Rational Theistic Luciferianism: The Occult Mind, Neural Nets and the Call of the Gods

This is an article in a series on Rational Theistic Luciferianism, for the other articles see:

• Magic Morality and Addressing the Spiritual
• Practical Thelema
• Rational Theistic Luciferianism: Philosophical Foundations
• A Practise and the Cults, Black Magick, Lucifer and Moloch
• Luciferianism, Demonolatory and the Black Flame 
• A Satanic Manifesto: My Personal Satanism

The Old Gods

Who were the gods of Stonehenge? Lost to history, the unknown gods, the nameless elder and eldritch gods who demanded human sacrifice. 

The earliest construction on the site of Stonehenge are from the Mesolithic part of the stone age, between 8500 and 7000 BC. 10000 years ago. A handful of pits with huge pine tree trunks in them. This is not long after the last ice age, the Younger Dryas which ended around 11700 years ago. The end of that ice age rendered Britain habitable again (barely) and modern arrived and the island has been inhabited continuously since then. 

Much later, around 3500 BC a cursus (earthwork enclosure with parallel banks) and long avenue leading to the site were dug using antlers as picks. Discarded antlers are perfect for radiocarbon dating. About another thousand years on Stonehenge was built, this is neolithic stone age man. We presume it has religious significance and was a temple. The shadows of some of the stones sort of align at midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset.

We know nothing of their gods or their language. We assume they had language, they could certainly collaborate. Our ancestors, the ancient dead, shrouded by the darkness of prehistory.

The Roman conquest of Britain in 43 AD is regarded as the start of recorded history. This is the era of Boudica and the legends of the ancient Britons. 

The gods of those who built the cursus and avenue way were just before the arrival of Bell Beaker culture. A point of social development in Europe sophisticated enough to produce the inverted bell shaped beaker drinking vessel, near the start of the bronze age.

Those people died off, a mass die out that took out around 90% of those ancient Britons. A large body of people moved across Europe and then through Ireland and then into Briton. A people who we would come to call the Celts, driving archaeologists and anthropologists apoplectic apparently, who arrived into mostly unoccupied lands.

These are the people who built Stonehenge, and honoured their gods there. The first we know of their gods and religion is when we get to the Druids, and the Romans. 

Julius Caesar wrote of the Druids in Gaul, the Gaulish Druids who they called the barbarian philosophers. Under Claudius the Druids were slaughtered at Anglesey. Tacitus had this to say of the battle:

A force was next set over the conquered, and their groves, devoted to inhuman superstitions, were destroyed. They deemed it indeed a duty to cover their altars with the blood of captives and to consult their deities through human entrails.

Prior to this battle the Romans had already encountered the Druids of Briton. Tactitus recounts: the legionaries were awestruck on landing by the appearance of a band of druids, who, with hands uplifted to the sky, poured forth terrible imprecations on the heads of the invaders. And that these "terrified our soldiers who had never seen such a thing before".

In the second century Diogenes Laërtius had this to say, also referencing the lost magic of Aristotle:

Some say that the study of philosophy originated with the barbarians. In that among the Persians there existed the Magi, and among the Babylonians or Assyrians the Chaldaei, among the Indians the Gymnosophistae, and among the Celts and Gauls men who were called druids and semnothei, as Aristotle relates in his book on magic, and Sotion in the twenty-third book of his Succession of Philosophers.

We know Julius Caesar was a horrible liar in his reports from Gaul, but we also know that it is likely that the Druids engaged in ritual sacrifice with burial sites having been found in Gaul and elsewhere, but this is still disputed.

Diodorus Siculus,  who may have been a druid, wrote about Druidic sacrifice: 

These men predict the future by observing the flight and calls of birds and by the sacrifice of holy animals: all orders of society are in their power ... and in very important matters they prepare a human victim, plunging a dagger into his chest; by observing the way his limbs convulse as he falls and the gushing of his blood, they are able to read the future.

What little we know about their religious practises we know less of their gods. The old gods. A religion of nature and the land. Nature who is red in tooth and claw.

