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?

In the “Methodology” section of her paper, beginning on page 39, she writes:

There are scarce academic sources for reference on the CoS, and the few existing scholarly works are surface studies based on Satanic Literature, Internet research, and pan-Satanism sources (Lewis 2001, Petersen in Lewis and Petersen 2005). The Church of Satan website, commenting on James R. Lewis’ efforts at Internet research for a “Census of Satanism”, states that, “we think it worthwhile that true Satanists should steer clear” as Lewis involves other groups that self-identity as Satanists that are unrecognized by the Church of Satan (Church of Satan, Pages/News 44, 2010).

Holt doesn’t come right out and say this, but it seems to me that one of her reasons for adopting the Church of Satan’s sectarian terminology is simply that she has no choice but to submit to the Church of Satan’s arm-twisting on this issue, so that she can continue her research on the CoS.

It will be interesting to see if, when she is done researching the CoS, she eventually moves on to studying other forms of Satanism. Hopefully she’ll change her terminology, at that point, to be more in line with the terminology of other new-religion scholars who have studied Satanism.

Anyhow, she then writes:

There are a number of these disparate groups that self-identity as Satanists. The great majority of these factions are theistic Satanists, that is, they believe in the existence of a spiritual Satanic entity. As such, they are diametrically opposed to the atheistic stance of the Church of Satan, which views Satan as a symbol and as a metaphor for how they see themselves. As far as my research has ascertained, theistic Satanists are primarily (although not exclusively) active on the Internet, as opposed to physical assembly, have several unorganized divisions with multiple nuances of how the entity of Satan is perceived and understood, and have ephemeral philosophies that are influenced by the writings of Anton Szandor LaVey and other occult authors (Lewis 2001, xiv).

The above is quite out-of-date.

First, some forms of theistic Satanism have been around — and publicly visible — long enough that their philosophies should no longer be considered “ephemeral.” One of the oldest of these is Demonolatry, which as been on the web on-and-off since the late 1990′s and also includes groups that hold in-person meetings. For links to information about Demonolatry and some other forms of theistic Satanism that have been around for a while, see The varieties of theistic (“traditional”) Satanism and Other theistic or theistic-friendly Satanism/”LHP” websites.

As for theistic Satanists being “primarily (although not exclusively) active on the Internet, as opposed to physical assembly,” the Church of Satan does not hold in-person meetings very often either. They periodically disband, then revive, then disband again, a system of local “grottos.” Even during their most active phases, they almost never hold any meetings open to the general public — unlike my own group New York City Satanists, Luciferians, Dark Pagans, and LHP Occultists, which has held regular almost-monthly meetings welcoming Satanists, etc., of all law-abiding kinds, since 2004.

Cimminnee Holt also writes:

Scholars of New Religions Movements (such as James R. Lewis), as well as theistic Satanists, have tended to refer to the Church of Satan as LaVeyan Satanism to distinguish it from theistic Satanism (2001, xiii-xiv).

Note, here, that she does acknowledge that most new-religions scholars who have studied Satanism use the word “Satanism” in a more general sense than she is using it.

It is, however, significant to note that members of the Church of Satan do not self-identify as LaVeyan Satanists but simply as Satanists. Since the Church of Satan was the first organized Satanic religion, founded and based on the book The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey (first published in 1969), the members of the Church deride the need to use labels applied by external social scientific categories or their theistic Satanic detractors (Gilmore in Shankbone 2007).

Current High Priest of the Church of Satan, Peter H. Gilmore, explains, “We don’t think [theistic Satanists] are Satanists. They are devil worshippers, as far as I’m concerned” (Quoted in Shankbone 2007). Perhaps more delicately phrased, the Church of Satan concludes that since they were first to codify Satanism as a religion, they hold the rights to the moniker of Satanist and the strong symbolism and responsibilities attached to the label.

