Surrealism, as an artistic, philosophical, and indeed political movement, has been one of my interests for some time, in part because of its anti-moral interest in desire and unconscious and the often occult quality of said interest, and when I recently read Jennifer Mundy’s Surrealism: Desire Unbound I took a very deep-seated interest in its biographical account of the Surrealist interest as what I took to be, in some ways, an exposition of the Surrealist philosophy of desire as the fundamental power of life, which struggles against everything that, whilst looking back in anger, tries to oppress it. This has the effect of bringing Surrealism into focus as almost red thread for my philosophical instincts and aspirations over the course of my life, and, ultimately, also presents us with a way of looking at Satanism as something other than the contemporary Cult of Reason that a lot of people want it to be.
In this light I should start off the same way Jennifer Mundy did, that is to say with desire as the central concept of Surrealism.
The Surrealist Concept of Desire: An Introduction
For the Surrealists, desire was the authentic voice of what counts for “the inner self”, the underwriting impulse behind love itself, and whose contours presented the path to self-knowledge. Andre Breton, the French poet who was basically the “leader” of the Surrealist movement in Paris, wrote in L’Amour fou (Mad Love) that desire is “the sole motivating principle of the world” and “the only master that humans must recognise”. Guillaume Apollinaire, the French poet and art critic who inspired the Surrealist movement and even coined its very namesake, called desire “the great force”, and Andre Breton quoted Apollinaire on this point in an article about his work that he wrote in 1917. Desire, of course, meant many things in the French verse, not confined to simple want in itself but also encompassing a much larger, all-powerful sense of yearning. It was also fundamentally connected to the will to live in Andre Breton’s discussions of suicide, in that he thought the desire for life would always prevail with him.
For a sort of working Surrealist definition of desire, we can point to the Lexique succincte de l’erotisme, which was published by Andre Breton and other authors in the 1959-60 catalogue of the Exposition international du surrealisme (the EROS exhibition). There, desire was defined as “a profound, invincible and generally spontaneous tendency that drives all beings to “appropriate” for themselves in some way or other an element of the exterior world, indeed another being”. Desire, in this definition, links life and existence to the act of consuming, enjoying, or becoming something else; a conception rather suitable for eroticism and sexuality, and the erotic and sexual import of Surrealist desire. Hence desire culminates in sexuality, but its manifestations were “innumerable and enigmatic”. Such, perhaps, is its own apophasis; but we will explore that later.
Naturally, the point of Surrealism was to develop ways of exploring and manifesting the hidden mechanism and sensations of desire in order to reveal its operations. Solarisation as practiced and developed by Man Ray, for instance, played with the contours of the human body by distorting the space of the image. That makes for a very interesting context for the way Valerio Mattioli in Revolutionary Demonology discusses solarisation as a means of revealing a whole hidden world through inversion; for Surrealism, this is the hidden world of desire. It also centered around a broader ethical focus on liberating the human spirit, and body, from all social forces that sought the repression and control of the individual, sexuality, and the operations of desire. That ethos forms part of a thread that resonates profoundly with Satanism, insofar as none other than Satan represents the continuum of desire fighting against the repressive operations of morality. It also came with a political dimension, in that Surrealism also represented a critique of the hypocritical and repressive morality of capitalist society, and also, despite their intentions, put the Surrealists at odds with the French Communist Party, which maintained a socially conservative attitude towards the family and against pornography, albeit in Marxist window dressing.
But of course, the Surrealists also tended to be romantics. Romanticism isn’t always as bad as the modern imagination likes to tell us it is, but it does always seem to present the danger of obfuscation, and in this regard the original Surrealist did still have a blindspot. Georges Bataille, as a critic of Surrealism, argued that the Surrealists didn’t see the world as it was because they focused too much on the redemptive power of love, which blinded them to the harsher and darker realities of eros. In Le Langage des fleurs, Bataille likened these realities to the center of a flower, a conventional symbol of beauty: we always think almost solely about the petals of a flower, but the centre of a flower, which we call the gynoecium or pistil, is a sexual organ, and Bataille noted that it’s this part that survives after the petals wither away. This is thus a Bataillean cipher for the fundamental bedrock of life: sex and death. For Bataille, sex was so interconnected with death that he defined eroticism as a psychological quest that opened the way to death, and violence is in some way latent to that, because it implies an end to the self-containment of the lives of those who partake of it. Of course, Bataille would go on to revisit the subject of the power of love as he got along better with Andre Breton, but even as he went on to say that love makes the world transparent, he still insisted on acknowledging that love meant suffering for humans because it meant the quest for something that he thought was tortuously impossible: complete continuity between two discontinuous beings.
The Indomitable Will of the Devil
The flower, or more specifically its inner organ, as a cipher for the bedrock of life, emerges as a way of colouring the Surrealist premise of the centrality of desire, and points the picture of the “great force” of desire as being an almost incomprehensible force, almost like what Enrico Monacelli referred to horror, which creates just as it destroys. When I read it, my mind turned to the discourse of innate enlightenment, the hongaku doctrine of esoteric Tendai Buddhism, which located ultimate reality and the basis of enlightenment itself in the very realm of passions traditionally conceived as the basis of ignorance and thereby the realm of the demonic.
And while we’re on that tone I think it’s worth interjecting with the context of Satanism while also progressing our discussion of Surrealism. Desire, for the Surrealists, was omnipotent. Desire here is a convulsive force, unquenchable and indomitable, pitted against the status quo of capitalist society, mainstream religion, patriarchy, and anything else that sought to repress it. That forms part of the ethos of Surrealist revolution, along with the idea that erotic desire in particular effects a critical transformation of human consciousness. The Surrealists liked to take cues from psychoanalysis, particularly the psychoanalytical theory of Sigmund Freud, from whom we get an image that brings us right to my point. Freud, in his study on Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva, made the point that the story of Gradiva reveals what he called the artfulness of desire in its efforts to overcome all obstacles, the ultimate victor in and behind the force of repression. Freud, to this effect, cites an etching made by Felicien Rops that seems to depict the Temptation of St. Anthony: the point he makes there is that, by placing Sin on the cross, and thus in the place of the condemned Jesus Christ, Felicien Rops confirms what psychoanalysis purportedly revealed, which is that when the repressed returns it emerges from the repressing force itself. In the image of Rops’ Temptation of St. Anthony, that would mean that Christianity represses sexual desire only to see sexual desire return triumphant in Christendom itself. But on that note, it’s here we get to how Satan, in the sense of Satanism, fits in, and in this regard the only relevant point of reference is Stanislaw Przybyszewski, the first modern man to establish a self-defined philosophy of Satanism.
