Chapter 119. Lucifer Rehabilitated: The Gnostic Serpent, Romantic Satan, Eliphas Levi and Baphomet

Modern Satanism rests on a long reversal. Through most of Christian history Satan was the enemy of humankind, a label pinned on others, not a figure anyone claimed. Over many centuries the Eden serpent, the fallen archangel and the “Light-bringer” became symbols of knowledge, liberty and progress. Ruben van Luijk describes this as a move from “attribution” (accusing others of Satanism) to “identification” (claiming Satan for oneself), and dates the turning point to the nineteenth century [van Luijk, in Faxneld & Petersen, The Devil’s Party, #87532, “Sex, Science, and Liberty”]. This chapter follows the main links: the Gnostic sects, the Romantic poets, socialist rhetoric, and Alphonse-Louis Constant, who as Eliphas Levi created the vocabulary and the Baphomet image of modern occultism.

The Gnostic serpent

Issitt and Main summarise Hippolytus of Rome: the “Ophite Gnostics and the Naassenes” both “developed heretical views regarding the serpent in the garden of Eden, hence the name ‘Ophite,’ which is derived from the Greek root meaning ‘snake'”. The Naassenes took their name “from the Hebrew word ‘nashah,’ which translates to ‘serpent,'” used the serpent “to represent self-creation”, and claimed to follow James the Just [Issitt & Main, Hidden Religion, #66220, “Secrets of the Naassenes”]. Gregory Lessing Garrett notes that “in The Hypostasis of the Archons among the Nag Hammadi texts, the serpent is the agent of Sophia, urging Adam and Eve to disobey”. He retells how Sophia, acting without her consort, brings forth an offspring “with the head of a lion and the body of a serpent. She names him Yaldabaoth. He is also called Saklas (in Hebrew, the fool)” [Garrett, The Age of Mask Deception, #64597, Ch. 1]. In this myth the creator of matter is an ignorant lesser power, and the serpent who offers knowledge serves the higher Wisdom. Garrett writes from a Christian standpoint opposed to this tradition.

Even the name is disputed. Twyman and Rivera quote G.R.S. Mead: “The term ‘Ophite’ is exceedingly erroneous; it does not generally describe the schools of which we are treating; it was not used by the adherents of the schools themselves” [Twyman & Rivera, Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled, #80137, Ch. 5 “Divine Knowledge”].

Picknett’s “Light-bringer” thesis

Lynn Picknett states the modern Luciferian counter-history most directly. Satan is “a potent metaphor for the worst of the worst”, while Lucifer “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'” [Picknett, The Secret History of Lucifer, #64661, Introduction]. She says the Gnostics went as far as “daring to reverse the usual role of God and Satan” [ibid., Part One]. Her line of “intellectual and spiritual Luciferanism” runs through Leonardo (“the ultimate Luciferan hero”), John Dee, Isaac Newton and the Freemasons, whom she calls “still routinely accused of worshipping a satanic Lucifer” [ibid., Introduction]. Chapter Three, “A Woman Called Lucifer”, links the title to goddess epithets (“Diana Lucifera”, “Isis Lucifer”) and to the “Mary Lucifer” of Magdalene devotees in southern France [ibid.]. Picknett frames the thesis politically: she attacks “the insidious fascism of political correctness” and argues that belief in Devil-worshippers “has caused more agony, terror and evil in the world than even any true Satanism” [ibid.].

