Lucifer

""Lucifer," is the pale morning-star, the precursor of the full blaze of the noon-day sun--the "Eosphoros" of the Greeks. It shines timidly at dawn to gather forces and dazzle the eye after sunset as its own brother "Hesperos"--the radiant evening star, or the planet Venus... Piously inclined readers may argue that "Lucifer" is accepted by all the churches as one of the many names of the Devil. According to Milton's superb fiction, Lucifer is Satan, the "rebellious" angel, the enemy of God and man. If one analyzes his rebellion, however, it will be found of no worse nature than an assertion of free-will and independent thought, as if Lucifer had been born in the XIXth century. This epithet of "rebellious" is a theological calumny, on a par with that other slander of God by the Predestinarians, one that makes of deity an "Almighty" fiend worse than the "rebellious" Spirit himself; "an omnipotent Devil desiring to be 'complimented' as all merciful when he is exerting the most fiendish cruelty," as put by J. Cotter Morison. Both the foreordaining and predestining fiend-God, and his subordinate agent are of human invention; they are two of the most morally repulsive and horrible theological dogmas that the nightmares of light-hating monks have ever evolved out of their unclean fancies."

"They date from the Medieval age, the period of mental obscuration, during which most of the present prejudices and superstitions have been forcibly inoculated on the human mind...So deeply rooted, indeed, is this preconception and aversion to the name of Lucifer--meaning no worse than "light-bringer" (from lux, lucis, "light," and ferre "to bring"), It was Gregory the Great who was the first to apply this passage of Isaiah, "How art thou fallen from Heaven, Lucifer, son of the morning," etc., to Satan, ever since the bold metaphor of the prophet, which referred, after all, but to an Assyrian King inimical to the Israelites, has been applied to the Devil." ] --even among the educated classes, that by adopting it for the title of their magazine the editors have the prospect of a long strife with public prejudice before them. So absurd and ridiculous is that prejudice, indeed, that no one has seemed to ever ask himself the question, how came Satan to be called a light-bringer, unless the silvery rays of the morning-star can in any way be made suggestive of the glare of the infernal flames."

"Lucifer began, mythologically, as a heavenly detective. He was the lawyer retained by the gods for the suppression of vice; and, from long engaging in that business, he came to love it. When he had nobody to accuse, he was in distress, and went about accusing innocent people. So he was called the Accuser. And then he fell lower still, and went about tempting people to sin, in order that he might prosecute them; and then he was called Satan. That was the course of the first Vice Society, and the end of its attorney."

"An object that has no will of its own, capable, if need be, of opposing its creator, and with no qualities other than its creator’s, such an object has no independent existence and is incapable of ethical decision…. Therefore Lucifer was perhaps the one who best understood the divine will struggling to create a world and who carried out that will most faithfully. For, by rebelling against God, he became the active principle of a creation which opposed to God a counter-will of its own."