Almost every public conversation about Satanism goes wrong in the first sentence, because the word is doing four jobs. It names something people have been accused of for centuries, something poets admired, something a number of atheists practice, and something a smaller number of believers worship. These have different histories, different texts and, for the most part, different members. This guide separates them.
It is descriptive. The archive holds no brief for or against any of the positions below, and nothing here is instruction.
One: Satanism as accusation
For most of history, Satanism existed only in the minds of people who feared it. Medieval churchmen charged heretical sects with worshipping the Devil at secret gatherings. In the witch trials of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries the charge hardened into a detailed fantasy: the pact signed in blood, the night flight, the assembly at which the Devil was adored and Christian rites were performed backward.
Historians who have worked through the trial records have found no evidence that such gatherings took place. The confessions were produced by leading questions, fear and torture, and they match one another because the interrogators shared a script. The Satanist of this period is a figure invented by his enemies. He is important not because he existed but because the image, once created, was available for anyone to step into later.
Two: the literary Satan
The second Satanism is a matter of reading. In 1667 an English epic poem retold the fall of the rebel angels and, whatever its author intended, gave the Devil the best speeches. Its Satan is proud, eloquent, wounded and unbowed, and he would rather rule in ruin than serve in paradise.
Readers of the Romantic generation took this figure as a hero. For them Satan stood for the individual against tyranny, for desire against repression and for the refusal to kneel. Later in the nineteenth century, poets and novelists of the decadent movement used the same figure to flaunt their distance from respectable society. None of this was religion. It was a symbolic vocabulary: a way of taking the side of the accused.
The library's Inverted Catechism, a privately printed pamphlet of 1902, is a characteristic specimen. It asks the questions of a child's religious primer and returns the answers of a rebel, and it worships nothing.
Three: rationalist Satanism
Organized, above-ground Satanism dates only from the 1960s, and its largest branch does not believe in the Devil.
In rationalist Satanism, sometimes called atheistic or symbolic, Satan is not a being. He is an emblem, drawn from the literary tradition just described, of qualities the movement values: pride, skepticism, independence, the enjoyment of bodily life. There is no supernatural realm and no afterlife. The human animal is the measure, and the proper object of reverence is oneself.
- View of Satan
- A symbol of the self-directed individual. Not a deity, not a spirit, not prayed to.
- View of ritual
- Deliberate theater. Ceremonies are described as psychodrama: staged events that use costume, sound and symbolism to release emotion and focus intention, with no claim that anything supernatural occurs.
- Ethics
- Individualist. The characteristic texts stress self-reliance, responsibility for one's own choices and reciprocity, and they forbid harm to children and animals.
- Relation to belief
- Hostile to faith as such, including faith in the Devil.
Later groups in this family keep the symbolic Satan and attach him to different commitments, some stressing personal achievement and others secular activism and the separation of religion from government. They disagree with one another vigorously, in the manner of all small movements.
Four: theistic Satanism
The fourth sense is the one most people assume to be the only one, and it is the least common. Theistic or esoteric Satanists hold that Satan, under that name or another, is real: a god, a spirit or a force with whom a relationship is possible.
Beyond that there is little uniformity. Some understand their deity as the bringer of knowledge and self-awareness, the liberator rather than the tempter. Some draw on older mythologies and regard the biblical Devil as a late and distorted mask. Many prefer a different name altogether. These currents overlap with the wider territory of the left-hand path, which has its own entry. Groups are small, informal and frequently short-lived, and much practice is solitary.
The Satanic panic
Between roughly 1980 and the mid 1990s, several countries were gripped by the belief that a hidden network of Satanists was abusing and murdering children in organized rituals. The claims spread through memoirs, talk shows, training seminars for police and social workers, and a form of therapy that set out to recover buried memories. Lengthy prosecutions followed.
When the allegations were examined, by courts, by official inquiries and by law-enforcement specialists, the result was consistent. No network was found. No physical evidence of the ritual crimes described was ever produced. The testimony had been shaped by suggestive interviewing of children and by therapeutic techniques later shown to create false memories.
The panic of the 1980s reproduced the witch trials almost point for point, down to the script shared by the interrogators.
The episode matters for two reasons. It destroyed innocent lives. And it reproduced the first Satanism, the accusation, almost point for point, three centuries after the witch trials and with the same structure: a shared script, authorities who believed it, and witnesses led toward it. Anyone inclined to think that such things belong to a credulous past should study it closely.
Symbols
Two images appear across all four senses and are routinely misread.
The inverted pentagram is a five-pointed star with a single point downward. The pentagram itself is an ancient figure with many uses; the claim that the inverted form signifies evil was made by an occult writer in the 1850s and adopted, a century later, by people happy to accept the label.
The goat-headed figure, winged, seated and pointing up and down, is usually called Baphomet. Its familiar form comes from an occult illustration of the same decade, where it was intended as an emblem of the reconciliation of opposites. Its use as a Satanic image is a twentieth-century development.
How to use this guide
When Satanism is mentioned, in a news report or a conversation, ask which of the four is meant.
- If the claim is about secret crimes and hidden networks, it is the first: an accusation, to be tested like any other and treated with the caution its record deserves.
- If the subject is a poem, a painting or a provocation, it is the second.
- If it is an organization with a public address and a published philosophy, it is almost certainly the third.
- If it concerns personal devotion to an adversarial deity, it is the fourth.
The four have very little in common except a name, and that name was chosen, in every case, by someone looking for the most frightening word available.