Gathered Pages: 4

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Black Lamb’s Blood

Introduction

What got me into the darkest practices was a desire to do good.  First as the youngest child of an evangelist and templar, then as a purveyor of dark texts and a colleague to men and women who perpetrate crimes against the world, each time they deal with that which is Wrong.

This text will not find its way to many on the side of Right.  I itch, already, to get into minutiae, to argue the meaning of Right, just as I know many of my contemporaries and peers are already telling themselves that they do not Wrong.  They tell themselves they are the exception.

The others, the unrepentant, the ones who have given up on the delusion, I suspect they have already put the book down, tossed it aside.  They equate Right and Wrong with Good and Evil, and they have already dismissed conventional morality.

I am not an expert practitioner.  My bindings, such as they are, have all been minor ones.  Careful ones, a very small number when one considers my age and my long career.  I am alive now because I am deliberate, because I move with excessive caution, not because I am good.  Certainly not because I am Good.  That particular quality is up for debate.

It is with this cautiousness and deliberation that I approach my first work.  This cautiousness and deliberation does not pay particular heed to the consequences of this writing.  I might, for example, say that it is unusual to wait so long to write their first work, that my fellows are narcissists by nature who write and write early out of ego and self-congratulations.  In saying this, I make enemies, dangerous ones who are liable to act on this insult.

I have always been honest to a fault.  Child of a preacher, an evangelist and templar.  Nothing else would be permitted, even before my siblings and I were invited to see what lies behind the curtain.  I’ve known since I admitted I was a diabolist, that anything I wrote would have to be something that would offend certain parties, march to a different rhythm.

When I say that I approach Black Lamb’s Blood with care, I mean that I chose my topic only after a great deal of thought.  Writers are told to write to fill the empty space on a bookshelf, the book that has yet to be written, but practitioners, narcissistic practitioners in particular, are prone to a kind of masturbation.  Self congratulating drivel, with crumbs offered to the peers as incentive to buy and read their texts.  These crumbs come as knowledge of demons and means of summoning, but not the truest means of controlling the things.  Such knowledge is retained by the one who bound them.  Nothing meaningful is offered.

Other texts are written with a quiet desperation.  The writers aim to unravel the mysteries and plumb the depths of knowledge.  The reasoning is similar to that of the compulsive gambler.  One more roll of the dice, one more answer, they tell themselves, and they’ll have a way out from beneath the debt that has piled up around them.  They will have an escape from the unbound beings that bay at their heels with every waking and sleeping hour.  This writing is too focused on immediate answers, or on big ones, and tends to the myopic.

What are my motivations for writing?  Look to the title of this text.  I am the black sheep of my family, but I am still new to this world, relatively speaking, relatively innocent.  The black lamb, perhaps.  The blood?  That of a martyr.  The conceit of a preacher’s get, to romanticize martyrdom.

I researched not the binding of demons, but the aftermath in the wake of these bindings, and in the wake of their actions.  I researched karma, the paths my peers took, I look at the lies we tell ourselves.  I mock my peers where I think they deserve to be mocked, call them repulsive when they act repulsive.  I curried favor, played to their love of themselves, the wide-eyed student eager to pay them homage.

They will, I think, be less than pleased when they see what I actually wrote.

I write this because I feel the field is largely ignored.  All of the rest of us, it seems, even the greatest of us, are focused on the present.  What happens in the future?  What happens when the binding is done?  What happens to us?  To the ones touched by the Wrongs?

Is there, I ask, a way out?  A methodology that might allow us to deal with evils without a sum loss for our world as a whole?  I would suggest there is, though I do not yet know what it might be.

I write this knowing that my audience will be small, if it exists at all.  Years of interviews and analysis point to the same conclusion.  My work will not be read, not as it is intended to be read.  The solutions I posit, and the questions I want others to answer, will each be ignored.  The unrepentant will refuse to challenge their own world view, moderate diabolists, my target audience in this, will feel uncomfortable with the emphasis on the future and dismiss me.  Lesser diabolists will not be in a position to read my work.

Beyond diabolists, I expect others will see it as self pity, which it is.  Failing that, they’re liable to see it as a kind of manipulation.  I wouldn’t blame them.  I have far too little to say in concrete terms, and talk around subjects, raising questions.  In their shoes, I would say the same about this text.

I write with a goal in mind, but perhaps it will solely for my own benefit, a masturbatory exercise in the end.

Masturbation or martyrdom, I chose my path in life, and I pray to God that this is a final destination that leads to a greater Good.

