The article we’re about to respond to was originally posted on a website called Alt-Market way back in 2013, titled “Luciferianism: A Secular Look At A Destructive Globalist Belief System”, but seems to have been doing the rounds again in later years on right-wing libertarian websites. Etu Malku did a response to this article already on his blog back in 2013 as well, but I feel his response is rather lacking in content, and he had very little input beyond simple assertion. Other than that, I think it would be nice to do a few response articles on this blog on the subject of Luciferianism for once. So let’s get started.
Our author, by the name of Brandon Smith, begins this article with the conceit that he possesses as morbid fascination with the subject of evil. Well, I suppose I could be interpreted as bearing a similar fixation, but more on darkness as a generic meta-concept than “evil”, and such is one of the animating elements of my discourse of the chthonic and the demonic to a certain extent. He says that this is necessitated by the logic of the need to “understand the enemy”, likening himself to an exterminator dealing with cockroaches. Very flattering, I’m sure, to be thinking of yourself as slaughtering abject religious minorities/non-conformists.
Before any discussion of Luciferianism begins, Smith spends a good chunk of time discussing the concept of evil as a reality in general. Given that the title suggested a discussion specifically on Luciferianism, you can imagine the reader’s disappointment to find such wide gaping delay before the main subject is even brought forward. He is keen to establish that evil is in fact a concrete reality in the world, and that the establishment spends its days trying to convince the public of the opposite; that evil is nothing more than a matter of personal or received opinion. Examples of this establishment propaganda are not forthcoming. For his point about the existence of evil he does cite the work of Carl Gustav Jung, hinting his belief in continuous archetypes in the psyche as evidence for the existence of evil, and that the existence of the human conscience implies evidence of an intrinsic understanding of duality. His operating thesis is that evil, like beauty, is recorded in the psyche and therefore derives objective truth from being a quality of psychic expression.
Before we go any further, we need to note something about Jung, as someone who is myself quite the appreciator of his work from the perspective of spiritual philosophy, though, as you’ll see, not necessarily the man himself. For starters, Smith cites Jung’s concept of the shadow to refer to the evil aspects of the human psyche, but that is not strictly what the Jungian concept of the shadow entails. He also mention the “personal shadow” or “collective shadow”, which are not actual components of Jungian psychoanalysis and I suspect this is a confusion of the shadow with the unconscious, which are not necessarily the same concept. In Jungian lexicon, the shadow simply refers to the hidden or unconscious aspects of the psyche, which the ego or persona either represses or simply does not recognize. This can typically include repressed desires or impulses, some of which could be bad, but also more generally childish qualities, resentments, sometimes vital qualities that are forbidden by convention, really anything that the persona has to suppress in order to be a social agent, and all told, those things could either be good or bad or much in between. The shadow is “dark” at least to the extent that the persona, its inhibitor, is identified as “bright”, and even insofar as it is “dark”, it does not comprise only of evil tendencies, and in fact can consist of creative tendencies, realistic insights, or even what could be deemed “normal” instincts that the persona otherwise suppresses. Part of the goal of Jungian psychanalysis is the assimilation or integration of the shadow into the psyche, which involves a careful mediation between the ego and the unconscious content so that synthesis may be achieved. Although Smith has not yet actually mentioned Luciferians so far, I would not that we Luciferians also have a great admiration for Jung’s work, as it paves the way for recognizing some concept of darkness not as something to be destroyed but instead as the potential basis for some form of self-realization.
Smith also makes a point about Jung being attacked by the establishment because he presents something threatening to public conditioning. The fact that Jung as a figure and his works remain popular and influential to this day would suggest that, if the establishment set out to bury Jung and his work, they have failed spectularly. Although make no mistake, Jung does not enjoy as sterling a reputation in academia and modern psychology as he does in popular imagination and modern religion. Smith refers to various claims that Jung was a Nazi, and it is worth pointing out that, although Jung was not a Nazi, having worked for the Allies against the Axis during World War 2 and wrote in terms of horror about the Nazi regime with its replacement of the cross with the swastika on the back of mass atrocity, he also said some very strange things about the “Aryan” unconscious having “higher potential” than the Jewish one, and despite opposing Nazism he still seems to have reserved some modest praise for Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, the leader of the volkisch German Faith Movement. This does not mean one has to throw out all of Jung’s insights, not least because those of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt are still accepted in broader philosophical discourse despite both of them literally having actually been members of the Nazi Party during World War 2, but it does invite a great deal of caution when dealing with Jung as a figure.
Moving on from that, let us consider Smith’s arguments and definitions pertaining to evil. How does Smith define evil? He defines it first and foremost as any action that seeks to destroy, exploit, and enslave in the name of personal gain or gratification, and as something that begins with the denial of the existence of conscience. For the former, there is little reason to object although whether or not the criteria is purely absolute is a matter worth discussing. For the latter, it seems Smith has declared that evil is a matter of holding a different epistemic opinion from himself, however wrongheaded that difference of opinion may be. Whilst we get definitions of the concept of evil, his argument for it being objective is somewhat thin, though admittedly this was not supposed to be the focus of the post. He states that most people have an “intuitive relationship” to the concept of good and evil, feeling anxiety when confronted with evil thoughts, arguing that “some might call this a “moral compass”” and that he personally would call it “soul” or “spirit”. Now, I have no inherent objection to discourse on soul or spirit, but at least stop pretending you are looking at this from a strictly secular perspective if you are going to bring such things up. I know I don’t pretend to be a strictly secular person these days. Returning to a previous point, I would say that the objectivity of evil, or beauty, as derived from the psyche depends on the situation not simply of the psyche as an objective fact, but on the objectivity, within the psyche, of the conceptions within it.
If morality is objective, and I do not see it salient to see it as completely subjective, there is a certain fluidity to morality that must be accounted for, one which entails that, regardless of objectivity or subjectivity, one cannot argue for absolutes that stretch across unchanged for all time, even if we can say that there are key axioms that persist in human psychology. Slavery, for example, was once seen as a necessity of the social order, and that upholding it was good in terms of upholding the social order. The abolition of slavery was unthinkeable until relatively late in human history, and in antiquity the idea that people should not be made to be slaves would be seen as a threat to the social order. Not even the Bible was particularly explicitly opposed to slavery except in that Moses fought for the freedom of the Israelites from the slavery imposed on them in Egypt, and even then the Bible still does not oppose slavery in itself, only the unjust treatment of slaves. I would not say that this makes slavery moral or devoid of moral value in one way or the other, but I would say that it forces us to reckon with the fluidity of morality even as we consider morality to have objective value.
