Truly a great read! You will find yourself nodding and smirking whilst reading; well researched, and even a bit of humor injected in places keeps this book entertaining, and very, very real. Recommend A+

I heard about this book from a friend and knew I needed to read it. Not only is this an important history lesson especially to the ignorant; it manages to present understandable explanations for the many teachings that most people had been asked to take on "faith." I am encouraged that diversity in understanding God's message has always existed and strangely relieved that politics has been a part of the church experience. It is amazing and just that chances for truth and wisdom can still be revealed, no matter how much time has passed. This book is very reminiscent to my 2006 book "Biblia Más Oscura" and I definitely recommend this to everyone.

Well, one good thing about all the exposure this book and the Da Vinci Code has received is that it is exposing people to old ideas they may not have even heard of before. Granted, there are a bit of liberties taken in the writing of this book, but there is still quite a lot of good information to be found. It at least introducing things that people can explore on their own. This book is filled with truth which was sadly downplayed or corrupted by the Catholic church and much of Christianity as a whole, it is worth re-exploring. Reality is subjective...

Here is an unusual tome which sets out to prove that the God of the “Holy” scriptures is malevolent, alien to those of European ethnic origin, neither omnipresent nor omnipotent, and may have been in fact an alien visitor who harassed the primitive Israelites into subjugation and worship. Also posited is that the hero of Genesis is The Serpent, and that the true Satan—the adversary of God—is Man. O’Toole quotes from biblical passages to provide evidence for his theories and even presents one of the Gnostic texts discovered in Nag Hammadi as an alternative, and God-damning, creation myth. Ultimately he arrives at the position we Satanists advocate, that of the self as the only proper God in one’s life.

Click on the cover above for ordering information and for forums for discussion of this author’s thinking on art, religion, literature, “The Gothic,” and the occult.

Sophia Bestiae can take it's place at the front of a line of books stretching forwards in time from as far back as the second century. 144 CE to be precise. Marcion realized that the God of the Old Testament could not be the same God as the God of the New Testament. The God of the Old Testament is clearly insane, he argued, and is actually evil. With power based on fear, terror, power, submission and continual animal sacrifices, the god of the old testament claimed to be jealous, and foremost amongst the gods. The Marcionites, surviving as an organization for five hundred years, made sense to a lot of people as they explained why you should resist and reject the god of the old testament.

Edward O'Toole lays bare the Old Testament versus that show without a doubt, exactly where the Marcionites got their ideas from. You don't have to look any further than the OT, with a clear mind, to see that its God is evil. But this is the conclusion of the book, and it is the beginning of this volume that makes the most profound impression.

This first section is entitled "Who is God and where does He come from?". It is based on the Gnostic text 'Origin of the World'. It charts the history of the battle between light and darkness in very human terms. Only slowly did it dawn on me what the true scope and meaning of this story was. Several times I had to pause reading in order to take in the vastness, drama, and significance of what I was reading.

The climax for me was the point where it becomes clear why God has such strange and strict rules about the Tree of Knowledge. So many things clicked into place! When God expels Adam and Eve, and deploys Cherobin armed with flaming swords to guard it, I was in awe at the deeper understanding I know had of the Genesis creation myth. Edward O'Toole showed me exactly how and why God can behave in the seemingly immoral and inhumane way that it does.

He then continues in history to explain why the Catholic Church, and the Old Testament before it, were both in such contrast to the actual teachings of Jesus, planted in between these two behemoths. Jesus, explained as a being of Light in a world of Darkness, makes so much more sense if you understand where, exactly, the God of the Old Testament is coming from, and what the forces that oppose it really are.

In real life, later in history, when the Marcionites were destroyed, The Cathars then inherited the understanding that the human spirit was trapped within the corrupt body, in an imperfect world. This concept was preceeded by the similar beliefs of the Bogomils, the Manichaens and classical Gnosticism in general. All these groups were violently oppressed by the fledging and (later) fully developed Catholic Church. This situation (of the Human soul) came about because this world is actually a creation of a lesser deity, which is classically called "The Demiurge". This creator is not 'The Supreme God' but is a lesser being. This lesser deity, vindictive, harsh, jealous, wanted to be (and claimed to be) the 'only God', the 'greatest' amongst the god(s), etc. The Cathars, in particular, knew that this Earth-creator god was actually evil, Satan in fact, and that to oppose this 'God' was to fight for light, for the true universal god. The Cathars also held that the God worshipped by Pauline Christianity is an imposter, and its teachings are a corrupt attempt at asserting the lesser deities power over humans and the Earth.

Gnostic Christians, along with Jewish Christians such as the Ebionites, were the original Christians. The fledgling Catholic Church expended a lot of effort, money and time into eradicating the Gnostics, Marcionites, Bogomils, Cathars, etc. They were very nearly successful in rewriting history to make themselves the be-all of Jesus's ministry. But they didn't manage, and a slow series of books have provided keys to understand the true meaning of Christianity and Judaism. Edward O'Toole, in this book, provides a historical type of key that provides the reader with a deeper understanding of religious history. With the key found in Sophia Bestiae, whether or not you accept all of it's theology as true or as symbology, you will at least understand that you can't take the Bible without a pinch of salt.

This book has it's shortcomings. The "evidence", purely taken from canonized Christian scripture, would have been made more powerful with more commentary and notes on the historical formation of the Christian Bible, and notes on the non-canonized apocrypha and the hints of truth that they might contain. The evidence is presented mostly as lists of Bible-quotes, and is therefore pretty much covered by many other similar books. In line with this, I'd like to have seen more in the opening story on the creation of the Catholic Church - hardly a minor point, yet covered almost in a single paragraph.

And to end at the beginning: The opening story of Sophia Bestiae deserves to be widely distributed, preached in churches, taught in Sunday Schools, aired on the radio and discussed with urgency. What are known as "God's evil verses" in the Bible, the lists of atrocities and admissions of evil behaviour by God, in the Old Testament in particular, also deserve to be widely publicized. This book achieves both of those ends.

Read excerpts from Sophia Bestiae here : Excerpts