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

CHAPTER SIX Do What Thou Wilt

As the West crawled towards the Age of Enlightenment, when the likes of Locke, Voltaire, Newton and Hume's secular religion of rationalism began to draw hearts and minds on its often precarious journey away from the medieval mindset, a wave of both Luciferan invention and discovery and quasi-Satanic decadence was unleashed - although, as Colin Wilson points out, the eighteenth century boasted little actual magic.' It was as if, after all those years in the iron grip of the ecclesiastical authorities a dam had broken, and the energy released had to find its own level quickly, be it in the form of exciting new discoveries in chemistry or medicine, or the grim trappings of an orgiastic faux Black Mass. Yet the Dark Ages of clerical oppression were not over: the Inquisition still had the power to torture and kill, and `witches' were still being condemned by both the Catholic and Protestant ignorant - on both sides of the Atlantic.

In Salem,' Massachusetts, for one year beginning in 1692 a terrible contagion of witch hysteria swept not one, but twenty-three communities, ending with 141 people arrested - including a fouryear-old child who was clapped in irons - nineteen hanged, one legally crushed to death and many more traumatized and robbed of their health, peace of mind and property.

The craziness allegedly began when the Reverend Samuel Parris' slave Tituba instructed his ten-and eleven-year old daughters about voodoo, although that may well be a convenient excuse. In any case, the girls began to convulse and act in ways that could `only' mean demonic possession - and that, in turn, could only mean terrible news for their community.

As the girls' accusations spread to other localities and the tragic harvest of their hysteria began to fill the jails, one of the accused, John Proctor, wrote a beseeching letter to the authorities, including the now-legendary witch-finder Cotton Mather, from Salem Prison on 23 July, 1692:

The innocency of our Case with the Enmity of our Accusers and our Judges, and Jury, whom nothing but our Innocent blood will serve their turn, having Condemned us already before our Tryals, being so much more incensed and engaged against us by the Devil, makes us bold to Beg and Implore your Favourable Assistance of this our Humble Petition to his Excellency, That if it be possible our Innocent Blood may be spared, which undoubtedly otherwise will be shed, if the Lord doth not mercifully step in. The Magistrates, Ministers, Jewries, and all the People in general, being so much inraged and incensed against us by the Delusion of the Devil, which we can term no other, by reason we know in our own Consciences, we are all Innocent Persons. Here are five Persons who have lately confessed themselves to be witches, and do accuse some of us, of being along with them at a Sacrament [witches' Sabbat], since we were committed into close Prison, which we know to be Lies. Two of the 65 are (Carriers Sons) Youngmen, who would not confess any thing till they tyed them Neck and Heels till the Blood was ready to come out of their Noses, and 'tis credibly believed and reported this was the occasion of making them confess that they never did, by reason they said one had been a Witch a Month, another Five Weeks, and that their Mother had made them so, who had been confined here this nine Weeks. My son William Proctor, when he was examin'd, because he would not confess that he was Guilty, when he was Innocent, they tyed him Neck and Heels till the Blood gushed out of his Nose, and would have kept him so 24 hours, if one more Merciful than the rest, had not taken pity on him, and caused him to be unbound. These actions are very like the Popish Cruelties. They have already undone us in our Estates [seized money and property of the accused], and that will not serve their turns, without our Innocent Bloods. If it cannot be granted that we can have our trials at Boston, we humbly beg that you would endeavour to have these Magistrates changed ... and begging also and beseeching you would be pleased to be here, if not all, some of you at our Trials, hoping thereby you may be the means of saving the shedding [of] our Innocent Bloods, desiring your prayers to the Lord in our behalf, we rest your Poor Afflicted Servants,

JOHN PROCTOR ETC.3

Note that Proctor describes the local people as being `incensed against us by delusion of the Devil', the complete reversal of how the accusers understood the situation: as experience took its dreadful toll, like all innocent `witches' Satan was embodied by those who accused them of worshipping him. And, speaking to a solid Puritan audience, Proctor also points out - with total justification - that `these actions are very like the Popish cruelties'.

Cruelty is no respecter of religion once the Devil is let in to rampage throughout a community via a fundamentalist belief in him, tempered by not a shred of humour, individual conscience or intelligence. Lucifer is not to be found in Salem - but once the Devil has been conjured, he is free to take over minds. And then humans go into swarm mode.

Although Proctor's petition caused the authorities to reconsider their criteria for dealing with `witches', it came too late for him and his fellow prisoners, who were hanged.

Montague Summers notes that while the godly Salem residents fasted, the witches were supposed to have indulged in `a Sacrament that day at a house in the Village, and that they had Red Bread and Red Drink.'4 He adds: `This "Red Bread" is certainly puzzling" - but not if seen as the desperate invention of an accused witch eager to placate the authorities with ever more fanciful accounts of satanic goings-on. Summers also asserts that the Rev. George Burroughs, accused by eight witches of `being an Head Actor at some of their Hellish Rendezvouses' `certainly officiated at their ceremonies',' for several of the residents testified to seeing him do so. By that time, however, sworn testimony, had come to be utterly worthless.

Tellingly, as the hysteria spiralled out of control, the girls' power craze meant they finally overstepped themselves and accused the governor's wife of witchcraft - an unwise move. When writs were issued for slander, the girls fled. Their `possession' was miraculously over.

Lessons about persecution and injustice were not well learnt: the succeeding centuries saw countless lynchings of poor blacks,' while America in the twentieth century suffered the McCarthyite antiCommunist `witch-hunts' and the later epidemic of accusations of satanic ritual abuse, mainly by fundamentalist Christian social workers. Arthur Miller's classic play The Crucible (1953), while outwardly about the Salem witch hysteria, is in fact an allegory for the McCarthyite House Committee on Un-American Activities.'

We have seen what a similar hysteria - mass craziness - did to Europe as the Inquisitors' eagerness to exterminate witches wiped out whole communities, especially in France and Germany. However, the Devil need not be invoked as such: Hitler persuaded most ordinary German citizens that all Jews were evil and that any indignity and horror could be inflicted on them because they were not human. Yet lesser-known contagions are often more instructive about the extraordinary capacity decent folk have for being blinded - almost literally - by an idea that provokes hysteria.

