The Lucifer Key
`The Mystery of Sorrow was consoled long ago when it went out for a drink with the Universal joke.'
Aleister Crowley
Let the Light shine in! Let Lucifer shed light on the grubby little corners of the mind, the delusions, the illusions, the hypocrisies and grinning horrors within. As in the greeting to the Masonic initiate: `Let the Brother see the Light!' Let the Sister also see the Light!
To the Gnostics Light is All - just as to Jesus the Light was in Mary Lucifer, his `All' - but this must be balanced by an acknowledged Darkness. To the Christian Jesus Christ is `the Light of the World', although this will be denied with more or less vehemence not only by those of other religions such as Judaism, but was also denied and still is by the Gnostic Mandaeans, to whom only John the Baptist deserved the title `High King of Light'. Ironically, at the time of writing, both Christians and Mandaeans are suffering at the hands of the same Islamic fundamentalists in Iraq.'
Let the light shine in! Let it sweep away the curse of all and any form of fundamentalism - `From our commitment to ideals comes our excuse to hate" - as well as thought-police and political correctness. Instead, shine on good humour, the ability to laugh long and immoderately, especially at ourselves, and a highly devel oped sense of the absurd. Become your own `laughing master', intoxicated with the joy of living. Without humour and alertness freedoms are eroded, then only the pompous, the stupid or, much, much worse, abominable dictators will certainly triumph - and the world has had quite enough of them.
In December 2004 British comic actor Rowan Atkinson ('Mr Bean') reacted strongly against a proposed law banning incitement to religious hatred, as a threat to free speech. He said:
The right to offend is more important than the right not to be offended. Freedom of expression must be protected for artists and entertainers and we must not accept a bar on the lampooning of religion and religious leaders.
There is an obvious difference between the behaviour of racist agitators who can be prosecuted under existing laws, and the activities of satirists and writers who may choose to make comedy or criticism of religious belief, practices or leaders just as they do with politics.
It is one of the reasons why we have free speech.'
Indeed, it is, but the way things are going on both sides of the Atlantic, we may not have free speech very much longer. As aspiring Luciferans we must keep watch on the incremental erosion of all our hard-won rights and freedoms. Use freedom of speech while it lasts to ensure that it will. It is not enough to fall back on evoking the mysterious and elusive `democracy' that the West is so eager to force-feed to others. It has to be seen to work well in practice in the land of the Mother of Parliaments and the Land of the Free first. Luciferans speak up, or you may soon be denied any kind of a voice at all.
The Light in action
Lucifer is the god of progress and intellectual enquiry, not only the divine inspiration behind the spiritual enlightenment of the Gnostic and the heretic and the lover of God in all his/her forms: it was through Lucifer's spirit that humanity first climbed down from the trees and has represented the flow of progress ever since. But Lucifer may be more than a metaphor for rebellion, enlightenment and advancement - as the pure creative and motive light s/he may actually be the key to life itself ...
Over the past fifteen years scientists, largely in Europe and Asia, have made a major discovery. The DNA within the nuclei of all cells of living creatures contains biophotons or ultra-weak proton emissions - in other words, light. While it is invisible to the naked eye, it can be detected using new equipment developed by German scientists.
As German science writer Marco Bischof declares in his groundbreaking Biophotons - The Light in Our Cells (1995): `A dynamic web of light constantly released and absorbed by the DNA may connect cells, tissues and organs and serve as the organism's main communication network and as the principal regulating instance of all life processes.' He suggests that `the holographic biophoton field of the brain and nervous system, and maybe even that of the whole organism, may also be the basis of memory and other phenomena of consciousness .. 4
And, excitingly for we Luciferans who refuse to delineate between `good' and `bad' sciences - between honest enquiry and well-funded research that, while paying lip-service to the wildest theories of quantum physics, derides research into the possibilities of continuing consciousness after death - biophotons even possess implications for the unconventional. Bischof writes that `The "prana" of Indian Yoga physiology may be a similar regulatory energy force that has a basis in a weak, coherent electromagnetic biofield.'
Lucifer is on the move, inside you and me, chattering between cell and cell, rousing the cohorts of the life-force, keeping us alive and wonderful. Every man and woman is a star - and now we know we have our own inner Tinkerbell light.
But for those who insist on confusing Lucifer with Satan and then indulging in a spot of Devil-worship behind the lace curtains of suburbia, a word of warning. We now enter the world of `extreme possibilities'.
