The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code by Lynn Picknett Page A
Authors: Lynn Picknett
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demonize. The saddest and most disturbing consideration is that even if they knew about the true background of Christianity's most notorious number, like their predecessors, they would still regard it as evil. To them, as a pagan goddess Aphrodite was clearly demonic, yet in fact she was truly Luciferan - in the sense of being an enlightener to her followers, just as were her sister goddesses. Some of Aphrodite's works were too strong even for the traditionalist ancient Greeks, to whom women should be confined to a narrow domestic life. When the lesbian poet Sappho petitioned the goddess for help in winning the favours of a particular girl, she replied: 'Who/O Sappho, does you justice?/For if she flees, soon will she pursue/and though she receives not your gifts, she will give them/and if she loves not now, soon she will love/even against her will.'92 Somehow one detects Sappho's own hand in this convenient response from the deity.
As we have seen, some of the pagan goddesses, such as the huntress Diana, even took the title 'Lucifer/Lucifera', the bringer of Light into the darkness of human woe.
Another reason that the old goddesses became synonymous with the Devil is that many of them were depicted wearing lunar horns. Isis-Hathor wears a pair of magnificent cow's horns, as befits that animal's patron, and must have seemed truly diabolic to the early Christians as her cult persisted in Europe as a rival until the fourth century CE - into the fifth century in parts of Italy. God's wife, Ashereth, gave her name to Ashteroth-Karnaim in Gilead, or `Ashteroth/Ashereth of the horns'. American researcher David Lance Goines believes that the goddesses' horns are not lunar at all, but reflect their association with Venus, a planet that also produces a visual crescent shape in the night sky 93 If so, this merely reinforces the sense that the early Christians associated the Feminine Principle with horns and venery - the Devil incarnate.
No doubt it will be assumed that Christianity, like Jesus himself, sprang from a divine state of chastity with no breath of the loathed contamination of sex. But like Yahweh with his Asherah, Venus and her Adonis and Osiris with his Isis, Christ also had his sacred consort, a woman who even received the title `Lucifer' from her devotees - and who, apparently, taught the mysteries of sacred sex not only to the chosen one, but also his followers ...
CHAPTER THREE
A Woman Called Lucifer
In the twenty-first-century West, all our ideas about right and wrong, good and evil, come from our culture's Judaeo-Christian tradition. But, as we have seen, Yahweh's credentials as a noble or even particularly intelligent deity fail to match his capacity for jealousy and smiting, and the story of humanity's fall from grace - and the subsequent subjugation of women - is a sad tale of garbled myth and blatant bias. However, none of that compares with the deliberate reworking of the original Christian story, apparently often in direct opposition to Christ's own wishes. This chapter will deal with a quite different view of Christianity, pieced together from long-forbidden texts, obscured identities and the reinsertion of passages from the flagrantly edited gospels. The result will be shocking and thought-provoking, and implicitly reverses many Christian assumptions about sacred figures, and even about their basic understanding of what is devilish and what is righteous.
In 1958 a discovery was made by Dr Morton Smith (later Professor of Ancient History at Columbia University, New York) in the library of an Eastern Orthodox closed community at Mar Saba near Jerusalem. It was a copy of a letter from the second-century Church Father, Clement of Alexandria, which, as we shall see later, includes potentially explosive material taken from a `Secret Gospel of Mark', apparently an esoteric version of the biblical Gospel, but for initiates only. Clement's letter is in reply to a Christian called Theodore who wanted to know how
As we have seen, some of the pagan goddesses, such as the huntress Diana, even took the title 'Lucifer/Lucifera', the bringer of Light into the darkness of human woe.
Another reason that the old goddesses became synonymous with the Devil is that many of them were depicted wearing lunar horns. Isis-Hathor wears a pair of magnificent cow's horns, as befits that animal's patron, and must have seemed truly diabolic to the early Christians as her cult persisted in Europe as a rival until the fourth century CE - into the fifth century in parts of Italy. God's wife, Ashereth, gave her name to Ashteroth-Karnaim in Gilead, or `Ashteroth/Ashereth of the horns'. American researcher David Lance Goines believes that the goddesses' horns are not lunar at all, but reflect their association with Venus, a planet that also produces a visual crescent shape in the night sky 93 If so, this merely reinforces the sense that the early Christians associated the Feminine Principle with horns and venery - the Devil incarnate.
No doubt it will be assumed that Christianity, like Jesus himself, sprang from a divine state of chastity with no breath of the loathed contamination of sex. But like Yahweh with his Asherah, Venus and her Adonis and Osiris with his Isis, Christ also had his sacred consort, a woman who even received the title `Lucifer' from her devotees - and who, apparently, taught the mysteries of sacred sex not only to the chosen one, but also his followers ...
CHAPTER THREE
A Woman Called Lucifer
In the twenty-first-century West, all our ideas about right and wrong, good and evil, come from our culture's Judaeo-Christian tradition. But, as we have seen, Yahweh's credentials as a noble or even particularly intelligent deity fail to match his capacity for jealousy and smiting, and the story of humanity's fall from grace - and the subsequent subjugation of women - is a sad tale of garbled myth and blatant bias. However, none of that compares with the deliberate reworking of the original Christian story, apparently often in direct opposition to Christ's own wishes. This chapter will deal with a quite different view of Christianity, pieced together from long-forbidden texts, obscured identities and the reinsertion of passages from the flagrantly edited gospels. The result will be shocking and thought-provoking, and implicitly reverses many Christian assumptions about sacred figures, and even about their basic understanding of what is devilish and what is righteous.
In 1958 a discovery was made by Dr Morton Smith (later Professor of Ancient History at Columbia University, New York) in the library of an Eastern Orthodox closed community at Mar Saba near Jerusalem. It was a copy of a letter from the second-century Church Father, Clement of Alexandria, which, as we shall see later, includes potentially explosive material taken from a `Secret Gospel of Mark', apparently an esoteric version of the biblical Gospel, but for initiates only. Clement's letter is in reply to a Christian called Theodore who wanted to know how
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