What Przybyszewski goes to great lengths to establish in The Synagogue of Satan (which I’ve covered in two parts here and here) is that Satan, the “evil god” who created the material universe and is the supreme patron of all its passions, struggles constantly with God, the “good god” who rules an invisible kingdom of “pure” spirits, and in this process that we see that the religion of Satan – “the heathen cult”, “the cult of Satan”, “the church of Satan”, Satanism, whatever we call it – faces repression throughout history only to return, either in the camouflage of the new dominant culture or openly in a new form. In Przybyszewski’s narrative, the Christian church is formed to repress “the heathen cult”, here involving hedonistic and polytheistic nature worship and magical demonolatry, only to survive as a hidden presence within Christian culture, with magic and even some of the orgiastic pre-Christian festivals hidden in the guise of Christian sacraments and celebrations, and even the very notion of Hell itself. Satan, in the end, triumphs over the Christian repression, albeit in secret. And over the years, while the church continues struggling against Satan and solidifies its power, Satan develops new cults dedicated to his worship and against Christianity, while possessing human beings and nurturing the very sins that the church fought, within the church itself, and all the while growing stronger and more powerful as he struggled with God and his church.
In a certain way I think this puts a new spin on medieval depictions of the Devil, which sometimes featured him wearing chains or being chained to the throne of Hell, not unlike how the pre-Christian god Kronos or Saturn was depicted as being bound in chains. There is no shortage of Christian mockery reserved for Satanists or anyone who reveres the Devil in any form, and the insistence is always to try and turn any emphasis on power towards the worship of Jesus: as their logic goes, Satan is a “loser” who, we are told, was defeated by Jesus in the Resurrection, is trapped in Hell, and will be defeated again forever in the Day of Judgement. But Christians should know better than to think like that, being that they worship none other than a man who was subjugated and crucified only to return from the dead and thus “conquer death”. Even if God has Satan chained up in Hell, he has far from defeated Satan. Chains are a very blatant image of repression, thus Satan being bound in chains as is sometimes shown in Christian art is a very fitting image of the mechanism of Christian repression, but Satan, like desire, is not so easily bound, and always breaks away from any efforts to repress him, even when humans are most confident that they have succeeded. And, of course, the link between Satan and desire is a very important one that we will explore.
The Surrealist Mysticism of Anamorphosis
An important part of the Surrealist project that also illuminates the horizons I’m trying to speak to is the notion of anamorphosis, literally meaning “seeing backwards”, which for Surrealism seemed to mean the encounter of an unconscious dream reality, parallel and alien to “normal” conscious reality, eventually leading to the point where the two worlds converge upon each other into what Andre Breton called “surreality”. A necessary premise of this idea is that there exists a reality alongside or apart from the one we normally experience, and which figures as a powerful alternative to rational reality and consciousness, perhaps buried beneath the unconscious. Although the Surrealists were atheists and did not align themselves with any particular religion, they also clearly broke with the consensus of Enlightenment rationalism in pursuit of what can, in many ways, be interpreted almost as a form of mysticism, in that it aimed to derive knowledge about reality and the self from a non-rational state and from non-rational experiences that are not accessible to the normal senses or to normative social convention. Navigating the world of the unconscious mind and its realities, and ultimately making all of that intelligible to the senses, is what the process of automatism or automatic experience was for. But that also required opening yourself up to that world, and getting away from any temptation to cast it away or reject it for its apparent irrationality. Only this allowed the individual to understand the unconscious, and the Surrealist, as a result of having automatic experiences, would achieve a sort of “dual consciousness”, capable of walking around at daylight fully conscious of the contents of their unconscious/dream reality, seeing the unconscious reality hidden within everyday reality, and even dreaming while awake.
This is a hugely important consideration. For one thing, it seems clear to me that “seeing ‘normal’ reality with double vision and perceiving the dream or unconscious reality usually hidden within it” is the actual core of what Walter Benjamin meant by “profane illumination”, basically a kind of psycho-political consciousness that would allow the individual “decode” the structure of bourgeois society in order to fully and freely interact with its conditions as they really are. The notion of surrealist anamorphosis as a means of revealing another world lurking beneath this one, in retrospect, actually seems to animate a great deal of the content of Gruppo Di Nun’s Revolutionary Demonology, a point made particularly resplendent or at least obvious in Valerio Mattioli’s essay “Solarisation” (in which the work of Man Ray is a very important conceptual theme), and one can also find a similar thread, very much observed by Gruppo Di Nun themselves, in the surreal occult mysticism of Austin Osman Spare as well as the Left Hand Path Thelema of Kenneth Grant. In fact, it’s the precisely the occult philosophy of Austin Osman Spare, who himself seems to have taken some interest in Surrealism and is sometimes regarded as a “proto-Surrealist” figure, that I find makes so much sense of Gruppo Di Nun’s overall approach to mysticism, at least if you don’t mind grappling with or getting past the seething masochism of its animus. I can see Spare’s version of anamorphosis as taking the form of the death posture, which brings the “ego” to its weakest state, or the way Spare thought that extreme despair, like orgasm or physical exhaustion, by which the “ego” is supposed to give way to the subconscious Will. In my opinion, it is this idea and its overall logic that runs through the heart of what Gruppo Di Nun present as their philosophy of masochistic mysticism. The whole concept of the union of Zos and Kia can be figured as an expression of the notion of surreality, if one takes Zos as the human mind and body to be situated as ones own conscious reality caught in the boundaries of everyday “ego”/rational consciousness and Kia as the universal vortex of life to be situated as the unconscious.
