The candidate for initiation would be made to feel the terrible sense of crisis and danger involved in the Fall in a quite literal way. Suddenly and as if impelled by an earth tremor, he found himself falling down into a black hole, pitched into what he immediately discovered to be a snake pit. In the esoteric tradition the rough-hewn chamber that lies underneath the Great Pyramid at Gizah, known as the Chamber of Ordeal, performed just this function. Recent excavations at Baia in Italy, where a system of caves, part natural and part man-made were believed by the Romans to be the actual entrance to the Underworld, have actually revealed the site of a trap door which would have flung the candidate for initiation down into the snake pit below.
The candidate experienced for himself how Lucifer and his legions infested the whole earth with a plague of glistening serpents. He saw how, according to the secret history, the whole earth had once begun to seethe with primitive animal life. He saw, too, how desire tormented the very ground, making it heave, and he realized traces of this torment could be seen in expressive rock formations.
But why should the translation from vegetable to animal life be marked by such torment? The account of the catastrophe in Genesis certainly emphasizes this tormented aspect in some of the most sonorous phrases on the Old Testament: ‘Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children… And unto Adam He said… cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.’ It seems that as a result of the Fall, humans have to suffer, to strive, and to die — but why?
Wrapped up in this ancient language are more truths modern science would recognize. Plants reproduce by a method called parthenogenesis. A part of the plant falls off and grows into a new plant. This new plant is in a sense a continuation of the old one, which therefore — in a sense — does not die. The evolution of animal life and its characteristic method of reproduction — sex — brought death with it. As soon as hunger and desire were felt so too were dissatisfaction, frustration, sorrow and fear.
WHO IS IT WHO TEMPTS EVE? WHO IS the serpent who inflames the world with desire?
We probably all feel we know the answer to this question — but naively. The problem is that those in charge of our spiritual development have kept us at a nursery level of understanding.
We began to see in the last chapter how the Church has covered up its astronomical roots, how the beginning of Genesis contains hidden within it stories of the same gods of the planets we know from other, more ‘primitive’ religions — the god Saturn, the Earth goddess and the Sun god. As we now move further into the Genesis account of history we can see again how this covering up of astronomical roots, the radical monotheism of the modern Church, can stop us from understanding clearly what the ancient text is trying to tell us.
Most people would naturally assume that Christianity allows the existence of only one Devil — the Devil — in other words that Satan and Lucifer are the same entity.
In fact we need only a quick, fresh look at the texts to see that the authors of the Bible intended something quite different. Again, this is something biblical scholars accept, but which hasn’t filtered down to congregations.
We have seen that Satan, the Dark Lord, the agent of materialism, is to be identified with the god of the planet Saturn in Greek and Roman mythology. Is Lucifer, the snake, the tempter who inflames humanity with animal desire also to be identified with Saturn — or perhaps with a different planet?
There is a vast, erudite body of literature comparing biblical texts to older and contemporary texts from neighbouring cultures, which shows that the two main representatives of evil in the Bible, Satan and Lucifer, are not the same entity. Fortunately we do not need to immerse ourselves in this literature, because there is a quite explicit statement in the Bible itself: Isaiah 14.12, ‘How thou art fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning.’
The Morning Star is, of course, Venus. The Bible, therefore, identifies Lucifer with the planet Venus.
It might at first seem counter-intuitive to equate the goddess of Venus in Greece and Rome — Aphrodite to the Greeks — with Lucifer in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Venus/Aphrodite is female and seems more life-enhancing. But in reality there are key points of similarity.
Both Lucifer and Venus/Aphrodite are bound up with animal desire and sexuality.
The apple is the fruit associated with both. Lucifer tempts Eve with an apple and Paris hands Venus an apple in a gesture that precipitates the abduction of Helen and the Great War of the ancient world. The apple is universally the fruit of Venus because if you slice an apple in two, the path that Venus traces in the sky over a forty-year period is a five-pointed star, pinpointed by the position of the pips.
Lucifer and Venus are also ambiguous figures. Lucifer is evil, but he is a necessary evil. Without Lucifer’s intervention, proto-humanity would not have evolved beyond a vegetative form of life. As a result of Lucifer’s intervention in history we are animated, both in the sense that we can move about the surface of the planet and also in the sense that we are moved by desire. An animal has a conscious awareness of itself as a distinct entity that is denied to plants. To say that Adam and Eve ‘knew they were naked’ is to say that they became aware that they had bodies.
Many beautiful representations of Venus have come down to us from the ancient world, but there were terrifying representations too. Behind the image of a woman of matchless beauty lurked the terrifying serpent woman.
IN ORDER TO DELVE DEEPER INTO THIS ambiguity and to understand better the next great event in the secret history of the world, we now turn to an early German version of Venus/Lucifer tradition which appeared in medieval poetry and would enter the mainstream of world literature when it was taken up and adapted by Wolfram von Eschenbach in Parzifal.
Tradition tells us that as Lucifer fell a great emerald dropped from his forehead. This signals that humanity would increasingly suffer a loss of vision in the Third Eye, the brow chakra.
