:SECRET HISTORY
OF
THE.
LUCIFER
By the same author
Mary Magdalene: Christianity's Hidden Goddess
The Encyclopaedia of the Paranormal (Ed.)
The Mammoth Book of UFOs
With Clive Prince
Turin Shroud: In Whose Image?
The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ
The Stargate Conspiracy
With Clive Prince and Stephen Prior
(additional historical research by Robert Brydon)
Double Standards: The Rudolf Hess Cover-up
War of the Windsors
Friendly Fire: The Secret War Between The Allies
THE,
SECRET HISTORY
OF
LUCIFER
The ancient path to knowledge
and the real Da Vinci Code
LYNN PICKNETT
For Debbie Benstead, with love Is there a tenth gate? Are we there yet?
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Introduction xi
PART ONE: A STAR IS BORN
1 Satan: An Unnatural History 3
2 The Devil and All Her Works 35
3 A Woman Called Lucifer 63
PART TWO: LEGACY OF THE FALL
4 Synagogues of Satan 117
5 Pacts, Possession and Seance Rooms 165
6 Do What Thou Wilt 215
Epilogue: The Lucifer Key 251
Notes and References 263
Acknowledgements 289
Select Bibliography 291
Index 295
Illustrations
The Fall of Man, 1549 (oil on panel) by Cranach, Lucas the Younger (1515-86), © Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA, Edith A. and Percy S. Straus Collection
Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library
Glad Day or The Dance of Albion, c.1794 (etching with w/c) by Blake, William (1757-1827), British Museum, London, UK
Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library
The Egyptian god Set
Statue of the god Horus making a drink offering, Third Intermediate Period c.750 BC (bronze), Louvre, Paris, France
Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library
Diana Lucifera (Lucina)
A late Roman statue, she carries the torch symbolizing spiritual resurrection and illumination
Pan, c.1880 (bronze on stone plinth) by Thabard, Adolf Martial (1831-1905), private collection/Agra Art, Warsaw, Poland
Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library
Negative of the Turin Shroud
Aggemian's 1935 portrait taken from the cloth
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) engraving by English School, (19th century), private collection/Ken Welsh
Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library
The Virgin and Child with St Anne and John the Baptist, c. 1499 (charcoal, chalk on paper) by Vinci, Leonardo da (1452-1519), National Gallery, London, UK
Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library
Mary Magdalene, 1877 (oil on canvas) by Rossetti, Dante Charles Gabriel (1828-82), © Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, USA/Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial
Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library
The Witches' Sabbath or The Great He-goat, (one of `The Black Paintings'), c.1821-23 (oil on canvas) by Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de (1746-1828), Prado, Madrid, Spain/Giraudon
Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library
Three Witches Burned Alive, pamphlet illustration (woodcut) by German School, (16th century), private collection/The Stapleton Collection
Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library
Edward Kelly (b.1555), a magician, and his partner the mathematician and astrologer, John Dee (1527-1608), raising a ghost, private collection
Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library
Sir Isaac Newton
Anonymous, Petworth House, West Sussex, UK
Courtesy of The Bridgeman Art Library
Introduction
Everyone knows what evil is. Everyone carries iconic pictures in their heads that symbolize the horror of real wickedness: smoke and flames pouring from the Twin Towers on the September 11 that stopped the world in its tracks; piles of emaciated bodies at the Nazis' death camps; thousands of grinning skulls in Pol Pot's killing fields; a naked little girl running screaming towards the camera, covered in napalm ... Terror, agony, war, death upon death. Although entirely of humanity's doing, we use words such as `satanic' to describe these deeds of historic atrocity, evoking the name of the Old Enemy, Satan, personification of all that is terrible, disgusting, beyond belief. Satan may or may not exist as a literal entity, but he is a potent metaphor for the worst of the worst. However, this book will sing the praises of another hugely powerful metaphor - Lucifer - who is emphatically not the Evil One, but the spirit of human progress, the fight to learn and grow, to be independent and proud, but also spiritually free. `Lucifer' simply means `the Light-bringer', the enlightener, and it is in that spirit that this book will examine the way that a belief in the values he represents has shaped our world, the Judaeo-Christian West, in which the very freedoms he seeks are fast becoming eroded.
As the great 19th-century French occultist and sage Eliphas Levi wrote `What is more absurd and more impious than to attribute the name of Lucifer to the devil, that is, to personified evil. The intel lectual Lucifer is the spirit of intelligence and love; it is the paraclete, it is the Holy Spirit, while the physical Lucifer is the great agent of universal magnetism."
In the dire past, the days of witch burning and mass bigotry, there were few recognizable freedoms. Today, when we are trying to force-feed democracy to eastern cultures, it would seem that we have all the freedom we want or need. Not so: the insidious fascism of political correctness - with its chillingly Orwellian undertones - and the growing threat of fundamentalism of all sorts mean that our everyday freedoms are under threat. On both sides of the Atlantic the radiant figure of the real Lucifer is being obscured by red tape, yet rarely have we needed him more. With the breakdown of the education system, ignorance, nihilism and the non-existence of selfrespect abound, turning into rage, violence and crime on the one hand and dangerously rigid religious belief on the other. Both represent their own form of evil, both threaten the future of our culture - but if we permit ourselves to be still, honest and objective for just a few moments, we will be able to hear the rousing cry of the Morning Star, Lucifer, all brightness and hope. Let the Light shine in!