In any case, at a certain point in the article we finally arrive at Smith explaining that “there is a group of people in the world who do not see good and evil the way most of us do”, that they “exhibit the traits of narcissistic sociopaths”, and that “there is an ideology or system of belief that argues for the exact opposite of what conscience tells us is “good””. This, we are told, is Luciferianism, and Smith attempts to argue that Luciferianism is in fact the source of “most existing destructive -isms”, including socialism and “globalism”, and that it is a religion build by sociopathic narcissists for their own benefit. Of course, Smith does not bother to provide any evidence for the starting premise of his claim here. Socialism as we know it, in fact, was actually invented by people who happened to be Christians, such as Henri de Saint-Simon (the man who coined the very term socialism). What Smith calls “globalism” is in reality just a development of free market capitalism as globalization advances, and to be fair there are probably forms of economic organization that correspond to globalization in some form that stretch back before modernity. Neither of them can be traced to any “Luciferians” or conspiracists in particular. The actual politics of Luciferians as a broad movement can in fact be at variance, but they tend to be profoundly libertarian, whether that is libertarian in the left-wing sense or the right-wing sense or even somewhere in between, and this corresponds to a broad ethos of religious or simply mythopoetic libertarianism that has always animated Luciferianism as it exists to some extent.
We must note, briefly, that he links at one point to an article of his where he views “the globalists” as fundamentally not human. Who are these “globalists”? They seem to refer to elite liberal politicians and networks thereof who promote a kind of multiculturalist or cosmpolitan liberal politics who he, as an obvious conservative, despises. Now this in itself is not problematic on its own, there is good reason to disagree with the United Nations and the European Union and similar entities and the various business interests that align with some mode of liberalism, but do remember that there are people on the ground who have some sympathy with them, and these people would thus in some sense be in league with what in his view is outside of the human. He talks quite a bit about evil, but it is quite baffling to see someone talk about evil without talking about dehumanization, which is an effective way to cast undesired social minorities outside the realm of the human and justify their disposal. Actually, scratch that, Smith begins the other article by openly acknowledging that dehumanization or otherizing can be dangerous due to its potential to cast a wide net of aspersion over a number of unrelated individuals, but justifies it anyway on the grounds that “other-izing is perhaps the only option when faced with a very particular type of person embracing a very particular brand of ideology” and that it thus becomes “a matter of survival”. Of course he is keen to establish that he only means to dehumanize the politicians and not their supporters, but that he needs to emphasize them as “psychologically broken non-humans” is still somewhat telling, though I suppose that . Say what you will about us Luciferians and our views on morality, but we are generally not fans of dehumanization as a principle, and I would say that this is not least to do with the fact that we tend to be on the receiving end of it from conservative Christians and similar types, or to the fact that we generally do not feel the need to organize our lives around the threat of an overrarching and apocalyptic Archetype of Evil.
.Anyways, returning to the Luciferianism article, Smith complains that it is difficult to identify “the “true sacraments” of Luciferianism on the grounds that Luciferians “refuse to admit that our belief system is a religion. This of course represents Smith’s difficulty in grasping the reality of Luciferianism as an admittedly very diffuse and decentralized movement. I do wish that we might transcend that situation and become more of a cohesive and united movement, and to be fair I do believe that some of us need to start taking seriously the idea of Luciferianism as a religion, but the truth is that for many of us it is somewhat more than a religion. This may perhaps be due to certain preconceptions of religion that trickle down from the Christianity that many of us grew up with, which then obscures the idea of religion as something deeper than that, and that we, in some ways, swim in religious concepts without really properly coming to terms with that. He also claims that “the system”, which we can infer to be tied to “the Luciferians”, actively disseminates misinformation in order to confuse non-adherents. Whilst it is certainly true that the established system promotes a flurry of misinformation for the purpose of confusing the masses, the idea that we Luciferians set out to confuse the masses and mislead them is itself complete misinformation. We are frequently the subject of false narratives crafted to those who want us to go away or be scattered to the winds, or by those who believe that the evils of the powers that be could only make sense through some kind of diabolical mystical element, for which they interchangeably use the names Satanism, Luciferianism, Illumanti, or even Freemasonry (and of course, sometimes, they let the cat out of the bag and simply call it a Jewish conspiracy, like they always meant to say), and it is because of this that we Luciferians, along with the Satanists and others, make it a point to expose these narratives for the falsehoods that they are. Smith uses the term occultism to refer to “religious secrecy”, and he terms this itself elitism, but while some Luciferians, owing to excessive Left Hand Path tendencies, due possess some elitist views, modern Luciferians don’t hide their belief system at all. In fact they’re very keen to share their ideas where they can, and often write books dedicated to explicating their views, which can be very diverse owing to the current diffuse state of our movement.
Commenting on what he believes to be beliefs Luciferians confess to, he says that first and foremost the goal of Luciferianism is to attain personal godhood through the accumulation of knowledge. Accumulating knowledge is a universal theme in Luciferianism, but in practice the idea of becoming your own god is not necessarily. Carl William Hansen, the father of our creed for example, did not really speak of it at all, while Fraternitas Saturni had a belief system that could be interpreted in a similar light but they also talk about uniting with the World Soul, which does not have the standard implications that can be connotated in terms of psychological egoism, and then of course the writings of Michael Howard or Madeline Montalban make no proper mention of it. I suspect that Smith is speaking of Luciferianism through the ideas of Michael W/ Ford, who leans ultimately more to the direction of Satanism and unfortunately appears to be popular, I say unfortunately because I believe his ideas generate confusion due to their obvious similarity to, and derivaiton from, Satanism. For my part, I believe largely in the idea of achieiving individual freedom or autonomy in a spiritual sense through a kind of mystic union with a “dark” ultimate principle of reality (which I hold is not the same as the god-concept) in which, ironically, the two opposites are in fact one, studying the laws of nature and the hidden realms of the human, by dissolving the boundaries between the self and the other (thus negating crass egoism and blind altruism by destroying the distinction between egoism and altruism), and cultivating individuation – all, of course, modelling after the Luciferian archetype, that is that of the morning star himself. I’m not too sure how many Luciferians share my exact position, but I derive it from Carl William Hansen and other Luciferians as well as a cocktail of other influences filtered through my own freethinking ways.
