On Gravity and the Fall of the Angels

 

 

According to some traditions it is said that while Satan fell due to pride (Hoch-mut), Adam succumbed to ‘baseness’ (Nieder-tracht), i.e. to ‘gravity’ (in germ. “Erdanziehungskraft”, literally: the force that pulls us down to the ‘earth’ or to the ‘world’) and through him “the law of gravity came to rule over all of creation”.

Gravity not only pulls us ‘down’, but it is also that which centers us in ourselves, it is ahamkâra (the ‘ego-maker’), the principium individuationis, not only in the soul of man but also in the whole macrocosm (the ‘demiurgic tendency’, the drive to particularity/multiplicity, etc.).

For Simone Weil ‘gravity’ (‘heaviness’, attraction to the earth) is the opposite of ‘grace’ (a ‘falling upwards’, the force of ‘attraction’ which draws us towards God): “La pesanteur est la force ‘deifuge’ par excellence”. Salvation thus lies in “escaping that which resembles gravity in us”, the ‘egoic centre’ which ‘contracts’ us in our own hollow shells[1] (and it is thus of a deep significance when Dante locates the abode of Satan at the centre of the earth, i.e. at the ‘centre of gravity’).  

The Böhmian insight that when the creature has lost its centre, it is yet never fully ‘empty of centre’ (centrumleer), but rather becomes ‘heavy’ with a false centre (centrumschwer) is thus fundamentally correct. One is either ‘centered’ in the Divine Heart, or ‘dragged down’ by the centurm naturae; “He who does not gather with me scatters” (Matt. 12:30). These two ‘centres’ are in a constant battle for the heart of man; for not only is the âtman (according to the Upanishads) hidden in the “lotus of the heart”, but Plato likewise locates thymos (which is also the ego, our pride and the desire for self-affirmation) in the chest. The heart is thus at once both the seat of the ‘self’ and the ‘Self’, the centre of ‘me’ and ‘I’, as one might say.

The Hindu doctrines tell us of three ‘tendencies’ (gunas) that inhere all of nature (prakriti), namely sattva, rajas, and tamas.  During the cyclical unfolding of the ages there is an ever greater degeneration of these qualities as possibilities contained in primordial unity are exhausted, from the principal ‘sattvatic’ equilibrium to an ever greater dominance of tamas, linked to heaviness, obscurity, ignorance, etc., which is of course the dominant guna of the ‘dark age’ (Kali-yuga) at the end of a cycle.

 

The development of any manifestation necessarily implies a gradually increasing distance from the principle from which it proceeds; starting from the highest point, it tends necessarily downward, and as with heavy bodies, the speed of its motion increases continuously until finally it reaches a point at which it is stopped. This fall could be described as a progressive materialization (Guénon, Crisis of the Modern World, I).

 

This dominance of tamas-guna is not only the force behind the increasing “solidification of the world” (cf. Reign of Quantity, XVII), but also manifests ‘sociologically’ in all kinds of ways, from the atomized individualism of modernity to democracy and the “reign of the masses”, a supremacy of multiplicity which (according to Guénon) only actually exists in the realm of pure matter (“numerus stat ex parte materia”) and which operates simply by “the law of matter and brute force, the same law by which a mass, carried down by its weight, crushes everything that lies in its track” (‘weight’, poids, like ‘gravity’, pesanteur, from peser, ‘to weigh’).

 

The allusion to weight has, in the present context, more significance than that of a mere comparison, for in the field of physical forces – in the commonest meaning of the word – weight effectively represents the downward and compressive tendency, which involves an ever  increasing limitation of the being, and at the same time makes for multiplicity, represented here by ever greater density: this tendency has been shaping the development of human activity since the beginning of modern times (Crisis of the Modern World, VI).

 

Being the ‘downwards tendency’ tamas is of course closely connected to the ‘infernal’ regions (infernus, ‘below’, ‘the lower world’) as well as to Satan (diabolos = ‘he who turns things upside-down’). As such it is in Vedic thought often seen as related (and sometimes even identical) to the Ashuras, the ‘powers of darkness’ (also the centripetal, ‘contractive’ cosmic forces) and thus – mutatis mutandis – also to the chthonic Titans of Greek mythology (who represent the demiurgic powers in Platonic and mystical thought).[2]

According to one interpretation one might speculate that the Fall of Lucifer (the ‘light-bearer’), pertaining to the angelic, noetic world (and maybe even representing Nous as such), could be seen as the demiurgic descent of the ideas into the psychic, subtle realm; the ‘turning away’ of Nous from the One (what Plotinus calls “apostasis” or “tolma”) in which it becomes the world soul (psyche tou pantos) that – as the activity of Nous ad extra – is the real ‘demiurge’ of Plato’s Timaeus. As Plotinus writes (Enn. VI.9.5):

 

This unity-in-multiplicity, the intelligible cosmos, is close to the First, but it is not the First, because it is not One and simple ... It is not One, but it is unitive, because the Nous is not yet dispersed, but truly united in itself, in that it does not separate itself into its members as being directed at the One, but yet, in a certain way, it dares to move away from the One (apostenai de nos enos tolmesas).

 

In this view then, the primordial ‘solidification’ of the world, the first fall away from the unity of the intelligible world (and by extension the demiurgic descent of the ideas into manifestation) is equated with the Fall of Lucifer – and not (as in other readings) with that of Adam per se. We find this idea most clearly formulated in the theosophy of Böhme, Baader, Saint-Martin et al., for whom it is Lucifer who, in his desire to ‘create’, plunges the equilibrium (Temperatur) of the angelic world into disarray (this ‘equilibrium’ of the divine element which the theosophers speak of can of course be approached to the Hindu notion of mulaprakriti in which all gunas are yet in perfect balance).

