Lately, I have felt the presence of my personal Satan lurking in the corners of my consciousness and Marbas has moved me to explore my shadow-self as a means to further my training. With divinations pointing toward a coming crisis, it makes sense to attempt to get ahead of any brewing problems, so I did some research online and got an ebook: Owning Your Own Shadow, by Robert A. Johnson.
What Is The Shadow?
The Shadow is a Jungian psychological concept that, briefly define, represents all the parts of a human psyche that the Ego, or consciousness, does not accept or acknowledge. It is thus, the “unknown unknown” within the mind.
I’ve run across the concept of the Jungian Shadow a long time ago, but had literally forgotten some of what I learned back in the day. Reading this book helped unearth some of that knowledge and bring it into the conscious thought, basically, bringing the Shadow out of my personal Shadow. Even so, the knowledge I have of the Jungian Shadow remained intellectual and cold, simple knowledge, to which I had no emotional or spiritual connection.
For the last couple of years, a figure has been “lurking” in my consciousness, sometimes appearing when I meditate and sometimes referencing himself as a “shaitan.” He appears smokey, gray, indistinct, but always wielding a massive, two-handed black sword that he has used to absorb anger, wrath, and hatred from me into its material.
Shaitan, Satan, and Lucifer
I identify as a theistic Luciferian, meaning I put stock into the belief that spirits, demons, etc. actually exist in a way that surpasses human understanding, but that they communicate and work with humanity when they are invoked.
I have always been somewhat thrown by the proper names of “Satan” and “Lucifer,” as they often point to the same being, but sometimes are considered distinct entities. True to LHP philosophies, a consensus does not exist on the use of the names and/or to what exact entity they refer. Couple this with a melange of biblical references, mythological references, etc. and there can be no exact mapping of entity to name. Like most Luciferians or Satanists, we therefore define it for ourselves and move on.
I have personally defined Lucifer as a supremely powerful entity whose goals are to bring knowledge and greater consciousness to humanity. Whether Lucifer feel from an Abrahamic heaven, was the right-hand of the Abrahamic God, and engaged in a rebellious war for which he and his army were punished by exile to a “hell,” I don’t know.
As an ex-Catholic, I am loathe to endorse any of the Abrahamic mythological elements, including their definitions of good and evil. To my mind, the Abrahamic religion endorses a spiritually fascist tyranny of belief and so, everything that they endorse is “good” and everything that smacks of free will is “evil.” These are not definitions I can get behind.
So I think of Lucifer — and all the so-called demons — as gods in their own right, but gods that lost the “public relations war” to the Abrahamic religions. They are thus, reviled by the Abrahamics, but are not what they are described to be.
But Satan? Until now, I had not been able to place him into my personal understanding. He lurked. He barely interacted. When he did, he presented as aggressive and hostile to me, a representation of my toxic male wrath. Maybe because I rejected this representation of my Satan, and maybe because of the general confusion between use of the names “Satan” and “Lucifer” in the community, I chose to refer to this figure as “shaitan,” co-opting the term from Middle Eastern mythology.
My recent revelations regarding my upbringing by a toxic father and my own male toxicity, led me to engage my Shaitan/Satan. This happened in stages, one of which led me to the ebook I referenced.
Owning Your Shadow
The book presents its information in three sections: a definition of the Shadow, a discussion of Romanic Love as an aspect of the Shadow, and a discussion on the power of uniting opposites, in this case, the Ego and the Shadow.
The first section presents the definition of the Shadow in terms of Jung’s psychological constructs, in that the Shadow (unconsciousness) represents all those things that are hidden or rejected by the Ego (consciousness). It thus, contains any number of hidden psychological components: memories, beliefs, behaviors, etc.
Johnson posits — as Jung did — that constant repression of the Shadow would lead to eruptions of behavior that are fueled by these unknown, unconscious elements. These eruptions can be extreme, even insane in quality, and leave the Ego shaken in its wake, since the Ego doesn’t understand why it happened by definition.
When I consider the bouts of rage I’ve experienced over issues that simply didn’t warrant it, and I look backward to my father who had similar bouts of rage, I have to consider that these were explosions of repressed Shadow energy that had no where else to go. They build up and then vent like a volcano.
Over the years, as I’ve gotten better at managing my anger levels, I can see how some of my simmering masculine toxicity might also be Shadow energy. In these cases, I give it a narrow opening into my consciousness, so it vents, but it’s still high pressure, just not volcanic. These become rant sessions about situations or people at work; short-lived bursts of cursing in traffic; ever-present judgemental attitudes about the choices others make and to what I attribute those choices to; any of a host of smaller behaviors that seem to coalesce around an idea that “I know better than they do” or “I am smarter than they are, but it’s unacknowledged by them.”
