The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code (39 page)

The second involves disciplining and clarifying your mind till it becomes pure and strong enough to respond to a spiritual order of life and wisdom. That is why in our Second Degree the discovery of a sacred symbol in the centre of the building shows a first glimpse of your personal centre. This knowledge is followed by a desire to wipe from your heart all obstacles to complete union with this centre.

The third stage, the `last and greatest trial', involves the voluntary dying of your sense of ego and separation from the universal life-essence. As your limited personal ego dies you become conscious of a bright morning star within you lightening your mental horizon.

This is the great secret of Masonry: by instruction and discipline each of you can achieve conscious realization of the unity of your centre.

But why is such a theory a secret? It is because it can only be understood as a personal experience. The experience must be prepared for in secret, be realized in secret, and it remains incomprehensible and incommunicable to anyone who has not lived it.

Masonry leaves you free to follow your own religion, in the sure knowledge that every religion leads ultimately to one centre. It is a preparation for what can be realized in its fullness only by initiation 65

Many of those who attack the Masons are outraged that they dare even use the names of pagan gods, as in the following extract from the notes of `ultimate Masonic guru'66 Walter Leslie Wilmshurst (d.1939), writing about the meaning of the term `Son of the Widow':

All initiates have a common mother. In Egypt she was called Isis, the universal widow. Do not be frightened of a so-called pagan name. Names change but reality endures. Later she came to be called ... the Mother of us all ... [the] Craft we speak and think of as our mystical and beloved Mother. She, like the Goddess, is a widow, widowed of her Grand Master and guiding hand. She too stands draped in veils, dark and forbidding without, yet shining and glorious within .. 67

Once again we see a healthy regard for tolerance, a Gnostic application of the meaning of the Goddess as God and - whether `official' or not - a profound comprehension of the high Luciferan qualities of enlightenment and scientific enquiry that are, unfortunately, routinely, even predictably, denounced as Satanic. As always, this is a very sad commentary on bigotry and human stupidity, but the mistaken identity of Lucifer as synonymous with the Devil has unfortunately only too often been reinforced by the often confused tenets of modern `Satanism'.

Wickedest in the world

With a practising Satanist6H on board Royal Navy frigate HMS Cumberland perhaps one might expect ill luck to dog its wake (although some might say heading for the Gulf is quite bad enough). Twenty-four-year-old Leading Hand Chris Cranmer from Edinburgh had read a book by the late Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, and realized that he must have been an instinctive Satanist all along 69 The story was greeted with delight by the media - the irresistible headline `The Devil and the deep blue sea' appearing in at least two newspapers70 - but less so by the representatives of the old guard." After all, his new religion declares:

Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence; Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek; and Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental or emotional gratification."

However, a Satanic spokesman was careful to point out `We do not murder children, kill animals or do weird things to virgins.' And to Satanists, `stupidity is very, very bad.'73

(The decision by the Royal Navy to permit Cranmer to practise his religion at sea means that if he is killed in action, he could be buried at sea by a priest of the Church of Satan.)

It is not difficult to be seduced by LaVey's easy style and irreverent gibes at the established religions, especially for those who have suffered at their hands. To such people after years of genuflection and watching one's every thought for sinfulness the apparent blasphemy of LaVey's description of the crucifixion as `pallid incompetence hanging on a tree' can be not only delightfully liberating in its rebellious daring, but also profoundly thoughtprovoking. After all, in essence Jesus was a failed Messiah - no Jew would accept him as such when he met his end so shamefully as a crucified criminal. And he predicted he would return within the lifetime of his apostles ...

In his Satanic Bible LaVey waxes lyrical about his Lord Satan, who is to him `the spirit of progress, the inspirer of all great movements that contribute to the development of civilization and the advancement of mankind. He is the spirit of revolt that leads to freedom, the embodiment of all heresies that liberate.' So far, so Luciferan.74

In 1969 on the last night of April - the old witch festival of Walpurgisnacht - the sixteen-year-old LaVey was inspired to launch his Church after observing the hypocrisy of church-going men lusting after showgirls, announcing `I knew then that the Christian Church thrives on hypocrisy, and that man's carnal nature will out! . . . Since worship of fleshly things produces pleasure, there would be a temple of glorious indulgence . . .'75

In his job as photographer for the San Francisco Police Department he was confronted with the worst sights possible, but to him more sickening was the endless litany of people saying, `It's God's will.' In fact, just like the officiating priest in Huysmans' Black Mass, LaVey's Satanic libertinism was perhaps surprisingly underpinned by a real sense of injustice, a railing against God's apparent obliviousness to human suffering. The fact that this archSatanist does not wallow in the almost unimaginable sort of human degradation frozen by his camera for the police department, but is horrified by it, reveals if anything a lack of real evil.

His jokey, irreverent style is undeniably appealing, although often rather adolescent. He writes: `Martin Luther dreamed up Protestantism while sitting on the toilet, and we know what a big movement that became.'76 But LaVey was deadly serious about his Satanism, explaining carefully however that to worship the Devil means being brave and proud, and to cynically acknowledge Man's basic egoism and instincts. `Man is the only animal who must be continually reminded of existence. Any sensation will do.'77

However, LaVey's new version of an old religion (or antireligion) was by no means merely a temple to libertinism made more shocking with satanic invocations. The Church of Satan is brutal about the weak or those who simply get in one's way (although it must be said that Jesus' `Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth' can be seen as a cynical politician's ploy - after all, the Meek are the very people who would never complain if they failed to get it!) In the opening chapter of The Satanic Bible, LaVey thunders: `Cursed are the weak, for they shall inherit the yoke!' and `Cursed are the poor in spirit for they shall be spat upon!'''

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