During the Second World War bomb-maddened and half-starved British folk often turned on any strangers in the neighbourhood, believing them to be Nazi spies, with a viciousness that their decent pre-war selves would never have believed possible. Occasionally, however, a kind of madness overrode even their persecution of strangers: on one occasion in remote East Anglia, the mob turned on a man who far from being a new face in the area was actually one of them, a neighbour known well to them all. Happening to be out on a Home Guard patrol, he was seized, roughed up, and, despite his desperate and bewildered protestation that he was their long-time neighbour, shot dead. He had spoken to the crowd, reminded them of his identity, and even shown them his papers, but they were so possessed by bloodlust that they literally could not see him as he was. The next day when the red rage had ebbed away, the people were stunned by the fact of a very familiar but very dead man, and the bewildered grief of his traumatized family. No one had any way of explaining what had happened .9

The last major fling of the English witch-hunters took place in the seventeenth century, as Elizabeth I's successor, James I (1566-1625)1° spread his own fear - amounting to a phobia - of witches through a land already raw with religious division, plotting and paranoia. His predecessor, while mouthing platitudes about individual consciences, had made it impossible for Catholics to worship legally in her kingdom, and resentment grew among them exponentially. Known as `the wisest fool in Christendom' (although even that remarkably back-handed compliment is debatable), James had survived the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 when he and his Parliament were targeted by a group of Catholic fanatics, which merely added fuel to the fires of religious intolerance and a heightened atmosphere of suspicion.

Even before Guy Fawkes and his co-religionists attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament," James had published his Daemonologie (1597), providing zealous witch-hunters with plentiful ammunition. In the book, the narrator Epistemon explains what categories of `unlawful charms, without natural causes' are to be considered witchcraft:

I mean by such kind of charms as commonly daft wives use, for healing of forspoken [bewitched] goods, for preserving them from evil eyes, by knitting ... sundry kinds of herbs to the hair of the goods; by curing the worm, by stemming the blood, by healing of horse-crooks ... or doing such like innumerable things by words, without applying anything meet to the part offended, as mediciners do.

This was a licence to persecute herbalists and traditional healers - be they efficacious or basically harmless, continuing the ancient traditions of folklore. Even if the healer's aim was only to do good, it was still witchcraft. (Many fundamentalist Christians take much the same view about healers today - unless they are of the same persuasion.) Yet what were the poor folk to do in an age when toothache could kill and `official' medicine was not only often worse than useless but also expensive, and the local wise woman with her mysterious jars of herbs might just provide some relief?

Under James, witches were everywhere, like the later `Reds under the bed' hysteria of twentieth-century America. The king himself took an active interest in the major cases, even participating in a number of the trials. Not surprisingly with this unofficial royal warrant, the courts were soon full of wall-eyed, deformed and senile old women on their way to the gallows.

In Scotland, the witch mania saw women at Forres bent double into barrels filled with tar, rolled down Cluny Hill and set alight at the bottom. This would have particularly satisfied James, who was convinced he had been cursed by witches during a visit to Forres in 1600. Having fallen ill while in the neighbourhood he had the area searched: a coven was found in the very act of melting a wax image of the monarch. (Somewhat suspiciously perfect timing.) They were tried and rolled down the hill to their deaths. Of course it is perfectly possible that people were trying to kill James with any means at their disposal - including the `sympathetic magic' of stabbing his image - but whether or not that made them witches or merely desperate to get rid of him must remain open to question.

As his reign progressed, James abandoned his belief in the supernatural abilities of witches, but persisted in seeing them as anti-social elements with subversive potential. Ordinary folk were slower to strip witches of their powers. For, as H. T. F. Rhodes notes in his The Satanic Mass (1954):

Witchcraft was not thought less a social and theological danger with the change of religion in Europe [i.e. from Catholic to Protestant]. It is a singular fact that opinions and beliefs concerning it became even less critical.12

The Jacobean playwright and cleric Thomas Heywood described in his Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels (1635)

ceremonies of the Sabbat where in the worshippers renounce Faith, Baptism and Eucharist, acknowledge Lucifer, and worship him with "contrarie" rites and ceremonies. To this he adds an original piece of embroiderie of his own by reporting that the witches worship their God standing upon their heads."

The contemporary Duke of Newcastle echoed the contradictory nature of the general attitude to witches in a conversation recorded by his servant Hobbes:

To which my Lord answered, That though for his part he cared not whether there were witches or no; yet his opinion was That the Confession of Witches, and their sufferings for it proceeded from an erroneous belief, viz, That they had made a contract with the Devil to serve him for such Rewards as were in his power to give them; and that it was their Religion to worship and adore him; in which Religion they had such firm and constant belief, that if anything came to pass according to their desire, they believed the Devil had heard their prayers, and granted their requests, for which they gave him thanks; but if things fell out contrary to their prayers and desires, then they were troubled at it, fearing that they had offended him, and not served him as they ought, and asked for forgiveness of their offences. Also (said my Lord) they imagine their dreams are real exterior actions; for example, if they dream they flye in the Air, or out of the Chimney top, or that they are turned into several shapes, they believe no otherwise, but that it is really so. And this wicked opinion makes them industrious to perform such Ceremonies to the Devil that they may worship him as their God, and chuse to live and dye with him.14

Hobbes may pour scorn on the poor deluded Devil-worshippers who thanked their god if things went right for them but were troubled and wondered how they offended him if matters took a bad turn, but it could equally be an accurate description about how many Christians actually view their own relationship with God, even today.

If the coming age of the true Lucifer means the western world was flooded with light, then - apart from the usual horrors of war and pestilence - there must have been attempts to harness and celebrate the opposite, the mentally and spiritually befogging darkness of Satan. While it is true that the Inquisition continued its satanic depredations on freedom of thought and spirit, there were those who sought to enter into a more immediate and intimate relationship with the Lord of Hell.

Of course, as we have seen, both the Cathars and the Knights Templar had been accused of being Satanists, but as the centuries progressed groups and individuals emerged from the shadows whose entire raison d'etre was not merely to indulge in what outsiders would consider dubious and weird rites, but explicitly to worship the Evil One. Many of these Satanists were claimed by one writer to have been priests - some defrocked - but a high proportion simply worked secretly for the opposition.

