Month: April 2023

Satan thinks martyrs accomplish nothing

Posted on by A lesser demon

To those who were always atheists and were raised in one of the few mostly atheist countries, compliance with externally-defined expectations is familiar to the extent that everyone is subjected to cultural norms and ethics, and few people are conscious of them. But there are also norms that apply almost exclusively to highly Christian subcultures.

Christians by and large teach you that not only must you accept that life on Earth should involve suffering until the happy day when you perish, but also that you should celebrate your suffering, displaying it as a form of accomplishment in itself. The more you suffer the better, because it somehow makes your life after death, including any redemption, correspondingly more awesome. It proves that you manage to stay spiritually strong, by some strange definition of strength. Suffering, present or past, is a decoration that you wear proudly and prominently, because the sheer fact that you are still around displays the power of your faith: God tests you but you persevere. Well, aren’t you something.

Satan did not check but thinks He would not be surprised if this mindset stems from the Calvary myth that depicts in bloody detail how Jesus suffered torture, humiliation, and finally death, in order to shortly thereafter return as the god that some believe he was. Or, recalling His days as an enforcer employed by God, maybe it is a present-day ideal derived from the book of Job in which Job was exposed to one trial after another to prove his faith. Like most consultants, Satan did not complete the task to anyone’s satisfaction, but He was paid well regardless.

Any form of suffering—although physical suffering works best since anyone can relate to a stubbed toe—can be used as proof that your faith will either save you or has already saved you, as your spiritual fortitude prevails over your corruptible body. For example, if such a believer has undergone surgery, the believer will conclude that his prolonged recovery was eased by his persistent faith or, alternatively, that his speedy recovery was made possible by his faith. (The latter is less impressive, though, unless recovery appears to be miraculously fast. That was a free tip.) The more you suffered, and the more you still endure, the stronger your faith appears. Such a person will gladly tell you of his hardships so he can brag about how he braved the odds by virtue of his piousness. Satan thinks that Anton LaVey made the right observation when he wrote in The Satanic Bible that invalids make good psychic vampires, because their (genuine) calamities provide them with an excuse to receive unearned benefits beyond the reasonable help that egalitarianism mandates. In the cult of masochism, disability and weakness are strength.

From the Devil’s perspective, however, it is downright pathetic. Everyone experiences adversity and sustains an injury from time to time (and when you go to Hell, rest assured it will be all the time), but moving on does not require any amount of faith. All it takes is basic self-interest and sometimes mere patience. It practically requires only that you do not derive your worth from victimhood, preferring to stay the sufferer to leech pity and attention from others, or even admiration from people with a similar mindset. If your highest sense of accomplishment is that you are not dead yet, Satan considers you a cosmic disappointment. Even losers can be said to have enriched someone else, but you might as well never have existed.

The form varies, but just like Christians rely on their Christian faith, it is a common occurrence in the Satanic arena that people tell how Satanism helped them get through hardship or even “saved” them. Their focus on being Satanists ostensibly gave them the sense of perspective they needed, the feeling that it rested upon them to better themselves, or how the explanations usually go. Keeping with Christian tradition, the greater the martyr, the greater the miracle of their newly-found faith. However, the Devil does not accept the blood of martyrs as valid currency and is offended by such sacrifice. Satan demands accomplishments, not failures or excuses.

It does not mean that Satan lacks empathy towards those who suffer from the trauma of religious upbringing, or in fact any trauma. Such genuine victims should seek professional therapy if possible, and may also find help in support groups provided they are well-guided to avoid reinforcing the trauma through full-length group cry sessions. Unloading on everyone else in one’s Satanic community is not a display of Satanism, however. Your Satanic identity is neither provided by your past or present suffering nor by your complaints, regardless of how honest and valid they otherwise be.

Satan is sorry to inform them that the einherjar did not go to Valhalla to brag about their survival. Such an “accomplishment” would be their ticket to rot in the festering halls of Helheim. Everyone perseveres, unless they are so broken that their only choice is to throw in the towel and accept whichever defeat, failure, and embarrassment awaits. It is true for Satanists and Christians alike that if your major accomplishment is, both figuratively and literally speaking, to not lay down and die then it is no accomplishment at all. They yearn for Heaven, and the Prince of Darkness thinks they should admit it instead of wasting His time. There is no such thing as a Satanic martyr.

Satan thinks His followers should soak their heads

Posted on by A lesser demon

Satan appreciates an attentive student and favors followers who pick up His teachings. It is seldom a poor idea to read a book, and in the case of His usual followers, often any book would probably broaden their horizons. But, there are times when one of His devotees combines Anton LaVey’s teachings and musings with a herd following instinct and uncritical orthodoxy. That is when Satan thinks that the result stinks worse than our sulfurous fumes here in Hell.

Satan is, of course, thinking about those churchgoers in His Church of Satan who heed Anton LaVey’s advice to stop bathing.

