Angels, Daemons, and Lucifer

The Machine Will Never Triumph, part fifty-one

Old Archangels

And so the official archangels
Orthodox Michael, and that whispering Gabriel
have had their term of office, they must go.
It is Lucifer’s turn, the turn of the Son of the Morning
to sway the earth of men,
the Morning Star.¹

Lucifer was one of the greatest of angels and his name means “bearer of light.” Lucifer is reviled by many, but there are numerous mystical traditions that acknowledge him not as a form of evil, but as a great worshiper of the Divine. Even some Muslim mystics call him the greatest of monotheists. Michael and Gabriel have ruled the heavenly spheres benevolently and it has allowed for the Machine. Lucifer would never abide by the Machine.² Perhaps, the reason Lucifer rebelled is because he knew that humanity’s free will would end in the disaster we are witnessing today. Lucifer may not be evil; he serves a divine purpose, but the Antichrist is evil, and one of its manifestations is the Machine.

Whether one believes Satan is good or evil, his existence serves a purpose. When viewed as evil, just the idea of him can prevent people from indulging in hubristic endeavors. And, conversely, if Satan can be said to have existence, and if he rebelled against God for creating man, how much more must he hate the Machine, that principle of evil that wants to be God, but is an anti-God. The Machine is the principle of nothingness. We have gone so very wrong today because we believe in nothing: no principles of good or evil. Lawrence contrasts this with how men used to believe:

[M]en believed passionately in heaven and the angels, they longed for the grandeur of the angelic city, the living in the brightness, speaking beautifully with the noble and splendid angels, wearing delicate white clothes and looking on the face of God. They believed just as strongly in the Devil. Angels hovered among them as they toiled in the fields or forests, devils tempted them from the bushes or out of the darkness of the night, monstrous and wonderful things were semi-hidden everywhere.³

Today, when men not only do not follow the angels, daemons, Gods, and Goddesses, but do not even believe in them, they set up their own false deities. The modern world, for all of its atheism, is the greatest era of gross idol worship the world has ever known. As Jeffers writes:

Why do the little Sirens
Make kindlier music, for a man caught in the net of the world
Between news-cast and work desk,—
The little chirping Sirens, alcohol, amusement, opiates,
And carefully sterilized lust,—
Than the angels of life? Really it is rather strange, for the angels
Have all the power on their side,
All the importance:—men turn away from them, preferring their own
Vulgar inventions, the little
Trivial Sirens. Here is another sign that the age needs renewal.⁴

Lucifer

“Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.—”
But tell me, tell me, how do you know
that he lost any of his brightness in falling?
He only fell out of your ken, you orthodox angels,
you dull angels, tarnished with centuries of conventionality.⁵

Though Lucifer fell, he retained his luminosity. Compared to all the false gods of today, Lucifer is a towering source of good. Once Christianity started to become anti-life, and started to give allegiance to the Machine, all the Christian angels fell, but the bright Lucifer, fallen Lucifer, may rise up again to smash the Machine!⁶ As Lawrence writes:

Lucifer is brighter now than tarnished Michael or shabby Gabriel. All things fall in their turn, now Michael goes down, and whispering Gabriel, and the Son of the Morning will laugh at them all. Yes, I am all for Lucifer, who is really the Morning Star. The real principle of Evil is not anti-Christ or anti-Jehovah, but anti-life. I agree with you, in a sense, that I am with the antichrist. Only I am not anti-life.⁷

Now, Lawrence states that he is with the Antichrist in a sense. The important caveat there is that he qualified his statement. He was not with the Antichrist as such, nor the Antichrist in the form of the Machine. In that sense, Lawrence was the greatest fighter against the Antichrist. But, Lawrence was with the Antichrist in one specific way: namely that he knew that modern Christianity had become ossified, degenerate, and anti-life, and, as such, it needed renewal, and sometimes the best way to renew is to burn the house down and start over. Perhaps if the Antichrist continues to destroy the Christian faith, ultimately leading more people away from Christianity, then, and only then, may the belief and practice of the true Christian faith be renewed and become more prevalent.