Just imagine
In his article on sailor-turned-Satanist Chris Cranmer (see page 242),6 Colin Wilson - about whom there is nothing remotely prissy or prudish - warned of the very real pitfalls of Satanism. He cites the case of celebrated photo-journalist Sergei Kordiev and his wife who in 1959 became involved in a Satanic circle in Burnham-onCrouch, Essex. After undergoing the usual colourful initiation ceremony, complete with a pact signed in their own blood, all seemed to go wonderfully for them, both financially and careerwise. But then they were forced to witness the rape of a girl - she was being punished for betraying the group's secrets - at a Black Mass, where all the Satanists had to drink the blood of a cockerel, specifically sacrificed for the purpose. Shaken and seriously regretting their involvement, the Kordievs later discovered that the man to whom the girl had betrayed their secrets had dropped dead of a heart attack at precisely the same time as the Black Mass was being performed. When they left the group their luck changed for the worse. Kordeiv came close to bankruptcy and his wife had a breakdown. And one night his studio was wrecked by a mysterious force, even though no one had broken in. It seems they also had a poltergeist to contend with.
Colin Wilson's other cautionary tale is perhaps more sensational. He cites author John Cornwell's research into good and evil,' during which he found a teacher who had been drawn into a Satanist cell, who at his initiation was `told to beg the Devil to take possession of him, at which point his teacher said: "If you want to see the Devil, look over there."
`The man looked round and saw a man-sized crow, its wings covered in slime. Then it opened its beak, and bloody male sexual organs emerged. The man collapsed in terror.
`Even with the help of a priest, it was a long time before the man regained his sanity.'R
A blood-chilling story indeed, but although one feels for the victim's experience of abject terror, had it really never crossed his mind that volunteering to become involved with a Satanist group might lead to such an encounter with a creature from the Pit, if not Old Nick himself? What in hell's name did he expect? Even Satanism in the Suburbs can occasionally spring some unwelcome surprises - and would be very tame if it didn't.
Whether this was `merely' diabolically clever hypnotism or truly a creature from the Abyss hardly matters. The damage was done. In fact, it may have been neither an hallucination nor the real thing, but a curious entity from the last frontier - of inner space.
Occultists and mystics have long known that visible beings called tulpas can actually be created by the human mind if one concentrates long and hard enough. It helps to be specially trained and mentally prepared, for otherwise that way madness could well lead.
A classic tulpa story is that of the early twentieth-century traveller Madame Alexander David-Neel. Having developed a passion for Buddhist art she was visited in her temporary Tibetan home by a local painter who specialized in painting `wrathful deities'. She was astounded to witness a misty form behind him of one of these terrifying entities, especially when she put out her arm and felt as if she were `touching a soft object whose substance gave way under the slight push'.' The artist confessed that he had been engaged in rituals to conjure the god whose outline she had just seen.
Fascinated, Madame David-Neel decided to create her own tulpa - a fat, jolly monk. Being nothing if not thorough, she went into retreat for a matter of months to concentrate her mind on this exercise in `extreme possibilities', and after some time began to get brief flashes out of the corner of her eye of a monk-like shape. Time passed and she concentrated further, and gradually her monk became more lifelike and solid. But then he changed from being the fat and jolly being she had set out to create, into a leaner figure that was, `troublesome and bold'. But to pre-empt all suggestions that solitude and obsession had affected Madame David-Neel's mind and that she was simply hallucinating, an unlooked-for breakthrough occurred when a local herdsman stopped by - and mistook her monk for a real man. Now quite malevolent, he had to go, but the process of `collapsing' him took six months of concentrated effort. If she had let him run amok, gaining strength and solidity, who knows what he might have done?
Over the centuries brave and learned men and women have sought to conjure all manner of beings, from angels to devils, and many have succeeded in conjuring something, although they often wished they hadn't. Whether the entity came from their own minds as a hallucination from their psyche like a tulpa or thoughtform, or whether it actually came from another dimension hardly matters. Conjuration is an enormous responsibility, not only for your own health and peace of mind, but also for those around you, possibly for years.
As a Luciferan you will do as you will (for it is the whole of the Law, Love under Law, Love under Will), but my advice is if and when you work with the unknown don't dabble in the occult. Do it properly! Read everything you can, not only about magic but also about the powers of the mind, prepare mentally and physically, and set up a support team in case of problems. Most importantly, never lose your sense of humour: it is your greatest protection for all manner of horrors from all manner of sources. Act like an intelligent child: open to the possibilities of the phenomena but willing to cut short the experiment if it goes wrong. The minute there's a problem, switch on the light, go to the pub, watch a funny programme, laugh. Or, and this is by far the best advice, forget all about it and go to the pub and laugh anyway. You have no need to conjure anything.
