Paradise Lost and the Hidden Secret
Why does the true God allow evil? The two answers from the esoteric tradition — and the 17th-century epic poem where secret societies encoded the full truth for those ready to see it.
The previous post left one question open: if the Monad is the true God and loves all of us, why does it allow the Demiurge's prison to exist at all? Why not simply intervene?
The tradition offers two answers. Then it points to a poem.
Why the Monad Doesn't Intervene
The first answer is freedom.
The Monad is entirely mind. It does not operate in the material world directly. More importantly: we have the capacity to return to the Monad on our own. Every human being can choose spirituality, goodness, and knowledge and begin moving back toward the source.
If the Monad forced that choice, it would not be a choice. A God who compels you to love him is not offering love. He is demanding obedience, which is exactly what the Demiurge does.
So the Monad waits.
The Second Answer: Why Evil Is Necessary
The second answer is stranger and comes from Dante.
The Monad is eternal, perfect, and unchanging. Nothing about it can change, because change would mean it had a flaw. But if nothing about it can change, how does it grow? How does it learn?
It cannot. Not on its own.
Here is the problem. The Monad is perfect and eternal. It cannot improve because it is already complete. But a thing that never changes never gains anything new.
The Monad allowed the Demiurge to create flawed, mortal, imaginative human beings precisely because of this limitation. When we make mistakes, commit evil, and then recognize those mistakes and try to do better, we expand the imagination of the universe. That expansion flows back into the Monad. It becomes more than it was.
In Dante's view: you can only be good if you have done evil. Evil is not a failure of the system. It is the mechanism by which the system grows.
We are not prisoners of a broken universe. We are the universe's way of imagining itself.
Every time you recognize a mistake and adjust, you are not just improving yourself. You are expanding the consciousness of the Monad itself.
This is why the tradition does not demand the elimination of evil. It demands the recognition of it. The path back to the Monad is not perfection. It is awareness.
The Secret in Plain Sight
Secret societies do not only pass knowledge through private rituals and initiations. They also embed it in public texts. Accessible to anyone who already knows what to look for.
Poetry was the primary vehicle.
If you can already see the truth, you will see it in the poem. If you cannot, you will read it as a pleasant story and miss everything.
The most famous example in the Western tradition is Paradise Lost by John Milton, written in 1667. It is the national epic of the British Empire. Every member of the Anglo-American elite was expected to know it deeply, to have it memorized, to carry it as part of their understanding of the world.
Milton was a rebel and a free thinker. He fought for free speech at a time when that position was dangerous. He questioned established authority all his life.
He was also blind when he wrote Paradise Lost.
A blind man who recites an epic from memory is, in any tradition, considered a prophet. Someone through whom a higher truth is speaking.
What Paradise Lost Is About
The surface story retells the fall of Adam and Eve. But Milton's version adds something the Bible does not provide: Satan's point of view.
In Milton's account, Satan was God's favorite angel. They had a falling out. Satan rebelled. God won the war and cast Satan and his followers into hell.
The poem opens in hell. The devils are regrouping after their defeat. They will never win a direct confrontation with God. They know this. So the question becomes: what do they do now?
Various factions propose different strategies. Some want to build an empire in hell. Some want to accept defeat and simply exist.
Satan refuses. He is determined to strike back at God, not through war, but through corruption. He will go to the Garden of Eden and destroy the thing God loves most: the human beings he created.
No one else will volunteer for this mission. Getting out of hell means passing through barriers of angels. Beyond hell lies the abyss: infinite and featureless space. You could wander for eternity and never find anything.
When no one moves, Satan stands up and says he will go alone.
His speech to the assembled devils begins here. It is the first of the two speeches that contain the hidden message:
Oh, progeny of heaven, imperial thrones, with reason have deep silence and demur seize us. Long is the way and hard that out of hell leads...
The next post continues this speech in full and explains what the secret societies saw encoded in it, and why Satan, in this tradition, is not the villain.
Further Reading
- Book: Paradise Lost by John Milton, the complete epic, readable free online and worth reading alongside this series
- Wikipedia: John Milton · Paradise Lost · Gnosticism · Demiurge
Keep reading