The result of surrealist anamorphosis also deserves considerable thought to its potentialities. The dual consciousness meant to be achieved by this process is a state where the two worlds of waking reality and unconscious reality are fully integrated in the individual personality, and consequently operating in what might be thought as a consistent state of automatic freedom in life. Figured particularly within the logic of the union of Zos and Kia in Austin Osman Spare, it’s very possible to look at this as a state of superconsciousness, in the sense that Jonathan David York was talking about when talking about Georges Bataille at least. The process of Dionysian descent breaks through all endopsychic frontiers by way of self-induced delirium, which then compels the mind to the breaking point of consciousness and leads it to an encounter with its own singularity, resulting in an epiphany, a symbolic death that is in fact an encounter with continuity, ending in a kind of rebirth into a state of superconsciousness, whereby individual consciousness comes to encompass everything once separated from the mind and shatters boundaries between Self and Other. In this light we can see surrealist namorphosis, quite simply, as a source of a profound and fantastic sense of enlightenment as well as power and freedom of will and action. In my view, this is what people like Roger Caillois, a post-surrealist critic on the one hand, and Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst who in some ways inspired Surrealism on the other, both failed to grasp, for the simple reason that even when they recognised the unconscious, they failed to see it as having anything to say to them. What they wanted was something that could be scientifically systematized and fully rationalised, and when it occurred to them that the unconscious would not or perhaps did not present that possibility, they dismissed it, and even where psychoanalysis recognised desire as an irreducible subject, it also saw itself as simply a scientifically neutral practice governed only by some objective rationality.
In any case, the mysticism that we are looking at is not a process of self-annihilation into God, as is the core of many systems of mysticism, or the recovery of a pure order of being that the esoteric fascists and traditionalists (such as Julius Evola in particular) are obsessed with. Instead, it almost seems like the creation of a “new” state of being for the individual, one that hinges on deriving power from becoming part of an endless continuity hidden from ordinary consciousness, and which underwrites life itself. That’s in Bataillean terms at least. For the Surrealists, this is the unconscious. For Austin Osman Spare, it is Kia. For Kenneth Grant, it is simply “the Other Side”. For Ernst Schertel, it is a demonic community of para-cosmic forces that transform the magician who interacts with them into a being capable of transforming the cosmos around them. In a very Pagan sense, though, it is the community of demons and gods. Hence, the Mysteries and certain forms of magic where ways of going down into the underworld to encounter and interact with divine power and knowledge, and thereby attain superconsciousness. The Greek Magical Papyri thus has the magician going there as well, into “the antechamber of death”, to gain the power to change the world to their liking, in the context of a pratice that is just as much theurgy as it is goetia.
The World of Darkness
To return to the focus of Surrealism at large, the centrality of desire, perhaps first articulated by Guillaume Apollinaire as the idea that desire is the beating heart of poetry, it remains to emphasize the mystical import of the Surrealist mission. In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, Andre Breton called for a “perpetual strolling throught the heart of the forbidden zone”, illuminating the hidden places and progressively darkening all other places. The object of that quest, which had grown to encompass the whole of Andre Breton’s daily life and for which many Surrealists risked everything, was nothing less than the singularity of desire, both in an individual sense and a much larger sense. The real revolution of Surrealism consisted in the affirmation of desire as a physical intuition of the infinite: an intuition that, from the investigations of the Surrealists, seems to never loosen its grip on representation. The Surrealists also tended to see desire as a great conductor of the energy through which eroticism is that which casts the very being of “Man” into question. More than that, however, Andre Breton asserted in 1952 that the totality of the sexual domain of desire, including perversion, has despite all investigation “never wavered in preserving its intractable kernel of darkness”. That kernel of darkness is what Surrealism proudly celebrated, and it is the central point of my exploration here.
Why darkness? I suppose that might have something to do with the combination of its unconscious character and its inscrutability and irreducibility. For both Breton and Bataille it seems, once the sovereignty of desire is acknowledged, it leads us into certain dark spaces. It is a “disquieting” centre of gravity within the broader social landscape and all representation, which the Surrealists sought to reveal creatively. Desire, according to the Surrealists, also contained in itself an inexhaustible of non-completion, which perhaps is to say that desire is always in some way incomplete, and never permanently satisfied. Desire also seems to be defined by a multiplicity of “the passions”, whose singularity is meant to be revealed in that very multiplicity and diverstiy via the Lexique succinct de l’erotisme. It’s for this reason among others that Andre Breton admired the Marquis De Sade (predictably in a rather romantic manner), who himself is known to have declared that the passions were the flame from which philosophy itself lights its torch. On that, I think Ernst Schertel would very likely agree, since he counted pornography among the origins of all forms of “high culture”. But this also, very interestingly, lends to the position that philosophy, the arts, every form of cultural genius we take for granted, all stem from some sort of fundamentally non-rational (or perhaps even irrational) creative power of passion: an idea shared by none other than Charles Fourier, who, in Le Nouveau Monde amoureux (which remained published until 1967), wrote that love is the passion of unreason and that there is therefore no reason to think it is misguided.
From there, Surrealist desire is figured as a “reason of which reason knows nothing”, which because of that very fact cannot be suppressed. Of course, they use the term “reason”, but if it is in fact an irrational or simply non-rational force, then “reason” as a term is far less fitting than Will, something like in the sense that Schopenhauer or better yet Nietzsche, or Spare for that matter, might have meant by that term. From this standpoint, perhaps even Aleister Crowley’s notion of Will (in the cosmic sense) may yet emerge as a markedly non-teleological force, and if so, it may invite a new and imaginative perspective on Thelema at least as Crowley saw it. All of that is to the effect that profane illumination in surrealist terms is not really about discovering hidden reason but hidden will, or a multiplicity thereof. In any case, desire for the Surrealists is the “great guardian of the key”, and the most vital source of all human thought (again, Ernst Schertel would probably agree with that), which is indeed so thoroughly based on desire that to somehow deviate from it, even slightly, would distort and caricature it.