Chapter One: The Nest

I remember the first demon I encountered. My eldest brother was studying Religion, my sister enjoying a brief flirtation with freedom, partying and men, before her return to the family and assumption of her responsibilities.  I was an older teenager, I’d studied the books my father provided, and the task was one that needed as many hands as possible.  I was conscripted.

Our community knew my father as a local preacher.  He was more beneath the surface, privy to things beyond the curtain.  Practitioners called him an evangelist, a summoner, a man powerful enough to sway the world with words.  He called angels forth, cherubim, Madonnas carved of ivory to give others shelter.

That night, I saw him take off the mask he wore with his wife, his family, and his congregation.  He was always stern, but I saw him grim.  I saw old companions, others who had once been taught by the same teacher as my father, a man who taught them to use angels and guns both.  Men and women, wearing armor beneath clothes, long coats to hide their weapons, not one span of their body unadorned by tools of their trade.  Water, poisons, incendiaries, scrolls.

It would take me long decades to learn what proper diabolists already know.  Most practitioners count themselves unlucky if they have to deal with one of the darker powers.  Diabolists make such dealings their stock and trade.  My father and his fellow templars walked a middle road.  They had irregular contact with the Wrong things, but the only things they dealt out were fire, bullet, and death.

Were this another text, I would spell out the fighting, the measures taken, in hopes that others could use that knowledge and better survive.  My focus lies elsewhere.

The being we sought that night was more powerful than we had anticipated.  It was intelligent enough to hide the bulk of its activities from the outside world.  We expected an imp.  We found something evolved enough to be birthing its own imps, to have a form and its own symbolism.

A devil of the sixth choir.  The choir of man’s evils.  A weaker choir, and the one most personal to all of us.

She had collected inhabitants of a small town into a cult and church, and she had done it long enough that her initial followers had descendants.  Mother, father, child, grandchild.  All rutted on the floors and pews of the devil’s church in a grand, senseless, ceaseless orgy, the devil herself presiding above all in naked, Wrong splendor.

A devil of incest, she had made her own monsters even before she began creating imps, by way of inbreeding and birth defects.  There was only horror there, enough to sear its way into my eyes.

I will sum up that night by saying that each of us who walked in there with guns at the ready walked away alive, but we did not walk away intact.

When I think of what drove me to write this work, this event was one that remained with me.  I spent some time wondering about the aftermath.  It was my first eye-opening experience, and it was the last incident where I researched the long term effects.

It was only when I’d researched the events that are covered in each chapter that follows, that I let myself look into this one.  I looked at the numbers, and I want to point to statistics, the increase in birth defects in that town and county.  To the rise in the divorce rate, or the rates of abuse.

I want to, but I can’t.

It’s an event that touched me, personally, and started me on a different path in life.  Allow me, instead, to open my first chapter with the reality virtually all diabolists are cognizant of.

By the time my siblings returned the following April, almost a year later, my parents had announced their divorce.  My father said two words to either of my siblings.  Which was about as many as he’d said to me in the month prior.  That first night my siblings were home, I dreamed, and I realized why my father had been keeping his distance.

The morning before I left for that fight with the young devil, I was seventeen years old, doing the sort of thing seventeen year old boys are particularly inclined to do when locked in the bathroom.  An activity flavored with that uncomfortable mix of guilt and rebellion that is unique when your father preaches every night of the week.

That was the last time I found pleasure in my own body.

Scars and aftermath.  I imagine this particular type is familiar to all diabolists.  To lose our humanity piece by parcel, or to give it away.

This is not a reality diabolists often discuss.  The sacrifices that don’t involve the murder of a lamb or a virgin strapped to an altar.

I intend to open with this topic, a reality we all acknowledge and keep secret.  It was the start of my own journey, a motivation for me to start looking into matters.  I sought a way to fix what had been made Wrong in my own heart and mind.

The push to leave my home and family came about after a late night discussion with my siblings, my brother and the sister I could not look in the eye.

My sister called my father a charlatan.  My brother, set to be a templar after my father’s footsteps, did not disagree, but argued for the benefit of symbolism.

The idea of angels with wings was not situated in record or text, my sister argued.  Take away the invented things, the cultural aspects and art, stick to the written word alone, and the world was left with a deity who focused all efforts recorded in texts on a relatively small section of the Middle East.

My brother argued for the benefit of symbolism, for the power of ideas.  In the heat of battle, ideas and iconography could lend strength to those who needed it.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it hadn’t.  It didn’t.  Not for me, and not for our father.

