Power, Family, Community and Law

The Occult: Its Nature and Significance: Q & A

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Sociology

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 11

Track: 42

Dictation Name: RR114A1

Date: 1974

Now, to the study of occultism. Just briefly, to read three verses from I Samuel 28:5-7. I Samuel 28:5-7:

“5And when Saul saw the host of the Philistines, he was afraid, and his heart greatly trembled.

6 And when Saul enquired of the Lord, the Lord answered him not, neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets.

7 Then said Saul unto his servants, Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit that I may go to her, and enquire of her. And his servants said to him, Behold, there is a woman that hath a familiar spirit at Endor.”

God would not answer Saul. Why should He? Saul had already heard the Word of the Lord and had paid no attention to it. What Saul wanted was not a word from God concerning what he should do, but he was inquiring concerning what should happen. And there is a difference between the two. God has given us in our generation since the time of the apostles, His complete Word. We know what God requires of us, but men do not want to meet God’s requirements. They are motivated rather by curiosity as to what will happen. And for such answers, they repair as Saul did, to the occult.

We make a serious mistake when we think of magic and of witchcraft in terms of primitive forms. I have seen its primitive forms among the American Indians for example, but witchcraft is more than the medicine mans’ bones and feathers and paraphernalia, it is a basic philosophy. It is a faith which is concerned not with submission to the power that created all things, but a control of all things. The basic purpose of magic, of witchcraft, of occultism, of demonism, of whatever the form of the occult, is a control of man, of the world, and of nature. It is man trying to play god; man saying that I do not want to submit to the pattern, to the meaning, to the law of the universe, I do not want to find the God who made all things and then to obey Him, I must have control myself, be my own god. And so man’s word must become the omnipotent word if he can only find the key. And so in occultism, man is seeking a key, a means whereby he can manipulate himself to total power.

It is not surprising that magic, that occultism, has become so prominent in our age, because modern philosophy has prepared the ground for it. Now I don’t know how many of you studied philosophy in college. How many of you read Hegel? A fair number. Remember the fundamental principle of Hegel is, the rational is the real. In other words, that which I logically conceive to be rational is the real. It’s not that out there which God made that is real. No. modern philosophy is concerned with denying that. Things in themselves are not knowable if they exist. It is only the world of phenomena, of what we experience, our ideas in other words, of reality, that are important. And for us, therefore, the rational is the real. If I therefore believe it to be real, it is going to be real. Man, in other words, makes his word the realty.

Now some of you no doubt remember Jerry Rubin, who was so important in the 60s. How many of you do? Most of you. Alright. The fundamental principle of Jerry Rubin in his book, Do It! is this, and I quote from page 143, “We create reality wherever we go by living our fantasies.” We create reality! Reality isn’t something that is already there, God-made. No, Jerry Rubin said, we create reality by living our fantasies. We make the real world. And because we make it, we then control it. And this is why modern man is bent on destroying the world as God made it, upon genetic tampering, upon creating clones and so on, so that it can make a world and then say I have total control over it as god, to replace God’s predestination with man’s predestination. Occultism is a natural phenomenon, a natural product of the whole drift of the modern Existentialist world and its philosophy.

Now, the laws of magic are two-fold. The first, is the idea that like attracts like. Like attracts like. Now, let me illustrate. First of all, with an illustration from anthropology, and I quote from Maurice Bouisson, Magic: Its History and Principle Rites, “At Fez and Rabat, when there is too much rain, a woman who has foreign twins goes up at noon to the flat roof of the house and threatens the cloud-masked sky, saying, ‘uncover or I will uncover myself.’ Whereupon she displays her naked buttocks to the sky and the sky becomes clearer.” Like attracts like. Now that’s a very primitive form of it; very primitive. But let’s take a very modern form of it. Hold a good thought. Hold a good thought, you see, and then what you want will come to pass. Think rich. Now, that’s the same principle as this woman in Fez and Rabat; same idea. The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale said, if you thought positively about catching fish, you’d catch more fish. I don’t believe it, of course. I’ve been a fisherman too long to go for that. [Laughter] But you get the principle—like attracts like.

