Suddenly the tumult fell away to silence and I saw the temple illuminated as clear as day. In the midst of it, as if having grown directly out of the floor, sat the Devil upon five death skulls looking at me perniciously with half-closed eyes. He was a shimmering green color and bore a torch between his horns as a sign of holy revelation; flames shot out from his eyes. I could not withstand his gaze without my own eyes burning up. I felt that I had to die if I forced myself. He had woman's breasts and wore the sign of motherhood. Suddenly the breasts turned out to be the heads of two demons, messengers from the realm of the dead, harbingers not of life but death, each holding a mirror in its hand. I saw my own face, but I had shrunk to a small, fiery dot. Having seen him once more personified before me, it was as if he swung to and fro between his body and my own. Observing myself from outside, I felt him at last growing inside my eyes like a seed. His head shrank into a tiny ball, then in the next moment flashed all the more overpoweringly out of its dwarfishness; it elongated, stretched, buckled and transformed into a goat's head, such as the one worshipped by the ancient people of Mendes as a Goat-God in cult sex. Then a sonorous voice was heard to say:

"You, my son, can encounter the truth if you recognize that the game of life is only a cover for truth and reality, a game which exists on a timeless plane. It is said that everything living is caught in the web of Lilith. Only those whom God simultaneously loves and hates can be successful in seeing themselves in the shroud behind which the truth of life is concealed. Sexuality is the harness of the She-Devil´s chariot of triumph into which human beings are integrated. It is the memory of the state of Paradise, one which they seek to regain through sexual intercourse: this fails, however, because the bond again falls apart and new generations are forever forced into this unredeemed cycle. When the hour comes, the She-Devil will enter you and set fire to your every atom. You are in her, and she is in you; she is the serpent in Paradise who has kept her word, and you are the infernal ego or the human god which destroys itself. God no longer gives birth to the Devil: the Devil begets God!"

Suddenly, I heard a strange crackle above me as if two high voltage units had touched. At the same time I felt as if a serpent-fire had erupted at the base of my spine, and there came a tremendous energy surge. The ethereal, sidereal body of Lilith streamed out of the torch between the horns of the Goat-God: the winged one and the strangler, the whore and vampire, She-God, Medusa of Night and Isis of Hell. She hissed: "I am the power, matter transformed and turned into radiation and I am leading you to the truth. I will penetrate you and set fire to every atom in you. Then, once I have penetrated you, all longing in your flesh will be stilled. You then become like God and recognize Good and Evil. I want to devour you in order to help you find your own mask: for I am the serpent who keeps its word and you, merely a human, were expelled from Paradise by your own God. I have not yet defeated God, but nor have I lost yet. And most important of all: I have not yet capitulated! I am in a state of total war."

Slowly the gates of Hell opened and out flowed a light brighter than a flash. An enormous serpent reared up before me ready to devour me. It was large and beautiful and wound itself around me. The flicker of light fell upon its face and I recognized in it the High Priestess - only a shadow nourished by its own shadow, and yet encircled by a fire emanating from itself and proving that the cherubs shine from all phenomena. I felt that magic poison of love which paralyzes the spirit. My whole body transformed itself into an orgiastic jungle of entrails seized by the desire to be consumed. I tried to tear myself away, but could no more, for my torso already seemed to have become part of the serpent. I felt as if a monster had swallowed me and I was being dragged into the deep. Pharoic death chambers opened up inside my body, within the slimy walls of my stomach: vegetative, insect-like creatures wound around the deepest stratum of my reptilian beginnings. It was the realm of the mother I longed for, the place where bodies returned to foetuses and swam in fetid broths, tremulously waiting to be spat out again by the cyclopean throat of a monster, or in manna-baths of light as unspeakable ecstasy with the Goddess, inexpressable in words.