One of the commonest of their dark rituals was the parodying of the Mass, with the intention of destroying a living person. As H. C. Lea noted in Materials Towards A History of Witchcraft (1939):

Wicked priests employed the mass as an incantation and execration mentally cursing their enemies while engaged in its solemnization, and expecting that in some way the malediction would work evil on the person against whom it was directed. Nay, it was even used in conjunction with the immemorial superstition of the wax figurine which represented the enemy to be destroyed, and mass celebrated ten times over such an image was supposed to ensure his death within ten days.15

Despite the evidence of repeated experience, Devil-worshippers were seen as richer, healthier and happier than Christians, and this myth may have fostered the occasional outbreak of somewhat pathetic half-hearted Satanism. In his Tableau de L'Inconstance des mauvais Anges (1613), Pierre de L'Ancre - admittedly a Catholic bigot - declares unequivocally `La plus grande partie des Prestres sont Sorciers' ('The majority of priests are sorcerers'.)16 He also believed that it was poverty that drove them to the Black Arts, although boredom and sexual frustration may well have been important factors, as we saw in the case of flamboyant possession in the religious houses.

As ever, secret societies or at least groups operating under conditions of secrecy are inevitably accused of wild orgies of the most ingeniously perverted kind imaginable. And just as inevitably, especially where Satanism is concerned, some of those rumours will be true. Indeed, the Black Mass as we know it today was invented - admittedly a somewhat dubious honour - by the seventeenth-century alchemist, abortionist and poisoner, Catherine La Voisin, who studded it with sexual sacrileges.

Montague Summers describes the diabolical activities at La Voisin's Paris home" (although his credulity and callousness make him hard to read and even harder to like, his scholarship is not always questionable):

It was in 1666 ... [that] night after night ... at the house of the mysterious Catherine la Voisin the abbe Guibourg was wont to kill young children for his hideous ritual, either by strangulation or more often by piercing their throats with a sharp dagger and letting the hot blood stream into the chalice as he cried: "Astaroth, Asmodee, je vous conjure d'accepter le sacrifice que je vous presente!" (Astaroth! Asmodeus! Receive, I beseech you, this sacrifice I offer unto you!) A priest named Tournet also said Satanic Masses at which children were immolated . . .'8

(Poor Asherath - `Astaroth' - has fallen a long way since her days as consort of God.)

For once, it seems that La Voisin and her confederates did use dead babies in their satanic rites, although they may not have been murdered specially. Apart from doing a brisk trade in harmless stuff such as cosmetics and love philtres, she branched out into a highly lucrative sideline as abortionist, once again underlining the connection - this time almost certainly real - between diabolism and abortion. From there for this highly ambitious and ruthless woman it was but a short step to providing poison for wives who urgently wished to be widows, together with all the evocative paraphenalia of Devil-worship.

La Voisin's expertise was called upon by the cream of Parisian society - even Madame de Montespan, one of King Louis XIV's mistresses, who desired to be raised to what she considered her rightful place as his consort. When La Voisin was arrested and horribly tortured, a veritable Satanic network was revealed of at least 246 people of high social standing, many of whom thought it prudent to suffer voluntary exile, while others of their class were jailed. Thirty-six of the `lower orders' were executed. Incriminating pages were removed from the archives, and the king forbade any mention of Madame de Montespan in connection with the scandal, although it did her little good: after the death of the queen in 1683, Louis took the good Catholic Madame de Maintenon as his wife.19

Child-killing in the name of Satan had become something of a cliche in France - which, for some reason, seems to have had more than its fair share of Satanists in the past, although now the United States is catching up rapidly. Perhaps it is France's long history as the heartland of heresy20 that provided such fertile soil: the heretics perhaps coming to believe their own bad publicity, with a Gallic shrug accepting their fate as `natural' Satanists.

Perhaps the most shocking satanic individual of medieval times was another Frenchman, Joan of Arc's marshal, Gilles de Laval, Marechal and Baron de Rais,21 a sexual pervert who derived ecstatic pleasure from the torture and butchery of children. In 1440 he was accused of the abduction and murder of 140 named children, but some estimate the number as high as 800. However, he was not always criminally insane, or if he was he hid it well: as a young man he had been remarkable for his absolute piety and generosity towards the Church.

At just twenty-four years old he was a national hero, due to his heroic exploits at the side of La Pucelle ('The Maid', or Joan of Arc); later he became Marechal (Marshal) of France. After Joan's burning as a witch and the end of his martial exploits, Gilles retired to his country estates - and began his life as a serial sex murderer.

A homosexual, Gilles would lure a handsome lad into his castle, hang him by his heels, but before he lost consciousness he would be taken down and reassured. Nothing horrible was really going to happen: it was all just a game. This was pure sadism, for then the bewildered boy would be violently raped, after which Gilles or one of his henchmen would cut his throat or slice off his head. The corpse continued to exert an irresistible allure, however, and Gilles piled necrophilia on to the horrors he had inflicted on the living boy, by slitting open the stomach and sitting among the intestines to masturbate. He also indulged in variations on this theme, for example procuring two boys, one of whom had to watch the other being tortured and killed while waiting his turn.

Gilles' intense bouts of sadism were like an attack of madness: he would collapse after each individual abomination and not regain consciousness for many hours. His fellow monsters meanwhile would cut up the corpses and burn them. However, they were not always very thorough, and it was their laxity that brought disaster to Gilles' insane bloodlust.

Having recklessly overspent, Gilles was desperate for money, and alchemy seemed like a promising solution, even though it was illegal. A magician named Francois Prelati impressed upon him that the only way to make alchemical gold was by selling his soul to the Devil, which he always refused to do, but had no scruples when told that in any case he must sacrifice boys in order to stand a chance of benefiting from the magical gold. Their rituals were often distinguished by violence both within and without the protective circle from invisible forces, and once by the hallucination of a monstrous green snake.