Then second, the Principle of Contagion; contagion. For this reason, infertility cults where this principle of magic is prevalent, it is important to have the maypole dance and then to have the couples, the young, to go out and copulate on the field, to stimulate the fertility of the crops. This is still done in parts of Europe and of course, very common in Asia, Africa and elsewhere; The Principle of Contagion.

Now, these two laws of magic rest on a common fundamental principle which is basic to all magic: the Law of Correspondences, which is also the basis of alchemy, astrology, and every form of occultism, the Law of Correspondences. The Law of Correspondences holds that the world is intensely and totally inter-related. Everything is interrelated and interwoven and interlocking with all else. And so, the world above and below are basically one. All things are simply aspects of one another and therefore, similarity gives power. That’s the idea behind putting pins in a doll that is made to resemble someone. It affects him. Similarity gives power. Hypocrisy is a form of magic. By pretending to the real thing, you have all the virtue of the real thing. Moreover, the idea that words and reality are linked, the magic word, is again a part of this Doctrine of Correspondences, plus a great deal of revolutionary activity. You have a dream of utopia and you smash everything and because this is in your head, suddenly tomorrow everything is going to be ideal.

You know the Russian Revolutionists overthrew the old regime and they had no plan. It was not there in Marx. All you had to do was to destroy the old order and the new was going to blossom. A great deal of the socialist program in Russia was created by Lenin after the Revolution when things didn’t happen. Instead what they had was famine. So he borrowed from Daniel De Leon, American Socialist writer, and improvised on his own and developed the Soviet idea and a plan for working towards Socialism after the Revolution. But they believed in terms of magic, that it would naturally unfold.

Now, because of the Law of Correspondences, opposites are basically one in occultism, since everything is supposedly one. Thus, if you hold to this position, then you must say that good and evil, love and hate, law and lawlessness, are different aspects of one and the same thing. You thus have modern psychiatrists saying, well, there’s really a great deal in common between the criminals and the police. A great deal in common between love and hate; everything is basically the same. There is no real difference between them. Moreover, in terms of the Law of Correspondence, they say, if you hate something it means that you secretly love it. So if you say that you are, as a Christian, strongly opposed to homosexuality, oh, you are a latent homosexual. You see, they’ve silenced a lot of criticism that way. If you are strongly against adultery, then secretly, you are at heart an adulterer, because all things are basically the same. And their idea of this Correspondences means that where you think there is a polarity, actually there’s an identity. If you are against theft, you secretly love it and want to do it. If you’re strong for law and order, it means that at heart, you are a dangerous, lawless man, and so you’re expressing the Correspondence that way, the love/hate relationship.

Now all this thinking, which is basic to every form of occultism the world over, rests on the Doctrine of Evolution, both pagan and modern scientific. Everything has evolved out of one, we are told in Evolution, and therefore all things are basically the same. There is, then, a similarity, a correspondence in all things. You understand man in terms of the animals, and so on. Only when you hold to the Doctrine of Creation, which says first of all that there are two kinds of being: the uncreated eternal being of God and the created being of the universe and that within the created universe there are separate and distinct things, all of them created by God in terms of separate and distinct functions. Only then can you break the basic faith that is essential to occultism. As a result, the Doctrine of Special Creation preserves the integrity of each and shuts the door in the face of all occultist belief. God, we believe, created all things, each with a specific and a unique purpose. We may not know that purpose, but in terms of God’s order, everything under the sun, from the smallest insect to every kind of animal, has its place and its function.

