Luciferianism

Luciferianism is a belief system that venerates the essential characteristics that are affixed to Lucifer, the name of various mythological and religious figures associated with the planet Venus.

The tradition usually reveres Lucifer not as the Devil, but as a destroyer, a guardian, liberator,[1] light bringer or guiding spirit to darkness,[2] or even the true god.

[1] According to Ethan Doyle White of the Britannica, among those who "called themselves Satanists or Luciferians", some insist that Lucifer is an entity separate from Satan, while others maintain "the two names as synonyms for the same being".

In 1392–1394, when some four hundred Luciferians from Brandenburg and Pomerania were brought before the inquisitor Peter Zwicker, he exonerated them of devil-worship and correctly identified them as Waldensians.

[26] Lucifer the Lightbearer was an individualist anarchist journal published in the United States by Moses Harman in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Lucifer, the name given to the morning star by the people of the ancient world, served as the symbol of the publication and represented the ushering in of a new day.

He declared that freethinkers had sought to redeem and glorify the name Lucifer while theologians cursed him as the prince of the fallen angels.

Rudolf Steiner's writings, which formed the basis for anthroposophy, characterised Lucifer as a spiritual opposite to Ahriman, with Christ between the two forces, mediating a balanced path for humanity.

Taxil promoted a book by Diana Vaughan (actually written by himself, as he later confessed publicly)[29] that purported to reveal a highly secret ruling body called the Palladium, which controlled the organization and had a Satanic agenda.

As described by Freemasonry Disclosed in 1897: With frightening cynicism, the miserable person we shall not name here [Taxil] declared before an assembly especially convened for him that for twelve years he had prepared and carried out to the end the most sacrilegious of hoaxes.

[31] In Devil-Worship in France, Arthur Edward Waite compared Taxil's work to what today would be called a tabloid story, replete with logical and factual inconsistencies.

[33] The couple initially lived together in Torrington Place, London, from where they ran the course; but in 1961 moved to the coastal town of Southsea in Hampshire, where there was greater room for Heron's engraving equipment.

[34] In Anton LaVey's The Satanic Bible, Lucifer is one of the four crown princes of hell, particularly that of the East, the "lord of the air", and is described as the bringer of light, the morning star, intellectualism, and enlightenment.

[43][44][45][46] Ford stated that The Greater Church of Lucifer was forced to shut down one year later because their landlord refused to renew their lease after receiving death threats.