By 1440 the local authorities and the Inquisition had a list of forty-seven charges against Gilles (the indictment was forty-nine paragraphs long), including conjuration of spirits, heresy and sexual perversions against children - and human sacrifice to demons. Although he himself was not tortured, presumably because of his high status, his servants were `put to the Question', but not one of his 500 attendants were required to give evidence in court. Gilles was not allowed to defend himself nor employ counsel. Begging for forgiveness and asking for the prayers of the onlookers - who openly wept at his plight - he was strangled and his body burnt. His two associates were burnt alive. The Church became phenomenally wealthy after seizing his land and property.

The terrible blood-spree of Gilles de Rais forms a grim background to J. K. Huysmans' La Bas (Down There, 1891),22 which discursively tells the story of a vampiristic sexual relationship in contemporary Paris, but which is famed for its apparently authentic description of a black mass. In his tour de force, The Occult, Colin Wilson writes of the critical scene:

The altar boys are ageing poufs, covered with cosmetics. The chapel is dingy and damp, with cracked walls. The face of Christ on the cross is painted so that it laughs derisively. [The] Canon ... pours out ... invective on the Crucified: `Thou hast forgotten the poverty thou didst preach, thou hast seen the weak crushed ... thou hast heard the death rattle of the timid . . .' The women then begin to have convulsions in the manner of the Loudun nuns. One of the aged choir boys performs an act of fellatio on [Canon Docre, who] ejaculates on the host and tosses it to the convulsed women; he also apparently defecates on the altar. Huysmans' language is not explicit, but ordure obviously plays a central part in the mass 23

Wilson sagely notes that uppermost in the black mass is the `desire of the participants to shock themselves out of their normal state of dullness.'24 Yet even so, their activities never reach beyond a puerile attempt to upset bourgeois sensibilities - with their emphasis on undoing all the accepted ideals of cleanliness - and, of course, an equally childish attack on the Church. As Colin Wilson says: `The "blasphemies" sound completely harmless to anyone who is not a Catholic and who does not accept that disbelief in the divinity of Christ involves eternal damnation.'25 This sort of backstreet Satanism was described perfectly by the twentieth-century British philosopher Bertrand Russell as `Satan in the suburbs'.

One of the most intriguing of the French `Satanists' was Eugene Vintras (1807-75), who established his Church of Carmel - also known as the Oeuvre de la Misericorde (Work of Mercy), in the early 1840s. Clearly a charismatic figure, Vintras appealed to high society, but soon his movement was accused of Satanism, largely because his rites were highly sexual in nature. Worse, Vintras was embroiled in a massive political scandal centred on Charles Guillaume Naundorff (1785-1845), who claimed to be the `lost' King Louis XVII, believed by most to have died during or shortly after the French Revolution in the 1790s. Naundorff and Vintras publicly backed each other, the latter ending up in what was clearly a show trial accused of fraud. After five years in jail, Vintras fled to London, as France was rapidly becoming too hot to hold him. A former member of his Church of Carmel, one Father Gozzoli published a pamphlet accusing him of organizing the most debauched orgies imaginable - and Gozzoli seems to have possessed a particularly lurid imagination. In 1848 the sect was declared heretical by the Pope and all its members excommunicated, whereupon they established themselves as a totally independent entity, with both male and female priests, rather like the Cathars.

What is especially interesting is that both Vintras' Church of Carmel and the Naundorff supporters were a shadowy sect called `the Saviours of Louis XVII' - otherwise known as the Johannites. A complex and elusive group, they were primarily concerned with the restoration of the monarchy in France, although they supported less obvious individuals and causes. These particular Johannites appear somehow to have `stage-managed' visions of the Virgin at La Salette in 1846, probably as part of a wider campaign to elevate the Feminine, first by emphasizing the role of Mary the Mother, then through more overtly sexual means and active hostility to the Church. Vintras' own link with the Johannites was through the evocatively named `Sister Salome' (Madame Bouche), but on his death the Order passed to the keeping of the scandalous Abbe Joseph Boullan (1824-93), who had set up the Society for the Reparation of Souls in 1859 with the much younger Adele Chevalier, whom he had seduced at the convent at La Salette. Matters escalated from highly controversial to outright shocking when Boullan extended his sex rites to the animal kingdom, and rumours spread like wildfire that he and Chevalier had sacrificed their own child during a Black Mass in 1860: interestingly, neither was even arrested for such an offence, although they were convicted of fraud.

The plot thickens, however. After serving a custodial sentence, Boullan of his own volition presented himself to the Inquisition in Rome, but even they could find no fault in him. He was free to return to Paris'21 where he threw himself into leading Vintras' Church of Carmel into ever increasing scenes of wild sexual licence, first declaring himself to be the reincarnation of John the Baptist. This may have inspired his portrayal as `Dr Johannes' in Huysmans' La Bas - also one of Boullan's aliases - although it would be quite wrong to assume that he was the villain of the piece. In fact, he was a friend of Huysmans who depicted him as a crusader against Satanism, though much maligned by the Church. But to this day there are major questions to be answered about Boullan. As we wrote in The Templar Revelation:

While in Rome Boullan wrote his doctrines down in a notebook (known as the cahier rose, overtly after the colour of the cover), which was found by ... Huysmans among his papers after his death in 1893. The precise details of the contents are unknown - though it was described as a `shocking document' - and it is now locked away in the Vatican Library. All applications to see it are refused .27

Was Boullan actually a sort of agent provocateur for the Vatican, infiltrating a heretical group in order to undermine it? Certainly it is very odd that, despite all the melodramatic and salacious rumours, he was only convicted for fraud and the Inquisition could find no fault with him. But if not a Vatican agent, perhaps he knew some great secret that he could wield as blackmail even against the might of Peter's Church. Perhaps it was connected with what may well have been the real John the Baptist, and the sex rites of the original Christians, including Jesus and the Magdalene ... To most ordinary Christians, that would seem like Satanism.

Secret and semi-secret societies mushroomed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, perhaps inspired by the new wave of Romanticism, revolutionary politics or the radical thinking that would produce embryonic trades unions, but they were more likely to concentrate on drinking and leching, with a hefty pinch of pseudo-Satanism thrown in for added spice. In England, the most famous of these clubs for the terminally bored was the Order of the Friars of Wycombe, or The Monks of Medmenham, the Order of the Knights of West Wycombe, or - most famously but inaccurately - the Hellfire Club.

