The invention of evil
Interpreting the world as a battle between light and darkness — and always placing oneself on the side of good — is a tool of power.
Many lies are currently being exposed. What has long been hidden is coming to light. Most of the time, light is seen as good and darkness as evil. In a relentless battle, light and dark forces face each other and struggle for victory. This view fuels the game of destruction that has been played on Earth for millennia. Two forces are always opposed, one of which must always be the winner and the other the loser, as if there were not enough room on the planet for everyone. The idea of an evil force on the other side keeps the machinery of war running.
[This article posted on 1/22/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet,
The origin of the word evil is not entirely clear. Originally, it meant bad, harmful, worthless, weak, but also pompous and pretentious (1). Evil — that’s the others. There is hardly anyone who would describe themselves as such. Even when we feel bad, we know that we are not actually bad, but have become so. Who would look at a newborn baby and think it is evil?
When we describe someone as evil, we do not distinguish between the act and the perpetrator. We burn the attribute into the other person’s skin, so to speak, and thereby justify any kind of violence against them. In doing so, we issue ourselves a free pass for their punishment and destruction. Oppression, exploitation, persecution, murder — would these things exist if we didn’t constantly label each other as inhuman? It’s not a big step from human to non-human. Something is so bad that we are allowed to eradicate it without fear of consequences.
By labeling other living beings as evil, we exclude what defines us as human beings: our capacity for compassion.
Instead of nurturing the best in ourselves, we encourage the worst: harshness, intransigence, arrogance, pride, and a willingness to use violence. From “evil” viruses to ‘evil’ Russians: this paves the way for every kind of war.
Stigmatized
“Evil itself does not exist. There is only energy that has not yet been transformed.” This is what it says in “The Answer of the Angels” by Gitta Mallasz. The book was written during the Second World War as a channeling. Four friends, three of them of Jewish descent, met regularly to discuss the burning questions of life when one of them suddenly exclaimed: “Watch out, it’s not me talking now” (2).
The speaker says that what we call evil is actually an energy that has not yet entered our consciousness, has not yet been integrated, has not yet been processed by us. We call evil that which we do not yet know, that which is foreign to us, that which we do not want to see, that which is hidden in the dark. Accordingly, darkness is associated with evil, and we forget that darkness also means protection and is the basis for the emergence of life.
Thus, the idea that light is good and darkness is bad has become widely accepted. Even in pre-Christian times, Western cultures began to associate light and the sun with the masculine and darkness and the moon with the feminine. With monotheism, the idea became entrenched that men were the stronger sex and women were inferior to them, that men were good and women were so bad that it was considered good form to patronize and oppress them.
Demonized
With this idea, the history of our civilization got off to a disastrous start. The woman who is considered the mother of us all had no mother herself. Eve was artificially created from a man’s rib. After Lilith, Eve’s predecessor, had already been banished from paradise and demonized for her disobedience, Eve was now considered the temptress of evil. It was she who had given Adam the forbidden fruit and was in league with the serpent (3).
Since then, women have had to pay for her deed. For a long time, she was kept like a slave and legally equated with livestock. For centuries, women were labeled witches and burned at the stake. With her humiliation and demonization, nature itself came to be increasingly perceived as evil. Evil women, evil savages, evil wolves, evil microbes: whatever the patriarchy sought to subjugate was first labeled evil.
To this day, science, which emerged from the Inquisition, dissects life, both large and small, into its individual parts in order to dominate it and, if profit is to be made, to destroy it.
Even death is equated with evil. In a sense, it is no longer part of life, of the original cycles of becoming and passing away that we once honored and celebrated. Diseases are fought like enemies. Cancer cells are considered malignant, insidious monsters that must be fired at with the most powerful ammunition.
Self-made
Fear is being stirred up on all fronts until we put up with everything and degrade ourselves to guinea pigs. The jungle, darkness, women, wild animals, disease, and death—fear has created countless monsters. Their names are legion: Lilith, Satan, Lucifer, Ahriman, and all the names that artificial intelligence generators produce today to drive us deeper and deeper into fragmentation.
