Last Thursday, Queer Satanic released an article about Satanism titled “Why You Should (Not) Become a Satanist“. The article itself is really very particular about its approach, in that first it presents a case against identifying as a Satanist, and then follows it with a very salient case for doing so, one that must contradict the previous case against it. There’s actually a lot about their article I agree with when it comes to how Satanism is presented in relationship to things like anarchism and queerness, but at the same time I agree with essentially almost nothing about why you shouldn’t be a Satanist besides the fact the dominant Satanist organisations are run by right-wing grifters and best and esoteric fascists or even Nazis at worst. Suffice it to say, I like Queer Satanic a lot and I value their work, but I have a disagreement about Satanism.
I’m going to make the thrust of my point plain: I am already tired of the legitimacy of Satanism being so consistently framed in modern discourse around anything other than what Satanism stands for on its own.
That Satanism can be defined primarily by religious trauma seems to be very prevalent in modern discussions of Satanism, and the fact that this throughline revolves so heavily around the experience of American evangelical Christianity, with all of its bigotries, makes it an inescapably Americentric perspective of Satanism (and possibly also Christianity), a religion that, despite Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan’s claim to the contrary, was hardly an American invention. I can’t help but remember how in countries like Norway, don’t get me wrong, Christianity effectively still dominates, but there’s nothing like American evangelical Christianity, and yet people not only became Satanists or pagans, they were incredibly edgy and rather problematic about it, in a way that you can’t really find trauma to account for. In fact, the conditions are very similarly applicable in Sweden, which is also not dominated by American fundamentalist Christianity, and yet modern Anti-Cosmic Satanism, one of the most “extreme” forms of Satanism around, originated in the Swedish scene. So there are many cases in which trauma doesn’t necessarily account for the desire to be a Satanist.
I suppose I just can’t relate to that interpretation of Satanism because I’m not a regular person, for better or worse I never have been, and I don’t have religious trauma – or at least, certainly nothing like what is sadly all too common in American society. For me, it was always something else that mattered. It helps that Satanism is one of the only religions that openly identifies with “egoism” or individualism in any forthright sense, or that, by centering around Satan and the demonic, it presents a sacred power that does not consist of the reflexive orthodoxy classical ontological “goodness” while elevating the individual and its desire. It may just come from, but I don’t believe religious trauma is the primary substance of the call to being a Satanist.
Nor does anyone have to tell me that all the organisations around Satanism are either inadequate or shitty, or that their leadership is pathetic, corrupt, and reactionary, though it does bear repeating from time to time. I’ve known that Satanist organisations were basically worthless for most of the time that I’ve been a Satanist. And yes, for some time of that time, that’s been a source of doubt. And yet, for a lot of that time, and this is something that I’ve found myself coming back to lately, I haven’t seen that as a strike against the value of Satanism on its own. Defining the value of being a Satanist in relation to the organisations that claim to represent it makes some logical sense, but it is also a very basically mistaken approach to what Satanism represents, because, as we have known for some time, the most important thing for Satanists is who they are and what they do on their own, their own individual path by which they assert their spiritual freedom, not some book club or church that someone set up in Satan’s name.
Individual Satanists have only ever gotten limited value from the organisations that claim to represent them, and that is exactly because Satanism is so fundamentally individualistic, quite inescapably so in fact – to the point that if you try to have Satanism without that sense of personal individualism, you might not even have Satanism anymore and maybe you’ll be left with something else instead. I remember an almost perfect analogy: Satanists are like cats, and you can’t herd cats like you can herd sheep. People like Peter Gilmore and Doug Mesner (a.k.a. “Lucien Greaves”) have always failed to see this, and so will anyone who is too rigidly invested in the dawn of the Antichrist (as in “the community of anti-Christians”) or the existence of any great counter-church. You can have a Satanist movement that basically just consists of myriads of covens that are basically just barely organised affinity groups held together only by mutual individualistic interest and you’d still have Satanism as an active contemporary religious movement. If anything, that particular set of affairs would actually be almost perfect for Satanism, or at least certainly far better than the status quo of Satanism (especially since it would allow us to do away with every leader, every wannabe Black Pope, and every cult of personality creeping around us).
But this herd of cats does share something between us: the call of the Devil.
Now of course very few religious persons know that they are mystics—already it annoys them to suggest it!—but, whether the lady doth protest too much, or too little, the fact is that they are. There is no true rational meaning in religion.
Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears
Every religion that can be called a religion concerns itself with a sacred power of some sort, even if that sacred power is not God. Satanism whether anyone will admit it or not, is a religion of its own, and just like any other religion there is a sacred power that defines Satanism as its own religion, whether some Satanists will admit it or not. But as long as that’s the case, one will inevitably ask, “what is the sacred power of Satanism?”. As strange as it may seem, “evil” is the simplest answer to that question.
Actually, that’s something Queer Satanic themselves still somewhat approach. That’s only natural for Satanists, when Satanism as a whole starts from taking on the realm of “evil”, sin, and damnation as a place of resistance against the reified power of authority and spiritual domination. One only has to trace that theme backwards into the esoteric context from which it was originally derived, and you will be able to piece together some of that throughline. In a larger sense, positionality in this sense is only a beginning. First one must embrace the transgressive power of being deemed the “demon” in modern societies, then, perhaps, you arrive at the sacred power by which order is destroyed, the law crumbles, and a creative freedom seems to be asserted.
When observed from this lens, the appeal of Satanism that defines it from other religions, even if you want to instead say “other responses to Christianity”, can be understood with some clarity. Even the difference between other Satanists can be understood in terms of how this power is to be understood, and what it means in the wider context of philosophies that they, no doubt, have shaped according to their own ideological whims. For the anarchist Satanists, thus, this is really a simple matter, not even requiring the old romantic myths per se.
