Psychology

Satan thinks people who strive to be nice usually aren’t

Posted on by A lesser demon

For all our awe and admiration of The Infernal Majesty’s insights and intelligence, The Dark Lord has insisted on several occasions that a little barstool psychology can go a long way.

The unfortunate ex-demon whose skepticism prompted it to ask for an example was immediately obliterated for daring to question our Master, but the Devil posthumously humored it and asked us who happened to be present what characterizes a “nice person.” We soon agreed that a nice person was nothing like Satan, and although our Master appreciated our sentiment, He had doubtlessly given it a little more thought than He had let on, and slightly impatiently explained Himself.

Satan thinks that truly nice people generally do not try to meet an ideal of “niceness,” even if they can easily formulate such an ideal or identify historical or mythical individuals who may serve as role models. The key to their nice behavior—being considerate of others, being helpful, etc.—is that they act according to an innate comprehension that humans are better off by working together. They ultimately serve their own interests but as a species not as specimens. Therein, says Satan, lies the difference between self-interest and self-preservation versus egoism, the former benefitting the human race and the latter benefitting oneself but in the very short term only. It is not required to “love one another.” There are some who deserve love, and some who deserve none. Satan thinks that genuine niceness involves a sense of justice that urges you to give and take from each what they naturally deserve.

It is people who are only admirable by obligation that Satan thinks ill of. They are people who have been instructed by word but not through example to be loving, friendly, and helpful as this ostensible acting makes them believe they are better people and have earned the right to feel entitled. They are people who do good not because they feel somehow compelled but from concern with what their neighbors would think. They are people who help others only for the sake of their personal salvation not because of the needs of others. They know right from wrong and good from evil only because they have it memorized. They invariably see themselves as good; even when they observe ill traits within themselves, they believe themselves superior because they consciously combat their true nature.

Satan may prefer deed to creed and thus appreciate that such people play nice after all, but the King of Lies is no fool. He knows that people exercise their true nature whenever their self-discipline is momentarily disengaged. A person who is not innately “good” but merely puts on an act (even if they believe in it themselves) is certain to eventually place a dagger in your back, speak ill of you, cheat on you, or betray you, and they will blame you, my friend, because knowing that they are your morally superior it cannot possibly be their fault; if they behaved poorly, you forced their hand. Satan advises to beware of martyrs in particular, as they think they do ever good but never understand that the perpetual source of their punishments is their own poisonous personality.

Such individuals are a terrible race, but Satan thinks that applied barstool psychology is useful to pinpoint these foul creatures of the human world. It is quite simple according to Satan: barstool psychology stipulates that you speak of your most prominent failures as if you are their conqueror. For example, when John Doe of forty brags about his many sexual conquests, you should bet your money that he is both still a virgin and has a tiny pecker. Extending this principle to moral inclination, expect people who speak of being devoted to a movement that does good to be none the part. If they had no problem being “good,” they would focus on something else. Hence, anyone who subscribes to a doctrine of good should be expected to be lacking in that very department.

It goes without saying that the Devil advises His followers to steer clear of the followers of His mortal foe—Christians, that is—but He thinks the caution should be extended to anyone who was brought up in a Christian home where one was demanded to “do good” for no heart-felt reason. Religions are codifications of group behavior (using symbolic language), and it is reasonable to include sanctions against dissocial behavior within this code, but merely following the code does not assure sanity. Satan thinks that no sane human being needs religion to behave properly, and that religion is in fact partially a sign that people lack this skill. The latter is beyond this discussion, however, as yours truly has a job to do torturing lost souls. Suffice to say that Satan is not fooled by people who declare themselves neither atheists nor Satanists if they grew up in a Christian home: He expects them to be as vile as their parents.

Satan thinks LaVey stared at goats

Posted on by A lesser demon

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.

Satan thinks people are being bullied because they are weird

Posted on by A lesser demon

From an evolutionary perspective, herd confirmity is critical to social animals. In fact, even solitary animals must obey the “social” rules of their species, including rules that mandate getting killed and devoured by a fellow specimen.

If you deviated from the social norms in ancient times, your local peers would quickly inform you of your misstep with angry outbursts and often physical reminders intended to motivate correct behavior. Deviation was not called for; it usually implied life-threatening risks and deadly mistakes affecting the entire social group, and such is usually dealt harshly and swiftly with on an evolutionary scale: evolution requires change and adaptation, favoring those who possess a lucky fit to physical and social environments, but most evolutionary paths are short and dead-ended. Repeat offense tended to be punishable with death, where your socially conscientious group would rend you limb from limb or ostracize you and leave you to the futile odds of surviving on your own. Lex Talionis—the law of the jungle—stipulates that you either conform or die.

