The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code (21 page)

The serpent - taken to be the embodiment of wickedness - successfully tempts Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. Yet in discovering evil, they also discovered good, and their Luciferan spirit of enquiry was ignited, which led to all human progress.

William Blake's Glad Dav encompasses the joy of being human, acknowledging the endless challenges in which the real Lucifer revels.

The ancient Egyptian god Set, destroyer and avenger - but was he also the model for the Israelites' Yahweh?

The Egyptians' magical child-god Horus, defier of the evil Set, Horus is the nearest Egyptian equivalent to the bright `Son of the Morning', Lucifer, who challenged Yahweh and lost - or so we are told ...

The Roman goddess Diana Lucifera - the illuminator or enlightener. The church hated and feared pagan goddesses for their power and the inspiration they offered to ordinary women.

Pan, the beautiful god of nature, caressing the sacred snake of wisdom. In his mature guise of horns and hooves he became the Christians' model for the Devil.

The face of the man on the Shroud, seen in an extraordinarily detailed photographic negative. Does the image behave like a photograph because that is what it is?

Portrait of the man on the Shroud. But is this really Jesus Christ, or the face of the great Luciferan artist and illusionist, Leonardo da Vinci as depicted below?

Da Vinci's preliminary sketch for The Virgin and Child with St Anne. Is the baby Jesus blessing John, or is he steadying his head to take a blow? Leonardo the Luciferan imbued many of his works with profoundly heretical messages about the superiority of the Baptist. Note the severed head hidden in the landscape at the top right-hand corner.

D. G. Rossetti's depiction of Mary Magdalene shows a flame-haired passive beauty. Known to her devotees in France as `Mary Lucifer' - the light-bringer - her red hair signified sexual energy, perhaps the main reason that red-haired women were believed to be witches.

Goya's famous The Witches' Sabbath superbly evokes the sinister horror of a coven's worship of the goat-like Devil. Unfortunately most of the more lurid accounts of the Sabbath came from the imagination of `witches' under torture.

No one knows exactly how many so-called `witches' were tortured and burned in Europe over at least 300 years. Estimates vary wildly between 5 million and a hundred thousand! But most of the accused were completely innocent of trafficking with the Devil.