When I read the last paragraphs of Surrealism: Desire Unbound, something clicked in me as if I was reading an almost apophatic notion of desire. It seemed as if an irreducible force or will underwriting everyday life that could not really be accessed intellectually and could not be understood rationally or in terms of rational utility, indeed the limits of psychoanalysis all seem to hinge on the very fact that they are incapable by their rationalizing means of comprehending the kernel of desire. The Surrealist conception of desire seems to present its whole other world whose only means of access is to open oneself up to it, and that means denying any reason to dismiss its non-rationality or irrationality. You have to bracket out the ordinary rational perception of conscious reality so that the hidden worlds of desire, in all their operations, can become visible to you. And yes, that is me sort of paging Claudio Kulesko in “Cultivating Darkness”, in the sense of the way he talks about how, by bracketing out all existing configurations of thought, you open up an infinite stream of new configurations that also already exist. It really does seem like there is much about Surrealism as presented in this book that I think also puts a lot of the philosophy of Revolutionary Demonology into perspective, or at least grants all the more perspective to it. But what got to me most abotu reading the final pages of Surrealism: Desire Unbound was the whisper of surrealist desire as meaning to convey a larger idea of “ultimate reality”, in the sense that Mara was in certain corners of esoteric Buddhism.
As Bernard Faure noted in Protectors and Predators: Gods of Medieval Japan, Volume 2, Mara, the paradigmatic adversary of Buddhist law, was at some point interpreted as the ambiguous source of reality itself, in line with the hongaku doctrine, which in Tendai Buddhist doctrine figured a whole host of “demonic” deities and entities as representing this same reality. Remembering, of course, the function of Mara within Buddhism as basically the apotheosis of desire itself, we would . Moreover, as Faure notes in an interview conducted in an episode of the Tricycle Talks podcast to discuss his new book, The Thousand and One Lives of the Buddha, Mara is in Buddhist terms the very power governs and rules over everything, even the gods (or rather the other gods as he says) themselves. Of course, in traditional Buddhist mythology, Mara and his forces are defeated by Siddhartha Gautama and it’s after this that he proceeds to enlightenment in the sense that Buddhism takes for granted, although somehow Mara still looms large over human life after this. Such a throughline has a few familiarities with the Christian notion of Jesus Christ first undergoing the Harrowing of Hell, “defeating” Satan, bringing damned souls out of hell and then returning from the dead to preclaim the “good news” of his resurrection before ascending all the way up to the highest seat of heaven, while Satan, despite all this, still continues to tempt humans away from God. Mara in fact seems to be undefeated, refusing to accept defeat and haunting the Buddha even after his “awakening”. Gautama did not convert Mara to the Buddhist law, and, after the attainment of Nirvana, Mara actually seems to further tempt the Buddhist monks away from Buddhist enlightenment, and can even take the form of the Buddha himself. In this sense, even the Buddha’s “awakening” is far from the defeat of Mara.
Faure also explains that Mara, though he does take on a stature similar to the Christian Satan, can be seen as more like a “nature god” in the sense that he presides over the whole continuum of generation (life procreating, growing, and continuing), and he tries to stop Siddhartha Gautama from acheiving Nirvana because he thinks it will lead to the world being emptied its population of living things. Some aspect of that, according to Faure, is reflected in East Asian interpretations of Buddhism, particularly in Japan, where Mara is sometimes seen as being on the side the local cults (and, by extension, the gods or kami) of various peoples in Japan who were threatened by the ambitions of the emperor to extend his control over the land, as well as Buddhists who were perceived as working in concert with the emperor in this regard. This interpretation of Mara shares yet another theme with certain interpretations of Satan or The Devil, which position him as the champion of the oppressed and the ally of pre-Christian gods facing subjugation by the Christian God, not to mention some still very popular (and historically mistaken) ideas about him being the secret god of the witches.
But Faure also talks about another aspect of Mara’s role in Buddhist mythology and the life of the Buddha, one that is radically underemphasized. Mara is simultaneously the great tempter and the great awakener, and much more than this he is also the “evil twin” of Gautama, in Faure’s view actually working hand in hand with Gautama to culminate in a Buddha who, by being the Buddha, encompasses all aspects of reality, “good” and “evil” alike. In one sense, this serves to figure Mara as another world of “desire”, one which in some ways must become one with the world of Gautama of Shakyamuni in the figure of the Buddha. Faure explores this much deeper connection in Rage and Ravage: Gods of Medieval Japan Volume 3, where Mara seems to be the shadow of the Buddha and the Buddha himself “contains” Mara, and at a certain point is even “one” with Mara. In Japanese Buddhism, the larger idea is called mabutsu ichinyo, the identical nature of Mara or devil and Buddha, which allowed the Buddha and Buddhas to encompass good and evil alike, and beings such as Sanbo Kojin to be classed as “actually existing Tathagata”. The Tiantai master Zhiyi even asserted, based on the Avatamsaka Sutra, that there is a “demonic” aspect of Bodhicitta itself, as well as of samadhi and the spiritual guide. All of this is also essentially an expression of the hongaku doctrine, in which good and evil were necessarily mutually identical, which is fundamental to Tendai doctrine.