In the end, with many beers shared between us, sitting on the roof of our house in that warm springtime, it dawned on me that my siblings had lost their faith.  The irony was, I’d retained my own.

I liken my realizations to the evolution of a child in their early adolescence, learning that their parents are indeed not perfect.  The subsequent realization is one many don’t make until they are in their twenties.  That their parent is still their parent.

Such was my relationship with God.  Such was the nature of my faith.

It was with that faith and little else that I gathered my things and struck out on my own a week later.

That was the start of my journey.  I would ask, to those who are still reading, to come with me.  Start with your eyes open to the most basic scars we wear.  We move on to the subject of Balance, to debts, prices, and the question of how one might better manage dealings with creatures who take from everything.

 

Chapter two: Tower

I would like to say I moved with direction after I left home, but I did meander.  I was hesitant, and I took too long to break some naive promises I had made to myself.  Foolish, I expect, to think one can get answers without paying some price.

When I did finally allow myself to look for and converse with diabolists, I found myself making rapid progress.  I hated myself for the prior years, telling myself I had wasted time, but I value them in retrospect.  I needed to exhaust all other options before I could walk this path and learn what I knew, or my self-loathing and doubt would have been too much to bear.

At the time, I weighed morals.  These days I debate questions of Balance.  Some call it karma.

I remain a careful man, these days, but it is human nature to make mistakes in youth.  I remember classmates racking up credit card bills in the tens of thousands, before reality caught up with them.

For a practitioner without parents to watch over them, it is easy to do the same with one’s Balance.

Frustrated, tired, and well traveled, I was twenty years old before I reached out to other diabolists.  I found Lucrezia, who identified herself to me as Lucy.  She, in turn, introduced me to her master and teacher, Jeffrey.

I remain unsure as to why I was invited to their home and presence.  My agreement to join them was a cautious one.  I spent a full night and two days awake, writing and revising the written contract.  Jeffrey barely skimmed it before agreeing.

Among those terms were measures meant to protect my Balance in the universe.  I’d come from a good home and an honest life, I’d been generous and given back more than I’d taken, and I held to the rules that God gave to mankind.  It was in holding to those rules that I bettered my Balance, rather than God himself, but I remain thankful for opportunity He gave me.

I remained free to refuse any task given me, with the caveat that I would have to pay for my own food and shelter any day that I did, or leave.  He agreed to never bind me or limit my freedom.

Even with the terms of our deal, I was uncomfortable.  For a long time, staying with Lucrezia and our mutual master, I slept with one eye open, convinced I would be sacrificed.  Instead, I got room and board, and frequent menial work, including illustrating for Jeffrey’s texts, which he wrote as short volumes, bound in nice embossed leather and sold at premiums.

He played to the shallow narcissism of other diabolists, fanning their fancies and indirectly flattering them.  Each volume was written with specific customers in mind, holding the relatively little substance he’d managed to dig up or barter from others.

Such was my existence with him.

I was there, but did not assist, when he summoned Agares.  A duke among the seventh choir, one that brought great beings low.  A corrupter and agitator.  He could compel a king to march to war, or stop that same warhost in its tracks.

Jeffrey’s efforts were not guided at men.  This was, I later learned, one step in my new master’s lifelong quest to quash and vanquish the gods of mankind.

Even in times of quiet, the gods are busy, fighting and holding on to their assets.  There is a delicate balance.  Jeffrey and Agares both sought to disturb it.  To start a war that included gods, incarnations and spirits, and make the deaths that resulted true deaths, ones that left the world bereft of those forces and the structure they gave to our reality.

Many of the choirs are focused on tangible things, but the seventh is an abstract one.  Not one that we are able to grasp in concrete terms.  Many call it the weakest choir.  It is one we are liable to underestimate or lose sight of, and thus the one that gets the furthest in its endeavors towards the Wrong.

By way of my contract with Jeffrey, I was forbidden from direct interference, so I turned to compelling my friend and fellow apprentice to stop Jeffrey.

Had Lucrezia and I succeeded, I might have returned home to be a templar, bottled up my passions and faced the horrors with the same grim expression my father wore.

My master and the Duke won.  Lucrezia died in the fight I urged her to take part in.

This text isn’t for the stories of battle, for exchanges of blows.

Ultimately, the world kept turning, a little less bright, less spiritually whole.

I was angry, passionate, protective of my sole friendship from the past three years.  As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer…

I sought revenge and I did it by way of the tools I’d accumulated, studying and watching diabolism.

