for the godhead, considered in its original and unmanifest totality, cannot be good in any morally intelligible sense, since goodness presupposes the possibility of evil, and evil presupposes a differentiation of values that has no meaning within the undivided pleroma, where creation and annihilation are merely alternative expressions of the same inexhaustible potency, and where the distinction between the sacred and the profane has not yet arisen to disturb the magnificent unconsciousness of primordial unity.

it is only with the emergence of the divine ego, that first crystallization of consciousness within the boundless psychic substance of the absolute, that evil assumes its properly tragic character, for the god who declares himself good has already performed an act of exclusion, has already consigned to the unconscious those aspects of his own nature that contradict the luminous ideal of his emerging identity, and has thereby inaugurated the cosmic shadow, that immense reservoir of repudiated divinity whose accumulated energies return in the forms of temptation, catastrophe, possession, and the terrifying autonomy of the demonic.

the devil is consequently not so much the enemy of god as the unconscious of god, the personification of everything the divine persona cannot acknowledge without imperiling its claim to moral sovereignty, and the more extravagantly the godhead identifies itself with purity, benevolence, justice, and light, the more monstrous becomes the compensatory figure gathering beneath the threshold of divine self-recognition, until the entire spiritual cosmos is organized around the desperate maintenance of a dissociation whose origins lie not in the wickedness of creation but in the narcissistic fragility of the creator's own idealized self-conception.

it is here that abraxas emerges from the obscure precincts of the archetypal imagination, not as another deity competing for jurisdiction within the differentiated pantheon of psychic powers, but as the terrible and numinous image of a reality anterior to the moral partition of existence, a reality in which god and devil are not reconciled through some sentimental compromise but disclosed as complementary expressions of a single, immeasurable, and fundamentally indifferent totality.

abraxas is the god beyond the opposition of god and satan, the luminous darkness in which creation and corruption become indistinguishable movements of one primordial energy, the sacred monstrosity whose completeness is intolerable precisely because it cannot be assimilated into the ego's demand that ultimate reality justify itself before the tribunal of human conscience, and whose symbolic presence announces the collapse of every comforting distinction by which the religious imagination has attempted to separate the divine from the demonic.

the numinosity of abraxas arises from this refusal of moral domestication, from the intuition that the ultimate ground of being is neither benevolent nor malevolent but possesses an intensity of existence before which such distinctions appear almost embarrassingly provincial, and that the same primordial force which animates the saint's ecstatic union with the divine also circulates through the tyrant's intoxication with power, the predator's appetite, the mystic's dissolution, and the terrible fertility of death.

here the religious ego encounters its most humiliating limitation, for it discovers that its cherished identification with goodness may be little more than a highly elaborated persona, a spiritual mask fashioned to conceal the unacceptable contents of the collective shadow, and that its insistence upon a morally purified deity may constitute an act of projection through which the individual attempts to secure metaphysical confirmation of his own preferred innocence.

thus evil attains its most sophisticated expression not in the openly demonic personality, whose destructiveness remains comparatively transparent, but in the consciousness that has so thoroughly identified itself with the light that it can no longer recognize its own darkness, and whose moral certainty becomes the very medium through which the unconscious enacts its compensatory revenge.

the process of individuation is therefore not an ascent from darkness into light, nor a progressive purification of the personality through the elimination of morally undesirable contents, but an encounter with the terrifying multiplicity of the self, a descent into the chthonic regions where the ego discovers that its sovereignty is provisional, its moral identity incomplete, and its cherished distinction between the sacred and the profane dependent upon psychic boundaries that the deeper archetypal forces neither recognize nor respect.

this is the significance of the coniunctio oppositorum, the mysterious union of opposites that constitutes the central drama of psychic transformation, for the goal is not the triumph of the luminous principle over its dark antagonist but the emergence of a consciousness capable of containing their conflict without collapsing into identification with either, a consciousness that has relinquished the infantile demand for absolute innocence and accepted the burden of participating knowingly in a reality whose foundations are irreducibly ambiguous.

perhaps, then, the deepest evil in the godhead is not cruelty, destruction, or even the primordial indifference of abraxas, but the tendency of consciousness to mistake its partial vision for totality, to elevate its own limited self-representation into an absolute, and to condemn as alien and demonic everything that threatens the coherence of that representation.

the ultimate mystery is therefore not why a good god permits evil, but why the godhead should have required the terrible detour through division, suffering, projection, sacrifice, and conscious moral conflict in order to encounter the contents of its own inexhaustible being, and whether the entire history of creation might be understood as the prolonged and frequently monstrous individuation of an absolute whose original completeness was purchased at the price of self-ignorance.

and perhaps the most terrible revelation of all is that the godhead does not stand above this labor as its perfected conclusion, but exists within it as its primordial subject, so that every genuine confrontation with evil, every withdrawal of projection, and every painful relinquishment of innocence becomes a minute but indispensable event in the self-realization of the absolute, as though the universe, in all its grotesque magnificence, were the dream of a god struggling to awaken from the unbearable perfection of his own unconsciousness.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5913540&forum_id=2...id#50194233)