Read The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code for Free Online

asking, in effect, `How could one of us become one of them?'49
    But while an eagerness to divide the world into rigid categories of `Us' and `Them' is nothing new - the Greeks called foreigners `barbarians' and, tellingly, the Egyptians' word for themselves was simply `human' - the western Christian tradition degraded its enemies as primarily nonhuman: if they challenged Christianity they were God's enemies.
    (Yet of course God himself had behaved reprehensibly in the story of the Fall. As Jean Markale writes:
    ... the Eternal God is bad-natured and horrendously jealous, and ... he behaves like a rich capitalist who has no intention of sharing his eternity with anyone else. For what pleasure would there be in it if everybody had it?)"
    While sadly it seems to be a human failing to dismiss those outside the tribe or church as unworthy of the same rights and considerations, the Christians made this a moral and religious issue, which gave their later persecutions a fanatical edge as they used this attitude `to justify hatred, even mass slaughter'.51 As we shall see, this justification was used to extremes by the Inquisitors, largely against `heretics' - free thinkers, Christian dissenters, or women - but `revulsion at this doctrine is one of the main reasons for the decline of belief in the Devil since the eighteenth century' 52 However, while the Jews have tended to dismiss the importance of the Fall as simply an allegory of evil, for many Christians the story of Lucifer remains potent.
    Lucifer is also depicted as the immortal serpent Sata, ruler of lightning, who takes on the Hebrew name Satan in Jesus' words: `I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven'.53 However, `Satan' as a synonym for `Lucifer' became `official' among Christians in the late first and second centuries, with the theological writings of Church Fathers Origen (born 185 CE) and Saint Augustine (354-430) - indeed, some theologians argue that Origen was the first to make this connection 54
    To the famous Greek philosopher Plato, the god associated with the Morning Star was Aster (which means simply `Star'); Plato realized that it had a strange, dual personality, for it also appeared in a different celestial position in the evening. Plato lauded Aster as the ultimate dying-and-ri sing god, exclaiming: `Aster, once, as Morning Star, light on the living you shed. Now, dying, as Evening Star, you shine among the dead.'S'
    Adversary and obstructor
    A major tendency of Judaeo-Christian thought is that God's opposite is a Satan, an `obstructor' of his will - which becomes, in New Testament Greek, diabolos, the Devil. But while the New Testament and the early Christians became increasingly concerned with building up Satan's role as they themselves fell prey to the barbarians and executioners, the Jews were, in the words of the American scholar Jeffrey Burton Russell `moving decisively in the other direction'. He explains: `[To the Jews] evil results from the imperfect state of the created world or from human misuse of free will, not from the machinations of a cosmic enemy of the Lord'."
    In the older Jewish traditions Satan is known as Sammael, a
    high angel who falls, uses the serpent to tempt Adam and Eve, and acts as tempter, accuser, destroyer and angel of death ... Satan has no existence independent of the Lord, who uses him as tester of hearts, an agent who reports our sins to the Lord, and an official in charge of punishing them 57
    Satan continued to lose his personal glamour where the Jews are concerned: by the 1940s he had dwindled to `little more than an allegory of the evil inclination among humans'.51 This sophisticated interpretation remains fairly constant today, certainly among Liberal Jewish congregations. Christianity was, and often still is, rather different in this respect.
    In the New Testament, Satan is Antikeimenos, the Adversary or enemy, the `archon of this age' - arction ton aiomon touton - or `ruler' of the early Christian era, according to