In Wicca, Lucifer is a figure in tarot card readings. In astrology, Lucifer is associated with the planet Venus and the zodiac sign Scorpio.

A parishioner asks his parish priest, "Why did God create the Devil?" And the father answers: "And who told you that the Devil was created?" It is probable that the Devil, like God, has always been there, because, in good account, both would be the same symbolic entity.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus, moved by his love for men, "Gives them the treasure of the sacred fire, although for this he has been forced to steal it from Zeus himself, who makes him pay terribly for his generous contribution humanity, ordering Mercury to plunge him into Tartarus and chain him on top of the Caucasus, where for hundreds of years a vulture would devour his entrails, the same ones that would regenerate to continue with eternal torture. Men also received the punishment from him with the Deluge ”. But Hercules killed the vulture and Zeus spared Prometheus.

Since then, thanks to Aeschylus, the Greek dramatist, the myth of "Prometheus in chains" represents "the living image of the spirit fighting with inert matter, like reason in conflict with force, like the personification of the great and elevated against the low and low."

Prometheus is not condemned for the act of theft itself, but for the audacity to share reason—that wisdom reserved for the gods—with mere mortals, moved solely by love.

From the first theories regarding the duality of Good and Evil, the notions of reason and savagery were present, and coupled, controlling more primary instincts. It was understood that the man who allowed himself to be led by his instincts would basically be guided by Evil, and that the man who acted under the shelter of reason would be lit by the torch of Good. God would be, then, in discernment and balance, and the Devil in the instincts, which will only seek to satisfy themselves.

In Eden, that paradise of flaccidity and disconnection, God forbids Adam and Eve—the first humans according to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs—to taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge at the risk of death. But why would a father who loves his children deny them the light of knowledge? What risk could humans run from being masters of their own acts?

God poses the prohibition as a surreptitious invitation to disobedience. There would be no such temptation if there was no need to transgress it. There were no needs in Paradise, remember. Why the need to control yourself? But since the first humans possessed the purity of the most conspicuous ignorance, except to flutter like hippies in the green garden, it was necessary for an entity to appear that would adopt the role of dissociator and facilitator, at the risk of being eternally condemned for such an action.

Satan, the fallen angel (“Lucifer, from the Latin lux: 'light', and fero: 'carry': bearer of light”), expelled into Chaos for rebelling against God, appears in Eden in the form of a serpent to tempt Eve to taste the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and thus extend the "mortal sin" to Adam and to future humanity.

The symbolic figure of Satan is probably the first indication of proper reason after God. His rebellion—all rebellion—requires a knowledge that opposes another. He was endowed with reason before Adam and Eve sinned by disobedience.

Satan (Lucifer, when he was the most beautiful angel) is the image of the fallen son and punished for rebelling against the Father, similar to that of Prometheus condemned for stealing the sacred fire from his supreme god, Zeus. The two sinned in discernment and personal intentionality, either out of envy or out of love; both very human characteristics.

In Eden, God forbids Adam and Eve to taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge at the risk of death. But why would a father who loves his children deny them the light of knowledge? What risk could humans run from being masters of their own acts?

Some religions, traditions or doctrines (Yezidism, Luciferianism, Gnostics) considered Lucifer to be a positive entity, free from darkness, who "rebelled against God to give Mankind wisdom, [and whom] God later forgave and restored as his own." favorite angel."

For this reason, if God made a surreptitious invitation to disobedience, Satan was only a vehicle of that plan that would seek, mainly, the awakening of man to reason, and to all its edges, advantages and disadvantages. That serpent could be the same God who, despite his desire to protect his beloved children, had to give them the push to leave the nest and face reality, with the unbeatable gift of knowledge. like torch.

God practiced free will in its most detached expression: he gave man the freedom to turn his back on it. could not be in a sincere love if the Father himself had created humans and love in a perfect way to maintain a hierarchical system based on unconscious, repetitive and eternal behavior. What father would want his children to love him for the fulfillment of a judicial or genetic mandate?

Under the deduction that God is Everything and that not a hair moves without his will, then God himself created balance through reason, materializing the opposite weight of the scale in an entity or attitude that came from Him same. God can be the other side of the mirror, having created "Evil" by mathematical equation, which we can choose, avoid or fight. Was Judas, for example, tempted to treason, or did he have a mission to accomplish through the most painful of sacrifices? Was Satan behind Judas, or God himself?

In his story “Three versions of Judas” (Ficciones, 1944), Borges makes a very interesting literary dissertation on the equivalence of complementary orders:

The Word, when made flesh, passed from ubiquity to space, from eternity to history, from limitless happiness to mutation and flesh; to correspond to such a sacrifice, it was necessary for a man, representing all men, to make a dignified sacrifice. Judas Iscariot was that man. Judas, unique among the apostles, intuited the secret divinity and the terrible purpose of Jesus. The Verb had lowered itself to mortal; Judas, a disciple of the Word, could lower himself to an informer (the worst crime that infamy bears) and be a guest of the fire that does not go out. The lower order is a mirror of the higher order; the forms of the earth correspond to the forms of the sky; the spots on the skin are a map of the incorruptible constellations; Judas somehow reflects Jesus. Hence the thirty pieces of money and the kiss; hence the voluntary death, to deserve even more the Reprobation.

In The Exorcist, the excellent novel by William Peter Blatty, in a recess from Regan's exorcism, a cool Father Merrin explains to a weary and hopeless Father Karras:

"And yet, even from this, from evil, will come good." Somehow. Somehow we can never understand, or even see. Merrin paused. Perhaps evil is the crucible of goodness," he said. And perhaps Satan himself, despite himself, somehow serves to fulfill the will of God.

Curiosity apart is the revelation of the most famous Vatican exorcist, Father Gabrielle Amorth, who explains that the ministers of the Church who do not believe in the Devil as a real identity and only as a generic manifestation are in mortal sin.

In some religions and beliefs the non-existence of the Devil is considered, explaining evil as the level of distance one has from God. That assumes that darkness also comes from God, but that we have the freedom to choose it or not, thanks to the fact that we possess the virtue of discernment.

The mythical figure of the Devil was the secret identity of God. Then the man adopted and made his own that figure to justify his weakness and feed his own fears and those of others. Thus man gave body and consistency (and horns and tail) to what for God was only an idea of complementarity.

God practiced free will in its most detached expression: he gave man the freedom to turn his back on it.

Demonic possessions are part of the symbolic game. The idea of being "possessed" scares us, terrifies us, moves us away from Evil and brings us closer to God. Evil incarnate has very bad publicity, almost always losing in exorcisms. What the Devil really does, through this macabre game, is to test our faith, strengthen it and spread it, as through the Saints, for example, so many times tempted when they were mere men and so many times victors. The demons are as inferior to the mere divine presence as when they begged Christ to stay, at least, inside a herd of pigs before falling off the cliff.

In short, the idea of the Father playing with his own shadow to scare the child into his protective arms.

In 1966, in the American city of California, the musician, magician and occult writer Anton Szandor LaVey founded the Church of Satan, with a concept totally removed from the popular perception of satanic groups. Anton LaVey's philosophy has nothing to do with sacrifices of any kind, human or animal, nor with the worship of the mythical figure of a Devil with horns and trident. LaVey's position is rather a fierce criticism of Christianity, which he accuses of "being a plague on the earth that terrifies, represses and does not allow millions of people to think." LaVey's "magical and symbolic" Church believes in Satan "as the representation of intelligence and humanity on Earth and refers to the description of him as a myth, in which Satan was an angel of God.