It was founded by Sir Francis Dashwood (1708-81), a wellestablished MP and former Treasurer to George III and Postmaster General: the epitome of the successful English gentleman. On the obligatory Grand Tour of Italy, he had come to hate the Catholic Church and, having met the legendary `Bonnie Prince Charlie' - the exiled Prince Charles Edward Stuart - he was enrolled as a Jacobite agent. He went on to become involved in various Rosicrucian, neoTemplar and Masonic Lodges. In 1738 Pope Clement XII had prohibited Freemasonry and excommunicated all the Italian brotherhood on pain of being handed over to the Inquisition, but Dashwood remained in contact with the Italian lodges. As a young traveller through France he had been an observer at a Black Mass, which intrigued him, but only at the more puerile level of insulting the Church.

Back in England he founded the Society of the Dilettanti, one of the many London clubs devoted to phenomenal alcohol consumption and whoring. In 1746 he founded the Order of the Knights of Saint Francis, which met at the sixteenth-century George and Vulture pub in the City of London, made famous in Charles Dickens' riotous first novel, Pickwick Papers (1836-7). They met in an upper room, the focus of which was `an everlasting Rosicrucian lamp', a massive crystal globe surrounded by a gold snake with its tail in its mouth, and topped by silver wings - a profoundly Gnostic design, which also appeared on the font Dashwood later presented to West Wycombe Church.

It was close to West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire that Dashwood and his cronies established their infamous `Hellfire Club', at Medmenham Abbey on the River Thames near Marlow in 1751. Dashwood lavishly renovated the former medieval monastery - no expense was spared - complete with the now infamous motto carved over the entrance `Do as thou will'. The temple to hedonism was complete with a priapic statue and a voluptuous statue of Venus in the well-tended gardens. As she was bending over, a clumsy newcomer would find himself already in a compromising position before he had even entered the house.

Two ancient deities of Silence - the Egyptian Harpocrates and the Roman goddess Angerona - adorned the Abbey's sumptuous dining room, perhaps as a reminder to the Order's members never to speak of the goings-on there in the outside world. Pagan gods were everywhere in Dashwood's life: one whole wing of his house, designed by Robert Adam, was a replica of a Temple to Bacchus, while Ariadne, Dionysus and a whole host of cavorting satyrs frolicked over the ceiling. Statues of other ancient deities graced the gardens, which some said were laid out in the rather graphic shape of a naked woman.

In 1750 Dashwood enlarged the honeycomb of tunnels and caves under West Wycombe Hill in which to hold the Order's meetings, although word spread that they took the form of orgiastic couplings. As occult writer and Dashwood expert Mike Howard explains:

These caves featured individual `cells' for the `monks' to entertain their female guests ... An underground stream, known to the monks as the River Styx had to be crossed to give access to the Inner Sanctum, a circular room where so-called "Black Masses" were said to be performed."

Heavily made-up prostitutes from London were delivered by the carriage-load to act as officiating masked 'nuns', while high-born ladies offered their naked bodies as altars for the Black Mass. Most people would dismiss the activities of Dashwood's circle as a fairly unimaginative attempt to stave off ennui by indulging in a little light whoring and blasphemy in excitingly spooky surroundings. However, there appears to be more to it than that. One of the leading `Friars' was John Wilkes, who declared: `No profane eye has dared to penetrate the English Eleusinian Mysteries of the Chapter Room [the inner sanctum] where the monks assembled on solemn occasions . . . secret rites performed and libations to the Bona Dea [the Good Goddess].'29 While many, if not most, of the Medmenham `monks' - whose number included some extremely well-known names, such as the Prince of Wales and possibly even the American statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) - probably enjoyed their naughty caperings at an adolescent level, some clearly observed them in a more ancient spirit. It is significant that the so-called `Hellfire Caves' dated back to prehistoric times, known locally as `pagan catacombs', with an altar to an unknown deity nearby. Mike Howard concludes:

As one nineteenth-century writer put it, `Sir Francis himself officiated as high priest ... engaged in pouring a libation from a communion cup to the mysterious object of their homage.' From the available evidence, it is safe to surmise that this `mysterious object of their homage' was, in fact, the Goddess and that Sir Francis Dashwood and his merry monks were not Satanists but followers of the pagan Mysteries.30

However, the enactment of the Black Mass - if indeed it were anything more than rumour - suggests not only a reverence for the ancient gods of fertility and sensual indulgence, but also an active detestation and mockery of Christianity. When Dashwood paid for the renovations of his local church, the result was `an Egyptian hall' that gave `not the least idea of a place sacred to religious [i.e. Christian] worship'."

However, once again, we find what was basically a Luciferan outbreak of orgiastic high spirits and pagan joy in sexuality being deliberately contaminated with faux Satanism. Perhaps rumours of the Black Mass were encouraged simply to keep away prying eyes, but it seems that some did indulge in that tasteless and ultimately pointless activity. Did they, perhaps, like some Knights Templar, Johannites and other Luciferans believe in their heart of hearts that they were indeed as evil as they stood accused? Christianity was, and to some extent still is, a most potent form of conditioning, and to subvert its teachings is for many brought up in the faith a very grave step, no matter how loud and brittle their pseudo-Luciferan bravado.

As the Enlightenment took hold of hearts and minds, science progressed by leaps and bounds, aided not only by a new secular freedom but by the astonishingly under-estimated mass drug of choice - caffeine. Tea, coffee and chocolate poured into the coffee shops and homes of the West, kick-starting a whole new level of energy and enquiry. Foremost among that blossoming of exciting new talent was, of course, Isaac Newton, who came second in a recent survey of the world's most influential people - after Mohammed (1) but before Jesus Christ (3).11 He is seen as the epitome of the no-nonsense rationalist, the atheistic scientist par excellence, but - as with Leonardo - nothing could be further from the truth.

At the end of the entry on Newton in Chambers' Biographical Dictionary (1990), very much as an apologetic afterthought, there is a passage of just three-and-a-half lines about his religious and esoteric interests, beginning: `Newton was also a student of alchemy ...'33 He was indeed: as the economist John Maynard Keynes remarked after reading Newton's previously lost notebooks (which were `of no scientific value'): `Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians."'

