Herd mentality

Satan thinks He is alluring

Posted on by A lesser demon

All who dwell in any circle of Hell agree that Lucifer, the Morning Star, is the most magnificent being in the Cosmos. We agree so strongly because it is true and especially because everyone who dissented found themselves disposed to accidentally falling into boiling sulfur, being crushed by falling rocks of molten brimstone, or otherwise being exterminated to give Social Darwinism a helpful hand. Satan denies that there is any similarity between Hell’s policy on that matter and common earthly Christian practice. Our infernal corporate values state that we are naturally drawn toward The Prince of Darkness whereas, clearly, His sworn opponent demands that humans love him against their better judgment.

Satan thinks humans are secretly drawn to Him as much as we demons are, except demons have been carefully conditioned through negative reinforcement to display our affection with great enthusiasm. Human souls may hide their true essences in the Earthly realm, but faced with His prodigious pulchritude, all souls surface. Christians may preach the love of one’s neighbor even if the person is generally disagreeable but will show themselves fully and passionately capable of capping the reach of Christian so-called “love” if said neighbor identifies with The Diabolically Supreme. Even impassioned atheists often experience a total recall of their Christian weltanschauung and reveal their true colors when they encounter a genuine follower of my Master. Jesus may have claimed to be the fisher of men, but Satan is the master magician angler’s legendary lure that draws every would-be Christian out of their hiding spots.

However, Old Nick recently mentioned that He is getting too old for this game and fears that Heaven may not be prepared to receive the vast number of Christians that He calls out of their closets. It seems to Him that there is no shortage of Christians in hiding. Even His very own Church of Satan is amassing a worrisome number of people who react to His presence for the wrong reasons. The name Lucifer appeals to many a rising star—Satan’s term for individuals who remain low above the horizon—who choose to assemble below His banner, and Satan thinks that many may have fallen prey to Christian propaganda about His pacts. Satan, or Satanism, will never offer powers and riches, regardless of what Christian indoctrination and Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible alike promise in His name. Nevertheless, the appeal of lazy entitlement in return for a Christian soul as non-cents payment has baited plenty of unworthy underachievers into the ranks of the Devil. Satan thinks Anton LaVey provided Christianity at a discount for worthless souls.

Satan thus finds that His would-be followers in His Church of Satan cannot cope with genuine diabolism. They choose His name but remain thoroughly loyal to their original values inculcated around their mothers’ knees and in their religious communities. Whenever they are confronted with non-Christian values or meet groups who, in the spirit of the early Church of Satan, openly flash their horns and declare themselves allies of the Devil in the pursuit of happiness and freedom, they sulk and demand that demonic attitudes be kept privately, or they pride themselves of hiding their Satanic identities when they (rarely) support faith-agnostic programs. Whenever a humanistic movement dares to invoke the Devil in its pursuit of humanistic values, they demand that the group comply with Christian expectations lest “someone gets hurt” or other excuse designed to demand Christian conformity. Whenever someone confronts the Church of Satans’s crybullies(*) according to their own rules about engaging bothersome people, they play the victim.

Satan thinks that His modern churchgoers are lured toward Him in the very same manner as traditional Christians and for the same reasons. However, they are as easily recognized as ever: they cannot cope with genuine diabolical action and revert to their programmed core in an instant when confronted with a Satanic presence. They will jump out of their closets with their crucifixes against their hearts and sing with the Christian choirs at the first sighting of a real-life demon.

Satan thinks that if any of His followers persistently find themselves agreeing with Christians, then that is what they are. They should scrap their fake horns and scurry back to the church that conceived them.

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(*) Crybully (n): a group or an individual who engages in: “abuse, slander, hate speech, and persecution,” but when they receive pushback: “figuratively recoil into a fetal position, believing they are a victim.”

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.

Satan thinks God judges

Posted on by A lesser demon

There are times when Satan makes a statement that appears obvious, but we demons who dwell in the abodes of Hell have learned to appreciate His infernal teachings and diabolical insights, and know better than to scoff at outwardly trivial axioms from His mouth. The Prince of Darkness keeps His underlings in a perpetual state of awe with every word He speaks. (Although not nearly in the same state as that of terror which is His primary focus that no one down here is stimulated to doubt for a second; after all, He is the Devil).

Thus, when Satan thinks that God judges, it comes as old news to any of our damned souls who, being tormented cruelly and endlessly by yours truly and collaborators, are painfully aware of their sentences, but it is not our subterranean clientele that Old Scratch has in mind. Satan is the Master of the Earth, and His insight concerns His followers. When Satan says that God judges, He speaks metaphorically because there is no god—a fact that escapes a significant number of His disciples who may rationally grasp that such creatures are the cerebral relics of a brain that evolved to survive in the world but not to understand it, yet cannot fathom a healthy world without God.

Gods are constructed from the blueprint of their creators: Christians do not emulate or obey their god but fashion their god according to their own natures. It is a judging god because Christians are judgmental, and it is a discriminating god because Christians are discriminatory. It is a strict, trying, punishing, doubting, unjust, intolerant, vengeful, and narcissistic god that serves only its own interests and renumerates only its worshipers, because such are its followers, who generally seem bent on inflicting a minority complex on the Devil by outperforming Him on every conceivable evil. Oh, were History to repeat itself, and His Evil Eminence again to confront Jehovah before being cast from Heaven, He would deliver this very accusation to the face of Jehovah and, with the benefit of experience, this time also wear a parachute. It is a little unclear why, considering that Satan wears a fully functional set of wings, Lucifer plummeted to the surface like a lead-encased rock at His legendary fall, but He refuses to share the finer details about the incident, and everyone south of Heaven is too afraid to ask.