Just as no television station can do without murder and mayhem, hardly any narrative can do without a villain who both teaches us to fear and elevates us. Because we are the good guys in the story. We are tolerant. We are united. We are woke. We are awake. We see through it all. We are the saviors. We can lecture others and, depending on the situation, bombard them with weapons or love.
While we present ourselves in the best possible light, in an increasingly divided world, anything that is different from us is pushed further and further into the shadows.
The war against evil rages ever more fiercely. The ego, the image we have of ourselves and project onto the outside world, becomes increasingly inflated. Look how good I am! The ego needs evil because it thrives on separation. It does not know connection, unity, community, or cooperation. In its quest to elevate us, it constantly invents new villains to work against and prove how important it is.
Challenge
There may be forces in the universe that are truly dangerous, hidden powers that can bring about great destruction. There is no doubt that they exist, the aspirations to subjugate the living and replace the natural with the artificial. They exist, the sorcerer’s apprentices who play with life, the profiteers who think only of increasing their own power. But to call these forces evil is an invention of the ego, the unattached part of us that makes us hard and self-righteous.
For these forces do one thing above all else: they challenge us. And? How do you behave now? Do you allow yourself to be seduced? Do you remain centered? They try to push us off balance and, so to speak, set the swing of evolution in motion. But they too, like everything else, are part of the unity, the greater whole from which nothing can fall out. Everything is in God’s hands. Even what we call evil. It may turn away from the source, it may take paths that harm the whole, but it is part of it.
The all-encompassing force that encompasses everything has no adversary. Would it otherwise be all-encompassing? Would the love of this force be unconditional if it did not integrate a part of itself? Where would the boundaries be? What would a person be allowed to do in order to remain “inside”? We are the ones who have turned God into a nitpicker, a space policeman who punishes the bad and rewards the good. For we have invented a God without a goddess, who has thrown everything out of balance.
Twisted
We have caused the poles to shift. We have turned a world in which opposites complemented and enriched each other into a sterile world in which peace is to be brought about by war and love by violence. We have allowed ourselves to be seduced, led astray, driven mad. We have made many mistakes. Not because we are evil, but because we have allowed ourselves to be deceived.
We have fallen prey to the illusion of separation. We have betrayed the great mother who loves all her children. We have made women subservient to men, nature a threat, and the earth a resource.
We have turned the snake, originally revered as the creator of the world, into the incarnation of evil, and the apple, symbol of life, into a sign of sin.
We have elevated a single father god to the firmament, who secures patriarchal power structures from above.
The wars of faith, the conquests, the global destruction—all of this is just as man-made as the labeling of those who disrupt the functioning of patriarchal power pyramids as evil. We have made it easy for ourselves. What we did not want to see in ourselves, we projected onto others. We led scapegoats to the slaughter and cheered when the axe fell. We proselytized to convince others of our misguided beliefs. We led our science into battle and placed it at the service of politics.
We trampled on the all-encompassing, loving force. We created fear and scarcity to humiliate and subjugate one another. We have become criminals, thieves, murderers, liars, rapists, child molesters, tyrants. We have become hard-hearted toward all the suffering we have caused. We consider war to be normal and believe it is reasonable to think that humans should disappear from the earth as quickly as possible.
The veils are falling
We have gone mad. We have allowed ourselves to be completely thrown off balance and have lost our center. But we are not evil, just as no cancer cell is evil. We are sick. Very sick. Well over half of the people in Germany already suffered from at least one chronic illness in 2020 (4). The suicide rate is rising. We have been completely wrong. Recognizing this is the challenge we now face. The more we refuse to do so, the more events will boil over to show us.
But no devils will dance before us, no hell will open up other than the one we ourselves create again and again. We will be confronted with what we have refused to see until now. This is our apocalypse: our refusal to look. The demons are nothing more than the illusions we have created, the lies, distortions, and perversions that hide the truth.