Born in 1642, Newton was to write over a million words on the subject of alchemy, although the Royal Society declared they were ,not fit to be printed'. He is most famous for his discovery of the Law of Gravity in 1665 or 1666, the fall of an apple in his garden suggesting the earth's irresistible pull.

In his specially constructed laboratory on the edge of the fens near Cambridge, Newton obsessively studied the construction of telescopes and the refraction of light through prisms, which led him to build reflecting telescopes, although they were to be considerably refined by William Hershel (1738-1822) and the Earl of Rosse (1800-67) 35 In the near-literal sense of the word, Newton was a true Luciferan, for he believed that light - his lifelong fascination - embodied the word of God, echoing the obsession of the Gnostics and esotericists with Light as both metaphor and actuality.

One of Newton's servants recorded:

He very rarely went to bed until two or three of the clock, sometimes not till five or six, lying about four or five hours, especially at springtime or autumn, at which time he used to employ about six weeks in his laboratory, the fire [furnace] scarce going out night or day. What his aim might be I was unable to penetrate to.36

From his writings, we now know he was striving to create the Philosopher's Stone that would convert base metals into gold. Perhaps it was this unusual hobby that prompted him to accept the occupation as Director of the Royal Mint, with the responsibility of looking after England's store of gold, instead of accepting a Cambridge professorship.

An eccentric scientist to his fingertips, Newton is said to have only laughed once in his life - when he was asked what use he saw in Euclid. He nearly ruined his eyesight by sticking a knife behind his eyeball to induce optical effects. A tortured and introverted homosexual, his only romantic involvements appear to have been with younger men, one of whom induced a nervous breakdown. Obsessed with the apocalyptical interpretations of the Old Testament Book of Daniel, he wrote on the subject extensively, and as a vehemently anti-Catholic Puritan he saw himself as a kind of prophet. As F. E. Manuel writes in his The Religion of Isaac Newton (1974):

The more Newton's theological and alchemical, chronological and mythological work, set by the side of his science, the more apparent it becomes that in the moments of his grandeur he saw himself as the last of the interpreters of God's will in actions, living on the fulfilment of times.37

Despite this, he was more heterodox than orthodox in his theology, subscribing to the Arian heresy, which upheld the theory that Jesus was not divine. But it was his passion for alchemy that primarily drove him. As Michael White notes in his Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (1997):

Newton was motivated by a deep-rooted commitment to the notion that alchemical wisdom extended back to ancient times. The Hermetic tradition - the body of alchemical knowledge - was believed to have originated in the mists of time and to have been given to humanity through supernatural agents.3x

That body of esoteric knowledge was known as the Emerald Tablet, and its guardian was the legendary Hermes Trismegistus, inspiration throughout the ages to the likes of Nicholas Flamel and, one assumes, Leonardo da Vinci. Isaac Newton translated the Tablet:

It is true without lying, certain and most true. That which is Below is like that which is Above and that which is Above is like that which is Below to do the miracles of the Only Thing. And as all things have been and arose from One by the mediation of One, so all things have their birth from this One Thing by adaptation. The Sun is its father; the Moon its mother; the Wind hath carried it in its belly; the Earth is its nurse. The father of all perfection in the whole world is here. Its force or power is entire if it be converted into Earth. Separate the Earth from the Fire, the subtle from the gross, sweetly with great industry. It ascends from the Earth to the Heavens and again it descends to the Earth and receives the force of things superior and inferior. By this means you shall have the glory of the whole world and thereby all obscurity shall fly from you. Its force is above all force, for it vanquishes every subtle thing and penetrates every solid thing. So was the world created. From this are and do come admirable adaptations, whereof the process is in this. Hence I am called Hermes Trismegistus, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world. That which I have said of the operation of Sun is accomplished and ended 39

It is easy to understand how even his short passage might obsess and even madden generations of seekers after alchemical truth. Newton cautioned fellow alchemist-scientist Robert Boyle (1627-91) against letting the uninitiated into their secret hot-house world `if there be any verity in the warning of the Hermetic writers. There are other things besides the transmutation of metals which none but they understand' ao

Some authorities" suggest Newton (who was knighted in 1705) may have actually achieved the fabled Great Work - after all, secrecy is no proof of failure, especially in such an intensely private discipline as alchemy. Look at how Leonardo triumphed behind closed doors, although his natural secretiveness did little to prevent the spread of rumours about his `sorcery'.

However, in the case of the British scientist Andrew Crosse, such a reputation - and worse - was to cost him a very promising career and the prospect of being feted throughout history as the discoverer of something very strange, perhaps even the creator of life itself ...

One who, according to his second wife, `delighted in whatever was strange and marvellous', Andrew Crosse was born in 1784 in the west of England and grew into a clever, questing young man. Probably because his father knew Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley, both pioneers of the new science of electricity, Crosse was fascinated by it from the age of twelve. After some wasted years as a typical `lad-about-town', he settled down to experiments into electro-crystallization in partnership with George John Singer. But then in 1837 something happened that remains bewildering to this day, as Crosse explains:

In the course of my endeavours to form artificial minerals by a long continued electric action on fluids holding in solution such substances as were necessary to my purpose, I had recourse to every variety of contrivance that I could think of; amongst others I constructed a wooden frame, which supported a Wedgwood funnel, within which rested a quart basin on a circular piece of mahogany. When this basin was filled with a fluid, a strip of flannel wetted with the same was suspended over the side of the basin and inside the funnel, which, acting like a syphon, conveyed the fluid out of the basin through the funnel in successive drops: these drops fell into a smaller funnel of glass placed beneath the other, and which contained a piece of somewhat porous red oxide iron from Vesuvius. This stone was kept constantly electrified ...

On the fourteenth day from the commencement of this experiment I observed through a lens a few small whitish excrescences or nipples, projecting from about the middle of the electrified stone. On the eighteenth day these projections enlarged, and stuck out seven or eight filaments, each of them longer than the hemisphere on which they grew. On the twenty-sixth day these appearances assumed the form of a perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail ... On the twenty-eight day these little creatures moved their legs ... After a few days they detached themselves from the stone, and moved about at pleasure 42

What on earth were the acari, or tiny mites? Further experiments only served to reinforce the mystery. Crosse recorded after the third attempt at replication:

I had omitted to insert within the bulb of the retort a resting place for these acari (they are always destroyed if they fall back into the fluid from which they have emerged). It is strange that, in a solution eminently caustic and under an atmosphere of oxihy-drogen gas, one single acarus should have made its appearance 43

Strange indeed.