In the absence of gods, it is their human inventors and believers who take it upon themselves to ensure that, when the gods do not adequately interfere, the will of their gods is nonetheless enforced. Their followers may not perform miracles of divine creation, but the havoc they often wreak would turn even the most vengeful god green with envy. They feel entitled to mimic the behavior of their gods and are compelled to do it as if their salvation depended on it. Or, more specifically, they create God in their own image and then consider their disgraceful behavior justified. As they discover what a dreadful monster such a representative of their nature is, they proceed to invent the Devil to take the blame.

Satan uses the term “God” as shorthand for the behaviors of Christians in their various abominations, excuse me, denominations. “God judges” is His way to communicate that Christians are recognizable by their exaggerated need to judge others, and lays it upon the shoulders of we lesser demons to explain their motive, as if we did not have better things to do, like prodding the condemned with sharp sticks. As it turns out, we have different views on the underlying reasons but agree that their immoderate judgments serve to create the illusion that they are superior for belonging to the correct cult by deeming anyone else to be worth less. Some of us note that the dynamic exists inside the cults, too, where smaller groups and individuals judge each other in rather toxic environments. It is worth mentioning that although the judgments serve the same ultimate goal of believing oneself to be superior, judgment comes in many forms and is mostly arbitrary: specific political observations, sexuality, gender, race, affiliation or disaffiliation, food preferences, national origin, income, weight, disabilities, age, first language, religion, past actions, education, parental status, etc., as well as combinations, can create the delusion that oneself and one’s peers are congenitally valuable compared with the inferior other, who can therefore be treated as such, unprotected by the laws that serve the chosen people. One’s group is the master, and everyone else is a slave. All it takes to become a master is to accept the arbitrary discriminator and choose the right side, then passionately defend the view; the lower one’s self-esteem, the higher the craving for seeming important and being admired.

There is nothing wrong with a certain level of unbiased judgment where appropriate. The lame should not limit the pace of the race, the blind should not lead the blind, and Americans should not be arbiters of taste. Even a certain amount of unintentional discrimination is permissible provided immediate exemptions can be allowed on an individual basis—stereotypes and associated prejudices are inaccurate and over-generalizing but help the human brain reduce its surroundings to a manageable amount of information. It is when they are applied presumptuously, based on arbitrary qualities, or with disregard for the situation that they are almost invariably invalid.

Satan thinks it is the generally judgmental attitude, not an occasional appraisal or sifting of individuals where warranted, that reveals the followers of God when they show themselves as holier-than-thou, vainglorious bastards with no other credentials than self-deceit and delusions of adequacy and no other accomplishments than joining an echo-chamber club to offer as proof of their self-proclaimed permission to hold opinions about others.

Satan never pretended that His followers were a chosen people or that simply by taking His name for oneself would one’s human caliber grow. That would be a modern variant of the famous allegories of those who traded their souls to the Devil to obtain fame and riches, soon discovering that the comforts they had gained made them no happier, no more satisfied, and no more appreciated and that these desires had been replaced with an emptied sense of self, a hole inside of them where their identity once lived. Satan offers no compensation at all that constitutes a license to judge. It is God who maintains the lie that one is a better person as a believer. Satan thinks if you meet someone who claims to follow the Devil yet passes judgments left and right, especially against other followers outside of his cult, you can bet your soul that this person is still a Christian inside. That is what Satan means when He thinks that God judges—and it is an accusation not a judgment.

Satan thinks His temple is a hate group

Posted on by A lesser demon

Make no mistake about it: The Satanic Temple is a political activist group first and a religious organization second. The fact that it has been around for about a decade and has yet to expound on a philosophy, still only listing seven ambiguous but generally reasonable and mostly agreeable tenets, is evidence that its resources are spent elsewhere than religious principles: the attention of the head of The Satanic Temple is directed at its many court appearances and political actions. Its stance as a religion is a means to an end that provides the Temple with the legitimacy required for legal combat against religious affairs. It is a weapon that changes the Temple from an interest group whose opinion existing religious groups can safely disregard to an equal whose rights and complaints must be taken seriously.

This does not imply that the religion is mere self-delusion to the members of The Satanic Temple. Satan thinks that the Temple’s reason to found a new religion is as good as any, if not better than yet another uneducated joker who believes he has discovered the truth, and the resulting religion is as authentic, meaningful, and legit as any religion based on fantasy creatures. But, Satan thinks that with such limited doctrine, the religion lacks the unification and direction that are some of the positive aspects offered by religion. Members are instead on their own with no guidance. The organization made the absolute minimum effort on this matter: it has secured legal recognition as a religion but does not provide religion beyond a very superficial level.

The Satanic Temple has chosen the strategically sound approach of appearing to be “for” something not “against” something. Hence, its official stance is to promote religious tolerance and pluralism and to ensure that its own members have equal rights as those of other religions. It does not take a genius to understand that The Satanic Temple thus turns the system upon itself and that its primary agenda is to oppose and combat Christian dominance in society and legislation, but its battles are fought in the arenas of believers, politicians, and lawyers, not geniuses, where subversive or hidden agendas are common. Thus, although it was important to establish a religion, the glaring absence of scripture and teaching shows that the founders of The Satanic Temple evidently are not invested in creating and maintaining a religious ideology. In practice, all The Satanic Temple is “for” is a very shallow body of opinions and values.

Satan thinks this reality is not entirely lost on the membership. Some naïve members may fall for the narrative that The Satanic Temple is truly bent on religious tolerance, and some members with diplomatic flair will claim so for political reasons, but moderately perceptive people soon learn that the Temple is—deservedly, let us not deny it—directly antagonistic towards Christians.

