Ben Kadosh

Ben Kadosh was the pen name of Carl William Hansen (1872–1936), a Dane from Copenhagen.

Scholars treat him as one of the first people to call himself a Luciferian in public and mean a cult of Lucifer, not only a joke or a slander.

The 1906 pamphlet

The book is Den ny morgens gry, Lucifer-Hiram, Verdensbygmesterens genkomst: The Dawn of a New Morning, Lucifer-Hiram, the Return of the World’s Master Builder. About thirty pages, Copenhagen, 1906. English versions exist now. The Danish is thick and odd on purpose.

He says Satan and Lucifer are “totally alien to the Christian teaching,” misunderstood because they “belong only to an esoteric cult and magic.”

Then he defines Lucifer:

Lucifer is the “Sum,” or Ego, of material nature, the creating Logos and Force. Personal and impersonal, as you will have him. A physical reality of a half-material kind. The potency of the forces in living matter, personified.

He is demiurge of the material world. Kadosh uses that word without the usual Gnostic sneer. Lucifer is not the last God and not the source of life itself. He is the builder of this world.

Kadosh then does something Masonic regulars still hate. He identifies Lucifer, and Satan, with Hiram Abiff, the slain master builder of Solomon’s Temple, and with the Great Architect.

He also identifies that same power with Pan, the goat-foot god of living nature. Pan is the face. Hiram is the craft. Lucifer is the name of the force.

The pamphlet is a call: spread esoteric Freemasonry’s Lucifer-Hiram, recruit, recover “keys.” He printed his Copenhagen address and said seekers could find him at home! How brave!

What kind of Luciferian he was

He preferred the label Luciferian. Later historians still argue whether to file him under early Satanism as well, because he joined Lucifer, Satan, Pan, and the Devil’s cult in one breath and asked for worship of that power.

He is not an earth-angel school. He is not a natal-chart magician. He is a fringe Mason and kabbalistic-Hermetic self-starter who made the builder of the world a god you could evoke.

Nineteenth-century “phallicist” writing (nature’s life-force as generative, often Pan) sits behind him. So does the Taxil hoax, the French fake that claimed Masonry was secretly Luciferian. Kadosh may have taken some of that scandal and meant it.

He joined and helped found more than one irregular lodge. The 1920s were his busiest occult years. He did not gather a large church. A handful of people, a notorious name in Danish occult gossip, then death in 1936.

But….Where did HE pull the word “Luciferian” if he did not invent the word?

Start in Copenhagen in 1906, not in the fourth century.

Carl William Hansen is thirty three. He lives at Hjørringgade 29. He has been a bookkeeper and a dairyman. He has Martinist papers. He is about to print a short, strange book that names Lucifer as the Ego of living matter and Hiram as that same power. On the cover he piles lodge titles. In public he is willing to be called a Luciferian.

The question is not “what did Lucifer mean in Latin.” The question is what that word would have sounded like in his kitchen.

Denmark is a Lutheran country with a small occult scene. There is no famous Luciferian church on the corner. There are irregular lodges, French imports, alchemy talk, and men who collect charters. Hansen has already stepped into that world. In 1898 a Finnish baron initiated him as a Martinist. Martinism is Christian esoteric work: fall, reintegration, a hidden God, ranks. It does not hand you a badge that says Luciferian. It hands you a hallway of secret Christianity and lodge manners.

So he does not get the word from his first initiation. He gets a taste for inner orders and for names that ordinary church people do not use.

Around him the bigger noise is still French, even in the North. For most of the 1890s Europe had been told that Freemasonry hid a Lucifer religion. Léo Taxil in Paris sold Palladists, secret rites, and a heroine who had seen Lucifer served in the lodge. Papers used Luciferian the way they used Satanist. Then Taxil confessed that he had made the cult up to mock Catholics and to sell books.

That confession reached Denmark. Carl Kohl wrote about Satan’s cult and explained the hoax. A careful reader could have closed the file. Hansen looks like a reader who kept the picture and dropped the joke. Lodge plus Lucifer was already a complete sentence in the scandal press. He had lodge. He wanted Lucifer. The word for that sentence was Luciferian.

Other books in the same years made the morning star respectable without the badge. Theosophists printed a magazine called Lucifer and meant light. Freethinkers in America ran Lucifer the Light Bearer and meant a new day. Those uses were in the air too. They made the name speakable. They did not yet say “I am a Luciferian” as a religion.

Hansen’s move is local and stubborn. He takes the scandal word, the Mason builder myth, the goat god Pan that poets and occultists were already in love with, and the Martinist habit of a power behind the world.

He writes that Lucifer is the Sum of material nature, one with Pan and with Hiram, not the last God, and that this force can be called. Then he signs the name the newspapers had used as an insult.

That is how it happens in his time. Not a relic handed down from an old bishop. Not a clean doctrine from Papus.

A dairyman in a two room flat, soaked in irregular Masonry, reading a Europe that had spent a decade shouting Luciferian at the lodge, deciding the shout was a door. 

Hail Lucifer!