Month: May 2023

Satan thinks anyone can be a Satanic übermensch

Posted on by A lesser demon

Those who encounter Satanists online will soon learn that, according to The Church of Satan, every Satanist is entitled to his or her own opinions and actions because Satanism allows such freedom. No two Satanists are alike. One cannot meet one Satanist and then think one has seen them all because seeking to pigeonhole a Satanist is supposedly like attempting to nail custard to a wall. It is only in recent decades that scholars of religion have narrowed down in scholarly terms The Church of Satan’s religion more tightly than for virtually any other cult, but that is mainly because they had formerly not cared. The official stance of The Church of Satan states that anyone who reads Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible and feels that it “resonates” positively with them may think of themselves as Satanists.

Those same people who encounter Satanists from The Church of Satan online will also soon learn that despite its alleged openness and personal freedom, The Church of Satan requires strict conformity. Woe be the Satanist who dares to criticize Anton LaVey or the current high priest, Peter Gilmore. Twice cursed be the Satanist who openly admits that deep flaws, outdated hypotheses and theories, misapplied science, and counterfactual claims and premises abound within the ideology originally introduced by Anton LaVey and later sophomorically pseudo-intellectualized by Peter Gilmore. Thrice cursed be the Satanist whose opinions and values would raise no eyebrows within The Church of Satan (not even the ridiculously trimmed ones of Peter Gilmore) who chooses to affiliate with another Satanic organization or just dares to acknowledge their legitimacy.

Nevertheless, the Prince of Evil agrees with His church that all it takes to become a churchgoer is to acknowledge that The Satanic Bible evokes a feeling of having views confirmed that you never managed to articulate. Some readers will find that Anton LaVey provided them with the pivotal portal to their incomplete identity, validating them with soothing words of power. They are Church of Satan material by its own certification.

Our Horn-Crowned Majesty does not interfere—after all, He is a supernatural entity and real only to us Hell-dwellers—but does not find Himself above (of course) to be opinionated. Satan thinks that The Satanic Bible is one of those books that cater to people who harbor a mortal fear of rejection. The very first page of LaVey’s preface to The Satanic Bible informs its readers that upon reading its pages, they will gain insights otherwise denied to the masses; and what follows are reassurances that if the reader feels alienated from the masses, it is because something is wrong with everyone but the reader. By reading the book, the reader will know something that others do not know, and it makes the reader better than the rest. It makes its readers feel superior in the Game of Life, unaware that this is the most tried and tested method for gathering cult followers.

Yet, all it takes for an outsider to join the club is to also read the book and gain the “knowledge.” It requires an excessive amount of self-deceit to believe that simply upon reading it, one joins a group that possesses a uniqueness reserved only for very special people. Satan thinks it cannot be that hard to read a damn book but, on second thought, has noticed that His disciples are notoriously unbookish, so perhaps they perceive it as an overwhelming barrier to scan anything with more text than a memorable Bible verse. What Satan means is that it is so easy to join this “élite” that it is no accomplishment whatsoever, unless one is phenomenally unable. It is evidence of a profoundly fragile self-esteem to derive a sense of worth by proxy of believing oneself part of a rare breed in the first place, and thinking one may join such a tribe purely by reading a book and not even being required to pass an exam sets the bar lower than the floor paint.

The Satanic baptism is thus simple: read The Satanic Bible, recognize your own innate superiority to the vast majority of humanity and publicly acknowledge how fundamentally you agree with LaVey’s critique of the herd, the masses, the rabble, the ersatz, the locusts, the sheep: learn that they are not Satanists and that alone makes you one. Without this baptism of complete agreement or, presumably, having never heard of the book, you are not a Satanist. (The latter makes Satan think of the indigenous tribes who asked the missionaries why they would tell them about Hell if Hell only applied to those who knew about it.) The criteria are arbitrary, however. Anyone can elevate themselves by declaring that they adhere to a philosophy that scorns the mediocrity of the herd and is thereby better than the herd. Not that this makes it an ineffective baptism, good gracious. The Satanic baptism may seem trivially naïve and uncomplicated from the outside, but from the inside, the newly-minted Satanist has undergone a magical transformation that retroactively transmogrifies his body from a herd member into a clansman of an alien élite.

