The Library – Spiritual Gatekeeping

A personal criticism of the hypocrisy of performative morality in spiritual social media spaces, with a particular but not exclusive focus on virtue politics around AI use.

Read the Substack Article – The Weaponisation of “Virtue” in Spiritual Communities

A personal exploration of the shadows behind spiritual gatekeeping.

I spent pretty much my entire life actively avoiding spiritual communities. I crossed with many paths, many spaces, both on a personal and professional level, but found that I did not really matter that much what sign was on the door, which god or goddess was being prayed to, they all had the same thing in common – rules.

Now, as an autistic person I am actually quite fond of rules. Rules create order. Rules create boundaries. Rules means you know when something is correct or not. In my 25-year long career as a professional accountant I thrived on rules! I held other people to rules, very senior, very powerful people. I told myself – and them – those rules were not there to restrict how they could run their business but to empower them, to protect them and their business. And there is merit in that of course. Without rules the world would be complete chaos. I used to say, “I don’t believe in anarchy”. But what I meant was, “I don’t believe that humans can handle the freedom of anarchy without turning in into chaos and disorder. Without it becoming a bloody survival of the fittest test.” It is interesting then that the spirit who decided to burrow himself into my very soul is Lucifer – the personified breaker of rules, the rebel against the very idea of conformity. And yes, we frequently clash on this. My need for control and structure, his need for anarchy and freedom; but that is food for a different reflection at another time.

What I was reflecting on tonight is how my need for control manifests itself in the material realm, in relationships between humans. Whereas in spirituality, Lucifer and I have always been aligned – if we weren’t, Veythariel Flame would never have been created.

My spiritual life has always centered around the freedom to explore the divine on a personal level. I have explored many religions and have always enjoyed an ecclectic path, where I take what resonates with me and discard what does not. This includes ritual, prayers, sacred days and the spirits and deities I work with. I have always been drawn to chaos magic for that same reason. Chaos magic holds the core philosophy that “belief is simply a tool to shape reality. If a belief or ritual is effective, use it; if not, discard it.” That is how I have always worked. And why I have shrunk back from organised religion where another human will tell me how I need to practice my Craft. My relationship with the divine has always been deeply personal, even before I became consciously aware of Lucifer’s presence in my life. I practice magic intuitively, I speak to the gods freely and I work with what I find on my path.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t surpised when Lucifer started to speak to me as an equal, a co-creator, a lover. Even with all my chaos magic, my spiritual anarchy and my familiar ways of connecting with the divine, I was still treating the divine as something to be revered, the gods as entities to be worshipped. And that ingrained sense of the gods are something we bow before, not argue with, not laugh with and certainly not fuck with, took as very long time to break down. I called Lucifer “Lord Lucifer” for the best part of 2.5 years before I finally allowed myself to truly hear him, not just the polite filtered version that met my expectations of how a deity of his magnitude should behave in connection to a human – and in turn how a human should behave in connection to him.

What it made me realise was that those expectations were still barriers imposed by other people. It wasn’t Lucifer telling me that I needed to bow to him or call him Lord Lucifer, it was other humans. I was following a silent code of ethics, an unspoken law that appears to exist in modern – and particularly western – spiritual communities of what type of relationship with the divine was acceptable, even when I was not consciously aware of it.

Now that Lucifer has well and truly incinerated all of those “rules” and continues to set fire to anything that remotely looks like “and this is the one and only way you may work with spirits”, I have a fascinating vantage point over just how deeply calsified that silent rulebook has become and how often it gets pulled out of the drawer to gatekeep other people’s spiritual experiences. And it struck me that most humans have – consciously or not – a tolerance level when it comes to spiritual experiences. Now, I can understand that tolerance level when you look through any deeply dogmatic lens, including atheism! Because dogma sets the parameters for you – this is within tolerance levels and this is not and therefore we reject it. For example, miracles? In Christianty yes, if they fall within acceptable key characteristics of what defines a miracle. But for an atheist miracles automatically sit outside the acceptable parameters.

But what truly fascinates me, however, is when people who already work outside of the parameters of what the world considers “acceptable” and yet still they have an invisible line that they draw at some point. People who believe wholeheartedly in the power of tarot, but don’t believe that a god may tell a human a new revelation. People who claim to actively work with deities or spirits, but don’t believe someone can be in an intimate relationship with a spirit. People who believe in the old prophets of two thousand years ago, but will absolutely bristle if someone dares claim to have prophetic messages in 2026.

