Satanism

• 1. Introduction

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  Satanism names a set of religious, ideological, and philosophical beliefs built around the figure of Satan. In 1566, a Roman Catholic tract condemned the "heresies, blasphemies, and sathanismes" of Protestants. In 1559, an Anglican author called Anabaptists "swarmes of Satanistes". Neither author meant that their opponents literally worshipped the Devil. Both simply meant that these people had strayed from true Christianity. The word itself was a weapon, hurled between rival Christian factions, before anyone had formed a group that actually called itself Satanic.

  That gap between accusation and practice shadows the entire history of the subject. Between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed during the European witch trials, almost none of whom had any connection to deliberate Devil worship. A moral panic between 1980 and 1994 saw hundreds of families accused of Satanic ritual abuse; an FBI investigation of 300 allegations found evidence of Satanism in none of them. And yet, alongside the panics and the polemics, self-declared Satanist groups did emerge, beginning formally in San Francisco in 1966 when Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan.

  What is Satanism, really? Who decides? And how does a term invented to slander others become the name people choose for themselves? Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. A Word That Weaponized Itself

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  Satan began as a Hebrew noun, not a name. It meant "adversary" or "to oppose". In the Book of Samuel, David is described as the satan of the Philistines. In the Book of Numbers, Jehovah sends an angel to satan Balaam. The word was functional, not personal.

  By the time the New Testament was written, Jewish communities had developed the idea that Satan was a specific angel who had rebelled against Jehovah and been cast from Heaven. The Book of Matthew and the Book of Luke both describe this figure attempting to tempt Jesus during his fast in the wilderness. From there, the character expanded through folklore, theology, art, and morality tales, accumulating imagery from classical mythology along the way. Pan, fauns, and satyrs contributed the horns, hooves, and tail that would eventually define the Devil's appearance in Christian iconography.

  The first recorded accusation of Devil worship within Western Christianity came in Toulouse in 1022, when two clerics were tried for allegedly venerating a demon. Over the following centuries, that accusation was leveled at the Paulicians, the Bogomils, the Cathars, the Waldensians, the Hussites, and the Knights Templar, who were charged with worshipping an idol called Baphomet and hosting Lucifer at their meetings in the form of a cat. Europe's Jewish community faced the same accusations.

  The Lutheran Bishop Laurentius Paulinus Gothus, writing his Ethica Christiana between 1615 and 1630, described devil-worshipping sorcerers as Sathanister, making him one of the earliest writers to use a Scandinavian cognate of the term in something approaching its modern sense. The term's meaning kept shifting: by the 19th century it had come to describe people living an immoral lifestyle generally, and only in the late 19th century did it settle into meaning deliberate, conscious veneration of Satan.

• 3. Panics and Their Mechanics

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  Between 1560 and 1630, the witch trials of Europe reached their deadliest peak. The educated elites who developed the idea of a Satanic witch conspiracy were drawing on accusations that had previously been leveled at medieval heretics, and they grafted those accusations onto a pre-existing popular belief in malevolent witchcraft. Folkloric ideas about the night witch, the wild hunt, and the dance of the fairies were folded into this new composite threat.

  The trials began in Northern Italy and France before spreading across Europe and into Britain's North American colonies. Most historians conclude that those executed were innocent of Devil worship. Historian Darren Eldridge wrote that claims of an actual cult of devil-worshippers being pursued by witch hunters had not survived scrutiny of surviving trial records from 1962 to 2012. Historians Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow did allow that some of the accused may genuinely have attempted to use magic against their enemies, but that is a long distance from organized Satanism.

  The Affair of the Poisons, between 1677 and 1682, showed how panic spread through the highest social ranks. During the reign of King Louis XIV, 36 people were executed after prominent members of the French aristocracy, including members of the king's inner circle, were implicated in poisoning and witchcraft charges. Investigators extracted confessions under torture, and the reports produced include what may be the first recorded description of a Satanic mass using a woman as an altar. The reliability of those reports is considered poor.