We are to remember again the character of Mara as representative of desire itself. This is especially reflected in Japanese Buddhism, insofar as Japanese Buddhist monks used the word “mara”, meaning “penis”, to refer to Mara, thereby explicitly associating him with sexual desire and lust and thus also extending sexual desire as a paradigmatic obstacle to Buddhist enlightenment. This paints a picture wherein the hongaku premise of an ultimate reality, defined in Tendai terms by the demonic powers (Mara, Daikokuten, Bishamonten, Enmaten, Kojin, Matarajin etc.), emerges as a hidden and irrational matrix of desire that underwrites the whole condition and continuum of existence, in all its pleasure and suffering, and is itself at once the source and companion of religious goodness, holiness, and enlightenment, and in that sense is one of the essential components, if not the essential necessity, of a divinity and enlightnment that is itself beyond all notion of good and evil, insofar precisely as it encompasses both. It is as if we are to follow a Nietzschean course where, to go beyond “good” and “evil” is first of all to embrace “evil” at the foundation, by way of a “return to nature” in which our closeness to nature is founded on the realisation and fondness of nature being “devilish and dumb”, not upon its perceived “goodness”, “reason”, or “beauty”. Apparently, medieval Japanese Buddhist theology can evoke or even anticipate that.
There is the occasion where non-Buddhists, or rather more particularly Christians, are inclined to make mock Buddhism on precisely the point that they believe that suffering is caused by desire and that freedom from suffering is freedom from desire by saying “desiring to be free of all desires is still a desire”. But even though, at bottom, that might well be correct, there’s an extent to which that’s hardly a strike against Buddhism. Certainly not, as we have shown (and as I like to show repeatedly), for esoteric Buddhist sects such as Tendai Buddhism. In that light, it’s simply the explanation of the omnipresence of desire, which to some extent Buddhism already acknowledges within its own philosophical and doctrinal confines. To my mind, this is not exactly to the discredit of Buddhism. Instead, it allows us a bridge to some far more interesting places.
The Question of Satanism
Here, I think, is where we can at last return to the subject of Satanism, and I think this admittedly somewhat lofty digression allows more than sufficient grounding to explore the grounding of Satanism away from the rationalist-humanist conception of Satanism that seems to dominate modern perceptions of Satanism, both within and outside of Satanism as a religious culture, in favour of what I will dare to describe as mysticism centered around the irrational and perhaps mutliplied will of desire at large, anchored by Satan, as The Devil, as Desire, or the patron thereof.
That Satan, or The Devil, has in modern culture come to represent some general ideas about rationality, the championing of rational thought over irrational ideas and superstitions, and rational enlightenment, is in many ways a relatively new development, and one that, in my opinion, tends to miss the mark for the real appeal of Satan. If there were any devil worshippers before the 1960s, their interests had nothing to do with the rational-scientific falsification of God; they came to the Devil because the Devil, and not God, would help them fulfill their desires. Even today, in both Christian culture and well outside the scope of Christianity, the Devil is the one who tempts humans away from the will of God, and towards perhaps what they really want most. Even Stanislaw Przybyszewski’s Satan, while he is credited with inspiring “rationalist” doctrines, this is principally to oppose the hegemony of Christian thought, and meanwhile much of his influence is focused on the eruption of orgiastic expressions of instinct, lust, in a sense desire. There is not much rationality or rationalism throughout Przybyszewski’s Satanism. Indeed, Przybyszewski’s Satan is ultimately more concerned with the eruption of human desire and instincts, and the power that flows from them, rather than human reason as such. Yet the notion of Satan as the champion of the Cult of Reason seems to be prevalent nowadays, with Satan as the patron of desire actually seems almost faded from view.
Satan as the “God of Reason” portrayed by the “Romantic Satanism” of the Enlightenment is certainly fitting for the Miltonic Satan that pretty much all rationalist “Romantic Satanisms” are built on, and in political terms has often been serviceable as a generic representation of resistance to oppression and tyranny. But even this, in the context of a less rationalist interpretation of Satan, is also bound up in his role as the patron of desire, or at least the desires of those who worship him: among these, of course, was always the desire for revenge against a system that has repeatedly crushed them underfoot. But again, alongside and part and parcel of this, there was always a pantheon of simply selfish desires such as greatness in hunting, wealth, sexual satisfaction, revenge, strength, knowledge of things, power, all of this also bound up with contact with demons. Insofar as there are any reliable accounts of devil worship at all, it worked a lot how sorcery was defined in antiquity: magic performed for mainly “egoistic” aims. But then Satan in “Western” occultism figures as both the patron of this and the representation of lust against the order of heaven, bound up with notions of fatality, matter, and the negation of God, a being whose opponent was always figured as the divine reason, or Logos, of the supreme Godhead.
The strange thing is that, even though the rationalist Satan looms large over popular culture, the notion of Satan as representing a more intangible, non-rational power of desire does, for better or worse, find representation in LaVeyan Satanism and similar doctrines. True, many LaVeyans will default to the idea of Satan as simply a metaphorical or symbolic represention of a kind of self-willing rational/skeptical individuality, typically defined along the lines of Ayn Rand’s notion of “rational self-interest” and her broader philosophy of “Objectivism”, but Anton LaVey himself, while very much a Randian, also espoused the idea that Satan was a dark force in nature in the precise sense that he was to be understood as the representation of the force and operation of carnal desire that forms part of the true law of nature (insofar as it can be called anyway) and which always prevails to some extent or another in human life: the notion of that hidden reality of carnal desire and power is how Anton LaVey accounted for the widespread moral hypocrisy of American Christian society as he saw it (people going to church every Sunday to ask God to forgive their sins and purge their sinful thoughts, only to go to the carnival every Saturday night to indulge themselves again). Satan in the LaVeyan sense represents exactly that power and its opposition to all religions and moral systems that exist to frustrate it: a throughline that actually, despite the rationalist undertones of much of LaVey’s worldview, seems to reflect the throughline of Surrealist desire.
