Only Lilith has a monad and complete consciousness. The karossas, her localized manifestations, notwithstanding their power and longevity, possess only the equivalent of consciousness and lack a monad, Dingra of Russia included. Incidentally, we are indebted to those sculptresses of the human flesh for the visible, at times almost elusive, physical resemblance that distinguishes the members of a common nation or kinship group.
It is known that the cult of the goddess of love on ancient Cyprus eventually split into two diametrically opposed sects: the lofty cult of Aphrodite Urania, the goddess of spiritual, creative, poeticized, and poetic love, and the cult of Aphrodite Pandemos, «the Common Aphrodite.» The latter cult gained widespread appeal among the lower classes, taking the form of orgiastic rites and the blessing of sexual excesses as a holy offering to the goddess. Some other cultures have experienced analogous processes of bifurcation and polarization of previously unified principles. There are even more cultures where the historian is presented with a later phase: cults of sexual perversion and the random blend of demonic and elemental properties behind the false mask of the divine. Ritual prostitution in Canaan, Babylon, India, and other countries is a phenomenon of that nature. The karossas of nations or suprapeoples presided over such institutions, and they preside over the rites of orgiastic sects and mass fornication even now. It is also clear that such phenomena require the involvement of the lunar demoness and the dark powers of Duggur. But when, in battling those who threaten his people with physical destruction, a demiurge seeks a way to create a powerful and combative champion, he is forced to descend to the karossa of the people and unite with her. The cursed yetzerhare unavoidably infects their joint offspring, and the poisoned body of the karossa produces a two-faced monster. That is the origin of the first born of every line of Witzraor. It will only be possible, it appears, to rid the karossas and Lilith herself of the yetzerhare in the second eon.
The first and last of the Greater Elementals, Earth, is the mother of all the others, and not only of them, but of every living thing in Shadanakar: every elemental, every animal, human, daemon, angel, demon, and even every great hierarchy. An inexhaustible wellspring, she is the one who creates the ether body of all beings and takes part along with the individual monads in the creation of their astral bodies. She is endowed with warm, inexhaustible love for everything, even demons: she grieves for them, but forgives them. Everyone, even angels of darkness and the monsters of Gashsharva, call her Mother. She loves all and everything, but she reveres only the highest hierarchies of Shadanakar, especially Christ. She is fertilized by the great radiant spirit of the Sun both in Enrof and in her own indescribable world. She perceives people and their inner world, she hears and responds to the call of our heart, and she answers through love and Nature. May her name be blessed! Prayer can and should be offered up to her in great humility.
May the beautiful Moon, the daughter of Earth and Sun, be blessed. And may the Sun be thrice blessed. All of us, our future body and soul, together with all of Shadanakar, at one time abided in its immaculate heart. Great god of light! They sang your glory in the temples of Egypt and ancient Greece, on the banks of the Ganges and on top of the ziggurats of Ur, in the Land of the Rising Sun, and in the far West, on the Andean plateaus. We all love you- good and bad, wise and ignorant, believers and nonbelievers, those who feel the infinite goodness of your heart, and those who simply enjoy your light and warmth. Your brilliant Elite has already created a staircase of radiant planes in Shadanakar and cascades of spiritual grace pour down it, lower and lower, into the angelic worlds, the worlds of the elementals, and the worlds of humanity. Beautiful spirit, the origin and sire of all living matter, the visible image and likeness of the Universal Sun, the living icon of the One God, allow me too to join my voice, audible to you alone, to the global chorus of your praise. Love us, O radiant one!
5.3. Perspective on the Animal World
We are offen unaware that our utilitarian view on all living beings has become almost second nature to us. Everything is valued strictly according to the degree it is useful to humans. But if we have long considered barbaric that historical-cultural provincialism, elevated to the status of political theory, known as nationalism, then humanity's cosmic provincialism will appear just as ridiculous to our descendants. The myth of "the crowning glory of Creation," a legacy of medieval ignorance and primitive egoism, should in time dissipate like smoke, together with the supremacy of the materialist doctrine that endorses it.
We are witnessing the emergence of a new worldview, in which humans are one link in a great chain of living beings. We are higher than many, but we are also lower than a great many more. And every one of these beings has an autonomous value independent of its usefulness to humanity. But how do we determine that value in every specific case? What criteria do we use? On which standard of values should we base our judgements?
We can first of all state that the material or spiritual value of anything, whether it be material or spiritual, increases in direct proportion to the total efforts expended on its becoming what it is now. Of course, when we try to apply that principle to the valuation of living beings, we soon arrive at the conclusion that it is impossible for us to ascertain the exact amount of those efforts. But it is possible to realize that the higher the being on the cosmic staircase, the greater the amount of efforts (its own efforts, those of Nature, or those of the Providential powers) expended on it. The development of intellect and of all the faculties that distinguish humanity from animals demanded an incredible amount of work-by humanity itself and by the Providential powers-an amount greater than was needed earlier to raise animals from lower to higher life forms. That is the basis, as best as we can grasp it, of the cosmic standard of values. It thus follows that the value of a protozoan is less than that of an insect, the value of an insect less than that of a mammal, the value of a nonhuman mammal far less than that of a human, the value of a human tiny compared with that of an archangel or national demiurge, while the value of the latter, notwithstanding all its grandeur, pales next to the value of the Elite of Light, the demiurges of the Universe.
If we examine that principle in isolation, we might draw the conclusion that humans bear practically no responsibility toward anything below them: if the value of humans is higher, it must mean that Nature itself dictates that humans utilize beings lower than them in a way useful for the race.
But no moral principle should be examined in isolation, for they are not sufficient unto themselves. Rather, they enter into a general system of principles that currently define the reality that is Shadanakar. The principle of moral duty could be considered a counterweight to the principle of spiritual value. It has not yet been intuited at levels below humanity; nor was it even intuited at the early stages of humanity. But it can now be given a fairly accurate formulation as follows: Beginning at the level of humans, the duty of a being toward beings below it increases in direct proportion to the level of the higher being's ascent.
A duty toward domesticated animals had been laid on humans as early as prehistoric times. This was not merely because humans had to feed and protect them. This was but a simple exchange, a duty in the lowest, material (not moral) sense. In return for providing the animal with food and shelter, people either put the animal to work or took its milk or wool or even its life (in the latter case, of course, they violated the natural rate of exchange). The moral duty of early humans was to love the animal they had domesticated and put to use. Riders of ancient times who felt a deep bond to their horses, shepherds who displayed not only solicitude but also affection for their flocks, peasants or hunters who loved their cow or dog-all of them carried out their moral duty.