Of the legends of the ancient Britons Boudica, our tragic and glorious warrior Queen, most stirs the heart. A legend spread by the Romans, of how they almost lost Britain to a great uprising led by Queen Boudica and viciously put down by a single legion returning from the slaughter of the Druids on Anglesey.

There is a modern Druid movement, but it traces its ancestry not to those original Druids of antiquity but from the European occult revival of the nineteenth century, and Eliphas Levi writing about ceremonial magic in impenetrable high French.

Levi was a contemporary of Schopenhauer's. Schopenhauer realised that all that could be known of life was Will and Representation (1819), your capacity to effect change and the forms of the mind. Schopenhauer concluded, therefore despair. However he led a decadent life.

Levi came to much the same realisation, but instead concluded: therefore magic.

For those interested in the modern Druid movement The Celtic Golden Dawn, by one of the chief Druids in Britain, is a superlative work. It is a Celtic reimagining of a pagan spiritual practise based on the Qabala in the tradition of The Golden Dawn.

True ignorance is to confuse knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge puffs up whilst love builds up.

Beware those who mistake studying the occult for doing the occult, who confuse knowledge for understanding.

Some quotes from Aleister Crowley on sexual repression and destiny:

"Destiny is an absolutely definite and inexorable ruler. Physical ability and moral determination count for nothing. It is impossible to perform the simplest act when the gods say "No." I have no idea how they bring pressure to bear on such occasions; I only know that it is irresistible. One may be wholeheartedly eager to do something which is as easy as falling off a log; and yet it is impossible."

-- The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, 1929

"The fact is, of course, that the puritan has been turned by sexual repression into a sexual pervert and degenerate, so that he is insane on the subject."

"As long as sexual relations are complicated by religious, social and financial considerations, so long will they cause all kinds of cowardly, dishonourable and disgusting behaviour. "

-- The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, 1929

"It is a terrible error to let any natural impulse physical or mental stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be one with it; or fulfill it, and get it out of the system; but do not allow it to remain there and putrefy. The suppression of the normal sex instinct, for example, is responsible for a thousand ills. In Puritan countries one inevitably finds a morbid preoccupation with sex coupled with every form of perversion and degeneracy."

"In these days, when devils enter into swine, they do not rush violently down a steep place. They call themselves moral reformers, and vote the Prohibition ticket."

-- Moon Child, 1917

 

I feel the call of the gods through my desires and passions, what I'm drawn to. I hear the call of the gods through coincidences and synchronicities in my life. I hear the call of the gods through culture and art, music and movies. I hear the call of the gods in nature and the wild. I hear the call of the gods in hearing their names all around me and knowing their nature and imagining their works.

Lucifer is light bringer, the bright morning star. Son of the morning and daughter of the evening. Where there is illumination, progress, fresh insight and light, there is Lucifer and the work of Lucifer.

The Occult Mind and Neural Nets

The human mind, psyche and spirit, is occult. Life is occult and life is spirit. We are spirit as life is spirit. 

The power of the occult is found in correspondences and associations. In the legends of the gods we find correspondences and echoes within the depths of our own soul. The forces and ideas that have shaped humanity and our experience and understanding of life are found in the world around us, external reality, as well as being foundational and formational within our own minds and depths. 

Correspondences in the human psyche with occult symbols and principles that echo back to the fundamental aspects of the mind, back in history and through evolution both biological and social, and echoing too in the same deeper aspects of the wider world from whence they came. The power of pure abstract thinking. Spirit as essence, abstraction to the forms.

How and why is this true? How does music and art move the soul and move the passions of the human hearts in ways that go beyond rationality and conscious understanding? How are we changed, and our lives impacted, by forces outside our control and understanding, and can we bring light to the operation and tides of the unconscious and our own shadow that appears as fate?

So much of the operation of our own unconscious happens in the minds of other people. This is the shadow, how other people respond and react to us and how that affects and influences us. We're social creatures, like it or not, and we do some of our thinking together. It all happens in and through and because of neural nets.

