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The notion that “punishment works” is simply taken for granted as true, part of our existing mental model for dealing with other people. Here this chapter asks whether punishment actually is effective and under what conditions. In chronically stressed organizations, as leaders become more authoritarian and their efforts to correct problems are ineffective, leaders are likely to become increasingly punitive in an effort to exert control. But organizational practices that are perceived as unjust evoke a very human desire for vengeance. As in the case of the chronically stressed individual, shame, guilt, anger and a desire for justice can combine with unfortunate consequences for individuals and for the organization. When this is happening the organization may become both socially irresponsible and ethically compromised. The chapter explores what happens when good people do bad things, including when otherwise decent people stand around and watch unjust behavior and do nothing.

When Shaun reappears, he has acquired a new name, “Jaunty Jaun”, after a long and wearing journey. He then speaks at great length, almost without interruption. As the beginning makes clear, the speech is to be a homily, a piece of instruction for the frail creatures whom Jaun is to leave behind, and it proves to be a torrential outpouring of advice, commands, threats, blandishments, exhortations, accusations, warnings, predictions, and even insults. After the failures of Part II, the manic series of struggles to find some element within Shaun that can underpin the value of a life appears as the dreamer's last, desperate opportunity to resolve his central problem. Shaun was first discerned in the gloom by his light, his “belted lamp”, and the “paling” of his light has evoked his loss.

Disrepute, then obscurity, were the eventual fate of John Horne Burns, despite the considerable acclaim that greeted The Gallery, his first published novel, in 1947. This chapter describes and interprets how that came about, challenging the conventional narrative regarding Burns: essentially a story of how his talent deteriorated. The Mourning After links the decline in the reputation of John Horne Burns more to postwar America’s irresolution on the issue of men’s intimacy than to a failure of Burns’s talent. Lucifer with a Book and A Cry of Children, the two novels by Burns that followed The Gallery, were not necessarily less artful than their predecessor, but did differ in their setting for male affection and sexual activity: the postwar United States, not Italy during wartime. The Mourning After maintains that the harsh treatment of Burns, who died at only 36 in 1953, was essentially a penalty for his domesticating affection and sex between men and for further developing the penetrating critique of American culture begun in The Gallery. John Horne Burns and his reputation were casualties of the era’s lavender scare, and of his criticizing so harshly basic features of modern American life.

Although not previously known as such, Edwards is a major interpreter of angels and demons in the Christian tradition, especially in relation to redemptive history. Functioning sometimes as spectators, the angels are also actively involved in human affairs. As part of Christ's body, they belong to the family of saints and benefit from a kind of metaphysical reconciliation of creatures with Creator through the Incarnation. In Edwards's account, the unfallen angels were not confirmed in grace until the time of Christ's Ascension—in terms of what is here called an “enthronement theology.” For Edwards, the angels were capable of growth in grace. Lucifer, the prince of angels, was a type of Christ, later replaced by Christ at the Ascension.

This chapter discusses Luciferian Witchcraft, which is to a great extent a spin-off from the Wicca movement, but with a satanic twist. While Wicca has created a “medium tension” towards society, by utilizing the negative witch figure as its central metaphor, Satanism has generated a stronger such tension by focusing on the strongly negative figure Satan. Both, however, are part of a larger movement where partly similar renegotiations of cultural symbols are being conducted. The interpretation of Lucifer is of central interest, as Lucifer can be seen to act as a crossover deity that appears with different meanings both within non-satanic as well as satanic interpretations of witchcraft. The chapter concludes that Luciferian Witchcraft can be seen as an example of the typological difficulties of positioning Satanism as an autonomous milieu within the larger Dark Magical subculture.

ha-satan (the adversary) is an ambiguous figure in the earliest Hebrew texts. Far from being the malevolent, majestic embodiment of pure evil imagined by Milton, the figure we confront in the Hebrew Bible can sometimes be a source of assistance around the heavenly court. Conversely, and even more surprisingly, Yahweh is depicted in some of these texts as having a moral character that is not wholly good. This Reflection assesses the way the depiction of ha-satan evolves across various parts of the Hebrew Bible, and relates it to the way the character of the devil is depicted in Christianity.

