More about Cimminnee Holt and the definition of “Satanism”

Earlier today, on another blog of mine, I posted Cimminnee Holt and the definition of “Satanism”. Cimminnee Holt, a grad student at Concordia University in Montreal, has written a paper titled Death and Dying in the Satanic Worldview, recently published in the Journal of Religion and Culture, “a peer-reviewed journal published by the graduate students of the Department of Religion at Concordia University.”

She uses the word “Satanism” in the Church of Satan’s sectarian sense, to refer specifically to the Church of Satan’s ideology, rather than as a general term encompassing many other Satanism as well. Why?

Christian-based duotheism vs. evilism vs. “Devil worship”

Thanks to James Nicholson for referring to my article on Christian-based duotheism in his recent post on sectarian Satanism. However, he seems to have misunderstood what I mean by the term “Christian-based duotheism.”

The here-and-now meaning of today’s Satan mythology

Who and what is Satan? The vast majority of the lore we have about Satan comes not from His worshipers, or from others who celebrate Satan, but from His enemies. Hence, in my opinion, the key to understanding today’s mythology about Satan is to ask these questions: (1) Who and what are Satan’s avowed enemies (SAE’s)? (2) What are SAE’s threatened by?

I believe in Satan as a deity. But I do not believe in the literal truth of any myth about any deity. I believe that the true essence of any deity is probably beyond human comprehension, but that there are real spiritual forces/entities that may manifest to us via our myths.. So, what kind of deity would manifest via the Satan myth?

Deities and element correspondences?

In Lilith: Queen of the Desert, Anya Kless says that Lilith is one of the few deities she associates with all four elements.

Personally, I’m inclined to believe that most deities have associations with all four elements — at least if we dig deeply enough into their lore — and that relatively few of them are truly specialized by element.

On being “God-owned”: “spiritual orientation” vs. divine “rape”?

Another post by Anya Kless has called my attention to the following: (1) Fun Facts For the Deity-Owned by Laura Patsouris, Patheos, January 26, 2011, and (2) God-Owned: Humans as Pets by P. Sufenas Virius Lupus, January 26, 2011.

I can relate to the experience of being “God-owned,” although I’ve tended to use different terminology to describe it.

Lilith and Samael, according to Anya Kless

Anya Kless, author of Lilith: Queen of the Desert, has written a very interesting blog post titled Samael: God of the Left Hand. Among other things, she confesses:

I don’t know if I’m ready to say that anyone who works with Satan is actually working with Samael (or one of His faces), but it seems quite possible. Considering the eye-rolling I used to do about Satanism, it’s actually rather ironic that, if the Satanists are right, I’m working with Him. Gods are funny that way.

I am, of course, relieved to see that past-tense “used to.” She also references a website called “Severity of God” (about Samael) by a LaVeyan Satanist who is also an Aztec reconstructionist.

Anyhow, Anya Kless’s post is an interesting compilation of lore about Samael, plus a brief account of some of her own personal spiritual experiences involving Samael.

The Catholic exorcism trend and Italy’s Satanic panic

The recent movie The Rite is loosely based on a (supposedly) nonfiction book that was published two years ago, The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist by Matt Baglio. The book is about an American priest who spent his sabbatical year in Italy training to be an exorcist.

As Laura Miller explains in “Eat your saints, purge your demons,” Salon, March 27, 2009:

Father Gary Thomas, Baglio’s trainee exorcist, half fell into the job; he volunteered when, in 2004, the Vatican asked every Catholic bishop to appoint an official exorcist to his diocese. This startling development can be explained by the fact that for the past decade Italy has been gripped by an intermittent satanic ritual abuse panic similar to the hysteria that swept through the U.S. in the 1980s.

The Devil’s Blood

Some good news for a change:

On August 25, 2010, the Baltimore City Paper published a favorable news story about a musician who is a theistic Satanist: Hail Satan: The devil made Dutch musician SL turn his life around—and forge a strangely moving band by Ian Grey, about “SL,” the “man behind” a Dutch band called the Devil’s Blood.

Reply to Finn (Raoul Bertel)

On my Theistic Satanism blog, Finn wrote:

What would be the considerations of difference between, say, seeking affiliation with the Black Goat Cabal and the Church of Azazel?

The Black Goat Cabal doesn’t really exist anymore. It was the inner circle of people in my Theistic Satanism Yahoo groups, which I ceased running in 2007. On the other hand, I’m now trying to get a local Church of Azazel group off the ground.

More about the Kimberly Simon murder case, featured on “America’s Most Wanted” tomorrow

Below is a copy (minus contact info) of a press release I sent out today regarding a murder case that will be featured on “America’s Most Wanted” tomorrow, for which the currently-suspected perpetrators are a small group of “Satan worshipers.”

On coming out as a theistic Satanist

Sergey Olson posted this comment:

Hi, my name is Sergey and I been looking into theistic Satanism for a year now. I consider myself to be a theistic Satanist, but people I know still see me as a Christian. I am trying to smoothly transfer over without being hard on people. Non the less I want to thank you for providing the Church of Azazel online. I have gathered great information since it feels like I’m the only person who is a theistic Satanist, and its great to meet others. Thank you again.

Suggestion: Would it be possible for you to tell people you’ve left Christianity without telling them you’re a Satanist? This might be easier, at first. Or do you live in the sort of place where, if you tell people you’re not Christian, people assume automatically that you’re a Satanist?

Hank Hanegraaff — an example of fundamentalist/evangelical Christian beliefs about Satan

Today I surfed onto a blog belonging to a fundamentalist/evangelical Christian named Hank Hanegraaff, who runs something called the Christian Research Institute (CRI).