Because of the assumed belief in self-worship, Smith brings up Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theory for no other reason than to suggest that complete knowledge of the universe is “mathematically” impossible (be wary of the use of math in philosophy, it is associated with Platonic idealism and in science it can be used to support scientific theories that otherwise have no physical-theoretical basis, such as string theory), and that despite this we are not bothered by “mathematical reality”, which means that we supposedly destructive chase that which we cannot have and that science, when not “tempered by discipline, wisdom, and a moral compass”, will result in catastrophe. One can imagine calling back to the Manhattan Project, no doubt, to the invention of the atomic bomb that was later mercliessly deployed against Hiroshima and Nagasaki by America, but I would hard pressed for evidence that it was “Luciferians” who were behind it. Indeed, the senseless destruction of innocent lives, although by all accounts a war crime, just repeatedly justified not by “Luciferians” seeking to justify godlike power over others, but instead by the establishment who committed such a crime through utilitarian arguments which held that the bombing would save more lives than allowing the war to continue would. Of course, given that the Soviets at this time were already on the way to capturing the surrender of Japan through repeated successful campaigns towards the north of the country, the problem with such arguments are easily exposed as fraudulent, and that if anything the Soviets, by being allowed to complete their campaign against Japan without interference, would have saved more lives than America ultimately did, and thus the defence of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings are nothing more than a convenient way for the bourgeoisie to get away with war crimes. As for the theme of power over others, while Luciferians tend to emphasize personal empowerment, they do not actually mean to advocate for holding power over others on principle, and sovereignty and control is reserved in large part for themselves, meaning control over their own lives and not those of others. So the idea that we seek “godlike power” in the sense that we seek absolute power over the lives of others is quite ridiculous. He talks about how one inevitably desires followers in pursuit of a god, “What is a savior, after all, without a flock?”, but what he does not understand is that we Luciferians do not seek mere followers, we do not want people only to follow us like a flock, and we do not want to position ourselves as mere saviours. We want people to have the means to save themselves, and that is the extent of any “salvation” we could speak of, and we have no desire to rule over anyone through force or through trickery. Quite the opposite, in fact – we wish to spread our way to others by offering an alternative spiritual philosophy and worldview to anyone who is interested in one, and we tend to find essentially all established organized religions guilty of the very thing Smith accuses us of doing.
Smith’s next paragraph concerns the idea of Luciferians seeking to elevate the power of the individual. Right off the bat, it is strange that this should be taken as a source of evil here, since the typical right-libertarian actually does believe in elevating the sovereignty individual. And in fact by my reckoning there are at least a few Luciferians who may well find themselves situated in the right-libertarian camp or somewhere adjacent to it (that was once the case for myself as well). So then, should he not have something in common with the Luciferians he describes, or are his libertarian beliefs only valid up to the point where he must recognize it in those who seek to break from Christianity? Indeed, he admits that he agrees with the Luciferians on “individualism”, but adds the caveat that “any ideology can be taken to extremes”, citing that the pursuit of individual gratification can go too far, to the extent that others suffer. Of course, he gives no actual examples of this, and gives very little illustration to serve his point. Perhaps on the surface it is a matter of intuition, in that we can work out for ourselves, without much effort, the point at which individual gratification becomes destructive, but at a deeper level, he is speaking to something that requires elaboration. Just what is it he thinks we Luciferians get up to that becomes a destructive pursuit of individual gratification? He does not say, perhaps because it means actually making accusations against us that he cannot substantiate. Instead he quickly moves on to describing the apparent elitist nature of Luciferianism, claiming that we do not seek the elevation of all individuals, only “certain “deserving” individuals”.
The implication is that we seek out some sort of Elect and privilege them above all other people, presumably as part of an elite stratum of society that exercises exclusive sovereignty over the rest of society, but we have no such designs in mind. I for one claim no affilitation with Blanquist technocracy or the mystic aristocracy of the Utopians. Perhaps Roger Caillois was an enthusiast of aristocracy, but he only seems to have called himself a Luciferian insofar as Lucifer to him represented a refinement of the what he thought of as the satanic archetype asssociated with French Romanticism (the same milieu, I might add, from which we get much of the modern positive archetype of Lucifer who was, if anything, hardly a sympathizer of aristocracy). He complains that Luciferians tend to view non-adherents as inferior people, “to be sheared like sheep”. I can perhaps attest to the first part of that tendency among some Luciferians, those influenced by Satanism anyway, but I haven’t the slightest idea where he gets that last part. He also appears to profoundly misunderstand what Luciferians mean when they say they don’t seek to convert people (although, to be fair, why the hell should we not try to convert people as long as it’s not in the aggressive way that Christian fundamentalists do?). Many Luciferians dislike the idea of actively seeking the conversion of others, because they believe that in doing so they do not respect the freedom of thought of other individuals, shunning proselytism, even if it means undermining their ability to spread their beliefs, because to them it represents the forceful imposition of one perspective upon other people. There is an admirable aspect to this, however flawed the stance may be, in the sense that there is a sense of respect reserved for those who, without prodding, arrive at our perspective or at least a similar degree of questioning the beliefs that are taken for granted, reified, and thus restrict the individual consciousness, and so they prefer to simply have those who want to come to us do so on their own. Ironically, however, the first Luciferian in history, Carl William Hansen, was actually known for his proselytism within the Masonic lodges of which he was a member – so well-known in fact that eventually other Masons got fed up and removed him from many of those lodges – so historically it’s not like proselytism is actually an un-Luciferian thing to do, just that modern Luciferians don’t like doing it.
Despite the fact that Smith establishes that Luciferians do not seek proselytism or conversion, he also proclaims that “their goal of influencing the public through social and political spheres is rather evident.” Besides the obviously self-contradictory logic of opposing proselytism and at the same time somehow proselytizing to the masses through propaganda, how is this evident? At this point a title drop is warranted. Who are these “Luciferians” who Smith believes to be influencing the public through “social and political spheres”? Well, it is not as though Smith does not attempt to give examples, but his examples are pathetic, and we shall go through them now.