But of course, there’s a problem. On the hand, LaVeyan Satanism does have going for it, in contrast to the Objectivism that partially inspired it, a latent appreciation for the irrational at least in that it de-centers reason as such in relation to the individual as a whole, valuing individual satisfaction, entertainment, and thereby fun first and foremost. This, of course, implicitly recognises that these things are connected to or expressive of non-rational desire, and in turn that focus comes with a critique of Objectivism as elevating impersonal rationality above the individual and individual desire. On the other hand, this thread nonetheless finds itself somewhat obscured over the years, with the Church of Satan maintaining its philosophical commitment to the notion of rational self-interest, in opposition to religion, mysticism, and occultism (despite them gladly pilfering the legacy of occult transgression in order to do so), albeit while considering itself open to the critical exploration of non-rational perspectives. Moreover, however, there is also the sense in which LaVey also linked his ideas about satanic carnality to a broader notion of an ordered body politic that is sustained through the rational control and recuperation of desire.
Anton LaVey and the Dictatorship of “Healthy Sex”
In The Satanic Bible, LaVey talks about Satanism representing indulgence instead of abstinence, and in so doing he makes the point that, by allowing people to indulge their desires without fear of embarassment reproach, society ensures that people lead unfrustrated lives and therefore are able to go about their duties in fullness of will and efficacy. In this sense, one of the main promises of LaVeyan Satanism is the formation of a society that fulfills or allows people to fulfill carnal desires in order to support and/or reward the masses that serve it. However, this is then extended into a comment about Nazi Germany, the fascist dictatorship that he otherwise ostensibly despised, for the one “good” that he thought can be extracted from its overall “madness”: that “good” being the idea of “strength through joy”, which LaVey understood as a program by which Adolf Hitler sought to ensure the loyalty and efficiency of his German subjects by supposedly offering them personal happiness. LaVey here seems to be referring to the “Strength Through Joy” program, essentially a large-scale propaganda department of the German Labour Front, which sought to promote Nazi ideology and “volksgemeinschaft” through a diverse series of subsidized leisure activities and consumer technologies that were promoted for German citizens. In fact, the Volkswagen Beetle car and the Volkswagen company at large might be the most well-known products of this very program.
In a way it kind of makes sense that LaVey would invoke this sort of totalitarian project as a roundabout example of his idea of a society that supports that the pursuit of pleasure in order to nurture the body politic through happy workers, at least in the sense that we know Anton LaVey was often close friends with fascists, who in turn had totalitarian aspirations of their own. The document of Pentagonal Revisionism outlines LaVey’s much later affirmation of a rigidly stratified society in which people live in their own constructed “total environment” while having sex with artificial companions can be contextualised in this broader picture: it’s basically a totalitarian society that tries to harness, control, and direct the power of carnal desire to support the formation of a flourishing body politic, wherein the individual fulfillment of carnal desires serves to support the effective operation of society and the service of its subjects. It’s something that sounds like a libertarian affirmation of personal desire while it actually arguably isn’t. In fact, LaVey’s ideas in this specific regard actually echo a larger trend in the attitudes of “Western” capitalist societies, which always tried to restrict pornography but, after World War 1, began to float the idea of regulating pornography in order to promote male sexual health in order to produce good workers and soldiers while combatting so-called “perversion”. This is where we get into a valuable discussion about censorship raised by Surrealism: Desire Unbound.
Western capitalist nations have always sought to repress, criminalise, and/or regulate pornography, usually under the rationale of “protecting the family” or “protecting children”. In the 19th century this was done with the aim of controlling the behaviour of working class men so that they would labour as workers, fight as soldiers, get married, and raise families in order to reproduce the body politic of the patriarchal capitalist nation state. This meant suppressing any material deemed capable of “depraving or corrupting anyone susceptible to immoral influences”, often meaning sexually explicit eroticism or homosexual eroticism. Anti-porn laws were also used to suppress birth control and “subversive political literature (such as anarchist, communist, feminist, and pacifist texts), while also suppressing pornographic magazines, with all of that enforced through constant police surveillance. But, after World War 1, it was believed that men were “losing their wills” and becoming obsessed with sadomasochistic pornography after coming back from the trenches. Pornography itself was increasing defined as an ambiguous “culture of death” encompassing whatever deviated from perceived sexual normalcy, especially homosexuality and sadomasochism. At the same time the war itself and even the existing anti-porn laws were singled out by progressive critics as the real cause of supposed perversions: in other words, progressives in the 1920s thought that homosexuality and sadomasochism were themselves just the products of war and repression. In response, people began to put forward the notion of sexual education and “sexual hygeine” as a means of fighting sadomasochism and therefore upholding a healthy body politic.
And so, in the 1920s, an entire genre of psychological literature emerged to promote sex education as means to combat sexual repression and teach men to “respect their bodies” for the precise purpose of “curing” them of homosexuality and sadomasochism, which of course were both presented as the products of sexual repression and therefore perversion. Thus, a homophobic and kinkphobic notion of “healthy sex” was born. At the same time, a variety of commentators and professionals began to reframe open expression of sexuality, at least of a certain kind, was a means to renew the body politic rather than destroy. Erotic literature, previously denounced as “pornography”, was sometimes reappraised for apparently frankly depicting sex and sexual immorality, and enlisted as part of a struggle against “perversions” that were thought to be “harming the race”. Hang on to that part for later. In the same vein, some writers expressed the idea that nudism and even pornography itself were legitimate means of “purifying the body politic” by “eliminating perversion” (again, mostly meaning homosexuality in this context). But one side-effect of this trend was that pornography was increasingly seen as omnipresent, conceptually intanigble, and very often disguised as basically anything innocuous, which in France especially actually led to the police casting a wider net of repression. Everything from classified ads to bourgeois novels was confiscated by authorities, because it was assumed that pornography could be almost anything.