Of course, these assertions are toxic in an of themselves. So, my Ego doesn’t want to believe I’m this toxic, so it pushes these ideas into the Shadow where they fester and aggregate resentment.
From a psychological perspective, this is all quite straightforward. I do find it interesting that some of this, I had known before, forgotten, and then brought back into the light with the reading of this book. It speaks to the Shadow (and the Ego’s denial) being fluid, less like a static curtain, more like a tide that washes unattended things into its shadowy ocean. It speaks to the need to remain vigilant on one’s issues, lest the Shadow slowly erode what you once acknowledged, leaving behind only smooth sand.
The Gold
The biggest thing I got out of this book was what Johnson references as the “Gold in the Shadow.” Up until now, it’s been easy to see how the elements of the psyche that remain in the Shadow are either undesirable to the Ego or something the Ego is simply not ready to accept as part of itself. These definitions lend themselves to the idea that the elements in the Shadow are wholly negative things…they are, in fact, demonized.
Johnson posits that there are positive things in the Shadow as well, the “gold” in the Shadow, as he calls it. Not only can our nasty weaknesses or our embarrassing personality traits be relegated to the Shadow, but our strengths and personal power can be shuffled off into the depths of the ocean just as easily, simply because the Ego itself is not ready to claim it.
When I consider how I have been socialized into submissive attitudes by my father’s emotional abuse, I can see how I have modelled his behavior into myself. Maybe it’s nurture or maybe it’s nature (I think it’s both in a complicated intertwining), but he and I are at once the same person and vastly different.
I have a great deal of personal power. Yet, I am reluctant to manifest it because I saw my father manifest his high degree of personal power in the worst ways possible and I have always striven to “not be like him” to such an extent that I have denied my power wholesale, at times. Now I am awakening to the fact that he and I are not the same person, are not destined to be the same person, and that I can use my power in ways he never dreamed of doing. I simply have to raise my power up out of the depths of the Shadow ocean and actually embrace it.
Once this realization hit me, things began to change in my spiritual pantheon. The Shaitan/Satan figure became much less hostile, aggressive, and dismissive of my (my Ego’s) needs, and actually felt like a treasured guardian of a sort, someone who was watching over the Ego to make sure it wasn’t overwhelmed and could still function. I started a dialogue with him when I meditate and he’s responding. We’re building a useful relationship that know will help both sides of the divide.
And example: It’s no secret that I body build, take steroids to do so, and generally am attempting to change my physical body to become more masculine, more muscular, more objectively attractive. Yet, I have issues with food — which is a major component to this goal. I ate a lot of garbage food last week and my Coach directly asked me what was going on emotionally, mentally when I did. He was pinging directly on the surface of my Shadow.
This morning, I directly posed the question to my Shaitan/Satan and he said: “You use self-destruction in obeyance to the mistaken idea that your emotions are too large and powerful for you to control. You are modelling the lack of control you witnessed for your father and have adopted because you believe that becoming like him would gain his acceptance and pride. You are wrong.”
How’s that for a brain bomb??
Now, I feel my Shaitan/Satan’s presence within me when I come up against that issue. He occupies my body parallel to me and just lends me clarity of thought and emotion, literal strength of character, to make better choices and decisions. I feel that I can invoke him whenever I need to, when such matters come up, and he will lend me his strength — which is actually my own strength that has been vested to his sea of shadow.
And now I can see Lucifer, the King of Inspiration and Knowledge, and Satan, Lord of Necessary Shadow, and linked entities, two sides of the same coin. Lucifer represents the conscious Ego and the knowledge that resides there and Satan represents the unconscious Shadow and everything we’re not ready to receive, positive or negative. The line between them comprises literal potential. Lucifer seeks to expand our consciousness and Satan seeks to safeguard our consciousness by keeping some things hidden. There’s a clear tension in their dynamic and should be respected, since both goals are righteous.
Trigger Warning: The Book Itself
I cannot finish the review of this book without a warning. Robert A. Johnson starts the book on psychological ground but in the first third of the book transitions to serious RHP, Catholic diction, dogma, and philosophy. By the middle of the second section, every observation he makes about the behavior of man references back to a religious allegory or a value judgement based in the Catholic viewpoint. His experts are Priests, his documentation is from religious sources, and even his illustrations through art are from religious painters, etc.
This book is not neutral to religious belief and honestly, began to chafe very badly as I read through it. Be warned.