The fact remains that Anton LaVey and the CoS did not coin the word “Satanism,” which was in dictionaries long before the CoS came along. Thus, using the word “Satanism” to refer exclusively to the CoS worldview makes even less sense than using the word “Christianity” to refer exclusively to the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, excluding Protestants.

Later in the “Methodology” section, Holt talks about the long process she had to go through in order to gain the trust of some high-ranking CoS members.

There’s also a news story about her research on the Concordia University website, Sympathy for the devil? by Beth Lewi, May 30, 2011. Holt is paraphrased as saying:

When some people learn the subject of her research, says Holt, “there’s this immediate, quickly hidden alarm on their faces. I find that fascinating: that even in our secular society, where we tend to say we don’t believe in the devil, even the mention of the word creates tension.”

This alarm arises from the public’s confusion between members of the Church of Satan and those theistic Satanists who do worship the devil.

That last sentence is a vast oversimplification, albeit congruent with the way the Church of Satan folks typically scapegoat “Devil worshipers.”

For people who don’t believe in a Devil, the alarm arises primarily from Satanism’s criminal fringe, plus the long-debunked urban legends of the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” scare of 1980-1995, still kept alive by conspiracy theorists.

As far as I can tell, most theistic Satanists are not violent criminals. Conversely, most criminals-in-the-name-of-Satan, e.g. the kids who deface churches, are not serious worshipers of Satan. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, the church-defacers often don’t even know enough about Satanism to know that a Satanic pentagram points down, not up.

Yet, as just one more of their many ways of being exceeding sectarian, the Church of Satan folks typically encourage the conflation of “Devil worship” with Satanism’s criminal fringe. Even some theistic Satanists go along with this, semantically distinguishing themselves from “Devil worshipers” too. (See my page titled Devil worshipers: Satanism’s scapegoats?.) But the Church of Satan classifies all theistic Satanists as “Devil worshipers,” and their leaders seem all too happy to scapegoat us all as alleged criminals and crazies.

Be that as it may, it is likely that Holt’s acceptance of the Church of Satan’s definition of “Satanism” will continue to be an anomaly among religion scholars. After all, as Per Faxneld told me during one of his visits to New York City, theistic forms of Satanism are likely to be more interesting to religion scholars than the CoS worldview.

But we theistic Satanists shouldn’t take this for granted. We need to prove to the academic world that we exist in sufficiently large numbers to be worth studying. So, if you are a theistic Satanist who does not want the CoS to succeed in their attempts to monopolize the definition of “Satanism,” please respond ASAP to James Lewis’s current survey.

First, thanks to the author for linking to a page on my Theistic Satanism website. Alas he also linked to, as an alleged authoritative source, a page about “The History of Satanism” on the website of the Satanic Kindred Organization. That page contains some serious errors which are echoed in the God Discussion post.

The Satanic Kindred “History of Satanism” page says:

Some Satanic cults are alleged to be involved in drug, prostitution and pornography trade and to have real estate holdings. Members are said to include white-collar professionals. These do not pertain to the modern day Satanists(LaVeyan)

Michelle Remembers (1980), by Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder, M.D., recounts the terrors Smith experienced as a child of five in Satanic rituals in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1954-55. She said her mother yielded her to devil worshipers, who used her as a living pointer in rituals. She witnessed the ritual killings of animals and infants and was shut in coffins that were put into graves and into which were thrown dead animals. She also watched the cult members attempt to bring life to a white statue of a man with horns. She said she was tricked into defacating on the cross and was asked to renounce the christian god. Smith descibes instances in which during the rituals, she witnessed the devil emerge from the fire, a man animal with a whipping, snake-like tail that struck her on the neck and seared her flesh. Fire shot from his finger tips and filled his mouth. He had clawlike hands, steaming nostrils and odd toenails. His shape constantly changed, and he appeared to be apart of the fire. Smith was able to purge her memories in psychiatric therapy at age 28.