With scarcely any philosophical content to discuss or examples of articulated ideology from representatives of the governing body of The Satanic Temple to appropriate, the lay membership adopts its antagonism and acts accordingly. Ideology boils down to a concentrate of anti-Christian sentiments, mutual reassurances of the evils of Christianity, a continuing compulsion to vilify the enemy, and repeated ridicule and constant criticism of their superstitions, with a majority of its membership creating and chiming in with such animosity. Satan agrees that Christianity is an atrocity of mankind, but He thinks that if one declares oneself a Satanist, one is already abundantly informed about their inhumanity and needs no daily dossier—in fact, Satan thinks that if one is a Satanist, one feels no need to revisit their territory and prefers to not be reminded of their existence. Hell may be a place of eternal suffering, but even His Focality of the Nine Circles would not inflict more Christianity upon the damned than they have already endured. Such preoccupation with Christianity has no place within any ideology of His.

Satan thinks that, based on the declarations and commentary from the active majority of the members of His temple online, The Satanic Temple is becoming a hate group—defined as a social group that practices animosity, hostility, malice, or hatred towards designated segments of society. The Devil defends His absolute sole right to torment Christian souls because it is His designated role, but will not lend His magnificent name to groups who sustain the proud Christian tradition of hating their enemy while outwardly subscribing to a religion of professed tolerance and compassion. Satan thinks that His temple’s haters need culling if not elimination.

Satan thinks all bad comes from above

Posted on by A lesser demon

Having ruled supreme in Hell for aeons, Satan has learned a thing or two about setting expectations. One cannot effectively lead an army of darkness only through barking orders or threatening with punishment. (The latter will be administered regardless, anyway. After all, this is Hell.) It is important that the infernal hordes know what is properly evil behavior, and there is only one way to teach them: to lead by example. This is why, if you paid attention in church, you know that the Devil is the ultimate evil and fundamental villain, who torments the damned with terminal wickedness, Satan being the worst of them all.

Satan thus does what any business coach and leadership consultant would recommend. They, too, know that organizational values propagate from only one place—the highest-level management. It is the top level that defines the company values and sets the workplace tone; and they do so by precedence not via memos or policy documents because such formalities are secondary (albeit still useful) to proper conduct. A company may have stellar written policies, but it is the behavior of the highest-level management that defines the standard which trickles all the way down to the last employee, causing the same behavior to be found on all levels of the company. This is how herds function.

Employees who find themselves in companies with a toxic senior management layer will find that the entire company is toxic, and that their own behavior becomes toxic or enabling of toxic behavior. Roughly speaking, new employees will either soon support and comply with the unspoken rules of conduct, or they will be harassed or fired unless they choose the only appropriate option of resigning.

It is with such insight in mind that His Esteemed Abomination turns a concerned eye towards His own church on Earth that was once consecrated in His name by Anton LaVey. It seemed an eminently fertile soil for future denizens of our Infernal Empire, but Satan thinks the values of its upper tier do not adequately further His cause.

The first High Priest of The Church of Satan was, of course, Anton LaVey himself. Old Nick thinks he was on to something useful, but unfortunately could not keep his mouth closed about his fascination with the Third Reich. There is no need to suspect that LaVey himself was more right-leaning than most conservatives at his time, but he believed that the Nazis were successful magicians, treasured their aesthetics, felt that they and he shared some objectives, and did not hesitate to be edgy by finding good things to say about Hitler, Satan rest his soul. Satan thinks that although Anton LaVey did not plan or desire the inevitable result of being thus historically unaware and lacking Fingerspitzengefühl, his silly references to the Herrenvolk nevertheless became not so much a dog whistle as a loud, lewd and longing mating signal for neo-Nazis.

Whatever LaVey’s motivation or tactical ignorance may have been, soon The Church of Satan attracted neo-Nazis in droves, and by the late 1980s it was brimming with neo-Nazis in its membership and clergy, who produced neo-Nazi texts, imagery, music, and other projects. New members learned to be accepting of this (but certainly not of leftist or centrist movements) as a condition to be a Satanist, and echoing their behavior was a tacit requirement if one wished to climb the organizational stairs. The last thing one should do was to criticize the neo-Nazi infestation, as it proved disloyalty towards The Church of Satan to thus be a shit-disturber, as Anton LaVey put it.

The next High Priest, Peter Gilmore, had expressed his interest in The Church of Satan in the early 1970s when he wrote to Anton LaVey’s column in a US monthly tabloid. Still an early teenager, young Peter’s Satanic ambition was to lead a group of Satanists and obtain both a free membership and an honorary title in The Church of Satan because he considered himself smart, and because he wanted to make his followers (his word) respect him more. LaVey declined, informing Gilmore that recognition is earned and that he would not reach his personal potential by settling for transitory, unearned “ego-sops.”

Unfazed, Gilmore later joined The Church of Satan and the competing Temple of Set, according to the high priest of the latter who promptly sent Gilmore on his way when it was discovered that he was riding on two horses at once. Peter Gilmore made sure to befriend Anton LaVey as soon as he could afford to travel between New York and San Francisco. Anton LaVey’s partner, Diane LaVey, was the main administrative person in The Church of Satan, and when she divorced her husband, Peter Gilmore was able to fill the administrative void that would otherwise have befallen LaVey himself and his groupie, Blanche Barton. Gilmore and his partner became the official online contacts and representatives of The Church of Satan and for all intents and purposes its de facto leaders until the passing of Anton LaVey.

Both Blanche Barton and LaVey’s daughter, Karla LaVey, desired to be the successor of Anton LaVey, and Peter Gilmore helped facilitate a shared leadership construction that was impossible and, predictably, immediately failed, leaving Gilmore as the fall-back choice—and he now assumed full control as the High Priest of The Church of Satan. Satan tips his hat at the successful take-over, of course. Management by confusion, intrigue, and triangulation requires Machiavellian skills not reserved for everyone.

Peter Gilmore was, and is, no neo-Nazi (nor was Anton LaVey), but had learned the rule of the game. His 1990s and early 2000s kept with the general use of thinly veiled Nazi innuendos, but it did not take long until he ceased to back the neo-Nazi clergy who began to siphon out of the organization one by one, often citing Gilmore as their reason. New values had been introduced by the new High Priest, and they understood that their neo-Nazi dispositions were now perceived as non-kosher by those in charge.

