What follows is part an essay part a blog post of my own beliefs/speculation of the Lucifer archetype and how I personally relate to the deity behind it – I’ve structured in terms of a trip I did to Munich where I finally managed to piece together the flavor of Luciferianism that makes sense the most for me.
It’s early March, after a particularly snowy spell in Dublin that saw the entire country shut down. Munich is the first German city I ever visited. I’d been left with a bit of a magickal hungover after the february trip to Glastonbury for the Visible College’s Occult Conference, and I felt like the time was ripe to materialize things that have been setting up for years in my life.
I’ve had a life-long obsession with trickster figures. When I was a kid and daydreamed myself into stories and adventures, I never liked being in the centre of it – there’s always an element of fate when you’re the villain or the hero, and fate meant slavery. I always liked the sidelines; the observer who can step in and out at anytime he wants. I’ve given the role a number of names over the years, stuff like Chesire-Cat or Dweller on the Threshold. The character is never quite good nor quite evil; its greatest strenght was in its detachment, and its greatest tragedy was that they never quite managed to be part of any community at all.
There’s no shortage of mythological characters that belong to the trickster category. For a girl growing up in a relaxed south american Catholic family, where mum had studied in a Nun’s school filled with Auschwitz survivors and Sorbonne-trained women, and dad had studied theology under Jesuits, the most obvious trickster character to latch onto was Lucifer. In Argentina, where the culture values wit over morality, and the devil is said “to know more for being old than for being a devil” (el diablo sabe más por viejo que por diablo), it’s clear how one can make friends with old foes. To give you an idea of how little the devil freaks out modern Argentinians, there’s at least 1-5 cases a year of people being sacrificed in “satanic” rites (some of them are not truly satanic, they’re just umbanda/quimbanda rites), and we don’t really see anything but vague suspicious attitudes towards occult practitioners (I’ll expand on that on a different post).
There’s a lot of folk tales where the devil’s work is not quite about bringing evil, but rather subverting the stablished order, or destroying existing preconceptions. The devil seduces men into falling for their own folly, which is a traditional trickster attitude. By doing so, the very notion of order is questioned and conventions are revealed to be examined; anyone undergoing the temptation of the devil comes out a wiser man. Jesus’ temptation in the desert comes right after the holy spirit descends on him, and is not just a trial of faith, it’s also a revelation of his own divine nature – it’s at this point that Jesus the Nazarene’s will is subdued to the will of Jesus Christ. The devil is an initiator, when considered as a trickster.
I didn’t quite know that at the time. At ten, I regularly spoke with something that seemed to always be hanging off my shadow; I felt watched and followed everywhere I went, and so I began speaking to it, telling it all about what I was doing and why. Sometimes I even spoke to God, making snide remarks or just informing him matter-of-factly of something that I thought was wrong. I never got an answer back, but that’s fine because I wouldn’t answer myself at ten, either.
Around eight I’d discovered that I had a knack for finding playing cards on the street. Poker or spanish baraja, I always seem to find them, from time to time, when walking around the city. Hindsight is always 20/20, but the ball didn’t drop until I was twenty and I read this one article about someone having encounters with a harlequin. The article in itself is a pretty interesting read, but as I was nearing the end I began to feel a very intense feeling of depersonalization, like reality was crumbling around me. It took me twenty minutes to reign myself in – I literally felt like I was slipping out of reality. No, I wasn’t on drugs. Something had just clicked.
Then I read DC’s Lucifer, and I was full on introduced to the romantic, anti-hero Lucifer that Paradise Lost had brought into the world – but that also had the echoes of that trickster figure I quite seemed to like. The local interpretation I like even more is the devil (or as he’s also called in Argentina, supay) as played by Alfredo Alcon in Nazareno Cruz y el Lobo, a very strange film based on a play based on the argentinian myth of the lobisón, or the seventh son of a seventh son who turns into a werewolf. In it the devil appears as a suave, handsome gaucho dressed in black, and who asks Nazareno, when it’s clear the boy will die, to “put in a good word for me with God” as he’s tired of Hell and his lonely existence.
