The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code

CHAPTER ONE Satan: An Unnatural History

All cultures have their creation myths - the ancient Egyptians believed that the god Atum, deity of the solar disk and the sun itself, masturbated himself, exploding a life-giving burst of energy that seeded the dark unformed void with countless galaxies. In the land of the pyramids there was no impropriety in the concept that `self abuse' created the universe, although millennia later Victorian archaeologists were predictably shocked to the core by the ancient Egyptians' melding of sex and divinity.

In the first act of creation, Atum was perceived as an androgynous figure, the hand that made the world being the female aspect, while his phallus represented the equal and opposite male principle. As the eminent American scholar Professor Karl Luckert writes: `The entire system can be visualized as a flow of creative vitality, emanating outward from the godhead, thinning out as it flows further from its source'. I

However, this apparently primitive - if somewhat explicit - tale actually encompasses a highly sophisticated understanding of the cosmology, as Clive Prince and myself noted in our The Stargate Conspiracy (1999):

It literally describes the `Big Bang', in which all matter explodes from a point of singularity and then expands and unfolds, becoming more complex as fundamental forces come into being and interact, finally reaching the level of elemental matter.'

Unfortunately our own culture's creation myth boasts no orgasmic Big Bang, no universe spawned unashamedly, even proudly, from the explosively virile phallus of the great Creator god.

What we have instead is the story of God's six-day creation followed by the myth of Adam and Eve - essentially the opposite of the Egyptian myth in its furtive, guilt-ridden attitude to nakedness and its emphasis on sexual sin, female culpability and divine retribution from a pathologically wrathful, tyrannical and petty God. Despite millennia of sermonizing and theological debate - in which the sheer nastiness and incompetence of Yahweh has been subjected to the damage limitation of philosophy by far greater minds, apparently, than his - arguably the story as told in the first book of the Old Testament, Genesis, has succeeded in inspiring more evil and more neuroses than Stalin and Freud could ever have dreamt of between them.

In the JudaeoChristian tradition, all human woes supposedly originated in the Garden of Eden, the blissful earthly paradise that God created to provide innocent and unmitigated joy for the two creatures he made in his own image - the prototype man Adam and his critically wayward companion, the first female, Eve. Clearly unwilling to expend too much trouble, God frugally created the world's mother from one of Adam's ribs, although in fact this aspect of the story is a perversion of a myth of a Sumerian goddess who, more understandably, created babies from their mother's ribs in her role `as the Lady of the Rib and Lady of Life'.'

Unfortunately one of the other creatures in the garden was about to become a little too intimate, as it slithered towards them with its burden of horror for the whole of mankind ...

While `Eden' itself may originate in the Sumerian edinu, simply meaning `plain', the term used in Genesis for `paradise' is a mixture of various near eastern words, including the old Persian paradeida, which may mean `a royal park' or `enclosed garden',' denoting a sense of exclusivity, even of luxury. Indeed, the Greek paradeisos was often used by writers such as Xenophon to describe the lush walled gardens of wealthy monarchs like King Cyrus, envied throughout the Near East for his opulence. Perhaps the old Mesopotamian belief in the `king as gardener' underpinned the Eden imagery ,5 where God himself creates the garden, and Adam - a true human king-figure before the Fall - maintains it. (And it may be significant that the priests of several ancient Mediterranean religions, such as those of the Egyptian Osiris cult, were known as `gardeners' and that Mary Magdalene, who, I have argued elsewhere, was a priestess of a goddess-worshipping religion,' believed the risen Jesus to be a `gardener'.)

`Eden' may refer to the wider region in which the first garden was believed to be located, variously described in the Old Testament as the `Garden of the Lord" or the `Garden of God',8 a verdant place that was soon synonymous with peace, tranquillity and, above all, innocence. Four rivers gave the garden its lush fertility, providing abundant food for its teeming and diverse plant and animal life, inspiring generations of Christian artists and writers.

Many Jewish and early Christian chroniclers pursued a fruitless task of trying to locate the four rivers of Paradise. These are named by the Bible as the Euphrates and the Tigris - both of which are real and important features of the near east - together with the apparently mythical Gihon and Pison, although the first-century Jewish chronicler Flavius Josephus believed that one of the latter was actually the Nile, placing Eden in north Africa. Indeed, some early Church Fathers and late classical writers placed Eden in Ethiopia, Mongolia or even India. Others have located the earthly Paradise in eastern Turkey, where it would have been served by the Euphrates, Tigris and the River Murat, the north fork of the Euphrates providing the identity of the mysterious fourth river.

Many archaeologists and theologians had long believed Eden to have been situated in Sumer, the ancient area approximately 125 miles (200 km) beyond the northern tip of the Persian Gulf, but in the 1980s Dr Juris Zarins argued that the original Paradise had sunk beneath the waves as the waters of the Gulf had risen dramatically since the time described in Genesis. Zarin also suggested that the `Gihon' is now the River Karun, which rises in Iran, flowing south west into the Persian Gulf. This is an exquisite irony - today's Iraq is no one's Paradise!

However, it hardly matters where Eden may have been - always assuming that it is a valid exercise to read the Old Testament so literally - for, like the Holy Grail, its significance is so much more potent if seen by the eyes of the heart, not the eyes of the head. Eden may have had the geographical reality of, say, New York or Madrid (or the comparative unreality of Las Vegas or Blackpool), but its maps are really treasures of the mind, like Shangri-La or Atlantis. In any case, Eden represents the Golden Age, when nature was at peace with itself and mankind `walked with God'. Unfortunately, however, the loss of Paradise, even as a mythical concept, has proved far more traumatic to the human race than any bitter-sweet longing for the delights of Camelot.

`Eden' remains a synonym for the ultimate, unspoilt and ineffably beautiful location. When Charles Dickens wished to underscore the true vileness of an allegedly paradisical plot of American swamp in his Martin Chuzzlewit,9 he simply called it `Eden' with characteristic irony. Surely it is one of the few instantly recognized names of ancient myth that is as well known today as it was millennia ago.

The story of Man's10 abrupt expulsion from Eden - be it fiction, metaphor or literal fact - has become etched too deeply on the collective unconscious to ignore, for it has set in stone JudaeoChristian attitudes to men, women, original sin (and therefore children), the Creator and his opposition, Lucifer/Satan/the Devil. This all-powerful myth has imbued us all at some level of perception with a belief that life is a curse, that death is the end - a collapsing back of the body into its constituent dust, no more - that women are inherently on intimate terms with evil, that men have carte blanche to do as they please with not only all the animals in the world but also their womenfolk, and that God, above all, is to be feared. Snakes come out of it rather badly, too, as the embodiment of evil, the medium through which Satan tempts we pathetic humans. The Devil, on the other hand, is the only being in the tale to show some intelligence, perhaps even humour, in taking the form of a wriggling, presumably charming, phallic symbol through which to tempt a woman.