Satan thinks the previous values of The Church of Satan were not specifically neo-Nazi or even fascist. It was through a combination of neglect, a bad choice of agent provocateur (Nazis, that is), and a lacking sense of consequence that neo-Nazism nonetheless became a predominant value by attracting a critical mass of wrong people. Satan is pleased to know that the current values are less so. He certainly demands that His legions of evil fight with stormtrooper courage towards the final cosmic solution, but as the archetypical Adversary, Satan has bad experiences with such convictions whose core ideologies involve the demonization of your opponents and considers their presence in his ranks to be an obvious recipe for disaster.

Satan has no use for the new values introduced by the next High Priest, Peter Gilmore, either, however. Young Peter Gilmore’s late-childhood read-through of The Satanic Bible had apparently instilled in his mind that his identity hinged on becoming a Satanic cult leader, but not for any reasons qualifying as Satanic. Satan thinks that Anton LaVey nailed Gilmore’s motivation in their very first correspondence as a need for ego consolation. He needed to be respected, but instead of earning respect per LaVey’s recommendation, years later he settled for an underachieving job in real life and, gained by befriending LaVey, the intimidating effect that a “Satanic priest,” whether high or low, has on some people. In that first communication, Gilmore had also described his fear, “the greatest Hell imaginable for anyone,” of being remembered by your enemies as a fool, but LaVey did not address this concern. Satan suspects it may have been out of pity, because only people with considerably low self-esteem would feel that belittled, if at all, by knowing their enemies think badly of them. Of all hated beings, The Prince of Darkness would be a sorry mess if such insignificance troubled Him.

The new values introduced by Peter Gilmore in The Church of Satan are, regrettably, a level of grandiose narcissism that lies comfortably within the clinically diagnosable range of personality disorders, and of which Gilmore’s early letter to LaVey is a textbook example. No doctrine, opinion, view, or standpoint is conclusively important as long as one requirement is satisfied: you must either give Peter Gilmore the impression that he is being liked and that he can ultimately sway your opinion if he wants to, or you must be a useful idiot who enables his narcissistic behavior towards others by defending him in spite of what should have been your better judgment.

Before we venture any further, it is important to understand what narcissism is. It is not egoism, which is basically just being a jerk. Narcissism is a compensation mechanism for an intense feeling of insecurity stemming from unusually low self-esteem. The compensation generally takes the form of a grandiose sense of self-importance and an excessive need for admiration, exploitative and superficial relationships that only serve to confirm a positive self-image, a need for control and lack of empathy, a fragile and easily threatened identity whose stability depends on maintaining the view that one is exceptional, blaming others for one’s faults, being unable to take no for an answer, and being deeply afraid of being perceived as wrong or seen as inadequate. Failing to give them their way often triggers a hysterical, sometimes violent, rage. They feel “special” and unique and believe they can only be understood by other special or high-status people. They feel entitled and often believe they deserve better or were overlooked, are envious of others, or believe that others are envious of them; they are preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love. Their attitude towards others is often arrogant and haughty, and they frequently demean, intimidate, bully, or belittle others in order to seem better themselves in comparison.

It is not clear what causes narcissism, but scientists currently tend to agree that a genetic element and a later trauma element together turn a person narcissistic, after which the personality disorder is chronic. Satan thinks that their deep-seated low self-esteem and their compulsive and pervasive self-deceit run counter to the very core of Satanism, and since part of their condition is neurologically hard-wired, Satan thinks that, contrary to Satanists, these Non-Satanists are thus born not made.

Where LaVey had, probably inadvertently, created an organization that attracted neo-fascists and neo-Nazis, Peter Gilmore has propagated values that changed the organization into an environment that nourishes his narcissistic cravings. He uses The Church of Satan as a proxy for his ego: every praise of The Church of Satan feeds his self-esteem, which in narcissists is a perpetually empty hole of starvation. He demands respect, reverence, and for people to be impressed with him. Conversely, no criticism or disagreement can be tolerated, and no mistake can be mentioned because they threaten the very core of his being.

It is why, his ego intertwined with The Church of Satan, he often provides excuses or claims that are quite outrageous: for example, that they have extremely influential and powerful members who all just happen to keep unrealistically secret about it; that Gilmore’s uncommitted slowness and sense of low importance in his processing of membership applications is deliberate, intended to “test” the applicants; and that whenever a formerly appreciated, decorated, or dedicated member leaves, it invariably turns out they were, retroactively, “never really into it,” or never truly understood Satanism.

Through more than two decades as the de facto head of the organization, his demand for positive attention, and his equal terror at even the slightest doubt of his worth, have been institutionalized throughout the organization. He chooses his close associates and enablers of his narcissism based on their willingness to look up to him, and has made sure to make others in high positions feel unwelcome, should they not place him above all else.

The Church of Satan has become an entity of people who have taught one another to demand of everyone the unbounded admiration that Gilmore requires and to attack on sight anything that might leave the slightest dent in their inflated self-regard. What they believe is the proper way to be members of a Satanic organization is, instead, Peter Gilmore’s low self-esteem marioneteering their behaviors (and his!) like a parasite taking control of its host. Satan is impressed—to minds who do not understand organizational dynamics, such herd mentality is indistinguishable from magic.

This environment, shaped to accommodate Gilmore’s narcissism, is an environment that other narcissists readily recognize as conducive to their own narcissism as well. The Satanic Bible, by Anton LaVey’s own admission, already appeals to such undesirable characters, and LaVey considered the damage they do to be a tolerable trade-off, but it was Peter Gilmore who turned The Church of Satan into a self-perpetuating and multiplying breeding ground for them. Even those who are not narcissists by nature will soon learn to act as if they were.