Sometimes as a result of the Fall and man’s aggravation thereof, these things go out of function and one animal or another gets out of its place and becomes more destructive. But each has its function in terms of God’s plan. And instead of being inter-related and corresponding in terms of occultism as all basically one, each is a specific and distinct creation with its specific and distinct purpose under God. Since everything in terms of occultist faith is supposedly one, and good and evil are one, then the basic moral principle of occultism since ancient times has been this: do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the law. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. It’s very interesting [Sneeze] whether we go back centuries before Christ in Greece and Rome among the Bacchanalians or whether we go to the various occultist groups of our time, we find this as their moral principle: do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Because there is no law, all things are basically one and there is no distinction between good and evil. And as a result, occultism leads to a rapid and total moral deterioration of any society which it captures. It leads to a war against law. Law reflects God. It reflects the fact of special creation, of differences. (All law, by the way, is theological. It represents an idea of religious order, because every law is a “Thou shalt not” or a procedural thereto, and therefore it affirms that something is right and something is wrong. And morality is a theological principle. It declares there is an order in the universe, in terms of the Creator and therefore when you have any kind of law structure, it represents a theology. It can be a Christian theology or a Christian law structure, or a Humanistic one or a Buddhist one or a Mohammedan one, but none of them ultimately can stand but the Christian law structure because all of them deteriorate in that ultimately they have no firm ground. That’s another subject and we can’t get into it.) But God’s Law reflects the fact of special creation and differences, whereas in occultism and Existentialist Humanism, all things are one, the only difference being a question of taste.

Thus, for example, Henry Miller, who was one of the leaders of the sexual revolution when it began in the 50s, in his books as he describes his various forms of total disregard for God’s moral law, makes obvious his distaste for homosexuality. And so, his champions have had to defend him at that point and to say, ‘don’t misunderstand Henry Miller. He is not against homosexuality; it’s just that he has no taste for it.’ Strange that you have to defend a man now for being not a homosexual, but in terms of the modern point of view, you see, since there is no law, you cannot make any distinction or differentiation or any condemnation of anything. And so, Henry Miller had to be apologized for by his followers that this didn’t happen to be his cup of tea.

Now there is another aspect you see, to occultism. Occultism’s premise is evolutionary. All things have evolve and therefore all things are at bottom, one. Our belief is that all things were created by the sovereign God. By definition for the modern, the world of God does not exist. It’s not that they have demonstrated that God is dead, but that the ‘Death of God’ school has said (and they say so very openly as Al {?} at Emory), that by definition we declare God is dead because He is not totally a product of history. In other words, He didn’t evolve from below, therefore He cannot exist. Anything that comes from above us, we do not recognize, only that which is totally immersed in history, which totally comes out of history, which totally evolves, only that by definitions, Al {?} says, can be real. So by definition, he says, the God of scripture who speaks from above, who made all things, has to be dead. We cannot allow Him.

Now, this that Al {?} says is basic to modern philosophy, implicit in De Carte, if you remember your philosophy, history of philosophy, but especially since Kant and Hegel. Therefore, for the modern man, power from below has been ruled out.

But man needs power. And man quickly recognizes that his own power is not sufficient unto things. And if he is denied the power of God in his life, he is going to go after power somewhere else. And where, in the evolutionary framework, where are you going to find power. You deny that it can be above you. You deny that there is a God. You deny that His grace and power can be operative in the life of man. So you look to power from below; power from below.

That’s very interesting, in the 20s there was a man named Kenneth Burke, who also in the 30s for a while was editor of the New Republic. Not a Christian by any stretch of the imagination and yet, a very brilliant scholar who, in a sense in his writings, witnessed against himself. And he said man needs grace, but modern man cannot see it from above because there is nothing above. Therefore, he said, before the century is out, modern man will seek for grace from below. Demonic, Satanic power and grace. And he was right.