Chapter 3 treats the fact that from the very start, literary Satanism has had a pronounced political dimension. It provides an overview of the radical Romantics who made Satan a symbol of rebellion against oppressive religious structures, and how socialists later appropriated this strategy of resistance to religious mores. Special attention is given to Percy Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam (1817), perhaps the first piece of Satanic feminism. Later, anarchists like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin took the Devil to heart and integrated the figure into their respective endeavours. Rounding off the chapter, a number of reasons why Satan was strategically attractive to Romantics and socialists are suggested.

Chapter 4 deals with Theosophical Lucifierianism and its feminist implications. The argument is that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s explicit sympathy for the Devil should be understood not only as part of an esoteric world view, but that we must also consider the political—primarily feminist—implications of such ideas. Several feminists, it would appear, drew on Blavatsky’s Satanic counter-myth to attack the patriarchal use of traditional Bible readings to keep women in their place. Blavatsky’s counter-reading of the Bible is here related to a selection of nineteenth-century feminist texts treating Genesis 3, in particular those from The Woman’s Bible (2 vols., 1895, 1898), edited by the leading American suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), a project on which several female Theosophists were among the collaborators.

The younger Primary classes encompass children in the age-groups from four through seven years and have as their central theme the making of “right choices.” This Primary class level is symbolized by the capital letters CTR (“Choose the Right”), and many children in this age-group wear a simple ring emblazoned with the CTR symbol. The teaching manuals, Primary 2 and Primary 3, guide the teachers in expanding on the plan of salvation, which recognizes Heavenly Father’s intention that all human kind, by their own effort, should return to his celestial kingdom worthy of a kingdom of their own. The immortal companions to Heavenly Father include Heavenly Mother, their literal son Jesus as the Christ, the Holy Ghost as a person of pure spirit, and the oppositional figure identified as Lucifer (Satan). The amplification of agency is examined as a value-schema important for human motivation. The chapter concludes with the presentation of a mothers’ focus group in the Crystal Heights Second ward.

This paper discusses the views of three medieval thinkers—Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus—about a specific aspect of the problem of evil, which can be dubbed ‘the Lucifer problem’. What was the object of the first evil choice? What could entice a perfectly rational agent placed in ideal circumstances into doing evil? Those thinkers agreed that Lucifer wanted to be happier, but while Anselm thought that that was something Lucifer could achieve by his natural powers, Aquinas held that it was not naturally possible for Lucifer to be happier, even though it was something he could obtain supernaturally. By contrast, Scotus posited that what Lucifer wanted was beyond what was logically possible, i.e. to be as happy as God (or to be God’s equal). An interesting consequence of Scotus’s hypothesis is that God could have done nothing to make Lucifer’s evil choice less likely.

This chapter reads the little-loved play Wisdom as a poetically and theologically sophisticated staging of participatory contemplation on the likeness between man and God. To export a feeling of contemplation to its audience, the play begins by establishing a baseline of likeness between the Soul and God, then violating that likeness to create instead a likeness between the Soul and Lucifer, and ultimately between the audience and the destroyed Soul. The shifting likenesses in the play make the audience aware not only of their fundamental likeness to the divine, but also of the fragility of that likeness, its susceptibility to damage and corruption. As in Revelations and Piers, in Wisdom, Trinitarian theology underpins the play’s contemplations on the likeness between man and God, but Wisdom uses a combination of metrical and stanzaic variation, French/English code-switching, comedy, and music to render a feeling of participation in the Trinity for its audiences, and to render the fall into sin that occurs when the Soul allows itself to be corrupted.

This chapter follows a suggestion, by Onora O’Neill, that Kant’s notion of autonomy should be interpreted neither in an anarchic “radical existentialist” way nor in terms of an authoritarian “panicky metaphysics.” It also develops her suggestion, in reacting to Iris Murdoch’s critique of Kant as anarchic and “Luciferian” in a bad Sartrian sense, that there is a way to read Sartre as, in part, a good Kantian. The chapter offers an extensive defense of Sartre’s “Existentialism as a Humanism” as a sensible existentialist version of Kantian ethics, and it also notes positive ethical connections between Milton and Kant. Empirical and transcendental notions of choice, and their “all or nothing” and “degree” aspects, are distinguished, and this distinction is used to vindicate Kant’s notion of freedom as also metaphysical but not in a “panicky” way.