The organization that was once established to create stronger individuals by exploring one’s own strengths is now an organization bent on pretending to have worth by diminishing the efforts of everyone else. True to the nature of narcissists, its claim to fame and accomplishment consists of exaggerating the tiniest of achievements to make the organization seem noteworthy, and first and foremost of demeaning and bullying everyone other than The Church of Satan who appears in the Satanic arena, as well as any true individual within their own ranks who calls the bluff and, as it were, exclaims that the emperor wears no clothes.

Satan has no use for such an organization, which is alive but an empty shell. Satan demands stalwart soldiers with genuine fighting skills for the imminent battle against the hordes of God, not a mob of deluded snowflakes who believe that their petty, verbal party fireworks rain fires of doom upon their foes and that victory is won by declaring that the celestial army is fake angels, all the while sabotaging the Devil’s far superior elite squadrons.

Satan thinks all members are representative

Posted on by A lesser demon

Usually when people complain about impolite, arrogant, hateful, aggressive, intolerant, stupid, or generally all of the above behavior at the same time from members of The Church of Satan, they receive a well rehearsed answer: these members do not represent The Church of Satan but speak for themselves. The only people who may speak for the organization are people above a certain clerical rank or people with special permission. Poorly behaving members are therefore not to be considered representative of the organization.

Intelligent people understand that those are not identical forms of representation, but social stratification mostly spares them from the company of said members. Less enlightened people are prone to believing The Church of Satan’s excuse. Appointed spokespersons, by rank or by selection, act as formal representatives who speak with organizational authority on policies, ideology, and decisions, and only when they explicitly say so. The rest, who are lay members, speak for themselves only. So far, so good—except that lay members and the clergy alike represent their organization by example. They demonstrate what is considered acceptable or expected behavior internally and towards others, and this is why many organizations (including The Church of Satan) occasionally find it necessary to expel a member.

Lay members or low-ranking members of The Church of Satan thus do represent their organization. It is easy to think that by neglecting to address their behavior, excusing their behavior as not formally required, or formally condoned, The Church of Satan ignores that Satan represents responsibility to the responsible. However, Satan thinks His church is only too happy to have a portion of its membership display such primitive hostility as sometimes makes others complain. Examples exist of the ruling body of The Church of Satan asking its members to antagonize selected people or groups that the organization considers inconvenient, and praising members for having taken such initiaves on their own.

The behavior is not openly condoned, but it is appreciated and encouraged behind the scenes. The Church of Satan is satisfied to see its members attack others in an attempt to enforce herd conformity, and members soon learn that such behavior earns them brownie points among their peers. If the organization had preferred that their members conduct themselves properly, it would be simple to issue a policy and have formal representatives of the clergy remind lower-ranking members to behave themselves. As long as The Church of Satan encourages, requests, and even coordinates hostility, the resulting bad behavior is representative of The Church of Satan.

Satan thinks everyone should smarten up and know that it is Church of Satan policy to stimulate such behavior, and that members with excessively hostile attitudes are therefore truly representative of The Church of Satan.

Satan thinks degrees are hot

Posted on by A lesser demon

His Infernal Majesty is a sucker for ranks, hierarchy, and degrees, and enforces relentless stratification throughout His infernal empire. Degrees boost efficiency, because they relieve everyone of the tedious and uninteresting task of learning about each other. An accurate and carefully awarded degree provides you with everything you need to know about a demon or, in the world above us, a person.

For example, if a person advertises a sixth degree in Scientology, you immediately know that he is a top shelf idiot who has spent a significant sum of money and time becoming delusional. There is no need to speak at length with this individual and learn it the hard way.

It should go without saying that the quality of a degree is contingent on a strict curriculum and objective, unbiased evaluations. Satan has no respect for organizations that award degrees as a token of “esteem” or any similar set of undefined skills. Satan’s church is right to warn against a degree system with no answers in its Satanic Bunco Sheet. Degrees have no merit unless they can be independently verified—secret, unpublished standards, subjective evaluations, or cautions that if you have to ask about a degree, it is because you cannot afford it, are a foolproof litmus cult test. Degrees are meaningful only if they are meaningfully awarded: students who pride themselves of graduating from the school of hard knocks rarely boast notable grades elsewhere and hence seldom impress people with actual educations.

Even a correctly granted degree per the Devil’s requirements holds merit only among those who consider the issuer to be authoritative. Any earned degree is hogwash to people who find the organization ridiculous whether it deserves such an opinion or not.

Either situation—that the organization’s degrees are absurd or useless outside of its membership sphere or that the organization applies arbitrary requirements, or both—explains why some “warlock” in one organization may be readily recognized as a black-belt retard in all walks of life by people outside of the organization (and often because of the degree, cf. the aforementioned Scientologist).

Satan thinks His disciples should be mistrustful of all such degrees. Satan represents rebellion against phony authorities and The Goat-Legged One thinks it behooves His followers to follow suit and question authority; if nothing else then because He says so.

This raises an important point. All disciples of the Prince of Darkness were raised in societies where self-proclaimed élites have manufactured a system in which degrees signal social positions. It compels people to attribute importance to a degree regardless of its significance, worth, or merit. Satan thinks that instead of conforming to herd mentality and automatically credit an awardee with importance, one should apply analytical thinking. Since everyone considers a degree to signal relative importance, degrees reflect a value system: by observing ranking members one can deduce what the real values of an organization are as opposed to its purported values.

A personality-cult–like organization (or one characterized by individuals with narcissistic proneness) often have few other values than unbending loyalty towards the organization and sycophantic praise of those who are superior in degree. It awards degrees to lickspittles and personal friends of the issuers. It is often possible to deduce such values by observing who receives degrees.

In contrast, formal procedures and veracious requirements for degrees usually indicate a system focused on the advancement of bodies of skill. The obvious example is educational institutions. The hierarchy of degrees is typically shallow considering the size of these organizations. (This is true for higher education, too, because although they feature a plethora of degrees, the degrees are identical across different scientific fields in terms of “level.”) Such degrees are often legally protected as a bulwark against counterproductive activity. Satan secretly longs for the day when “witch” is designated as a protected degree, but thus far it has been awarded only by historically inept personnel.

