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a cache of usenet and other text files pertaining
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a cache of usenet and other text files pertaining
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Subject: Valiente also does tackle the subject of Satan in "An ABC of Witchcraft: Past and Present" (Robert Hale 1973) on pgs 81-83: "The whole doctrine (of demonology) rested upon the Biblical references to the fallen angels, who were suppose to have been cast out of heaven, together with their leader, Satan or Lucifer, and thereafter to have become the implacable enemies of God and mankind. It is doubtful, however, if the ancient Hebrews originally meant anything like this by their references to Satan. In the Book of Job Satan figures as a sort of heavenly agent provocateur, employed by God to test people's faith. He boldly enters into heaven amongst the sons of God, a term used in Genesis to refer to the angels. The word satan means an adversary. ........". Further on she continues: "The idenification of Satan with Lucifer rests upon a text in Isaiah, Chapter 14, verse 12 "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art though cut down to the ground, which dist weaken the nations!" Early Biblical scholars connected this with the story in Revelations about the great star that fell from heaven, and with the words of Jesus in the Gospel of St. Luke, Chapter 10, verse 18: "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.". Yet it is obvious from the context of this passage from Isiah that the prophet is not referring to Satan at all but to a proud and oppressive king of Babylon. The Hebrew word translated as 'Lucifer' means 'shining one', one of the stars of heaven. Out of such doubtful beginnings did religious doctrine grow, with the assistance of pious and semi-literate demonologists." From Leland's Appendix 1. Comments on the Foregoing Texts (in my fascilile text pgs 110-111). "The strange and mystical chapter "How Diana made the Stars and Rain" is the same given in my Legends of Florence, vol ii, pg 229, but much enlarged, or developed to a cosmogonic- mythologic sketch. And here a reflection occurs which is perhaps the most remarkable which all this Witch Evangel suggests. In all other Scriptures of all races, it is the male, Jehova, Buddha, or Brahma, who creates the universe; in Witch Sorcery it is the female who is the primitive principle. Whenever in history there is a period of radical intellectual rebellion against long-established conservatism, hierarchy and the like, there is always an effort to regard Woman as the fully equal, which means the superior sex. This in the extraordinary war of conflicting elements, strange schools of sorcery, Neo-Platonism, Cabala, Heretic Christianity, Gnostics, Persian Magism and Dualism, with the remains of old Greek and Egyptian theologies in the third and fourth centuries at Alexandria, and in the House of Light of Cairo in the ninth, the equality of Woman was a prominent doctrine. It was Sophia or Helena, the enfranchised, who was then the true Christ who was to save mankind." Valiente: "This, then, is the doctrine of the [Gospel of the Witches]: 'Diana was the first created before all creation: in her were all things; out of herself, the first darkness, she divided herself; into darkness and light she was divided. Lucifer, her brother and son, herself and her other half, was the light'. (This is a concept paralleled by some of the religious thought of the East, particularly that of the religion of Shiva and Shakti, from which the Tantric beliefs and practices arise.)" A few lines later Valiente quotes again from Leland's text : "'So Diana went in search of counsel, to the fathers of the Beginning, to the mothers, the spirits who were before the first spirit'........ The counsel Diana receives was that "to rise she must fall; to become the chief of goddesses, she must become a mortal.'"
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