Having involved the steady and methodical W. H. Weeks to attempt to replicate the experiments - whose first concern was to ensure that no extraneous insect eggs fell into the equipment - matters were progressing well. But then Crosse made the mistake of discussing his discovery with the editor of a local newspaper, when all hell broke loose. Had this mad scientist actually created life in his secret laboratory? Who was this mere man to play God? Although eminent scientists such as Michael Faraday (1791-1867) went to some lengths to defend Crosse, Mr Weeks ruined it by solemnly announcing that the experiments had indeed `given birth' to living creatures.

Bewildered and hurt, Crosse retired to his rural laboratory, only to find himself a social pariah: the local vicar even carried out an exorcism on the locality. Crosse's innocent and objective discovery had marked him out as a Mephistophelean dabbler in the Black Arts. Although he returned to his research - intending to construct `a battery at once cheap, powerful and durable'' and worked on the preservation of food and the purification of sea water through the use of electricity - he remained a broken man, an object of ridicule and superstitious fear.

Before he died from a stroke in May 1855 he said: `... the utmost extent of human knowledge is but comparative ignorance' 45 The inscription on his gravestone reads:

Sacred to the memory of

ANDREW CROSSE/THE ELECTRICIAN ... HE WAS HUMBLE TOWARDS GOD AND KIND TO HIS FELLOW CREATURES

- perhaps a dig at those who thought him very arrogant towards God, and those who were less than kind to him.

To this day, no one is sure what the acari were, and Crosse is largely forgotten except in books about mysteries. But this true scientist may be remembered in much more sensational form: in 1814 the poet Robert Southey (1774-1843) visited his friends Mary and Percy Shelley after having discussed his experiments with Crosse himself. The three friends spent some hours on the subject. And the Shelleys attended a talk given by Crosse that same year. Four years later Mary Shelley (1797-1851) produced her first novel, Frankenstein, about an eccentric scientist who creates life in his laboratory through the use of electricity ... Was this a particularly bizarre case of life following art, or a nasty attack of the Cosmic Joker? Although sceptics might claim Shelley's novel put the idea of creating life in Crosse's head, all the evidence suggests that his mystery was genuine. But in any case, his is the classic case of the Luciferan martyr, persecuted by the mindless mob for honestly investigating a scientific anomaly.

On Saint John the Baptist's Day (24 June) 1717 the Grand Lodge of English Freemasonry was formed, taking what had been a truly secret society concerned with the preservation of sacred knowledge into a new semi-secret era that some might argue saw it degenerate into little more than a well-refreshed dining club.

An `Invisible College' of Masons had existed in 1645,46 but if as certain authors47 claim, they were the rightful descendants of the Knights Templar, then obviously they possessed a much longer pedigree. Indeed, an alchemical treatise dating from the 1450s specifically uses the term 'Freemason' ,4' and researcher John J. Robinson cites evidence of Masonic lodges as far back as the 1380s.49 But as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries passed, it became clear, according to one writer, Robert Lomas, that the Freemasons were at the forefront of a Luciferan explosion of unprecedented scientific invention and discovery and intellectual progress, with the formation of the Royal Society in 1660, `the oldest and most respected scientific society in the world'.50 Under the auspices of Freemason Sir Robert Moray, the aims of the Society were to be:

To overcome the mysteries of all the works of Nature for the benefit of human life51 ... and this is the highest pitch of human reason; to follow all the links of this chain, till all secrets are open to our minds; and their words advanced, or imitated by our hands towards the settling of an universal, constant and impartial survey of the whole Creation 52

Predictably, the Masons have suffered their fair share of abuse and outsiders' paranoia, especially from zealous Catholics and, more recently, fundamentalist Christians, who see `the Brotherhood' as a sinister conclave of either quasi-Devil worshippers or outright Satanists. A quick glance at the host of fundamentalist websites devoted to this subject will soon reveal the gist of their attitude. According to American scientist and Masonic writer S. Brent Morris, their fulminations usually begin with the words: `On July 14, 1889, Albert Pike, Sovereign Pontiff of Universal Freemasonry, addressed to the 23 Supreme confederated Councils of the world the following .. .'53 They go on to quote Pike's alleged declaration:

If Lucifer were not God, would Adonay, whose deeds prove his cruelty, perfidy and hatred of man, barbarism and repulsion for science, would Adonay and his priests calumniate him? Yes, Lucifer is God, and unfortunately Adanay is also god. For the eternal law is that there is no light without shade, no beauty without ugliness, no white without black, for the absolute can only exist as two gods: darkness being necessary to the statue, and the brake to the locomotive.

Thus the doctrine of Satanism is heresy; and the true and pure philosophical religion is the belief in Lucifer, the equal of Adanay; but Lucifer, God of Light and God of Good, is struggling for humanity against Adanay, the God of Darkness and Evil 54

There have been no shortage of others willing to condemn Pike for the worship of Lucifer. The French commentator Jules Bois wrote in 1902:

It is surprising, the sacrilegious Gospel of Albert Pike. He divides Christ's existence into two parts: in the first, he classes his doctrine in a way rational, natural (Christ was then, for him, the envoy of the `Good God', that is to say Lucifer). In the second, he had the mystic exaltation ... such as his affirmation that he is himself the son of God and equal to the father .. . According to Albert Pike, Jesus had signed a pact with Adonai ... [where] a desire for solitary divinisation had intoxicated him, rendering him unreasonable and in human. From then, Lucifer abandoned him and, in exchange for his apostasy, had inflicted on him by the people the torture due to thieves.