Anton LaVey had good reason to find bathing unpleasant. The heating in his house on California Street in San Francisco was broken, and for either lack of initiative or income he never had it fixed. The home was cold in the winter, and the water ran cold all year. LaVey therefore opted for the solution chosen by most humans who live in denial of their situation: he rationalized his situation into a personal choice. Unable to crank up the thermostat or enjoy a soothing long hot tub bath, he found that he liked the coldness of the wintertime, reasoned that bathing was unhealthy until he could no longer tolerate his own bodily odors, and found immersion in a cool bath pleasant only when temperatures were too high.

Hell is the epitome of all central heating systems, and the Devil settles for temperatures nowhere below the melting point of rock under the Earth’s gravitational pressure. He nonetheless understands that the benign winters of the coastal climate of San Francisco in Northern California are mainly a question of bad clothing, not bad weather, and Anton LaVey could ignore the unsolicited heads-up Mother Nature would otherwise have offered had he stayed in his birth town of Chicago.

Environmental choices were easily defended as a matter of preference, but unhealthy and socially problematic poor hygiene decisions required elaboration, perhaps even more so to LaVey whose sexual preference involved practices that incur additional demands on cleanliness.

LaVey concluded that because bathing masks the natural scents of a human being, it is dishonest and therefore liked by only the worst people. (Satan never checked but presumes LaVey must have been a completely honest person.) Based on his knowledge of animals as a cage hand in a circus in the times when animal welfare had yet to receive public attention, LaVey believed that a reduced bodily odor would confuse an animal. Satan believes this may have been LaVey’s experience with animals in such environments, but in trusting relations between humans and unstressed animals, a shower and some soap do not introduce unfamiliarity. When The Prince of Darkness emerges in all His splendor from a contemplative hour in a fiery lake and His pet Baphomet rubs its territorial glands against His marvelous unspeakables, it is not confusion but a reaffirmation of trust and belonging, for example.

True to his misanthropy, LaVey considered bathing to be nothing short of treason against the eugenics that he advocated, in that undesirable women (just women), through cloaking their scent, would thereby mask their undesirableness and coerce males into helping produce genetically inferior offspring. LaVey did not mention the genetic impact of males, but Satan is sure that was just an oversight, as He would not accuse LaVey of male chauvinism now that LaVey cannot defend himself. No, seriously, we had to tie him up and gag him after Diane Hegarty died a little less than a year ago and joined us as a proud citizen of Hell; and the recent premature arrival of his grandson did not improve the situation. If LaVey had males in mind, it would be his belief that his stench kept them at bay.

It is not entirely incorrect that humans react to each others’ pheromones, but the diminished senses of humans compared with many animals (although humans senses seem generalized and balanced compared with, say, the keen eyes but poor sense of smell of the eagle, or the extraordinary hearing of the nearly blind bat) are the likely evolutionary result of a significantly improved cognitive skill: to find a mate, the human animal relies on the many additional, often visual, cues of complicated social interaction patterns enabled, and recognized, by its brain beyond the mere smell of an opposite-sex fellow specimen in heat. A human being so horribly poorly socially inept that it had to rely foremost on its snout to identify a mate would not qualify for one in the first place. The smell of a human in heat would be rather uninformative anyway, as the human animal is a species that may have minor hormonal fluctuations influencing its sexual interest but is always in heat compared with the either-or periods of many animals. Humans have sex for pleasure and important social bonding, not only to procreate, and any biological traces of heat periods are counterproductive evolutionary artifacts. What you experience is vestigial heat as you chase vestigial tail.

LaVey’s need to explain his poor personal hygiene turned resistance to bathing into an accolade. He believed that he was an emancipated being by contrasting habitual bathing as the habit of the pious, the guilty, and the frightened—that is, it was the attempt of the religious to escape their animal nature. His Infernal Majesty recalls that His sworn enemies and followers of God entertained some attitudes toward bathing, indeed, but remembers the details somewhat differently.

If anything, traditional Christian focus on spiritual purity was paid with physical asepsis. Monks would abstain from bathing to show their spiritual strength over the physical body, not because hygiene was fundamentally sinful or animal-like, but because it was hard on the body and thus proved their mental fortitude and “superiority” over the physical needs of an average individual. And contrary to popular belief, Medieval Europe was not characterized by filth and grime although the sanitation of growing cities left plenty to be desired. Medieval people bathed often, but because public bathhouses were also gathering places, spas, brothels, and otherwise provided extra-sanitational activities, Christian officials discouraged going to baths and bathhouses; again not because bathing itself was sinful, but because it tended to involve a role in the tub occupied by a maid or a man-servant.

Christianity left literal stains on sanitary practices. Satan thinks His followers should understand that their true human animal selves are far more complex than meets the nose, and that Anton LaVey’s non-scents belief is the misguided excuse of a person who could not maintain his own personal hygiene. Satan thinks that the least His followers can do to leave the Christian mindset behind is to bathe regularly.