Munich was a city that I connected to right away; it seemed to jump out to me in a way that no other place (except for London, maybe) had done before. I got the feeling that it was a place of a particularly Solar character, and that at one point it had been consecrated to something. When I reached for Munich, I felt like there was something else in its place, something that had taken over and was answering the phone in the city’s place. I don’t quite make up my mind yet as to who that was, but my money probably is on St. Michael. I love the image of St. Michael and the Dragon. There’s one particular depiction that I favor the most because of how ryhtmic the image is; I love the sinous form of Michael as he stands over the Dragon. I even painted a version of it in a leather jacket I found at a clothes-swap, but subverted with a human-like Lucifer blocking the stab. Non serviam and all that. The image in the original Christian context is meant to represent what is actually an uncredibly unorthodox dualism most likely derived from manicheism and early church fathers shitting all over the source material. Good versus evil, the angel against the dragon. Michael is also supposed to be a solar archangel; we therefore see the sun triumphing against the saturnian underworld forces that the dragon represents, which again can be compared to Jesus’ own triumph against death, that all good christians can emulate.
Gordon White at some point in his podcast Rune Soup dropped a pearl of wisdom that finally managed to put some things in perspective for me: the dragon is the serpent untamed. The Dragon represents Chaos, and once that chaos is controlled (by magic forces), the dragon turns into the Serpent. And the serpent stands for all the good things we normally associate with it: the ourobouros (infinity, rebirth, cyclic nature of time), healing and initiation (through poison) – as symbolized by the caduceus. But I’d like to take the image of Michael and his foe a bit further – as I mentioned, there’s something inherently dualistic about it. Whoever painted that goddamn painting I like so much, there’s something about the composition that truly does justice to that concept, and fucking kudos to you sir, beyond the grave. Michael’s body seems to extend a bit into the dragon, both joined in a perpetual struggle. One and one in their individualities, two foes; two foes and the conjuction of their wills, three – the fight. Michael is the Dragon’s mirror twin – his opposite. When opposites unite (in this case, in a fight), we see the entirety of creation. I thought I was being cute when I realized that you could potentially see Michael and the Dragon (or Lucifer, or Satan, but more of that later) as mirror images of each other but I recently found out that I’m incredibly unoriginal (shocking!) and that other people beat me to the idea. So yeah, that means I can claim at least that it’s a thing.
So, back for a bit to my wanderings in Munich: first thing I see after lunch is this church with a GIANT STATUE OF MY FAVOURITE MOTIF so clearly that was to be my first destination. Michaelskirche is a pretty standard church by itself (much more to my liking is the extraordinary church of San Román in Toledo, originally build in the múdejar style of muslim Toledo and later decorated by christians in gorgeous XIII century romanesque paintings); its charm relies solely on that lovely statue. I did, however, bless myself with some holy water for, y’know, good luck [insert ominous music here]. First day comes and goes as expected; by the end of it I decide to go into the Englischer Garten and maybe do a ritual to help me achieve my magickal goals for the trip. It goes absolutely horrible, it’s an embarrassment for me and the whole universe: can’t concentrate, I’m alone in the dark in the middle of some park in a country I’ve never been in, I’m constantly thinking about the unholy trinity of Bad Things That Can Happen: mugged-raped-killed, and the worst of it all is that while I did manage to find some incense, I couldn’t fucking find a lighter so I can’t even do a small offering to the spirits of the park. I did however see a man come out of some bushes with a bag full of clinking bottles, which I now believe was probably my HGA going to get drunk to forget the second hand embarrassment.
During the night, however, I get a warning: I dream I’m living in a shared house, and I discover someone’s stolen all the feathers from one of my altars, and smashed the black skull holding them. In its place I find instead a white skull with little flowers painted on them. This is the altar dedicated to Lucifer, containing a black skull I got from an alternative gallery in Dublin – originally from Mexico, made with a very beautiful and fragrant black soil. It’s matted with little holes, which I’ve used to hold rook and peacock feathers. There’s other stuff in it, including a little figurine of the Harlequin I got in Venice, and some of the cards I’ve found in the street.
