Lucifer Is Christos, the Inner Light

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 33 pages

Thirty-three pages with a contents page and central ideas. *It exists to answer a question the movement was asked constantly: why Blavatsky called the London periodical she launched in 1887 Lucifer*. Its subtitle says as much — on Lucifer, the Bright Morning Star, and the title of that journal.

The opening line is the file's warning to the reader: there is more in a name than the profane is prepared to understand, or the learned mystic to explain. What follows is arranged in numbered scenes, which is unusual for this library and makes the argument easy to follow. The etymological case is simple and is stated early — Lucifer is the light-bearer, the first radiant beam that destroys the lethal darkness of night, and the name belongs to the planet Venus long before it belongs to a fallen angel. The astronomical section develops that: when named Venus, the bright planet-star becomes the symbol of dawn, the chaste Aurora, and Lucifer and Venus are called the twin-stars of the First Day. Then comes the file's central grievance, put memorably: Lucifer-Venus, the sister planet of our Earth, was sacrificed to the ambition of our little globe, in order to show the Earth as the chosen planet of the Lord — that is, the morning star was demonised so that this world could be made the centre of the story. The heading over the astronomical passages states the reason a periodical might be named after a star at all: stars teach as well as shine. Read beside "Great genius and counterfeits" and the other files here on the descent of light into matter, it is the same doctrine told through one name, and it explains why the Third Proposition treats the giving of mind to man as an act of light rather than of rebellion.

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