Satanism: the story on HearLore

When did the word Satanism first appear in English and French texts?

The term Satanist emerged during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, appearing in English and French texts as early as 1559 to describe Anabaptists and other Protestant sects as swarms of Satanists.

How many people were executed during the witch trials of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries?

Estimates suggest between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed during the witch trials of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, almost all in Europe, based on the idea of a Satanic conspiracy.

Who founded the Church of Satan and when did it begin?

Satanism as a self-declared religion began in 1966 with the founding of the Church of Satan by Anton Szandor LaVey in San Francisco, California.

What is the primary belief of Theistic Satanism?

Theistic Satanism, otherwise referred to as spiritual Satanism or devil worship, is a form of Satanism with the primary belief that Satan is an actual deity or force to revere or worship.

When was the Temple of Set founded and by whom?

The Temple of Set is an occult left-hand path religious organization founded in 1975 when Michael Aquino, the founder of a Church of Satan Grotto in Louisville, Kentucky, left the church.

Which Satanic organization claims 700,000 members worldwide and is based in Salem, Massachusetts?

Satanism

The word Satanism was not originally a name for a religion, but a weapon used by Christians to destroy their enemies. In the 1560s, Catholic and Protestant leaders began labeling their rivals as Satanists to prove they were in league with the devil, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where the accused began to adopt the very identity forced upon them. This historical invention of the devil worshipper served to unify Christian societies against a common, imagined foe, leading to the execution of tens of thousands of people during the witch trials of the early modern period. The term Satanist emerged during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, appearing in English and French texts as early as 1559 to describe Anabaptists and other Protestant sects as swarms of Satanists. These accusations were not based on evidence of actual devil worship, but rather on the theological necessity of defining heresy as a pact with evil. The concept of the devil as an archrepresentative of evil developed in the early middle ages, creating a mirror image of the good Christian that allowed societies to project their fears onto specific groups like the Knights Templar and the Cathars. The earliest recorded accusation of devil worship within Western Christianity took place in Toulouse in 1022, when two clerics were tried for venerating a demon, setting a precedent for centuries of persecution. The witch trials of the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries reached a historical apogee, with estimates suggesting between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed, almost all in Europe, based on the idea of a Satanic conspiracy. These trials were driven by educated elites who developed the idea of a conspiracy of Satanic witches, incorporating folkloric ideas about the night witch and the wild hunt into a coherent narrative of evil. Most historians agree that the majority of those persecuted in these witch trials were innocent of any involvement in devil worship, yet the fear generated by these events shaped the beliefs of what would become modern religious Satanism. Those who absorbed and accepted the tales sometimes began to imitate them, a process known to folklorists as ostension, where the accusers and the accused began to mirror each other in a cycle of fear and performance.

Romantic Rebels And Poets

In the late 1600s, the character of Satan was increasingly rendered unimportant in western philosophy, and ignored in Christian theology, while in folklore he came to be seen as a foolish rather than a menacing figure. The development of new values in the Age of Enlightenment contributed to a shift in many Europeans concept of Satan, transforming him from a monster into a tragic hero. John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, published in 1667, became the central character in rewriting Satanism, portraying Satan as a victim of his own pride who rebelled against the Judeo-Christian god. Milton was a Puritan and had never intended for his depiction of Satan to be a sympathetic one, yet in portraying Satan as a rebel against tyranny, he humanized him and allowed him to be interpreted as a friend to other victims of the all powerful bully. This literary Satanism became a strategic use of a symbol and a character as part of artistic and political expression, rather than a religious belief or ritual activity. The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, influenced by Milton, praised the serpent as a force for good in his poem Laon and Cythna, while Lord Byron included Satanic themes in his 1821 play Cain, which was a dramatization of the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. These more positive portrayals also developed in France, with the 1823 work Eloa by Alfred de Vigny and Victor Hugo's La Fin de Satan, which outlined his own cosmogony. The figure of Satan, who was seen as having rebelled against the tyranny imposed by Jehovah, was appealing to many of the radical leftists of the period, serving as a symbol for the struggle against tyranny, injustice, and oppression. The French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon embraced Satan as a symbol of liberty in several of his writings, while the Russian Mikhail Bakunin described the figure of Satan as the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. These ideas probably inspired the American feminist activist Moses Harman to name his anarchist periodical Lucifer the Lightbearer. The idea of this Leftist Satan declined during the 20th century, but the literary foundation had been laid for a new kind of religious movement. The romanticist poets and writers did not perform religious rites to venerate Satan, yet their work created a cultural space where the devil could be seen as a brave, noble rebel against tyranny. This literary Satanism provided the symbolic language that would later be adopted by actual religious groups, transforming the devil from a figure of evil into a symbol of individualism and rebellion.