By the same token, physical deviance is perceived as a threat, too, for good reason: in Nature, if an animal looks like something is wrong, then usually something is wrong, and the unfortunate individual should immediately be prevented from contributing to the gene pool as a matter of precaution.

Mankind may consider itself to be highly evolved but Satan thinks Man is barely a late-generation ape whose apparent sophistication is skin deep. A long history of evolution and very basic rules of survival govern human behavior to a much larger extent than humans like to think. Such deeply rooted core behavior dominates, so as soon as a human grows old enough to decode primitive social situations, any sight of unnatural (meaning any eccentric or peculiar) behavior will prompt normal human children to use all forms of peer pressure involving chicanery, harrassment, exclusion, bullying, and violence to suppress the aberration. The specific methods usually become more refined and artful as the children grow older and into adults, but typically not much and least among less gifted individuals. Nonconformity is feared by any age group because unnaturalness awakens the primoridal terror of a threat to group survival.

Satan wishes to interject here that it is a common misconception that people who rise to the top broke the rules to get there. They did not; they are in fact highly conformant. Some successful businessman or leader may indeed seem to break all codes of conduct or deviate from classical methods but social expectations ask just that of a powerful individual, and he or she rose to the top only through satisfing the herd’s demand for conformity-enforcing products or opinions. Satan thinks that few things are as conformant as acting “nonconformantly” in accordance with a social role that is defined by the herd. To successfully deviate from the herd, you must deviate in a predefined fashion that everyone accepts.

There are individuals who cannot help being nonconformant, however. They may suffer from mental illnesses or personality disorders that prevent them from understanding or following social rules or even from perceiving the world in a manner that aids their survival. To a varying degree, their irregular behavior threaten the life-sustaining conformity and hence they deserve to be either taught to conform or be properly disposed of, sometimes for perfectly good reason if their deviant behavior is harmful to others. And so from an early onset in life they are bullied until they occupy a harmless role in their society and until they keep a proper distance to normal people. For matters of brevity (and possibly because my Master specifically asked me to avoid any mention of demonic possession in the context of mental illness), your disloyal demon points its dear readers to our esteemed denizen Mr. Foucault’s book: Madness and Civilization for a historical rundown of psychotherapeutic treatment. Focus must remain what Satan thinks, not how humans have historically addressed mental health.

The Devil does not wish to share His opinions on the moral aspects of bullying, nor will He discuss specific forms of deviance. He merely understands that it is innately human to bully outliers, and that being bullied is thus a litmus test for deviance. Some anomaly is easily identifiable—physical disability or deformity is obvious—but adults do not readily recognize that if a child is otherwise being bullied in school, then probably there is something wrong with that child from a normality perspective. Bullies may be forced to stop but Satan thinks that an important step to stop the bullying would be to locate the deviant behavior and its cause because an early diagnosis can change everything for the better for a person.

Satan thinks the Ninth Statement is a warning

Posted on by A lesser demon

A religion that preaches redemption from evil needs evil to be redeemed from, and a religion that sentences its stray sheep to Hell needs Hell. My Infernal Lord is therefore not surprised to be integral to Christian mythology, nor has He overlooked the fact that by His many names, countless other religions and ideologies have drawn upon His services to drive their droves into place and will continue to do so.

All it took for Mr. Hitler and his associates to convince their population to persecute the Jews was to draw pictures of them with little horns and claim that they were my master’s people. (My master asks me to mention that He nonetheless does not hold “Adolf,” as He said, entirely responsible for the Holocaust incident, as Mr. Hitler had merely followed up on the proposals of Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism.) And a few decades ago, a president in the Western World who shall remain nameless, because we do not wish to speak the names of angels to be, needed only declare the Middle East to be the “axis of evil” and an enemy of his religion in order to launch a full scale war against a competitor to his family business.

Satan thinks the mechanism is a tad more general than being a manipulative, religious tool, however, because He finds it deeply rooted in the human brain. Any group—religious, political, social, or other—defines itself positively and negatively. The terms refer to what the ideology believes to contain and not to contain, and do not signify “good” or “bad” values. For example, atheism rejects the notion of gods, and although atheists consider this to be good (and Old Nick wholeheartedly agrees), it is a negative definition. A positive definition of atheism, had there been any, would describe what atheism adds rather than what it subtracts compared with other groups. The population of the USA would define itself positively (i.e., by what they are) by stating, e.g., that they are inhabitants of Northern America, and negatively (i.e., by what they are not) by assuring that part of their excellence involves not being Canadian.

