The Satanic Bible ends with a section on the `Enochian Keys', the very magical formulae taken from Meric Casaubon's 1659 biography of John Dee, although that godly magician would no doubt be horrified at what they have become at the hands of the Church of Satan. LaVey declares that Dee's `angels' were only believed to be so `because occultists to this day have lain ill with metaphysical constipation'. The quality of the Enochian words and their `barbarous tonal qualities' create a `tremendous reaction in the atmosphere',79 but in doing so they open the doors to Hell .. .
As LaVey began to attract a huge following, not unnaturally rumours spread about his activities: that he served up a human leg at a banquet, that he cursed movie star Jayne Mansfield and she was duly decapitated in a car crash, that real demons appeared at his command ... Then, inevitably, came the backlash - not from the godly, for they had already voiced their opinions long and hard, but from the media. A little research had discovered that LaVey had never been a police photographer, had never had an affair with Marilyn Monroe as he claimed, and although he had denounced the infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley as a `poseur par excellence [who] worked overtime to be wicked',"' the general view among serious occultists was that this was somewhat rich coming from him.
LaVey died in 1997, controversy still dogging his memory as his associates - and even his daughter - line up to besmirch his name, which quaintly, is still possible even where a Satanist is concerned.
With the media's soubriquet of `Wickedest Man in the World' Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was and still is regarded by `nice' people with a shudder, although most people, nice or otherwise, know very little about that astonishing magus. Certainly he is a Mount Olympus to LaVey's traffic-calming hump both intellectually and spiritually, although he was by no means an unmitigated joy or a consistently golden inspiration either as a man or a role model.
A talented poet, one of the world's top mountaineers (he is Chris Bonnington's hero), an erudite writer, adept yogi and gifted pornographer, Crowley is largely remembered for adopting the biblical title of `the Great Beast 666', after his grandmother - a member of the puritanical Plymouth Brethren - insisted on using it of him, quite seriously. But as occult historian Francis X. King wrote in the Introduction to Crowley on Christ (1974):
Crowley was much more than a black magician, although he did once crucify a toad; he was much more than a sexual athlete, although he did on one occasion or another indulge in almost every perversion from sodomy to coprophilia ...81
`Never dull where Crowley is!'
After a mercurial relationship with various magical and secret societies (including the Freemasons), he chose to pursue sex magic (or his preferred `magick') with the enthusiasm of the Carpocratians or Simon Magus in partnership with either fellow male magi or his serial `Scarlet Women'. Believing himself to be the reincarnation of Eliphas Levi, he strove for the ultimate magical experiences, even seeking to conjure his Holy Guardian Angel, which he managed partly through the mediumship of his wife Rose in Cairo in 1904. As Francis X. King wrote, `... he was much more than a "satanic occultist", although he did identify Aiwass, his "Holy Guardian Angel" with Satan, the Christian Devil.'82
Like all dedicated magicians, Crowley sought to obey the ancient injunction to Know Thyself, to discover and implement his True Will. His encounter with Aiwass can be seen as the climax of that quest, the confrontation of his inner self as an external force. (He wrote in his Magical Record, July 1920: `I want to serve God, or as I put it, Do My Will, continuously: I prefer a year's concentration with death at the end than the same dose diluted in half a century of futility.,)83
The result of this climatic angelic encounter was the Book of the Law, which - without actually terrifying him - disconcerted Crowley so much he kept trying to lose it, but somehow it always returned. In September 1923 he recalled the quintessence of the `Cairo Working', writing: `The Secret was this: the breaking down of my false Will by these dread words of mine Angel freed my True Self from all its bonds, so that I could enjoy at once the rapture of knowing myself to be who I am."'
When writing on the subject of the Tarot card, the Hanged Man, for his Book of Thoth (1944), he quoted Aiwass from the Book of the Law: `I give unimaginable joys on earth: certainty, not faith, while in life: upon death: peace unutterable, rest, ecstasy; nor do I demand aught in sacrifice.'85 Always opposed to the concept of the dying-and-rising Christ as redeemer, he writes: `This idea of sacrifice is, in the final analysis, a wrong idea.'R6 He also made the point: `... Judaism is a savage, and Christianity a fiendish super- stition.'87 (Indeed, up to the Cairo Working Crowley had been largely Buddhist in spiritual outlook, but then Aiwass' insistence that existence was `pure joy' seriously eroded the concept that life was ultimately nothingness.)
