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What the Name Became Afterwards

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What the Name Became Afterwards

Once established, the name acquired a career the mistranslation could not have predicted.

Milton used it in Paradise Lost as the angel's name before the fall, with Satan as the name after, which is a poetic invention and not a doctrine, and it fixed for English readers the idea that they are two stages of one person. The nineteenth century read Milton's character against the poem's intention and made him a Romantic hero of rebellion, a reading Blake gestured at when he said Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it.

The nineteenth century also produced a straightforwardly confused strand. Theosophy used the name approvingly for a principle of intellectual light and rebellion against ignorance, taking the etymology at face value. From roughly the same period comes the Taxil hoax: Leo Taxil, a French writer, spent twelve years publishing fabricated revelations about a Luciferian cult supposedly at the heart of Freemasonry, complete with invented rituals and an invented high priestess, and confessed the whole thing publicly in 1897. The material he made up is still in circulation and is still cited.

Modern religious movements using the name divide into groups that treat it as a symbol of enquiry and autonomy without believing in a personal being, and much smaller groups that treat it theistically. Neither is continuous with anything ancient.

The scholarly point remains simple and is not seriously contested by anyone who reads Hebrew: the verse is about a Mesopotamian king, and the name is a Latin word for a planet.

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