I was dead and I was born - I felt as if I were both. In the midst of the seraphim's beam I saw all demons and heavenly hosts praise God before the throne. Baphomet radiated a white aura of light on the throne. I simply sank into him (or him into me?), for the encounter with him proved that I was now ready to descent into the darker shafts and lift the Medusa head into the light. From the torch between my horns, in a beam of light pointed at me, shone the heavenly image of the inner seductress. The ethereal form of my feminine counterpart lit up: Black Isis; no mirage this, but a real, mind-bending form which, in the fire of fusion, lit an intra-cellular blaze as it broke out from my Chakra-crown. She sat upon my lap and looked at me in such heavenly, orgiastic rapture that the coiled serpent awoke from my coccyx and, thoughts of alchemical fusion coming to mind, my spine began to swing. A deep crack of thunder rent the air and made the earth tremble, and the sky became as bright as day. Right in front of me, as if having grown out of the soil, a moldy, wooden pillar jutted from the earth. It almost reached the heavenly spheres and had the crossbeam of a crucifix on top. The curtain in the temple tore apart, but it was the serpent and not the Devil who rose upon the cross and spoke: "When I once promised you the truth if you would kneel down and worship me, you refused because you thought that you wanted to be cleverer than me. But in your satanic cleverness you have destroyed the world! Because you were unable to notice the movement of life, your satanic cleverness hindered you in becoming the truth yourself. You put something else - your image of truth - in its place. And since every truth was nourished by you, like all truths, it again became a poor imitation of this image: an image of an image referring to and having been derived from the first image. Such images serve as an escape from the fear of life so that you bind yourself to them by your own free will and place the spirit in chains. But I am the power itself that binds human beings to their images - I am the mistress of images! But you are the slave of my power for so long as you do not recognize yourself. Those who desire to free themselves from their own specter must deny themselves to me. I am the spirit of knowledge by whose erasure human beings elevate themselves above the image of their God ..."

I had no idea where my hallucination ended and where reality began. But I could clearly smell the odors of Hell! A breath of reality clasped by insanity crept over my face. This reality was perversity congealed in one moment; I was enormously startled as it presented itself to me for the first time naked as lusting otherness, not concealing itself behind the hustle and bustle of everyday life and the omnipresence of habit - a dreadful mistake, for the "derby" of mankind is simply run in Hell. I saw the Black Isis surface before me: the angel of Hell who sucks in human beings with her serpent's kiss. She sat on my lap hissed: "This is the Devil´s pact! This brings you security because you are binding yourself to an image, giving you such certitude that you even expect your desires to become reality. But this is a false conclusion! For even a feeling becomes a dead image, no matter how true and thus coherent. It is mummified! And all this prevents life, because it is happening through a fear for God, because it occurs out of fear and not a love for God. Now kiss me! Realize that I am your God, your father! Do not punish the Devil for the fact that you are not capable of really loving God!" We gave ourselves the kiss of life, probably the most terrible union in which two pairs of lips ever melted into one. A serpent wound out of her mouth and hissed: "We are trying to hinder the development of God´s spirit with an image that we ourselves have created. Yet He overcomes us in the end, for our image collapses and we realize our crisis. This is the experience of our guilt!"

A tremendous flash erupted - it was a sign! This was the divine password. The rope! Where was the saving rope? Despairing, I stretched out my arms towards the sun. There! A glitter, quite faint at first, then becoming brighter - the savior, Noah's Ark, the shimmering cross. Longingly, I raised my arms and prayed to the father: "Satan, have mercy upon my wretchedness and redeem me from my guilt!"

All of a sudden, an appalling brightness broke through a crack in the middle of the heavens. Glistening chasms of light, naked and desparate, falling to the Earth in apocalyptic greed, swelling again and again, surging back, filled with hatred and constantly becoming inflamed. Inside, as in a cosmic vision, appeared the shroud of Christ yet bearing the face of Satan. I then saw a dark face outlined in the sky. It drew closer as though it wanted to devour Heaven and Earth, creating deep shudders. It looked at me with strange sphinx-like eyes that had no lashes: "I am the Demon," proclaimed the phenomenon solemnly. "I am the spirit, the golden calf - the truth you called for. Yes, it is me, the mistress of the world and I forgive you for all your sins if you kneel down and pray!"

I felt that I had come to the end of my search. And there, I kneeled down and laid my head in her lap: "Mother, in your hands I command my spirit!"