Satanism

Satanism is a diverse philosophical and religious movement encompassing both atheistic ideologies (which use Satan as a symbol of rebellion and self-liberation) and traditional theistic practices (which revere Satan as a literal deity). Modern groups generally promote bodily autonomy, compassion, and skepticism.

The Two Main Branches

• Atheistic/Rationalist Satanism: The most common form. Practitioners do not believe in, nor do they worship, a literal devil. Instead, Satan serves as a metaphor for questioning authority, individualism, and the pursuit of wisdom.
  
• Church of Satan: Founded by Anton LaVey in 1966, this branch emphasizes individualism, indulgence, and personal responsibility.
• The Satanic Temple (TST): Established in 2013, TST is heavily focused on social justice, human rights, and the separation of church and state.
• Theistic Satanism: A smaller, less unified group of practitioners who believe that Satan (or Lucifer) is a literal, conscious entity. Beliefs vary widely, ranging from venerating Satan as a god to viewing him as a guide to higher knowledge.

Core Values & Activism

Modern Satanism frequently acts as a counter-cultural movement that opposes religious overreach in secular society. Organizations like The Satanic Temple frequently engage in public advocacy, such as defending reproductive rights and challenging religious displays on public property.

Satanism as it exists today is largely non-violent and deeply committed to rational inquiry and justice, actively distancing itself from historical myths and sensationalized “Satanic panic” stereotypes.

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Satanism

A Christian heresy that worships Satan, the power of evil in Christian mythology, rather than the Trinity, and embraces those actions and attitudes classified by more orthodox Christian sects as “sinful.” Satanism has been a subject for Christian fantasies and paranoias for nearly two thousand years, and its influence as a catchall for Christian ideas about evil, sexuality, and other people’s,rg,ligions has been vast. Satanism in practice, on the other hand, has been relatively rare, and seems to have been generated almost entirely by Christian propaganda against it.

The idea that there are people who worship Satan seems to have emerged very early in Christianity, largely as away of attacking Pagan religions in the Roman Empire. Much early Christian propaganda insisted that Pagan gods and goddesses were simply nonexistent. Since Pagan temples and priests reported miracles about as often as Christians did, however, there was a steady undercurrent of claims that the Pagan deities were actually demons in the service of Satan. These conflicting claims were applied in turn to every other religion Christianity encountered during its ancient, medieval, and modern expansions; Judaism, Islam, and the various European Pagan religions were all at different times classified as worship of nonexistent beings, as Devil worship, or (inconsistently) as both at the same time.

In ancient and medieval Christian literature, Pagans and’ Jews alike were routinely accused of deliberately summoning demons for nefarious purposes. Two of the most important early Christian legends about magicthe stories of Saint Cyprian of Antioch and Theophilus of Adana-had, respectively, a Pagan and a Jewish sorcerer as important characters, and both summoned the Christian Devil by magical arts. These legends, and the pattern of thought behind them, played an important role in laying the groundwork for later beliefs in Satanism.

The idea that a secret underground of Satanists actually existed within Christian society, however, was a creation of the fourteenth century, and developed out of a series of conspiracy panics that swept medieval Europe during that time. In the wake’ of the Black Death of 1347-1351 c.E., in particular, claims went around that various people-Jews, lepers, Muslims-had conspired to unleash the plague on Christendom. Toward the end of the century, a new set of rumors emerged in what is now western Switzerland, claiming that a secret sect of Satan worshippers met at night to invoke the Devil, murder babies, engage in orgiastic sex, and direct harmful magic at their neighbors. The resulting panics launched the age of trials and executions that modern Pagans call the Burning Times.

Ironically, the vast publicity given to these supposed Satanic conspiracies came to function as a sort of unintentional propaganda for Satanism, and as the hold of Christianity on the Western world slackened, a certain number of people appear to have been attracted to Satanism because of its apparent promises of worldly power and pleasure. One example of this sort of Satanism surfaced in the “Affair of the Poisons” in late seventeenth century France. Those implicated in this massive scandal included important members of the nobility, as well as King Louis XIV’s mistress Madame de Montespan; the participants were present at Black Masses in which a naked woman (on several occasions, Mme. de Montespan herself) was used for the altar and various demons were invoked. The ringleaders of the group were also involved in prostitution, poisoning, and providing abortions. It’s uncertain how seriously they took the Satanic ceremonies they provided, and it may have simply been a form of exotic entertainment for bored aristocrats.