An unexpected sequel
When I began this book I had little idea how neatly it would follow on from my previous work, Mary Magdalene: Christianity's Hidden Goddess (2003), which examined the real role of one of Christendom's most maligned saints, revealing her to be nothing less than Jesus' lover and even his chosen successor. For two millennia the Church has deliberately obscured the truth about her, terrified that her status would inspire other women to fulfil their own destinies as intelligent, spiritual leaders. In the light of all the evidence, it is incredible that there is still heated debate among churchmen about the validity of female priests - or, if `stuck' with them, of female bishops. Yet if the truth about Mary Magdalene were widely known there could be no debate: she set the pattern for women to be equal with the men in religious debate and leadership - and in that, she was Jesus' own choice. And it is hugely significant that to her devotees in the south of France, she was known as `Mary Lucifer' - `Mary the Light-bringer'.
This was a time-honoured tradition: pagan godd
esses were known, for example, as `Diana Lucifera' or `Isis Lucifer' to signify their power to illumine mind and soul, to create a mystical bond between deity and worshipper, to open up both body and psyche to the Holy Light. Of course to the ignorant all pagan gods and goddesses are still routinely dismissed as devilish, just as the great nature god Pan himself became the very image of Satan - with his horns and hooves - when Christians came to rule the known world with a rod of iron. Yet there is evidence to suggest very strongly that the Magdalene and even Jesus himself were highly influenced by pagan goddess cults, especially that of the Egyptian Isis (from which John the Baptist took his then new ritual of baptism).
Of course millions worldwide have now read about a Church conspiracy to defraud us all of our true spiritual inheritance via the Magdalene, from Dan Brown's publishing phenomenon, The Da Vinci Code. Until now, there has been far too much darkness in the world of the spirit for far too long, and whether presented as a worthy academic tome or a rip-roaring page-turner, letting a little light in can only change our culture for the better. Yet the truth is that his novel goes nowhere near far enough. The real Da Vinci code is considerably more shocking than merely suggesting that Mary and Jesus were man and wife with children.
Nineteen ninety-seven saw the publication of my book, The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ, co-authored with my closest friend and long-term colleague Clive Prince, which first introduced the idea of heretical symbolism in the so-called `religious' paintings of the great Renaissance genius, in a chapter called `The Secret Code of Leonardo da Vinci'. Although this was to provide Dan Brown with the background for his thriller, he has hardly scraped the surface of what Leonardo was really trying to convey ...
Leonardo (as `Da Vinci' should properly be known) was the ultimate Luciferan hero: daring, shocking, challenging, endlessly questing without acknowledging any limits, ever pushing back the boundaries of human knowledge. Famously the inventor of flyingmachines and military tanks, he also invented all manner of devices such as a sewing-machine, a bicycle (complete with chain and same-size wheels) - and even devised a primitive but effective form of photography with which he almost certainly created the world's most famous and baffling hoax, the Shroud of Turin, as detailed in our book Turin Shroud: How Leonardo da Vinci Fooled History. The `holy' image even has his own face on it. In other words, incredibly, instead of a miraculous image of Jesus Christ, we have a 500-year-old photograph of Leonardo da Vinci, a fifteenthcentury homosexual heretic who hated Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
The Church reserved a special loathing for those - and there were many - who tinkered with what we would call the early stages of photography, so it was a joke of particular viciousness with which Leonardo probably created the ultimate Christian relic, knowing it would be cared for by the priests of the very Church that he despised, perhaps until the day when it would be recognized for what it really is. But make no mistake, photography was believed to be `occult' once, and there is no reason to doubt that Leonardo actually believed himself to be involved in a magical process when he created the `Shroud'. If caught working with the `devilish' photography, he knew his position on the top of a flaming pyre would be assured.
(For those who, despite all the evidence to the contrary, might be eager to declare the Shroud is genuinely the miraculously imprinted winding sheet of Jesus, may I draw your attention to certain glaring anomalies of the image - see page 179 - which conclusively prove not only is it a fake, but also that it is a projected image. Further details can be found in our first book, Turin Shroud: How Leonardo da Vinci Fooled History, 2000.)
And, of course, as Clive and I revealed in The Templar Revelation, it is our theory that Leonardo put Mary Magdalene next to Jesus in his Last Supper, forming a giant spread-eagled `M' shape with the composition of their bodies as a clue. A brilliant psychologist, Leonardo knew that people only ever see what they expect or want to see. Quite what that says about my own mind, as the first person (as far as I know) to notice the giant penis on the head of Mary in the Virgin of the Rocks is open to question ...