The Father Of Satanism

Satanism as a self-declared religion began in 1966 with the founding of the Church of Satan by Anton Szandor LaVey in San Francisco, California. LaVey, known as the Father of Satanism, was an entrepreneur who saw an opening for a new religion in the spiritual void of a secularizing post-Christian West. He shaved his head, wore a goatee, and performed Black Masses with nude women serving as altars, creating a gigantic media circus around his Satanic aesthetics. LaVey invited celebrities to his satanic parties and appeared on national talk shows, making his church the most influential satanic organization in history. His 1969 Satanic Bible sold nearly a million copies, becoming the best-known and most influential statement of Satanic theology. These texts had very little connection with either Satan or the worship of Satan, but were based on the Romantic literary concept of Satan, not as a symbol of evil, but as a rebel anti-hero, defying God's tyranny with charisma and bravery. LaVey wove together humanism, hedonism, aspects of pop psychology and the human potential movement, publicizing them with a lot of showmanship. Philosopher Ayn Rand, who argued that selfishness is a virtue in that unfettered self-interest is good and altruism is destructive, was a major influence on LaVey's thought. Other influences included Friedrich Nietzsche, who celebrated the Ubermensch and proclaimed God is dead, and English occultist Aleister Crowley, famous for the axiom Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the moral Law. LaVey used Christianity as a negative mirror for his new faith, rejecting the basic principles, theology and values of Christian belief, along with other major religions and philosophies such as humanitarianism and liberal democracy. Instead of idealism, humility, abstinence, self-denigration, obedience, herd behavior, spirituality, and irrationality, he praised the seven deadly sins as virtues, not vices. LaVey went beyond discouraging sexual inhibitions and feelings of guilt and shame over fetishes, calling for a celebration of, and indulgence in, humanity's animal nature and its desires. Human beings should seek out the carnal rather than the spiritual, satisfying the ego's desires enhanced an individual's pride, self-respect, and self-realization. LaVey saw Satanism as something like a personality type as much as a belief, since Satanists are outsiders by their nature, and born, not made. He insisted the church scoffed at the supernatural, but also told an interviewer he considered curses and hexes against enemies a form of human sacrifice by proxy. LaVey died in 1997, but the church maintains a purist approach to his thought, insisting he and the church have codified Satanism as a religion and philosophy, and dismisses other Satanist groups as reverse-Christians, pseudo-Satanists or Devil worshipers.

The Satanic Panic

At the end of the 20th century, a moral panic arose from claims that a Devil-worshipping cult was committing sexual abuse, murder, and cannibalism in its rituals, and including children among the victims of its rites. Initially, the alleged perpetrators of such crimes were labeled witches, although the term Satanist was soon adopted as a favored alternative, and the phenomenon itself came to be called the Satanism Scare. One of the primary sources for the scare was Michelle Remembers, a 1980 book by the Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder in which he detailed what he claimed were the repressed memories of his patient and wife Michelle Smith. Smith had claimed that as a child she had been abused by her family in Satanic rituals in which babies were sacrificed and Satan himself appeared. In 1983, allegations were made that the McMartin family, owners of a preschool in California, were guilty of sexually abusing the children in their care during Satanic rituals. The allegations resulted in a lengthy and expensive trial, in which all of the accused would eventually be cleared. The publicity generated by the case resulted in similar allegations being made in various other parts of the United States. A key claim by the anti-Satanists of the Satanic Scare was that any child's claim about Satanic ritual abuse must be true, because children do not lie. Although some involved in the anti-Satanism movement were from Jewish and secular backgrounds, a central part was played by fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, in particular Pentecostal Christians, with Christian groups holding conferences and producing books and videotapes to promote belief in the conspiracy. Various figures in law enforcement also came to be promoters of the conspiracy theory, with such cult cops holding various conferences to promote it. The scare was later imported to the United Kingdom through visiting evangelicals and became popular among some of the country's social workers, resulting in a range of accusations and trials across Britain. In the late 1980s, the Satanic Scare had lost its impetus following increasing skepticism about such allegations, and a number of those who had been convicted of perpetrating Satanic ritual abuse saw their convictions overturned. In 1990, an agent of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Ken Lanning, revealed that he had investigated 300 allegations of Satanic ritual abuse and found no evidence for Satanism or ritualistic activity in any of them. In the UK, the Department of Health commissioned the anthropologist Jean La Fontaine to examine the allegations of SRA. She noted that while approximately half did reveal evidence of genuine sexual abuse of children, none revealed any evidence that Satanist groups had been involved or that any murders had taken place. She noted three examples in which lone individuals engaged in child molestation had created a ritual performance to facilitate their sexual acts, with the intent of frightening their victims and justifying their actions, but that none of these child molesters were involved in wider Satanist groups. By 1994, the Satanic ritual abuse hysteria had died down in the US and UK, and by the 21st century, hysteria about Satanism has waned in most Western countries, although allegations of Satanic ritual abuse continued to surface in parts of continental Europe and Latin America. A 1994 survey for the women's magazine Redbook reported that 70 percent of those polled believe that at least some people who claim that they were abused by satanic cults as children, but repressed the memories for years, are telling the truth.