Behind the veils that are now falling, there is no one standing to punish us, no one seeking revenge on us. The pain we feel comes from our own resistance to acknowledging the truth: everything is one. Everything is love.
Paradise is not some distant place on another star. It is right here before our eyes. Every day, it is given to us by our Mother Earth. Every day, we trample it underfoot.
If we open ourselves to it, we will enter. Whoever asks to be let in will be welcomed. Everyone who desires it will be warmly embraced by unity. We don’t have to make any effort to achieve this. We don’t have to prove anything or justify anything. We don’t have to play the savior for others and try to ensure justice. All we have to do is integrate what we call evil and transform it within ourselves.
Integrated
Let us accept that we can also be what we don’t want to be. Each of us can be aggressive, unjust, selfish, petty, arrogant, vain, impatient, careless, calculating, controlling, jealous, envious, excessive, dishonest, harsh. Those who believe they do not possess these traits project them onto others, creating an imbalance that can cause a great deal of harm.
According to psychoanalyst Hans-Joachim Maaz, those who do not integrate their Lilith, the rejected, untamed power that pulsates within each of us, contribute to the increasing violence in the world, the increasing injustice, the increasing wars, the increasing destruction (5). Only when we accept within ourselves what we do not want to be can we find a balance from which we can become creative.
If the world today bears so little resemblance to what almost all of us want, it is also because so many of us are still dismissive and exclusive and do not promote what unites us. Hypocrisy is not creative. The prerequisite for unlocking our innate creative power is honesty, sincerity, and transparency. We should not stand there as know-it-alls, lecturing others, but rather as we truly are.
No games, no showboating, no drama, just authenticity. That is what is needed now. Because only when we stop hiding will we be free. Creativity needs freedom—the freedom to acknowledge that we are both one thing and another. A person who has integrated their demons knows that they can be mean. Only with this knowledge do they have the choice not to be. Only then can they use the tool they were given from the beginning: their free will.
Free
The free will from which creative power arises does not need to be trained, but rather the choice between several possibilities: I can now harm another living being. But I choose not to do so. We can only achieve this freedom if we allow ourselves to be what we are, even if it is not flattering. Only then can we nurture love, the all-encompassing force that holds everything together. It can only flourish in freedom, not with oppression, manipulation, and missionary zeal.
Freedom and love—these two belong inseparably together. Control has no place here. There are no guarantees, no security except that we still belong even when we fall deeply and turn away from the source.
That does not make us evil. We wanted to have certain experiences. We wanted to try something. It is part of being human to experiment. But sometimes things go wrong and we set the lab on fire. Then we have to realize that we have made mistakes. Mistakes can be corrected.
Sources and notes:
(1) https://www.dwds.de/wb/b%C3%B6se
(2) Gitta Mallasz: Die Antwort der Engel (The Answer of the Angels), Daimon 2018
(3) Kerstin Chavent: Die wilde Göttin (The Wild Goddess). Der Lilith-Mythos als Weg zur Versöhnung zwischen Mann und Frau (The Lilith Myth as a Path to Reconciliation between Men and Women), Scorpio 2025
(5) Hans-Joachim Maaz: The Lilith Complex: The Dark Side of Motherhood, dtv 2005
Kerstin Chavent is a language teacher and lives in the south of France. She writes articles, essays, and autobiographical stories. Her focus is on dealing with crisis situations and illness and raising awareness of the creative potential in people. Her works published in German include Die wilde Göttin (The Wild Goddess), Der Königsweg (The Royal Way), Die Enthüllung (The Revelation), In guter Gesellschaft (In Good Company), Die Waffen niederlegen (Lay Down Your Weapons), Das Licht fließt dahin, wo es dunkel ist (Light Flows Where It Is Dark), Krankheit heilt (Illness Heals), Was wachsen will muss Schalen abwerfen (What Wants to Grow Must Cast Off Its Shells), and Und Freitags kommt der Austernwagen (And on Fridays the Oyster Cart Comes). For more information, visit kerstinchavent.de.