As both Judaism and Christianity depend so intimately on the basic premises of Genesis, this lost paradise of the soul is evoked several times throughout both Old and New Testaments. The crucified Jesus promised the thief hanging on the cross next to him `Today you will be with me in Paradise'," although it is unclear how those listening may have interpreted this term. Did they see it as synonymous with `heaven', a state of bliss that must remain unknowable to the living (and remain for ever unknown to the wicked)? Or did it somehow encompass the old idea of the luxuriant garden?

Images of the garden as Paradise recur throughout the Old Testament, assuming a highly sensuous form in its love poem, the Song of Songs - believed to be the erotic praise of the Queen of Sheba by her lover, King Solomon - in powerful phrases such as `Our bed is verdant';12 `You are a garden locked up, my sister, my bride," and `You are a garden fountain/a well of flowing water streaming down from Lebanon' .14

(These blatantly sexual verses are still widely interpreted by modern churchgoers and theologians as `an allegory of the great Christian drama of sin and redemption, affirming the love of Christ for both the individual soul and his Church',15 which would be truly remarkable, for they were composed centuries before Jesus was born. Not only that, but the ripe lasciviousness which summons up sometimes disconcertingly vivid images of Solomon and Sheba's amorous activity in their tented boudoir seems a world away from the austere love of Ecclesia, the Christian Church. However, as we shall see, the Song of Songs does have some light to shed on a great Christian mystery, but hardly one that would feature in any sermon.)

As in all the best dramas, early harmony must be doomed - or there simply won't be much of a story - so the scenario described at the beginning of Genesis is not to last: after all, no state of earthly bliss can endure. It was to be all downhill after the creation.

As the original naturists Adam and Eve frolicked among amiable animals, one of which had already evolved a remarkable talent. This was a talking snake, whose ability seemed to take its creator by surprise, although this is by no means the last time his own creations will catch Yahweh unawares.

Having created Adam and Eve `in his own image' he then ordered them not to touch the fruit of `the tree of the knowledge of good and evil' in the middle of the garden, on pain of death - presumably a concept they had some difficulty understanding. But along slid the loquacious serpent, who swiftly took the opportunity to whisper with his flickering forked tongue to Eve: `Did God really say, "You must not eat from any tree in the garden?""'

When Eve dutifully repeats God's proscription on `fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden', the serpent responds `You will not surely die ... For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil'" [My emphasis]. While the humans seem to be enticed primarily by the lusciousness of the forbidden fruit, the serpent concentrates on making explicit the appeal of becoming like God, with the implication of a potential challenge to his authority. If his intention were simply to make mankind fall from grace - evil for its own sake - there was no need to spell it out for them. `Look at the lovely fruit!' would have done just as well. Did the serpent actually care about Adam and Eve's intellectual development? In any case, there must be something special about the fruit because God put it out of bounds so specifically. So they eat.

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened . . .l8

They may have had only the taste sensation in mind - the fruit being `also desirable for gaining wisdom' seems something of an afterthought - but in gobbling it down the damage is done. Their guilty snack is a moment of pure cataclysm, for far from being the equivalent of being caught with their hands in the cookie jar, it opened the portals for evil - although of course in order to tempt the woman Satan was already present, so presumably the Fall was only a matter of time, fruit or no fruit.

The sensuous indulgence changes everything. The man and his wife realize abruptly that they are not only naked but that their nudity is a shameful thing - the implication is that this is actually unnatural, some kind of perversion - so they hastily manufacture clothes out of leaves, revealing if nothing else that sewing is apparently instinctive human behaviour in an emergency.

But as they cower in the bushes covered in fig leaves, they realize that all is lost: God is walking in the garden `in the cool of the day' and calls out `Where are you?' Adam tells the Almighty that he is hiding because he `was afraid because I was naked'. God is outraged, demanding to know (without a flicker of irony) `Who told you you were naked?' Like an irate schoolmaster trying to elicit a confession from a mulish class, he adds: `Have you eaten from the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?"9

When God wrathfully demands to know how they knew they were naked, Adam pipes up disloyally: `The woman you put here with me - she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it.' After the world's first sneak has finished blaming his wife, and in doing so also even implies that he blames God for giving him Eve as his companion, she, too, is keen to pass the blame on to the serpent, which God declares:

Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, And between your offspring and hers; He will crush your head And you will strike his heel.20

Yet the symbolism of the snake is open to very different interpretations. In ancient Egypt it was used as the uraeus, the cobra that decorated the head-dress of the royal family as `Lord of Life and Death',2! the ultimate symbol of earthly power. According to the medieval Jewish Cabbalists, the secret or esoteric number of the serpent in Eden is the same as that for the Messiah: as the infamous - but extremely well educated - ritual magician Aleister Crowley wrote: `[the snake] is the Redeemer', noting `the serpent is also ... the principal symbol of male energy'22 and `creator and destroyer, who operates all change'.23 (He also amused and shocked by proffering `the serpent's kiss' to women, especially those whom he had just met. Of course it was a more or less painful bite.) To the heretical Gnostic Christians, the serpent, coiled around the Tree of Life, was to be celebrated as the bringer of gnosis, of intense personal enlightenment of the spirit. And to the Tantrics, the eastern devotees of sacred sexuality, the snake represents the power of kundalini, the creative sexual force that is normally envisaged as being curled up at the base of the spine. When roused it produces intense heat and power - but woe betide the individual who has not prepared diligently for its awakening with rigorous magical and spiritual discipline, for it can become awesomely uncontrollable.

However, in the original Eden myth, as the serpent slithers off to a fate of humiliation24 God rounds on Eve, cursing her:

I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; With pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, And he will rule over you.25

The culpability of Eve and the serpent may be endlessly debated, but those four short lines have proved only too influential over the minds of men, not only providing a divine blessing for wife-beaters and all manner of marital abuses, but also - as we shall see - even specifically and egregiously dooming generations of midwives to torture and death. As their medical and herbal knowledge eased the pains of childbirth, they were singled out by an outraged Church as heretics or witches who had deliberately flouted God's holy law. Thousands of midwives were duly hounded to an atrocious death.

(Although when God removed one of Adam's ribs with which to fashion Eve, at least he first mercifully put him to sleep, it is quite incredible that as late as the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria's doctors were horrified when she asked to have her pains relieved for the births of her last seven children by the new anaesthesia. These men of the modern era, the time of rail travel, photography and the telegraph, seriously objected that to kill the agony of childbirth was to risk offending the Almighty, who had made his views on this subject very clear in Genesis. Fortunately for Victorian women and subsequent generations of nervous mothers-to-be, the queen-empress won that particular battle.)