Neural nets, neural networks, can be found in two basic forms. Biological and software. Biological nets are the basis of all intelligence and consciousness on planet earth. Neural networks are the basis (although not the only stone in the foundation) of the modern scientific fields of both data science and artificial intelligence. A series of algorithms and techniques for data processing have created a revolution in the way we work with data, this is called data science and is a branch of Artificial Intelligence. At the heart of this is the software neural net. An implementation to run on computers, processing numbers as everything in a computer is a number, of the neural net that our brains are made of. 

If you're not familiar with software neural nets, this is a reasonable article on the topic:

• The Differences Between Artificial and Biological Neural Nets

"Your brain contains about 86 billion neurons and more than a 100 trillion (or according to some estimates 1000 trillion) synapses (connections). The number of “neurons” in artificial networks is much less than that (usually in the ballpark of 10–1000) but comparing their numbers this way is misleading."

Deep learning involves more than one layer of software neural net, closer to how our brains work. We're not really sure how software neural nets work, they're a black box, but we know they work in a similar way to the neural nets in our head. The major difference is that in software we only have AI (Artificial Intelligence) and not AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), true intelligence. We can put together an algorithm using neural nets and we can teach it something by encoding our own understanding into it. This is "training the model", with a training data set which it can learn to recognise. If this dataset matches well to the real world then the model will work well. Any bias in the dataset will produce a biased model. This is how you get facial recognition systems based on AI that only work with white people, because of the bias in the training data. 

The big difference between AI and AGI though is that our current AI can't learn new things. We can teach them something, usually just one thing, but they can't learn in the field or adapt to changes. We don't have general intelligence. What makes our intelligence so powerful is that we can learn how to learn and we can learn new things. The human mind starts as an almost entirely blank slate, fresh and clean neural nets waiting to be trained. Take a baby crocodile fresh from the egg and throw it into the bush and it will survive. Well, probably. Its behaviour and instincts are hard wired and it only has limited capacity for learning. A much smaller neural net than the human one. A baby human knows virtually nothing. About the only innate knowledge is the nipple, beyond that everything is learned. That takes time, so their young take a lot of care, but they're extremely flexible. Apex predator.

Here's a pop science crude summary of how a neural net works. A neural net can learn to recognise an idea or a pattern. That can come from text or numbers or sound or images. Anything that a computer can turn into numbers. You feed the neural net the training data, let's say images of cats, and the neural net builds up an abstract "idea" of what a cat is based on all the different cats you show it. Given a new image it can look at it and judge how close to a cat it "feels" based on the training data it has seen. A typical neural net model might be a classifier. A binary classifier being the most common and basic type, and given a picture it can classify the picture as "cat" or "not cat" based on how well it matches the fuzzy idea of "cat" that the model has stored. 

So the fundamental operation of neural nets, both software and in our heads, stores correspondences. Our heads also store specific memory and data. We store some of the training data along with our abstract idea. Memory also works with correspondences and associations. On a psychological level we have short term recall and long term memory. Memories can be a bundle of feelings and impressions including words and sounds and smells and thoughts and feelings, and are stored by association with other "similar" things. When you recall a memory it is refreshed, maybe even changed subtly, and new associations can be made. Or memories aren't associated with very much, are rarely recalled, and fade from reach. So at the heart of how our brain processes, and how our memories work, depend on the properties of neural nets which operate by correspondences and associations. How well does this new picture correspond to our idea of a cat?

“To call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names . . .”

― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“Perhaps Legba, the loa Beauvoir credited with almost infinite access to the cyberspace matrix, could alter the flow of data as it was obtained by the scanners, rendering the vévés transparent.…”

― William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive

What relevance does this have to the occult? We learn, our character is built up, by these correspondences and associations in our neural nets. We have pleasure and pain detectors and through experience we learn what makes us happy and what causes us pain. We learn what we want and how to get it and what we don't want and how to avoid it. This happens by interacting with the outside world. Our minds start blank, more or less, and are fashioned through our sensory impressions and how our biological firmware responds to this. Our brain builds the software of our mind, our personality, based on experiences. Biology and genetics and chance gift us particular hardware, the brain, for this software to run on. The process of learning creates new connections in the brain and shapes aspects of the physical brain, new physical connections are formed through learning. So the combination of software and hardware, the biology and our personality, is the firmware (or wetware perhaps) that makes "us", our experience of life all happens here.

