Open Veils · Answer
Is there such a thing as "good" and "evil"?
The esoteric and perennial traditions converge on a view that good and evil are real as forces or orientations, not merely social conventions. The question is not whether they exist but what their ontological status is — polarity, privation, or something stranger. Multiple independent streams — Gnostic, Hermetic, consciousness research, and remote-viewing intelligence — point toward a structured cosmos in which these categories have objective purchase.
Evidence
- Rudolf Steiner identified two opposing adversarial forces — Lucifer and Ahriman — as literal cosmic intelligences pulling human consciousness toward inflation and contraction respectively.
- The Nag Hammadi texts, analysed by Elaine Pagels, present a more radical frame: the Gnostic Demiurge is a lesser, ignorant creator-god whose very act of making the material world constitutes a kind of structural evil — not malice but ontological error.
- Terence McKenna framed it differently: good and evil map onto entropy and syntropy — dissolution versus complexification of meaning.
- Serge Kahili King's Huna teaching, reported through Huna International, offers a behavioural anchor: evil is the wilful harming of another, expressed through fear, coercion and restriction; good through healing, connection and growth.
- This was not metaphor for Steiner; he described them as beings with agendas operating across time, documented in his 'Occult Science' and lecture cycles.