Marilyn Yalom, in A History of the Wife (2001), describes how early Christian Fathers such as Tertullian and Saint Augustine believed that Eve's Fall had `conferred a moral taint on all carnal union, even that within marriage'. While Augustine declared that `married couples should engage in sex only to beget children, and should scrupulously avoid copulating merely for pleasure':

Saint Jerome went even further. He considered sex, even in marriage, as intrinsically evil. He rejected sexual pleasure as filthy, loathsome, degrading, and ultimately corrupting. This linkage of sex and sin, with blame attributed to the daughters of Eve, became increasingly entrenched within the church, and by the fifth century was common currency among ecclesiastical authorities. It was also related to the rise of monasticism, which, by the sixth century, offered an alternative to marriage for Christian men and women. (Institutionalized celibacy has not been a part of Jewish or Muslim practice.)26

Back in a Paradise, trembling on the brink of disaster, Adam and Eve (wearing new suits of clothes made from animal skins for them by God himself) are then summarily expelled, prevented from trying to sneak back in for further helpings of delicious wisdom by `cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life'.27 In the words of the blind English poet John Milton (1608-74), Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell and a fervent Protestant, in his epic religious poem Paradise Lost:

The world was now before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow, Through Eden took their solitary way 28

Although weary and chastened, Milton's Adam and Eve seem on the brink of a great adventure as they resignedly turn their newly clad backs on Paradise. `The world was now before them' - anything could happen now they were no longer institutionalized and free to go and do as they pleased. They might be cursed and even damned, but they had a glimmering of hope.

Yet although, as the French writer Jean Markale notes of our progenitors, `in discovering evil they also discovered good', he goes on to remark astutely: `Men now felt guilty. Guilty of what? We have no idea.'29

It will not be an easy journey. Adam is condemned to a life of `painful toil' with the brutal reminder `dust you are and to dust you will return'. According to Christian theology, their Fall is the original sin with which we are all burdened, even - indeed, especially - newborn babies, who arrive in this world as kicking, screaming proof of Eve's curse, not to mention the very fact that their existence is the inevitable evidence of parental intercourse. Birth itself was shameful. (It was only in the 1950s that pregnancy was mentioned openly in polite society. Before that, euphemisms, such as being in `an interesting condition' applied, and even then some blushes were expected.)

However, in the biblical account, there is no mention that the snake is the Devil, Satan or Lucifer. He is simply a snake, apparently doing what snakes do best - tempting women. The sexual connotations may be cringingly obvious to the post-Freudian world, but they were not necessarily so blatant to our Bible-quoting ancestors. However, it is not much of a leap from the story of the wicked snake to the notion of its being instructed or even possessed by the personification of evil, whoever or whatever that might be: Milton makes the point clear in his description of `... the serpent, or rather Satan in the serpent.'3o

(The identification of snakes with evil is so ingrained that a serpent, tongue flickering horribly, simply had to be the symbol for Hogwarts' house of Slytherin, alma mater of all magicians who went to the bad, in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels. Yet Harry's unconscious skills do set a boa constrictor free from London Zoo, who is polite enough to hiss 'Thanks', before slithering off.)

The unedifying story of the expulsion from Paradise is believed to be essentially about the arrival of sin among humankind - its fall from grace and future as the plaything of evil and the repository for all known pain and suffering. While the preferred modern view is to dismiss it as nonsense or at best see it as an allegory, a surprising number of Christians still believe that Adam and Eve literally existed and that we have since suffered from their sin.

However, perhaps the story is most revealing about God's own nature. He appears to be as much at a loss with Adam and Eve as they are in their new circumstances - and not much of a psychologist, despite having created the prototype man and woman in the first place. Did he really believe that banning a certain substance, the fruit of a tree - that one over there, look! - would mean that they would obediently steer clear of it? Clearly he has a great deal to learn as a father.

Not only does God seem taken aback by the whole episode, but also he seems neither to have understood that he has created intellectual curiosity and a desire for sensuous satisfaction nor that the snake, too, was his handiwork, saddled with a set of characteristics that inevitably led him to tempt the woman. Like Judas in his role as catalyst for Jesus' sacrifice, the snake was doomed from the first. And both are seen as literal embodiments of, or at best, servants of evil. And - after Eve's calamitous fall - traditionally women have been seen as not much better.

Perhaps, too, the myth also contains an element common in modern science fiction, the fear of the robots' rebellion. Just as medieval and Renaissance Jewish legends told of the horror of the golem, a magically animated man, in the story of the Fall God's robotic creatures seize the initiative, revealing an inherent - and potentially dangerous - intelligence that their creator did not want to acknowledge. The creation myth is famously parodied in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, although perhaps it may be less of a travesty and closer to the original than is usually thought.

However, although it might seem a pointless exercise to question or read such a modem interpretation into what is essentially a group of ancient myths, even today's most sharply sophisticated cultures are still heavily influenced by them and their potent ramifications. Even in the twenty-first century, much of the JudaeoChristian legacy informs the way that even most materialist sceptic thinks and behaves. Whether we like it or not, that legacy has built the history that spawned us, and shaped the attitudes that linger, often unpleasantly, in the dark recesses of our minds.

Perhaps, though, God did have a psychological understanding of Eve, knowing she would inevitably fall prey to the serpent. Perhaps the whole episode of the Fall was set up to test the loyalty of the first man and woman. But, in that case, surely their banishment was somewhat harsh? Perhaps a stiff talking-to, literally to put the fear of God into them, and another chance to prove themselves, would have made more sense? It is only too easy to liken God's reaction to that of a spoilt child taking out his spite on his new toys, the rather mindless Adam and Eve, when they failed to work according to the instructions. Indeed, if he had never experienced any other being standing up to him, a spoilt child is pretty much what he would have become. But was he ever challenged - apart from Adam and Eve in what was to prove their critical act of rebellion?

According to the Old Testament, Yahweh was confronted by one of his own leading angels, Lucifer, in a sort of explosive palace coup - which, of course, failed spectacularly, ending with the rebel leader's banishment to Earth, and beyond, into the nightmarish realms of hell.

To the Jews, the infernal regions were ablaze with Gehenna, a river of fire, although the name was often applied to the whole area. The concept of Hell as a fiery pit, so beloved of medieval theologians and witch-hunters, actually originated in ancient Egyptian wall paintings of `the wicked' being consumed by fire, although in fact these tormented souls were not meant to represent human sinners, but elemental spirits, enemies of the sun god Atum.31 However, that religion never laid any emphasis on eternal punishment for sin, the afterlife being instead a sort of assault course of monsters and demons that could be overcome with the right spells.

Although Egyptians spent their entire lives, and often their fortunes, trying to escape death - which they called `an abomination' - an essential aspect of their belief was that the dying-andrising god Osiris had saved humanity from death through the process of rebirth.

