Chapter XV: The Oldest Diagnosis
An ancient scroll described history not as a battle of heroes and villains, but as a struggle of order vs. disorder. Read through the lens of coherence, it is less apocalyptic and more diagnostic.
More than two thousand years ago, between roughly 200 BCE and 100 CE, an isolated Jewish community living near the Dead Sea committed a record which matches almost perfectly my new understanding and perspective. They recorded it on parchment. The document predates Christianity, predates the New Testament entirely, and sits near the outer edge of Western religious thought. It survives today among the Dead Sea Scrolls, written in a form of Hebrew older than rabbinical Judaism itself.
When I first encountered its title, The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, my reaction was immediate and superficial. It sounded like exactly what it appeared to be, a cosmic struggle between good and evil, dressed up as apocalypse.
That idea fell apart once I read it. The Scroll wasn’t about heroes and villains, angels and demons, or cosmic theatrics. It was about order, how it’s built, how it’s lost, and what existence looks like once it’s gone.
Once I read it carefully, with the same discipline I had learned to apply to Hermetic texts and Scripture, it became clear that the Scroll was describing a conflict between two modes of order.
Reading the Scroll through the lens of ordered and disordered states revealed an assumption rarely stated in modern discourse: creation operates through order, and life persists through alignment with that order. The Scroll does not present the concept as a religious edict, it instead frames it as how reality works. And that, to me, was striking.
By the time I encountered the text seriously, I had already learned about what unfolds when order erodes at the biochemical level, when water loses coherence, gradients flatten, and regenerative systems begin to leak energy rather than store it. The language of the Scroll matched those observations with the same uncomfortable precision I had already encountered in other texts from antiquity.
Within this framework, the sons of darkness are not villains. They are systems that consume order faster than they generate it.