I believe that, with this example, we touch the centre of Lucifer ss

However, according to Brent Morris and many other modern Masons, all this and similar commentary is slander, based on a hoax perpetrated by `Leo Taxil' (Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pages). He publicly confessed his deception in 1897,56 although that part of the story is usually overlooked by those eager to brand Masons as Satanists. Brent notes that rabbis, bishops and other men of God are among those who should have been taught `this disgusting "Luciferian doctrine"' if it existed, and it `is inconceivable there would not have been mass resignations'.51

Some Catholic zealots and fundamentalists also tend to quote Madame Blavatsky in the same breath as the Taxil slander: this nineteenth-century Russian visionary and founder of the Theosophical Society has a perhaps not entirely deserved reputation for charlatanism - but her monumental writings have been most influential on many to this day, including various secret societies. For example, she wrote: `Lucifer represents ... Life ... Thought ... Progress ... Civilization ... Liberty ... Independence ... Lucifer is the Logos, the Serpent, the Saviour.'"'

In this light, it is worth examining Madame Blavatsky's writings more closely in order to understand the esoteric tradition she represented. In her Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology she quotes the Vatican's Ecumenical Council of 1870: `Let him be ANATHEMA ... who shall say that human Sciences ought to be pursued in such a spirit of freedom that one may be allowed to hold as true their assertions even when opposed to revealed doctrines'.59 She adds: `Christianity is on trial, and has been, ever since science felt strong enough to act as Public Prosecutor.'60 Although temptingly - and endlessly - quotable, just two more of her little gems will have to suffice here: she notes that the ancients were `too enlightened to believe in a personal devil 161 and `Hell and its sovereign are both inventions of Christianity, coeval with its accession to power and resort to tyranny . . .' With a contemptuous flourish, she adds: `Sad degeneration of human brains!'62

While the Masons indignantly deny Pike's alleged devotion to Lucifer - and there is no reason to doubt that Taxil did perpetrate a hoax intended to slander them - one is left wondering why they are quite so upset. As we now know there is absolutely no need to equate Lucifer with Satan, and in any case, the quotations given above reflect almost pure Gnosticism. In fact, for an organization that prides itself on mystical understanding and tolerance one is left hoping that they do secretly honour the real Lucifer, whose attributes would have made him the perfect patron for the Royal Society.

Indeed, the Masons take religious tolerance particularly seriously, as the following extract from a letter to myself from Masonic writer Robert Lomas makes very clear:

No man truly obeys the Masonic law who merely tolerates those whose religious opinions are opposed to his own. Every man's opinions are his own property, and the rights of all men to maintain each his own are perfectly equal. Merely to tolerate, to bear with an opposing opinion, is to assume it to be heretical, and assert the right to persecute, if we would, and claim our toleration as a merit.

The Mason's creed goes farther than that; no man, it holds, has any right, in any way, to interfere with the religious belief of another. It holds that each man is absolutely sovereign as to his own belief, and that belief is a matter absolutely foreign to all who do not entertain the same belief; and that if there were any right of persecution at all, it would in all cases be a mutual right, because one party has the same right as the other to sit as judge in his own case - and God is the only magistrate that can rightfully decide between them 63

Robert Lomas points out, therefore, that `Freemasonry is not liked by organized religions because it is tolerant of any and all religious beliefs. And shows no favouritism to any. So Freemasonry does not encourage devil worship but neither does it condemn it. [My emphasis].' Of course to Christians this in itself would be tantamount to devil-worship.

Leaving aside the Taxil hoax, do Masons have any connection with Lucifer? The Bright Morning Star is, according to Lomas, `a key feature in both the First Degree Tracing Board and Third Degree Ceremony', key initiations intended to change the Mason's entire outlook in radically profound ways, as he explains in a Masonic paper:

The process of initiation is one of regeneration. It means Developing your inmost essence, first to birth and then to full growth. This involves a rejection and mystical death of all the lower principles that obstruct your growth. This is the path traced through our three Degrees.

The first stage involves refining your gross sense-nature, killing your desire for material attractions and developing indifference to the allure of the outer world.

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'.

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

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 superstition.'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

Ever one for assuming the guise of the `laughing master' - like Simon Magus - Crowley declared, tongue in cheek, but still really, really meaning it: `I have been taxed with assaulting what is commonly known as virtue. True, I hate it, but only in the same degree as I hate what is commonly known as vice.'95

Moralists often rub their hands with glee over the story of Crowley's life - from Victorian gentleman to pitiful, povertystricken heroin addict in a boarding house at Hastings in 1947, begging his doctor for just one more fix96 - but he had long recognized that `attainment is insanity'. Despite appearances, this was not the pitiful death of a failed shaman: as real appreciation of his life and works continues to grow exponentially, it becomes ever clearer that there was little that was truly failed about The Great Beast.

His legacy is astounding. He left behind him a corpus of writings that improve with the keeping, and certainly do not become contemptuous with familiarity, indeed quite the reverse. Where this present enquiry is concerned, Crowley had a particular legacy to bequeath to future generations of seekers, although paradoxically he would have hated to think of it in these terms. But it was Aleister Crowley who gave would-be Luciferans the rules.

By its very nature, striking out into the unknown towards the bright light of the Morning Star is as fraught with danger as any pilgrim's progress. Even buoyed by the noblest of ideals, there are dangers aplenty, not the least the temptation of frolicking naughtily in the soft light of black candles to celebrate orgiastic fauxSatanism. The real thing, after all (by any other name) is and always will be a form of outright criminal insanity - the evils of a Hitler or a Saddam Hussein being beyond even the imagination of most people. Ordinary folk are simply not cut out to be true Satanists because like it or not, they possess a conscience and an intense disgust for the disgusting. Satanism in the suburbs may be an interesting diversion, but with its emphasis on dirt and darkness it can never provide the way to the Light. But whereas we all have to find our own path, and to some extent therefore make our own maps, these `rules' of Crowley's provide a sound basis for a well-lived life.

Everyone knows Crowley declared: `Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law', usually, and inaccurately, taking it to be a licence for depraved hedonism, but in fact his creed goes on: `Love is the Law, Love under Will'. He adds: `Every man and woman is a star' - echoed in diluted form in LaVey's `Each child is a minute Renaissance man'97 - explaining that in his system, `The sin against the Holy Ghost is to hinder another star from following its true will'. All too often, however, each individual `star' hinders his or her own path to their true will.

As Colin Wilson says, `Man is not small - he's just bloody lazy.'98