Margaret Smith writes in her online article that Armageddon represents the last struggle between the worldly self and the spiritual self before they become as one. She says, “Doom and gloomers have taken St. John the Divine literally even though they are unaware of the symbolism encoded into the language in which it was written. The Revelation involves a series of events that occur in the spiritual world of the cosmos. In the first part of the account, John sees the scroll with seven seals, each which represents an aspect of vengeance that must come to pass before the last judgment.

“Modern theologians are untrained into the mystery of ancient thought and they are unable to contend with the complexities of the Apocalypse, for him this divine message in the mystical writings is unreal and highly questionable. No book has been subject to more criticism in the New Testament than Revelations. The fact is that the whole Book of Revelation, no less than the Book of Job, is simply an allegorical narrative of the ‘Wisdom Schools’ and the description of the initiation of the initiate himself. In this case St. John the Divine is the Kabbalist. It’s quite possible that Revelation was written to appease the differences between early Christian and pagan religious philosophies.”

“When the zealots of the primitive Christian Church sought to Christianize paganism, the initiates of the ‘Wisdom Schools’ answered with a counter offensive to paganize Christianity. The Church won the battle but not the war: With the decline of paganism the initiates transferred their symbols to the newly emerging Christianity and therefore saved the priceless wisdom of the ages. The Apocalypse shows clearly the subsequent fusing or melting of pagan and Christian symbolism and consequently is undeniable evidence of ancient minds at work in the formation of the Christian Gnostics.”

Lucifer has often been considered a fallen angel, one who fell out of God’s favor when he began to have his own ideas about how to go about things. However, it may well be that Lucifer (Satan) was a friendly force that gave mankind the ability to think freely and learn in the world of cause and effect. Perhaps Lucifer is the name humanity has given its own tendency toward evil rather than owning this itself.