A History of Error

It is proper to begin by quoting scripture, in particular the perilous lines of Isaiah 14:12. This may seem well trodden ground, but all exegesis starts with Isaiah, and all subsequent errors have, in a sense, coalesced around this ill-fated pronouncement. The story of Lucifer can be read as the history of the falsehoods, myths, hopes, hatreds and dreams that this one line has engendered. It is the centre point of the web, only made visible by the patient work crafted about it. The majesty is best conveyed in the King James Version of the Bible, a masterpiece in its own right, which throngs with satyrs, witches, sorcerers and dragons. It proclaims:

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!

We should take the time to allow these words to resound in our deepest depths, as they have a weight to them that drops us vertically into a shrouded stillness. We respond to their magnetic mass. Before we make pronouncement on this doomed figure of fallen light, we need to sense the gravity of the parabolic descent, and the sense that we too are part of it. Our inclination is to sympathise with this romantic figure, to project ourselves down from the heights. It is, in truth, these mysterious words that have exerted their fascination upon us. Having achieved this moment of silent memory, of loss, we can hold this fulcrum steady in the gimbal of our pitching hearts.

The architecture of this vision and vault is buttressed by a history that cannot be sensibly neglected if we are to produce work of any meaningful significance. My task is to examine the context of this evocative slur rather than plucking it from history as a pretty bauble with which to adorn our post-modern motley. I will quote chapter and verse, as it is from the recovery of this myth that we will ultimately draw the form of the ritual which is performed in the subsequent volume Lucifer: Praxis. There will be time enough for revelation, but first the hard graft of exegesis is required. Fortunately, there is a wealth of specialist scholarly work available without which the task would be insurmountable. Lest this be considered a fool’s coat, made from the offcuts of others’ cloth, I will add that this material has not been approached in this way before, and it is tailored for a specific practical purpose. So it begins.

Isaiah is the named author of this crafted curse in what is a great litany of tumbling curses. But, as with Solomon being ascribed authorship of the grimoires, this is a convenient fiction. The chronology of Isaiah spans from the Assyrian occupation to the post-exilic period, encompassing the Babylonian exile, and is delivered as if it were the words of a single prophetic author. There is, however, enough context to date the Lucifer verses; this, at least, seems likely to have been written not by the prophet Isaiah but by Isaiah, son of Amoz, in the mid eighth century BCE.

These lines have been extracted from a highly political text, written in a time of war and disorder, when Israel had been defeated and absorbed into the Assyrian Empire. The context is critical; our author has a radically conservative agenda. His railing against paganism makes the text a repository of heresies. Yet the main thrust of the attack is aimed squarely at the Jewish people, who have turned away from Yahweh, and, in critiquing them, simultaneously appeals to a special inner group of the orthodox:

Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me.

The rebellion takes a specific form: the opposing of divine order, by acceding to the conquering Assyrians and their vassals. To this failing is bound the immoral worship of supposedly foreign gods. Heaped upon the sins of idolatry and sacrifice are attacks on women, such as the scandalous, adorned beauty of the daughters of Zion, who are reviled for inciting God’s anger. In this regard it is not superfluous to quote Isaiah 3:16–24, the exquisite detail of the description creates a locket that contains, on one face, the hatred of the prophet, and on the other paradoxically preserves what would have been a lost vision of beauty. The text is forensic in detail, and precise in its measuring out of retribution, characteristics that will enable us to get closer to Lucifer than we could have dared to hope when we come to consider his fate:

Moreover the Lord saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts. In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, The chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, The bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings, The rings, and nose jewels, The changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping pins; The glasses (mirrors), and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the vails. And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty.

It is women who are so often attacked in scripture as the weak point through which heresy enters, and it is this susceptibility which flourishes into a wilful embrace that becomes a key element of the medieval witch hunts. Adornment, that is, the celebration and enhancement of female sexuality on its own terms, is anathema. The demonisation of carnality – often expressed as the worship of female divinities erroneously glossed as foreign – emerges centuries later in the form of the witch hunting manuals. One reason to study texts such as Isaiah is that the history of ideas is best understood as a churning ocean that dredges up treasures from the depths and deposits them wet and gleaming on the shore before it drags them under again. What is important about this passage is that it highlights how the fate of the transgressors is matched to their supposed crimes, a technique of symmetrical inversion that Isaiah specialises in. An understanding of Lucifer is predicated upon recognising his origins in this process. Rebellion is the sign of an internal corruption which has led to the fall of the nation to a foreign enemy, in this case Assyria. Elsewhere in Isaiah the enemy is Babylon, as it is in Revelation and other apocalyptic works that do not cite Kittim or Egypt. This sense of an inner enemy weakening the state has been a constant political trope: the motif of a ‘fifth column’ re-emerged with the witch hunts in the early modern period; more recently we find the argument used in Weimar Germany by the nascent Nazi party, expressed in disproved notions of race and blood; by McCarthy, whose agents fingered Jack Parsons; and currently by the security state whose search is ultimately for ideological heresy.