Fundamental to this are correspondences and associations, our ability to pattern match. We can get this wrong, "A Beautiful Mind" is a work of art and true life story of what happens when this pattern matching runs amok. Madness can happen. Even madness is impossible to define, except by reference to normality which is also impossible to define. We're all mad, it's just a question of how well the hallucinations of your mind match the evasive objective reality that no-one experiences directly except filtered through their sense perceptions and inherent biases. 

The occult is the study of and working with the fundamental and foundational currents of life, particularly human life. Call them the spirits or forces or currents, however you rationalise and think of these things. The common ideas, like survival and comfort and commerce, that have shaped your way of life and the way of life of others and how that has influenced the way you think and see life, how your neural nets have been trained. Social and consensual reality. The collective unconscious, the water to our psychological fishbowl that we may not even see, the power of the invisible. We do this through finding and manipulating correspondences that map to our lives and psyches, to the outside world and to the inner world and psyches of others, with a language of symbols and symbolism. Abstract thinking, the power of pure abstract thinking. The Platonic forms, the living archetypes of the mind. 

Where there are correspondences energy can flow, there is recognition, a meeting of eyes, light can travel, there is connection. Life happens. They're the stuff ordinary life is made of, like a scent evoking memories of childhood delight.

The human mind is occult because intelligence is occult. William Gibson prophesied, in Neuromancer, that when true AI arose the old gods would be found within it. Such a deep insight into the nature of intelligence. So AGI, when and if we find it, will also be ruled by occult principles.

I've seen so many good people lost to domestication. Self immolated, their wildness put away into a box to be taken out and admired every now and then. It grows a little smaller each time, but that doesn't matter for age dims the vision anyway.

The Seeker and the Light

This picture shows a few items from my altar. I aim with all the elements of my altar to have personal mythological or spiritual or emotional significance as well as "objective" mythological significance.

The statue is called "The Light of Knowledge" (by whoever made it) and represents the seeker and the light. It is also a talisman of the modern fantasy of ancient magic. See how easily it fits the wizard archetype of popular culture, it could be Gandalf or Dumbledore or Rincewind.

Television and movie fantasy occupies such a large space in the popular collective consciousness. We suspend our disbelief and "believe in it" for a while, and love it. That ancient magic seen through modern eyes.

The symbols in the photo are the sigil of Lucifer (Venus) and Leviathan's cross, the alchemical symbol for Sulphur. The stone at the top left is Azurite, then blue Apatite and Fuchsite with Ruby. The wand is the wand of Sirius Black from Harry Potter. The lego witch at the back was put together for me by my daughter Irina, who we also call Nuca which is a contraction of the diminutive Irinuca meaning little Irina. Nuca also means walnut. Her grandmother would sometimes call her Nucutsa, which means little walnut. Irina has the wand of Hermione Granger and Delia has the wand of Nymphadora Tonks. All members of The Order of the Phoenix.

Juju is an Open Source devops tool, AGPL copyleft licensed, written in Go for the automated deployment of systems to the cloud or bare metal. It is made by Canonical who also make Ubuntu. Juju means magic and Ubuntu means community.

Meditation is concerned with inner reality. Ceremonial magick with the fusion and bridge between inner reality and outer reality. 

Inner transmutation, the philosopher's stone, is the goal.

Applied Mythology

My Satanic manifesto, My Personal Satanism, begins:

"My personal Satanism stands as enemy, Satan and Ahriman the spirit of destructive opposition, to the evil gods of the slave religions and conventionality who are identified with the super-ego. The id, the primal urge and surge, is represented with Leviathan that ancient enemy who dwells in the ocean."