Lucifer [2]

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
But tell me, tell me, how do you know
he lost any of his brightness in the falling?
In the dark-blue depths, under layers and layers of darkness
I see him move like the ruby, a gleam from within
of his own magnificence,
coming like the ruby in the invisible dark, glowing
with his own annunciation, towards us.⁸

Perhaps, Lucifer is coming to us now to tell us something. Perhaps the warmth we are feeling as the world gets hotter is Lucifer coming to say that he is going to burn the world down, Machine and all, so that life may rise again from the ashes, like a phoenix from the flames.

Lucifer was cast down by one of the Gods, but Lucifer worshiped the great dark God, the primordial Fire that is beyond being, and beyond all conventional Gods. All the Gods are real, and they can all coexist, but there is a grand unity linking everything, and that unity is the dark God. Now, the dark God is not jealous of Dionysus or Christ, but it is offended by one thing—the opposite principle of its essence, namely nothingness. Since the Machine represents nothingness, personified, the dark God hates the Machine and all people allied to the Machine. As such, as Lawrence writes, if the dark God showed itself now it would burn our whole damn civilization to the ground in vengeance:

“For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.”

It is not that He is jealous of Thor or Zeus or Bacchus or Venus. The great dark God outside the gate is all these gods. You open the gate, and sometimes in rushes Thor and gives you a bang on the head with a hammer; or Bacchus comes mysteriously through, and your mind goes dark and your knees and thighs begin to glow; or it is Venus, and you close your eyes and open your nostrils to a perfume, like a bull. All the gods. When they come through the gate they are personified. But outside the gate it is one dark God, the Unknown. And the Unknown is a terribly jealous God, and vengeful. A fearfully vengeful god: Moloch, Astarte, Ashtaroth, and Baal. That is why we dare not open now. It would be a hell-god, and we know it.⁹

Ultimately, it is not “Lucifer,” or any other godly or daemonic being who is the principle of evil, but man, particularly man allied with the Machine. No beast, no devil, no evil cosmological principle has ever wreaked the havoc on this planet that man has, for man is a destroyer of beauty, and his heart is where love goes to die. As David Constantine writes:

Monstrous, a lot. But nothing
So monstrous as man.
[…]
Oh man the killer
Who multiplies
Who schemes in his sleep after ways of living for ever
Who smothered the law in his heart
In these days of the melting poles
Of earthquake and flood and the cavalry charge of the tides
He knows it now
The law
By virtue of having transgressed and will stand
On the shore as the leaden waves
For his comfort deliver him
Carrion
Starfish and whales. Oh swiftly climbing and fouling
The lovely curve of the sky
The infinite swarm of death
Will fall on his fields
And he will have nothing to answer
The child who asks who are they
Passing on the last of the light? They are
Persephone in rags
Leading her blinded mother by the hand
Seeking an entrance to preferable Hades.¹⁰

Oh yes, we have ravished the earth and tortured the Goddesses of the earth. Gaia and Demeter are screaming in anguish due to our arrogance, hubris, and folly. We have fouled the earth and fouled ourselves. Now, even Hell is preferable to a planet more full of fiery furnaces and dark satanic mills than bountiful forests. The only question is whether Lucifer will open the gates or leave us to our just deserts.

Bibliography

Constantine, David. Belongings. Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2020.

Jeffers, Robinson. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Edited by Tim Hunt. Vol. Three. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Lawrence, D. H. Kangaroo. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2018.

———. Movements in European History. Edited by Philip Crumpton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Edited by Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton. Vol. VII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

———. The Poems. Edited by Christopher Pollnitz. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

1. D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 528.

2. One must be careful to make a very fine distinction between the actual being Lucifer and the principle of evil called satanic. The angel Lucifer is not necessarily evil, and is a metaphysical necessity. Due to Lucifer’s great love of and allegiance to his God, he would rebel against the Machine. On the other hand, the Antichrist is a force for destruction, but even the evil of the Antichrist can, inadvertently, be a source of good if it wipes away that which is festering. As for the Machine, it is the ultimate evil, the principle of nothingness embodied.

3. D. H. Lawrence, Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 116.

4. Robinson Jeffers, The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt, vol. Three (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1988), 4.

5. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:529.

6. One may also claim that Christianity never became anti-life, but that Western Civilization became secular and abandoned the traditions of Christianity, and that what is called Christianity today is that religion in name only.

7. D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, vol. VII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 331–32.

8. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:612.

9. D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2018), 328.

10. David Constantine, Belongings (Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2020), 99–100.