The whole thing that we see today is a quest for power from below. And the kind of power it seeks is a very deadly and a dangerous one. Moreover, it’s very interesting to see the image of Satan in modern literature. It’s very different from the biblical picture of Satan, because the biblical picture of Satan is much better than you find in modern literature. At least Satan is the creature of God and he is, as the old theologian said, the ‘ape of God.’ He is trying to imitate God. God created paradise, the Garden of Eden. God works to re-establish the New Creation, the glory of the city in the garden, with the Tree of Life in its midst. Satan works to create his own paradise, without God, at the Tower of Babel, the kingdom of man, imitating God at every point and unable to accomplish anything, because everything he tries to do, his own principle, that every man is his own god shatters and destroys. And this is why there can never be a successful ungodly regime. It is always doomed to frustration, and the more history advances, the quicker that destruction will come.

But the Satan of modern occultism is a totally mindless, perverse thing, created in the image of Evolution, coming totally from below with a total mindlessness which is total insanity. And the result is, of course, the impact of this kind of thinking on the occultist is more and more devastating.

In the past week, I was contacted by someone with regard to a serious problem they had, someone I’d never met before who got in touch with me and called me and asked me to meet with them, about the commitment of a member of a family who had reached the point of becoming virtually criminally dangerous. On the process of trying to do something about it, I learned a very interesting fact. There is no place in our mental institutions for the kind of people we used to consider as applicants for a mental institution. They are so full of those who through drugs and occultism have blown their mind and those who have committed fearful crimes, that in most of the major institutions across country, there is no room for anyone else. Having gone in search of mindless, totally perverse power from below, they themselves have been given over to total unreason, to total mental destruction. Modern occultism is a very deadly and a very dangerous thing. Every presupposition it has is anti-Christian, and the kind of power it seeks for is the ultimate in mindless and perverse power that destroys the mind of man.

It is interesting that over the years, the Psychic Research Society, as it has dealt with various mediums and people with high E.S.P. has never found any whose character was good. Only two were supposedly of half-way good character, and both of them under examination have been proven to be of very suspicious and bad character. Every dabbling in the realm of the occult and the extraordinary leads to the destruction of man. Man thus, today in his quest for power from below, is committing suicide.

It is important for us as Christians to look to God for power. Man will not stay impotent long. There are too many impotent Christians. They’ve merely swept the house clean, and our Lord tells us that such a man will soon be possessed by seven more evil spirits. Our Christian life, or idea of what constitutes a Christian life, is too often mere negation, I’m not doing these things, fine, but are you doing that which God requires with all your heart, mind and being? We cannot have an empty house. We either move in terms of power from God or we become subject to the promptings of power from below. The Word of God still remains true: “Choose ye this day whom ye shall serve.”

Saul would not hear the Word of the Lord as it commanded him. Not the moral word; he wanted the power word, what’s going to happen tomorrow so I know what to do, and the result was judgment.

Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we give thanks unto Thee for Thy Word. They Word is truth, oh Lord, and Thy Word gives us the way that we might walk therein. Oh Lord, our God, grant that by Thy grace we walk in obedience to Thee and by faith day by day manifest Thy truth, Thy righteousness, Thy grace and mercy to a world lost in sin. We pray, our Father, that our day may see power from above and the powers of darkness confounded. Use us to this purpose; we beseech Thee, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

[Audience] One of the questions this morning had to do with our, uh, a person’s response if he’s held at gun point, how far should he go if the criminal makes demands on him and the like, Mr. Rushdoony had a few more remarks to be made on that.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I was told afterward that perhaps what was intended by this question was, to what extent should you tell the truth to someone who is trying to do evil? Well, the answer to that was better formulated by southern theologians a century ago than anywhere else in the country because they were not infected by the perfectionist nonsense that had so extensively influenced men in the north. And they said, we are under no obligation to tell the truth to someone who wants to use the truth to do evil, to rob or to kill or to rape. So to use the illustration, because this one I had once in a controversy with a minister who said under all circumstances we should tell the truth, and I said, would you if your wife were in a hiding place and it was a time of marauding and they demanded, where is your wife, turn her over to the rapists, and he said, I certainly would, I would not lie to them. Well, his wife was standing there, and I, [Laughter] I saw her face! And I could understand why there were problems in that minister’s family, and the wife did not respect her husband too much.

