Themelia: Falling in love with God; atē and poisoning.
[ENG]
Dear brothers, dear sisters,
This evening, my invitation to you is to turn your mind and your attention towards what might appear as a simple, insignificant detail of our spiritual identity, but which is instead its true foundation, the ratio upon which the entire edifice of Ophidism has been built. When our doctrine took shape, the term “Ophism” was not chosen, as would otherwise have been logical, but rather that of “Ophidism”, which, in modern languages, indicates «poisoning by means of a snake’s bite».
This, dear brothers and sisters, is not a casual metaphor, nor a simple linguistic whim. For us, poisoning is the true encounter with the Divine, a genuine Theophany, and not the passive acceptance of a consoling dogma or a pre-packaged morality. It is an authentic, violent, and radical poisoning of the spirit. It is an overwhelming infatuation, a metaphysical infatuation that catches us before the altar or in the contemplation of the Cosmos, tearing away the veil of everyday illusions.
The Pharmakon penetrates our spiritual veins: it cures by destabilising us, it heals by destroying our old perception of the world. We are not here to be reassured, but to be bitten by the Truth. It is precisely within this bite that we encounter the profound mystery of the atē. In the eyes of the profane world, this state is often feared as a form of sacred blindness, a violent disorientation of the soul that tears away our dynamic certainties. Yet, within the Synodus, we recognise the atē not as a destructive condemnation, but as an indispensable phase of our spiritual alchemy. It is the necessary veil of confusion that the Divine casts upon our human presumption, a twilight of the intellect that forces us to abandon the illusions of the senses. Through this sacred crisis, atē becomes the very catalyst for our transfiguration. It dismantles the rigid structures of the ego, leaving us naked and unmoored in the presence of the Cosmos.
Only when we are completely lost in this divine vertigo can the old perception truly die, allowing the raw, illuminating power of the Pharmakon to rebuild us from the ashes of our previous self.
Upon this mystery, which unites the pain of transformation with the ecstasy of knowledge, I open our Themelia, and I ask you: In what way does the poisoning of the spirit, understood as an irrational and overwhelming infatuation for the Absolute, redefine your perception of everyday events? How do you experience, in your own journey, that subtle boundary where the Serpent’s venom ceases to be a destructive force and becomes the supreme instrument of your spiritual liberation?