The politics of 1920s “healthy sex”, which positioned eroticism and sex education as a tool of the “renewal” and “purification” of the body politic, was thus also characterised by what was actually an even more extensive regime of repression and censorship. In France, this included banning even the simple act of advocating for birth control and abortion under laws that condemned even material that contained nothing we would call pornographic whatsoever. By 1939, however, the French government increased its prosecution of homosexuality while banning all forms of “obscenity” in the name of protecting not only “the family” but also “the race“. Lo and behold, just one year before the Nazis invaded and occupied France, the same rationale by which the culture of “healthy sex” presented sex education and eroticism as a means of “protecting the race from perversions” by combatting repression has reappeared in French law as the repression of sexual freedom done for “protecting the race from perversions”. The whole discourse of the “culture of death”, which is to say the notion of pornography as a psychic extension of the horror of World War 1, counted sex workers, sexual liberation, homosexuality, and even jazz music as symptomatic extensions of the war, sadomasochism, and its supposedly “degenerating” and “emasculating” effects on the body politic. That jazz was somehow figured into this can be interpreted as a prefiguring of the Nazi concept of “degenerate music”, itself part of the larger concept of “degenerate art”, in which jazz was seen as part of a trend of musical “decay” supposedly caused by capitalism and Jews. And, just six months before the Nazi occupation, the French government created a special commission charged with evaluating “obscene” material, and with disntiguishing between “eroticism” and “pornographie grossiere” (literally “crude pornography”), the latter of which tended to include homosexual pornography. We can assume that the distinction was based on the state deciding that it either “protected the race from perversions” or was itself a “perversion” that “hurt the race”.
Now, even though Anton LaVey in The Satanic Bible had no problem whatever with homosexuality or sadomasochism, and indeed he seemed to champion the freedom of perhaps almost all manner of sexual non-conformity as expressions of natural carnal desire, the politics he employs in The Satanic Bible as well as elsewhere (including Pentagonal Revisionism) operates on a logic fairly similar to the 1920s notion of “healthy sex”. As I previously explained, his ideal society is not only one whose subjects are allowed explore and satisfy their carnal desires without repression, it’s also one that actively encourages, promotes, and rewards the satisfication of carnal desires by said subjects so that they would happily serve society and perform the duties it imposes. Keeping in mind that LaVey’s ideal society is a highly stratified one, a Social Darwinist hierarchy where the supposedly “strong” get to oppress the supposedly “weak”, and of course the fact LaVey brings up the “Strength Through Joy” program as a snapshot of how society should operate in nourishing carnal desire. The totalitarian politics of desire doesn’t really emerge as the dominion of the pleasure principle in itself, as a certain mediocre socialist argument would put it, but rather as a logical extension of political and social frameworks of repression, including ones that sometimes claimed to be fighting sexual repression, ordered around a sexual and racial body politic centered on the cisheterosexual white male. In this setting, desire is something that is affirmed so that it can be harnessed for the good of the social order. For LaVeyan Satanism and its politics, this means worshipping carnal desire symbolically represented as Satan on the one hand, and proposing a “rational” body politic predicated precisely on the control of carnal desire on the other hand.
A Surrealist Satanism
It may seem like I’m getting ahead of myself, but this broader picture is part of the exploration of desire with regards to Satanism. I think that the notion of desire that the French Surrealists present to us might allow us to approach Satan, in Satanist terms, in relationship to desire at large (not simply individual desires) as a kind of ontologically irrational will, or part of a larger concept thereof, one that underwrites and propels life beneath its surface and makes it flourish, but which also seems to make life fundamentally “problematic”, yet whose realm presents a kind of hidden knowledge and freedom of action once we negate every limit to its perception. In simple terms: a more Surrealist conception of Satan would be as a/the god of a hidden dark world, the occult world of desire and will.
What we get from that should be completely different from the modern emphasis on Satan as effectively the god of reason and justice, a departure from the legacy of “Romantic Satanism” and the Cult of Reason. I mean, let’s face it, a contemporary look at polytheism presents us with the prospect that a lot of the gods, more than you might think, can be interpreted as gods who represented rebellion for the cause of “justice”. Instead, one can picture something more like how Kenneth Grant presents Satan (who he identified with the god Set, of course) as the “other side” of life, which is at once also the “true root” of life. The “true will”, the “hidden god”, the “hidden sun”, Satan/Set in Grant’s view is the representation par excellence of a kind of unconscious or subconscious drive or will that underwrites the agency and activity of life as its source, a hidden ground of reality which we tend to suppress in the process of conscious thought, and whose contents are accessed by way of a kind of “inversion”. This basic concept can and should be carefully distinguished from the way Satan almost seems to figure as a sort of progressive superego figure in certain forms of modern Satanism (which is not to say that Satan has ever complained much about being somebody’s “good guy” for once!). I think the basic throughline of Grant’s idea is expressed clearly enough as follows:
In the preceding Aeon (that of Osiris), Set or Satan was regarded as evil, because the nature of desire was misunderstood; it was identified with the Devil and with moral evil. Yet this devil, Satan, is the true formula of Illumination. “Called evil to conceal its holiness”, it is desire that prompts man to know himself – “through another” (i.e. through his own double, or “devil”). When the urge “to know” is turned inwards instead of outwards as it usually is, then the ego dies and the objective universe is dissolved. In the light of that Illumination, Reality, the Gnosis, is all that remains.
Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival (1972)
Of course, in this framework, Satan remains the time-honoured champion of liberty against oppression. Indeed, how else can it be when his beloved demonic kingdom of desire and the life it brings forth has so many enemies in this world? Christianity and the church obviously loom among the largest of these enemies to this day, and by extension that would include its allies in the form of governments and apologists. Capitalism, as a system always seeking to control, suppress, and recuperate our desires, is also among the greatest of these enemies, contrary to all manner of whining about the supposedly “demonic” nature of capitalist. And we need not stop with Christianity and capitalism. Surely the state itself the enemy lodged at the centre even of the previous two antagonisms against desire. Fascism, perhaps the deadliest and most insidious enemy of freedom in modern history, has in all its forms also functioned as nothing less than systematic dictatorships of repression.
Just for everyone in the back: yes, Satan is anti-fascist. Anyone who doesn’t like that can go and cry in the gutter.