In the same way, other examples of Satanism in practice are subject to doubts as to just how seriously the practitioners meant what they were doing. The Hell Fire Club, a collection of upper-class Englishmen in the eighteenth century whose tastes extended to Gothic ceremonies as well as alcohol and orgies, is a good case in point. Activities along the same lines occurred in France and Belgium in the late nineteenth century, as part of the fashionable decadence of the fin-de-siecle period. J.-K. Huysmans, author of the horror classic La-Bas, reported being present at several Black Masses, and there is no reason to doubt his testimony on the subject.

Another confusing factor is the habit of accusing any occultist who practiced sex magic of Satanism. The Abbe Boullan, a scandalous figure defrocked by the church for promoting a variety of Catholic sex magic, was accused on that basis alone of being a Satanist pure and simple.

Aleister Crowley, who has commonly been termed a Satanist but actually worshipped the quasi-Egyptian pantheon of his own religion of Thelema, is a similar casealthough Crowley’s claim to be the Great Beast 666 at least gave Christians some reason to confuse his religion with Satanism. Neither of these men can be called a Satanist in any strict sense of the word, but both are still cited as Satanists in popular books on the subject.

The emergence of modern Satanism was largely the result of a massive hoax carried out by the French journalist Leo Taxil in the late nineteenth century. Taxil, a left-wing journalist and writer of pornography, suddenly announced in 1884 that he had been reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church, and proceeded to publish a flurry of writings detailing a vast Satanic organization, the Palladian Order, which was associated with Freemasonry.

After several years and a great deal of hullaballoo, in which many prominent Catholic leaders lent the antiPalladian crusade theirr full support, Taxil let the other shoe drop by announcing in a large public meeting that the whole thing was a fraud, cooked up to demonstrate just how gullible and superstitious the Catholic Church was. The legacies of the hoax included the word “Satanism,” which first entered the English language in media accounts of the Palladian affair, and a major boost to the idea of Satanic conspiracies in the minds of conservative Christians who refused to believe that they had been deceived.

The first public Satanic religious organization did not surface until 1966, when Anton Szandor LaVey (19301997) founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco. As much a work of showmanship as a serious religion, the Church of Satan derived much of its philosophy from the writings of Ayn Rand and used the trappings of Satanism mostly as a source of publicity. LaVey’s media presence, however, spawned plenty of copycat groups who took their Devil worship more literally, and also gave rise to a schismatic group, the Temple of Set, dedicated to the serious practice of the Left-Hand Path.

The 1960s and 1970s also saw the large-scale renewal of claims by conservative Christians that secret conspiracies of Satanists were at work in American society, committing horrible crimes and encouraging sex, violence, and liberalism. These claims burst out of the fundamentalist subculture in the early 1980s with the beginning of the Satanic ritual abuse furor. The closest approach to the Burning Times in the Western world in recent centuries, the frenzy of accusations and prosecutions that resulted from claims of Satanic ritual abuse put dozens of people in jail on the basis of testimony extracted from children and adults by very questionable methods, and without a trace of corroborating evidence.

The 1980s also saw the emergence of Satanism as a small but highly visible subculture among American teenagers. Drawing their inspiration mostly from Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible, from the most popular of the Necronomicon forgeries in circulation, and from other more or less Satan-related ideas and images in current music and popular culture, adolescent Satanists became a focus for a good deal of debate and consternation in the media, the educational industry, and conservative Christian circles. The fact that a few disturbed teens committed violent crimes under the cloak of Satanism did nothing to decrease the furor. Like the folklore about Satanic ritual abuse, though, Satanism as an adolescent subculture had far more to do with pop culture than with the historical current of Satanist tradition and practice.

Satan

In Christian myth and theology, an angel who rebelled against God and became the Prince of Darkness, Lord of this World, and leader of the forces of evil. In most Western occult traditions, Satan is a relatively minor figure, and many branches of Western occultism specifically deny that a single, conscious power of evil exists. Christian occultism, and the Christian heresy of Satanism, are important exceptions; some systems of goetic magic also find room for Satan in their demonologies.

Satan has a possible echo in Theosophical lore, where the Lord of the World-the spiritual ruler of the Earth and head of the Great White Lodge-is Sanat Kumara (literally “Lord Sanat”), a Lord of the Flame who descended to Earth from Venus in a fiery chariot some six million years ago.

Lucifer

Originally a Latin name for the morning star, this word was mistakenly applied to the Christian Devil as a result of a misunderstood biblical verse (Isaiah 14:12) that referred to a king of Babylon. It is one of many names assigned to the Prince of Darkness.

In Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899), American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland claimed to have discovered a manuscript containing myths and teachings of an ancient Italian witch-cult. In the central myth he presented, Lucifer was the son and mate of Diana, the goddess of the night. Aradia, the witch-messiah whose career is central to the myth, is the daughter of these two.

In Anthroposophy, the occult philosophy created by Austrian occultist Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), Lucifer is one of two powers of evil in the universe. He represents the temptation of intellectual arrogance, with its tendency to retreat from material existence into a purely mental life

Satanic Ritual Abuse

The subject of a flurry of accusations, rumors, panics, and criminal charges that appeared, starting in the 1980s, in most of the countries of the Western world. According to proponents of these claims, a vast underground network of Satanists permeates the modern world, sacrificing, torturing, and sexually abusing children by the thousands or millions, raising funds through sales of pornography and drugs, infiltrating and corrupting the police and the courts, and disseminating Satanic ideas into society by way of rock music and Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying games. The entire frenzy bears an uncomfortable similarity to the witchcraft panics that marked the Burning Times, and it is probably not an accident that Satanic ritual abuse claims have been used as the basis for persecution of occultists and Pagans.

All through the twentieth century, various figuresmost of them closely connected with conservative Christianity-claimed that an invisible underground of Devil worshippers was at work in the modern world. These claims seem to have originated with Leo Taxil’s Palladian entered the picture.

That factor was the publication of a book, Michelle Remembers by Michelle Smith and Lawrence Padzer, which claimed that Smith had been sexually abused and tortured by a cult of Satanists in Victoria, British Columbia. Smith claimed to have witnessed human sacrifice and cannibalism, and alleged that horns and a tail had been surgically implanted on her body (she claimed she had later ripped them out). All this had surfaced while Smith was in therapy with Padzer, a conservative Catholic and former missionary who had treated her for multiple personality disorder, converted her to Catholicism, and later married her.

Michelle Remembers quickly became a bestseller, and several other “Satanic cult survivors” surfaced around the same time with their own stories of sex, torture, and human sacrifice. Laurel Wilson, a teacher from Bakersfield, California, alleged that she had been a baby-producing “breeder” for a Satanist cult, and wrote a successful book, Satan’s Underground, under the pseudonym Lauren Stratford. Another successful “survivor” was Christian minister Mike Warnke, who by 1991 had parlayed his book The Satan Seller and his claim to have been a Satanic high priest into a six-figure income from lectures and book royalties. The year 1984 saw the publication of what would become the standard handbook for “survivors” in therapy, The Courage to Heal, and the modern ritual-abuse industry was born.

Criminal charges against supposed Satanic abusers were not long behind. The first case erupted in suburban Los Angeles in 1983, where the mother of a two-yearold accused staff members at the McMartin day care center of sexual assault. The mother was diagnised as schizophrenic two years later, but in the meantime the authorities had moved in. An unlicensed therapist who claimed to be an expert in ritual abuse was called in to interview some four hundred preschool-age children. Her methods included asking leading questions, repeating the same questions over and over again when the answers didn’t support the accusations of abuse, threatening children and calling them “bad” when they did not report abuse, and giving them presents when they did. The result was 135 counts of molestation against seven staff members, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history, and no convictions.

Defendants in other Satanic abuse trials were considerably less fortunate. In a Texas trial in 1986, for example, child care worker Michelle Noble was convicted and sentenced to life plus 311 years for sexually abusing children; the only evidence was the testimony of several children, extracted by methods similar to those used in the McMartin case. (In 1988, she managed to win a new trial, and was acquitted on all counts.) Similarly extreme sentences on similarly scant evidence were handed down in a number of other cases; many of these, similarly, were overturned on appeal.

More complex were cases of alleged Satanic ritual abuse which were supposedly repressed from memory by victims in childhood, and then recovered by therapeutic techniques years or decades later. The entire subject of “repressed memories” is a subject of massive scientific controversy at present. What is clear, though, is that methods used by many therapists in the pursuit of “repressed memories” could be used as textbook examples of ways to distort and redefine memory. Patients are told that their recovery depends on being able to remember being abused, handed books such as Michelle Remembers as guides to what they ought to be remembering, subjected to hypnosis and powerful drugs such as sodium amytal, and put in therapy groups where intense emotional pressure is put on them to support other patients’ claims to victimhood by coming up with “repressed memories” of their own. The results have included thousands of accusations by adults against their elderly parents. More recently, a number of therapists have been successfully sued for malpractice for these approaches to “therapy.”