Luciferanism, paganism, hedonism and atheism may be seen as a continuation of the Enlightenment, a rebellion against the centuries of ecclesiastical repression and outright lies and a genuine desire to set foot in a brave new world. Like all new and audacious endeavours there will inevitably be dangers and dead ends, and once the old certainties and the paralysis of blind faith have been removed, opportunities for major mistakes and even crimes. But in seeking their own paths towards the Light, such questers are not aligning themselves with evil.
However Satanism proper is dangerous because it unbalances the psyche, and concentrates the mind on subjects and images that are only normally found in the more colourful works of Hieronymus Bosch. Of course other pursuits also unbalance the psyche: anything that we concentrate on to the exclusion of all else induces the same intensity of tunnel vision, be it compulsively playing computer games or compulsively studying medicine or theology. The key is the compulsivity, the addiction. Everyone knows that chemicals such as alcohol or crack cocaine ruin mind, body and spirit, but the mind itself can become addicted to negative influences, as in gambling, shopping or pornography. Satanism, however, actively invites in the world of real and endless night mares. Concentrating on the worship of evil inevitably engenders a mind capable of what most of us - non-religious, ordinary decent folk - would automatically reject not only as the apotheosis of immoral and anti-social activities but actually also deeply distasteful and unattractive.
Although it is common to enjoy a minor thrill when touring the grimmer sideshows of waxwork exhibitions, for example, or standing gawping at a traffic accident or watching a graphic movie about Jack the Ripper, there are usually limits to our willing association with horror. Once we have indulged in a burst of catharsis, we return to the mundane and the humorous, recapturing a sort of human balance and reactivating our conscience - arguably the inborn system of checks and balances that requires no religion or political creed to regulate our would-be excesses and dampen the wilder enthusiasms of our inner demons. But true Satanists are essentially unbalanced by choice, having voluntarily switched off their consciences: indeed, to serve their Lord and Master they often find themselves compelled to kill the innocent in cold blood.
In January 2005 the British media splashed the story of 16-yearold Luke Mitchell Dalkieth in Scotland, whose enthusiasm for `Antichrist superstar' Marilyn Manson and Satanism - he covered school exercise books with mantras such as `Satan master lead us into hell' - led directly to the murder of his 14-year-old girlfriend Jodi Jones. Other fans of Manson include the Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris who killed 25 of their classmates at Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado in 1999.10
Satanism is dangerous because it fosters a belief in personalized evil, in the very real and omnipresent, Devil. But this is also precisely one of the major reasons why religion, especially fundamentalism, is also dangerous, with a similar addiction to the power of evil, against which one must be on guard every split-second of the day. Such concentrated belief in Satan - from either a Satanist or fundamentalist Christian - may as an extreme possibility create him as a sort of tulpoid thoughtform, however briefly. Or if there is already such an objective being, the belief itself may summon him, for doesn't he feed on fear? And fear is the key. Unbounded it can turn any of us into monsters.
Some fear is good: the adrenaline rush of blended fear and excitement got our hairy ancestors out of the trees into open plains and encounters with much bigger hairier creatures, ending in the eating of one by the other. That's Luciferan fear - which throws open the door to progress, which sniffs the coming catastrophes in the air and has the fortresses built, the food and vaccines stockpiled, archives secured and museums built before our heritage falls to the Philistines ... But there's the other darker fear, which grows in the night and swamps all humour, discernment and rationality, all things of the Light. As Lucy Hughes-Hallett notes in her Sunday Times' review of Joanna Bourke's Fear: A Cultural History:
She discriminates between anxiety (usually rooted in guilt) and fear (which has an identifiable object) and she demonstrates how the one can be converted into the other by the identification of a scapegoat.'
Scapegoating bleakly links the Jewish Holocaust with the great witch holocaust - indeed, anti-Semitism and anti-witch/women have always had much in common, from their both being accused of being unashamed baby murderers and eaters to being in league with the Devil. It is fear of chaos that drives rational and decent folk to demonize other rational and decent folk. In their unbridled madness the Nazis singled out the Jews as scapegoats to atone for the rise of Bolshevism and the dire economic privations of post-1918 Germany, while the `witch' hysteria actually arose after a wave of antiSemitism in medieval Europe - second choice scapegoats, lined up to atone for hostile weather conditions, famine and the Black Death. God could not be blamed - although as Hughes-Hallett goes on to note: ' . . . many people, it seems, find it easier to accept a catastrophe inflicted by a vindictive God than to come to terms with a piece of random bad luck"' - so he must have permitted the Devil to do his worst, as a test to see if the righteous could weed out his emissaries with all the brutality at their disposal ...
