I've remarked previously that The Process had a well developed cosmogony, but little or no mythology: our own history, especially at Xtul in Mexico, provided that. Still, we tried at times to weave our Gods into a more accessible material through story-telling. Thus emerged the primal vignette that one day, Jehovah the God of Strength and Battles said to Lucifer the Light-Bearer, let's play a game of opposition. Lucifer, being the peace-loving God, replied: No, I won't. And off we all went.

We over-played the Game of the Gods among ourselves, endlessly analysing each other's actions and words in these terms, as well as those of historical persons and the various Gods of older mythologies. Allah, we declared, was Jehovah, as was the Bible's God-the-Father and the Hindus' Brahma. Vishnu and Isis were Lucifer, Shiva the Upper End of Satan (as in several ways Allah was, too), Moloch and Kali his Lower End, and so on.

I always found the mythological attributions lacking in depth or completeness, and it was much easier to see the Gods manifesting in and through ourselves. How can you assign an entire pantheon so that it is reasonably attributed to a simple fourfold pattern? There was a lot of early speculation about which mythic deity was which God, but later we tended to switch back to the psychospiritual perspective that was our home territory. It was from ourselves the conception was derived, so it was best seen in us.

Here the paradoxes mounted. Rough 'n tough Jehovah had a core of love as sweetness-and-light Lucifer had a core of hatred, so that both could be mean on their bad sides. Stalin, Mao and Mussolini, for example, were all Luciferians - ruthlessly pursuing visions of perfection, but in crises often doing what Lucifer did - deserting, either giving up or washing their hands of the problems they'd created and purging someone who could convincingly provide a cover for their own ineptitude.

King Henry VIII of England was Jehovian, a tyrant but also a man who loved to joust in his youth - Bluff King Hal, sponsor of the arts and genial pal to his subjects. Jehovians like meat and drink and sleep, and Henry fit that profile to a T, as well suffering from the classic Jehovian paranoia that God was out to get him.

Few people could truly embody the Satanic extremes. Rasputin comes to mind, being both dissolute and a prayerful ecstatic. Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great also fit. Both were warriors who pursued their wild dreams to the exhaustion and despair of their own followers. But normally, the Satanic pattern, being dysfunctional in the everyday world, found better fulfilment in the arts. Four-fifths of 60s rock stars (including Keith Richards and today's other geezers who didn't manage to overdose in their youth) were Satanic, though they often operated through a freedom-loving Luciferian persona. (Think Jimi Hendrix in flower-power shirts).

A distinguishing point of the Satanist was that where the Jehovian feared and endured failure, and the Luciferian feared the futility that can follow material success, the Satanist felt he was already damned (hence the overdoses). The Satanist's world seems a trap, a private hell of compromises and imperfections, and the Crusade, the Jihad, the campaign of conquest, offers an apparent way to remake it.

Christians would be Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, though both of these showed the pattern at its peak. Christians span a spectrum from martyr down to victim, the effective ones achieving a martyrdom that had a point and a lasting effect, the victims being ... well, victims. You might put Nelson Mandela in this category, but his sheer defiance and ultimate triumph more closely resemble a Jehovian's long struggle to maintain the right. Pastor Niemuller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany are more classically Christian, especially in their natural affinity for Christianity or a Christ-like attitude.

Ideally, there is a superordinate pattern we can each attain, by which all the characteristics of the different patterns manifest at their optimum. The love and acceptance of Satan and Christ, the strength of Jehovah, and the brightness and vitality of Lucifer are accessible to us, and we can employ them at will. Qabalistically, this condition corresponds to that of an Exempt Adept, the person who has attained control of the mind and the passions and can deploy them at will, or not at all.

But as I often remark here, we became enmeshed in the Game and its permutations, and became overly fascinated in this. For anyone to have attained to that detached state would have threatened the group-mind and the group-think, because it represented freedom.

Curiously, it occurs to me that a negative trait of the Christian pattern was referred to as 'compulsive independence'; that is, the Christian always wants and needs to do things his or her way. This can lead to obstruction, or it can produce an inspiring figure like King or Niemuller. The victimishness and weakness the pattern can exhibit seem, in retrospect, often to have been exaggerated within the Processean community; a negative suggestion that was often reiterated to those who felt this trait in themselves. As we also did with Satanists, we reminded them too much of their private hells under the guise of offering healing.

In such ways did we deny our own road out from the Shadow.