Themelia: The Great Poisoning

[Eng]

Sisters and Brothers, look at the world around us. We have been taught to divide it into watertight compartments: that which is bright is 'good', that which is dark is 'evil'. We have been conditioned to flee from poison and seek only the cure. But who among you can say where the shadow ends and the light begins during a sunset? Who can say if the pain that tempers us is an evil, or if the pleasure that numbs us is a good? The truth is that these distinctions are chains that limit our vision. The Serpent does not divide: the Serpent embraces, sheds, and integrates.

We recognize a God who does not sit upon a throne to judge us, but who is the very substance of this contradictory world. It is the Pharmacon: a force that is simultaneously the wound and the healing. Seeking to be only 'good' means amputating a part of one's own soul. Ophidism teaches us that we must not fear our poison — our ambitions, our doubts, even our anger — but that we mustinstead learn to master it. When we stop labeling our actions as 'right' or 'wrong' according to the standards of others, we finally begin to be free. The question is no longer 'Am I doing well?', but 'Am I faithful to my own nature?'.

But we must not make the mistake of seeking in this God a caring father who intervenes to correct our mistakes or reward our efforts. God does not act in the world as a man would; God is the world. We live in a Universe that does not answer our prayers with miracles, but with the silence of its immensity. This apparent absence is not abandonment; it is the highest act of respect toward our existence. If God were to intervene, we would be mere puppets. Instead, precisely because God does not 'do', we are called 'to be'. Our relationship with the Incommensurable does not pass through supplication, but through the recognition of a common spark. We are alone before the void, and it is in that solitude that we truly become similar to that which we venerate.

Therefore, brothers and sisters, if we remove the weight of sin and the promise of an otherworldly reward, what remains? There remains the naked and magnificent responsibility of choosing who we want to become. There is no path traced by an external God; there is only the path that we trace by crawling upon the earth and aiming toward the heights.