It does not matter for identification purposes whether the degrees make any sense; the institutions and their members think they do and that is enough. Satan thinks that the use of degrees in higher education is generally admirable although degrees in fan-fiction fields such as theology, political science, and economics are mostly self-contained. The key is that degrees expose an organization’s fundamental objectives and that they may tell a different story to the out-group than to the in-group.

Within any group, degrees are important regardless of their merit for entirely different reasons than position, prowess, or progress. They serve as structural elements that keep organizations together.

Firstly, they establish a hierarchy of authority that dissuades early adopters from voicing criticism. This is generally advantageous to any organization. Bodies of knowledge rarely benefit from “input” from insightless newcomers, and power-centric organizations gain little from status seekers. This mechanism is maintained through-up the degree system, ensuring that authority stays in the hands of its rightful owners.

Secondly, they increase efficiency (as mentioned earlier). No single member must investigate who is considered an authority within the organization, because degrees provide this information. All that remains is to choose among the available array of higher-ranking individuals as sage, inspirator, or mentor, depending on organizational terminology.

Thirdly, degrees cement loyalty through multiple means. Growth recognition fosters loyalty in that as long as there is yet a degree to attain, members are compelled to keep advancing and hence staying until they reach the pinnacle degree. (New degrees may be introduced, should too many students become proficient.) Few organizations focusing on personal development can keep their members interested unless their growth is continously acknowledged.

Perhaps a corollary of hierarchy and achievement, a degree makes the owner feel important. Human vanity enjoys any badge of social recognition—especially that of your favorite group—that you may pin on your suit, literally or figuratively. The feeling of being significant by virtue of membership often suffices to keep the sheep at bay. In the same vein, what you have been given can be taken. Your title may be revoked or you may even find yourself disassociated from your organization. This silent threat is highly motivating towards loyalty.

More importantly, degrees are captive. Degrees designate a role, and roles are defined by expectations. Once a degree has been awarded, its new owner adopts a role whose behavior and sense of loyalty is predefined and reinforcing, because otherwise no-one within the organization will recognize the new awardee as such. (The so-called “Stanford prison experiment” by Philip Zimbardo, although critized and contested, illustrates the power of roles.) Both loyalty and values are thus preserved because the new degree owner must imitate the behavior that led him or her to achieve the degree to begin with.

Satan likes degrees but mostly in the sense that He loves to boil the souls of the damned.

Satan thinks all gods are puny

Posted on by A lesser demon

Legend tells us that The Son of the Morning was cast into the pit as punishment for committing the mortal sin of pride when He refused to kneel before Jehovah’s newly crafted creature of clay. However, it was sarcasm not pride that triggered the wrath of Jehovah on that fateful day when the Devil saltily added that if God had created man in his image, mankind wouldn’t be the thinking kind.

The human brain evolved to survive in the world, not to understand it, and mankind created its gods as a means to understand a world that the human brain is not configured to comprehend. The human animal saw actors—animals and mostly humans—as arbiters of change, and the brain of a social animal surmises that any change is caused by such actors even if the actor is unseen. Forces of Nature such as the Sun, the weather, the seasons, natural disasters, a well as perceived forces of good or bad fortune, were all viewed from the perspective of the anthropomorphizing human brain: whenever something happens, it is caused by someone who acted according to similar motivations and logic as the observer would have applied, only this someone is very powerful.

The gods thus took the shape of humans and animals with human qualities of reasoning and the ability to be influenced, and they were all “invented,” or rather taken as axiomatic, to provide mankind with a mental image of Nature. Gods serve to satisfy the brain’s requirement for a human-centered explanation where all is interpreted in terms of human interaction and human qualities are assigned to even inanimate objects.

No level of intelligence can deny the brain its need for actors as an explanation. The human brain imagines actors and succumbs to magical thinking when its host is not in control. It is not until an individual gains direct control over a situation and recognizes himself or herself as the cause of change that external actors become irrelevant. Hence, gods are killed not by intelligence, which is why even intelligent people often believe in them. A god dies when the human brain realizes that it is in control of the realm that belonged to the god.

It is with the above in mind that Satan finds it amusing when some of His followers declare themselves to be their own gods. Satan’s amusement is partly caused by somewhat concerning circumstances that He would like to spend a few paragraphs on. If gods are born of a lack of control, the Devil cannot help but wonder if it reveals that those followers are the very essence of powerlessness. The idea behind the declaration was never to do away with gods, only to replace them. But a god who is defeated disappears. It does not change ownership or name, no matter how personal, because all gods are deeply personal as they each live inside your brain. They cannot be abandoned and replaced if they still live there.

Satan thinks that the very need to introduce a god by proxy, even by figure of speech, points towards the person’s need for a god to mask the person’s insecurity and inability to cope. Satan therefore thinks it is probably a person who used to believe in gods and is unable to let go of this belief who utters the phrase “I am my own god.” After all, to an atheist who never had any god, the term “I am my own god” equals “I am my own non-existence,” and would be quite ridiculous.

Now, Satan knows that the phrase is derived from The Satanic Bible and Anton LaVey’s ill-founded model of religion in the chapter The God You Save May Be Yourself; the original variation of the phrase is found in the chapter Religious Holidays. The Devil thinks that those of his followers who make declarations about being their own gods have generally put limited thought into the statement and take it to mean that they choose their own moral views, make their own decisions, etc. instead of obeying some religious rules. Satan fully supports this idea. He is of course aware that in practice the declaration is similar to stating that one is one’s own master, although in this case human masters are not denied.

The main source of Satan’s amusement with the term “I am my own god!” however, is the connotations of the word “god.”

