Church on the B-Sides Vol VI: Prometheus, Christ, and the Child-Soul at the Controls

The Spiritual Disease Behind War

Let me tell you a story — one we think we know, but refuse, generation after generation, to truly face.

Prometheus, the defiant trickster. The rebel who stole fire from the gods. The fire: creation, destruction, transformation — the sacred technology of becoming. He gave it to humanity not out of malice, but out of hope.

And the gods, in their fury or perhaps their cold wisdom, knew what would follow. They knew that to hand sacred power to a species that hadn’t earned it was not a gift, but a curse. So Prometheus was chained. His liver ripped out day after day, a living warning of what happens when fire is given to those still too small, too young, too unready to hold it.

We burned ourselves with that fire then. And we are burning ourselves still.

“That which rules is hidden. It is hidden, but it governs the All.” (Corpus Hermeticum)

Thousands of years later, another figure appears — Christ. Not the tamed, empire-approved Christ hanging limp in cathedrals, but the wild, heretical, Gnostic Christ. The one who came to smash the monopoly on divine knowing.

He came to say: The kingdom of God is within you.

He came to give the people what the priests and rabbis guarded — the gnosis, the direct connection to Source, to the divine spark. And what did we do?

We murdered him.

We crucified the one who came to unchain us. Then, like Prometheus’ fire, we twisted his gift into a weapon. From his ashes, we built another empire.

Another machine for control.

“He who knows himself knows the All.” (Corpus Hermeticum)

And here we stand today. June 22, 2025. We bombed Iran yesterday. Iran bombed Israel. Israel bombed back. The endless arithmetic of blood and revenge. The same tired script. The same god — the god of domination, of chosen and damned, of sacrifice — still demanding bodies on his altar. We are still kneeling to that god. Still calling violence virtue. Still confusing might with right.

And here’s the thing we don’t want to look at.

The misuse of power didn’t start in government buildings or ivory towers. It didn’t originate in academia or the boardrooms of corporations.

The misuse of power IS born in the home.

It begins at the dinner table, in the living room — in the place where new life sprouts in innocence, and in that same place, loses its innocence.

The devouring mother who feeds to control. The narcissistic father who crushes or abandons. The unspoken rules, the manufactured loyalties, the gaslighting, the triangulation. This is where the child first learns that power is not a sacred responsibility, but a weapon. This is where the soul’s corruption begins.

Long before the bomb is built, the boardroom conquered, the laws passed — the wound is made in the family.

The original empire is the family.

And every war we wage on nations, we first waged at the table, in the hearth where young hearts are beating, paying attention to those who bore them.

And so, that first empire teaches the child that power is to be hoarded, wielded, or feared — not honored.

The child grows into an adult who mistakes domination for strength. Control for wisdom. Conquest for salvation.

So when fire is handed down, when gnosis is offered, when technology and wealth and weapons beyond imagining fall into our hands — we do not see gifts. We see tools for our hunger. We see new ways to enforce the pattern we learned at the table.

And what have we done? We have burned, crucified, dominated, consumed. Because we are still spiritual toddlers at the controls. Drunk on fire we do not understand. Desperate for crowns we have not earned.

This is why I speak so often about spiritual bypass and stolen valor. Because what we parade as power in this culture is so often nothing but narcissism — a false self, puffed up and posturing, spitting out the language of wisdom it never earned, flexing a strength it never forged. It is stolen valor. It is the costume of initiation without the fire, without the blood, without the work.

It is ego wrapped in the language of the sacred while avoiding the actual work of growing the soul.

It is spiritual bypass — reaching for the fire, the gnosis, the status, without ever facing the family empire we first built within. And until we face it, we will keep mistaking fire for salvation, domination for love, and war for righteousness.

And if that wasn’t enough, power does not only corrupt in metaphor.

It corrupts in biology. It rewires the brain.

Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and author of The Power Paradox, shows through his research that power dulls our capacity for empathy. The powerful feel less of the other. The circuits go quiet. The faces of those beneath them, the suffering, the consequences — all of it fades into abstraction.

What’s left is the self, inflated and insulated.

Adam Galinsky, Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, shows that power inflates entitlement, moral superiority, the fantasy that the rules no longer apply. The powerful stop seeing limits because they stop believing limits are real. The prefrontal cortex bends. Judgment, restraint, caution — gone. The powerful become impulsive, reckless, convinced of their own righteousness. Self-awareness dims. They stop seeing themselves as they are. And they stop caring. What begins as disconnection from the other ends as disconnection from the self — and this is the point where the soul is no longer at the wheel.