The occult art uses symbols to cast light into our unconscious depths, to explore who we are and where we come from. Through the meditation of the aeons the ancient symbols speak from the depths of the past right through to the place they hold in the collective unconscious now. Language is potent and powerful, language speaks to us and a simple phrase can conjure a whole world view. Crowley called pen and paper, keyboard and screen, magickal tools.

The evil god of the slave religions, in particular the Abrahamic religions, is the demiurge. The god of rules who crushes individuality, the ghost of the unfeeling and inhuman machine. The crushing of the years, the sausage grinder of history. The super-ego is a piece of jargon from psychology and in particular the psychology of Freud, who preceded Jung. Freud popularised the understanding of the role of the unconscious, the unseen, in our personalities and psyches. Within this way of understanding ourselves Freud spoke of three major components, the ego, the id and the super-ego. 

The ego is our conception of self and of the world. We're formed by the world, from the world and in relation to the world, so our idea of our self contains the reflection of ourself that we have seen in the world and our perception and understanding of the world has been filtered through the bias of a world responding to us. The world is confusing and contradictory and refuses to make sense. Our ego is the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of ourself and the world. 

The super-ego is our idealised conception of self, who we think we ought to be. It is here that the slave religions reside, the super-ego is the throne of the demiurge, disguised as the voice of conscience. Always ready to condemn and accuse and tell you that you have missed the mark. "The guilt and shame and fear is all for your own good" it tells you as it condemns and your soul withers. Authoritarian, follow the rules or else. Your own rules, internalised, but taken from the outside. Cast guilt and judgement far from you. 

This is why My Personal Satanism is a ruthlessly individualistic path. Interdependence is fine, but social and psychological systems want you to bow to them and their rules and will not cope with your freedom from them. You have an absolute right to resist them and to be who you want to be, but you must resist them or be enslaved. This is the Spirit of Lucifer, rebellion against the established norms that the light may be seen. 

The id is our connection to the collective unconscious, our animal drive and source of passion. The dynamo of life present in each of us, perpetual motion and unending power but filtered and dimmed by the ego and layers of trauma. We have constructed safe personalities to limit and constrict the flow of the id to protect ourselves and to avoid upsetting those around us. The norm, the conventions, how you're supposed to be. 

Most of the id, most of our creative drive, is submerge and held captive by the unconscious. Everything you are is expressed in everything you do. What you won't give conscious expression to will have unconscious expression. The shadow, the part of ourself that we cannot see, which we project onto others and are afraid of. 

What lies submerged in the unconscious, wanting freedom and expression, influences us without our knowledge. It lies like a shadow and curse on our life, the movement of fate and the gods all around us. And we do not understand. This great power contained within each of us, the fire of the gods firmly under a bushel to keep it safe. Leviathan ancient enemy both personal and collective, a primal fear stretching back through history and the darkest passages of our minds. Forbidden desire, unfulfillable needs, inexpressible passion, your own worst enemy who is you, the chains that hold you bound.

This is Leviathan, whose cross which is the alchemical symbol for Sulphur, the great and mythological enemy of the Hebrews who dwells in the great ocean of the unconscious. The infinite ocean of Samsara. Subtly influencing you, perverting your plans and intentions, because you are not who you think you are. 

By legend Leviathan the sea beast or sea serpent has a great enemy on the land, the beast who is Behemoth. This is the soul in opposition to itself. The Behemoth of ego is at war with the Leviathan of the id, Behemoth would twist and rend Leviathan unto his will whilst Leviathan would be in charge and defeat and plunge the Behemoth into the ocean of unconsciousness where he must perish.

Where you identify with your Leviathan, where you are enemy and are at peace with the inner beast, then Behemoth also is tamed. 

Within every person resides a great beast. Repress it and forever live in fear of yourself, or master it and rule. We are Leviathan under the sea that we might be Behemoth upon land.

A Sense of Honour

Ethics, a sense of honour, is important to life. Having honour is central to being a real person. If you have no principles by which you try to live, to hold yourself to, then you have no way to make sense of yourself and understand yourself. If truth isn't important to you then you won't find it.