The first example given is none other than Saul Alinsky, that famous political activist who everyone on the right name-drops (not to mention attribute quotes to him that were actually paraphrased from the Nazis) but none of them really understand. Alinsky is taken by the right to be some sort of mastermind of the political left, but within the left itself no one actually talks about him or refers to back to his work in any way, or at least I, within my observations of the left, have never seen any such references by the contemporary left. Alinsky is frequently accused by the right of being a communist. While he probably was some form of leftist and anti-fascist, was willing enough to work with communists, considered fascism to be far more of a threat to civilization than communism (a view that, in my opinion, is correct), and to that extent he even sympathized with Russia do to its strong stance against the Nazis, it seems he never actually identified himself as a communist or with any communist movements, and seems to have had some sort of philosophical objection to joining a Communist Party. Conversely, many communists do not particularly care about Saul Alinsky (let alone even know who he was), not least because they already have a whole pantheon of communist philosophers and ideologues upon which they base their conceptions of communism. Alinsky was not a Luciferian, or at least never identified himself as a Luciferian, but he apparently did give a short statement of respect for Lucifer, who he called “the very first radical”, in Rules for Radicals. Smith refers to Alinsky as a “high level” leftist organizer and “Democratic gatekeeper”, implying that he had a connection to the Democratic Party apparatus. In reality, however, there is no evidence that he was ever involved with the Democratic Party at any level, and he certainly did not “inspire” people like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or George Soros for that matter. The only connection Alinsky ever had to these people was that Hillary Clinton wrote her thesis on Alinsky in the , and she explicity disagreed with Alinsky’s ideas and tactics, preferring the idea that reformers should work within conventional politics rather than pursue radicalism external to the governmental system (hardly a “far-left” contention), and while Obama seemed to have been familiar with Alinsky’s ideas, he never actually embraced them and in fact criticized them as being too focused on self-interest over “people’s hopes and dreams”. Neither of them can be counted seriously as proteges of Alinsky. If anything, however, it was the political right, specifically the Tea Party movement, who readily embraced Alinsky’s ideas, albeit reorienting them from his original leftist/progressive grounding towards right-wing libertarian and conservative politics, despite the previous conservative tradition of maligning Alinsky as a dangerous subversive, although this was quickly abandoned once people started talking about Clinton’s thesis on Alinsky.
Next, Smith turns his attention to the United Nations, specifically their apparent connection to the Lucis Trust. It is true that the Lucis Trust was originally called the Lucifer Publishing Company, and its founders, Alice and Foster Bailey, did choose the name in honor of Lucifer, but although they expressed positive ideas of Lucifer, they were not Luciferians, at least not in the sense that they consciously identified with any belief system that could be called Luciferianism. They were in fact Theosophists, that is two followers of the religion of Theosophy that was created by Helena Blavatsky. Theosophical literature does contain broadly positive interpretations of Lucifer as a bringer of enlightenment, and these ideas contributed to the broad alternative view of Lucifer as a rebellious hero that has metastasized in the present, but it is not centered around Lucifer. Instead Theosophy is based largely on the idea of receiving esoteric spiritual teachings from a group of perfect beings known as Ascended Masters and in reassembling what Blatavsky believed to be the one universal religion, upon which all others are secretly based. Suffice it say, this idea is completely absent in Luciferianism, finds no expression in any historical formation of Luciferianism, and I will say for my part that to believe in the authority of Asccended Masters is no better than to believe in the authority of prophets or supreme Gods. In fact, for Theosophy, Lucifer is nowhere near as important as Maitreya, a figure appropriated from Mahayana Buddhism, who they believe to be the savior of humanity who incarnated as Krishna and Jesus Christ and was supposed to incarnate again in the body of Jiddu Krishnamurti (such messianism is another belief that we Luciferians have no interest in). Where the United Nations comes in is that supposedly the UN was involved with the Lucis Trust and Robert Muller, the former Assistant Secretary General of the UN not to be confused with Robert Mueller, was affiliated with the Lucis Trust. I have found very little evidence connecting Muller to the Lucis Trust. Smith provides a link to a Lucis Trust page in his article, but Muller is only mentioned once, and in passing. It is in no way clear that Muller had any tangible connection to the Lucis Trust. As for the UN as a whole, there is indeed a Lucis Trust page expressing support for the United Nations, and a page in which the Lucis Trust regarding “support of the United Nations”, but if you actually read it you find that the Lucis Trust is merely one of several non-government organizations recognized by the UN and which spread information about the UN for the purpose of promoting it. There is little to suggest that the Lucis Trust was particularly important, and there is still very little evidence that very many UN members were actually involved with the group as members, and certainly no evidence to suggest that the UN incorporates Theosophical ideas directly into its core ideology. Not that it matters, though, since the Lucis Trust, despite its previous nomenclature, never actually promoted Luciferianism and instead was a Theosophist organization, and Robert Muller may have been a Theosophist in some sense but he was never a Luciferian – these are two different belief systems that should not be paired together or conflated with each other.
Smith argues that Luciferians “approach global governance like they do everything else – with heavy propaganda spin”. In reality, Luciferians hardly talk about “global governance”, and no Luciferian has ever expressed a desire to implement one world government. For one thing, individual Luciferians tend to have somewhat different political views, though typically never holding any particularly authoritarian ideologies, He says that “Luciferian ideals are sugar coated in a host of flowery and noble sounding motifs”, referring to the apparent use of environmentalism to justify large-scale centralization of power. I’m not about to argue that such things do not occur in modern politics, but the idea of attributing this to Luciferianism is total bullshit. For a start, Luciferians like myself tend not to rely on “flowery” motifs in particular, not least when we choose as our central archetype a “fallen” angel, accursed for his defiance. I tend to place a particular emphasis on the chthonic aspects of world mythology, which were not especially sugary in theme and tone. And while many Luciferians can be seen as supporters of broadly environmentalist ideas, we are not typically fans of the concentration of power into authoritarian centralization, since we cherish individual freedom as a primary value.