Leonardo da Vinci was by no means the only shining light of intellectual and spiritual Luciferanism throughout history, which included secretive alchemists such as Queen Elizabeth I's astrologer John Dee - who as her spy master took the code name 007! - and eminent pioneering scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton and Andrew Crosse. As well as the Freemasons, the backbone of British and American progress, still routinely accused of worshipping a satanic Lucifer ...
However, because Lucifer and Satan are very wrongly assumed to be one and the same, this book will also examine those who have chosen to be Satanists or those whose magical operations have brought them perilously close to crossing the line into a much darker and bleaker world. But nothing could be darker or bleaker than the result of a belief in the existence of Devil-worshippers. For at least three entire centuries Europe (and then parts of North America) were ravaged by the craze for denouncing the most innocent of beings as witches, resulting in the devastation of whole communities, when the walls of village houses were caked in stinking human fat from the dreadful and seemingly endless burnings - even of tiny children. (Once a baby was actually born to a woman shrieking in agony among the flames. Somehow she managed to throw it free. The crowd threw it back, as an imp of Satan.) A belief in the Devil and his faithful has caused more agony, terror and evil in the world than even any true Satanism.
It was a madness that must never be forgotten, for like all historical abominations it holds a unique lesson for the future, should we be willing to confront and learn from it. This was not a vaguely interesting hiccup in European history that ought to be relegated to dry-as-dust text books - it was about the demonization of ordinary men and women just like you and me, by ordinary men and women just like you and me.
Yet while few of the hundred thousand or so witches caught up in this abomination were real Devil worshippers, most of their accusers could be said to be devils incarnate. It rapidly became a burnable offence even to question the existence of witchcraft. That is the price of a kind of fundamentalism. Lest we forget.
From the iniquities of the great ecclesiastical conspiracy to cover up the truth about Mary Magdalene and her `Luciferan' predecessors, the goddess-worshipping priestesses and priests, through the astounding courage and intellectual magnitude of freethinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci and his brethren, we arrive at today, hedged around and threatened by censorship, political correctness and worse. But, paradoxically, our journey to the murk and high anxiety of the twenty-first-century West begins with the pernicious myth of very first humans and a certain talking snake ...
LYNN PICKNETT
London 2005
Long live Lucifer - but to Hell with Satan!
PART ONE
A Star is Born
CHAPTER ONE
Satan: An Unnatural History
All cultures have their creation myths - the ancient Egyptians believed that the god Atum, deity of the solar disk and the sun itself, masturbated himself, exploding a life-giving burst of energy that seeded the dark unformed void with countless galaxies. In the land of the pyramids there was no impropriety in the concept that `self abuse' created the universe, although millennia later Victorian archaeologists were predictably shocked to the core by the ancient Egyptians' melding of sex and divinity.
In the first act of creation, Atum was perceived as an androgynous figure, the hand that made the world being the female aspect, while his phallus represented the equal and opposite male principle. As the eminent American scholar Professor Karl Luckert writes: `The entire system can be visualized as a flow of creative vitality, emanating outward from the godhead, thinning out as it flows further from its source'. I
However, this apparently primitive - if somewhat explicit - tale actually encompasses a highly sophisticated understanding of the cosmology, as Clive Prince and myself noted in our The Stargate Conspiracy (1999):
It literally describes
the `Big Bang', in which all matter explodes from a point of singularity and then expands and unfolds, becoming more complex as fundamental forces come into being and interact, finally reaching the level of elemental matter.'
Unfortunately our own culture's creation myth boasts no orgasmic Big Bang, no universe spawned unashamedly, even proudly, from the explosively virile phallus of the great Creator god.
What we have instead is the story of God's six-day creation followed by the myth of Adam and Eve - essentially the opposite of the Egyptian myth in its furtive, guilt-ridden attitude to nakedness and its emphasis on sexual sin, female culpability and divine retribution from a pathologically wrathful, tyrannical and petty God. Despite millennia of sermonizing and theological debate - in which the sheer nastiness and incompetence of Yahweh has been subjected to the damage limitation of philosophy by far greater minds, apparently, than his - arguably the story as told in the first book of the Old Testament, Genesis, has succeeded in inspiring more evil and more neuroses than Stalin and Freud could ever have dreamt of between them.
In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, all human woes supposedly originated in the Garden of Eden, the blissful earthly paradise that God created to provide innocent and unmitigated joy for the two creatures he made in his own image - the prototype man Adam and his critically wayward companion, the first female, Eve. Clearly unwilling to expend too much trouble, God frugally created the world's mother from one of Adam's ribs, although in fact this aspect of the story is a perversion of a myth of a Sumerian goddess who, more understandably, created babies from their mother's ribs in her role `as the Lady of the Rib and Lady of Life'.'
Unfortunately one of the other creatures in the garden was about to become a little too intimate, as it slithered towards them with its burden of horror for the whole of mankind ...
The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code Page 1