But in the West, the concept of Hell has long proved useful to keep the vulnerable in terror of God. Although this subject will be discussed in detail later, the following extract from the nineteenth century Father Furniss' Sight of Hell, an improving tract for young people, will suffice to convey these sadistic fantasies:

Of two little maids of sixteen, one cared only for dress, and went to a dancing school, and dared to disport in the park on Sunday instead of going to mass: the little maid stands now, and forever will stand, with bare feet upon a red-hot floor. The other walked through the streets at nights and did very wicked things; now she utters shrieks of agony in a burning oven. A very severe torment - immersion up to the neck in a boiling kettle - agitates a boy who kept bad company, and was too idle to go to mass, and a drunkard; avenging flames now issue from his ears. For like indecencies, the blood of a girl, who went to the theatre, boils in her veins; you can hear it boil, and her marrow is seething in her bones and her brain bubbles in her head. `Think,' says the compassionate father, `what a headache that girl must have!'32

Surely no comment is necessary.

As we shall see in a later chapter, some of the worst excesses of hellish punishments were invented by patriarchal societies to terrorize women. Barbara Walker notes, for example, that in this male-dominated Hell:

Women who scolded would be forced to lick hot stoves with their tongues. Women who showed disloyalty to men would be hung up by one leg, while scorpions, snakes, ants and worms dug their way in and out of their bodies 33

`Disloyalty to men' is a conveniently loose term open to a wide variety of interpretations.

We are not told whether Hell existed before the war in Heaven, but it certainly existed afterwards, when Lucifer lost his heavenly status. Isaiah apparently describes this landmark event:

How art thou fallen from heaven O day-star, son of the morning! (Helel ben Shahar) How art thou cast down to the ground, That didst cast lots over the nations!

And saidst in thy heart: `I will ascend into heaven, Above the stars of God (El) Will I exalt my throne; And I will sit upon the mount of meeting, In the uttermost parts of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the Most High (Elyon).' Yet thou shalt be brought down to the nether-world, To the uttermost parts of the pit.3a

While the putative existence of this once-great, but apparently anonymous, hero of Heaven provides the opposing force to God's goodness - and to a cynic an excuse for the evils of the world - in fact the passage quoted above may well simply be an allusion to a Phoenician or Canaanite myth about Helel, son of the god Shaher, who, coveting the almighty god's throne, was cast down into the abyss. But while in northern Syria there is an ancient poem about Shaher (dawn) and Shalim (dusk) - two divine offspring of the god El - no mention is made in the Canaanite sources of a Lucifer figure or a revolt against God.

Lucifer was also associated with the Assyro-Babylonian lightning god, Zu the Storm Bird, sometimes known as `the fiery flying serpent'. He was condemned for seeking Zeus' Tablets of Destiny, given to him by his mother, the goddess Tiamat. Zu cried: `I will take the tablet of destiny of the gods, even I; and I will direct all the oracle of the gods; I will establish a throne and dispense commands, I will rule over all the spirits of Heaven!'35

However, the description of the fallen one in the passage quoted above is seen as a clue to his identity by many Apocalyptic writers and Christians, particularly evangelicals or fundamentalists. `How art thou fallen from heaven 0 day-star, son of the morning!' is taken as a reference to Lucifer, whose name means 'Light-bringer', and therefore by extension is associated with the radiant Morning Star, the perfect symbol of hope that comes with each bright new day. Lucifer is identified as the former hero of heaven who challenged God, lost, and, together with his faithful angelic hordes, was exiled to Hell. Milton writes of the agonies of the fallen being, once God's favourite, now the personification of evil as Satan: `Apostate Angel, though in pain/Vaunting aloud, but rack'd with deep despair' .36

The first book of the apocryphal book of Enoch refers to the falling angels as stars, listing them by name as `Semiazaz, Arakiba, Rameel, Kokabiel, Tamiel, Danel, Ezeqeel, Baraqijal, Asael, Armaros, Batarel, Ananel, Zaqiel, Samsapeel, Satarel, Turel, Jomjael and Sariel' 31 Perhaps this passage was the origin of the confusion between the story of the Watchers - the angels who were overcome with lust for human women and fathered a race of giants with them - and Isaiah's story. Later Christian writers such as Saint Jerome also associate the fallen being described in Ezekiel 28: 13-15 with Lucifer:

You were in Eden, the garden of God; Every precious stone was your adornment: Carnelian, chrysolite, and amethyst; Beryl, lapis lazuli, and jasper; Sapphire. Turquoise, and emerald; And gold beautifully wrought for you,

Mined for you, prepared in the day you were created. I created you as a cherub With outstretched shielding wings; And you resided in God's holy mountain; And walked among the stones of fire. You were blameless in your ways, From the day you were created Until wrongdoing was found in you By your farflung commerce You were filled with lawlessness And you sinned. So I have struck you down From the mountain of God, And I have destroyed you, 0 shielding cherub, From among the stones of fire.

Here a great anti-hero's dazzling radiance is emphasized: he is hung about with the world's greatest riches, resplendent with the most fabulous jewels and gold. But he transgressed through his `farflung commerce' apparently suggesting an unpopular trading deal - which is a little odd but meaning `social relations' or even `sexual intercourse', - and lost it all. Worse than bankruptcy by far, however, was the fact that he has been struck down `From among the stones of fire', brought to the lowest state imaginable, apparently both materially and spiritually. Superficially this story seems to reinforce that of the fallen angel in Genesis, stressing the terrible dynamics of Luciferan exile.

Once again, though, there are other interpretations: it has been argued that this passage actually refers to the proud king Nebuchadnezzar, who suffered a dramatic fall from grace.38 But the associations with Lucifer persist, although not always in the context of evil. The Morning Star god, the Canaanites' Shaher, is still commemorated in the Jewish Shaharit or Morning Service 39 His twin brother, the Evening Star Shalem, announces the daily death of the sun and utters the Word of Peace, shalom. The twin gods were openly worshipped in the `House of Shalem' - or Jerusalem.

Their female parent was the Great Mother goddess Asherah, or Helel, the pit. The Canaanites believed that Shaher sought to usurp the glorious sun god, but was defeated and cast down from heaven as a lightning bolt. A seventh-century pagan dirge to the fallen one reads:

How hast thou fallen from heaven, Helel's son Shaher! Thou didst say in thy heart, I will ascend to heaven, above the circumpolar stars I will raise my throne, and I will dwell on the Mount of Council in the back of the north; I will mount on the back of a cloud, I will be like unto Elyon 40

The prototype for the story of Lucifer's fall originated in the Persian myth of Ahriman, the Great Serpent or Lord of Darkness, who challenged his rival, the sun god, Ahura Mazda, the Heavenly Father. ('Ahura' was once a feminine name4' As Jean Markale notes: `Ahura-Mazda was originally a luminous being who materialized in the form of a female goddess.')42 Being cast out of Heaven, Ahriman tempted the first man and woman in his guise as the Serpent, and prophets declared he would be defeated for ever at the end of the world. But he was Ahura-Mazda's twin, from the womb of Infinite Time, the Primal Creatress, not his inferior. In fact, Ahriman is honoured for having created the physical world, and became a major influence on the cult of Mithras - another dying-and-rising god - as `Armanius', the secret god of magic. The Persian emphasis on opposite-but-equal gods of Light and Dark enjoyed a renaissance in the beliefs of the Christian Gnostics, as we shall see.