  Three centuries later, a 1980 book called Michelle Remembers launched a new panic in North America. Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder detailed what he described as the repressed memories of his patient, and later wife, Michelle Smith, who claimed she had been abused in Satanic rituals as a child, with babies sacrificed and Satan himself appearing. In 1983, the McMartin family, who ran a preschool in California, were accused of sexually abusing children during Satanic rites. All of the accused were eventually cleared, but the publicity produced a cascade of similar allegations across the United States.

  Ken Lanning of the FBI investigated 300 allegations of Satanic ritual abuse and found no evidence of Satanism or ritualistic activity in any of them. In the United Kingdom, anthropologist Jean La Fontaine, commissioned by the Department of Health to examine the allegations, found that roughly half revealed genuine sexual abuse of children, but none revealed evidence that Satanist groups had been involved or that any murders had taken place. She documented three cases in which lone individuals had constructed ritual performances to frighten and justify their actions, but none of these people were connected to wider Satanist groups. By 1994, the hysteria had subsided in the US and UK, though allegations continued to surface in parts of continental Europe and Latin America. A survey published in the women's magazine Redbook in 1994 found that 70 percent of those polled still believed that at least some repressed memories of Satanic cult abuse were genuine.

• 4. Satan as Romantic Rebel

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  John Milton's Paradise Lost, published in 1667, changed the cultural meaning of Satan more profoundly than any theology could. Milton was a Puritan and intended no sympathy for his devil. But in portraying Satan as a proud rebel against the Judeo-Christian god, he opened the character to reinterpretation. Readers including the publisher Joseph Johnson and the anarchist philosopher William Godwin, whose 1793 Enquiry Concerning Political Justice reflected this reading, took Milton's Satan as a hero.

  By the 19th century, a movement scholars call literary Satanism or romantic Satanism had formed around this reinterpretation. Percy Bysshe Shelley, influenced by Milton, praised the serpent in his poem Laon and Cythna as a force for good. Lord Byron included Satanic themes in his 1821 play Cain, a dramatization of the Biblical story. In France, Alfred de Vigny wrote Eloa in 1823, and Victor Hugo made Satan's fall from Heaven central to his La Fin de Satan, where he outlined an entire cosmogony.

  None of these writers performed religious rites to venerate Satan. For them, Satan was, as scholar Ruben van Luijk put it, "a strategic use of a symbol and a character as part of artistic and political expression". The French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon embraced Satan as a symbol of liberty. The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin called Satan "the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds" in his book God and the State. These ideas probably inspired American feminist activist Moses Harman to name his anarchist periodical Lucifer the Lightbearer.

  Paradise Lost had been translated into French by Voltaire, giving Milton wide reach on the continent. This made Milton, as scholars later noted, "a central character in rewriting Satanism", and many later religious Satanists came to regard him as a de facto Satanist, which he certainly was not. The anarchist and romantic readings of Satan declined across the 20th century, but they left lasting marks on the groups that followed.

• 5. Anton LaVey and the Church

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  Anton Szandor LaVey founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966, in a moment of broad public fascination with the occult and witchcraft. LaVey shaved his head, wore a goatee, performed Black Masses with nude women serving as altars, appeared on national talk shows, and hosted Satanic parties attended by celebrities. The media spectacle around him was described as "a gigantic media circus".

  LaVey was not a theist. His 1969 Satanic Bible, the most influential statement of Satanic theology, sold nearly a million copies and had, by most measures, "very little" connection with either Satan or the worship of Satan. It drew instead on the Romantic literary concept of Satan as rebel anti-hero, woven together with humanism, hedonism, aspects of pop psychology, and the human potential movement, and delivered with showmanship. Philosopher Ayn Rand, who argued that selfishness is a virtue and altruism destructive, was a cornerstone of his thought. So were Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleister Crowley, and Arthur Desmond, whose Social Darwinism permeated LaVeyan doctrine.

  LaVey inverted Christian ethics deliberately. The seven deadly sins, pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth, were recast as virtues. Victims should not turn the other cheek but take an eye for an eye. Human social equality was a myth that produced mediocrity. A "true Satanic society", described in the church's periodical The Black Flame, would consist of "free-spirited, well-armed, fully-conscious, self-disciplined individuals" who neither needed nor tolerated external protection. LaVey also envisioned breeding an elite of superior individuals who would live apart from the human "herd", which he proposed consigning to ghettoes, ideally located on other planets.