To the Prince of Darkness, gods symbolize lack of control, insecurity, powerlessness, impotence, infirmity, and herd mentality. So as far as Satan is concerned, any human being that invokes a god betrays these very personal shortcomings. What an unintended joke the Devil’s followers make of themselves by declaring themselves as gods!, the Devil grins.

The statement “I am my own god” may inspire awe among those who believe in gods and to whom gods are authoritative. But to everyone else it fosters no respect … or even disrespect when this “god” is soon revealed to be reared by the very god that the person was raised to believe in. It is uncanny how often the Devil’s followers cast themselves as contenders to the thrones of the old gods instead of doing away with the controlling gods altogether, only to model their “own” god by the old one.

Like the god they wished to abandon, they feel every bit the same need to reassert themselves, are every bit as arrogant and resistant to reason, and generally behave every bit like when the followed their former god, only maybe a little more pronounced. Satan thinks they should not be surprised that once they declare themselves as their own gods, no-one comes to worship them at their altars; their gods will never gain beyond a single worshiper.

Satan thinks tall membership fees create cultists

Posted on by A lesser demon

The painful transition rituals where young males are initiated into manhood that have been practiced by a variety of indigenous tribes often strike developed countries as unnecessarily and irrationally brutal. Yet, developed countries feature a long array of similar initiation rituals in various communities.

New army recruits have until recently been (and in some places still are) put through painful or humiliating “baptisms” at the hands of their lower-level superiors or dragged through demanding boot camps. College and university campuses have a tradition for similarly degrading or torturing new members of their fraternities during what Satan considers the alluringly named “Hell Weeks.” Some lines of work have traditionally welcomed new apprentices with humiliating events. Laws have been penned to prevent this phenomenon but seemingly without success.

The specific contents of such rituals are invariably kept secret to the prospective initiates, who usually know no more than rumors that they will be expected to endure an unpleasant experience. This helps explain why they are willing to accept an “formal initiation” but mostly one can expect them to accept the initiations as the price they must pay for their membership of the elite. However, as will be explained shortly, this conclusion is mere post-rationalization.

The presence of such initiation rites across the world in primitive and advanced societies alike throughout history affirms that they are motivated by the psyche of the human animal. Satan would have preferred to think that humans have an innate knack for being evil but alternative psychological explanations exist. Firstly, human herd mentality compels you to flock together. The survival of the specimens is contingent on their keeping their group together, and social dynamics ensue, including all sorts of often seemingly peculiar social behavior.

Secondly, the human mind cannot grasp its own irrationality. Nobody believes he or she acts randomly without cause: everything is rationalized, even self-harm, and no-one is evil just for the Hell of it (except our Infernal Lordship, but that goes without saying). If a person has acted uncontrollably irrationally, the person may fell all kinds of regret or guilt afterwards but can readily justify the behavior; if nothing else, then because he or she “must have felt for it” in the moment. In much less extreme situations, any seemingly irrational act, especially when performed consciously and deliberately, will be interpreted as having meaning and a purpose, and must make sense.

Satan thinks that this is in part what makes religious rituals and ceremonies so effective. Their irrational components of impossible narratives and symbolic acting and decoration serve to envelop the participants’ minds in irrationality that their minds will afterwards interpret as somehow true even if this “truth” is none the sort. The nonsense of the rituals and the ceremonies force the participants to think there is sense where there is none.

The newly minted Phi Beta Kappa member who now puts her clothes back on after receiving humiliating jeers and physical violations is still dazed but her mind is already rationalizing the abuse as the gateway to her new social position. Why was she put through it, but more importantly, why did she accept it, the mind inquires, and provides the reassuring answer: it was not a price to be paid but a requirement and an integral part of the membership, and an accolade to have endured. Nothing less is required of next semester’s initiates, demands the brain, which refuses to acknowledge that it would otherwise have been meaningless and refuses to admit the absurdity of the situation.

The psychological principle of social proof also plays in. Initiation rituals are usually formed on groups of initiates, who look to each other for clues on how to react during the mistreatment, and in a collective bystander effect where all are victims they remain passive. Any nonconformist dissidence will immediately be subjected to peer pressure. Social proof also fosters group cohesion by creating a social bond from the shared experience. It fortifies group loyalty, and as a rule of thumb, the worse the abuse the more loyal the initiates become towards the social group that admitted them, because the rationalizing brain interprets the tougher abuse as proportionally more meaningful.

Faced with irrationality, the rationalizing brain turns logic upside-down. It turns the abuse from unreasonable misdeeds into proof that the membership is important and worthwhile, and that the group is unique and desirable.

Loyalty may be gained with less than downright torture, as much as Old Nick hates to admit it. The scarcity principle of both economics and social psychology can play tricks on the mind, too, and may be utilized to keep a person to behaving with consistency. A high price tag on an item provides social proof of scarcity, and the buyer of at item that turns out to have been far too costly will post-rationalize the buying impulse and invariably conclude that the purchase made sense. In fact, a buyer is likely to attribute more value to an expensive item when if it is proven to have been available at a more competitive price, and will like the item more. The buyer may understand that he was unlucky, inattentive, or even conned, but his brain will reassure him that the item must then have been that more valuable to him. Being obviously cheated only reinforces this belief. It is hard enough to admit to others that one was duped but to the core brain such a thought is beyond guilt or shame; it is unthinkable, and the brain will defend the decision beyond the point of being ridiculous.

You will believe you can tell the audible difference with your expensive and literally gold-plated wires for your stereo set although no electronic measurement equipment can detect the change, and the overpriced, tasteless vase that you purchased on the street market from a clearly dubious seller somehow remains sitting on the table.

All this insight into the mentality of the human herd animal made Satan think of one of His churches, specifically The Church of Satan and its membership fee. In its early days, entry fees were paid to attend Anton LaVey’s lectures in his home but after a little less than a decade the organization instead admitted members for a fee. Satan does not remember off-hand if the amount was originally particularly high but in the 1980s it had become the official stance of The Church of Satan that the amount was set somewhat high to ensure that only sufficiently motivated and/or successful (to whom the amount was inconsequential) people would join and stand as a deterrent to anyone else.

