We have published a new blog article titled “Radical Interdependence: Magick as Structured Psychophysical Participation in a World of Coupled Oscillators”. The article was written by Beata Grobenski, is an independent researcher and an active member of the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium (EPRC) and the Qualia Research Institute (QRI). You can read the full article 👉 here

If you wish to submit a blog article as well, please do not hesitate to contact our Managing Editor Aaron French ( @afrench ) at aaron.french@rensep.org.

Best,

Nuria

Please find below the Zoom link for today’s Ask a Scholar event with Dr. Richard Kaczynski:

Time: Mar 21, 2026 05:00 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88069663123?pwd=hH1LJLKFEpONatFTNFbeTbztPK4Taq.1

Meeting ID: 880 6966 3123

Passcode: 094462

About Richard: “Richard Kaczynski, Ph.D., is the author of ‘The Weiser Concise Guide to Aleister Crowley’, editor/annotator of a forthcoming edition of Crowley’s ,Sword of Song’, and co-editor with Hymenaeus Beta of ,The Revival of Magick and Other Essays’. He has been a student of the Western hermetic tradition since 1978, and has lectured internationally on these topics since 1990. His writing has appeared in numerous magazines and books. A research scientist and statistician with the VA Northeast Program Evaluation Center, Kaczynski is also affiliated with Yale University’s School of Medicine (Department of Psychiatry).”

We hope to see you there!
The RENSEP Team

We have just published a new blog article titled “Palmistry and the Problem of (Not) Knowing”. The article was written by Alexandra Nagel, an independent scholar in the Netherlands. You can read the full article 👉 here

If you wish to submit a blog article as well, please do not hesitate to contact our Managing Editor Aaron French ( @afrench ) at aaron.french@rensep.org.

Best,

Nuria

rensep.org

Palmistry and the Problem of (Not) Knowing - Research Network for the Study of Esoteric Practices

By Alexandra Nagel Palmistry is the art of reading hands. Palmists “know stuff” about people through analyzing their hands. When this form of art first…

Please find below the Zoom link for today’s Ask a Scholar event with Heather D. Freeman:

Time: Mar 7, 2026 05:00 PM London

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89233292719?pwd=Z2oCmT7UrMuXtn2bzLaIjcw8tdMFnG.1

Meeting ID: 892 3329 2719

Passcode: 440714

About Heather: “Heather D. Freeman (she/they, b. 1974) is a Professor of Digital Media in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Director of the Center for Magic, Esotericism, and Occulture. She is an artist, esoteric practitioner, and the host of the NEH-funded podcast series Magic in the United States, produced by PRX.”

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The RENSEP Team

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Please find below the Zoom link for the second session of the Study Group about co-production of knowledge.

Date: Saturday, February 28, 2026
Time: 4:00 PM (UK) / 5:00 PM (CET)
Location: Online via Zoom

Join Zoom Meeting

https://rensep.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=e1716930384c29c35ddd887b8&id=8872300e1c&e=e33db28862

Meeting ID: 815 9832 3915

Passcode: 723276

See you there!
The RENSEP Team

Please find below the Zoom link for the first session of the Study Group about co-production of knowledge.

Date: Saturday, February 14, 2026
Time: 4:00 PM (UK) / 5:00 PM (CET)
Location: Online via Zoom

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81598323915?pwd=vFuWvpTba3Z6xli5mogfqlbjlQmRo0.1

Meeting ID: 815 9832 3915

Passcode: 723276

See you there!
The RENSEP Team

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The history of a cosmic force embodying falsehood, deception, and metaphysical evil is a long and intricate chain of religious encounter, reinterpretation, and synthesis. Through millennia of cultural exchange, theological reform, and political opposition, rival cosmologies were not merely rejected but actively revalued, and sacred powers recoded as adversaries in order to establish new religious hierarchies and moral absolutes.