  Critics inside and outside the church noted contradictions. LaVey insisted the church rejected the supernatural while also telling an interviewer he considered curses and hexes against enemies a form of human sacrifice by proxy. He preached personal freedom while, according to CoS priest Gavin Baddeley, micromanaging the lives of his followers. He maintained an ambivalent relationship with far-right groups including the United Klans of America and the American Nazi Party, neither endorsing nor rejecting them. LaVey died in 1997, and his daughter, High Priestess Karla LaVey, re-founded the First Satanic Church in San Francisco in 1999, describing the new organization as more exclusive than the original.

• 6. The Satanic Temple's Different Satan

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  Based in Salem, Massachusetts and active since 2012, The Satanic Temple claimed 700,000 members worldwide as of late 2023, making it the most prominent Satanic organization in terms of both size and public activity. Like the Church of Satan, its members do not believe in a supernatural Satan. But where LaVey's church used Christianity as a negative mirror, reversing its altruism into selfishness, the Satanic Temple targets politically conservative Christian activism, including opposition to abortion rights, the teaching of evolution, and the separation of church and state.

  The Temple has been described as using the literary Satan as a metaphor to promote pragmatic skepticism, rational reciprocity, personal autonomy, and curiosity. Its seven fundamental tenets, listed on its website, address compassion, justice, freedom, the inviolability of the human body, scientific understanding, and human fallibility. Satan is not mentioned. Lucien Greaves, a spokesperson for the temple, posted a detailed refutation of LaVey's doctrines, accusing the Church of Satan of fetishizing authoritarianism and arguing that Social Darwinism and Nietzscheanism within LaVeyan Satanism conflict with game theory, reciprocal altruism, and cognitive science.

  The Temple's tactics include satire and political theater. Members performed a "Pink Mass" over the grave of the mother of the anti-LGBTQ preacher Fred Phelps, claiming the mass converted her spirit into a lesbian. The group has demanded government privileges extended to Christians, including the right to give prayers before city council meetings, to erect statues on government property, and to distribute materials in public schools. Its congregations have also volunteered to clean highways and assist the homeless, at least partly to demonstrate civic engagement.

  The Church of Satan, for its part, has declared Satanic Temple members to be only "masquerading" as Satanists, accusing them of violating five decades of a clearly defined belief system. The dispute illustrates a recurring pattern: different Satanic groups, including the Church of Satan, the Temple of Set, the Order of Nine Angles, and the Satanic Temple, routinely accuse one another of being fraudulent Satanists.

• 7. Who Actually Identifies as a Satanist

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  Surveys conducted in the early 21st century, summarized by the scholars Asbjørn Dyrendal, James R. Lewis, and Jesper Aa. Petersen, showed that the Satanic milieu was heavily dominated by young males. Census data from New Zealand, however, suggested a growing proportion of women. In comprising more men than women, Satanism differs from most other religious communities, including most new religious movements.

  Most Satanists came to their religion through reading, online or in books, rather than through personal contacts. Many do not describe themselves as converts but say they were born with pre-existing worldviews that Satanism eventually named. Atheistic Satanists appeared to form the majority in surveys, though the number of theistic Satanists seemed to grow over time. Most practiced magic, with disagreements about whether magical acts operated according to etheric laws or produced only psychological effects. A number described performing cursing, usually as a form of vigilante justice.

  The average length of involvement in the Satanic milieu, according to survey data, was seven years. Involvement tended to peak in a practitioner's early twenties and drop sharply in the thirties. Most conducted their religious practice in a solitary manner, meeting fellow Satanists rarely or never. Primary interaction took place online. The largest proportion of Satanists identified as apolitical or non-aligned; over two-thirds expressed opposition or strong opposition to Nazism, while a small minority expressed support for it.

  The 2021 Canadian census counted 5,890 Canadians identifying as Satanist, representing 0.02 percent of the population. That figure offers one of the few hard demographic data points on a community that, by its own habits, keeps most of its practice private and individual.