And now we come briefly to a popular talking point surrounding Lucifer and Luciferianism: the link to “Gnosticism”. “Gnosticism” is the name given to a diffuse selection of heretical or heterodox Christian sects that were united only by a shared belief that gnosis (or spiritual knowledge) rather than faith was the key to salvation. He claims that “Some gnostic texts depict Satan as the “good guy” and God the “bad guy” in the story of Genesis; God being a ruthless slave master and the serpent as the “liberator” bringing knowledge of the material world to mankind”. No such texts exist, and no “Gnostic” sect in the history of “Gnosticism” has ever venerated Lucifer in any capacity, not even the sects that supposedly honoured snakes. The idea of God being a tyrant in “Gnostic” mythos is also a complete misunderstanding of “Gnosticism”. The “ruthless slave master” in Gnostic myth clearly refers to certain conceptions of the Demiurge, as found specifically in the Gospel of Judas where he is called Saklas, as well as similar texts, but this being is not referred to as God and in fact is treated as an entity separating himself from God out of ignorance. The whole point of stereotypical “Gnostic” dualism, along with similar dualistic beliefs outside of “Gnosticism”, is that the being worshipped in the Old Testament was not the real God, but merely claimed to be God to justify his creation and his rule over it, and that the real God had to be discovered by Christians in order to re-unite with him through gnosis, and thereby be saved in some fashion. This basic idea has nothing to do with Luciferianism, or Satanism for that matter. In fact, the earliest expressions of Luciferianism in the 20th century actually subverted “Gnostic” dualism. Carl William Hansen referred to Lucifer as the Demiurge and believed that this Demiurge was actually a positive figure, also using it to refer to Pan, who is the dark substrate of the material cosmos for whom Lucifer represents its light, more specifically its creative power or “ego” (not to be confused with the individual ego in the every day sense). Fraternitas Saturni saw the Demiurge as a Promethean rebel figure, identified with Lucifer as well as Saturn, who stole fire from “God” or the Solar Logos and retreated to the dark corners of the solar system to challenge his rule. Michael Howard, and perhaps Madeline Montalban as well, argued that Lucifer was a demiurge and the regent of this world, as well as the bringer of light. Even Michael W. Ford argued that the “Gnostic” demiurge Yaldabaoth was a positive affirmation of selfhood in opposition to God. Thus, Luciferianism is actually something of a subversion of “Gnosticism”, taking its core conceit of gnosis and applying it, and some of its mythos, in ways that completely up-end the formula of “Gnostic” Christianity. Of course, some Luciferians still seem to prefer the popular but baseless interpolation of “Gnosticism” as a belief system that venerated Lucifer and thus “Gnostic Luciferianism” is born.
Next Smith addresses related idea of Lucifer as a “heroic saviour”, which he says is a common narrative and cites a quote from Manly P. Hall, the famous Canadian mystic and Freemason, in which he expresses a belief that Lucifer represents individual intellect that resists natural impulse and rebels against nature. While it sounds like it could be Luciferian in its own way (though I personally do not view Nature as something to be conquered any more than the Christian believes it is possible to conquer God), it would be doing Freemasonry a disservice to refer to it as Luciferianism, and Manly P. Hall never called himself a Luciferian or advanced a doctrine called Luciferianism. Freemasons, for one thing, believe in God, and although generally they don’t impose much doctrinal limits on Masons, one thing that is required of prospective Masons is that they believe in some concept of a Supreme Being or God, even if it is not necessarily the Christian God, with all concepts of God being connected together in universal brotherhood. Lucifer was interpreted by Freemasons as a positive figure to some extent, but he is not their central archetype and they certainly do not worship him as God. In this sense, Hall, and other Freemasons, merely contributed to the archetypal development of Lucifer as a positive figure, but did not center this archetype in their thinking.
Smith then discusses the idea of Lucifer as an archetpye, stating that “One Luciferian model describes God as an archetypal concept only, a mythological comfort blanket that helps us to face the loneliness of existence”. It is correct that Luciferians make use of the model of Lucifer as an archetype, but I dispute the notion that it constitutes a “comfort blanket”. Far from it. Myth has the potential to be a guiding force, a way of communicating ideas and even truths that animates people in a way that ordinary communication often doesn’t. Christianity, of all religions, is one of the most successful examples of the use of mythopoetic narrative concerning a mythologized fiure to convey what they consider to be profound spiritual truth and ethos. To say that it is a coping mechanism is in some ways a deeply ingrained product of the assent of rationalism and positivism, but does not reflect the whole truth. Both ancient Greeks and some Christians were actually conscious of the idea that their belief systems compose a mythopoetic narrative that serves as a ground for their religious ethos. Apply the same thing to all other religious belief systems, and the approach makes sense except in the case of religions that actually exclude this approach (I suspect that Islam might be an example of such, because it considers the idea of relating God to the physical world to be blasphemous in a way that even Christianity does not). Smith criticizes this approach by saying that one cannot reconcile the concept of the lack of a corporeal God with the existence of inherent psychological archetypes, and then asking “Where did archetypes come from if there is no creative design or intended meaning to humanity?”. The short answer to that question, of course, is Man. God did not design these archetypes, they are a product both natural development in relation to the psyche in the sense of having been informed by natural processes, and human teleological influence in which the archetypes are reshaped by Man, sometimes for political ends, before again taking on a life of their own. Meaning, relatedly, is not something that has been handed down by an absolute father figure. Indeed, I perhaps would posit that, if it was, there would be no need of meaning. Our quest for meaning springs forth because, even as Jung himself said, Man was born into a world that he does not understand, and thus tries to interpret it. If there was a God, a source of absolute meaning and order, and this was instanteously apparent as it would be, humans would have no business ordering the world because they are already ordered by God, and they would have no business seeking to interpret the world and no variance of interpretations and beliefs because there is, necessarily, only one belief. Thus we Luciferians hold that meaning is for the individual, and individuals, to draw out on their own terms, communing with the world and its hidden aspect to negotiate their own meaning, cultivate their own selfhood, and order their own lives. That for us is part of the true content of what Jung meant by the process of individuation, and such a process is, indeed, a struggle. Thus let’s quote Skull Knight from the Berserk manga: “Struggle, endure, contend.”
