What is a Gnostic Luciferian?
By Tau Heosphoros Iacchus
©2008
The term Gnostic Luciferianism has found itself used with increasing frequency, often to express vastly differing ideas. It, therefore, seems useful to talk a little about what we mean by the term.
First, though, perhaps it would be best to address the name, and concept, of Lucifer. Most people would, if asked, say that Lucifer was the name of the Archangel who rebelled against God, was cast out of heaven, and became Satan. Indeed this is a correct summation of Lucifer’s back-story as described in Christian Mythology, a mythology that we, at least in part, draw from ourselves. However, this mythos is not, as most believe, taken whole cloth from its Jewish predecessor.
The name Lucifer appears only once in the Old Testament, Isaiah 14:12, "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!"
Of course the original Hebrew contained no Latin words (the Latin language not having yet come into existence). The Hebrew reads “Heleyl, ben Shachar" (“shining one, son of dawn."). When the Hebrew text was translated into Greek during the Hellenic period the word Heleyl became Phosphoros, or Heosphoros, (Morning Star). This word would be used again in John of Patmos’ Apocalypse (aka “The Book of Revelations”) when Jesus Christ (appearing to John in a vision) refers to himself as “the bright and morning star” (Rev. 22:16).
The name Lucifer derives from the Latin lucem ferre (light bearer), and was a name for the planet Venus, as well as a title of the Goddess Diana. To the early Christians, this name not only had no negative connotations, it was a popular name among priests and bishops. When St. Jerome was translating the Latin Vulgate, he interpreted the Greek Heosphoros as Lucifer, probably as a jab at his rival Bishop Lucifer Calaritanus of Cagliari.
In no time flat, the Church combined the characters of Lucifer (the original text was probably a reference to Nebuchadnezzar) and Ha-Satan (the loyal and obedient accuser angel who serves in Gods court by tempting man, and in one case Jesus, to forsake God) with the rebellious “Watcher Angels” of the pseudepigraphal Book of Enoch (the leader of whom is identified variously as Satanael, Azazel, and Samyaza among others) into a single mythological Devil with a cohesive narrative and purpose.
I first heard the word Luciferian as a teenager in reference to the 19th century poets Byron and Shelly as part of what Robert Southey referred to as the “Satanic School of Literature”, so called because it invoked the tragic and noble figure of Milton’s Lucifer. I immediately began to identify myself (at least in my own mind) as “Luciferian”, initially in the Byronic sense, and later, as my interest in the occult grew, as a sign of my affinity with the archetype of Lucifer.
Before proceeding, please do not be lead astray by the use of the word archetype. The use of Jungian terminology has a tendency to evoke a knee jerk assumption that the writer is taking a materialist/reductionist view of the concepts so referred. This is due to the efforts of Jung’s apologists to deny Jung’s own Gnostic/Neo-Platonist/Hermetic interpretation of his theories. To say that Gods and spirits exist within the “Collective Unconscious” is not to say that they are “all in the mind” but rather that our minds are collectively in touch with a vast primordial reality that transcends the material world.
Many modern Luciferians take great pains to distinguish between Lucifer, the Light Bringer, and Satan, the Accuser/Adversary. However, I find the cohesive mythology behind the Christian Lucifer/Satan complex to provide a more satisfying representation of the Promethean figure, which, like the Ophite Gnostics we identify as the serpent in Eden, who offered Man the light of Knowledge (Gnosis) in order that he might be free of the tyranny of the Demiurges. Also in common with the Ophites we recognize The Christ as another form of Lucifer, the Morning Star, sharing the same mission of liberation and the transmission of the Gnosis.
In his essay, Hekate and the Satanic School”, Tim Maroney states,
“But why are underworld and sorcerous deities especially demonized? Officialdom is chiefly opposed to the individual will: the power that authority delights in exercising is the power of imposing its will on others. The opposition to this authoritarian will is the individual fount of creativity and unpredictability. In psychology, this fount is called the unconscious mind, the obscure and unseen intelligence which motivates us all to seek our own paths. The unconscious mind, the dark side of the psyche, is the symbolic meaning of the mythical underworld or "Hell." Tyrants are right to fear this deep well of power and to frighten their subjects away from it. Sorcery is a symbol of independent action, unauthorized and unregulable, obeying only the laws of the dark side and scorning the workings of temporal power. Tyrants who believe in its "magical" power fear it for pragmatic reasons, but these mundane concerns reflect the nature of the sorcerous myth. The individual sorceress could, like Medea, shatter the structures of authority if they became intolerably alienating. Sorcery is the mythological face of art. All good artists are sorcerors; spell-weavers; subversives; Satanists.
The veneration of demons is not, as is commonly believed, the "worship of evil", but an escape from the authoritarian mentality of "us vs. them", of allies and enemies, of repressive and arbitrary regulations expressed for power itself rather than for the general interest, of good and evil as absolute forces in the world rather than as subjective judgments applied to human behavior. All these naive or corrupt political influences are banished from the crossroads at twilight by the irresistible, but subtle, influence of Hekate, snake-woman, Medea's muse, friend and mistress of the hounds of Hell; they are cracked and ruined by this sorceress behind and beyond all sorcery.”
The Children of The Blood of Lucifer recognize that such practices as sorcery and congress with demons are our birthright as human beings. We, as thinking creatures, were birthed at the moment of our “fall”, as we evolved from beasts that moved unfettered by the burden of “free will” to fully conscious beings gifted with the compulsion to rebel. We exercise our rights to bargain with the forces that dwell beyond the shadows; we claim our heritage to storm the gates of Heaven, and lift ourselves up above the stars of God, sit on the mount of assembly on the heights of Zaphon, ascend to the tops of the clouds, and make ourselves like unto the Most High.
In closing we remember the words of Oscar Wilde, “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made”