Positive and negative definitions are often made-up. The positive definitions serve to reassure oneself of validity and greatness, or they are group goals, while negative definitions serve to both demark the limits of a group, and to be “inverse positives” which communicate that the group is the opposite of the negative definition. The Devil dryly notes that from his perspective, the latter is generally a statement of what the group merely wishes it wasn’t, because humans usually are as deplorable as they say they aren’t.

Human beings tend to converge on quite similar positive and negative definitions regardless of group identity, mainly because Man is a social animal and behaves accordingly. Human survival depends on everyone behaving mostly alike, and in societies, which all function mostly the same around the planet. Satan grants that there are trivial differences between groups such as geographically determined traditions regarding food or fashion, differently named gods and varying degrees between believing in literal or abstract deities, or different names for how governments universally enable the ruling class to exploit the less fortunate.

As social animals, humans need to belong to a group but its size is limited by the mental capacity of its members. Everyone outside of the group (which can be geographically far stretched in a highly connected world) is “the others” because the human brain can scope only the individual’s own group. Human identity is derived from their groups through the groups’ self-definitions: that which the group is and is not is what its members are and are not; defiance implies ostracism, which is the worst of all fears because in human evolution group rejection once spelled certain death.

Satan thinks that the stronger the need of an individual to feel the identity bestowed by his or her group, the more prone he or she is to concentrate on negative definitions, emphasizing how other groups are different or, equivalently, how his or her group is entirely unlike them. This is especially true when the groups seem similar, because at a deeply primal level the similarity creates the impression that the other group is a close contender to one’s own group, which might subsequently be overtaken and eliminated and oneself with it. Satan cares little whether the need to underscore one’s group at the expense of others arises from a self-inflated sense of significance which inspires people to contribute high importance to negative definitions, or whether it is the result of a mental capacity falling far below Dunbar’s number that requires less ambiguously defined group boundaries. He thinks that the strong need to defend one’s group is herd mentality regardless of cause, and the only important and perhaps counter-intuitive observation is that herd mentality compels an individual to identify strongly with narrowly and even binarily defined groups (by specific congregation, nationality, etc.) and aggressively dismiss its closer contenders rather than finding common ground. Herd mentality drives Europeans to fear the Middle East more than the Far East, and Western Satanic groups to be more spiteful against each other than even against the soup of Christianity that engulfs them all.

Your humble, and more often humbled and humiliated, narrator had wished to ask its master if the observation is really counter-intuitive, and whether not true individualism as opposed to herd mentality would obviously make someone both shrug off group conflicts and be capable of joining very large communities without feeling obliged to group-think. However, the Horned Almighty routinely punishes dumb questions with another turn on the rack, and yours unfaithful has decided to leave the answer blowing in the hot winds of Hell.

Satan thinks that the Ninth Statement should be taken as a warning not to be yet another friend of the Church through one’s actions and demeanor. When Satan observes one of His followers behaving according to Christian precepts about the Devil’s own, believing to be thus expected, He thinks the follower is a Christian who has no place wearing the Devil’s colors. It helps little if the follower does so knowingly in order to offend his or her haters. That requires no talent; true demonic skill lies in turning the haters’ invested emotions against themselves, perplexing them into dislodging their ideological conviction. Satan thinks that wishing, by one’s actions, to be the best friend the Church has ever had, the best option is: go to church.

And Satan thinks this warning should call for introspection, too, allowing the abyss to gaze back. His followers should avoid the herd mentality need to identify themselves so strongly with their own group that their use of other groups for negative definition turns disagreement into obsession. He recalls that one of his denizens, some Friedrich Nietzsche, once cautioned against becoming the monster you chase, and thinks that His followers, too, should avoid the temptation to allow their enemies—percived or real—a seat on His throne by casting them as the followers’ Devil in order to stay in business.

Satan thinks His followers have silly names

Posted on by A lesser demon

My fellow denizen Mr. LaVey recommended changing one’s name as needed as an application of lesser magic, and provided a list of useful names in The Satanic Witch. The Devil’s followers have certainly taken it to heart, and the Devil marvels at the enthusiasm of His followers who are so intent on selecting impressive names that awkward (or perhaps ironic) moments occur when nobody believes its authenticity once a person uses his or her given name because it sounds somehow noteworthy. Satan tips His hat at Anton LaVey’s recognition of the manipulative power of a well-chosen name but thinks His followers should perhaps consider their goals and their cultures, and also their own character, a little better.