Romantic Satanism: sex, science and liberty

Van Luijk traces the literary reversal to radicals around the publisher Joseph Johnson. For them, Milton’s Satan, in rebelling “against absolute, ‘divinely ordained’ authority”, became “a hero instead of an object of horror”. Godwin’s Political Justice (1793) praised a Satan who “saw no sufficient reason, for that extreme inequality of rank and power, which the creator assumed”. Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790) “could be considered the first ‘satanic’ Bible in history”. Shelley took up the theme, and Byron’s Lucifer in Cain (1821) stands with those “who dare look the omnipotent tyrant in His everlasting face / and tell him that His evil is not good!” In France, George Sand’s Satan calls himself “the archangel of legitimate revolt”, and Hugo made Liberty Satan’s daughter, born at the fall of the Bastille. The hostile term “Satanic School” came from Robert Southey [van Luijk, in The Devil’s Party, #87532]. Van Luijk groups the themes as sex (earth, nature, “the flesh”), science (progress and critical thought) and liberty. He also insists that “Romantic Satanism is a term of literary history, not of religious studies”: none of these writers held rites [ibid.]. The editors agree that they were “purely literary Satanists” whose leanings “seldom extended beyond occasional outbursts in a text or two”. Their exception is Stanislaw Przybyszewski (1868-1927) [Faxneld & Petersen, The Devil’s Party, #87532, Introduction, p. 5].

The political Satan

Faxneld and Petersen record that “Satan was also popular among nineteenth-century socialists as a symbol of revolt against capitalism and the bourgeoisie, with some reds using the figure in a fairly sustained and consistent manner” [The Devil’s Party, #87532, Introduction, pp. 5-6]. Richard Wurmbrand makes the stronger claim that Marx himself was a Satanist. He contrasts the schoolboy’s essay on union with Christ with Marx’s student poems, for example “I shall build my throne high overhead”, which he likens to Lucifer’s boast in Isaiah 14. He reads the drama Oulanem as an inversion of “Emanuel”, and “The Fiddler” (a sword “the prince of darkness / sold to me”) as an allusion to a satanic blood-pact initiation [Wurmbrand, Marx și Satan, #20684]. Faxneld and Petersen treat Satan here as a political metaphor; Wurmbrand alleges a personal cult.

Mitchell Heisman supplies a philosophical frame for such revaluations. He argues that Judaic ethics were “at least in part, the inversion of the values of politically powerful oppressors”: “from the perspective of Egyptian values, the entire slave revolt was immoral and wrong” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, Part II]. In his reconstruction of Hitler’s view, “Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature” [ibid.]. On this reading, the Romantic and Satanist praise of the rebel is one more inversion of who counts as “good”.

Eliphas Levi: from abbé Constant to magus

Alexandrian gives the biography. The former abbé Constant took over La Revue progressive in 1853; his patron, the old Marquis de Montferrat, seduced his wife, who left with him. Levi then stayed in London “from May to August 1854”, where the novelist Bulwer-Lytton, “passionate about theurgy”, persuaded him to evoke spirits with the Clavicule de Salomon. In sessions from 20 to 26 July, Apollonius of Tyana appeared to him [Alexandrian, Istoria filozofiei oculte, #9675, ch. 8 “Magia sexuală”; #38980]. After this Levi wrote only on occultism: Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Alexandrian cites Germer Baillière, 1856, “a classic book of occultism”), Histoire de la Magie (1860) and La Clef des grands Mystères (1861) [ibid.]. Alexandrian’s verdict is critical. Levi uses his documents “with a lyricism that carries him beyond the truth. He never doubts a forgery if it suits his wishes”, and “his interpretation of the tarot is folly”. Like Michelet’s history, the Histoire de la Magie must be read “with countless precautions” [ibid.].

Levi’s doctrine drew sharp lines: “there is a true and a false science, a divine and an infernal… magic… we must distinguish between a magician and a sorcerer, between an adept and a charlatan” [Alexandrian, #38980, quoting Levi]. Ritual magic, he taught, works through the “Astral Light”, which he called “a natural and divine” agent [Twyman & Rivera, Baphomet, #80137]. Of Satan he wrote: “You have only one excuse, O prince of Darkness, that of not existing!” [Alexandrian, #9675]. He also reclaimed the name Lucifer: “The intellectual 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” [Picknett, #64661, Introduction]. Greer notes that his 1860 Histoire “argued that the Templars were Gnostic sorcerers practicing the true, magical Christianity of Jesus”, building on French neo-Templar claims of Gnostic descent made by 1828 [Greer, The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies, #64911, “Templars”].