The Satanic Kindred page doesn’t mention that the book Michelle Remembers, which launched the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” scare of 1980 to 1995, has been definitively debunked as being, at best, a collection of false memories — if not an outright hoax. (See the Wikipedia article on Michelle Remembers. See also “Satanism” scares and their debunking – a brief introduction on my website Against Satanic Panics.)

The Satanic Kindred page goes on to say:

Perhaps most dangerous of all are small cults whose members call themselves Satanists and practise ritual murder and animal mutilation. Such groups are said to kidnap runaway children and the homeless and use them as sacrificial victims.

Such cults were alleged to be commonplace in the 1980′s, and were a common feature of the highly questionable “recovered memories” that were faddish back then. However, in real life, only one cult even remotely resembling this description has ever been found and prosecuted: the drug gang led by Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo.

The Satanic Kindred page then says:

Ex-Satanic cult members have reported gruesome rituals in which hearts are cut out of living victims. Others report that victims are sexually abused before being killed; then their blood is drunk and their flesh is eaten. Women “breeders” produce babies for the “ultimate” and “ideal” human sacrifice. Former breeders report witnessing their babies being skinned alive, eaten, burned, poured in concrete and cut up and thrown in the ocean. Ritual tools are made from their bones.

These are classic “Satanic Ritual Abuse” allegations, most of which have long since been discredited and have never been substantiated. (See various pages listed in my collection of links about The “Satanic Ritual Abuse” scare of the 1980′s and early 1990′s on my website Against Satanic Panics.)

The Satanic Kindred page then talks about the infamous Bakersfield cases:

n 1985 a ten year old boy in Bakersfield, Califonia, said that he and about two dozen other children were taken to a bad church by some 40 adults, who took off their clothes while chanting prayers to Satan. The children were forced to throw knives at a living baby, which was killed and dissmembered. The children were then forced to drink its blood. Then the boy said that the adults molested the children.

The Satanic Kindred page fails to mention that 34 convictions were overturned on appeal. (See the Wikipedia article about the Kern County child abuse cases.)

Then, finally, the Satanic Kindred page gets around to the following very brief note of mild skepticism, buried in the middle of a paragraph:

Similar cases were reported throughout California, but the authorities found little evidence to support the claims.

Nowhere does the Satanic Kindred page put these allegations into historical context. In reality, the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” scare was a full-fledged witch hunt that ruined the lives of thousands of probaly-innocent people.

Instead of any further skepticism, that paragraph ends with:

In 1987 a report issued by the Alberta Royal Canadian Mounted Police suggested that Satanism might be related to unsolved cases of missing children. Satanists where also believed to be responsable for some grave desecrations and robbings.

The Satanic Kindred page never mentions the 1989 report by FBI special agent Kenneth Lanning, who concluded that the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” scare was almost entirely nonsense.

The Satanic Kindred page then presents, without any hint of skepticism, the claims of Maury Terry:

Author Maury Terry, in the Ultimate Evil (1987), asserts that David Berkowitz, the convicted “Son of Sam” killer who terrorized New York neighborhoodsin the late 1970′s, was a member of a Satanic cult that operates in Westchester County and planned the Son of Sam murders. Terry states the cult is linked to a network of cults across the country, with a primary headquarters near Los Angeles, and that Charles Manson may have been involved with it. The cult is reportedly an offshoot of a Satanic group in England.

Maury Terry’s The Ultimate Evil is well known to have been trash journalism. I bought that book many years ago and stopped reading when I got to the list of alleged Satanic holidays. Supposedly it was significant that a lot of the murders committed by various serial killers occurred within a few days of a Satanic holiday. But there were so many alleged “Satanic holidays” that almost every day on the calendar was within a few days of a “Satanic holiday.”

