Hey, Jeanie. What do you mean by occult here? Occult to me has religious connotation and I'm a non-religious person so my interest per se in anything that might fall under the category of occultism is purely academic (in other words, it's fun to read about things but I don't take them literally or believe in them). I like mythology and folk lore. I've read my fair share of christian tales but my interest in them is parallel with my interest in say the Hindu pantheon or the Aztec gods. For me it's enjoyable storytelling the same as reading a comic book, nothing more. That isn't to say I am invalidating christianity as a belief system, just that it's not my belief.



Well, just for the sake of argument here it's not possible to believe in the christian version of Satan without believing in the christian God, is it? But to answer the question, no, I don't believe such an entity exists; I don't believe in Satan or God. Since I'm agnostic I do consider possibilities however. IMO if there were a creator god and an archetypical Lucifer figure that went along with it, they would actually have to be allies not enemies, integral parts of each other: this ties in with what I was saying about Mordred and Arthur being one entity. Buddhist concepts of duality spring to mind here. The fact that some animals or forces in nature are seen as both giver and taker, friend and foe, etc., by many religions.

All that aside, my interests in the Lucifer character are purely from a storytelling standpoint. I'm not talking about secret midnight pacts with demonic entities and standing in the middle of a pentagram I've drawn on my apartment floor surrounded by candles and things like that. As I said, I don't believe in such things. But I do like where some tales deviate the traditional Satan character and make him into a more sympathetic entity. In some stories he is the light bearer and in no way represents evil deeds. In these versions he's simply a misunderstood persona who rebelled for the sake of individualism. But I'd like to differentiate this as storytelling from whatever your beliefs in a Satan persona might be. The characters (and versions of characters) I discuss here are not meant to reflect the same entity you believe in so I hope you don't consider anything I've said as offensive. To illustrate what I'm saying with an example here, it'd be like me writing a story about a character patterned after Jesus Christ and using the same name but having my character perform slightly different actions. He's not meant to reflect the authentic Jesus Christ, this one is just a character in a story. The connection ends there. Sort of like historic fiction if you will.