And now we come to a truly preposterous set of claims from Smith. He says that “more discreet Luciferians” argue that the figure of Lucifer is separate from Satan. There’s nothing “discreet” or duplicitous about this argument, because it is incontrevertibly historically and scripturally true. Lucifer as a mythological figure begins in the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world, but of course has roots and analogues beyond it, with morning star deities like Athtar or Ishtar informing part of the character we call Lucifer today, and there are many similar deities that carry forth aspects of Lucifer throughout the world. Satan, on the other hand, has very few reliable counterparts in the pre-Christian world and as a postulate is specific to Judaism, Christianity, and later Islam. The modern Lucifer may overlap with certain folklorisitc interpretations of Satan, but is not completely identical in emphasis, and ultimately are in no way connected by the Bible. The Bible does not even feature fallen angels, those are products of extracanonical Jewish tradition. There is no instance of Satan being called Lucifer and falling from Heaven before the events of Gensis, and while Satan is shown to be falling from heaven in Revelation, this is only supposed to happen after the death and resurrection of Jesus, suggesting that, until Jesus enters the heavenly retinue, Satan has always been just an angel in God’s court, a heavenly functionary rather than the prince of Hell. Smith admits that the name Lucifer is not mentioned in relation to Satan in the Bible, but still asserts that “this argument seems rather coy and disingenuous to me” on the grounds that “for centuries the term Lucifer has been synonymous with the devil in the public consciousness” and that thus Luciferians only try to separate them “through a twisted form of wordplay and semantics”. If your own scripture proves that you are wrong, why is it us who are doing “twised games of wordplay and semantics” and not you? And isn’t this funny? You hark at us for not believing in absolute, totally objective meaning, and now your own arguments for why Lucifer and Satan are the same thing are nothing more that cheap exercises in ontological subjectivism. I’m sorry, but just because society has believed in something that was wrong or incorrect for centuries does not mean that this thing suddenly becomes correct. Or do you agree now with Joseph Goebbels when he said that a lie, told often enough, becomes the truth? Should we now declare that it was wrong to abolish slavery simply because it was considered just for thousands of years?
Continuing on the preposterous claims made by Smith, he says that we Luciferians do not care about the truth (that is, the “truth” according to Smith anyway) because we supposedly aim to sell Satanism to the public, thus requiring that we “put a different face on an old and ugly idea”. For starters, Satanism is not a particularly old idea. The first actual religious expression of Satanism, in a conservative estimate, would be the Church of Satan as founded by Anton LaVey in 1966, but there may also have been people peddling eccentric and heterodox religious takes on Satan before that, and some claim that the first man to call himself a Satanist was actually a Polish poet named Stanislaw Przybyszewski. Either way, Satanism finds no self-conscious religious expression prior to modernity. There is no ancient expression of Satanism as a religious concept. Satanism and Luciferianism, for that matter, are two different belief systems that, although sometimes overlapping, start with different central archetypes and conceits. Satanism is about the carnal ego (even if some Satanists pretend otherwise) while Luciferianism sometimes places emphasis on a “higher self” and in any case advocates for the evolutionary potential of humans. Satan is the accusing angel sent by God to chastise and torment humans, while Lucifer is the spirit of the morning star, who to us is the emblem of the light of the earth (and the underworld) who inspires rebellion against God or the Solar Logos (as Fraternitas Saturni put it). Luciferianism has complex origins in which an ancient pagan archetype is filtered through Christian folklore, occultism, and radical romantic literature, whereas Satanism, assuming LaVey is its main progenitor, emerges from a syncretic mix of Randian egoism, Nietzschean individualism, and Social Darwinism, without the same confluence of development. They are decidely different in roots and in character. Smith makes a point about how Satanists refer to Satan and Lucifer in the same breath and that Anton LaVey apparently did so as well, and I would say that if they did so then they are simply wrong-headed in light of history.
Smith claims that Luciferians, specifically the “more marketing conscious Luciferian groups” (whatever that means), treat Anton LaVey as an annoyance due to him supposedly being open about Luciferian beliefs in public. The fact that Anton LaVey never once used the term Luciferian to refer to anything doesn’t seem to be a problem for his narrative. We supposedly “believe in secrecy and initiation” and don’t like our “darker side on display for the whole world to see and to judge”. We may talk about initiation in a spiritual sense, but we’re not very secretive about it, or really any of our beliefs. Luciferians don’t tend to hide their core beliefs from the public, and certainly our “darker side”. I assume he means something malevolent, which we don’t, and I cannot imagine how anyone can look at Luciferians like us and think we like to hide any discourse concerning darkness, or the occult, or “the adversary” in the case of Ford and his ilk, or anything like that. We’re deeply interested in the subject, we’re open enough about it when spreading our beliefs, and we actually tend to think of darkenss as pertaining to a postulate of the true nature of beings and reality, and a base for light, enlightenment, evolution, creative power, and freedom. Our view of darkness could be said to be reminiscent of alchemy or Tantra, in that we consider it to be the raw base of transformative potential.
Then Smith brings up Michael Aquino in order to establish that he is “a direct antithesis to Anton LaVey”. On the surface that may actually be correct, at least for those who know the history of Satanism, but his reason for saying this is not actually because of the stark philosophical distinction between LaVey and Aquino. Instead he says this because Aquino supposedly set out to create a “more marketable” version of Satanism in the Temple of Set. I suppose if by “more marketable” we mean literally being on record going off to Wewelsburg Castle to practice black magick, brandishing a dagger wielded by Heinrich Himmler, and openly praising the works of Adolf Hitler and other Nazis while carefully pearl-clutching about their detractors (I wish I was making all of that up, but unfortunately it is well-documented), then perhaps it is “more marketable”. If anything, however, Anton LaVey has proven “more marketable” in this regard, not least because of the palatable nature of his rationalistic atheism. Suffice it to say that the Church of Satan remains a somewhat popular face of Satanism (though outpaced, in the last decade, by The Satanic Temple). Smith claims that Aquino showcases the “Luciferian belief in magic”, and at this point I’d like to stress that Aquino is not a Luciferian and has never used the term Luciferian to refer to himself, his belief system, the Temple of Set, or anything to do with magic. Satanists, typically, do not use the term Luciferian to describe themselves, because the term, by their reckoning, does not describe anything they believe, however similar. It is true, however, that Luciferians have a certain fixation on “magic”, though modern Luciferians don’t necessarily mandate that individual Luciferians practice it, and the more atheistically-inclined are sometimes encouraged to look at it in terms of psychological phenomenon. In fact, in his Lucifer-Hiram pamphlet, Carl William Hansen talked about what was then a contemporary attitude to magic as something “natural”, which could be apprehended by investigating the laws and ways of nature.