That is wicked! Because it makes you an accessory to evil. You consent to evil. You do not owe the truth to someone who wants to get the truth from you to do evil. And that’s why Rahab’s lies to the king’s men was blessed. Very clearly, we are told, that it was a virtue on her part, a mark of faith, because she did not turn over two godly men to a king who was going to kill them. Again, the midwives you remember, they did not kill the babies; they lied to Pharaoh, but God prospered them for that. No one has a right to the truth who plans to use it for evil. But this does not mean that apart from that we have any right to falsehood. In courts of law, and every other situation, the truth, whether it hurts or not must be told where it is required of us. But not from an evil-doer.

[Audience] Do you believe that there is a large-scale conspiracy behind world events today? Would you comment on the book, None Dare Call it Conspiracy?

[Rushdoony] Yes. First of all, I believe that Psalm 2 gives us the best statement of conspiracy. “Why do the heathen rage and the nations take counsel together” (or conspire together) “against the Lord and His anointed?” This is the conspiracy of history, of Satan and his cohorts against the Lord. Now, against that we are told that we should share in God’s laughter. “He that sitteth in the circle of the heavens shall laugh. The Lord shall hold them in derision.” God’s laughter should be ours. We should not be unduly absorbed in studying all the conspiracies of history. Let me read to you God’s judgment through our Lord on those who did! Because we know from Church History there were many in our Lord’s day and thereafter who were constantly studying the conspiracy. It was known then as ‘the deep things of Satan,’ And so our Lord, in his letter to the church at Thyatira in Revelation 2:24 says, “But unto you I say and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as have not this doctrine and have not known the depths of Satan as they speak, I will put upon you none other burden.” In other words, our Lord condemns those who spent all their time studying the deep things of Satan, or the depths of Satan, his conspiracy when they should have been doing the Lord’s work, when they should have been strengthening their homes, strengthening whatever line of Christian activity they could. I think it’s a serious error to concentrate on studying evil.

Now I believe there have been many, many conspiracies in history. I don’t believe there is one large-scare one, I believe there are many. And I don’t feel they are of any matter of concern to me. Never, never in the history of the United States were there more conspiracies at work than during the presidencies of Washington and Adams. They had fought right up into the cabinet. We had an army of less than 200. There was more money spent by the British Secret Service and by the French Revolutionary Regime, especially, in the United States in those days than the federal budget! And yet they couldn’t overturn the country. Why? Because of the basic faith of the people. Now that’s the issue.

You’re always going to have conspiracies, just as at this moment in this room, and any room or any place you go to in Florida or anyplace of the world, you’ll find all kinds of germs; TB germs, cold germs, and what-not. Why aren’t you sick? Because you have developed a resistance by good food and good sleep. Now, I travel a great deal; normally, I go two, three years without catching a cold, because I try to take care of myself. But if I lose out on my sleep, and am not careful about what I eat, I will, I know for sure, I’ll come down with a cold. My resistance is lowered. All right, what’s the answer to conspiracies? It’s not to study cold germs and cancer and all that; I can study them from one end of the year to the other and never avoid them, but by developing my health, I can. And the answer to all conspiracies is: study the Word of God, not the conspiracy. Grow in grace and in knowledge of the Lord. Develop Christian institutions, Christian schools, one thing after another. And that’s your answer. Those germs (of conspiracy) can never overthrow health (God’s health). This is what we must cultivate.

Well the book, None Dare Call it Conspiracy, I know. I know the author. Let me add I read American Opinion and A Review of the News especially, very faithfully, except for anything written by Gary Allen. I skip over what he writes, because I’m afraid something he says might stick in my mind and I’d forget that he said it! Because I do not regard him as accurate; I know too many well-to-do Conservatives who’ve been sued because they’ve quoted him (They are sued, not Gary, because they have the money, Gary doesn’t you see. You don’t bother to sue somebody for libel if he doesn’t have anything you can take. But if he’s a millionaire, go after him! That’s where the gravy is!), and it’s been very costly for them to quote Gary, and I feel he’s very sloppy and careless with the facts and as a result he destroys everything he says. So I just regard him as the weakest writer they have. I don’t care for his things, to put it mildly.