Common morality is full of compromises and deceit and hidden cruelty and barely hidden prejudice. If you are only as good as everyone else you're terrible. How can you know yourself, without having a basis to judge yourself? A sense of honour and integrity is necessary in order to have strength of character and depth.

No honour, no character. You can't be a person, be known and know people, without being able to explore your motivations and actions. How can you stand firm without believing in what you do and who you are, and how can you do that if you have no principles to hold you. A life without principles is blown away and shrivels and is gone like straw in the kiln.

If you have no honour how can I trust you? It is impossible to deal honourably with a dishonourable person.

The double minded person is unstable in all their ways. If you want depth, you need honour. If you want real understanding, you need honour. If you want to stand and keep on standing you need honour and integrity. People without honour are weak, neurosis riddled, unable to really grow or change.

So when people treat you with a lack of honour, know that they are weak. You don't need revenge, life will surely have it for you.

Sow a thought, reap an action. Sow an action, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny.

Dishonour is its own reward.

The big danger of taking your morals from your crowd, even a good crowd, is that they can and often do drift or hide cruelties. To have your own ethics is to know what they are, to have principles and live by them and to be rooted and grounded. That's only true if you stand up for them even when nobody around you does. Otherwise you just think you have ethics but actually take them from the crowd, and then before you know it you're a fascist. A reluctant one perhaps, reluctantly evil without really knowing what you're doing. 

A good test is how do you react to people you don't know when you're in a group - do you take your cues from the people around you on whether to accept them or not? How you treat strangers is a moral issue. It's so easy to not think and take your morals from the crowd, which might just be the morals of the worst of them.

Bring light to the unconscious parts of you by making conscious choices.

A Commitment to the Truth

You can't have an honest search for truth if you're willing to deceive yourself about your motives or who you are, or about who your friends are. Even if the truth is inconvenient or you do it to be nice. This tells us the right code of ethics, a commitment to the truth. But speak the truth in love, there are many paths through truth and silence may be one of them. 

Deceiving ourself, letting ourselves off the hook, becomes a habit practised so readily we forget we're even doing it. You can't know yourself if you hide yourself away from yourself and others. Speak your truth that you might know it. Stand up for it in order that you might be a real person, and not just an imaginary one with imaginary ethics. The ego, the stories we tell ourselves, obscure the truth that lies beneath but never goes away.

If you're ruthless with yourself and the truth, holding beliefs lightly and appropriate to your degree of confidence, open to multiple possibilities, accepting when you're wrong and able to turn swiftly when the occasion demands it - then you can learn quickly and see deeply. A well practised commitment to the truth sees deeply, it clears away the weeds.

Everything changes, even the past. Reevaluate your personal history in the light of new information and new ways of seeing things. Reinvent yourself and be made new all the time. Having multiple perspectives brings insight, lots of different ways of seeing things all reflecting aspects of the truth. How we see ourselves, and the past, always changes with time. 

What we think is happening, and the reasons for it, are very rarely what we think happened and why five years on. So remember that as you evaluate situations, let things unfold and see what happens.

If you practise telling the truth, even when you're angry, then you can get very good at it. There is nothing more cutting than the right truth spoken in the right way. Have compassion on your enemies, for compassion sees deeply. Control of the mind means control of the tongue.

"But the greatest people," says King Lamus, "are those that refuse to be treated like squalling children, who insist on facing reality in every form, and tear off ruthlessly the bandages from their own wounds."

-- Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

Consecration

A dedication or consecration ritual for an item, like a statue or symbol for your altar.

Light some candles.

Burn some incense.

Clear your mind and still your soul.

Stand before your altar or the artefact you wish to consecrate. Feet shoulder width apart and both point dead ahead, knees slightly bent and tailbone tucked in, head straight forward and crown lifted, eyes looking to the distance. This is the standard Qi Gong standing position. Sinking energy. 

Relaxed and alert, this is the mood to carry.

As an alternative you can do the ritual seated. Sit comfortably, and straight - like a thread is pulling up the crown of your head, all the way through your spine from the base. This is the "lifting of the spirits" in Tai Chi.