As we have seen, the witch holocaust should serve as a lasting warning against fostering superstition and a belief in devils. As the old saying goes: `Speak of the Devil and he will appear'. Believe fanatically in the Devil and he will appear, possibly in the form of your once innocent next-door neighbour, who you then deem it your duty to have arrested, tortured and burnt. If you think those days are behind us, think again.
However, merely ridiculing the witch trials of old - having a good old laugh at the ludicrous and uneducated posturings of Kramer and Sprenger and the mumblings of the senile accused - can itself be dangerous, being a form of nervous denial hinting at half-buried fears that could easily erupt as a new incarnation of witch-baiter and burner. As Erica Jong says at the end of her extraordinary book Witches (1981):
When we laugh at the figure of the witch, when we laugh at our ancestors for believing in her evil, when we laugh at those who warn us of the grim morals of the witch-hunts, we bring a renewed siege of witch-hunting that much closer.
In her rattling cart, blindfolded, gagged, bound, on the way to the torture chamber, the gallows, the stake, the witch is trying to tell us something. She is trying to warn us. Hear her. She may be you - next time.13
Inside all of us seethes a host of demons, which for our health and the well-being of society should be controlled and denied any strength or potential to grow. We do not need to exorcize them in the name of Jesus Christ or any other god, god-man, guru or political leader, but we do need to apply common sense and conscience before the demons are out of the bag and causing mayhem.
The signs are all around us. Ordinary decent British folk feel justified in spitting at veiled Muslim women; American and British soldiers of both sexes and all sizes have themselves photographed torturing Iraqi prisoners, smiling hugely; television programmes and plays are banned because they threaten the beliefs we so neurotically cling to as if our lives depended upon it, although we would be horrified to discover that they don't ... In other words, we feel justified in turning into complete fascist dictators because we are Us and they are Them and - heaven forfend! - never the twain shall meet except in the Inquisitors' court.
Them and Us. Us and Them. Nazis and Jews. Red Army and intellectuals. Witches and Christians. Jews and Arabs. Freethinkers and any sort of fundamentalist, and so it goes on, a litany of terror producing more terror ... We are always in the Right and They are always in the Wrong. We have God on our side, they are spawn of Satan - and even to argue against us, or for them, is proof of their intimacy with him.
The Devil is extremely useful because he proves the existence of God, and can take all the blame for God's failures to regulate and soften our hard everyday existence. Create the Devil in our own image and He will oblige by creating hell on earth.
But viewed through the bleak prism of history, surely God is much more of a failure, especially given his alleged omnipotence. While Satan's henchmen successfully follow their job descriptions - they're only obeying orders, after all - by spreading terror, agony and death across the globe, what has God achieved? True, faith and that highly attractive sense of belonging bestows a sense of inner peace on individuals, enhancing their physical and emotional health, but personal radiance and an aura of smugness and judgementalism has done little for humanity as a whole. We know where Satan's earthly hell is -just look around you - but where is God's heaven on earth? Even, or perhaps especially, the `holy' cities, home of the self-appointed henchmen of the Lord, stink to high heaven with corruption, hypocrisy and the ongoing death of the soul that seeps cancerously across the globe. Where is the modem paradise? Washington DC? Salt Lake City? Vatican City? Jerusalem? Or is it perhaps in the old Eden, modern Iraq?
If the millennia have taught us anything, it is that we can only count on ourselves and each other for help, support, love, forgiveness and practical assistance such as medicine and sanitation - although of course those human-on-human miracles include the barely understood hidden powers of the mind, which sometimes manifest as apparently paranormal abilities. It is dangerous to invest one's entire psyche in either God or the Devil, for really there is very little difference, as they are mutually supportive and endlessly mutually generating. Where would God be if there was no Devil for his worshippers to be terrified of? Where would the Devil be without God's worshippers to be so terrified of him? Just like humanity's relationship with the God of the patriarchal modern religions, God's own relationship with Satan is symbiotic, the belief of each in the other keeping themselves alive.
If one wants or needs a God, there is always the bright light of humanity, the key to life and progress - Lucifer. Now there's a deity worth inventing with all the explosive power of our collective imaginations. But of course he, she or it already exists, sitting quietly, gloriously bursting with creative and illuminating light in every cell of our bodies, waiting at the core of our being to be summoned to make us gods, but perhaps equally happy to be banished once we have become divine - as long as we remember that we created Lucifer in the first place ...