Chapter 3 focuses on apocalyptic motifs which are present in Donatist writings from the early years of the schism. This was a period bracketed by two persecutions; that of Constantine, which ended c.321, and the “Macarian” repression, which lasted from 347 to 361. Accordingly, of the five documents which will be examined in this chapter, two are martyrological acta dating to the Macarian era. The other two are sermons: one a commemoration of Constantinian martyrs likely composed sometime around the 330s, and the other a Christmas sermon delivered either during or soon after the time of Macarius. The chapter concludes with a comparison between these texts and the writings of contemporary pro-Nicene and Homoian polemicists, highlighting striking overlaps in the apocalyptic rhetoric of each community.

This chapter tells the story of Palladism, a masterful hoax by French prankster Léo Taxil that purported the existence of a secret inner core of organized Satanism within Freemasonry. Finding credence among wide strands of Catholic opinion, the fraud was crowned with the alleged conversion to Roman Catholicism of Diana Vaughan, Grand Mistress of the Independent Palladists. Apart from a detailed description of the scandal itself, the chapter also explores the foundations on which Taxil could build his edifice of deception, in particular the earlier Roman Catholci agitation against Freemasonry. The disruption that the Western Revolution had brought to the partisans of “outraged traditions” had induced these to seek out the hidden hand behind these unprecedented developments—and many had pointed out a secret plot by Freemasonry as the hidden motor behind them.

This chapter examines the myth of Helel, later called Lucifer, who contemplates a self-deifying ascent in Isaiah 14. The historical and literary setting of Isaiah 13–14 (two oracles against Babylon) is examined in tandem with the mythological background on Helel. Helel’s myth served to naturalize and sacralize Israel’s experience of its history in the Persian period. The paradigmatic self-deifier, collectively remembered as Nebuchadnezzar, is (through a performative use of poetry) consigned to hell for his attack on the Jewish temple. In so adapting Helel’s myth, ancient Jews fostered sentiments opposed to perceived theandric governments in support of a Yahwistic theocracy.

The Mormon cosmos, like that of the Church Father Origen, is replete with heavenly beings and diabolic entities. Mormons espouse a literal understanding of a pre-mortal War in Heaven that was followed by Lucifer’s (now Satan’s) expulsion, along with a host of followers. Lucifer operates on earth to destroy human agency, along with his unembodied followers, who are evil spirits. Angelic entities may be spirits not yet embodied, those who have departed life, and those who have already received celestialized bodies. Ministering angels participated in the restoration, bestowing authority on Joseph Smith, and are promised the faithful LDS today.

The Satanic Bible is the key text of Satanism, but it is rarely presented more than in passing. This chapter gives an overview and extended analysis of style, content, and organization of the four books in The Satanic Bible: The Book of Satan, Book of Lucifer, Book of Belial, and Book of Leviathan. It discusses some of the many claims that have been put forward about The Satanic Bible itself, the variety of its content, and the “haphazard” manner in which it is sometimes alleged to have been constructed, arguing for seeing it as more planned and consistent as a magical working. The final part of the chapter then addresses an important part of the most common editions of the book: Burton Wolfe’s biographical forward about Anton LaVey, its uses, and the polemical critiques invoked against it and LaVey both.

This chapter reviews the book The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (2007), by Philip Zimbardo. In August 1971, the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his team of investigators conducted the now famous Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). They recruited twenty-four young men to participate in their study of the psychology of imprisonment, randomly assigning them the roles of prisoner and guard, fifty-fifty. Prisoners were to stay in the prison for the entire two weeks; guards served in eight-hour shifts, three groups per day. The Lucifer Effect recounts the shocking events of the SPE that provide the lead-in to a detailed examination of psychological research showing the power of situations to shape human behavior. Zimbardo concludes that situational features, far more than underlying dispositional features of people's characters, explain why people behave cruelly and abusively toward others.