Satan thinks this is too easy to count as a qualification. With so little obligation, accomplishment, and proficiency, anyone can be a Satanic übermensch. Even Anton LaVey acknowledged that this mass-market book breeds pretentiousness in the inferior because it enables anyone to be a superman. His only solution to that problem was a vague reference to “true” Satanists. LaVey did not clarify who they were, but Satan thinks the inferior ones are easily spotted: they focus very little on the contents of Satanic ideology, and have no marketable skills or personal qualities to speak of. Their identities do not revolve around their own vital existence but around others being non-Satanists. Because they have nothing of substance to show, they feel validated as Satanists only by loudly and persistently defining others as non-Satanists—especially when they encounter people who might just be the real thing compared with whom their shortcomings and mediocrity become as plain as a pikestaff.

Satan thinks His church still believes in magic

Posted on by A lesser demon

Personality cults never take kindly to criticism of their gurus. Their gurus are flawless, and even outright personality disorders or mental illnesses are viewed as proof of their superhuman capacity or as evidence of their divine insights or an earned privilege. Their lies, deceptions, and displays of hypocrisy, when discovered, become gemstones in their robes, adding a sparkle to an already fascinating persona. True personality cultists will never admit that their guru can make a mistake and will invent all sorts of explanations, evasions, redefinitions, rationalizations, etc., that have denial in common to avoid facing the reality that their guru was plainly and simply wrong, incompetent, or delusional.

Satan thinks His Church is one such personality cult because any negative mention of Anton LaVey is met with hostility, whereas even the most obvious and blatant misconceptions and disagreeable features are compulsively whitewashed into comical absurdity. Satan marvels at their blind devotion and zealous worship of their guru, who decades later is still their axis mundi while the rest of the world moves on and properly disposes of those past errors that are the pillars of his cosmology. Concepts that, in the words of The Satanic Bible, have “been proven by results to be but an empty fiction” that the remainder of the educated world has long decided should be “unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and wreckage,” are defended with fang and claw by the LaVey cult.

Sometimes, however, LaVey was so evidently delusional that any defense of his hallucinations is impossible, and the LaVey cult instead revises his teachings, convincing themselves and (less so) others that LaVey meant something different, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary. Satan can think of several examples because many theories and ideas that may have meant life and hope and freedom for the early Church of Satan have lost their ground as environments changed over the decades following the establishment of the Church. Its scripture demands that no revision of the guru’s teachings is necessary, though, and therefore the churchgoers aggressively loyally insist that no revision is taking place. This reminds Satan of one example where revision only seems to occur while the flawed core is kept alive and true to LaVey’s pipe dream.

It warms the Devil’s cold heart that it is magic—a cornerstone of LaVey’s religion—that is being maintained as delusionally now as it was then. Satan was genuinely worried when He discovered that apologetical churchgoers began to dismiss magic as “just psychodrama” (despite Anton LaVey explicitly stressing in The Satanic Bible that magic is not just psychodrama) that merely helps rid the practitioner of unhealthy emotions, to serve as positive thinking, and what else do-it-yourself therapy purposes one finds in questionable feel-good self-help books. It seemed for a while that the churchgoers considered magic to be their new kind of the “thoughts and prayers” they used to employ before stumbling upon the Devil, but Satan was relieved to find that LaVey skillfully embedded magic so strongly into his ideology that it resists both sanity and reason. One may say, and even believe, that magic is superstition, as long as one still incorporates the superstition into one’s thinking: despite what Satanic Rule of the Earth no. 7 might suggest, what is a little denial of mysticism among friends? Satan finds that magicians of The Church of Satan may still decapitate their ex-girlfriends by accident, be the cause of power blackouts when they get insulted during a thunderstorm, or find that mass shooters kill innocent people because they have last names that somewhat resemble those of the magicians’ ex-wives. Why, they may even mentally force the traffic lights to change, although Satan suggests they abstain from similar attempts to change the stop signs.

Ours truly has already explained Satan’s thoughts on LaVey’s magic and hopes that The Dark Eminence accepts a mere hyperlink here, but you should read or revisit this post before continuing. Practically everything LaVey said about magic matches the psychological framework that was still widely believed back then, especially among the general population. People born before the early 1970es may even remember being taught that very framework at school and should easily recognize LaVey’s choice of words and conclusions.

