The Secret History of Lucifer

Everyone knows what evil is. Everyone carries iconic pictures in their heads that symbolize the horror of real wickedness: smoke and flames pouring from the Twin Towers on the September 11 that stopped the world in its tracks; piles of
emaciated bodies at the Nazis' death camps; thousands of grinning skulls in Pol Pot's killing fields; a naked little girl running screaming towards the camera, covered in napalm ... Terror, agony, war, death upon death. Although entirely of
humanity's doing, we use words such as `satanic' to describe these deeds of historic atrocity, evoking the name of the Old Enemy, Satan, personification of all that is terrible, disgusting, beyond belief. Satan may or may not exist as a literal entity, but he is a potent metaphor for the worst of the worst. However, this book will sing the praises of another hugely powerful metaphor - Lucifer - who is emphatically not the Evil One, but the spirit of human progress, the fight to learn and grow, to be independent and proud, but also spiritually free.`Lucifer' simply means `the Light-bringer', the enlightener, and it is in that spirit that this book will examine the way that a belief in the values he represents has shaped our world, the Judaeo-Christian West, in which the very freedoms he seeks are fast becoming eroded.

As the great 19th-century French occultist and sage Eliphas Levi wrote `What is more absurd and more impious than to attribute the name of Lucifer to the devil, that is, to personified evil. The intel lectual Lucifer is the spirit of intelligence and love; it is the paraclete, it is the Holy Spirit, while the physical Lucifer is the great agent of universal magnetism."