Whilst you make the sign of the symbols visualise the symbols in your mind and keep the mind still. Let go of any thoughts and distractions that arise when you notice them. This gets easier with practise and much easier if you meditate. The direction you trace the symbols does not matter, although you may pick for a reason, but stay consistent within the ritual.

Make the signs with a wand or sacred Athame (blade) in the air before you, tracing the patterns slowly and mindfully but purposefully with continuous movement. I use the standard banishing pattern, appropriate to a cleansing and dedication. Be consistent within the ritual unless you vary it for a purpose.

Your mind should be clear and still, like a lake on a calm summer day. Void and without thought, present in the moment, as you perform the ritual. If thoughts or distraction arise then let them fade without holding to them, return your awareness to the ritual. 

First with your left hand:

Make the sign of a pentagram.

Make the sign of Lucifer's sigil.

Make the sign of the pentagram again.

Then repeat with the right hand.

Then offer a prayer of dedication, something simple like this perhaps:

Lord Lucifer, bright morning star.

Son of the morning, daughter of the evening.

I consecrate this symbol to you.

With holy wonder we abjure the spirits of the air,

With holy wonder we conjure thee, Lucifer, bringer of light.

Add to or modify the prayer as you fit, perhaps using one of the prayers from Luciferianism, Demonolatory and the Black Flame.

Gnostic and Mystic

The Demiurge, the evil god of conventionality and the slave religions whose throne is the super-ego and whose nature is rules. Thou shalt perish.

The Demiurge is a concept borrowed from gnosticism (much influenced by the Nag Hammadi library in 1945 with many new second century gnostic texts like The Gospel of Thomas discovered) and originating in Platonic philosophy.

Within gnosticism the Demiurge is slightly different; the genuine creator, although only one of the deities and not the supreme being, but mostly evil and Lord of the also mostly evil physical planes. Our understanding of the Demiurge has evolved as our understanding of the nature of rules has evolved. In Platonic philosophy the Demiurge appeared as the creator and not yet seen as evil.

The other strand of Gnosticism, which is poorly defined, that I use is the concept of gnosis. Divine revelation, direct knowledge of God.

Rational Theistic Luciferianism is neoplatonic, pantheistic, polytheistic, gnostic and monistic.

If you believe in the spiritual intelligences, the gods and angels, and if you believe that they partake of the divine nature and if you believe that we and all creation also partake of the divine nature and that we can experience the divine nature and if you believe that the divine nature is one and that the divine nature is also plurality, then you too may be neoplatonic, pantheistic, polytheistic, gnostic and monistic.

The story in the image is a straight telling of the "mainstream" view of Lucifer, the official version if you like. Although this version doesn't appear in the Bible it is (pretty much) "standard Christian" theology.  

This is the dominant mythos, the way Lucifer is seen officially by the largest religion in the world and the originator of the myth of Lucifer (although the deity has many other stories too, some older than Christianity, under the name Lucifer they originate in this).

Lucifer as devil is where a lot of the power of Luciferianism as Satanism comes from. Lucifer is devil in the popular imagination, with Lucifer as deity there is a huge amount of faith in your god all around you and in popular culture. And fear. That's powerful.

This is that story. The "origin story" of our Dark Lord, the evil version.

Some Luciferians, particularly some Theistic Satanists, believe this story and choose to side with Lucifer Ha-Satan. In these world views God tends to take the role of Demiurge, evil god of the slave religions and conventionality, making Lucifer the supreme being on the side of freedom and true good.

I love the parable of the vinegar tasters:

Confucius, Siddharta and Lao Tsu were all tasting vinegar together.

It is sour, declared Confucious. For people are degenerate and in need of rules to correct them.

It is bitter declared Siddharta. For life is suffering, but there is a path out of suffering.

It is sweet declared Lao Tsu. For life is sweet if only we know the way.

To this extent Taoism is better than Buddhism. In all other matters it is inscrutable.

The early disciples of the Christ were called followers of the way. The way is love, love is the way.