The furor gave rise to a curious alliance between social workers and therapists, on the one hand, and fundamentalist Christian organizations on the other. Some of the therapists involved in the field come to it from liberal or even radical feminist political stances. Still, it is interesting (and may be significant) that the targets of the Satanic ritual abuse frenzy make up a laundry list of things fundamentalist Christian leaders had been attacking for a decade or more prior to the first accusations-Wicca and other Pagan religions; occultism in general; rock music; “occult” fantasy fiction and related games such as Dungeons & Dragons; and day care centers, which permit women to work outside the home.

Certainly attempts were made by fundamentalist groups to use Satanic ritual abuse accusations to target Wiccan and other Pagan groups, as well as the few actual Satanist organizations in the United States. The only professed Satanists caught up in the frenzy, however, were Michael and Lilith Aquino of the Temple of Set; SEE TEMPLE OF SET. Accused of participating in the ritual abuse of children in San Francisco, the Aquinos defended themselves with gusto and proved that they had been in Washington, D.C., at the time the alleged abuse had taken place. No charges ever actually filed against them, and two authors who published books alleging the Aquinos’ guilt found themselves facing libel suits and settled out of court.

By the late 1980s Satanic ritual abuse accusations had become the center of a growing industry. Cadres of “experts,” most of them without any relevant professional training, were holding seminars for law enforcement officers, social workers, and therapists across North America; TV and print media were drawing large audiences with shocking claims about Satanic activities; foundations, associations, and Christian ministries, dedicated to fighting the vast Satanic conspiracy, were raising millions of dollars; therapists and social workers had discovered that helping people “recover repressed memories” of Satanic ritual abuse could be turned into a lucrative line of work. All that was missing was evidence that Satanic ritual abuse was actually happening.

This sheer lack of evidence was among the most striking features of the entire phenomenon. Consistently, police investigations of alleged Satanic ritual abuse found no bodies of sacrifice victims, no traces of blood where sacrifices had allegedly taken place, no evidence that children who had been allegedly tortured and raped had suffered physical injuries or sexual contact, and no Satanic paraphernalia or ritual equipment. Supporters of Satanic ritual abuse allegations, for their part, claim that the absence of evidence simply shows how clever the Satanists are.

Support for the Satanic ritual abuse industry began to wane in the United States in the early 1990s. The failure of most ritual abuse prosecutions to stand up in court was one cause of this, but much of it was the work of investigative journalists and detectives who took a harder look at the allegations. Reporters for Cornerstone magazine, an evangelical Christian monthly, investigated the claims of “Lauren Stratford” and published a scathing article in 1989 documenting a mass of contradictions between her claims and provable facts. Another article in the same magazine in 1993 did a similar background check on Mike Warnke and produced much the same results. Several widely circulated books tackled the entire Satanic ritual abuse furor and detailed the inaccuracies and lack of evidence involved. More damning still was FBI specialist Ken Lanning’s 1992 official report on 300 cases of alleged Satanic ritual abuse, which dissected the entire frenzy and found no evidence behind any of it.

By this time, however, Satanic ritual abuse claims had spread to England and several other European countries. The English outbreak was largely the result of the Reachout Trust, an evangelical Christian organization whose officially stated purpose is “to promote a Bible based Christianity by any means expedient” (quoted in Medway 2001, p. 231). Social workers in Britain and other European countries were also involved in passing on American ideas about Satanic ritual abuse. The result was much the same as in the United States: a flurry of loudly publicized cases, followed by sweeping legal charges that ultimately collapsed due to lack of evidence.

By the late 1990s, as a result, police and courts throughout most of the Western world had become wary of Satanic ritual abuse claims, and few cases were brought to trial after that time. Supporters of the Satanist hunt responded by claiming that the criminal justice system was under Satanist control. Attempts were made to broaden the hunt by accusing the Freemasons, the CIA, and alien beings from other worlds of colluding with the Satanists, or engaging in ritual abuse or mind-control conspiracies on their own.

As of this writing, charges of Satanic ritual abuse are still being made, primarily by fundamentalist Christian groups and in private networks of “survivors” and their therapists. Outside these limited circles, very few people seem to be listening, but the risk that this modern-day witch hunt might resume some day cannot be dismissed by occultists

(Taken From: The New Encyclopedia of the Occult, John Michael Greer)