The Temple And The Temple

The Satanic Temple, based in Salem, Massachusetts and active since 2012, has been called the most prominent satanic organization in terms of both size and public activity, claiming 700,000 members worldwide. Like the older Church of Satan, its congregants do not believe in a supernatural Satan, but if the Church of Satan saw Satanism as a negative mirror of Christianity, reversing Christian principles of altruism to selfishness, the Christian principles The Satanic Temple wants to reverse are politically conservative activist/fundamentalist ones. This left-wing, socially engaged Satanism involves activism rather than the individualism and right-wing-oriented, getting what you want for yourself, of the Church of Satan. They have been called rationalist, political pranksters, with pranks designed to highlight religious hypocrisy and advance the cause of secularism. One such prank was performing a Pink Mass over the grave of the mother of the evangelical Christian and prominent anti-LGBTQ preacher Fred Phelps and claiming that the mass converted the spirit of Phelps' mother into a lesbian. The Seven Fundamental tenets of the temple on its website mention compassion, justice, freedom, inviolability of the human body, conforming to scientific understanding, human fallibility, but say nothing about Satan. The Temple has been described as using the literary Satan as metaphor to promote pragmatic skepticism, rational reciprocity, personal autonomy, and curiosity, and as a symbol to represent the eternal rebel against arbitrary authority and social norms. The temple has also demanded the privileges the government affords Christians, such as giving prayers before city council meetings, erecting satanic statues on government property, and distributing its materials in public schools. As the movement became bigger, its congregations volunteered to clean highways and help the homeless, at least in part to demonstrate they were civic minded and not evil. It has made efforts at lobbying, with a focus on the separation of church and state and using satire against Christian groups that it believes interfere with personal freedom. Lucien Greaves has described The Satanic Temple as being a progressive and updated version of LaVey's Satanism, posting a fairly detailed refutation of LaVey's doctrines, accusing the Church of Satan of fetishizing authoritarianism, and explaining how elements of Social Darwinism and Nietzscheanism within LaVeyan Satanism are incongruent with game theory, reciprocal altruism, and cognitive science. The Church of Satan, on the other hand, has declared the TST members as only masquerading as Satanists, being in violation of the five decades of a clearly defined belief system called Satanism expounded by a worldwide organization.

Theistic And Underground

Theistic Satanism, otherwise referred to as spiritual Satanism, or devil worship, is a form of Satanism with the primary belief that Satan is an actual deity or force to revere or worship. Other characteristics of theistic Satanism may include a belief in magic, which is manipulated through ritual, although that is not a defining criterion, and theistic Satanists may focus solely on devotion. The Temple of Set is an occult left-hand path religious organization founded in 1975 when Michael Aquino, the founder of a Church of Satan Grotto in Louisville, Kentucky, and editor of the Church's newsletter, The Cloven Hoof, left the church, taking 28 members with him. Aquino's anger that LaVey had devalued his high level grade of magister in the church may have initiated his break, but Aquino also disagreed with LaVey's materialist philosophy, arguing that while the church might publicly be materialist, Satan as symbol was only part of the truth. Aquino held a ritual to ask Satan where to lead his CoS defectors and, on the night of 21 to the 22nd of June 1975, Satan allegedly told him to Reconsecrate my Temple and my Order in the true name of Set. No longer will I accept the bastard title of a Hebrew fiend. Thus Aquino came to believe that the name Satan was a corruption of the name Set, the Egyptian god of darkness. The philosophy of the Temple of Set may be summed up as enlightened individualism, enhancement and improvement of oneself by personal education, experiment, and initiation. This process is necessarily different and distinctive for each individual. The members do not agree on whether Set is real or symbolic, and they're not expected to. The Order of Nine Angles, claiming to have been established in the 1960s, rose to public recognition in the early 1980s. This movement expressed the idea that groups like Church of Satan were too benevolent and law-abiding to be true Satanists. This notion grew, particularly among musicians and fans of extreme heavy metal music, where being more extreme meant being more authentic. The O9A's writings not only encourage human sacrifice, but insist it is required in Satanism, referring to their victims as opfers. According to the Order's teachings, such opfers must demonstrate character faults that mark them out as being worthy of death. No O9A cell has admitted to carrying out a sacrifice in a ritualized manner, but rather, Order members have joined the police and military to carry out such killings. The Temple of the Black Light, formerly known as the Misanthropic Luciferian Order, is a Satanic occult order founded in Sweden in 1995. The group espouses a philosophy known as Chaosophy, asserting that the world that mankind lives in, and the universe that it lives in, all exist within the realm known as Cosmos. Cosmos is made of three spatial dimensions and one linear time dimension. Cosmos rarely ever changes and is a materialistic realm. Another realm that exists is known as Chaos. Chaos exists outside of the Cosmos and is made of infinite dimensions and unlike the Cosmos, it is always changing. Members of the TotBL believe that the realm of Chaos is ruled over by 11 dark gods, the highest of them being Satan, and all of said gods are considered manifestations of a higher being. This higher being is known as Azerate, the Dragon Mother, and is all of the 11 gods united as one. The TotBL believes that Azerate will resurrect one day and destroy the Cosmos and let Chaos consume everything. The group has been connected to the Swedish Black metal band Dissection, particularly its front man Jon Nödtveidt. Nödtveidt was introduced to the group at an early stage. The lyrics on the band's third album, Reinkaos, are all about beliefs of the Temple of the Black Light. Nödtveidt committed suicide in 2006.