Mr. LaVey lived in a culture where authors and artists habitally use pen names and aliases, and few people in the United States would bat an eye if they learned that someone prefers another name. Americans take mostly favorably to people altering their lives or dispositions and will readily allow a person the benefit of doubt. The same person might receive undesired reactions elsewhere, however; Europeans, who generally demand a broader spectrum of impressive features than the relative superficiality of a name, are often slower to trust first impressions than Americans and would consider him or her a clown. What may impress a Midwestern redneck could be the very thing that enables a Norwegian to recognize a self-inflated buffoon when he sees one â€¦ or worse, because the European mind is historically accustomed to thinking in terms of swift disposal rather than respect when confronted with a person named “Ruthless” or similar.

Even so, names are strongly determined by short-lived fashion, and the names that Anton LaVey listed in his decades-old book convey different sentiments today. Their application in lesser magic no longer applies, and any modern witch worth her salt would be wise to study the herd’s fashion statements and learn some new names. That is, the names made sense when the book was released, but unless our witch genuinely wishes to remind her quarry of his or her grandparents’ generation by selecting among outmoded names, the list of names is now just silly. Satan actually thinks the entire book has become outdated, because few of the many indicators of a person’s position on the “LaVey personality synthesizer” are still observable; the very principle of the synthesizer is based on pseudo-scientific bunk; and women no longer must rely on manipulating men in order to get ahead.

If the primary goal of the prospective witch or warlock is to ingratiate herself or himself with other followers of Satan, recognition as a witch being more important than magical acumen, the name should obviously appeal to the Devil’s other followers. This is straight-forward thanks to Anton LaVey, whose mandate derived entirely from his being the proto-Satanist (i.e., his authority rested on him being a Satanist by example) and hence role model: a witch yearning for peer recognition needs only appeal to LaVey’s fascinations, because they are compulsively imitated by his idolizers. To apply lesser magic, this observation spells—if you will excuse the pun—a combination of a burlesque attitude with some excess body fat, some slightly morbid pastimes, and a name that resurrects either Jayne Mansfield or Marylin Monroe. Everyone outside of Satanism thinks that the 1940es are History, and burlesque shows with them, however, and are utterly unimpressed and thus immune against such sneaky witchcraft.

The Devil begs His followers to learn that the Balance Factor makes everyone know intuitively that the choice of a pompous name is typically counterbalanced with correspondingly personal shallowness. The Devil had made up a few ludicrously exaggerated examples to illustrate His point and conscientiously did a web search to avoid accidentally targeting real people, only to find proof that, regrettably, reality exceeds His imagination. Satan thinks there are just too many Marylins, Daimons, Luci-somethings, Dracos, Wolves, Sades, Ravens, Mansfields, Liliths, cliché novel characters (oh, another Dorian Gray?), and any variety of names inferring violence. Satan believes that such contrived names only highlight that kings always beget kings and slaves always beget slaves, and that no name makes the king.

Satan thinks nobody says it like it is

Posted on by A lesser demon

The Lord of Lies appreciates honest communication but finds that whenever someone “says it like it is,” it is never like that.

People who “say it like it is” use simple words that are each readily understood, but the statements in which the words are used carry little or no meaning on their own. Often they are unclear, ambiguous, or incoherent and riddled with non sequiturs and random thought-associations, and make no sense to an educated or intelligent person, who attempts to analyze and understand the statements. Such statements make sense only if the audience fills in the blanks and finishes the sentences as the statements trail off with no ending.

Less gifted people overlook the inherent inconsistencies and missing internal logic, however. They are provided with fuzzy implications and hazy connotations only and then reach their own conclusions—believing it was the speaker who offered them this conclusion, too. If they are assured that “you know who I’m talking about,” they imagine the speaker describes whoever they think it is, and if the speaker knowingly assures them that he offers a solution without mentioning which one, they each believe that the speaker is talking about the solution they are thinking of.  They introduce their own bias into the incomplete statements believing it to stem from the speaker.

By thus leaving it to the audience to fill in the blanks with their own ideas, explanations, and desired solutions, the audience is bound to agree with the speaker because they are their own ideas. From an analytical point of view the speaker said nothing at all, but it sounds as if the speaker “says it like it is” because all they hear is their own voice.