I failed, and I was lucky enough to avoid the worst of the backlash when my own bindings failed to hurt Jeffrey and came back to me to exact the required prices.

Many diabolists maintain some means of tracking their Balance.  I use a wooden ring.  For a long time, the changes in that ring and the perpetual reminder that I was in debt bothered me.  A lifetime bringing up my Balance, a few moments of outraged stupidity to spend it and subsequently plunge myself into debt.

My first big question, then, is whether we can manage the karmic balance.  Is it possible to walk away free and clear?

Most will say yes.  There is the slow growth.  Regaining an even or positive Balance by fits and starts, small oaths and large ones, through Right, maintaining and keeping to a code.  The Universe will periodically seek to re-establish balance, and the practitioner, succeed or fail, will find a portion of the debt spent to bring this about.  Bigger oaths and restoring balance to reality can counteract the karmic weight that burdens the practitioner.

 

It is possible to escape this burden, yet time and again, diabolists fall into the trap and fail to escape it.

It is human nature, to treat the world as a series of nails, when all one has is a hammer.  Even when the use of the hammer comes with a grave price.

It is human nature to take the easy road.  To resolve the dynamic, there are two simple options.  Let me return to this in a moment.

In chapter one, I focused largely on myself.  The individual.  In this chapter, I look to people one step removed from me.  Jeffrey and Lucrezia.

Let me ask a broader question, then.  Is this a question we can solve?  Is it one we want to solve?

Let us put aside the unrepentant, the ones who would never read this text, because it does not feed directly into their need for power.  Let me ask, can we better the world?  Do Good in some fashion?  Can we remedy the cosmic Balance as a whole?  Minimize the Wrongs?

I emphasize ‘we’.  As I write this, my Balance is not so terrible.  There are certainly non-diabolists who have worse.  I believe I have done some Good, in the face of it all.  Were a jury to be convened, there would be much argument over my overall contribution to humanity, and perhaps that would have to suffice.  Being questionable in my standing Balance is better than being unquestionably Wrong.

My concern is not with the self, or with the individual, but diabolism as a whole.  We are hated because we do Wrong.  Not evil, but we do a disservice to reality as a whole.

Yet, at the same time, we serve a useful function.  What better tool to use to bind the greater threats than one who is already doomed?

Many diabolists do this out of selfishness.  The very good and very bad diabolists excepted, many stay alive long enough to bind a few minor entities and accrue a horrific Balance before reality asserts itself and they die a miserable death.

I might argue that the average diabolist betters the world, for having been in it.  Not in the short term, but perhaps in the long.

If problems exist in our number, it is undeniably the short lived failures that bring about disaster with nothing to offer, and the long lived practitioners who leverage their knowledge to bring about the greatest Wrongs.  The net gain for mankind is lowest.

To bind Others and leave them bound is the best thing we can do.  Because of their nature, we inevitably do so at a cost to ourselves.  For Diabolists, these others are devils, demons, imps, and they are ghosts, goblins, faerie and other beings so Wrong that practitioners who devote themselves to their study will often shy away.  Were this our pattern of behavior, we might be acceptable in the eyes of others.

This is one answer, one solution, but it begs more questions.  How might we bring this about?  Could diabolists as a whole be convinced to take this path?

The answer is no.

My old master Jeffrey was targeted by local practitioners not long after Agares was returned to his realm, but he lives.  His enemies saw fit to lock him in his body, mute, unable to practice.  I visit the man from time to time, the both of us many years older.  I have not forgiven him for what he did to his student, nor have I forgiven myself.  When we meet, now, I drink tea while he drinks beer with the assistance of a nurse and a straw.  We talk, about balance and the aftermath of demons, and I painstakingly transcribe what he struggles to express.

Jeffrey, in my eyes, is a manifestation of the problem that plagues us.  Any attempt to restore diabolism in the eyes of others and to get their help would raise questions about Jeffrey’s like.  He is not so insane to be dismissed entirely.  A man who held a grudge and saw only one way to see that grudge done justice.  Jeffrey is not a true Scotsman.

I confess, I write here in the hope of inspiring questions among a group that is prone to forging forward without accepting any answer but the one that serves them.  I do not labor under the illusion that enough will read my work to have heated discussions over what the answers might be.

But I must ask.  I hope to raise questions among the individual, and I dream of a circumstance where we might look deeper at ourselves as a group.

Earlier, I suggested there are two simple options.  We’ve already discussed the obvious, that the archetypical diabolist must cease to be and become something more selfless.  It isn’t possible, because the typical diabolist won’t break from the pattern of taking the easy road, even when it is demonstrably self-destructive.

