Lucifer

Lucifer, exalted from Heaven, after a failed rebellion aimed at taking the throne of God.

“I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the Most High.”

“Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell”

Lucifer, Satan, is cast into Hell. Rather than repent, his pride and defiance only fuel his rebellion even further.

“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”.

Before his fall, however, Lucifer was a high-ranking guardian angel.

The light bearer. The morning star.

The brighter it is that the light burns, the darker and deeper the shadow from it. The more you claim perfection, cling to ideals, the more control you claim to possess, the more you believe yourself to be as god, as did Lucifer.

So then, you stare into the light, hoping that it may make you whole. But it blinds you, and you can no longer see the shadow that it casts behind you.

Lucifer reveals the shape of Christ just as the shadow reveals the shape of the object that light casts upon it.

You are not god. God is within you, and god is without you. You must surrender the ideals of perfection, of purity and piety.

The Kingdom of Heaven is within us, and so too must be Hell. If Christ is within us, so too must be Satan.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

The tragedy is that what he saw in God, was within him the whole time. Had he only accepted that he were the part, not the whole.

Know that you are not god, and not perfect, but a man, and that you too like everything must cast a shadow, and in the absence of light you see who it is that you you really are around the edges, just as the shadow reveals the shape of the object.

The Catholic Church hijacked and repressed the figure of Satan, Lucifer, not as a warning of the capacity for imperfection and sin internally, but as an external enemy, as a scapegoat, as a tool to instil the fear of Hell as a punishment for heresy, the perfect form to manipulate en masse, control behaviour, and ultimately assert the dominance of the church across Europe.

Rather than accept the darkness, and Satan, as within them, they have condemned themselves to live for eternity without him. Thus, as Carl Jung suggests, they have not only repressed the deepest darkest parts of themselves, but the gold that lives within the shadow - their individuality. They did not slay the dragon, they imprisoned him.