However, the third chapter of the Book of the Law changes gear, predicting - even encouraging - mass brutality, bloodshed and death: `Mercy let be off: damn them who pity! Kill and torture; spare not: be upon them!' Yet, as Tobias Churton points out, it is the alternate voice of a Crowley `contemptuous of the mush and mire of Edwardian sentimentality'," a world that was quickly to be blown to pieces in the carnage of the First World War. `It is the voice of every place where the True Will is silenced; where the individual walks in fear of the mass'.89
Sometimes Crowley could rise to the noblest heights, and when he did, few could match his pure Luciferan sentiments, as in:
... Redemption is a bad word; it implies a debt. For every star [individual] possesses boundless wealth; the only proper way to deal with the ignorant is to bring them to the knowledge of their starry heritage. To do this, it is necessary to behave as must be done in order to get on good terms with animals and children: to treat them with absolute respect; even, in a certain sense, with worship 90
And, music to the ears of the confined and frustrated Edwardian woman, the Book of the Law opens with a clarion call to end false modesty and throw open the gates of womanhood. Aiwass/Crowley writes:
We do not fool and flatter women; we do not despise and abuse them. To us a woman is Herself, as absolute, original, independent, free, self-justified, exactly as a man is ... We do not want Her as a slave; we want Her free and royal, whether her love fight death in our arms by night ... or Her loyalty ride by day beside us in the Charge of the Battle of Life ...
But now the word of Me the Beast is this; not only art thou Woman, sworn to a purpose not thine own; thou art thyself a star, and in thyself a purpose to thyself. Not only mother of me art thou, or whore to men; serf to their need of Life and Love, not sharing in their Light and Liberty; nay, thou art Mother and Whore for thine own pleasure; the Word to Man I say to thee no less: Do what thou wilt. Shall be the whole of the Law!91
At least that was the theory. Crowley's Scarlet Women tended to have grave mental problems - Rose, for example, died of alcoholism - and what a pity that he could bring himself to show so little respect for his fellow human beings in general, displaying a marked infantile exhibitionism by defecating on hostesses' drawing-room carpets, and offering `love' cakes (made of faeces) to his own guests. His desire to shock by cultivating a sensational image often reduced the would-be Master of the new Aeon to the mental age of about three. In that, but only in that, LaVey's sneering dismissal of Crowley as a `poseur par excellence' hits the mark. And another aspect of his sheer nastiness (after all, he had a lot to live up to as the Great Beast) was his fondness for cursing people92 with a real deep-down viciousness mixed with a show-off arrogance, a sort of dark and dirty swagger of the soul. ('Never dull where Crowley is!' he wrote of himself.)93 This is what Tobias Churton, a great admirer of the Gnostic magician Crowley calls `his frequently stupid, frequently selfish and frequently delightful, magical self' .9a
Ever one for assuming the guise of the `laughing master' - like Simon Magus - Crowley declared, tongue in cheek, but still really, really meaning it: `I have been taxed with assaulting what is commonly known as virtue. True, I hate it, but only in the same degree as I hate
what is commonly known as vice.'95
Moralists often rub their hands with glee over the story of Crowley's life - from Victorian gentleman to pitiful, povertystricken heroin addict in a boarding house at Hastings in 1947, begging his doctor for just one more fix96 - but he had long recognized that `attainment is insanity'. Despite appearances, this was not the pitiful death of a failed shaman: as real appreciation of his life and works continues to grow exponentially, it becomes ever clearer that there was little that was truly failed about The Great Beast.
His legacy is astounding. He left behind him a corpus of writings that improve with the keeping, and certainly do not become contemptuous with familiarity, indeed quite the reverse. Where this present enquiry is concerned, Crowley had a particular legacy to bequeath to future generations of seekers, although paradoxically he would have hated to think of it in these terms. But it was Aleister Crowley who gave would-be Luciferans the rules.
By its very nature, striking out into the unknown towards the bright light of the Morning Star is as fraught with danger as any pilgrim's progress. Even buoyed by the noblest of ideals, there are dangers aplenty, not the least the temptation of frolicking naughtily in the soft light of black candles to celebrate orgiastic fauxSatanism. The real thing, after all (by any other name) is and always will be a form of outright criminal insanity - the evils of a Hitler or a Saddam Hussein being beyond even the imagination of most people. Ordinary folk are simply not cut out to be true Satanists because like it or not, they possess a conscience and an intense disgust for the disgusting. Satanism in the suburbs may be an interesting diversion, but with its emphasis on dirt and darkness it can never provide the way to the Light. But whereas we all have to find our own path, and to some extent therefore make our own maps, these `rules' of Crowley's provide a sound basis for a well-lived life.
Everyone knows Crowley declared: `Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law', usually, and inaccurately, taking it to be a licence for depraved hedonism, but in fact his creed goes on: `Love is the Law, Love under Will'. He adds: `Every man and woman is a star' - echoed in diluted form in LaVey's `Each child is a minute Renaissance man'97 - explaining that in his system, `The sin against the Holy Ghost is to hinder another star from following its true will'. All too often, however, each individual `star' hinders his or her own path to their true will.
As Colin Wilson says, `Man is not small - he's just bloody lazy.'98
EPILOGUE
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 career
wise. 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.
The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code Page 29