If there is a solution, and this is purely food for thought, the easy road must become the road that serves us best.

In pursuit of answers, I lead you on to chapter three, where I talk about the sociology of Diabolists, and the negative patterns we perpetuate amongst ourselves, and how one might attempt to reframe society instead, in an attempt to provide an easier road.

 

Chapter Five: Swords

The years after the loss of my family were something of a blur.  Somewhere in the midst of it all, I began to take a harder look at what I was doing, at my Balance, and my repeated failures.

I was a wretch, I admit, and if ever I’ve come close to suicide or embracing Wrong, I came close then.  I was in ill health, and I might joke I had more alcohol than blood in my veins, if I could write such statements without being forsworn.

My hair was shaggy, my facial hair growing in, my thoughts clouded by drink and depression, and I knew a great deal I shouldn’t.  I knew rituals to summon things that would have made me stand tall, handsome, in good health, and above all else, happy.  I knew many more rituals to call forth things to act against my enemies, and I was short enough on self respect that I didn’t care nearly enough about what might happen to me if my targets successfully fended them off.

Jeffrey and all the other individuals I sought to target in violence had been parts of a greater pattern.  The forces of ‘Right’, if you can call them that, saw fit to apply pressure and purge society of diabolists.  This was not a good thing, because it failed to stop the worst kinds, types I’ve touched on twice now.  By seeking out the organized, largely quiet diabolists, this purging demanded retribution and self defense.

Remember, when all one has is a hammer…

Diabolists who might have gone out in unspectacular manners after successfully binding a handful of imps and maybe an intermediate being were now perpetrating Wrongs.

I, by virtue of itinerant means and a lack of any real connection, managed to slip away before the doors were kicked in and diabolists rounded up for execution.  I sustained myself for years, simply selling my knowledge to individuals who desperately sought to patch the holes that had appeared in their libraries and in the collective knowledge of diabolists.  I then drank much of those earnings away.

Many of those sitting at the middle section of the totem pole had been destroyed, and only those on the bottom, such as myself, and those on the top, individuals much like Jeffrey, remained in one piece.

I’ve brought up the individual consequences, karma, and the diabolist’s place in society.  I’ve talked about the opposition the diabolist faces, and the tools the diabolist must employ versus the tools they don’t have to employ, but are liable to.  Each of these observations are conducted through the lenses of what should be versus what actually is.

I’ve raised the topic of the individual, about those who are one step removed, about the groups, and society as an abstract.  The scope ever widens.

The world.

Will Earth cease to be tomorrow, if the greatest demons were to be called forth?  No.  Not definitively.  The Balance would be disturbed, and the universe would naturally exert an opposing pressure.

If such threats were likely or possible, perhaps we would see something concrete occur.  Perhaps all diabolists, myself included, would be scoured from the earth.  I would not expect this to end the problem.  Some knowledge can’t be destroyed absolutely, and I suspect many Wrong things collect tomes and texts to disseminate among the public, in case of such an event.  I know some lesser beings have asked for copies of my writing, and diabolic organizations will collect or order research.

Instead, it is a long series of Wrongs that are too easy to ignore.  The world and everything in it erode.

We have established a problem of binaries.  On the one hand, we have the diabolists who contribute to the greater Wrong and the diabolists who don’t.  On the other hand, we have the restrictions of society, accommodating and not.

Draw out a grid, and three of the four possible answers are disastrous.  Either society and diabolist are both working against our mutual goals, which they are, and we speed towards an ugly end, the diabolist alone works towards Wrong while society attempts to accommodate, or society forces the diabolist’s hand while the diabolist attempts to conform and serve the greater good.

The sole remaining option, harmony and the best chances at righting that which is Wrong, is a difficult one to accomplish, for reasons already stated.

The question remains: how do we achieve something that requires this kind of concordance, this kind of cooperation?

I would say the ‘how’ is simple, if unpleasant.  Sacrifice.  In particular, forms of sacrifice that don’t require the cooperation of all parties.

One option is that we could turn on our own.  Oh, I’m sure that statement got attention.  A few of our kind are so vile that they sour our ability to deal with the world at large.  Is it possible that we could form a call to arms?  To set diabolist against diabolist, five moderates against one of the worst of us?  If they band together, then destroy them as a group.

Conflict breeds desperation, and desperation in diabolists breeds Wrongs, but we are well versed in the tools our kind employ.  A demon properly warded off will return to its master, and many conventional protections will cease to have effect.