[Audience] Does the devil give any real power to occultists, or is it just in the minds of their victims?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Uh, now scripture tells us in II Thessalonians 2:9 that it speaks of the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders. Now, unfortunately, in our English text, the word ‘lying’ is misplaced. The word lying modifies powers, signs and wonders so that they are lying powers, lying signs and lying wonders. We are not therefore to be impressed by the power of the occultists. There are some real things that they accomplish but they are pointless; pointless.

I never saw this more clearly than when I was among the American Indians. This was a very isolated reservation. When I went there some years ago, it was, well, the West you know was still very young country. The last Indian battle there was fought in 1915 in Nevada. Some people think it was the Battle of Wounded Knee in the 1890s but it was the battle against Shoshone Mike and his band in 1915. So, well, one of my elders had hunted with a bow and arrow across the plains of Nevada and in the mountains and another one could go into great detail and tell me exactly how they scalped in the old days; gave me a very detailed account of how they did it and how they (the Shoshones) didn’t necessarily kill their victims if they weren’t too mad at them. So the old ways were still very common and I could go on and on by the hour and tell you what I learned and what I saw, and we still had some of the old-time medicine men.

Now let me cite one thing to you. This one medicine man, very, very sharp mind. Now we had in the West a type of rattler that you don’t have here. It’s a very deadly rattler. The snake cults in some parts of the South, you know, hold and handle snakes in their worship. We’ve had some of those adherents move to California and they only try it once and they’re dead! So the cult died out among all the people who came to California. [Laughter] Our Western Rattler is very, very deadly, very potent. And he’s never more potent than in the spring, because when they come out of hibernation, their venom is very concentrated, you see. So at that time, you’re very careful! Very careful with a rattler! Well, in the spring round-ups on the reservation when they were up in the mountains rounding up the cattle and branding the young calves, every now and the a young rattler or an old rattler would come out of hibernation and the indians of course, would move aside. You didn’t argue with a rattler! And this medicine man would come up and start chanting and talking. He’d pick up that rattler and hang it around his neck, put the head in his mouth and go around with this weird chant, talking to his brother the snake. Nothing ever happened to him. I know what would happen if I tried that! [Laughter] No question in my mind, there was some kind of power here. But a lying power. It didn’t add up to anything, and a disintegrating power, because as intelligent as that man was, it was productive of nothing but a total disintegration in his personality, in his family, in his children. They lived in the most abject kind of circumstances, in a log cabin that was not as long as from this wall to the other, and from here to about the second pew. Dirt floor. Most wretched circumstances. An inability to function that went hand in hand with the kind of powers that he had. So, it was a lying kind of power. He had studied throughout his childhood and become a medicine man, but what was the result of it? It was destructive. It led him to dead ends. It led him to the place of being a peculiar, a warped, a broken kind of person.

Now, it isn’t a real power when it leaves you a shattered hulk of a man, when all you can do is to pick up a snake and do a few things like that, that frankly are unaccountable. I don’t know any way of explaining them. And those were certainly not snakes that he had trained or de-fanged or anything. It was any snake out in the wild, any rattler. I have no explanation of it other than it was clearly demonic, and I felt that the man, because of his cultivation of his powers, was a shattered man. You could only look on him with pity. The other indians feared him. They also pitied him because they knew that he paid a price for what he had; a very, very heavy price.

[Audience] Have you ever had any encounters with demon possession? Have you ever been called upon to perform an exorcism?