Scholarly consensus identifies Zoroaster’s religious reform (dated variously 1500-1000 BCE) as the decisive innovation creating absolute cosmic antagonism between asha (Truth, order) and druj (Lie, chaos, deception), personified in Angra Mainyu (Ahriman) as the conscious adversarial counterforce to the creator Ahura Mazda. This dualistic theology necessitated demonizing the daevas—pre-Zoroastrian Indo-Iranian deities reinterpreted as malevolent servants of Ahriman. Yet in the parallel Vedic Indian tradition, the devas remained the luminous gods worthy of praise, while the asuras became adversarial figures. The Proto-Indo-European root deiwos (divine, heavenly) fragmented into strikingly divergent fates across daughter cultures: becoming Sanskrit deva (gods) in Vedic tradition, Avestan daēva (fiend) in Zoroastrian theology, Greek daimōn (divine spirits), Latin deus (god) and divinus (divine), Germanic tīwaz (god, preserved in Old Norse Týr), and ultimately English deity.

The serpent in the Garden of Eden was not originally identified as Satan—that connection emerged only in later interpretive traditions, centuries after Genesis was written. The emergence of Satan as a distinct figure first appears in the Book of Job, composed during the Babylonian Exile (586-539 BCE), when Jewish communities encountered Zoroastrian dualism. Here, ha satan (literally “the adversary” or “the accuser”) functions as an agent within God’s heavenly council, testing humanity’s faithfulness, exposing hidden motivations, and challenging claims of genuine righteousness. However, Second Temple literature (516 BCE-70 CE), like the Book of Enoch, increasingly depicts Satan as an independent malevolent force leading fallen angels in cosmic rebellion. The most compelling evidence is Asmodeus, whose name derives from the Avestan Aēšma-daēva (the demon of wrath), a specific Zoroastrian daeva serving Ahriman. Asmodeus appears in the Book of Tobit and Talmudic literature as king of demons, demonstrating direct influence of Zoroastrian deities of darkness on Jewish demonology.

When Hellenistic Jews translated Hebrew scriptures into Greek (the Septuagint, 3rd-2nd centuries BCE), they rendered satan as diabolos—literally “one who throws across,” meaning “accuser”—which spread through Latin diabolus into Romance languages (Spanish diablo, Italian diavolo, French diable) and Germanic languages (German Teufel, English devil). Christianity completed a demonological process parallel to Zoroaster’s treatment of the daevas: Greek daimōn, originally denoting neutral or benevolent spirits, underwent systematic vilification as fiends, fallen angels serving diabolos.

The earliest surviving depictions of Jesus Christ, the Alexamenos graffito (circa 200 CE), portray him as a crucified figure with the head of a donkey, mocking Christian worship as absurd and degrading; this beast-headed imagery would later be adopted by Christians themselves in their iconography of the Devil. Medieval and Renaissance depictions of Satan incorporated deliberate visual elements from pre-Christian deities: Pan’s horns and goat legs reinterpreted as bestial evil, Poseidon’s trident becoming the Devil’s pitchfork, and chthonic underworld associations of deities like Hades transferred to Christian Hell and its ruler. All of these visual motifs appear in various depictions of the Devil card in Tarot, until they were canonized in the Tarot de Marseille pattern (1500-1600).

The modern Tarot Devil owes much of its specific form to the nineteenth-century occult revival, particularly to Alphonse Louis Constant, who adopted the Hebraized name Éliphas Lévi and created the now-iconic image of Baphomet. Louis drew inspiration from medieval accusations against the Knights Templar (1307-1314), who were persecuted by King Philip IV of France under charges of heresy, idolatry, and sexual transgression—accusations widely understood by historians to have been politically motivated, as the French crown was heavily indebted to the Order and sought both its wealth and its elimination. Among the charges was the alleged worship of a mysterious idol called Baphomet, described inconsistently in testimonies extracted under torture, suggesting not an actual deity but a projection shaped by fear and polemical imagination. The name itself is widely considered to derive from “Mahomet,” an Old French rendering of Muhammad, reflecting medieval Christian anxieties about Islam rather than any coherent Templar theology. In later centuries, elements of Templar mythology were absorbed into certain Masonic traditions, helping preserve and mythologize the figure that Louis would eventually reinterpret.

