This is my first post given the new rules of the library, in which I respect, and will aim to provide a productive service of my own before receiving the work of others as my reward. Thank you all, and I am grateful to this community.
I have been reading and combing through Princeps and using some of my limited knowledge of Praxis from reviews and reading of a paused YouTube screen. With that said, I am more operative than scholarly, so if I bring a piece of something into my workings, I need to understand where it fits within my cosmology and how it functions logically mostly for risk management. So I've been breaking Grey's Lucifer down to its first principles. Feel free to disagree with me and correct me if I miss or misstate anything.
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On the one hand, yes: the old church story about Lucifer as pure evil is obviously slanted. Grey’s attempt to dig underneath that—to the Canaanite dawn god, the Watchers, Milton, the Romantics, all of it—absolutely has teeth. On the other hand, we’ve got about two thousand years of Western imagination poured into this figure and into the goetic spirits. That’s not just “bad theology”; it’s accumulated pattern, fear, obsession, ritual, and memory.
So I’m not ready to either: swallow Grey whole, or throw the entire demonological tradition in the fire because a new cosmology feels more flattering.
If we’re going to reframe the Western tradition around a different picture of Lucifer, I want to see what Grey’s model
leaves out, not just what it recovers.
For me, the missing piece is
order.
Grey is great at talking about
transformation. Lucifer dissolves. Lucifer breaks stale systems. Cool. Necessary, even.
But transformation needs something to push
against, and something to re‑cohere
into. Otherwise it’s just churn. Fire doesn’t do alchemy without a vessel. It just burns.
That’s where Azazel is useful.
In Grey’s reading, Azazel isn’t some random demon in the desert. He’s Yahweh’s
shadow—the wild, dangerous face of the old storm‑god that gets kicked out when Yahweh moves into the temple as the respectable god of the new order. One goat for Yahweh, at the altar; one goat “for Azazel,” driven out into the wilderness with the community’s filth on its back. It’s literally a split: polite order in the middle; everything messy and ungovernable pushed to the edge.
So if Azazel is Yahweh’s shadow, Lucifer sits in that same space: the part of the divine that gets expelled when a system tries to look pure and in control. That’s the side Grey champions. Fair enough—but that’s still only half the pendulum.
Right now, I think “God” in the broad Western sense is no longer just Yahweh with thunderbolts. It’s more like:
- the field things happen in,
- the alchemical container reality sits inside,
- the background intelligence or structure that lets anything hang together at all.
Not a guy in the sky, more like the power grid. You plug stuff into it and it either runs or fries.
So if we translate Grey into contemporary language, Lucifer is the
transforming force—the thing that breaks and reconfigures structures—and “God” is more like
order itself. The question then isn’t “Yahweh or Lucifer?” so much as:
When does a given structure need to be broken, and when does it actually need to be protected?
To keep it clean, I’ve tried to drop “good/evil” and think like this:
- Order
- when it works: a living pattern, enough stability for relationship and growth.
- when it fails: rigidity, systems that can’t adapt and start crushing what’s inside them.
- Transformation (Lucifer)
- when it works: breaks dead patterns, frees trapped energy, allows something new.
- when it fails: just smashes things, drops a system below the level where it can function.
Grey mostly shows:
- order in its failed form (Yahweh as brittle, jealous, genocidal), and
- transformation in its successful form (Lucifer as liberator and teacher).
What’s underdeveloped is:
- the good side of order (when structure is actually helping), and
- the chaotic side of transformation (when breaking things just… breaks things).
If you want a non‑mythic example of Lucifer running hot, look at
capitalism. It melts everything down, deterritorializes, reterritorializes, innovates like crazy—and it also shreds ecologies, communities, and psyches. It’s Luciferian as hell: brilliant, creative, and casually destructive.
That’s why I don’t want a metaphysics that only says “More transformation!” and never asks
“into what?” or
“based on what kind of order?”
For me, this splits into two different questions:
- Personal:
If the “god” operating inside me is still a rigid, punitive sky‑father, then yes, I probably need Lucifer. I need something that can crack that internal order so a more flexible, honest structure can grow. That’s my soul, my risk, my rebuilding job.
- Collective:
Grey doesn’t leave Lucifer at that level. He runs him into politics, history, uprisings. And that’s where my alarms go off. Am I really qualified to decide when a whole society’s order is calcified enough that it needs a serious dose of underworld solvent? And if I’m wrong—if the structure is fragile but basically harmonized—then what I’m summoning isn’t transformation, it’s chaos.
History is full of people trying to “transform” the world out of conviction that they were on the side of light. The results are… mixed, to put it politely.
So my working position is:
- I’m not going to run magical or metaphysical experiments on the world using a current I haven’t fully run on myself.
- I’ll treat Lucifer as a potent, hazardous reagent: vital when my own order is brittle, dangerous when the order around me is already doing a decent job of holding things together.
Grey has absolutely moved the needle for me on how I think about Lucifer. He’s just not convinced me that we should hand the steering wheel to transformation alone. Without an explicit principle of order and integration in the mix, Lucifer looks less like an initiator and more like capitalism with better poetry.
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