[Rushdoony] I believe I have had a few encounters with demon possession, but I have never been called upon to perform an exorcism because I do not believe that anyone is demon possessed unless they actually want it. They cultivate it. I don’t believe in accidental possession. I believe it is something that is systematically cultivated by people and I think that people are doing this on a large scale today, so that I, I’m just dubious about exorcism in a case. You see, a part of our ungodliness today is we believe things happen accidentally. They don’t. They don’t happen accidentally. And people who are possessed are possessed because they have sought it one way or another, or laid themselves wide open to it. And even children can do that. They can be very willful, totally contemptuous of parental authority, eager to do anything, cultivate anything whereby they can bedevil their parents. So people can lay themselves open to possession, and especially in our time.

This is why, when we read of exorcisms in by-gone eras, we are told that it was not too common that it was accomplished, that it took a great deal of time and patience, and a great deal of teaching, a great deal of witnessing before it was accomplished. We must not be magical in our attitude toward exorcism. It’s just evangelism carried to the nth degree, with people who are far, far gone in their trust only in power from below and their hatred of power from above. All evangelism is, in a sense, is exorcism. Exorcism is simply evangelism to the nth degree. We mustn’t feel that we are dealing with something here that is suddenly going into another magical realm. It’s very dangerous to get into that kind of thinking, because then you’re wide-open to believing in magical sorts of things. The essence of it is simply that which we deal with every day as we deal with the ungodly. They resist the Word of God, they resent it, they will lash out at you for witnessing to them, well with the possessed, this is scary to the nth degree. And the answer again is simply, this witness. This witness to them, to what they have made of themselves, what they have opened themselves to, the kind of power they put their trust in. so don’t separate exorcism from evangelism. If you do, you’re going to misunderstand it.

[Audience] Will you please comment on Hitler’s (alleged I suppose) involvement in the occult?

[Rushdoony] Yes, there are several books that have come out that deal with Hitler’s ostensible involvement in the occult. The Spirit Destiny, for example, is one such book. I don’t know they are anything except what I have read. However, basically what I said earlier applies there, too, there was an extensive disavow of any power of God and a quest for power from below. And wherever people are systematic in their denial of God, they’re going to seek for power, but not from above. You have a great deal of experimentation in the Soviet Union in this sort of thing. And it’s sponsored by Soviet funds. They are definitely seeking power from below in various forms and are ready to believe in it, but not in God. We have here, too, a growing involvement in the occult too as we depart from the faith. So, I’m quite ready to believe that to a considerable degree, Hitler was involved with occultism. It was a part of his denial of the faith. It was a part of his lust for power. Therefore, logically, you will seek it below.

[Audience] This question deals with the activity of Satan. Can a person ever feel the actual presence of Satan? Rush, you might comment on satanic activities.

[Rushdoony] Now, I’m glad that question has come up because I think one of the things we do today is to over-rate Satan. We over-rate him tremendously; and we under-rate the power of God.

For one thing, many people have made Satan today into another god and they ascribe to him powers and abilities which only God has. Now Satan is a creature, just as we are. His status was that of one high in the hierarchy of angels. But we are emphatically told in scripture that the angels were created in a status below that of man; a very important fact, which means we have (if we will use them), greater power than the angels and the angels are ministering spirits.

Now, because Satan is a creature, it means he has a purely local presence. In other words, I cannot be here in this church and home with my wife at one and the same time. It’s simply impossible. I can only be in one place at a time. Satan, as a creature, can only be in one place at a time. He’s not God! He cannot be working on my mind and your mind, and everybody’s mind all at once like God, a great spirit who is omnipresent everywhere. That’s wrong! That’s Manichaeism, the belief in two gods: a good god and a bad god. Satan is a creature with a purely local appearance, purely local manifestation, a purely local power. This does not mean that demons cannot be sent out to work here, there and everywhere, but too often we ascribe to Satan what we should ascribe to the Old Adam; because of course, it give a little more status to us if we feel Satan made a special trip to work on us when we didn’t need Satan. We were ready to sin on our own!

