Occultism and modern Luciferianism

Your goal in this lesson: to know who actually recast Lucifer as a bringer of light, and to tell Luciferians, Satanists and hoaxes apart.

Blavatsky’s light-bringer

Modern Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, did more than anyone to recast Lucifer as a bringer of light. In September 1887 in London she launched a monthly magazine called Lucifer, co-edited at first with the writer Mabel Collins. In the first issue she explained the title: Lucifer was the ancient name of the Morning Star, unjustly turned into a name of the Devil, and the magazine meant to bring light to hidden things. It was renamed The Theosophical Review in 1897. Blavatsky did not found a Devil cult. She used Lucifer as a symbol of light and mind.

Crowley and Fraternitas Saturni

Modern Aleister Crowley, who founded the religion of Thelema in 1904, used provocative “Beast” imagery, but Thelema centers on the Law of Thelema and deities drawn from Egyptian sources. It is not a religion of Lucifer. Fraternitas Saturni, a German magical lodge founded in Berlin in 1928 by Eugen Grosche, links Saturn with Lucifer as a bringer of light. Stephen E. Flowers has written a scholarly history of it in English.

The Taxil hoax

Modern From 1885 the French writer Léo Taxil published books “exposing” a secret Luciferian order of Freemasons. On 19 April 1897, at a public meeting in Paris, he announced that the whole thing had been a hoax. Yet some of its inventions, such as a fake quotation attributed to the Masonic leader Albert Pike, still circulate. If you meet a quotation in which a famous person openly confesses to worshipping Lucifer, check where it first appeared.

Satanists and Luciferians

Modern The Church of Satan was founded in 1966 by Anton LaVey, whose Satanic Bible appeared in 1969. It treats Satan as a symbol of human nature, not a being. The Satanic Temple, founded in the 2010s, uses Satan as a symbol of rebellion against arbitrary authority and campaigns on religious liberty. Neither believes in a literal Devil.

Luciferians prefer the name Lucifer because it stresses light, knowledge and self-rule rather than opposition. Some treat Lucifer as a real spirit or god; others as a symbol of the mind that seeks knowledge. Groups differ widely, so the honest approach is to ask each one what it means. Ruben van Luijk’s Children of Lucifer and Massimo Introvigne’s Satanism: A Social History are careful scholarly histories.

Moral panic

In the 1980s and early 1990s, a wave of fear about secret Satanic cults swept several countries. Official inquiries, including a 1992 FBI report by Kenneth Lanning and a 1994 report for the British government by Jean La Fontaine, found no evidence of the organized cults alleged. Real abuse happens and is a serious crime, but the conspiracy picture was false, and it hurt innocent people.

Try this

Today’s exercise: find one quotation online in which someone famous “admits” to worshipping Lucifer. Try to trace where it first appeared. Write down what you found, even if the answer is “I could not find a source”. That answer is information too.

Quick recap

• Blavatsky’s Lucifer magazine (1887) recast him as a light-bringer.
• Crowley’s Thelema is not a religion of Lucifer.
• The Taxil hoax invented “Luciferian” Freemasonry, confessed in 1897.
• Satanist and Luciferian groups differ: ask each what it means.

Keep going

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Ethics, safety and mental health. For more myths and their answers, see Lucifer myths.

Need a refresher? Go back to Medieval devils and Milton or see the whole course.

Sources

• H. P. Blavatsky and Mabel Collins (eds.), Lucifer, vol. 1, no. 1 (London, September 1887).
• Ruben van Luijk, Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism (Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible (1969).
• Massimo Introvigne, Satanism: A Social History (Leiden: Brill, 2016).

Go deeper: the Lucifer pages on this site

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