In some versions of Lucifer's fall, Lucifer fought and lost to the archangel Michael, who remains for ever his personal enemy. (Both angels had shared similar characteristics, being associated with light and fire.) However, some of the angelic host refused to take sides and - somehow - managed to remain neutral, and will resurface later as central characters in the myths surrounding the Holy Grail.

In the last book of the Bible, the New Testament Revelation, the story is told thus:

And there was a war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down - that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him a3

Revelation also tells us that `the dragon's tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to earth,' which is taken to mean that a third of Lucifer's angelic followers fell with him.

Later versions of the Fall describe Lucifer being angered because God created a brother for him, Jesual the Son, from whose head sprang Sin, who in turn gave birth to Death. It was only after suffering this extra humiliation that Lucifer was ejected from his heavenly home.

According to Milton, the heavenly hosts - presumably slightly ruffled by Lucifer's dramatic exit from their number but no doubt rather smug at having made the wiser choice to remain in Heaven - were divided up into the following hierarchical categories: Powers, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominiations, Virtues, Principalities, Archangels and finally, angels. Although much favoured in recent years, especially by the New Age, angels were originally merely God's messengers, and often took the form of ordinary men.

However, in the first century CE the account of the Fall in Genesis was not the only story of mankind's earliest days that circulated among both Christians and Jews. Certain apocryphal tales loosely based on Genesis 6 began to circulate.

When men began to multiply on earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair 45

The `sons of God' being angels, their subsequent enthusiastic coupling with Eve's descendants was a blatant transgression of God's law, but in any case their offspring became the half-human, half-angel `giants' (or `heroes' in some versions) in the `earth ... the mighty men of renown', whom later writers had no compunction about categorizing as demons. (The early Christians believed they were constantly at the mercy of attack from demons of all sizes, often quite literally. Saint Paul ruled that women's heads should be covered in church `because of the angels',46 for there was a real fear that female hair attracted daemones (other-worldly entities), much as jam attracts ants. The veils were therefore seen as sensible precautions, a sort of holy mosquito net.)

Another, non-biblical, myth has God calling his angels together to admire his latest creation - Adam. The archangel Michael obediently enthused, but Lucifer was horrified, demanding to know `Why do you press me? I will not worship one who is younger than I am, and inferior. I am older than he is; he ought to worship me! [My emphasis]."'

As Elaine Pagels points out in her excellent Origin of Satan (1995), all the stories of the Fall, both biblical and non-biblical, `agree on one thing: that this greatest and most dangerous enemy did not originate ... as an outsider, an alien, or a stranger. Satan is not the distant enemy but the intimate enemy - one's trusted colleague, close associate, brother.'48 Just like Judas, who was to bring about Jesus' torture and death according to a heavenly script, Satan brings about mankind's freedom of choice, although - as we have seen - he may have done so from almost altruistic motives.

Pagels notes that

Whichever version of his origin one chooses, and there are many, all depict Satan as an intimate enemy ... Those who asked, `How could God's own angel become his enemy?' were thus asking, in effect, `How could one of us become one of them?'49

But while an eagerness to divide the world into rigid categories of `Us' and `Them' is nothing new - the Greeks called foreigners `barbarians' and, tellingly, the Egyptians' word for themselves was simply `human' - the western Christian tradition degraded its enemies as primarily nonhuman: if they challenged Christianity they were God's enemies.

(Yet of course God himself had behaved reprehensibly in the story of the Fall. As Jean Markale writes:

... the Eternal God is bad-natured and horrendously jealous, and ... he behaves like a rich capitalist who has no intention of sharing his eternity with anyone else. For what pleasure would there be in it if everybody had it?)"

While sadly it seems to be a human failing to dismiss those outside the tribe or church as unworthy of the same rights and considerations, the Christians made this a moral and religious issue, which gave their later persecutions a fanatical edge as they used this attitude `to justify hatred, even mass slaughter'.51 As we shall see, this justification was used to extremes by the Inquisitors, largely against `heretics' - free thinkers, Christian dissenters, or women - but `revulsion at this doctrine is one of the main reasons for the decline of belief in the Devil since the eighteenth century' 52 However, while the Jews have tended to dismiss the importance of the Fall as simply an allegory of evil, for many Christians the story of Lucifer remains potent.

Lucifer is also depicted as the immortal serpent Sata, ruler of lightning, who takes on the Hebrew name Satan in Jesus' words: `I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven'.53 However, `Satan' as a synonym for `Lucifer' became `official' among Christians in the late first and second centuries, with the theological writings of Church Fathers Origen (born 185 CE) and Saint Augustine (354-430) - indeed, some theologians argue that Origen was the first to make this connection 54

To the famous Greek philosopher Plato, the god associated with the Morning Star was Aster (which means simply `Star'); Plato realized that it had a strange, dual personality, for it also appeared in a different celestial position in the evening. Plato lauded Aster as the ultimate dying-and-ri sing god, exclaiming: `Aster, once, as Morning Star, light on the living you shed. Now, dying, as Evening Star, you shine among the dead.'S'

A major tendency of JudaeoChristian thought is that God's opposite is a Satan, an `obstructor' of his will - which becomes, in New Testament Greek, diabolos, the Devil. But while the New Testament and the early Christians became increasingly concerned with building up Satan's role as they themselves fell prey to the barbarians and executioners, the Jews were, in the words of the American scholar Jeffrey Burton Russell `moving decisively in the other direction'. He explains: `[To the Jews] evil results from the imperfect state of the created world or from human misuse of free will, not from the machinations of a cosmic enemy of the Lord'."

In the older Jewish traditions Satan is known as Sammael, a

high angel who falls, uses the serpent to tempt Adam and Eve, and acts as tempter, accuser, destroyer and angel of death ... Satan has no existence independent of the Lord, who uses him as tester of hearts, an agent who reports our sins to the Lord, and an official in charge of punishing them 57

Satan continued to lose his personal glamour where the Jews are concerned: by the 1940s he had dwindled to `little more than an allegory of the evil inclination among humans'.51 This sophisticated interpretation remains fairly constant today, certainly among Liberal Jewish congregations. Christianity was, and often still is, rather different in this respect.

