Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,”
they are virtually putting into practice the supposed crime they would fain accuse him of. They prefer reigning over the spirit of the masses by means of a pernicious dark LIE, productive of many an evil, than serve heaven by serving TRUTH. Such practices are worthy only of the Jesuits.
But their sacred writ is the first to contradict their interpretations and the association of Lucifer, the Morning Star, with Satan. Chapter XXII. of Revelation, verse 16th, says: “I, Jesus ... am the root ... and the bright and Morning Star” (ὀρθρινὸς “early rising”): hence Eosphoros, or the Latin Lucifer. The opprobrium attached to this name is of such a very late date, that the Roman Church found itself forced to screen the theological slander behind a two-sided interpretation—as usual. Christ, we are told, is the “Morning Star,” the divine Lucifer; and Satan the usurpator of the Verbum, the “infernal Lucifer.”[[2]] “The great Archangel Michael, the conqueror of Satan, is identical in paganism[[3]] with Mercury-Mithra, to whom, after defending the Sun (symbolical of God) from the attacks of Venus-Lucifer, was given the possession of this planet, et datus est ei locus Luciferi. And since the Archangel Michael is the ‘Angel of the Face,’ and ‘the Vicar of the Verbum’ he is now considered in the Roman Church as the regent of that planet Venus which ‘the vanquished fiend had usurped.’” Angelus faciei Dei sedem superbi humilis obtinuit, says Cornelius à Lapide (in Vol. VI. p. 229).
This gives the reason why one of the early Popes was called Lucifer, as Yonge and ecclesiastical records prove. It thus follows that the title chosen for our magazine is as much associated with divine and pious ideas as with the supposed rebellion of the hero of Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” By choosing it, we throw the first ray of light and truth on a ridiculous prejudice which ought to have no room made for it in this our “age of facts and discovery.” We work for true Religion and Science, in the interest of fact as against fiction and prejudice. It is our duty, as it is that of physical Science—professedly its mission—to throw light on facts in Nature hitherto surrounded by the darkness of ignorance. And since ignorance is justly regarded as the chief promoter of superstition, that work is, therefore, a noble and beneficent work. But natural Sciences are only one aspect of Science and Truth. Psychological and moral Sciences, or theosophy, the knowledge of divine truth, wheresoever found, are still more important in human affairs, and real Science should not be limited simply to the physical aspect of life and nature. Science is an abstract of every fact, a comprehension of every truth within the scope of human research and intelligence. “Shakespeare’s deep and accurate science in mental philosophy” (Coleridge), has proved more beneficent to the true philosopher in the study of the human heart—therefore, in the promotion of truth—than the more accurate, but certainly less deep, science of any Fellow of the Royal Institution.
Those readers, however, who do not find themselves convinced that the Church had no right to throw a slur upon a beautiful star, and that it did so through a mere necessity of accounting for one of its numerous loans from Paganism with all its poetical conceptions of the truths in Nature, are asked to read our article “The History of a Planet.” Perhaps, after its perusal, they will see how far Dupuis was justified in asserting that “all the theologies have their origin in astronomy.” With the modern Orientalists every myth is solar. This is one more prejudice, and a preconception in favour of materialism and physical science. It will be one of our duties to combat it with much of the rest.
Occultism is not magic, though magic is one of its tools.
Occultism is not the acquirement of powers, whether psychic or intellectual, though both are its servants. Neither is occultism the pursuit of happiness, as men understand the word; for the first step is sacrifice, the second, renunciation.
Life is built up by the sacrifice of the individual to the whole. Each cell in the living body must sacrifice itself to the perfection of the whole; when it is otherwise, disease and death enforce the lesson.