Alphonse Louis transformed this fragmented myth into a symbolic synthesis, drawing from alchemy, Hermeticism, and Kabbalah, depicting Baphomet as an androgynous goat-headed figure uniting opposites—male and female, light and dark, human and animal—bearing the inscription solve et coagula, signifying the transformative current carried by the Templars. This image entered Tarot through Oswald Wirth in 1889 and later influenced the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (1909), embedding Baphomet into the visual language of modern occultism.

Aleister Crowley built upon Louis’ Baphomet and its fundamental principle of reconciling dualities, integrating the Golden Dawn’s zodiacal correspondence of Capricorn—the goat-fish ascending toward the zenith—with his own Thelemic vision to reinterpret the Devil as raw vitality, primal creative energy, and the courage required to break from limiting beliefs in order to align with one’s True Will. In his instructions for the Devil card to the artist Frieda Harris, he wrote:

“There is no fear so terrible to the ordinary person as the fear of going up.”

Across these historical layers—from Indo-Iranian inversion to medieval iconography to esoteric reinterpretation—the Devil emerges less as a metaphysical necessity and more as a recurring social mechanism: a figure constructed to externalize conflict, enforce boundaries, and concentrate blame. What is unfamiliar, rival, or threatening is recoded as demonic; what challenges authority or unsettles identity becomes aligned with cosmic opposition. The genealogy of the Devil therefore reveals a history not simply of theology, but of projection, of societies defining themselves by transforming the Other into symbols of danger, instigating perpetual fear, and locating evil outside themselves in order to preserve internal coherence.

As a trans Sufi Iranian living in Europe, I hope the magick of Tarot helps us envision a world in which the Devil is recognized not as an enemy to be hunted, but as a mirror reflecting our own darkest, often unfounded fears, and inviting us to take responsibility for them rather than casting them onto others.

We have just published a new blog article titled “Revealing Hidden Knowledge: An Arabic Translation of Occult Books”. The article was written by Zaid Adwan, a Jordanian legal professional, translator, and independent researcher.

You can read the full article 👉 here

If you wish to submit a blog article as well, please do not hesitate to contact our Managing Editor Aaron French ( @afrench ) at aaron.french@rensep.org.

Best,

Nuria

rensep.org

Revealing Hidden Knowledge: An Arabic Translation of Occult Books - Research Network for the Study of Esoteric Practices

By Zaid Adwan يحتل علم الباطنيات مكانة خاصة بين العلوم؛ لما يتميز به من خصائص عديدة تجعله مختلفًا عنها، فهو يُعتَبر من العلوم القديمة التي…

You were unable to join the Ask a Scholar event with Dr. Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm? Don’t worry! We have just published the recording of the event.

You can watch it by clicking 👉 here, or by navigating to the video content page.

Enjoy!

Please find below the Zoom link for today’s Ask a Scholar event with Dr. Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm:

Time: Jan 25, 2026 05:00 PM London

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88516390829?pwd=awiYdK2beECuGfR3N9bN97ZMx4YcT4.1#successMeeting ID: 885 1639 0829

Meeting ID: 885 1639 0829

Passcode: 626403

About Jason: “Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm is an historian and philosopher of the Human Sciences. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard; as well as Third Century Professor of Religion and Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College. He is the author of award-winning ‘The Invention of Religion in Japan’ (2012), ‘The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences’ (2017), as well as the award-winning ‘Metamodernism: The Future of Theory’ (2021), all published by University of Chicago Press. A fourth monograph, ‘The Genealogy of Genealogy’, is currently under contract.”

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The RENSEP Team

aaron.french@rensep.org

Thank you!

We are happy to share the introductory meeting of the ERC Synergy Grant MOSAIC: Mapping Occult Sciences Across Islamicate Cultures. It is hosted online and at the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theology, which is also associated with our partner CAS-E.

“The programme will feature a keynote lecture by Prof. Dr. Godefroid de Callataÿ (UCLouvain), corresponding PI of MOSAIC, as well as a presentation by Dr. Petra Schmidl (FAU), one of the four MOSAIC PIs, who will introduce the Erlangen branch of the project.”

The meeting will take place on February 3, from 4:00–6:00 PM CET. You can register until January 26!

For more details and to register, please click 👉 here.

Best,

Nuria