The second day though brings me to Neuschwanstein Castle and Linderhof Palace, both built by bavarian king Ludwig II who had a) an obsession with Michael and b) an obsession with peacocks. Peacocks in european history have symbolized a myriad of things; royal power, riches (and thus, have solar associations), eternal life (in ancient greece it was believed that a peacock’s flesh didn’t decay after death) but much more recently, it’s also been linked to Lucifer in occult circles because of Yazidism. Now Yazidism is a very interesting minority religion from the Middle East (most of the Yazidis live in the Nineveh province in Iraq) – basically it is said they worship the devil, which is why they were massacred by Isis and face persecution from religious extremists; obviously this is not true, although given that I’m not a Yazidi nor a scholar with a firm grasp on the matter I can’t really say for certain what their practices are like. The gist of it, however, concerns a certain Melek Taus, or Peacock Angel, who’s one of seven angels and the one apointed by God to rule over the world. Melek Taus, having fallen once at some point, brings both good and bad to mankind, and is a very ambivalent character – yes, we can all see the similarity. For a post-Blavatsky magician, though, this Melek Taus resonates a lot with the kind of gnostic Lucifer that gets paraded around occult books. Thus, the adoption of the peacock as yet another symbol for that world-ruler Lucifer.
At this point I just want to make a note to say that I’m a disgusting postmodernist in my approach to magick; I don’t give a shit about lineage. I’m writing a post about it at some other time, but the gist of it for the moment is that we can gain a lot of knowledge about entities from the way people have reacted to their existence rather than what the written cannon says. The name Lucifer was a fuck up from the translator in the Bible; yet look at the sheer publicity given to that one fuck up. People have found something so inherently alluring about that name and what it represents that we’ve spent millenia dedicating artwork and music and books to it. And if that isn’t enough to tell you that we’ve got someone on the other side of the line... well, close the tab, read my comic.
BACK TO MUNICH! I’m on the way back to the city after a day walking around palaces and castles. Neuschwainstein castle is my kind of place, full of rooms covered in wood panels and absolutely gorgeous romantic paintings inspired in teutonic mythology and epic poems like Parsifal. It has a bunch of different names, but basically there’s the Wagner opera, based on the epic poem composed by Wolfram Von Echenbach, based on an earlier french poem by Chretien de Troyes, which was left incomplete. Ludwig II, the guy who commissioned the palace, was a friend of Wagner and a huge nerd – hence why the palace was covered in paintings depicting scenes from the poem. I’ve picked up Parsifal but still haven’t finished it; a couple of years ago I even went to see the Wagner opera at the Colón theatre in Buenos Aires but left after the first act (in case you didn’t know, the fucking thing is FIVE AND A HALF HOURS LONG and I’m a pleb). One of the reasons why I went to see it in the first place was that I’d recently read Otto Rahn’s Lucifer’s Court (ding dong Nazi alert!). The book is a good read, you just need to double-check everything he says because it’s a very romantic reading of history (and as you’d expect, the kind of stuff that was used by Nazis to mythologize their racism). Trigger warning for the book: wistful 1930s soyboys and intense mysoginy and anti semitism.
In the book, Rahn puts forth the idea that Wolfram Von Echenbach had coded the story of the albigensian crusade in his epic poem, after hearing other troubadors in the Languedoc tell the story. One little thing I can’t resist to mention is that while he offers a summary of the Cathar ideology as understood in the late XIX century, at the time of writing there were translated copies of the Pistis Sophia available in german universities – the Pistis is not a Cathar text, but Cathar heresy is a direct descendant from the gnostic heresies of the III-IVth centuries. It was the only first hand gnostic text available for years until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi, other than Origen’s scathing reviews in his Against Heresies.