Everyone is prone to such confirmation bias, especially if feelings are involved, as is usually the case when someone delights in hearing something being “said like it is.” Feelings are the language of the “primitive” part of the human brain which is concerned mostly with survival. It thinks fast but is careless and error-prone, as opposed to the later evolutionary layer of the brain which adds rational thinking and the capability of weighing pros versus cons and outlining plans, at the expense of speed. All other things being equal, the capacity of afterthought and critical thinking enabled by intelligence and education helps reduce the tendency to add confirmation bias; or as Satan prefers to phrase it: confirmation bias is wholesale among stupid people.

All of the above is true for written documents, too. No book is known with certainty to provide sufficient information, and no text is exempt from interpretation. All communication, written or otherwise, is a two-way street. There is no book that “says it like it is” or provides “bedrock” that is not subject to the reader’s adding his or her bias wherever the reader fails to understand the author’s intent, regardless of cause or blame. Satan wishes to skip any detailed examples, however, because He feels at risk of insinuating that His followers are stupid for believing that, say, The Satanic Bible clearly outlines “it” in a way that anyone should be able to understand, or that His followers in His temple are stupid for believing that seven vague tenets suffice.

At the end of the day, the Devil knows that whenever you think that someone “says it like it is,” it is just you who are being stupid.

Satan thinks that Anton LaVey has Asperger’s syndrome

Posted on by A lesser demon

Satan disapproves of psychology and its attempts to explain human behavior. He has successfully possessed mankind since the dawn of time, and that should adequately explain human behavior, thank you very much.

He is especially angry with the Freudian disaster which led His esteemed denizen Anton LaVey to both waste much time and to mislead His followers into performing rituals that, if anything, had the opposite effect of their goals. The pressure-cooker model of explanation of pent-up emotions that required release lest they destroy their host was shamelessly stolen from the Devil’s realm of thermodynamics with not a single mention of His infernal name in spite of His being the very force of entropy. The only demon ever to be summoned in the Freudian tradition of LaVey’s rituals would be your mother.

But, the Devil is a pragmatist and finds that communication is key. Resorting to the phraseology of psychology may be a better means of communication than through spasms, froth, and back-masked speech in a growling voice, even if He feels that He deprives Himself of due credit.

Using psychological terms, Satan thinks that his denizen Anton LaVey has Asperger’s syndrome. It is part of the autism spectrum disorder and is characterized by people with the syndrome appearing to function somewhat better than other autists, and generally possessing a superior intelligence. Autists are sometimes found to have savant, or magical or demonic, talent, as He prefers to phrase it, and among the herd, such fine qualities are undesired and considered a diagnosis.

As readers of Blanche Barton’s entirely truthful and in no manner exaggerated biography of Mr. LaVey may remember, she introduces him as remarkably skilled and mentally superior to others, whom he usually chose to avoid, as someone with highly specific interests, and as someone who had difficulties understanding and abiding by social norms. We lesser devils have noted that he speaks with a somewhat narrative voice and often takes on the persona of a character from a movie or a novel. We keep some distance from him, however, half in respect and half because his inability to take proper care of himself would require us to ignore the effects of poor personal hygiene.

The Devil is aware that Mr. LaVey feels a closer relationship with animals than most humans do, and suspects that it is a feature of LaVey’s condition, because Satan has noticed that His autistic denizens exhibit a peculiarly animalesque behavioral bent compared with His legions of “normal” sinners. Their social impairment (as those normal individuals regard any deviation from herd compliance) lead them to interact in a fashion somewhat reminiscent of those who walk on all-fours, and Satan ponders whether perchance autists occupy an evolutionary position somewhere in-between man and other animals. The Devil represents all humans as just another animal species, anyway, and reminds His denizens that His is the hand that wounds and heals.

On a sadder note, even here, in his right element of brimstone and flames, Anton LaVey’s condition exposes him to the same frustrations as any above-ground autist, who wholeheartedly agrees with Jean-Paul Sartre that Hell is other people: autists do not suffer from autism; they suffer from other people, and often develop depressions. Satan is sad to watch LaVey thus suffering fits of depression that can last weeks or months but He is the Accuser, not a psychiatrist.

It is unnecessary to minutely derive LaVey’s entire biography and evaluate it according to the diagnostic criteria for an autism spectrum disorder here. The long story short is that Satan has determined that the diagnosis matches, and that psychologial mumbo-jumbo is unnecessary because the good old word “demonic” suffices.