Baphomet

Twyman and Rivera derive “Mauffe” from a French “alteration of Mahomet… which supposedly morphed into the word Baphomet”, with variants “Maufe”, “Mauffez” and “Maphumet” [Twyman & Rivera, Baphomet, #80137, Ch. 1 “Pacts with the Devil”]. The Templar confessions “described Baphomet mainly as a head”, and Levi drew on Hammer-Purgstall’s Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum [ibid.]. His goat-headed, winged androgyne “looks like the Devil himself” because the Rider-Waite Devil card copied it, so “the modern conception of the Devil has been influenced by Levi’s illustration”. Yet “Levi repeatedly stated that Baphomet was not the same as the Devil”, and “towards the end of his life… had come to question his dabblings in the occult” [ibid.]. The date of Dogme et Rituel differs by source. Alexandrian gives 1856. The library copy of Greer says “By 1845, when Eliphas Lévi’s Dogme et Rituel… took the occult scene by storm and reinvented magic for the modern world” [Greer, #64911], which conflicts with Alexandrian’s chronology. The goat later became the Church of Satan’s sigil (Chapter 121).

Bridges to organised Satanism and the conspiracy reading

Faxneld and Petersen list the precursors. Blavatsky praised Satan in The Secret Doctrine (1888), but “these ideas are peripheral” to her system. “The first person to construct an entire esoteric system, if a rather miniscule one, around Satan was the obscure Danish occultist Ben Kadosh (Carl William Hansen, 1872-1936)”. The Fraternitas Saturni of 1920s Germany “celebrated Luciferian masses”. Maria de Naglowska’s “‘satanic’ temple” in 1930s Paris sought “an integration of Satan and God”. None founded a lasting tradition [The Devil’s Party, #87532, Introduction, p. 6].

Conspiracy authors read the same lineage as the secret religion of elites. Texe Marrs writes that “according to occultists, their guiding angel, their deity, is Lucifer, the Morning Star, god of liberty, bearer of the light”, and sees him in the torch of the Statue of Liberty [Marrs, Mysterious Monuments, #66353, ch. 18]. The Vigilant Citizen holds that “modern Luciferianism takes its roots from Gnostic teachings as well as ancient Egyptian and Babylonian paganism”, with Lucifer “the savior of humanity by giving it the gift of knowledge” [The Vigilant Citizen, 2024 vol. 4 – Sinister Sites, #70345]. Picknett, Marrs and the Vigilant Citizen accept the same lineage and differ only in their verdict on it. The academics see such lineages as identity built “retroactively” from historical material [Faxneld & Petersen, #87532, Introduction, p. 5].

Key points

• According to Hippolytus, the Ophites and Naassenes revalued the Eden serpent. The Hypostasis of the Archons makes it Sophia’s agent against the lion-headed Yaldabaoth, and Mead calls “Ophite” a misnomer.
• Picknett’s revisionist thesis separates Lucifer, “the spirit of human progress”, from Satan, “the worst of the worst”.
• Romantic Satanism recast Satan as a hero of sex, science and liberty, but stayed literary (van Luijk; Faxneld & Petersen).
• Socialists used Satan as a symbol of revolt; Wurmbrand argues from Marx’s poems that Marx was personally a Satanist.
• Alexandrian documents Levi’s London evocation of Apollonius (20-26 July 1854) and judges that he “never doubts a forgery if it suits his wishes”.
• Levi called Lucifer “the great agent of universal magnetism” and created the goat-headed Baphomet that shaped the modern image of the Devil. The sources give different dates for Dogme et Rituel.
• Blavatsky, Ben Kadosh, Fraternitas Saturni and Naglowska were precursors of organised Satanism, while Marrs and the Vigilant Citizen read the lineage as an elite conspiracy.