And of course, every system of repression, every ideology competing to construct a new moral Image of the World, naturally opposes itself to the irreducibility of desire, and so they are all enemies. The French Surrealists learned this the hard way when dealing with the French Communist Party, who opposed any affirmation of sexual and erotic freedom and, despite Surrealist overtures of support, opposed the Surrealists with traditionalist arguments about they were “complicating the relations between man and woman”, which they thought were “so simple and healthy”. Such is so often the course of Leninism, Marxism-Leninism, and similar repressive wastes. The modern application of technology forms a more sophiscated and extensive environment of repression, undermining or even destroying the horizons of personal agency as much as (if not more than) it creates new possibilities for that agency, while possibly threatening to undermine the coherence of our emotions and, increasingly, the boundaries of our autonomy. All modern doctrines of “natural law” and “right” are distortions, as are any iterations of supposed radicalism that serve only to renew and reframe consensus morality. And, at bottom, what we call society is itself nothing but a complex and often fairly incoherent assemblage of modes of repression and control.
For this reason I would advance that a genuinely Satanic path to acheiving full freedom from all of these repressions, and victory against all of these enemies, looks a lot like the anarcho-nihilist position. And for that reason, we have to consider negation in a different light. I am inspired to borrow Rudolf Otto’s way of describing the concept of “void”: he meant it to mean negation in the sense of a particular kind of negation that “does away with every ‘this’ and ‘here,’ in order that the ‘wholly other’ may become actual”. In a very real sense this is what the marco-emergence of anarchy in its most complete sense: bracket away the limits of the world that exist by means of the insurrection, as an event or as an act of daily life, so that the world after the world may emerge. Yet again we can see the parallel in Kulesko’s idea: bracketing out established configurations of thought in order to actualise new configurations hidden from the perception of everyday thought. In another particular sense, this allows us to create a thread back towards the anamorphosis of Surrealism. By opening ourselves up to the hidden world of desire or dream, which is to be done by bracketing out the normative consciousness of our society, we allow the automatic consciousness of that world to actualise itself in ourselves. And so the Russian nihilists fought to overcome everything around them, struggling in rejection of the entirety of Russian society as they knew it and every principle that upheld it, such that only in this activity the greatest freedom reveals itself. Even for Max Stirner, the self is revealed only through the negation of everything else.
The satanic negation hinted at by Eliphas Levi, when he said that Satan was the negation of God and also “an instrument of liberty”, thus takes on a new meaning. If for the apophatic depths of Christian mysticism, and the theology of Cornelius Agrippa himself, you had to bracket out everything in order to know God, the world of Satan, of the Devil, suggests to us that we must bracket out even God (just one more “being” in any case), alongside the regime of reason and the sovereignty of Man, in order to manifest the hidden itself. There’s a sense in which Levi was not entirely wrong to say that the Devil is composed of God’s ruins. It is partially by this that Satan truly earns his namesake: the Adversary.
Surrealism gives us a profound and indispensable mystical insight by its concern with the hidden world of desire or will, beyond reason, beynd morality, “evil” and yet beyond good and evil, pure intractable darkness. This concern connects us with a powerful philosophiscal thread expressed even by such philosophers as Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, both of whom saw an unseen will or world of unseen drives as the overriding basis of a reality that, as far as they were concerned, was probably actually composed by illusions. It also, as I hope I have shown, flows through the occult worldviews and influences of the likes of Ernst Schertel, Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Grant, possibly (as I have admittedly not discussed) even Aleister Crowley himself at least insofar as he saw the goetic kingdom of demons as a kingdom of desire, as well as the new mysticisms proposed by Gruppo Di Nun and Eugene Thacker (the former very clearly deriving from the latter), and, much further afield, the medieval landscape of esoteric Japanese Buddhism. It may also present an anti-solipisism that comes with the very notion of having to access another world, even if that’s part of yourself. The Surrealists also recognised desire connected to otherness, and defined it partially by its tendency to seek something other. The French author Annie Le Brun suggested that Marquis De Sade posed the question of human existence as “what is desire?” and framed the answer as being the location of the subject in a universal interplay, refusing to interpret “Man” as being fully distinct from the rest of the universe. The knowledge of desire thus, in the Surrealist sense, compels human beings reach outwards in the very same sense as they much reach inwards, because it is to “the other side” that they must venture forth: to the kingdom of the Devil.
Desire itself may even just be part of a much larger picture, a multifaceted domain comprising the world of Darkness, or perhaps, for all we know, much more even than this. Satan may undoubtedly represent all of that, though there is perhaps still a multiplicity to consider. Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, said that the gods all “died laughing” when one day one of the gods declared himself to be the One True God. There’s a sense in which that, in the Christian landscape, that laughter is the whole of demonkind: submerged beneath God’s order in Hell, but laughing at God all the same, waiting to burst into the earth and bust through the gates of heaven. Perhaps there is room in this to make sense of the idea, sometimes found in modern Satanism, that Satan is a manifestation of a much larger power of Darkness, represented by multiple gods. Even Anton LaVey played with this notion in his concept of the “infernal names”, which consist not only of the names of demons and/or various aliases of The Devil but also numerous pre-Christian gods who LaVey thought were names and incarnations of Satan. A curious omission in this menagerie is Mara, who surely counts more than almost any figure you can think of as a true power of darkness. And yet his presence in what Bernard Faure pictures as a polytheistic network of demonic deities suggests the multiplicity of the powers of Darkness. Into this arena perhaps you may find many many more gods. That, though, is an inquiry for another day.
As I write this article, I consider its contents to be an evolutionary development and extension of what I wrote last year in “An inquiry into the philosophy of Darkness”, so I invite you to take a look: https://mythoughtsbornfromfire.wordpress.com/2022/04/08/an-inquiry-into-the-philosophy-of-darkness/
I have also derived inspiration for several lines of inquiry from a very fascinating article S. C. Hickman’s article “The Daemonic Imaginal: Ecstasy and Horror of the Noumenon”, whose work I think brings much into perspective and I encourage the reading of at least this article: https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2016/07/24/the-daemonic-imaginal-ecstasy-and-horror-of-the-noumenon/
Aleph's Heretical Domain 
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