No, Sufism isn't Luciferian or Promethean, but that's because we're the masochistic losers in that scenario. The sadomasochistic dynamic is intact, with God as the sole dominator, making the Sufi's spiritual ambition one of Lovecraftian submission, as I said. This is the giddy submission of the ant to the human, if the human were given mystical insight into its lowly status as a plaything of a much higher power.

Your account of how Promethean humanism arises in the Western context is plausible, as always, but I think we should take a broader, albeit somewhat more speculative view. We tried the symbiotic relationship with nature for millions of years in the Stone Age. What anthropologists call "behavioural modernity" emerged only with the gradual settling of our species into relatively alienated societies, surrounded by walls, run on social ideals rather than natural norms, and worshiping gods that more and more reflected the early social hierarchies rather than the whole of nature (as in prehistoric animism).

So you're proposing a return to the Stone Age mentality. I try to incorporate something like that shift in my talk of pantheism that includes an animistic take on scientific objectification of nature.

But you seem to be objecting mostly to my cosmicist take on things, to the idea that nature is horrific or monstrous. The thing is that prehistoric naivety isn't so easily achieved again. Once the cat's out of the bag, via scientific discovery of the extent of nature, it's hard to go back to a childlike anthropocentrism. Nature only inadvertently aids or harms us, of course, which is another way of saying that nature is inhuman, as in indiscriminate, showing no favourites, being indifferent to our welfare. Assuming we evolved to be social mammals that do play favourites, nature's inhumanity will seem monstrous and terrifying to us. That's the source of Lovecraftian horror, I think.

I don't say that horror should affect everything, but neither do I think it can be set aside. It's something to be creatively overcome.