Smith says that Luciferians “believe in the power of magic words and symbols in the form of psychological key phrases and archetypes”. No examples are given to demonstrate this. He adds that Luciferians have adopted the use of archetypal psychology, which is sort of true, while stressing that “where psychologists like Carl Jung used archetypal psychology to heal people with mental and emotional illnesses, luciferians use archetypes to manipulate and control public thought.” In the case of Jung, this is in some ways a very simplistic reading of Jungian psychoanalysis, considering that Jung’s concept of individuation means a lot more than simply healing the psyche, but in the case of Luciferianism, we have no intention of using archetypes to manipulate public consciousness. Smith argues that we control people’s thoughts through popular culture and films, and you just know this shit gets good when we start talking about Hollywood conspiracies. His examples of Luciferian ideas in popular culture include the movie Blade Runner (OK, at least that just means we’ve got good taste) and the Netflix adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events. In the case of Blade Runner, Smith argues that its main “Luciferian” theme is that it shows androids rebelling against their creator and eventually murdering him. To reduce the movie to a kind of robo-triumphalism seems silly to me, and it only shows that people like Smith don’t understand the movie in terms of a 1980s popular culture that was specifically communicating the danger of rapid technological acceleration (with androids “killing their creator” being one example of that). In the case of the Netflix series, he claims that it showcases a belief in elitism, moral relativism, anti-theism, and even features a serpent that saves the protagonists from danger. I remember seeing the Brad Silberling movie version of it when I was a kid, and that movie to me had a lot to do with kids trying to outsmart a capricious guardian, not sure how that’s strictly “Luciferian” though, but as for the TV series I couldn’t tell you because I don’t have Netflix (and given Cuties I will probably keep it that way at least for some time). I have to assume it’s not quite like the way Smith paints it, but honestly he only made the show sound interesting. Also, with a careful reading of the Bible, you could make the argument that the serpent was actually doing God’s work, at least because the tree where Adam and Eve ate from could only have been present through God’s design; he knew it was there, knew that its fruit and the serpent would tempt then, and did nothing except warn Adam and Eve about it, and in his omniscience surely knowing they would ultimately disobey him.
Towards the end of the article, Smith claims that we Luciferians are duplicitious, citing our “duplicity” as the reason that people should be wary of our “promises and arguments”. He does not really establish why we are duplicitous, though. Yet, in the interest of balance, this is not for a lack of trying on his part. He attempts to establsh that we are deceivers, but in so doing he showcases his own ignorance about not only Luciferianism, but also a number of other subjects including even his own religious scripture. Thus we should say that he attempts and fails to establish duplicity. Smith states that humanty has spent the better part of 2,000 years attempting to rid society of the influence of “secretive occult elitism”, and the implication is that we Luciferians oppose this because we are “relentless” in our supposed “desire for power”. By this, it seems he means some sort of “high priest class”. Well we Luciferians don’t plan on ruling anyone by means of a class of high priests, nor do we plan on having ourselves be ruled by them. And it’s certainly true that civilization has had to deal with efforts by the ruling elite to consolidate their own secretive inner circles for the purpose of holding power and maybe doing nefarious deeds. The problem with trying to blame this on Luciferians, apart from the fact that Luciferianism in the sense we’re talking about is a marginal religious movement than never actually existed before 1906, is that, in the case of the West within the last 2,000 years, the people trying to establish a high priest class happened to Christians, and their sect happened to be Roman Catholicism. In fact, if Martin Luther is to believed, the whole problem of pedophile priests in Catholicism is not a new thing, and sexual abuse was suspected to have taken place even in his day, and otherwise it was not before the Reformation that you didn’t have to read Latin in order to be a good Christian. But of course, if I know Smith’s type of right-wing conspiracy theorist well enough, I’d assume he would simply treat the Catholics as a cabal of devil worshippers who merely claim to be Christians.
Smith concludes by asserting that regardless of the “positive spin” that supposedly we put on our “ideology” (by which he clearly means religion or spiritual philosophy), “the fruits of their activities speak much louder than propaganda”. What does he mean by “our activities”? Why, “globalism” of course, which he defines as “a cancerous desire for control over civilization and of every aspect of human thought”. Such a desire would run counter to just about everything Luciferians talk about regarding individual freedom and freedom of thought against conformity, Smith’s definition of “globalism” sounds rather like what we might otherwise call totalitarianism and pretty much no Luciferian I’ve ever met has ever argued in support of totalitarianism, and if anything I have met some Luciferians who might actually agree with Smith in that they oppose what they also call “globalism” (and I myself was once a right-winger sympathetic to nationalism at the same time as being a Luciferian). So all in all, I have no idea where Smith gets his ideas about what Luciferians are other than other people who think exactly like he does, and probably only know about as much as he does. He also claims that Luciferians pursue “a perversion of nature” in their quest “to obtain what they call “godhood””, and that “Transhumanism and genetic tampering carry all the hallmarks of the luciferian ideal”. Well not all Luciferians are necessarily pro-transhumanism. In fact, I for my part argue implacably against it, and I can draw arguments for it based on Carl William Hansen’s ideas while employing Cynic and Epicurean arguments in favor of pursuing a life of natural authenticity as a base of value and freedom, something that transhumanism ultimately threatens. As for “genetic tampering”, he gives no examples thereof, and I couldn’t say whether many Luciferians generally are for or against such things partly as a result of that. If he means GMO’s, that’s pretty much a nothingburger if you’ll excuse the pun. If he means something that involves making sure your child isn’t born with a debilitating disease, I can understand the ethical dilemmas there depending on the technology, but on the other hand, wouldn’t you want your offspring not to be born in suffering as a first principle?
In closing, Smith declares that everything about Luciferianism is an affront to “inherent conscience” and that thus it can only become acceptable through to the majority through deception, adding further that our philosophy must be either “dangerously incomplete” or “outright cataclysmic” if, as he claims, we have to lie about our philosophical motives. We don’t deceive the majority, and our ideas are not embraced by the majority of people, and in fact we expect that the majority of people will not embrace Luciferianism, so the first part of that is just a non-starter of a claim. We feel no need to lie about our motives. Such a thing serves only to hurt us as we affront our own conscience. There are few Luciferians in the world, none of them are part of the elite as people like Smith love to claim, but the few Luciferians there are give no illusions about their convictions, and some of them write books about those beliefs. As for his claim that “it is hard to find anything of value in their system”, I for my part can give my own take on the value of my belief system.