The Modern Milieu

Contemporary religious Satanism is predominantly an American phenomenon but has spread elsewhere via globalization and the Internet, allowing for intra-group communication and creation of a forum for Satanist disputes. Satanism started to reach Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s, in time with the fall of the Communist Bloc, and most noticeably in Poland and Lithuania, predominantly Roman Catholic countries. The Satanic Temple, based in Salem, Massachusetts and active since 2012, claims 700,000 members worldwide, making it the most prominent satanic organization in terms of both size and public activity. The Satanic Reds, founded in 1997 by Tani Jantsang, is a unique organization blending Marxist-communist politics with Lovecraftian occultism mixed with elements of Central Asian folklore and the advocacy of social welfare. The group became notable mainly for their online activism and usage of communist symbols merged with Satanist ones. However, the Satanic Reds claim to belong to the left-hand path but do not identify as theistic Satanists in the manner of believing in Satan as a god with a personality, since they conceive it as Sat and Tan, Being and Becoming, similarly to the fictional deity of chaos Nyarlathotep from Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. Personal Satanism, in contrast to the organized and doctrinal Satanist groups, is the Satanism of individuals who identify as Satanists due to their affinity for the general idea of Satan, including such characteristics as viciousness and/or subversion. Dyndal, Lewis, and Petersen used the term reactive Satanism to describe one form of modern Satanism, described as an adolescent and anti-social means of rebelling in a Christian society, by which an individual transgresses cultural boundaries. This tends to fall into two tendencies: Satanic tourism, characterized by the brief period of time in which an individual was involved, and Satanic quest, typified by a longer and deeper involvement. Some personal Satanists are teenagers or mentally disturbed individuals who have engaged in criminal activities. During the 1980s and 1990s, several groups of teenagers were apprehended after sacrificing animals and vandalizing both churches and graveyards with Satanic imagery. Introvigne stated that these incidents were more a product of juvenile rebellion than organized religious belief. The Satanic Temple has been described as using the literary Satan as metaphor to promote pragmatic skepticism, rational reciprocity, personal autonomy, and curiosity, and as a symbol to represent the eternal rebel against arbitrary authority and social norms. The temple has also demanded the privileges the government affords Christians, such as giving prayers before city council meetings, erecting satanic statues on government property, and distributing its materials in public schools. As the movement became bigger, its congregations volunteered to clean highways and help the homeless, at least in part to demonstrate they were civic minded and not evil. It has made efforts at lobbying, with a focus on the separation of church and state and using satire against Christian groups that it believes interfere with personal freedom. Lucien Greaves has described The Satanic Temple as being a progressive and updated version of LaVey's Satanism, posting a fairly detailed refutation of LaVey's doctrines, accusing the Church of Satan of fetishizing authoritarianism, and explaining how elements of Social Darwinism and Nietzscheanism within LaVeyan Satanism are incongruent with game theory, reciprocal altruism, and cognitive science. The Church of Satan, on the other hand, has declared the TST members as only masquerading as Satanists, being in violation of the five decades of a clearly defined belief system called Satanism expounded by a worldwide organization.

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