Far from being a scientific theory of recent origin, evolution was an established religious belief at the heart of occultism and mysticism thousands of years before the Greeks gave it "scientific" status. And the central core of the ancient mystical theory of evolution is the lie of the serpent to Eve in the Garden, the belief that we are evolving ever upward to godhood. Sounding like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Masonic authority W. L. Wilmhurst in his book The Meaning of Masonry declares:

New Age leader Robert Muller, for many years Assistant Secretary-General of the United nations, expresses much the same: "I believe that humanity…has a tremendous destiny to fulfill and that a major transformation is about to take place in our evolution." ⁸ Muller states clearly: "Decide to open yourself…to the potential of the human race, to the infinity of your inner self, and you will become the universe…at long last your real, divine, stupendous self." ⁹

The goal of evolution, as portrayed for thousands of years before Darwin, has always been to journey through endless reincarnations until union with the Universal Mind, or All, has once again been achieved. Barbara Brown of UCLA Medical Center declares that we are "evolving to a higher level of mind…[called] supermind."¹⁰ At Esalen, the New Age center in the Big Sur area south of San Francisco where the Human Potential movement began, Michael Murphy and George Leonard offered a seminar on "The Evolution of Consciousness," which suggested that "a transformation of human consciousness as momentous as the emergence of civilization is underway." Darwin also recognized the spiritual implications of his theory. In The Descent of Man he wrote: "Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen…to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for the still higher destiny in the distant future."

Whether Darwin fully realized it or not, the mystical goal of the theory of evolution he championed had always been to become "God." In The Atman Project, Ken Wilbur lays it out clearly: "If men and women have ultimately come up from amoebas, then they are ultimately on their way towards God."

In Up from Eden Wilbur identifies this belief in man’s ascension to godhood as the heart of what has been "known as the ‘perennial philosophy’…the esoteric core of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taosim, Sufism…." As Jon Klimo in his book Channeling summarizes it, the "truth of truths" of the channeled material is "that we are God" and only need to "realize" it. So the serpent’s lie to Eve continues to dominate the ambitions of modern man, and evolution is his hope that the lie will one day be realized.

Evolution plays a key role in the occult. Theodore Roszak pointed out that mysticism is "the parent stock from which the theory of biological evolution springs." ¹¹ Anthropologist Michael Harner reminds us that "millennia before Charles Darwin, people in shamanic cultures were convinced that humans and animals were related." ¹² Evolution, as the core belief of Hinduism and witchcraft, is at least as old as the theories of reincarnation and karma, in which it is a key element.

Of course, evolution must be an essential part of the belief in reincarnation and karma. There is no point in coming back in an endless cycle of death and rebirth unless progress is being made upward. That progress is allegedly accomplished through evolution, not only of the body but of the soul.

Since reincarnation is a belief basic to witchcraft, it is not surprising that it is amoral. If a husband beats his wife, the cause-and-effect law of karma will cause him to be reincarnated in his next life as a wife who is beaten by her husband. That husband (who will have been prepared by his karma to be a wife-beater) must in turn come back in his next life as a wife beaten by her husband; a murderer must in turn become the victim of murder, and so forth endlessly.

The perpetrator of each crime must become the victim of the same crime, which necessitates another perpetrator, who in turn must become a subsequent victim at the hands of yet another, ad infinitum. Rather than solving the problem of evil, karma and reincarnation perpetuate it.

Apropos to our subject of the occult, evolution opens the door to belief in a mysterious "Force" pervading the universe, a Force which evolutionists believe brought life into existence and has directed its astonishing development over billions of years. It is a Force, too, which presumably has even greater heights of evolutionary development in store for mankind. Clearly this force is a substitute for God.

Evolution is a religion without any support in fact. C. S. Lewis wrote: "If minds were wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind…."¹³ That simple logic destroys Darwinism. If man is the chance product of impersonal evolutionary forces, then so are his thoughts—including the theory of evolution.