It is essential to understand the idea of rebellion in its traditional sense, rather than the glamourised or romanticised sense it has come to hold in our culture. The blind imposition of values is one of the most common errors made in reading the past. Rebellion, in particular, has come to be associated with the privileging of a particular pre-verbal emotional state, one that many are heavily invested in. The all too frequent identification with the emotional response to the idea of rebellion prevents us reading history as it was written. We cannot begin to read the past without first acknowledging that these modern prejudices lead us to overwrite the past, or construct histories that flatter us. My aim is to be effective in sorcery, rather than be ensorcelled. Rebellion has become a marketing device designed to exploit the developmental stage of sexual awakening and differentiation in modern teenagers, who have no formal initiation ritual into adulthood. It is part of a deliberate strategy to create consumers, subverting the drives of social and sexual dissatisfaction by channelling them into brand loyalty and consumption, rather than questioning the values of the corporate state. It avoids the crisis of initiation to keep the population dependent and uncertain in an extended ‘kidulthood,’ whilst simultaneously breaking social cohesion in favour of the individual – by which is meant the individual as production/consumption unit rather than as sovereign. Rebellion is therefore employed as a key element in commodification. ‘Individuals’ are simultaneously hyper-sexualised and de-eroticised. Marcuse wrote eloquently on this, and it is not necessary to embrace his entire Marxist theology to utilise such incisive tools of critique. Put simply, most modern rebellion is not rebellion at all; neither is it harmless: it is actively beneficial to the corporate culture and values it purports to reject. The rebel is rendered impotent by their consumption, whether of pornography or possessions, caught by their own reflection from breaking free into the possibilities of experiences not mediated by constant reference to the screen ideal. Rebellion has, through these and other methods, been very neatly transformed into a tool that creates self-slavery.

In traditional societies, rebellion is understood in a very different sense: namely, opposition to the cosmic order defined by the gods and flowing down through all social relationships. It is a potentially catastrophic event on every plane. We will examine this further when we discuss the antecedents of Isaiah and the coded records of stellar events in our mythic heritage. Rebellion is not a posture of that modern invention of affluence, ‘the teenager,’ but a crisis that threatens the cosmic fabric.

In Isaiah, the inner corruption of the Jewish people is divined by the prophet, despite their outward demonstrations of piety; a pernicious idea that opens the way for anyone to be accused of heresy, irrespective of their deeds. It is the impossible hunt for purity that societies often embark upon in moments of duress, and one which demands an enemy be found, invented or re-baptised. In Isaiah 1:13–15, Yahweh berates his people:

Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.

The turning ‘backwards’ to the trappings of paganism is ultimately proposed as the only explanation as to why their almighty god has abandoned them. Yahweh represents the legitimate cosmic and political order, whose power cascades down into king, priesthood, state and designates woman as the (sexual) property of man. Witchcraft, and the figure of Lucifer, is seen as standing in opposition to this hierarchy. The appeal to an earlier state of purity is common in apocalyptic literature. So, too, is the condemnation of seemingly virtuous acts as containing some hidden deviance or heretical inflection. As well as being an exoteric method of spreading religious terror, practitioners can exploit this deviant potential in every orthodoxy to invert, or return, the virtue of prayer and ritual in clandestine fashion. The verses of Isaiah 1:13–15 are a superstitious and magical reaction to a state of interminable crisis and failure. The expectation is that a new golden age of justice will occur after a period of tribulation, but only if the proper rules, dictated from on high, are strictly observed. At times the transformation is said to be the result of the intercession of a Messiah; see, for example, Isaiah 7:14, 9:6. The later sword-tongued Christ of Revelation 1:16, who engages in a combat with a dragon or monster, is perhaps inherited from Isaiah, with Jerusalem as the site of manifest destiny and Babylon as the dragonish enemy. The combat myth is a theme in Canaanite mythology which has clearly influenced both the Old and New Testaments, and though of tangential interest, is not the central theme of our study. Its connections with the development of the ‘Son of Man’ iconography are a highly contested area of scholarship that we must leave to one side. What I must necessarily do is define Apocalypse, and here, like many scholars in the field, by deferring to J. J. Collins. His definition, given in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, is this:

‘Apocalypse’ is a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, in so far as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial in so far as it involves another, supernatural world.

The sources upon which this definition is built are Enoch, Daniel, 4 Ezra, Revelation and 2 Baruch. What Collins’ definition lacks is that salvation is most often envisaged for a select group of people, though that does not imply that apocalypticism is the preserve of marginal groups. It engulfs whole cultures as often as it produces the seeming aberration of a Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate.

The apocalyptic myth structure can indeed be read in movements as diverse as Marxism, Capitalism, Rosicrucianism, Wahhabi Islam and the New Age. It is worth being familiar with this myth and its variants, as it undergoes spasmodic resurgences and has returned with a vengeance in our war torn times. On the grand stage it seems inevitable that Islam will be used for such an end in our century, but as luxury becomes scarcity, it is inevitable that many others will also find themselves demonised.

Often the idea of apocalypse is ascribed solely to the Judeo-Christian tradition, a troubling legacy that can therefore be safely excluded from our consideration whether as secular, or pagan, moderns. Contrary to this, the mytheme of apocalypse is one of the fundamental elements of the human story. It cannot be traced and confined to the Qumran community or its Zoroastrian precursors, though these must be accounted for if we are to understand Christianity in general and Revelation in particular. Apocalypse, as a myth, has been dated to the Paleolithic in the monumental work of E.J. Michael Witzel. He has utilised the tools of comparative linguistics, genetic data and archaeological evidence to unearth the ur-tales and demonstrated how they have endured throughout the common history of humanity and been forged into a single narrative. This remarkable persistence can be attributed, in part, to the story arising from, and being tethered to, our lifecycle. Thus, if we are to remove the idea of apocalypse, we effectively remove both the initial achievement of consciousness and our inevitable death from the script. Yet these two events are insoluble, our end is found in our beginning. Arguing for a truncated narrative reveals the screens that we have erected to preserve us from the moment of excarnation; it is a thoroughly modern conceit. In apocalypse denial, the spark of life itself is lost, as Lucifer, who represents the promise of the continuity of consciousness, is snuffed out.