Satanism

Two completely different things wear the same frightening name — the imaginary Devil-cult that persecutors have invented for a thousand years, and the real, mostly atheistic philosophies that modern people have deliberately chosen — and telling them apart, with the same descriptive rigor this book gives every tradition and none of the shock, is the whole task of the chapter.

The panic that found nothing

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, a wave of terror swept the United States and beyond: the conviction that a vast, hidden network of Satanists was ritually abusing and murdering children in secret. Day-care workers were accused, tried, and imprisoned on the testimony of coached children; talk shows and self-styled experts described underground cults of unimaginable evil; families were destroyed. It was called the Satanic Panic. And when the FBI's own investigator, Kenneth Lanning, examined the claims exhaustively — publishing his report in 1992, after a decade of allegations of thousands of murders — he found essentially no evidence that any of it was real. There was no network, no ritual murder, no secret Satanic conspiracy. There were only frightened people and an old, old fantasy.

That is the necessary starting point, because it is the pattern of one whole side of this subject: the imagined Satanist is a scapegoat, not a believer — and has been for a very long time.

Two Satanisms

Everything written under the word "Satanism" falls into one of two utterly different categories, and confusing them is the source of nearly all the nonsense told about it.

The first is accusatory, imaginary Satanism — the Devil-worshipping conspiracy that other people invent and project onto their enemies. It is the fabricated witches' sabbath of Chapter 32, the medieval blood-libel, the fin-de-siècle rumor of the Black Mass, and the 1980s Satanic Panic. It has almost no members, because almost no one actually belongs to it; it is a mask persecutors hang on the faces of the feared.

The second is self-identified Satanism — real, living people and organizations who deliberately take the name of Satan for themselves. And here is the fact that dissolves most of the horror: the largest of them are atheists. They do not worship the Devil. They have adopted Satan as a symbol. (A smaller current, as we will see, does treat a dark god as real — but as a path of self-deification, not the child-murdering cult of the panics.)

Before the modern: the one black mass that (almost) was

The accusatory fantasy has, across all its centuries, exactly one well-documented near-exception, and it is worth naming precisely because it is so rare. In the Affair of the Poisons (1677–1682) at the court of Louis XIV, the Paris fortune-teller and poisoner Catherine Monvoisin, "La Voisin," ran a network selling poisons, abortions, and love-magic to the aristocracy — and, the investigation charged, arranging messes noires, "black masses" said over a naked woman's body by corrupt priests, to petition dark powers on a client's behalf. Whether these rites happened as luridly as the testimony (extracted partly under torture) claimed is genuinely uncertain. But the episode marks the difference the whole chapter turns on: even here, this was hired transgressive magic by desperate courtiers and venal clergy, not a standing religion of Satan-worshippers. The vast conspiracy the persecutors imagined never existed; this squalid, real affair is the closest history comes, and it is nothing like the myth.

The rebel becomes a hero: Romantic Satanism

Long before anyone founded a Church of Satan, poets rehabilitated the Adversary. In John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), Satan is so magnificent a rebel that later readers took him for the true hero of the poem — and the Romantics said so openly. William Blake wrote that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it"; Percy Shelley judged Milton's Satan morally superior to his God; Byron cast the defiant rebel as an ideal. From there the figure passed to the anti-clerical and Decadent nineteenth century: the Italian poet Giosuè Carducci — a future Nobel laureate — wrote the Inno a Satana ("Hymn to Satan," 1865), praising Satan as the spirit of reason, progress, and revolt against the Church; Baudelaire and the Decadents made Satanic imagery a badge of artistic rebellion; and J.-K. Huysmans's novel Là-Bas (1891) fixed the literary image of the Black Mass in the popular mind. This is the true ancestry of modern self-identified Satanism: not a secret cult, but a literary tradition that read Satan as the symbol of the free individual against tyranny.

LaVeyan Satanism: Satan as a symbol

Modern self-identified Satanism as an organized religion begins with Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco on Walpurgisnacht, 30 April 1966, and published the Satanic Bible in 1969. Its central doctrine is the surprising one: neither God nor Satan exists as a real being. Satan is a symbol — of the carnal and natural human being, of pride, individualism, indulgence, self-reliance, vital existence, and defiance of herd-conformity and religious hypocrisy. The Nine Satanic Statements that open the Satanic Bible make the creed explicit ("Satan represents indulgence, instead of abstinence… vital existence, instead of spiritual pipe dreams…"), and a set of "Eleven Rules of the Earth" governs conduct. LaVeyan Satanism is thus a form of atheistic, materialist philosophy — a theatrical Nietzschean egoism — expressed through dramatic ritual understood not as literal magic but as psychodrama, a cathartic performance. The Satanist, in LaVey's phrase, is his own god. After LaVey's death in 1997 the Church continued under Blanche Barton and then Peter Gilmore. It is, in short, almost the exact opposite of what the word makes people picture.

The Temple of Set: Satan as a real god

Not every self-identified Satanist is an atheist. In 1975, dissatisfied with LaVey's symbolic materialism and his commercialization of the Church, a high-ranking member and U.S. Army officer named Michael Aquino broke away and — by his own account, through a ritual invocation — received a new scripture, The Book of Coming Forth by Night, from the Egyptian god Set. His Temple of Set is a genuinely theistic, initiatory order of the Left-Hand Path: it treats Set as a real, non-natural intelligence, and its goal is not the appeasement of that god but the deliberate development of the isolate, immortal self — "Xeper," a becoming. The Temple of Set matters here because it is the clearest real example of a Satanism (broadly defined) that is neither the imaginary murder-cult nor pure atheism, but a small, serious, self-deifying esotericism.