Anyway, Rahn heard about the stories of a great cathar treasure taken from Montsegur, the last stronghold of the Cathars, and speculated that maybe (gasp!) it was the Holy Grail that Perzival was after and that the Grail had originally been the green gem fallen from the crown of Lucifer during the fall. The idea seems to have an echo of sorts - another legend told to me in Toledo (Spain) says that the gem had been used to fashion a table used by King Solomon, which had fallen into Roman hands, which had then been taken by the Goths during their sack of Rome, taken to Toledo when the Visigoth kingdom made it its capital and is now hidden in one of the many tunnels under the city (Rahn, funnily enough, also mentions the posibility the Goths stealing the grail but taking it to Carcassone instead). Perzival, says Rahn, could actually be based on Carcassone’s main man Viscount Raymond Roger Trencavel (who Rahn treats as a Cathar even though we know he was not – he just didn’t give a fuck, and in fact, relied on jews to run Béziers). Trencavel tried to negotiate with the crusaders before rushing back to Carcassone after the entire population of Béziers was massacred, and was imprisioned right after negotiations for surrendering ended, dying of dysentery or poison. His lands were then given to Simon de Monfort. To be honest, as I write this, I’ve just arrived from a two-day trip to Carcassone, and while it’s a lovely fortified town, possibly the most energetic place is the Calvary garden in the bastide. I’ll put my money on Toledo for most likely place to hide the grail, that place is fucking charged.
Rahn’s luciferian origin for the grail is not the only mention of Lucifer in the book. He identifies Apolo with Lucifer, claiming that the cathars believed that Lucifer’s fall actually was the “son of the Nazarene” supplanting the legitimate first-born. There’s a bunch of racism that follows this train of thought that I’m not going to unpack here because I don’t think it’s worth the effort. I’m writing at a time where we have the Nag Hammadi and we know more about the Cathars and the gnostic heresy lineage, and I think that to set Jesus against Lucifer in the context of gnostic thought is a bit stupid. The so-called Ophiates believed the Serpent in the garden of Eden was a messenger from Sophia to save humanity – who the demiurge had created with a bit of the spark that came from the One Unknowable God, and thus was capable of going back to the source and uniting with the godhead. Jesus then, was another messenger, and one would think then, a pal of the serpent.
The identification with Apollo is a curious one, as he’s a solar deity – consider that Lucifer is the son of the morning, thus identified with Venus, known also as the morningstar. Lucifer’s then is the sun before the sun; and while I do think he has some solar qualities, they’re a conflation of the original association with Venus. In a way he’s the sun, but he’s also the sun that’s not. Let’s think for a moment of his double identity as the Devil, lord of the Underworld/Hell/Sheol, and then it’s interesting to think that the solar characteristics are transformed when he assumes this chtonic aspect, transforming from visible Sun/Morningstar into Black Sun/Eveningstar. Chew on that for now.
Yet another dude making that Apollo-Lucifer connection was T.C. Lethbridge, who went on to hugely influence modern wicca through authors like the Farrars. He claimed that Lucifer was cognate not only with Apollo, but also with solar celtic deity Lugh/Lugos/Lúg. I don’t particularly see much connection other than the solar attributions (his name derives from an indoeuropean term associated with brightness) but one interesting thing about the continental worship of Lugh is that he appears as a male triple deity as attested by inscriptions and votive statues found in France and Spain. Most pagans are used to female triple deities like Hekate, or the Morrigan. Another interesting connection our favourite soyboy makes is that Apollo, as a god associated to poets and bards, would be a good protector for the troubadors. May I remind everyone how musical the devil really is? We all have heard of the american blues devil, the one that appears on a crossroads at night and for the minimum price of your soul, can make you into the best goddamn blues player there’s ever been. In Argentina, in the absence of rap battles there were payadas, where two payadores (imagine wandering gauchos with guitars, it’s pretty awesome) would battle each other with improvised songs; rhyming to see who was the best composer. Out of all the payadores, perhaps the most famous is Santos Vega, who only lost a payada against the Devil himself. (illustration here)
The argie troubadors would also know to go to the devil to make a deal for some mad guitar skillz. He’s said to run some wicked universities called Salamancas, normally accessible at the top of a mountain, or a cave, or in a vizcachera (a hole left in the ground by the vizcacha, a mammal). The entrance exam consists basically in renouncing god, but may also include other physical ordeals (cough, initiation ordeals, cough) like walking on broken glass, fire, etc. Jorge Cafrune sings, very sorrowfully,
Already poor and almost naked, and having nothing to eat
I reached the Salamanca, to see Lucifer
“Mandinga, open the door”, I said when I arrived
“I fear almost nothing, so tired I am of suffering”
“Come on in, poor gaucho, nothing will bother you
Living in my Salamanca, nothing will you want for”
The morning is upon us, the morningstar is almost gone
Give me some black ink, that a contract must be signed
“Mandinga, open the door, I want to be a guitar player
give me luck in betting, much happinness in love”
“If you want me to open the door, a chacarera you must play”
And in less than it takes a cock to sing, I’d started to pluck the strings
“It goes nicely,” said the Supay “you will not miss a beat,”
“With my tail and my spurs, I will mark the rythim for you”.