So, it is very wrong to go so far as to feel that Satan is always working on us, and everyone. It’s like when a youth worker I know, when it rained at the Night of the {?} Service, when they were going to have decisions, and they were all rained out of the summer conference, said it was Satan who sent that rain storm. Well, that’s wicked. It’s ascribing to Satan the power of God.

So, I’d say there are cases where the actual presence of Satan has been felt. Our Lord certainly was tempted directly by Satan. We have a few examples of Satan’s actual manifestation in scripture; very few. Demons were present during our Lord’s ministry, because Satan was certainly concentrating at this point, of central power, central manifestation of God’s power in the world in the person of His Son to try to undo, to strike out against our Lord’s work. But perhaps you’re flattering yourself if you feel that Satan has actually been present to you. I think we just don’t need Satan that much. The Old Adam in us is ready enough to lead us into sin.

John Dunne, the divine, 17th century divine and poet spoke of tempting Satan to tempt us. I think that was a good phrase and we need to beware of that. And I don’t think we need to speculate as to whether when we are tempted it is actually Satan who’s there and present. You’re getting into the sin of delving into the deep things of Satan, you see. We’re not to go into those things. We are to do the will of God. We are to obey Him, not to delve into Satan’s realm, or Satan’s conspiracy or Satan’s presence. I think it’s dangerous to get involved there and I have seen some spiritual disasters of people who have so become involved. It has a very destructive effect on them. It lays them open to demonic influences when they concentrate too much on trying to know these things.

[Muffled] No, I don’t know that organization.

[Audience] Do you find the same philosophical tenets at the roots of all these: American education, occultism, Socialism, Communism, Evolution, Arminianism, political Liberalism, Humanism, religious Liberalism, Modernism, I suppose etc. Everything’s bad.

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, to a very great extent, these things all have a common root in the worship of man, in the desire of man to be his own god; so that they are very closely inter-related, and they do feel friendly one to another as against us. I know that over the years in some of my experiences, for example, when I was at one foundation, I found that the Marxists and the hard-core right wingers finally joined forces against some of us who were Christian, because we were a challenge to them. They were agreed in the primacy of man, so that they stopped their fighting with each other long enough to unite against us who held to the Sovereignty of God and the absolute authority of His word. They didn’t like to admit they were bed-fellows, but they did in their common hatred of God and anyone who stood in terms of His Word.

Well, American education had as its purpose our public school education, although very few people realize it, I develop it out of their own words in my Messianic Character of American Education to throw the Bible out of this country. It was anti-Christian in purpose, and Socialist in purpose.

Occultism, we’ve gone into.

Socialism and Communism, their whole and avowed purpose is the predestination of man by man and to replace the sovereign God and His predestination by the sovereign man and his elite planners, or predestinators.

Evolution, of course, is a faith. There’s no evidence for it. It requires more miracles than scripture provides for! And its basic plan is to say, well, any miracle can happen if you have enough millions of years, you see. The millions of years take the place of God and it is anti-God to the core.

Arminianism, and please say ‘Arminianism’ not ‘Armeniansim’ because I am an Armenian, and I’m not Arminian. Arminianism is a form of theology which exalts the power of man to the point that it makes man a cooperator in his salvation. Well, it is Humanism disguised as Christianity, and ultimately, its logic will overthrow Christianity and does. And this is why the Arminians either come to the Doctrine of Sovereign Grace, or ultimately the drift into Liberalism, given the logic of their thought because they do not recognize that man is dead in sins and trespasses, that he can only be born again by the sovereign grace of God.

Well, political Liberalism rests on the doctrine of the goodness of man, which is anti-scriptural.

Humanism is the worship of man.

Religious Liberalism or the principle of Modernism says that it’s the spirit of the age that gives the infallible word, and so the modernists change their gospel every 10 or 20 years, and openly and avowedly do so because it’s the spirit of the age that should govern and you should move with the spirit of the times. This is Humanism.