Anton LaVey described in rather broad terms what magic is, and rather vaguely how it supposedly works. It is possible to waive responsibility by claiming, like LaVey, that magic works but is yet to be explained by science, that LaVey’s banter on magic should be taken metaphorically (although that begs the question of why one should bother practicing it), or that it is a pseudo-meditative exercise that affects only the practitioner. It is easy to repeat LaVey’s own cop-outs on how magic “works” or to invent new ones because, after all, there is no such thing as magic. Besides, LaVey was not born with a scientist’s heart and was satisfied that magic works, leaving the scientific hows and whys to others. He cared about what one should do to make it work, much like his clientele of today cares less about how technology works than how to use it to watch pornography. Everyone at LaVey’s time “knew” that humans generate emotional, or psychic, energy, and it needed little further elaboration; the important element to LaVey was what to do to harness that energy, not to author yet another book on pseudo-psychology.

LaVey introduced The Satanic Bible with a promise that with this book, magicians would finally find bedrock, and the section specifically devoted to the practice of magic provided explicit procedures and all but checklists. He explained that the ritual entrapments serve to rile up the practitioner’s emotions so that emotional energy (or bioelectrical, vital, sexual, or psychic energy; he uses all these terms and more) is generated and can be directed at the target of one’s hex. Not surprisingly, the instructions and their purpose align perfectly with the aforementioned psychological framework, because one cannot separate the “what to do” element of The Church of Satan’s magic from that framework.

It is easy to overlook the importance of these practical instructions, but religious practice beats religious pondering any day. In a ritual setting, one lives out the mythology of the religion by following the steps of a ritual with its arcane language and decorations. The otherworldly settings of a ritual turn otherwise trivial actions of the real world into important actions as far as the brain is concerned, reinforcing and conserving the mythology. It is thereby kept alive within the society of practitioners, even if they are mostly unaware of its history. If this seems strange, consider the mystical ceremonies of many Christian churches: even if all their members know is how to properly participate, the ceremonies and rituals keep the antiquated tradition alive. Religious rituals and ceremonies are critical to perpetuating and maintaining mindsets that would otherwise have been overtaken by progress. That is the true purpose of a ritual, not its formally stated goal that one finds in the pages of the religious textbooks: Christians do not gulp down the “blood of Jesus” in order to be magically cleansed of their sins but to stay reminded of their religion and its concepts of sin.

In the rituals of The Church of Satan, the mythology is the outdated psychological framework, and by performing LaVey’s rituals, one acts out that pseudo-science, maintains it, and absorbs it. This means that for all that the members of The Church of Satan insist that magic is mere psychodrama (not to be confused with the psychotherapeutic term that Jacob L. Moreno coined far earlier), in practice, through practice, they believe in actual magic in the form that Anton LaVey originally envisioned it—the pseudoscience that everyone once believed to be model truth. One may consider it a good case of “suspension of disbelief” when modern churchgoers deny magic yet enter their ritual chambers, but Satan thinks it is an empty statement. Nobody would care to enter the ritual chamber unless disbelief was already suspended.

It is impossible to dismiss LaVey’s magical loads of hooey as “just psychodrama” unless one also rejects his rituals altogether. Churchgoers may think they are skeptical of magic and feel compelled to reason the word that appears 150 times in The Satanic Bible or reduce it to a metaphor, but the actions of the rituals and LaVey’s recipe for a ritual with an explicit tangible goal cannot be denied. The same members of The Church of Satan follow the rituals to the letter and in so doing reinforce in the real world the very hocus-pocus that they mistake for rational thinking.

The above-mentioned Christian communion makes Satan thinks these churchgoers do what Luther did to Catholicism: by granting that maybe the wine and bread did not physically turn into blood and meat, but also arguing that the blood and flesh of Jesus were somehow still present, the Christian communion was unaltered for all practical purposes. The actions of the Christians did not change, and the Christians remained Christian.

One might identify a much-needed revision to LaVey’s silly magical beliefs that renders the superstitious mythology obsolete and replaces it with a modernized “mythology” that reflects how healthy human beings actually function or should function. However, such a revision would require a corresponding, radical change in the rituals, and very little would be left of LaVey’s original rituals beyond the colorful language.

To summarize, Satan thinks that it is fruitless to debate whether LaVey’s magic “works,” or whatever LaVey may have meant by this and that mention of the word “magic.” Had it worked, perhaps the Great Magus would have met a different fate than living in a derelict house and dying bitter, broke, and abandoned by family and friends, and in the end had more miasma than charisma. The all-important, undebatable, and undeniable fact is that LaVey provided specific instructions on how to activate an explicit function of the human body and psyche that does not exist save within a psychological framework that now finds itself in the same category as the four humors, the use of mercury to cure diseases, and the wandering uterus. No amount of rationalization can justify such clinging to past orthodoxies.