Another god associated to music, and someone who’d probably be very fond of the irish ceol agus cráic is none other than goat-y homeboy Pan. I think Rahn mentions it at some point in the book, but I don’t think I’m bringing anything new to the table by pointing out the Pan-devil association; goats, horns and little fat men with goat hindlegs being common depictions of the christian devil as it appropiated the imagery of a classical god. In modern neopaganism Pan is associated with the green-man or the horned god in Wicca, essentially representing a male fertility god associated with the woodland. This male fertility god, who Damh the Bard very cunningly calls the Piper in one of my favorite songs by him, also has some interesting hobbies:
The Piper smiled
And to the priest he said
I was lord of animals
The wild hunt I led
Two things from this: the most well-known Piper in European folklore is perhaps the Pied Piper of Hamelin (Hameln – the actual mystery told in the fable happened in 1284, just 64 years after the death of Von Echenbach and 59 years since the end of the Albigensian Crusade fyi). Said piper in Hamelin rids a town from a rat infestation, and when the people in the town are shown to be ungrateful little shits, he disappears with all the children following in tow. That, my dears, is the work of the trickster. Interesting as well is how our Piper is sometimes shown in Harlequin-like clothing – an inscription from the 17th century in the town talks about a “piper dressed in multiple colors” seducing the 130 kids, who are lost then in the calvary (go pay a visit to the local spirits in your calvaries!!).
Second thing: the mention of this green man/male fertility god leading the wild hunt. Brief recap: the wild hunt is this old european folk tale of a group of phantasmagorical figures who are seen on a procession (most of the time, they seem to be dressed for hunting). This wild hunt could be headed by a historical figure, or even a god (Odin is a favorite in northern Europe). I may mention as well that one of the french names for the wild hunt is Mesnie Hellequin – hellequin is the origin of the english word for Harlequin. Wild hunt sightings were bad omens, either auguring wars, or plague, or the death of the person who witnessed it. More close to home for me is the Galician recension of this legend, the Santa Compaña – where a procession of souls is seen, with the leading man or woman carrying a cross.
BACK TO MUNICH – for the last time. At this point, I’ve finally come to my Expected Revelation and I know I need to do a small dedication ritual. It’s softly raining, it’s a saturday night, it’s kind of cold: perfect for the satanists to come out to sacrifice in the English garden in Munich. (Hint – Saturday – Saturn’s day, the Opposer planet in the solar system, the one associated with the underground and death, and one that also has a very interesting history of demonization in the modern and ancient world. I might mention as well, I was born on a Saturday on the fourth day of the fourth month at four in the afternoon, in the middle of a seasonal autumn storm. I was always meant to be an annoying edgy contrarian).
