url: https://shwep.net/podcast/radcliffe-g-edmonds-iii-on-the-mithrasliturgie/
Secret History of Western Esotericism podcast
SHWEP podcast & Oddcast covers no-free-will in Early Antiquity and the invention of freewill in Late Antiquity
How come this scholar who runs this podcast has no problem effortlessly mentioning that the initiate ascends through the planetary spheres and then the sphere of the fixed stars…
yet Wouter Hanegraaff has NO IDEA where to place the fixed stars so he just solves his problem by removing all of the stars and redefining “beyond the stars” to mean above Saturn?
and in practice suppresses and moves down the zodiac constellations into the planetary spheres below / before the Saturn gate of ego death exorcism & rebirth?
The challenge here is to answer the question in a simple, pointed, understandable way:
Why does Wouter Hanegraaff remove the stars from the sky when talking about entheogen-induced rebirth and getting rid of fate?
Hanegraaff assumes that ego death and rebirth cannot lead to heimarmene (no-free-will; eternalism; dependent control; non-branching possibilities; pre-existence of control-thoughts).
He assumes that ego death and rebirth must remove such things and replace them by freewill; freedom; autonomous control; branching possibilities; possibilism.
Hanegraaff latches onto the “I Hate Fate” theme of Late Antiquity and misreads the hermetic text which says “the maiden sacrificed in surrender and in honor of the fate-controller planetary archons” as if hermetic text said “the maiden offered sacrifice to the ultra-transcendent Source, and the Source then made the fate-controller archons surrender to her and go away.”
Hermetic texts might be coherent when precisely judged by some poet who has a form grasp of the actual trajectory that Early Antiquity delivered and glorified.
But Late Antiquity’s advanced poetic ironic inversion are themed around the confusing emphasis on movement from no-free-will to freewill, which is a backwards overall direction and it tries to appear to eliminate heimarmene rather than reconcile with heimarmene.
April D. DeConick’s book The Gnostic New Age similarly contrasts, like Luther H. Martin (Hellenistic Religions), the reaction of Late Antiquity against the eternalism-overemphasizing Early Antiquity.
This is how Late Antiquity invented free will, and that development led to the other lopsided emphasis, in 1950 late modern era we totally forgot the altered-state eternalism that Early Antiquity emphasized.
Now we must combine both the eternalism-only gnosis of early antiquity plus the possibilism-only glorification that was fabricated from Late Antiquity to Late Modern era.
Only an emptied ordinary-state reductionist shell of religious mythology remained, by the Late Modern era, even in Joseph Campbell’s relatively sophisticated (ordinary-state confined) hero’s journey with treasure won from the guarding dragon.
Accurate Developmental Sequence Model
Simple reference model of mental model development in the entheogen-induced altered state: MAP MYTH TO this model as the foundation for clear thinking:
1. Experience freewill/ branching/ autonomous control in the ordinary state.
2. Experience no-free-will/ non-branching/ dependent control/ pre-existence of control-thoughts, in the altered state. The mind is reshaped accordingly, while also retaining eternalism-thinking too, as a separate, distinct model.
3. Experience freewill/ branching/ autonomous control in the ordinary state, and remember eternalism-thinking from the altered state.
more detailed version:
1. In the ordinary state, start with the freewill branching-possibilities mode of experiencing. Autonomous control.
2. In the psilocybin altered state, experience eternalism; no-free-will, non-branching possibilities, and 2-level, dependent control, with near-future control thoughts already existing unavoidable on the path ahead; pre-existence of control-thoughts. Perceive and experience that you as a control agent are dependent on an uncontrollable source of control thoughts. Threat and demonstrate dependence. When brought into alignment with perceived mechanism of dependence, release and gain new mode of stability of control.
3. Return to the freewill branching autonomy experiential state.
Hanegraaff’s Egoic Backwards Model of Cognitive Development
Hanegraaff’s backwards model of altered state cognitive development derived from the ironic poetic I Hate Fate theme of heimarmene-reactionary Late Antiquity:
1. egoic enslavement to Fate/ heimarmene/ no-free-will. Demonized, very heavily disparaged and loathed Fate (“cancer, sickness, poison”, etc)
2. cast out the egoic, Fatedness negative traits to pass through ego death and rebirth into freedom = honoring the Source.
So Hanegraaff’s model is:
1. eternalism; no-free-will
2. pass through the ego death & rebirth gate at top of the Saturn onion layer of the cosmos. slough off negative traits = exorcise eternalism/ fate/ heimarmene/ block-universe no-free-will.
3. reach destination: freedom empowerment, unity with Source (John Lash: “everyone but me has ego-inflation spirituality”)
In a Loose Cognitive Science, or transpersonal developmental psychology version of the Religionism error re: bad historiography method, Hanegraaff commits the religionism error when he makes ambiguous poetic mythic analogy the foundation of his model of the mind’s developmental transformation in the entheogen induced altered state.
The Egodeath theory uses the correct methodology of pure cognitive science to first model and explain how the mind transforms in the entheogen state when moving back-and-forth between the ordinary state and the altered state while observing and probing the self-control system.
That proper basis was from 1985 to 1998 (with some interpretation of rock lyrics as analogy since 1988).
Then after that, I read David Ulansey’s book from 1989, 1998-2006 and in 2005 Erik Davis accurately and clearly summarized my, in book Led Zeppelin 4, explanation of astral ascent mysticism referring by analogy ultimately to mental developmental phases.
First, accurately model mental development, and then explain the twisted inverted “I Hate Fate” repurposing of mythology analogies that early antiquity created – like the best rock lyrics – to rightly report the astonishing unexpected no-free-will altered state experience and release from it.
Hanegraaff commits the confusing error of starting from poetic ambiguous “I Hate Fate” repurposing of early antiquity’s mythology which described mental altered state transformation, so he ends up with a freewill-premised reverse model of mental altered state development, as if we are transformed from egoic no-free-will to transcendent freewill; freedom empowerment. 💪
List of Relevant Episodes
Back when the Egodeath Theory discussion group used to be good, before the quality plummeted and fell off a cliff, I would have efficiently used a plain text editor to summarize all 200 episodes of this podcast.
But now I just carelessly upload failed voice transcriptions, garbled incomplete sentences, and I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
The Egodeath theory 