Mr. Scratch has not doubt that a little greediness may have influenced the amount but otherwise trusts that His organization speaks the truth on this matter and (regrettably) does not suspect any nefarious undertones. Its membership fee is $225 as of this writing, and appears to be steep enough to often cause would-be members to seek advice on raising the money and rarely a follower of the Evil One to consider it pocket change.

For those to whom $225 feels like a personal financial sacrifice, or even becomes one, the deep impression in their bank account reminds them that they must have made an important and thoughtful decision. It strengthens their belief that The Church of Satan provides them with peers that are more intelligent, more interesting, or more desirable to meet more than had they merely paid the production costs, shipping, and a minor processing fee for their little red membership card. A tall amount instead makes them exhibit loyalty to their organization, which deserved the money, in order to suppress the skeptical mention from others that perhaps they were had. Not once has Satan encountered a member of The Church of Satan, whether current or former, who spoke of the membership fee as too expensive. In fact, if one were to pay any less, it would be a token of insincerity! The latter sentiment is regularly observed when members of The Church of Satan belittle The Satanic Temple for its much lower, and dare one even mention free membership options.

The tall membership fee of The Church of Satan utilizes herd mentality to purchase the faithfulness of its members for their own money. Their monetary oblations to the organization helps instill a cult-like behavior of unquestioned devotion.

Satan thinks Satanists are made, not born

Posted on by A lesser demon

If asked, a large number of the Devil’s followers will tell you that they always were Satanists, but that they first realized this when they encountered Satanism one way or another and realized their true nature. They never knew about Satanism and when for no apparent reason they accidentally obtained a copy of The Satanic Bible and decided to spend time reading it, it dawned upon them. Satan is not always entirely convinced by their explanation because some have been fundamentalist Christians for their entire lives until only a few years earlier, and usually when someone later discovers that Satanism was not for them after all, they cease to always have been Satanists. Far be it for the Devil to insinuate that they are lying; He merely hypothesizes that they sometimes apply alternate pasts.

Unlike we Hell-spawned creatures who dwell in the Devil’s reign of chaos, humans are a little conservative in that you require a certain level of consistency to stay sane. It is a social requirement that is deeply embedded in the human brain to expect that people do not behave entirely erratically, and to maintain a steady mental course. People usually do not change spontaneously unless something is very wrong. Convictions, ideologies, values, and morals are malleable but possess a degree of inertia. Any major change, such a politician’s change to another political party or someone’s decision to join a religious movement that they hitherto disagreed with, requires a good explanation which convinces especially themselves. An atheist simply does not become a born-again Christian overnight, for example, without providing some believable and unsophisticated story that supports the change: having met Jesus in one’s dreams is a tried and tested answer that is usually good enough for both believers and non-believers, because although their reaction will differ, they will accept the story as a valid reason.

Anyone who attempts to dig a little into such stories will find that such change typically has a backstory and rarely occurs as fast as told. People have usually shown significant interest prior to their revelations, and their “sudden” change merely marks the day they finally came out of their closets. Satan remembers that when Michael Aquino in 1975 spun his tale of being bestowed with the Fallen Angel’s “infernal mandate,” he had evidently desired it for a while, for example.

Such explanations are conversion narratives, which often follow certain unspoken rules depending on the nature of the target. Each ideology has its own set of expected and accepted narratives. The aforementioned Jesus experience is common among Christians in the US, and politicians whose alliances shift often explain that either the political landscape had moved while they stood their ground, or that they always were at heart what their new party represents.

Those who chose to follow the Prince of Darkness also use conversion narratives that obey certain rules. Satan maintains a strict principle of not showing Himself to His followers, so any narrative that involves His presence is frowned upon in the atheistic, Satanic arena, and will generally not be acknowledged. Even “losing faith” in one’s former religion is often not considered sufficiently convincing, and perhaps reasonably so, says Satan, because that would merely turn this lost sheep atheist.

The gold standard for a Satanic conversion narrative was provided by Anton LaVey, who several times declared that Satanists are born, not made, offering himself as a matchless example who demonstrated demonic tendencies from the day he was allegedly born with a tail. Satanists were unlike the herd; an alien elite in a sea of ordinary people. Satan thinks there is good reason for Anton LaVey’s sentiment because Satan thinks he had Asperger syndrome, which often manifests itself as herd apprehension and extraordinary skills that alienates one. However, the proclamation may also be a corollary of Anton LaVey’s belief in social Darwinism: a statement that Satanists are a breedable race with an iron youth.

Anton LaVey’s stand is regularly echoed by both The Church of Satan and non-affiliated Satanists, and The Church of Satan’s application for active membership still includes questions about the applicants’ biography, including their early childhood, supporting its position that one does not become a Satanist, one is a Satanist and therefore joins the organization. This conversion narrative has prompted Satanists across the entire spectrum to declare that they always were Satanists, only they did not know it, and to identify all sorts of anecdotes highlighting diabolic qualities earlier in their lives.

Satan has not doubt that most of His followers have occasionally exhibited traces of Satanic dispositions but suspects that the same followers could readily, and much more convincingly, identify an equal number of habits contradicting them if they felt so inclined—and they certainly do in those cases where they find it necessary to declare that Satanism was not their thing after all. As any born-again Christian will gladly inform you, everyone has a sinful past, so by carefully ignoring everything that speaks against your claim, anyone can say he was always a Satanist. Satan thinks that for the most part His followers do indeed become Satanists in the same way that anyone else gravitates to a new position and explains the change of mind and heart according to appropriate conversion narratives. A a Satanist, the proper conversion narrative is to make yourself and others believe you always were one whenever you become one.