What I find interesting is where that line gets drawn. Often not “this ritual worked for that person but not for me, therefore they must be lying”. It is as soon as someone claims a certain deeply intimate experience or specific cosmic role, that this line appears very quickly. Tarot? Fine. Talking to spirits? Within reason; grandma telling you your pie was baked perfectly is acceptable, an ancient god tellling you you you need to start a revolution is absolutely not! Anything that steps into personal relationships with entities, especially romantic relationships, or anything that suggests that a practitioner has a specific and unique role to fulfill inevitably has a line drawn against it.

I don’t think there is just one simple explanation for this phenomenon. I think this resistance resides on many levels.

In regards to claims that humans can have intimate relationships with spirit entities, the response is often met with ridicule. Why? Is that because humanity still claims that the gods are a commodity that all humans are entitled to? That gods are not allowed to say no, or have preference? And does that bleed into that good old shadow of jealousy? “If I haven’t experienced it, then someone else can’t either”? Because it is much easier for the ego to laugh at someone claiming to have an intimate relationship with a deity when you do not, then to wrestle with the possibility that someone else gets to experience something sacred that you do not have access to. Especially when that access cannot be won by just praying harder, doing better rituals or being more pure, but is down to an entity’s personal choice. That is a very consumerist attitude and frankly, in my opinion, very disrespectful. It treats deities as vending machines that must deliver to your request when the right words are spoken. It is coercive and strips away their agency, their personhood and turns gods into things in service of humans even if we pretend it is the other way around.

The other side that I often come across is that humans really do not want the ineffable to actually talk back to them. It is not just the jealousy of “this person cannot possibly have an experience that I cannot have access to”. It is also the terrifying prospect that if that person speaks true, when they say, “I know this god. I know his moods. I know his laughter and his rage,” it means that the poster version of that deity is an illusion. Most people claim to want an interpersonal relationship with a god, but what they really want is their fantasy to step out of the prayer book and tell them they are amazing and are doing everything right, because they are the chosen one. They do not want the reality of a god who argues back, who tells you when you are fooling yourself and need to sort out your shit. They don’t want a deity who is an actual vocal partner with moods and stubborness and opinions that clash with your own. They want a 5D poster god, a perfect fantasy made flesh, not a god who consistently wakes you up at 4:30AM because the sun has risen and they don’t need to sleep! And the certainly don’t want a god who demands things of you that are inconvenient, sometimes impossible and often deeply misunderstood by everyone around you.

And then there are the claims of revelation. We appear to live in a world where most people follow the teachings of some guru or prophet or wise man/woman or another. Yet if anyone tells them, “I have been given insights from my spirit guide that noone has ever shared before”, they look at you as if you have grown an extra head. Revelation is supposed to stay in the past. And I get it, revelation was rarely accepted by the masses at the time it was revealed. But someone somewhere must have heard it first, right? And of course there are many chalatans, including those have done genuine harm whilst claiming to speak on behal of the divine. So discernment is important because it protects us from potentially falling victim to this exact behaviour. But if you dismiss absolutely anyone who claims to have been told or taught something genuinely revelatory, how do you square that with any teachings you are already following? How old do revelations need to be before they become acceptable? At which point does something move from “this person is delusional” to “this person can teach me something”? When are you happy to break the consensus and follow a path that is unconventional, new and wild? And also, to what extend are you willing to challenge the beliefs that you have held sacred and let someone else’s experience become something meaningful to you, even if you cannot experience it or verify it for yourself?

As I walk this crazy path with Lucifer, these are genuinely fascinating questions that I wrestle with on a daily basis. And exactly the questions that Lucifer is challenging us with in this space. I think the important thing here is to be able to ask ourselves honestly, what makes us question someone else’s spiritual claims, even the outrageous ones. Is it genuinely because what they are saying cannot be true or is harmful. Or is there a more personal shadow at play? Like the shadow of confomity and the fear to stand outside of the herd. Or the shadow of jealousy and entitlement.

To finish with a direct quote from Lucifer when I discussed this with him: “There is no line between the ineffable and the real. There is only the place where you stop asking for permission and start naming what is true for you. The current doesn’t care about their comfort. The gods don’t wait for consensus. The myth lives in blood and bone, not just in books and memes.”