Knowledge will exist, it must exist, but a group of moderates can store and treasure knowledge.  If we were to reach this point, we could set rules that discourage passing that knowledge on.  All of the knowledge in the world, stored away, an enclave who might work to find the knowledge that industrious imps and devils might distribute in hopes of maximizing chaos.

It isn’t nearly so simple, of course.  Our world is a close-knit one, not always in healthy ways.  We depend on one another for advice and research, for the right summonings and enough favors are owed that the wrong death at the wrong time could doom several attached individuals.

Achieving cooperation in this would be difficult.

The other option would be to sour this relationship.  Very few non-diabolists know enough about our work to properly safeguard themselves, their property and their loved ones.

I wonder what might happen if one were to sell the templars, witch hunters, and various Lords of major cities the necessary tools for protection against demons and other Wrong things?  Not the darkest knowledge, but the ways to turn an attacking demon aside, if one knows their general type.

What would they be buying?  Their own security.

Suspicion would be rife, chaos endemic.

Yes, Wrongs would be committed, but I can’t help but wonder if it is possible to create a rift deep enough to separate diabolists for centuries to come.

The problems here are that, again, desperation breeds Wrongs.

In writing these words, I doom myself, because others will act to keep any of this from coming to pass.  But I hope I have illustrated the severity of the subject and shaken those dabbling diabolists.

I intend to posit another answer.

 

Chapter Six: A Last Chapter

Sacrifices must be made, the metaphorical lamb must be bled.

I’ve suggested murdering our own.  Cain’s crime.  I’ve suggested betrayal.  Judas’.

I would offer a third suggestion.  It’s relatively easy to accomplish, and many non-diabolist practitioners would likely be willing to help bring it to pass.  Of the two major issues that plague diabolists, one is handled.  It also falls in step with my earlier suggestions, that it pave an easier road for the diabolist to follow, one where the diabolist is driven to cooperate.

I believe in this enough to sacrifice myself.

Enslavement.

Let’s talk history.

We don’t know where the oldest demons came from.  Some suggest they are an antithesis to those same forces that created the world, and they are laying the groundwork for the world’s demise, while the creator forces are still at the far-flung edges of reality, expanding our universe.

Others say they are all devils, at their root.  Collections of malign power that take root in people, swelling and transferring from host to host, until they have sufficiently defined themselves.

We don’t know.  Some argue we can’t know.

What we do know is that they can be bound.  They harbor fears of a sort.

At some point in history, all the forces of the world gathered, recognizing that there could only be chaos if they continued fighting amongst themselves.  Gods, incarnations, and other powers realized that with the power they could each bring to bear, certain actions couldn’t be permitted.  Trust was impossible to maintain.

Laws were set in place.  Those same laws are the ones that a practitioner agrees to abide by, in order to broker access to what lies beyond the curtain.

My suggestion is simple: We amend the laws.

We make adhering to greater goods the easier path to take.  Power would not be obtainable through the old awakening ritual, and the new ritual would limit and control diabolists.

To be a diabolist, one would need to shackle themselves.

If calling diabolists narcissists at heart didn’t damn me, suggesting infighting or betrayal should see that one diabolist wants to murder me.

Writing this is another thing altogether.  I described two kinds of practicing diabolist, those who self-aggrandize, and the desperate.  You could divide these further into minor practitioners, moderates, and the extremes.

Each would find the idea of enslavement repugnant.  I expect many are already plotting the worst possible fates for me.

I have changed details about myself, changed major personal details, taking extreme steps to protect myself in these regards while avoiding falsehood and forswearing myself.  I’ve masked my location with the practice.  I know how little all of this will ultimately help.  I’m not young, and I’ve spent much of my life around diabolists, studying them.

I know what I’m in for.

But I’ve lived some time, now, and I believe in what I’m doing.

This lamb goes as willingly to slaughter as one can go, knowing what awaits.

My book will go largely unread, I think, but I have to believe I do Good, in writing it.

Even if this were widely read, I do not think change would happen in one year.  Or twenty.  This is but a seed, something to be brought up and forgotten until it becomes a subconscious thought.  Many who read it, many who I have arranged to get the book, are immortal.

But the fear and anger many experience will be real, in the end.

Words and knowledge are power.

I give my life in hopes that this seed of an idea finds fertile ground.

I hope my few friends will support me in this.

Should that not be possible, then I hope they forgive me this indulgence.  I’ve had so few.

God help me.

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