In the New Testament, Satan is Antikeimenos, the Adversary or enemy, the `archon of this age' - arction ton aiomon touton - or `ruler' of the early Christian era, according to the Church Father Saint Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch. Since the Fall, the Devil had held sway over humanity, but now the incarnation of Jesus, God's son, has shaken his influence, which will finally be exploded by the `Parousia', or Second Coming of Christ. In the meantime, however, the individual can ensure a place in Heaven via the doctrine of Atonement, a phrase first used by William Tyndale in the first English translation of the New Testament, in 1526. In fact, he had to invent the word - meaning `at-one-ment' - to convey the nowfamiliar idea of reconciliation, itself a term that did not exist in his day 59 This is also found in the later King James' or `Authorized' version of 1611, in New Testament passages such as `We also [have] joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement' 60

However, Jesus became the man-god substitute for a much older idea of the Jewish scapegoat, when the chosen animal was ritually heaped with the sins of the people and sent off into the wilderness to die. But as Barbara Walker explains, `The Jews' Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement, was based on the Sumero-Babylonian kupparu, an atonement ceremony in which a sheep was ceremonially loaded with all the community's sins, and killed.'61 Jesus was symbolized as the sacrificial Lamb of God - although certain heretics, as we shall see, had a startlingly different version of this concept.

The New Testament declares `Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ:'62 that is, victory over `sin, death, and Satan' 63 This triumph was accomplished by Christ's willing death upon the cross, and the spilling of his holy, redemptive blood. As it says on posters outside countless churches: `Christ died for your sins.' Jesus atoned for the sin of Adam and Eve by his sacrifice, and in dying became our saviour. After the doors of Paradise were slammed shut, his blood was the price that re-opened them. However, to non-theologians this presents a complex and rather contradictory conundrum, for if Christ has already died for our sins, why do we need to be baptized, live a good life, and die in a state of grace to hope to reach Heaven? This scenario had not bypassed the Church Fathers: as Barbara Walker notes:

Among medieval theologians there was a general opinion that Jesus' sacrifice was not really effective; only `a few' were saved by the Savior's death. St Thomas Aquinas and others claimed the vast majority of people were still doomed to eternal suffering in hell' Thus the theory of atonement for all time or for all humanity was actually denied by the same church that pronounced it as a basis for worldly power 65

Take the concept of Atonement out of the picture, however, and it makes more sense, for baptism is an outward and visible sign of the individual's cleansing of sin and commitment to lead a good Christian life and deny the Devil. In fact, the early Christians were exorcized before being baptized - no doubt a considerably tougher and perhaps even more traumatic ritual than today's polite dips and modestly clad dunkings. This was hardly surprising, as the precursor of the Christian rite also took that form, the Egyptian baptisms in grand temples dedicated to Isis and Osiris on the banks of the Nile were preceded by public confessions of sins, and dramatic exorcisms 66

Exorcism was necessary for, as we have seen, demons were genuinely believed to be everywhere, in the food the good Christians ate and the wine they drank, in the sidelong glance of a young woman at the well, even in the uncovered tresses of a nubile girl. To the early Christian, everyday life was beleaguered by Satan, a paranoia that in a sense was justified, for who knew which kindly seeming person was actually a spy, about to deliver them up to their pagan persecutors?

Of course all pagans were deemed to be inherently heretics, followers of the Devil, although, according to the Church Father Irenaeus, a heretic was any individual whom a bishop had singled out as a heretic. As Jeffrey Burton Russell remarks dryly, `Since no objective definition of "heretic" is possible, this definition was almost inevitable.'67

The pagans were clearly satanic, for their gods had even dared mimic Christ's life and death. The Egyptian Osiris, the Persian Tammuz and the Roman Mithras - not to mention several other dying-and-rising gods, such as the Greek Orpheus and Dionysus - were born at the winter solstice around 25 December in humble surroundings such as caves, their nativity attended by new stars, shepherds and Magi. They all died (on a Friday) in spring, to be resurrected miraculously a few days later. Incredibly, even today, some Christians explain away this awkward fact as a sort of diabolical parody on the part of the pagan myth-makers, even though this stretches blind faith rather thinly as most of these stories predated the life of Jesus by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Sometimes it is suggested that at best these stories were invented as a rehearsal, a sort of feeble dry run for the real 'thing68

Even membership of the Church was no guarantee of a pristine soul. Bishop Ignatius declared that anyone who acted without the approval of his bishop was a Devil worshipper, although he admitted to being tempted himself by Satan to shirk his `duty' of martyrdom - an interesting theological and moral point. Here we have the Devil tempting him to save his life and the good God requiring him to commit a form of suicide, although of course that is a modern view, for which, no doubt, some wretched demon would have been blamed, had it been voiced in those far-off days. Ignatius wrote `I long to suffer, but I do not know whether I am worthy ... I need the meekness in which the prince of this world [Satan] is undone' 69 As Jeffrey Burton Russell notes: `Torture and death were [Satan's] work, and even kindness on the part of the pagans was a diabolical snare, since it might weaken the martyr's resolve' .70

Distasteful though this holy masochism may seem to most modern eyes - although Catholics are still encouraged to `offer up their suffering to God', who surely must be hoping for someone to offer up their joy and pleasure by now - it must be remembered that these zealots firmly believed that Christ was about to return at any moment and claim his own. (In fact, it is highly unlikely that Jesus ever intended to found a church for posterity, being apparently firmly of the belief that the end of the world was imminent. Certainly his disciples expected him to return in glory, signalling the end, at any moment. Ironically, Saint Peter's founding of the Church of Rome can be seen as the direct result of Christ's failure to return as promised in the Apostle's lifetime.) In the meantime a martyr's death would guarantee the early Christians eternal bliss.

Perhaps it was one way of glorifying, even simply of coping with, the persecutions that took the willing and unwilling alike and had them disembowelled by wild animals in the Colosseum or used as human torches. The arena became a potent metaphor for the battlefield between good and evil - indeed, an early Latin sermon depicts Satan as a gladiator attempting to ensnare the good Christians in his net," a perhaps unfortunate analogy, reinforcing the image of the enemy's virility at their own expense. (And ironically, this early Christian insistence on those who cause pain and humiliation being evil - and who can doubt it? - sits uncomfortably with later Inquisitorial justification for its institutionalized sadism.)

Yet for at least the first two centuries of Christian belief there was no coherent set of articles of faith, not even a shared set of holy writings, a New Testament. Attitudes to the Fall of Adam and Eve and the nature of God and the Devil differed massively from Christian group to Christian group throughout the Roman Empire. This confusing state of affairs only ended when Constantine created a state religion out of Christianity, the old slaves' faith, in the fourth century CE. By then, of course, any individual or group who took a different line from that of the Catholic Church was anathema.

Although most shared the view of Church Father Polycarp that `Anyone who twists Christ's words to suit his own desires and says that there is no resurrection, or judgement is the firstborn child of Satan',72 there were always dissenters, who were inevitably accused of `twisting Christ's words' to suit themselves. By and large, these were the Gnostics, who were to lose out to the Roman Church and, by doing so, become persecuted almost to extinction as the perceived servants of Satan. Certainly, they were to entertain some extremely thought-provoking notions about good and evil, even daring to reverse the usual role of God and Satan ...

