The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code (41 page)

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 ...

Notes and References

Introduction

1. Eliphas Levi, The Mysteries of Magic, Paris, 1861, p. 428.

Chapter One Satan: An Unnatural History

1. Professor Karl W. Luckert, Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire, New York, 199 1, p. 47.

2. Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, The Stargate Conspiracy: Revealing the Truth behind Extraterrestrial Contact, Military Intelligence and the Mysteries of Ancient Egypt, London, 1999, p. 9.

3. Barbara G. Walker, The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, New York, 1983, p. 9.

4. Alister E. McGrath, A Brief History of Heaven, Maiden, MA, USA, 2003, p. 43.

5. Ibid.

6. See Lynn Picknett, Mary Magdalene: Christianity's Hidden Goddess, London, 2003 and also Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ, London, 1997.

7. Isaiah 51:3. Most biblical quotations throughout will be taken from the New International Version (1973).

8. Ezekiel 28:13.

9. 1844.

10. 'Man' will be used as a synonym of 'human' and therefore includes 'Woman'. Absolutely no insult is intended to either sex.

11. Luke 23:43.

12. Song of Songs 1:16.

13. Ibid. 4:12.

14. Ibid. 4:15.

15. McGrath, p. 46.

16. Genesis 3:1.

17. Genesis 3:4-5.

18. Ibid. 3: 6-7.

19. Ibid. 3:11.

20. Genesis 3:14-15.

21. Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth, London, 1944, p. 86.

22. Ibid., p. 100.

23. Ibid., p. 96.

24. Among other things, as the raw material for countless luxury goods such as handbags.

25. Genesis 3:16.

26. Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Wife, New York, 2001, p. 15.

27. Genesis 3:13.

28. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667, IX, 171-2.

29. Jean Markale, Montsegur and the Mystery of the Cathars, trans. Jon Graham, Paris, 1986, pp. 115-16.

30. Milton, `The Argument', Paradise Lost.

31. Walker, p. 384.

32. Homer Smith, Man and His Gods, Boston, 1952, p. 376.

33. Walker, pp. 384-5.

34. Isaiah 14:12-15.

35. Assyrian and Babylonian Literature, Selected Translations, 1901, p. 304.

36. Milton, 1:144.

37. Jean Doresse, The Book ofEnoch, trans. R.H. Charles, London, 1984, quoted in Tobias Churton, The Gnostic Philosophy, Lichfield, Staffordshire, 2003, p. 48.

38. For example, St Jerome.