The Satanic Kindred page echoes “Satanic Ritual Abuse” scare claims without any attempt to debunk them. Instead of debunking them, the Satanic Kindred page’s sole concern is to classify these alleged crimes as “Devil Worship” and, thereby, to absolve LaVeyan Satanists and Setians:

LaVeyan Satanists, Neo-pagan Witches and neo-pagans are wrongly blamed for devil worship activities. Several organizations carry on public relations and education programs for the media and members of the law-enforcement community to counteract such accusations

Satanic religious organizations, such as the Church of Satan and Temple of Set, DO NOT condone the violent blood sacfifices of the cults and are not associated with them in any way. According to Aquino, the Temple of Set emphasizes “rational self interest” and taking responsibility for one’s own intellectual and ethical decisions.

The Satanic Kindred’s “History of Satanism” page also contains, without any note of skepticism, various other questionable historical claims, such as Anton LaVey’s claim to have participated in the filming of Rosemary’s Baby. But I’m not nearly as concerned about those as I am about the Satanic Kindred’s endorsement of long-debunked “Satanic Ritual Abuse” claims.

It is vitally important that Satanists not endorse such claims. When Satanists – of all people! – repeat such claims without debunking them, it gives the claims undeserved credibility in the eyes of the general public, because a Satanist’s endorsement of such claims will be seen as an admission that goes against our natural bias.

Anyhow, the God Discussion page echoes the Satanic Kindred page as follows:

There is a tendency for Theistic Satanists who come to the open on internet to present a refined form of practice. There is, however, evidence that some of the small and clandestine Theistic Satanic groups are indeed dangerous and often include extreme personalities such as race supremacists, criminally inclined and deviant individuals. Some of these groups practice ritual murder, animal sacrifices and mutilation and some kidnap runaway children and homeless people for their rituals. LaVeyan Church of Satan members do not refer to such groups as Satanists but as Devil Worshipers. There are police documented cases of Devil Worship activity in California. The best example being that of a ten year old boy who, in 1985, in Bakersfield, California, reported to the police that he and other children were kidnapped by Satanists and subjected to gory rituals. Similarly in 1987, Canadian Police had reasons to believe that Satanists might have been involved in a series of unsolved cases of missing children. Ex-Satanic cult members have reported extreme rituals to the police in the past.

Alas it is true that there are some people who commit violent crimes in the name of Satan — and they can’t all be accurately characterized as “Devil worshipers,” as I have discussed at length elsewhere. But the specific allegations referred to in the above paragraph have long since been debunked.

By “Christian-based duotheism,” I mean a form of theistic Satanism which accepts the basic theological/metaphysical framework of traditional Christianity. The Christian God is believed to be the ultimate God and creator of the universe, and Satan is believed to be a “fallen angel” — albeit (and here’s the only major difference from Christian theology/metaphysics) a “fallen angel” with the ability to raise Himself to the level of God and everntually overpower God.

James Nicholson uses the term “Christian-based duotheist” to refer to something else: those who, without irony, “feel Satanism is to be the ultimate Evil, in congruence with the Christian philosophy of the Devil.”

These are distinct concepts. Note that I defined “Christian-based duotheism” in terms of metaphysics, not in terms of morality.

For those who see themselves and/or Satan as “ultimate Evil,” and who advocate what they themselves regard as “Evil,” without irony, a better label might be “evilist.”

Many of the Christian-based duotheists I’ve run into are not evilists. On the contrary, many of them see Satan as a heroic rebel against the Christian God, whom they see as an evil tyrant.

On the other hand, evilists do not necessarily believe in a Christian-based metaphysical/theological framework. Some do, others don’t. For example, some evilists are inspired by the “Order of the Nine Angles” writings, which taught a metaphysics very different from Christian beliefs. Other evilists believe in an “anti-cosmic” Gnostic-based paradigm, in which the Christian God is only one manifestation of the “Demiurge” — NOT the ultimate God. (But I should also point out here that not everyone with an “anti-cosmic” Gnostic-based paradigm is an evilist.)

Many Satanists have referred to evilists as “Devil worshipers.” But that’s neither accurate nor a good idea, for the following reasons:

1) Evilists are not necessarily even theistic, let alone “worshipers” of any deity. The “Order of the Nine Angles” writings, though theistic, were as scornful of the idea of “worship” as any LaVeyan.