The Satanic Temple: Satan as protest

A third and very different organization, The Satanic Temple (founded 2013, based in Salem), is like the Church of Satan non-theistic — its members do not believe in a literal Satan — but it points its symbolism outward, into politics. It invokes Satan as the Romantic rebel, the Miltonic Adversary who says no to tyranny, and organizes around Seven Fundamental Tenets emphasizing compassion, reason, bodily autonomy, and justice. It is best known for turning the machinery of religious liberty against establishment: when Oklahoma and Arkansas placed Ten Commandments monuments on capitol grounds, the Temple commissioned a bronze Baphomet statue and demanded equal space, exposing the establishment of one religion by insisting on parity for another. It has launched After School Satan clubs to counter evangelical clubs in public schools, and, after the fall of Roe v. Wade, framed a religious abortion ritual and sued under Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, arguing that its members' access to abortion is a protected exercise of religion. In 2019 the U.S. IRS recognized it as a church. It is, in effect, First Amendment activism in devil's clothing — and, to its adherents, a sincere belief system.

The darker fringe

Smaller and darker currents exist too. Luciferianism venerates Lucifer — often as a light-bringer and figure of enlightenment rather than an evil power — and shades into the theistic Left-Hand Path. A scatter of genuinely theistic Satanists worship Satan as a real deity. And at the extreme sit truly dangerous groups such as the neo-Nazi Order of Nine Angles, which has promoted criminal violence, and, historically, the 1960s Process Church of the Final Judgment. These are real and must be named honestly — but they are a tiny minority, wholly unlike the vast conspiracy the panics imagined, and most self-identified Satanists repudiate them.

The believer's lens

To the modern Satanist — LaVeyan or Temple — Satan is the most honest symbol available: the figure Western culture used to demonize everything it feared and forbade, reclaimed as the emblem of exactly those things the reclaimer values. For the LaVeyan, that means the frank affirmation of the self, the body, ambition, and pleasure against a Christian tradition read as life-denying and hypocritical; ritual is a psychodrama that discharges emotion and focuses will, not a petition to a real fiend. For the member of the Satanic Temple, Satan is a moral exemplar — the eternal rebel against arbitrary authority — and Satanism is a lived ethic of reason, empathy, and defense of the vulnerable, expressed through activism. For the Setian, the path is a disciplined labor of self-creation. None of them experiences their religion as evil; each experiences it as a truer, braver alternative to the faith they left. To describe Satanism as its adherents actually hold it is to find, almost everywhere, a philosophy of self-possession — and to see how completely the popular image inverts it.

The skeptical lens

The historian's task here is mostly subtraction — clearing away a fantasy. The accusatory Satanism that has terrified Europe and America for a millennium is, by the overwhelming weight of evidence, a projection: the witches' sabbath was a demonological theory (Chapter 32), the medieval Devil-cult a libel, the 1980s abuse network a moral panic that produced, on Lanning's exhaustive review, no bodies, no forensic evidence, and no verified cult. The real, self-identified Satanisms, by contrast, are exactly what their published texts and founders say: recent, organized, mostly atheistic, and non-violent, with founders, dates, and doctrines all on record. The skeptic's remaining work is narrow and precise — to gauge the real (small) size of the theistic and criminal fringe, to test the Temple's provocations case by case in court, and above all to keep refusing the ancient conflation that made the panics possible: that to bear the name of Satan is to do the harm the name was invented to accuse.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Satanism is, fittingly, a religion of reclaimed and inverted signs — and their true histories are as revealing as the signs themselves.

• The inverted pentagram enclosing a goat's head — the Sigil of Baphomet, emblem of the Church of Satan — encodes the reversal of the spiritual by the carnal: spirit's point turned downward into matter. It is the exact inversion of the upward, spirit-crowned pentacle of Wicca (Chapter 38) — the same star, opposite creeds.
• Baphomet itself, the horned "Sabbatic Goat," is not an ancient demon but the 1856 drawing of the French occultist Éliphas Lévi (of the occult revival, Chapter 37) — a deliberate composite of opposites (male and female, human and animal, the Latin solve et coagula on its arms) meant to symbolize the union of all forces. Its supposed antiquity, and its link to the medieval Templars, are later myths; the Satanic Temple's statue is a knowing modern reuse of a nineteenth-century invention.
• 666, the number of the Beast, is reclaimed from Revelation — where, as Chapter 16 showed, it most likely encoded, by Hebrew gematria, the emperor Nero. And the Black Mass, the imagined inversion of the Catholic Mass, is very largely a literary invention (Huysmans's Là-Bas) with only the squalid La Voisin affair behind it — not a widespread real rite.
• The organizing idea of the theistic wing is the Left-Hand Path — a term borrowed from Tantra (Chapter 24), inverted from its Indian sense, and repurposed to mean the deliberate path of self-deification against dissolution into the divine.

The thread through all of it is deliberate inversion: taking the symbols a dominant religion made terrifying and wearing them on purpose, as protest, philosophy, or provocation.

Connections

The two Satanisms have two entirely separate genealogies. The imagined one descends directly from the fabricated Devil-cult of the witch trials (Chapter 32) and the medieval libels — the same fantasy, recurring. The real one is a modern child of the occult revival (Chapter 37, which gave it Baphomet and the Left-Hand Path), of Enlightenment individualism, of the Romantic re-reading of Milton's Satan as a heroic rebel, and of the modern rejection of religious authority — a new religious movement (Chapter 35) among the others of this age. To treat it, as this book does, with the same calm description as any other tradition is not to endorse it, but to refuse the very confusion that made the panics possible.

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