Satan

Lucifer is, however, not the same thing as Satan. The word Satan simply meant "one who tempts" and it merely referred to any contradicting, skeptical, or accusatory agent and their argument. Within holy orders, like the Essenes and Gnostics, a "Satan" was any detractor or opposition party. There was nothing supernatural about a Satan. There is little doubt that the term and concept has its origins in the Egyptian god Set, the opposer of Horus his twin. To oppose any hegemony is, therefore, to be "Satanic." So we see that there is a big difference between Satan and Lucifer. Lucifer was originally based upon the pagan god Mars and, eventually, Satan also became identified with the red fiery planet and its astrological energy. In the bible we have Jesus turning to Peter saying "get thee behind me Satan." If we accept Jesus to be the sun then we can take this statement to be of Astro-Theological significance. Mars occasionally rises heliacally, that is, with or even before the sun. The priests of the sun would exclaim from their temples "get thee down" or "get thee below" or "get thee behind Satan," in order not to have their deity be ousted, rivaled, and outshone.

When the Hebrews emigrated from Egypt during the 19th Dynasty...they took with them the caricature of Set: Satan

Set has been considered the Egyptian equivalent of the Christian Satan, though we stress that Set was a much more complex archetype than the Christian version.

[...] for doubt itself is an attribute of Saturn (Satan). Those who are not striving for the highest, partake of the lowest.

If Satan were to go out of the scheme, man would be burned up by the fiery passions of Mars and the angels of Lucifer. Without the chill, caution, and curbing of Saturn, his soul would speedily be lost in utter debauchery and licentiousness. If on the other hand, Lucifer should withdraw, man would soon be a stone again, incapable of incentive, of motion or emotion, and chained, like the sufferers of Dante's Inferno, by the icy fingers of death.

Satan is the spirit of caution, prudence, and when perverted, negation. At his door are laid the sins of omission. Few realize that man is responsible for the things he has not done. That is part of the law. It is just as wrong not to do the right things as it is to do the wrong thing. Satan inhibits, he draws back, he holds aloof.

The two Great Demons of Creation are: Satan - Saturn, and Lucifer - Mars (According to the Greeks, Venus)

The devil, the archetype of misuse, is not a son of Saturn, but a son of man and the false darkness of earth. Man is the incarnation of the germ of mental intelligence, and black magic is possible only to intelligent beings.

The Children of the Dark Birth who labor in the blackness of this substance, molding it into myriads of unseen and unmeasured form, are not evil. They are the sons of Saturn (Satan), the Black Father, who, like the very darkness of chaos itself, must in time swallow all his creations and, in so doing, bring them back to life again from the death that men call creation.

Today's skyscrapers may be taken as representing fundamentalism. On the one hand there are right-wing Christians whom we should bracket with the cruder forms of Islam. Both want to repress human individual free will and intelligence, to lure us into an unenlightening ecstasy. This is the influence of Lucifer.

On the other hand there is the militant scientific materialism that wants to snuff out the human spirit. Machines are making us machine-like. This is the influence of Satan, who wants to go further and squeeze out the spirit altogether and make us mere matter.

And just as Lucifer incarnated so too Satan will incarnate. He will do so as a writer. His aim will be to destroy spirituality by 'explaining it away'. He will have the ability to create supernatural events, but then know how to give them a reductively scientific explanation.

At first he will appear to be a great benefactor on humankind, a genius. To begin with he himself may not realize he is the Anti-Christ, believing he acts only out of love for humanity. He will do away with much dangerous superstition and work to unite the religions of the world. However, there will come a moment of pride when he realizes he is achieving some things that Jesus Christ was, apparently, unable to achieve. He will then become aware of his identity and his mission.

How to recognize Satan? Or any false prophet? Or any false, purportedly spiritual teaching? False teaching usually has little or no moral dimension, the benefits of reawakening the chakras, for example, being recommended merely in terms of selfish 'personal growth'. True spiritual teaching puts love of others and love of humanity at its heart - intelligent love, freely given.

Beware, too, of teaching that doesn't invite questioning, or tolerate mockery. It is telling you, in effect, that God wants you to be stupid.

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.

Satan is not a spirit of destruction. There is no essential evil in the universe. Our present form of the devil is merely derived from the Greek nature god Pan. As Goethe says, Mephistopheles, or Satan, "is part of the power that still works for good while ever scheming ill." Satan is really karma, but he is more than that. He is the temptation from which arises strength. When the Mysteries were celebrated in ancient Egypt, there was an evil spirit called Typhon or Set who brought about the death of the good Osiris. It is the red Set that has given us our concept of the devil; but Set was nothing but the material world, the ground of man's temptation, and also the environment in which he gains immortality through self-discipline. Therefore, Set, or Satan is divine opportunity; the world into which we come in ignorance but from which we depart in wisdom.

The appellation Satan, in Hebrew...belongs by right to the first and cruelest “Adversary” of all other Gods–Jehovah, not in the serpent which spoke only words of sympathy and wisdom.

For this scheme of threat and trepidation to succeed, it was imperative for people to believe that the diabolical Satan had existed from the beginning of time, and there was no earlier story with which he could be associated than that of Adam and Eve.

This sinister satanic figure (sometimes called Lucifer, Beelzebub or Belial - meaning worthless) emerged mainly through the onset of Christian dualism - the concept of two opposing and equally powerful gods. According to different traditions, Satan was either the brother or the son of Jehovah, or was even the competitive and aggressive aspect of Jehovah himself. In essence the Jehovah-Satan conflict was representative of the ancient pre-Christian tradition of the symbolic battle between Light and Darkness as perceived by the Persian mystics.

But this Satan character was an invention of the post-Jesus era, a fabulous myth with no more historic worth than any figment of a Gothic novel.

Nowhere in the Genesis account is there any mention, direct or indirect, of Satan's involvement, and yet it has become common practice for the Church to portray the serpent as an emissary of Satan, or even as Satan himself.