This time I’ve got the incense, I managed to buy some lighters, and even bought at a souvenir shop outside of Neuschwainstein Castle a candleholder in the shape of a dragon (it’s fabulously kitsch, I fucking love it). So I make my way into the park, and find a nice spot right next to one of the canals that run around the city. This time I make an offering to the spirits of the place, light the incense and the candles (the rain didn’t take them out, thankfully) and perform a small ritual. This time I can imagine my HGA, hungover, was probably giving me the thumbs up.
AND THEN... I get back to the hotel room, and my throat is sore and I’m feeling the tell tale signs of a fever. I spend a really terrible night, unable to really sleep due to the fever until, at about 2 in the morning, I’m deriliously thinking that Michael didn’t really like that a dirty southamerican satanist was doing dedication rituals to Lucifer in his backgarden and that he’d stricken me down. I visualize that beautiful painting of Michael and the Dragon... and I immediately feel the fever breaking and the throat pain disappears. Duly noted.
There’s something to be said about sickness and initiations, but my mind is not yet made up about what exactly transpired then. The dream on the first night and the sickness on the second seem a bit of an attack from a hostile entity (yeah, fuck you Michael, I like your buddy Raphael better) but there isn’t creation without a bit of destruction, and all in all everything was rather harmless.
THE CONCLUSION -
In the same way that all fandoms have that one epic shitstorm that re appears from time to time, I feel like magickal traditions always have that one thing that their practicioners will have to refer to when they start the conversation - “oh yeah I’m x but y theme is not representative of my practice”. Lucifer has always been a hugely multifaceted figure, and every single person writing about him will go “he is this but not that” and that’s kind of the big shitstorm plaguing every written piece of him ever. And it’s fine in a way, not everybody connects to the a deity in the same way. But the result is a heavily mutilated picture that doesn’t quite satisfy me. There’s the people who will claim that Lucifer and Satan are two different entities – thus making him out to be a spirit of light who’s purely positive and enlightening. But outside of western contexts, enlightment and trascendence don’t come without pain and suffering; and even within the western esoteric tradition we see examples of this in the ordeal of the crossing of the Abyss. Or just ask anybody who’s had a real intense kundalini awakening, if it’s a pleasant experience at all. So Lucifer can’t be just mushy and warm and blond and safe; at some point he needs to get his hands dirty and maybe knock a tooth off or two. So yeah, this disassociation for me is very unsatisfying.
There’s also the people who will claim that Lucifer/Satan are merely contrarian spirits, existing in opposition to God, working in the shadow of the tree of life. Which would be fine except that most of the time this is heavily coated in anti-christian dogma of the most infuriating kind (the kind meant to answer to southern baptism christianity instead of the complex folk catholicism I grew up with), so I can’t work with that.
And finally, I feel like there’s something earthy, something that is vaguely explored in luciferian witchcraft, where Lucifer adopts a more earthly guise as the God of the Witches, and his association with the woods and nature becomes stronger. But sometimes he’s just another name for Pan, sometimes he’s just something more alien.
The gist of the matter is that for me, it makes sense to see Lucifer not as one god but as a triple deity.
He’s Lucifer in his higher aspect, in the trascendental realms; pure solar deity, giver of knowledge, the blond guy in the nice suit, associated with venus, the sun, the (feathered, sometimes) serpent.
He’s Baphomet in his terrestrial aspect, leader of the Wild Hunt, a green man in his own right. He’s the satyr in the forest, the trickster, the piper. The animal to represent him is the goat.
He’s Satan in his chtonic aspect, lord of the underworld. He’s the Accuser, the black sun. The revealer of all hidden things. Saturn. The animal is the Dragon.
So yeah, I think that it not only makes sense from a theoretical perspective to deal with him as a triple deity, but also on the practical side the triplicity lends itself to loads of different ways to work with him. It’s easy enough to see above that the associations are vertical in nature (underworld/earth/heaven) which begs the construction of a world tree for the mythology. I think it could also be mapped temporarily (past/present/future), and even structured in an emanational model.
My next objective is to build a good corpus of material to work with him; I’ve a couple of ideas in the works, hopefully to be fleshed out in the near future.