westerners took Eastern lingo and made up their own pseudo-Tantra, pseudo- Taoism and pseudo-Kaballah, not to mention people who knew the real doctrines deliberately selling frauds for profit while keeping the truth hidden, or inventing New Age-like syntheses of heaps of rubbish with physics lingo thrown in for good measure. Using the strict language of science could never lead to that. For example, if "the light is the child of the all-thing which always was and will be," wouldn't it be logical to infer that "like father, like son," i. e. the "son," being the "light," could only come from something which has the ability to convey the property of "lightness" to it, so therefore there must be at least something of the "light" in the always-all-thing which is its "father," (which means it is not really dark)? Such was AND IS the thinking of the dualists and patriarchists (despite the fact that they all presumably now that men do not give birth to sons)! Their mythology arose from a complete LACK OF FEELING ROOTED IN CARNAL REALITY. The innate Satanists, if they used this metaphor, tended to think of the "light-son" as coming from a "Dark-Mother", or as a Dark Mother and Light Daughter, or (notably the Eastern ones) knew of this as a FORCE and equated it with perceived time. You may be used to this kind of paralogistic mythopoetry: I have come across lots of it in Setian, pseudo-Satanic, Gnostic, pseudo- Kabbalistic, etc. circles and literature where such people don't have a clue as to what they are parroting; but I've also run across it among Satanists who knew exactly what this was and deliberately disguised it in such talk as code. These kinds of false "inferences," which the triple-question appears to be guided by, are obviated ("made impossible") by the scientific method which, as everyone from Plato to Penrose has noted, is the Pythagorean method.

I hope this sheds some light (!) on these often-asked questions (asked in one form or another). There is a great deal else I could discuss if I stopped talking science alone: e.g., the complex subject of one of Dr. LaVey's favorite things: music. For example: is music more like the Dark Force mentioned above, or the light, and since it consists only of sound waves, which are completely composed of the light like everything else in the cosmos, what sense would it make to say any music is dark? Also, why would certain people, like Dr. LaVey or Tani Jantsang or others, refer to or regard certain music as light and to other music as dark? Why are compositions in minor keys often called "dark?" Tani Jantsang would explain that the sound waves acting upon your particular physical being (matter) make you feel the Dark Force more or less (or not at all), and further explain that this would probably depend on the type of physical being you are and how good your harmonic hearing ability is. You can see the difficulty in my discussing this with anyone: they might understand nothing I have said so far, except perhaps the paralogism I gave about the "light son or daughter" coming from a "dark father or mother" who "might therefore be at least partly light," and they might be tone-deaf or one of the much more numerous people who form the great bulk of the music-patronizing public who are partly tone-deaf to a degree sufficient that they find it difficult to "learn" to name chords or to tune a guitar or stringed instrument without a pitch pipe or a "string-reference" method (in guitar tuning the partly tone-deaf are taught to tune the guitar by what is called the "fret-reference" method). Or one might like to get into a conversation about such tone-deaf people and why they'd strive (wanna-be) to be musicians in the first place when they can't!

Now that we know there are "light forces" which arose from a "Light Force," the answer to (b) should be obvious unless the person is still under the illusion that there are dark forces (plural). We do not know what happened before the Big Bang or if there were dark forces. But now there is only ONE Dark Force. With the laws of the cosmos being as parsimonious as they are, one would find no reason to speculate about "some other dark forces" which may or may not have existed before the Big Bang. One may get the idea that entropy (not energy, not matter) is impliedly different from the other laws or "the light forces" in Nature because it "guides" all the rest. And this is true: many physical events are explainable using only one or two forces or laws, but the law of entropy is always there too - all the time. You would be correct to think this does not make it really different from the other laws simply because it "always applies." I would agree to this. However, there is a better reason why the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the "law of entropy") is so much different from all the other laws: it is the ONLY law of physical science - bar none - that is time irreversible (note that the Eastern Dark Doctrines connected this force with Time). This is an astonishing fact: all the other laws of physics (light forces) are invariable with negative time quantities substituted for positive ones in their equations. If any of you have access to an old movie projector, watch a film in reverse. What you will see is the impossible, something never observed but not in any way barred by any physical laws - except one: the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Dark Force in Nature.

And does this Satan (entropy) only "Will the Evil" (result in decay and dissolution)? No! As Goethe said in "Faust," and as Tani Jantsang wrote in her Mephistopheles article (in "Package of Doctrines"), the Satan Wills the Evil but DOES THE GOOD: nothing would come into being without entropy. The very act of it "willing" dissolution results in becoming: in growth, in diversity, in change, in complexity. For the dualist-minded or Christian-type who fears and battles change and diversity, such a force would be Satan. As such, it motivates all of nature, all of the cosmos. It cannot actually be battled though in "living" we, as living bodies, tend to "slow it down" (at least in the very small region around our bodies) by the mere act of living. It is and can be felt by some as The Paramount Vital Force. In the East they view this force and vitality as "Joy." Not strife. Not rebellion. Not griping. Not "xeper." JOY!

Some of you might notice my use of the word "becoming" and recognize it as a word many other Satanists use, correctly or incorrectly. The manner in which I use the word is the right manner in which the ancients used it. It never meant to "strive to try to be" something. The word had more in common with the concept of flowing into or "letting go." It is not surprising that those who can not flow, let go, or feel the Dark Force would adopt this concept also (along with the others they borrow) and completely lack an understanding of the meaning of "becoming" as development, growth, evolution, change, etc. As we have repeatedly said: tone-deaf people can not know music, but with musical vocabulary easily learned, they can fake it and/or "talk about music." But no one with the ability to hear/know music could be fooled.