Could there be a more ambiguous, mulivalent being out there?
Man, great conversation, everyone. Solxyz, great write-up. Again! You have a gift!
Oh, there is another "Lucifer" we should mention - The New Thought Lucifer. Identifying him helps us unpack a lot of 20th century magic practices.
So there's is another operative magisteria - and probably the least identified and covertly most popular one in all of modern magic: New Thought / Chaos magic / American Positive Mind Metaphysics.
Most of modern "magic" is this. It is not daimonic / sublunar except through the imaginative / personal nephesh self. Again, all good. I love New Thought, but I dislike how it get used to 'explain' away daimonic sorcerous practices.
I've read Peter Grey's work and like him, but he's also British so I'm also like "Yeah of course , you'd need something like this." But I'd rather gently call out Promethean Luciferians (but not naming names here, I hate calling people out) - who mix LHP philosophy with New Thought mind manifestations practice, typically by mixing in a bunch of Anglo LHP philosophy to help you ya'll believe more strongly then smear it over everything.
All good, but I also get low-level irritated when the "LHP" philosophy from a different cultures jumps the shark and gets smeared into sorcery practices held within what are usually Catholic - if weird Folk Catholic cultures - like Mexican Brujeria or Haitian Vodou / Makaya. It just confuses the planes.
What Haitians call "magic" - and I'm giving a temporary label of "daimonic/operative sorcery."In Haitian culture what they call
magie has has none of this psychodrama and "self-worshiping" Anglo totalizing gloss over it.
I only highlight this here to distinguish sorcery from New Thought practice. Since the Golden Dawn, Gardner, and Crowley, then LaVay, the O9A, then WitchTok - hat people have taken to calling "magic" - all this STUFF - that is not traditonal magic nor found in it. It's actually 19th–20th century American Positive Mind Metaphysics stripped of the Christianity with "Satan" or "pagan gods - See Gardner here "added in a personal emotional- symbolic engine. All fine, just needs to stay in it's lane a bit more and nnot swerve over the place , crashing into practices that has nothing to do with them.
OK, to support this idea of what we might think of as New Thought Lucifer:
The wonderful Mitch Horowitz (who identifies as a "Satanist" who also likes Catholics and has an archangel tattoo) observed that LaVey was actually a New Thought practitioner. His whole "Lil' Hot Stuff" thing was for him his own New Thought "Total Environment" — all of which he surrounded himself with 24/7/365 was what jazzed up his imagination - very much like , well identically to - the "Dragon Ball Pagans" (as they call themselves) who use Goku from Dragon Ball Z...
... and me. In my own New Thought practice I will sometimes employ the fictional grim-trad GV magician John Constantine as a Chaos Magic "word of power." But I keep them separate and do not try to summon Constantine. Although I hear he has shown up on occasion IRL. But he'd be a daimon - not a literal John Constantine.
Oh, for the new folks. New Thought is a 19th-century American metaphysical movement that holds that mind is the primary causal force in reality - and that thought, belief, and mental environment shape material conditions. LaVey took this substrate - that came out of New York Chrtiian Science and the Ameican farming heartland - and reversed its picture-show imagery he is surrouding himself with.
New Thought was optimistic, positive, and uses the parables of the Bible and Christ so LaVey made it carnal, cartoonish, and "Satanic" – in a fun-naughty little boy going 'tee-hee' and pulling the ponytails of the little girls sort of way. But the mechanism is identical – you create your reality aided by the total environment you construct around yourself and other NT techniques .
Anton LaVey swapped out the pious American Christian language for what gets his imagination jazzed up. For him, it's nude women on altars, red devil's horns, and the Latino-Iberian-European symbolism found in
La Frontera Northern Californian barrio brujería, And all them uh,
stuff of ' Lil' Hot Stuff' - thel ittle devil Archie comics charatcer – the red devil horns, tail, hooved feet, the pitchfork, the dice and cards of and mid-20th century California tattoo parlors, carnivals and dive bars dice - playing cards as the symbols of luck, fate. The kinds of 1950s Rat Pack Las Vegas Slap-and-Tickle Mobster Diabolism.
See the art of Coop (Chris Cooper) – who is also from California and who draws on the same
La Frontera folk traditions for his art – below.
And this is also for people in other countries – or who are too young – to be aware of where much of this 20th-century pop culture "LHP" or "Satanic" "magic" stuff comes from. The point is this is what jazzed up LaVey's imagination in the 1950sIt did became increasingly nasty after TV adn ithe internet and had to be more 'snuff film' and nasty just to get a rise out of the flaccid imaginations of terminally online people with depressed dopamine receptors.
Anyway, LaVey's Lucifer is more "Carnival Devil" as a New Thought technique, but it's also mashup that draws heavily on the Iberian Cyprianic and Latino barrio brujeria traditions of California, traditions that were mostly absent from the British and Anglo-American Protestant forumulations. Which is why it worked here . It was new. For his "Satanic" system he appropriated many of these folk-magical
Diabolito symbols - the red devil horns, dice, cards, the red caps - repurposing them for his new, individualist, and theatrical-religious art project.
Anyway, the the black cats, the dice of fate, the trident,he crossroads, and the red devil's horns are all part of this symbolic system. They are also the material components of a folk-magical worldview that traveled from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas, where they were uh, 'creolized' in barrio brujeria and later aestheticized by artists like Koop abive ) . LaVey's quite the showman and took all this as his ' total environment ' of symbols, systematizing them into a theatrical philosophy of "self-creation."
All good, but normie Chistians do to a good job egging them on by freaking out over this childishness. And then the later "Satanic" movement are too stupid and nasty to be in on the joke.
OK, real fast, symbols of the Iberian Cyprianic / European witchcrft traditions are a rich visual vocabulary, blending folk Catholicism, European witchcraft, and African influences absorbed through colonial contact. The same symbols are often found now in American Halloween decorations and tatto parlors all acoss the American SouthWest.The black cats, bats, the serpent, black goats, toads. The Iberian Baraja cards - the 40-card deck of Cyprianic cartomancy beom regular playing cards. But also the cross, the scorpion, the four-leaf clover, and the colors purple, black, and red, the pentagram, and more.
Note please! I'm not trying to say Lavey stole from Latinos, but that the Latino/Iberian contribution is a central and under-acknowledged component of his symbolic repertoire.
In the Anglo-LHP "Satanic" Total Environment his New Thought Lucifer is not a being to be worshipped (not as I understand the term) . His cartoon Lil' Hot Sutff " is the red-capped, horned, dice-throwing, tattooed figure of barrio brujeria which becoke the is the aesthetic costume for this "Byronic self" effort.. It's a mask transgression in the theater of the world. The Devil is not real here, and us just intheir heads.
The performance of the Devil is real -like, it happens - and it produces real effects in the their psyche. And it does to in society, but only if you let your ponytails get pulled by their LHP theatrics.