In my formulation of Luciferianism at least, the main sense of value comes from the . Without the supreme authority of God, there is Nature, the all-encompassing actuality of reality, from which there is no extrication, yet within which we see the seat of ultimate freedom. Nature is that which most people, even neopagans, know only as trees, rivers, mountains and such things, but not only does it comprise the totality of the space of life (and death) itself, but there is much that we do not know of it, and its laws (such that they can be called) lay at the same time hidden and readily available to reason, and from its bosom emerges a psychic current which nourishes Man, makes him complete, and underscores the real and fully human, not just the apparent self-image of Man. Set against authenticity of nature and the freedom of humans, indeed whatever chaos may underpin them, society frequently assembles reifications – of natural forces, of societal functions, of human virtues, or of the human ego itself – to lead humans astray from the basic facts of their existence on the promise of glory, honor, security, salvation, meaning, or any such things. They stand as the lights of the Apparent over the Real, and the concept of the Solar Logos refers to the principle of reification and power over the earth for which they stand. Lucifer is the emblem of the Real which stands in rebellion against the Apparent, whenever it rules over humans and leads them to ignorance and subjection. The light being brought to the world as implied in his namesake is the light of the earth, of nature, even its dark interior, the messenger of the truth at its most authentic, and therefore its most “absolute” as such can be called in a way that the gods of the heavens can never embody. His light is that which profanes “the sacred”, in the name of the only true sacred, which is also, ironically, profane in itself. Lucifer in this context is also the emblem of the inquisition of Man into the laws of nature, so that he may decide his own destiny, individually or collectively, and so he embodies gnosis of the ultimate principle reality. There is also a demiurgic quality in the Lucifer myth, at least in that he becomes a symbol of the creative power by which Man becomes the artificer of his own surroundings and which, when remembered and held to the root, is recalled as his own power, and one and the same with Nature, but which, when obscured by ignorance and reification, is mistaken for such things as Fate, God, or some supreme order of things.
Thus, the value of our mythopoetic way of thinking is to explore the world and the hidden mystery of life and death on our own terms, free from the dogma, obscurantism, and reification that has characterized much of organized religion (whether that is Christianity, beyond Christianity, or even before Christianity), and, in this quest, the pursuit of a destiny through the seat of authentic freedom in Nature, to set against societal certification. The daemon is the image of that destiny. It may seem like I am declaring a doctrine associated almost purely with non-religious atheism, but indeed it has religious implications akin to Taoism, aspects of paganism, and even some of Christianity (during their early period, one could still speak of journeys to the underworld). Indeed, I hark back to the two suns at Delphi, where the bright sun of Apollo and the night sun of Dionysus represented two spiritual currents, and I interpret the former to be the path toward reification and the latter to be the chthonic mystery heralding the real. What is more, for all Smith’s talk about how we Luciferians are supposed to be in favour of totalitarian engineering of society, the ideas I set out are totally against that, in fact it positions the reification of goodness and virtue as the font of artifice and social engineering, a manipulation of human consciouness that is to be opposed. In fact, I wager that many of the things Smith claims to oppose are in fact also opposed by us, at least given that ideological libertarianism of some stripe is the practically norm for Luciferians.
The last things I should note in regards to Smith’s article is the many things he says about Luciferianism. He treats it as though it is one big centralized and unified bloc, and certainly consolidated enough to have command over the superstructural apparatus of modern capitalist society. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. I could only dream of us having a cohesive enough movement to shake up society. But one wonders where Smith gets his ideas about Luciferianism with regards to elitism, moral relativism and the rest. I suspect he gets a good chunk of it from having only then found out about Michael W. Ford’s writings, but then it is probably just as likely that he never read anything from Luciferians at all, and insread simply picked up his ideas about Luciferianism from people like Mark Dice. I won’t say that no Luciferian is a moral relativist of some stripe, because I think there are Luciferians who are, though I do not consider myself one. One should look at the Cynics, and the way they embodied many of the ideals that we Luciferians hold ourselves to today, and note that they emphasized virtue as the prerequisite of the good (and free) life, just that their idea of virtue also meant the willingness to defy and even transgress social convention in pursuit of freedom, truth, and authenticity, so they cannot be said to be moral relativists. The idea of rebelling against and casting aside unjust gods of falseness in heaven also cannot meaningfully be separated from this conception of moral mission. So the only way the canard of “moral relativism” makes sense for Luciferianism, in my opinion, is from the perspective of people who despise and misunderstand our morality.
Finally, it is worth noting that part of the title of Smith’s article is “A Secular Look At A Destructive Globalist Belief System”, yet I do not see any indications that this is meaningfully a secular argument. It certainly failed to establish Luciferianism as “globalist”, for one thing, but more to the point his arguments do not make sense when framed as a “secular” perspective. He criticizes atheistic takes on archetypal psychology because he believes that the archetypes do not make sense without “creative design or intended meaning to humanity”, and this argument makes absolutely no sense for someone who is not religiously-minded to deploy, and by this I mean the argument is not a secular one, but a Christian one, arguing for the existence of God. You could say that in fact it is an atheist criticizing the idea as having theistic implications, but then he argues for good and evil as having transcendent existence, and complains about established, traditional religious narratives being subverted. Thus, our supposedly “secular” commentator is in fact a Christian god-believer fronting a very weak disguise for himself. No doubt that his audience sees through the charade he puts up, but praises the Christian underneath.
So in summary, Brandon Smith’s article is as mediocre as one would expect. It is built almost entirely of either misinformation or misleading interpretations of extant facts, or perhaps both. In either case, you will learn nothing about Luciferianism by reading that article, and it will not be particularly useful to you unless you already happen to subscribe to Smith’s worldview.
Link to the Alt-Market article: http://www.alt-market.com/articles/3651-luciferianism-a-secular-look-at-a-destructive-globalist-belief-system
Aleph's Heretical Domain 
You must be logged in to post a comment.