Lynn Picknett - The Secret History of Lucifer - And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code

For Debbie Benstead, with love Is there a tenth gate? Are we there yet?

Everyone knows what evil is. Everyone carries iconic pictures in their heads that symbolize the horror of real wickedness: smoke and flames pouring from the Twin Towers on the September 11 that stopped the world in its tracks; piles of emaciated bodies at the Nazis' death camps; thousands of grinning skulls in Pol Pot's killing fields; a naked little girl running screaming towards the camera, covered in napalm ... Terror, agony, war, death upon death. Although entirely of humanity's doing, we use words such as `satanic' to describe these deeds of historic atrocity, evoking the name of the Old Enemy, Satan, personification of all that is terrible, disgusting, beyond belief. Satan may or may not exist as a literal entity, but he is a potent metaphor for the worst of the worst. However, this book will sing the praises of another hugely powerful metaphor - Lucifer - who is emphatically not the Evil One, but the spirit of human progress, the fight to learn and grow, to be independent and proud, but also spiritually free. `Lucifer' simply means `the Light-bringer', the enlightener, and it is in that spirit that this book will examine the way that a belief in the values he represents has shaped our world, the Judaeo-Christian West, in which the very freedoms he seeks are fast becoming eroded.

As the great 19th-century French occultist and sage Eliphas Levi wrote `What is more absurd and more impious than to attribute the name of Lucifer to the devil, that is, to personified evil. The intel lectual Lucifer is the spirit of intelligence and love; it is the paraclete, it is the Holy Spirit, while the physical Lucifer is the great agent of universal magnetism."

In the dire past, the days of witch burning and mass bigotry, there were few recognizable freedoms. Today, when we are trying to force-feed democracy to eastern cultures, it would seem that we have all the freedom we want or need. Not so: the insidious fascism of political correctness - with its chillingly Orwellian undertones - and the growing threat of fundamentalism of all sorts mean that our everyday freedoms are under threat. On both sides of the Atlantic the radiant figure of the real Lucifer is being obscured by red tape, yet rarely have we needed him more. With the breakdown of the education system, ignorance, nihilism and the non-existence of selfrespect abound, turning into rage, violence and crime on the one hand and dangerously rigid religious belief on the other. Both represent their own form of evil, both threaten the future of our culture - but if we permit ourselves to be still, honest and objective for just a few moments, we will be able to hear the rousing cry of the Morning Star, Lucifer, all brightness and hope. Let the Light shine in!

When I began this book I had little idea how neatly it would follow on from my previous work, Mary Magdalene: Christianity's Hidden Goddess (2003), which examined the real role of one of Christendom's most maligned saints, revealing her to be nothing less than Jesus' lover and even his chosen successor. For two millennia the Church has deliberately obscured the truth about her, terrified that her status would inspire other women to fulfil their own destinies as intelligent, spiritual leaders. In the light of all the evidence, it is incredible that there is still heated debate among churchmen about the validity of female priests - or, if `stuck' with them, of female bishops. Yet if the truth about Mary Magdalene were widely known there could be no debate: she set the pattern for women to be equal with the men in religious debate and leadership - and in that, she was Jesus' own choice. And it is hugely significant that to her devotees in the south of France, she was known as `Mary Lucifer' - `Mary the Light-bringer'.

This was a time-honoured tradition: pagan goddesses were known, for example, as `Diana Lucifera' or `Isis Lucifer' to signify their power to illumine mind and soul, to create a mystical bond between deity and worshipper, to open up both body and psyche to the Holy Light. Of course to the ignorant all pagan gods and goddesses are still routinely dismissed as devilish, just as the great nature god Pan himself became the very image of Satan - with his horns and hooves - when Christians came to rule the known world with a rod of iron. Yet there is evidence to suggest very strongly that the Magdalene and even Jesus himself were highly influenced by pagan goddess cults, especially that of the Egyptian Isis (from which John the Baptist took his then new ritual of baptism).

Of course millions worldwide have now read about a Church conspiracy to defraud us all of our true spiritual inheritance via the Magdalene, from Dan Brown's publishing phenomenon, The Da Vinci Code. Until now, there has been far too much darkness in the world of the spirit for far too long, and whether presented as a worthy academic tome or a rip-roaring page-turner, letting a little light in can only change our culture for the better. Yet the truth is that his novel goes nowhere near far enough. The real Da Vinci code is considerably more shocking than merely suggesting that Mary and Jesus were man and wife with children.

Nineteen ninety-seven saw the publication of my book, The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ, co-authored with my closest friend and long-term colleague Clive Prince, which first introduced the idea of heretical symbolism in the so-called `religious' paintings of the great Renaissance genius, in a chapter called `The Secret Code of Leonardo da Vinci'. Although this was to provide Dan Brown with the background for his thriller, he has hardly scraped the surface of what Leonardo was really trying to convey ...

Leonardo (as `Da Vinci' should properly be known) was the ultimate Luciferan hero: daring, shocking, challenging, endlessly questing without acknowledging any limits, ever pushing back the boundaries of human knowledge. Famously the inventor of flyingmachines and military tanks, he also invented all manner of devices such as a sewing-machine, a bicycle (complete with chain and same-size wheels) - and even devised a primitive but effective form of photography with which he almost certainly created the world's most famous and baffling hoax, the Shroud of Turin, as detailed in our book Turin Shroud: How Leonardo da Vinci Fooled History. The `holy' image even has his own face on it. In other words, incredibly, instead of a miraculous image of Jesus Christ, we have a 500-year-old photograph of Leonardo da Vinci, a fifteenthcentury homosexual heretic who hated Jesus and the Virgin Mary.

The Church reserved a special loathing for those - and there were many - who tinkered with what we would call the early stages of photography, so it was a joke of particular viciousness with which Leonardo probably created the ultimate Christian relic, knowing it would be cared for by the priests of the very Church that he despised, perhaps until the day when it would be recognized for what it really is. But make no mistake, photography was believed to be `occult' once, and there is no reason to doubt that Leonardo actually believed himself to be involved in a magical process when he created the `Shroud'. If caught working with the `devilish' photography, he knew his position on the top of a flaming pyre would be assured.

(For those who, despite all the evidence to the contrary, might be eager to declare the Shroud is genuinely the miraculously imprinted winding sheet of Jesus, may I draw your attention to certain glaring anomalies of the image - see page 179 - which conclusively prove not only is it a fake, but also that it is a projected image. Further details can be found in our first book, Turin Shroud: How Leonardo da Vinci Fooled History, 2000.)