If you have paid attention to Hollywood movies and popular literature, you will know that my Master of All Things Evil is a sucker for rituals of destruction and for coercing unsuspecting victims into having sex when their mating signal has not been given, and hence is very happy with Anton LaVey’s rituals that one finds in The Satanic Bible. Satan is a little less impressed with the compassion rituals but understands why some of His followers and whoever knows them feel deserving of self-pity if not euthanasia.
But if there is anything my Master hates more than love, life, and happiness, it is a job performed sloppily. We have lost count of the number of times our Dark Prince has been summoned to a dimly lit room only to find a cheesy replay of the Monty Python sketch where John Cleese hates communists, or to find some wreck who thinks that by masturbating frantically behind fortunately closed doors some woman with taste will catch sexual interest in him. We lesser demons and several of our superiors know, because the Devil often vents his dissatisfaction on us afterwards with a temper that has made some of us very secretly compare Him with Jehova. Very secretly.
Satan is, of course, thinking specifically of the third section of The Satanic Bible entitled “The Book of Belial” where the author, Anton LaVey, explains how to perform Satanic magic, and why this magic works. In brief terms, for those who do not have the book at hand, Anton LaVey explained that by working up strong emotions of hate, compassion, or sexual desire (no, not simultaneously), one concentrates energy that can be directed at a desired (human) target who will be influenced according to the magician’s emotional state. Ritual chambers serve as “decompression chambers” during the rituals and aid in extracting the emotional energy from the magician. In addition, rituals are a therapeutic method that help get emotions “out of one’s system,” because pent-up emotions may be harmful to a person.
If this seems vaguely familiar, it is because none of it was Anton LaVey’s invention. Its origins predate Anton LaVey by several decades. It stems from the late 19th century when modern psychology was still in its infancy. These early psychologists drew heavily from the last big discovery of the natural sciences at the time: thermodynamics. This provided them with a paradigm where emotions were believed to be a form of energy and the human mind a kind of boiler that consumed the energy and turned it into tangible and useful actions provided the mind was healthy and the emotions were under control. If emotions were too strong or the mind could not process the emotions, however, it corresponded to providing too much energy or throttling the boiler output, and pressure would build up with damaging results to the entire system. One would sometimes have to “let out steam,” as humans still say today. Psychological models varied but were all based on the thermodynamics-inspired “energy and boiler” premise.
This paradigm was prevalent well into the 20th century where psychotherapists believed that emotions could be pent-up—that is, “causing pressure”—and had to be vented one way or another. From the 1930es and up until the 1970es, popular culture, too, had learned that this was how emotions worked, and any occultist or therapist worth his salt then knew that emotion and thought were some kind of energy that was somehow transformed into something else via the mind, whether it be sublimation per Freudian teachings or some other outlet. It was widely theorized that one could concentrate mind and emotion and somehow channel an intent towards an external desire, and possibly control the minds of other people.
Soon any therapist, scientist, occultist, hippie using drugs as a mind-enhancing tool, and even certain CIA programs (as was told satirically in the fictional movie The Men Who Stare at Goats) experimented with mind control, and Anton LaVey entered the arena in its heydays. He was neither controversial, novel, or unusual for believing it was feasible, nor was he the first to consider it magic. Anton LaVey mostly rehashed what scientists adhering to the thermodynamics paradigm of psychology still believed to be a possibility. It was not considered magic (nor Satanic), except perhaps that nobody knew how to channel this speculated energy. Occultists attempted with magic, and the CIA performed scientific studies of personnel trying to read each others’ minds, both equally unsuccessful.
In the meantime, unfortunately hampered by Freud’s enormous and regrettable influence on psychology, the science of psychology matured in a matter of decades. The emotional “energy” had been elusive and the human mind had proven to be far more complex than a steam engine, so psychologists eventually realized that the thermodynamics paradigm was fundamentally flawed and had prompted models that were either useless or counterproductive. The old paradigm did not explain a thing, which is also the reason why nobody figured out how to channel energy that does not exist via means that cannot.
Psychologists today know that there is no such thing as emotional energy that can build up and boil the mind as if humans were steam plants. The early psychotherapeutical belief that one should get an emotion “out of one’s system” by focusing strongly on it (as Anton LaVey requires in his Satanic magic) is now known to be detrimental to mental health, and is currently replaced with cognitive behavioral therapy methods that teach patients to work around their so-called mental “schemas” of negative emotions and deleterious behavior.
What Anton LaVey said was generally believed to be true at the time and made sense to include in The Satanic Bible, and Satan thinks he should not be blamed—although had he been a scholar with access to contemporary psychological research he might have discovered that the “pressure cooker” paradigm was already being challenged and stayed alive only because its adherents were not dead yet (as our denizen Max Planck once said), popular culture needing yet another generation’s time for it to fully evaporate. But today the paradigm that was required for Anton LaVey’s model of magic has been abandoned for decades after having been proven by results to be empty fiction. Satan thinks that the outdated paradigm and all its dependent psychological models, Anton LaVey’s thus ill-conceived model of magic included, should be unceremoneously flung into the darkness of other dead ideas.
“But it works! It works for me!” cries the choir in the Devil’s church, and Satan trusts that some of them truly believe so, not merely speaking with misunderstood loyalty towards Anton LaVey and The Church of Satan, which insists that there are no flaws in its scripture. After all, Christians, too, believe that their prayers are heard and have made their god change its mind. They, too, believe that biscuits and wine become flesh and blood at the Catholic communion. They, too, believe that a blessing changes them. Satan thinks that followers of His who believe that Anton LaVey’s rituals work are no different from these Christian churchgoers, and that they should perhaps start going, too, if that is how their minds work.