`Gnostic' derives from the Greek gnosis, which means knowledge, referring to a sense of personal relationship with the deity, maintained by intuition, revelation and incremental initiation. Gnosticism was basically a knowledge of self - Gnothi sea uton - 'know thyself': `what united the various Gnostic sects was the belief that the world is completely evil and cannot be redeemed.'73 To them the world was so terrible that it could only be a shadowy, inferior realm, a grotesque parody of something far finer, more spiritual, which existed beyond our material senses.

Even the less extreme Gnostics assumed that the Creator himself was formerly a benign spirit who had fallen, like Lucifer. Indeed, they often identified this blind, ignorant and evil entity with the Devil, and, after the Greek Gnostics, called him the `demiurge' or `partial mover', the opposite to the prime mover, God. Robert McL. Wilson writes: `The Demiurge of Gnostic theory is simply the Satan of Jewish and Christian theology . . . transformed by the dominant Gnostic pessimism into the creator of the world, its present ruler. 171

To the Gnostic it made no sense to debate the likely outcome of the battle between Good and Evil - or as they frequently symbolized it, Light and Darkness - if, as most Christians believed, the Devil was already known to be doomed to defeat. Like the ancient Persians, most Gnostics were dualists, seeing the world in a constant state of flux between the powers of equal but opposite forces of Light and Darkness. The only problem, to put it bluntly, was knowing which was which ...

Although colourful, with their wild prophecies and speaking in tongues, the Gnostics' cosmology - apart from being immensely, not to say ludicrously, complex - was ultimately somewhat depressing, as acknowledged in the passage quoted above. They saw men and women as vulnerable slivers of spirit trapped in a gross fleshy package: to them originally mankind had been pure spirit, but had been caught by the evil aeon. Of course by espousing the idea that Yahweh was Satan, they were doomed to a not very peaceful future among the flock of the emergent established Church, the Roman Catholics.

It was usually left to the heretics to point out that there was a basic and disturbing discrepancy between the harsh, tyrannical Almighty of the Old Testament and Jesus' loving Father of the New Testament. Indeed, John Milton, who sought in his poem Paradise Lost famously to `justify the ways of God to Man' - and only succeeded in firing up luminaries of the Romantic Movement such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake with admiration for Lucifer, who saw him as the hero of the work - wrote of a truly sadistic Yahweh:

Almighty ... Have left us this our spirit and strength Strongly to suffer and support our pains That we may so suffice his vengeful ire.75

He seems little better, and because of his status and omnipotence even worse, than the Inquisitorial torturers who revived their victims so they could suffer further agonies, even (as we shall see) pulling them half-consumed from the flaming pyre to writhe for an hour or two before returning them to the fire. God has ensured that Adam and Eve had enough `spirit and strength' with which to suffer, to appease his own pathological anger. Yet even here, Milton seems unwilling to have the first man and woman wholly and irretrievably tormented, for although they were condemned `to work and suffer' the situation was `not without hope'.76 And while Satan was to suffer `torture without end', this somehow represented `Eternal justice'.

Indeed, many early Christians (and some more recent thinkers) became exercised over the vexed question of whether a just God would leave even Satan to languish in Hell for eternity - although gradually they came to accept that even the average sinner would be condemned to the infernal regions for ever. The Church Father, Clement of Alexandria, believed that in the fullness of time, all sinners - even Satan himself - might be saved. To Clement, the existence of free will meant that even the Devil retained the right to repent. But it was left to Origen to develop the concept of apocatastasis, `the ultimate return of all beings, including Satan, to the God from which they sprang'?? Today the Vatican proclaims that even the most dyed-in-the wool sinner can be forgiven by the Church, if he is genuinely repentant.78

However, the Gnostics with their intense anxiety about the real nature of God, had not plucked the idea of a good Lucifer out of thin air. Their sympathy for the Fallen One was similar to the ancient Greeks' admiration for Prometheus (whose name means `Forethought'), who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mankind, only to be condemned to be chained to a mountaintop where his liver was torn out by `his own totemic eagle and nightly restored to be devoured again'79 The wretched Prometheus lamented: `I rescued mankind from the heavy blow that was to cast them into Hades . . . Mankind I helped, but I could not help myself."' Admiring this altruistic anti-hero, and seeing in him true Luciferanism, Gnostic icons depicted Prometheus creating the first man out of clay - according to the Greek legend. Perhaps they saw behind the myth, for, like Lucifer, Prometheus, who gave Man the `fire' of intelligence, was ultimately the loser. With his fellow Titans, the giant spirits who roamed the earth even before Zeus and his pantheon took up residence on Olympus, Prometheus lost the ensuing battle for supremacy, and was chained in bondage under the planet.

This story was one of the inspirations for the JudaeoChristian `war in heaven' and the fall of Lucifer," although Prometheus seems also to have been the prototype for trickster gods, such as the Scandinavian Loki. According to Barbara G. Walker he played a trick on Zeus that also surfaced in the Old Testament in another guise:

... Prometheus tricked Zeus into accepting the less edible parts of sacrificial animals, such as the fat and bones, on behalf of the gods, while human beings were allowed to consume the meat. This was not what Zeus intended, and he swore vengeance on both Prometheus and his human friends.82

Zeus was forced to accept the offal because he had made a sacred oath to take the sacrifice, but when the similar thing happened to Yahweh - the priests being instructed that they `shall remove all the fat ... and burn it on the altar as an aroma pleasing to the Lord 181 'the Jews simply claimed that Yahweh preferred it'.84

Significantly, however, it was `Prometheus' excessive contribution of rationalism"' that effectively brought the Olympian religion to its knees. Intuitive and mystical religious sentiments fade like the morning dew under the bright solar glare of too much thought, too much `right-brain' logic. (We will also see this in action when the scientific Age of Enlightenment of the eighteenth century helped sweep away the religious dogma and superstition of the ages, although some claim that science itself has become the modem bigotry.)

To Christians, Lucifer fell because of his wicked presumption. Yet to an objective eye, the Church's story is all too neat, Lucifer's transformation being suspiciously swift. Somehow during the fall, between being God's favourite angel and arriving on earth/in hell, the radiant Son of the Morning had acquired much nastier characteristics than mere pride. The shining Lucifer had become Satan, the literal embodiment of all imaginable evils, a dark creature of mind-freezing horror, who knows no mercy or compassion. He presides over his hellish college of demons amid the eternal flames of punishment and conspires with them to lure mankind into their foul embrace. He is the ultimate vampire, the soul-sucker par excellence, whose chief triumph is to make men evil like him. His underlying raison d'etre is to kill hope, although, as the `Father of Lies', he will first deceive by offering whatever the seeker desires.

Despite Milton's best intentions, his Satan, compared to a God seriously in need of anger management, is comparatively normal. Once forced down to Hell - or 'Pandemonium', the abode of devils - Satan seems determined to make the best of it, as a sort of diabolical pioneer, declaring `Here at last we shall be free',86 and, classically: `Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n'.87 And Milton depicts Hell as a sort of Parliament (perhaps he should know, having worked for Cromwell!), where the demons debate whether or not to try to recover Heaven, which sounds really rather democratic.

