Necessity is the logical condition for freedom. It is only within the territory of necessity that freedom can emerge. It was necessary for the Devil to create the world of necessity in order to free the mind. Necessity is a situation ordered by laws, by unbreakable chains. Freedom is the breaking of the unbreakable chains. Therein lies its absurdity. The Devil created laws in order to break them. This is a typically diabolic situation being sketched. Existential philosophy, and especially Sartre, is wrapped and embroiled in this situation. The law limits freedom; in theory, it frustrates freedom, but the law is an indispensable condition for freedom. Science limits the mind as it formulates laws; in theory it frustrates the mind, but science is an indispensable condition for the freedom of the mind.

4.2.1. If seen from this perspective, the situation is diabolically complex. However, if seen as a historical process, it becomes comprehensible. Science, sensu stricto, emerged just over four hundred years ago. But the tendency toward organized wrath is much older. Above the world of lust hovered, since time immemorial, perhaps even since the origin of humanity, another ill-defined world, a vaporous, wrathful world, called the world of “magic.” This world of magic was a type of astral body of the sensible world. It hovered above it, but penetrated through it. Thanks to this “supernatural” world, the natural world acquired a problematic type of order. This world represented an ordering principle, in a methodological and normative sense.

Thanks to magic it was possible for the mind to orient itself in the natural world. Natural phenomena acquired, thanks to magic, a purpose and a meaning. The world of magic was a hermetic one. It was kept a secret. Only a few minds inhabited that world, the minds of the magi. Those were the few wrathfully disciplined minds within the dominant lustful environment. The magi sought to free their minds through disciplines that could be characterized by terms such as, “give to receive,” “debt and retribution,” and “promise and responsibility.” These were the chains that the world of magic established, even though they were not properly causal, in the strict sense of the term. These chains were laws, although they were not laws in the scientific sense of the term. They were closer to the judicial meaning of the term “law,” since they were more like obligations than necessities. The magi thought via imperatives, the scientists think via indicatives.

4.2.2. The world of magic did not satisfy the Devil in his attempt to free the mind. The failure of this diabolic method had two profound reasons. The first resided in the excessive complexity of the chains he established. These chains enveloped the mind of the magus from every side. At every step, the magus infringed some of the threads of the web of obligations that he had spun. It was necessary to almost uninterruptedly appease some of the “forces” that had been offended. An authentic freedom was not possible within this web. The second reason had to do with the ethical aspect of the chains established by magic. This ethics was somewhat uncomfortable for the Devil. There was always the danger of the defeat of the Devil through his own weapon. The distinction between “black magic” and “white magic,” certainly a naive distinction, although symptomatic, illustrates what I have in mind. It was therefore necessary, from the Devil’s perspective, to change tactics within this field. It was necessary to simplify the set of chains, and it was necessary to de-aestheticize them.

4.2.3. The scope of this book does not allow for an attempt at describing the history of law, i.e., the Devil’s history in the field of wrath. If we were to do it, this chapter would reach the same prohibitive dimensions that were reached in the chapter on lust. So let me just say briefly that in a history of laws the Devil would emerge as a founder, or at least the cofounder, of the traditional religions of the West. Let us abbreviate history and say only that the Devil removed the law from this magic environment; he made the law simpler, removed its ethical robes, and created the world of the exact sciences. In his Promethean incarnation, the Devil took hold of the laws deposited upon the altar of the gods (where he had surreptitiously deposited them in ancient times), and handed these laws to humans, so that they could become free through them.