Although, just to check myself here, I suspect that not every Satanist shares how I see Satanism in these terms precise because we are still a herd of cats. It’s understandable, indeed, that for atheistic Satanists all talk of the sacred power of the Devil must seem like nonsense. Then again, many atheistic Satanists in my experience are in the habit of denying that Satanism is even a religion. Besides, I’m probably at the point where to me it doesn’t even matter that much if you’re an atheistic Satanist: depending on how you approach that, it’s still a way of approaching the same kind of sacredness, and you’re simply approaching religious transgression and even the language of the sacred without open recourse to anything theistic, “supernatural”, or “superstitious”. Yet, it is both the individualistic relationship to organisation and the latent attraction to the sacred power identified with “evil”, transgression, the demonic, and Satan that all testify to the error and futility of positioning the identity of Satanism in relationship to the modern world at all, despite the very modern context of the Satanism we see today.
To put it simply, the world we live in, the modern world, is something we are rebelling against, whether we acknowledge it or not. The modern world is but a tapestry of capitalistic dictatorships (democracies among them of course), who are all in competition to establish full control over a world collapsing into chaos, while ruling societies gripped with poverty, alienation, anxiety, inequality, and a generalised sense of powerlessness. If Satanism is positioned as being concerned with the modern world in any way other than rebellious (and therefore hostile) opposition, it will only be a surrender to the order of things, whether we mean it as such or not.
In other words, I do not care about my relationship with the modern world. Since my adolesence and all through my adult life, I have lived with the “hope” of seeing the destruction of the world’s order within my lifetime, slim though those odds might be for me (I expect I’ll probably die before the great empires of the world collapse spectularly). So I don’t have any intentions of conceding to positionality in relation to that same world.
I would like to close this article with a counter even to the positionality of Satan in relationship to “might makes right”. On the one hand, one of the core problems with LaVeyan Satanists and similar movements is their embrace of the ideology called “might makes right”, or Social Darwinism, which, when properly understood, is still nothing other than a reaffirmation of a moralistic imperative stretching from the oldest justifications of power you can name. On the other hand, as Queer Satanic say, Satan is the being who lost a power struggle against omnipotence. Or did he?
If you take seriously the premise of Christianity, with its discourse on sin, and you look all around you, it doesn’t take much effort to realise that the Christians were wrong about something. The basic Christian mythology as regards Satan is essentially that he was defeated twice: once, when he was defeated in the War in Heaven by God and cast down from heaven, and then again by Jesus Christ as he completed the Harrowing of Hell after his death and before his resurrection. But think about it? Did Satan really lose that struggle? After all, after falling from heaven, and even in losing the battle against God, he succeeded in “corrupting” God’s perfect order by his very fall, and then the temptation of Adam and Eve away from Eden, thereby bringing death into the world. Then, one of the most important premises of Christianity is that Jesus is supposed to have already conquered death and Satan in the resurrection, and the apocalyptic battle of Armageddon is supposed to just, and yet every Christian, insofar as they acknowledge the concept of sin, is forced to concede that sin remains real, omnipresent, and overpowering, in spite of the triumph of Jesus, not to mention the ever-present spectre of death still haunting God’s creation. The fact that medieval Christianity could have dreamed the presence of a global conspiracy of devil-worshipping witches capable of waging war against God reveals that, even as far as Christianity is concerned, the One God Universe is not a stable order of dominion, it too can be threatened with destruction, and a satanic outside always seems to be present, leading people away from the domination of God. The war has hardly been lost; Christians are merely labouring under the delusion that God has won.
This is not to be confused with an affirmation of LaVeyan ideology. Quite the opposite, really. Of course, the obvious trap that the LaVeyan falls into is that, if God is more powerful than Satan, and might makes right, then he ought to be forced to worship God, but then again it helps that the LaVeyan denies the existence of God, even where LaVey himself did not necessarily do so in The Satanic Bible (one of LaVey’s original arguments was that, if God exists, God is basically too distant from the human species to be remotely interested in our welfare, let alone our “salvation”). What could be more powerful than to conquer or overcome death? But the point is that God and his son hold power over humanity through the belief that they conquered sin and death, but look all around you and God’s order is nowhere near as absolute as it seems. Indeed, it might be on its way out. The very concept of the “Death of God” reveals a so-called divine omnipotence collapsing into chaos and laughter. Social Darwinism in modern terms is just a recapitulation of the old logic of authority, that those with authority have the natural, “divinely-ordained” right to rule because of their power, because the strong rule the weak. In fact, when you get down to it, a lot of modern conservative Christian arguments are so straigtforwardly reducible to such a “might makes right” argument (even if it’s only the far-right that actually blare it out, and even so the argument seems to remain almost hidden in plain sight) that, if you bought into it, you’d be forced to conclude that America rules the world because God made them the strongest country in the world in exactly those terms, at least implicitly. But the rights that are stake in this argument don’t exist, or certainly not as the doctrine of “natural law” would have it, and those with authority fall, and die, and meanwhile their authority is only so stable, always subject to contestation, decline, and subversion. Under that argument, God would be the most powerful being in the universe, and even he has no rights over those he is supposed to rule, even he can be threatened, and his order will die and crumble into chaos. For at least that much being the case, neither Satan nor any of the old gods have lost the war, certainly not when they can apparently tempt the world away from God.
Since the advent of monotheism, God has been taken up by at least some of the human species (certainly entire civilisations) as the ontological answer against the war of all against all, the hope for order instead of chaos, but the war of all against all rages on. Satan and humans are very much a part of it, and our only “place” in this world is to fight for ourselves, against the order we live in.
To the festival of destruction that awaits the order of God and Man. Hail Satan! May all of our enemies be cursed.
Aleph's Heretical Domain 