The early Christians themselves were often confused by the nature of evil and the character of God. Marcion, who was expelled from the Christian community in Rome in 144 CE for musing on the big question `Whence is evil?' came to the conclusion that two gods must exist, the Old Testament demiurge, whom he also called the conditor malorum, `author of evils', and auctor diaboli, `maker of the Devil' 88 The benevolent deity, on the other hand, was allmerciful, but - presumably because there is not much evidence of this characteristic in most people's lives - his ways must be hidden from humankind.

To the Muslims, the Devil is either `Iblis' or `Shaytan', a pagan Arabic term `possibly derived from the roots "to be far from" or "to [be] born with anger".89 He was originally one of the morally ambiguous, shape-shifting djinn, created by God out of fire. These impish beings are associated with graveyards and the underworld, and on occasion they can be `trapped' into servitude as sorcerers' servitors. Satan himself can only tempt, never force, but he is remarkably successful, leading the righteous astray - specifically into apostasy, heresy and blasphemy.

Traditionally, the Hebrew Shaitan - who acted as arch-tempter in the Book of Job - is seen as deriving from the ancient Egyptian god Set,90 but there is another, more unsettling and controversial association. Although this would hardly sit comfortably with traditional Judaism or a literal form of Christianity, Hebrew scholar Professor Karl W. Luckert notes an interesting parallel between the Old Testament God and the ass-headed Set (although he is often depicted as a jackal-like mythological beast), the ancient Egyptians' nearest equivalent to the JudaeoChristian Devil. Once ruler of the pantheon, Set (or Seth) villainously killed and dismembered the good god Osiris, consort of Isis, the mother goddess. In some versions of the story, he also sexually abused both Isis and her son Horus. However, the Egyptians had no out-and-out Satan figure, no irredeemable evil god with no function or purpose except to torment and entrap humans. To them, all their gods were aspects of the one God, so in a sense Set was an equally valued part of the Creator with the likes of Osiris, or Thoth, god of learning and healing. Even Set had his uses, to balance the usefulness and goodness of the others, and therefore should not be blamed for it. (His was also a useful name to utter in spells, as in The Book of the Dead, where the soul uses it to pass by afterlife snares and obstacles, saying `... for I am great of magic, with the knife that issued from Seth, and my legs are mine for ever.')" Set also appears in the Old Testament in human form as Seth, `the supplanter' of the Good Shepherd Abel92

Nevertheless, Set ruled over a physical realm - an actual, geographical location - that the Egyptians knew from their everyday experience to be nightmarish. With only their narrow strip of verdant land hugging both banks of the Nile, on which they were totally dependent for food, they were vulnerable to famine and recognized the hellishly inhospitable nature of the surrounding `red' desert - which was Set's kingdom. The Egyptians hated anything red, as can be seen from an invocation to Isis: `Free me from all red things' 93 In his alter ego as Typhon, Set was called `the red-skinned one' 94

Yet Set's desert was exactly the same environment that the Old Testament God Yahweh seemed to favour, as he led Moses and the Israelites out of Egypt, as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Indeed, he seemed curiously loath to let his nomadic people escape from the never-ending wilderness, managing to keep them wandering on its sand for `forty years' (usually taken to mean simply `a long time'), while they managed to travel just as many miles, apparently going round in circles. And like a typical desert dweller, in the story of Adam and Eve's fall, Yahweh prefers to walk `in the garden in the cool of the day' 95 Luckert writes:

As a desert god, Seth was known among Egyptians as the god of foreigners, of thunder, lightning and earthquakes ... It has been told that Moses spoke to the Pharaoh in the name of the God of the Hebrews. (Exodus 5:3). To an Egyptian pharaoh that meant in the name of Seth. [• •] The God who killed the firstborn sons of the Egyptians would have been Seth to them, the very god of desert-dwellers 96

It is interesting that Set combined the characteristics of both Yahweh and Lucifer, especially his association with lightning. The Egyptian pharaohs also descended into the earth as the serpent Sata, father of lightning, before their triumphant ascent into the heavens as the resurrected Osiris, where they literally became a star. The devout believed they could become immortal like Sata, by repeating the prayer in which they identified with him:

I am the serpent Sata, whose years are infinite. I lie down dead. I am born daily. I am the serpent Sata, the dweller in the utter most parts of the earth. I lie down in death. I am born. I become new, I renew my youth every day 97

In the Gospel according to Luke Jesus describes Satan `as lightning fall from heaven.'98 Yet the nearest Egyptian god to the bright star Lucifer was the hawk-headed Horus, magically conceived by Isis and the murdered Osiris. Horns was Set's sworn enemy - so reminiscent of the Israelites' Yahweh, was no benevolent deity. But although he delighted in human folly, as we have seen, he had his uses. The Gnostics, like the ancient Egyptians - who rejoiced in the ultimate balancing triad, their Trinity of Father, Mother and Child - also saw a sort of essential balance in Good and Evil, the glue that kept the cosmos together. The Gnostic Gospel of Philip (rediscovered after nearly 1,500 years at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945)99 makes the point that: `The Light and the Darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers one for another."00

A contemporary of the heretic Marcion, the Egyptian Valentine, arrived in Rome in 139 CE and caused an enormous stir, not least because of his `complex, cluttered, emanationist mythology aimed primarily at the problem of evil' .10' Yet running beneath all his babblings about eight `higher aeons' and at least twenty-two lower ones that in his fevered world view encompassed the nature of the deity, was a straight challenge to the notion of original sin. He believed that Adam and Eve's rebellion against the evil Creator god was a gift to humankind, and the snake its benefactor for making us wise to the principles of good and evil, which Yahweh was intending to keep from us.

Largely because of this concept, other Gnostic groups, such as the Ophites (from the Greek ophis, `snake') developed the tradition of the `fortunate Fall' (felix culpa). Because of original sin, man could transcend puerile ignorance - or perhaps foolish innocence - and begin to make progress towards his own god-like status. But to most Gnostics, the snake remained the evil `dragon', as in the New Testament Book of Revelation:

And there was a war in heaven. Michael [the archangel] and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down - that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the ground, and his angels with him."'

However, although Luckert notes that both Set and Yahweh were associated with the hated colour red103 it has been argued that the `Scarlet Woman' of the New Testament's apocalyptic Book of Revelation owed her inspiration to a female Egyptian deity, the lioness-headed Sekhmet. Goddess of flame and destruction (like the Hindu Kali), her very fearsomeness seems to have inspired particular terror in the heart of Saint John the Evangelist, who is generally believed to have written the last book of the Bible. Although his authorship is by no means certain, there would have been a certain irony for - as we shall see - perhaps he had his own reasons for appreciating the archetypal Feminine.

The myth of Eve's fall came to associate all women and the concept of evil, but there are good reasons to link a certain historical woman with the powerful attraction of Lucifer ...