The (angelic) domain of Lucifer degenerates in the flames of divine Wrath and becomes the ‘kingdom of Satan’, which many commentators have seen as a theosophical equivalent to the psychic (and infra-psychic) realm of traditional cosmology. The corporeal world is then created by God to put a stop (or a ‘limit’) to this descent into multiplicity and dispersion, and Adam is formed as the ‘repairer’ to mend the ontological schism caused by Lucifer and to restore the world to primal unity (which arguably also links in with the patristic tradition, according to which the number of the elect mirrors the number of the fallen angels)[3].

 

Boehme makes it a point to maintain that the remains of Lucifer’s kingdom and our world are situated ‘in the same place’ – which seems to imply that the latter is somehow ‘superimposed’ upon the first. It suggests, in other words, that the ruins of Lucifer’s realms exist to this day ‘underneath’ the corporeal domain in which we find ourselves, like some primordial paleontological stratum deeply submerged beneath the earth. Now, this would explain many things, beginning with the notion – so much emphasized in Orthodox Christian sources – that the ‘aerial realm’ or the ‘middle plateau’ is indeed the habitat of demons (Smith, In Quest of Catholicity, I).

 

We find a similar tradition in many early Christian writers like St. Clement, Origen, Athenagoras, and others, according to whom the fallen angels were banished from the noetic realm to the “kingdom of the air” (Eph. 2:2) or the “misty atmosphere”. They lost their intelligible natures and took on “airy bodies”, says St. Augustine, being banished into the aerial realm like “in a sort of prison”.

 

The angels that sinned, in company with their leader, who is now the Devil but was once an archangel, inhabited the highest region before their fall. But after their lapse into sin they were driven down into the misty atmosphere below (De Genisi ad lit. III.10).

 

This ‘atmosphere’ is of course the ‘intermediary realm’ (antariksha = ‘air’, ‘atmosphere’) of Vedic cosmology, the ‘middle plateau’ of the tribhuvana (triple world).

A similar notion is found in Islamic lore, where it is sometimes said that Iblis was originally an Angel (created from light, i.e. pertaining to the noetic realm) and was only turned into a Jinn (created from fire, i.e. pertaining to the intermediary world of subtle elements) when he fell and became al-Shaytân, Satan.

This also points us to another interesting tradition, according to which the Jinn are said to have been the rulers of a previous age or the race that lived on earth before the creation of mankind (which might also be related to the Nephilim that Genesis talks about the “giants that walked the earth in those days”).[4] In fact, according to the Quran, Iblis became Satan when he refused to bow to Adam; so that we might infer that the fall of the Jinn is closely linked to the creation of man (similar traditions are also present in Christianity, which speculate that Satan rose up against God because he was jealous of man’s theomorphism or of the fact that man should be deified in the Incarnation).

Here we are obviously referred back again to the Greek Titans, which were exiled or ‘dethroned’ by the Olympian gods headed by Zeus, and other similar traditions, which seem to indicate that the Jinn (the Platonic daimones) were once ‘gods’ (keep in mind here that the pagan ‘gods’ correspond to the angels in Abrahamic traditions) that had been overthrown or ‘demoted’ in a past theomachy (or titanomachy), reminiscent of the ‘battle in Heaven’ that we see in John’s Revelation (also the war between Jinn and angels in Islamic tradition or that of Ashuras and Dêvas in Hinduism). And in similar manner we often see how dethroned gods like Saturn (the ruler of the Golden Age, overthrown by his son Zeus) take on an increasingly ‘dark’ character as the cycles progress (this might also be connected to the ‘psychic residues’ of previous traditions that manifest malefically once they have been replaced; cf. Guénon, Reign of Quantity, XXVII).

Now in all these stories we seem to touch back upon the notion of cyclical descent, of the increased ‘law of gravity’ that manifests during the later ages. While it is indicated that the Jinn once served (like the daimones) as mediatory figures (cf. Quran 72:8f.), i.e. as ‘angeloi’ (messengers), they are now seen (more often than not) as ‘demonic’ beings (shayâtîn) that try to separate man from contacting the Divine (which also manifests in the general movement towards psychism that characterizes the ‘dark age’).[5] This is why it’s said that the rebellious Jinn are “kafir”, they have lost their religion, i.e. their connection to the spiritual realm, instead of carrying up the prayers of man to the ‘gods’ they take them for themselves, stealing the fire of heaven like the Titan Prometheus.

From the fact that the ‘intermediary realm’ starts manifesting more and more malefically as the ‘tamastic’ descent accelerates, we could also infer why in the later religions like Christianity and Islam the daimones are seen almost exclusively as ‘demons’, whereas in earlier Traditions (like in original Greek paganism or Japanese Shinto) they still played an important mediatory role. This ‘descent of the demons’ upon the world is of course also on factor that explains the greater spiritual darkness of the Kali-yuga and the widespread loss of faith/spirituality. However, we should not despair, for this curse is also a blessing for those who persevere in spiritual battle. As Abba Moses said:

 

In the latter days people will be much weaker than we are. Austerities will be largely impossible for them due to this weakness. But they will be better men than we are, because they will be given the opportunity to battle Satan face-to-face.

 

“Blessed are those born in the Kali-yuga”; so let us fight boldly against all the “rulers of the air” together with the Angels and Archangels, with Thrones and Dominations and with all the Hosts and Powers of heaven. Amen.