He seems to be, in some ways, one of the more honest and reasonable evangelical Christian public figures. Back in the early 1990′s, CRI published some articles debunking the “Satanic ritual abuse” scare , for which I would like to thank him. Back then, standing up against the SRA scare required quite a bit of courage.

In most other ways, though, I still have to regard him as being very much in the enemy camp, for reasons aptly summed up here on RationalWiki (although, as I’ll detail later, the RationalWiki page contains some inaccuracies).

Anyhow, I would like to call attention to some things he says that are of interest both to Satanists and to Pagan Witches.

Reply to meowmixeater on my theological views

In the general feedback thread, meowmixeater asked me one of the usual questions that Christians commonly ask theistic Satanists: “Do you believe that satan is actually more powerful than God? If so why?”

My answers to that question can be found here:

• Post-Copernican natural theology
• The here-and-now principle in theology
• Theology of the Church of Azazel

If you have further questions, feel free to post them as a comment here.

Some very good news

I’ve been away for a long time — very busy with a new job, among other things.

Some good news: As of this past month, I’ve found a very passionate co-administrator for the budding NYC proto-congregation of the Church of Azazel, and also for New Yorkers Against Religion-Based Bigotry. Hopefully both can now, finally, begin to get off the ground. I cannot launch them all by myself.

Zalbarath’s commentary

Zalbarath has replied here to my previous response to him about the draft of rules for the Theistic Satanism Blog Network.

Punkwolf’s commentary on the tags and the rules

Punkwolf has written a Commentary on the TS Blog Network rules:

For example, it is much easier to keep a debate between Satanists and Christians rational and civil if the link to it appears on a page with a title like “Theistic Satanist interfaith discussion,” so that those theistic Satanists who aren’t prepared to deal with Christians in a friendly manner can easily avoid it.

It’s also for those Satanists who might be prepared to deal civilly with Christians, but who realise that Christians might not be prepared to reciprocate. It would be nice if there was some way to differentiate. The separate tag for the “troll playground” is along the right idea, but a lot of “interfaith discussion” can become hostile without much warning. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any way to weed out the hostile Christians et al. except by relying on their own self-policing, just as the network relies on Satanists (and pagans and occultists) to police themselves and use their better judgement.

Actually, the system will rely on more than just self-policing, especially for people other than Satanists, Pagans, and occultists. Bloggers will be divided into five categories with different levels of access in their use of the network tags. See Sets of people eligible to use particular network tags.

Theistic Satanism Blog Network: more about the draft of rules

Kafele Minkabh, in a blog titled Ave Satana, has written some brief comments about the proposed rules for the Theistic Satanism Blog Network:

I have not read the page in full yet–the document is lengthy and I’ll have to set aside some time in the near future to go through it properly. I have, however, scanned the whole document and read the first few sections carefully.

I look forward to seeing your further comments when you have time to read it in more depth.

Theistic Satanism Blog Network: draft of rules, etc.

Zalbarath says he finds my draft page Theistic Satanism Blog Network: Tag topicality and other rules and guidelines to be more confusing than the rules for my Yahoo groups.

This surprises me. Zalbarath, are you sure that the blog network rules are actually more complicated, or are you just disappointed that they aren’t several orders of magnitude simpler? Offhand, I don’t see any ways that the blog network rules are more complicated than the Yahoo group rules, except that some issues are discussed as gray areas rather than as absolute black-and-white prohibitions.

I would appreciate it very much if you could take another look at the page and tell me specifically what parts you find confusing - and, especially, what parts are more confusing than the corresponding rules for my Yahoo groups. Perhaps there are some specific issues on which the blog network rules need to be clarified or simplified? Or perhaps there are some ways that the page could be organized better?

Theistic Satanism Blog Network

I hope soon to launch a blog network. Once the script is finished, there will be pages on my Theistic Satanism site containing automatically updated lists of recent posts with particular tags on all member blogs, one such page per tag. My script will be able to support blogs hosted on WordPress.com, Google/Blogspot, and LiveJournal. For more information, please see my pages about the Theistic Satanism Blog Network.

The owner of a blog called Ave Satana recently pinged my post on “Taking elements of” older religions and “warping them into something else”. In that blog there is a post titled Satanism as a uniform entity which talks about, among other things, the need to raise the public visibility of theistic Satanism. Hopefully my forthcoming blog network will help to accomplish just that. At the very least, hopefully it will do a better job of this than my Yahoo groups did.

Welcome, Theistic Satanists (and others)

Hi everyone! I’d like to experiment with the idea of using WordPress categories/tags to create a de facto unmoderated forum, as a possible replacement for my Theistic Satanism forums on Yahoo, in the event that I decide to phase out the latter.

For every tag, WordPress.com has a page of all the recent posts on WordPress.com with that tag. So, if a bunch of us regularly use a sufficiently rare tag, that page becomes a defacto forum for all relevant posts by us here on WordPress.com.

Publishing this post with the tag “theistic Satanism” will enable me to find the page for the tag “theistic Satanism.” I’ll then add a comment with a link to that page.

To put a tag on a post the first time, type the tag in the text field under the heading “Categories,” next to the “Add” button, at the top of the side panel of the page where you write a new post, and then click the “Add” button before you publish the post. To add the same tag again to a subsequent post, check the checkbox for that category/tag.

As we can do with the tag “Theistic Satanism,” so some of us can also do with the tags “Black Goat Cabal” and “Church of Azazel.”

To try out another neat feature, let’s experiment with trackback pings. In your post, put a link to this post. (Note: That’s a link to this individual post, NOT to the page for the tag, or to my home page.) Soon afterward, a link back to your post will automatically appear as a comment on my post.