This is when the shadow drives. The False Self. Possessed.

The Hermeticists knew this before neuroscience had a name. Evil, they wrote, does not come from the stars. It comes from man’s failure to hold opposites: power and humility. Knowledge and mystery. Strength and tenderness.

And so the archons — those counterfeit rulers of the Gnostic world — rise not only in empires, but inside us. The archons are the false authorities, the parasitic forces that thrive on our ignorance. In the Gnostic texts, the archons were described as cosmic impostors — rulers who fashioned a counterfeit world to imprison the divine spark of the soul.

“They took counsel together and said, ‘Come, let us create a man that will be soil from the earth.’” (Hypostasis of the Archons)

Their purpose was to keep humanity asleep, trapped in illusion, chained to systems of domination that we would mistake for truth.

But what the Gnostics knew — and what we refuse to see — is that these forces are not just out there. The archons don’t merely build empires of stone and law. They build empires inside us. They creep into the psyche, teaching us to see power as domination, control as safety, conquest as salvation. We become the tyrant first in our own hearts. We internalize the archon, the voice that tells us the other is a threat, that righteousness lies in subjugation, that power means feeding the hunger instead of taming it.

And then we project that inner tyrant onto the world.

We build the systems, pass the laws, drop the bombs, hoard the wealth. We call it divine order. We call it justice. But it is nothing more than the archon — the counterfeit ruler — wearing the mask of God, ruling through us because we refused the hard work of knowing ourselves.

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” (Gospel of Thomas)

Every bomb is a blood offering to the false god of power. Every war is another ritual sacrifice. We are still replaying the myth of Abraham and Isaac — except this time, no angel comes to stop our hand. We call it security. We call it justice. We call it democracy. But it is the child soul playing with Prometheus’ fire, burning down the house while calling it salvation.

And behind it all, hiding in plain sight, is the war god we refuse to name: Yahweh. The god of domination. The god of chosen and damned. The god who has been waging war on the Western mind for over three thousand years. We have inherited this dysfunction so deeply, so thoroughly, that we no longer see it for what it is.

We call it the natural order.

We accept it as the way things are.

The toxic power dynamic it planted runs so far back into antiquity that it no longer needs temples. It lives in our heads, our hearts, our laws, our economies. It lives in the unquestioned assumptions we carry.

It hides in plain sight, because it no longer has to hide at all.

We don’t need another war god. The altar is soaked. The bodies are piled high. We don’t need more bombs, more fire, more empty declarations about freedom and security. What we need is the courage to admit the truth: we’ve mistaken the tantrum of a wounded child for the voice of God. And we’ve called it justice.

The hunger we unleashed didn’t start on the battlefield. It started at the table — where the first empire taught us that power means taking, hoarding, controlling. And it ends only when we’re willing to turn inward and see the tyrant we built there.

Stop asking for more fire.

Stop asking for more knowledge just for the sake of knowing.

Stop pretending you’re ready for it, if you’re not.

The work isn’t out there, in the smoke and rubble. It’s here. In you. And it always was.

“The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty.”
— The Gospel of Thomas, saying 3

God is the Law of Cause and Effect, and you will know the true from the false by its fruit.

About the Author

Chriselda Pacheco is a chicana, political heretic and the founder of The Lilith Academy, a shadow work ecosystem for women, specializing in decolonization, Christian deconstruction, and the reclamation of feminine primordial power. A retired sex worker, independent journalist, writer, philosopher and politically homeless thinker, she examines the intersection of sex, power, myth, culture and politics with a razor-sharp wit. As a consecrated Neo-Luciferian Gnostic priestess (2014), she weaves esotericism, cultural critique, and unapologetic storytelling to expose the hidden machinery of empire and the collective shadows we refuse to face.

Find her courses, services and unfiltered takes at www.thelilithacademy.com.

🌑 Shadow Work Prompts

• Where in my life do I mistake control for strength? Where do I believe I am “righteous” when I am actually just afraid?

• What parts of me seek power not to serve, but to avoid my own vulnerability?

• Where have I dressed my unhealed wounds in the costume of wisdom?

• When have I claimed the language of the sacred while refusing to walk the path of actual initiation?

• What “empire” have I built in my heart that mirrors the domination I condemn in the world?

• Where do I still serve the god of domination in my own mind?

• What is the fruit of my power? If I stripped away all my justifications, what would I see growing from it?

• Where am I still waiting for salvation from the outside, instead of doing the work within?

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