2) More importantly, no matter what we say, the term “Devil worshiper” will always be a synonym for “Satanist” (and especially a synonym for “theistic Satanist”) in the eyes of the general public. Hence it is not in our best interests to collaborate in besmirching the term “Devil worshiper.”

It is as if a gay rights activist were to respond to slanders against gays by making a distinction between “gays” and “faggots,” saying things like, “gays don’t molest kids, only faggots do.” I hope it’s obvious why that would not be a smart strategy. For the exact same reason, it’s not a good idea for Satanists — especially theistic Satanists — to vilify “Devil worshipers.” For more about this issue, see my page titled Devil worshipers: Satanism’s scapegoats?.

Although a few evilists are articulate adults (albeit with an inherently paradoxical worldview — see Elliot Rose on the absurdity of “Evil” as a principle), most evilists are probably what I call “black circle boys” in my article on Satan and “Evil” in Christianity (and Satanism). It is hard to know what “black circle boys” believe, if anything, because they tend to be uninterested in discussing philosophy. Mostly, they are just troubled teenagers acting out.

I think it’s significant that almost all the few articulate adult evilists I’ve heard of, starting with the “Order of the Nine Angles” writings, are/were in Europe — as also were the two best-known instances of actual crime on the part of teenage Satanic-themed metalheads (the Norwegian “Black Metal Circle” and the Italian “Beasts of Satan”).

Here in the U.S.A., especially in those parts of the U.S.A. that are dominated by fundamentalist/evangelical Christians, the moral obtuseness of many of those Christians who promote belief in a Devil is immediately apparent. It is therefore immediately obvious that a lot of the things Christians traditionally associate with Satan aren’t really evil — a fact popularly satirized, a generation ago, by the Church Lady on Saturday Night Live. Hence it seems to me that religious Satanism — which, for the most part, is not evilist — has more of a social and cultural basis here in the U.S.A. than it has in Europe.

In most European countries, Christianity — though still supported by governments to some extent — has been very much on the decline over the past few generations. Even in Europe, the more fanatical forms of Christianity are nevertheless on the rise, but they are still small compared to their counterparts here in the U.S.A. Hence, most Europeans simply never encounter the true practical significance of Christian Devil-beliefs. And I would guess that, for that reason, it might be at least a little bit harder for Europeans to relate to the idea of theistic Satanism apart from evilism.

(However, there are non-evilist theistic Satanists in Europe too; my point here certainly isn’t to stigmatize all European theistic Satanists as evilist.)

You asked: “Why reconstruct an “Old Religion” this way, rather than just going back to the records of actual old religions? Other forms of neo-Paganism, e.g. Asatru and neo-Druidism, which do base themselves more on what’s known about actual ancient religions, are far less likely than Wicca to be confused with Satanism by outsiders. Why do Wiccans insist on using words like “witch” and “coven” when they could easily use other, more respectable-sounding words?”

But your question is rhetorical – you answer it a little later: “…at least some of them are using words and images popularly associated with Satanism as a way to attract attention, and/or because they themselves enjoy feeling naughty” – and you are absolutely right about that! – in my opinion, based on my experience. I’ll be more specific however – some Wiccan witches want to believe they have magical powers, and very much want OTHER PEOPLE to believe that being a Wiccan witch means they have magical powers. They don’t, of course…no one does. There is no divine/supernatural causation.

“Wicca is not “the Old Religion”…” – true.
“Much of Wicca’s self-image is based on the Paganized re-interpretation of alleged Devil-worship, rather than on actual ancient religion” – true.
“Much of Wicca’s terminology and imagery, e.g. the words “witch”, “coven”, and “sabbat”, are used because of the Wiccan myth that Wicca is the survival of an underground medieval religion that was the target of the witchhunts. (Regardless of the linguistic origin of the words themselves, this constellation of terms comes from the witchhunts.)” – true.

“The related idea that modern Wiccans too are in continual danger of being confused with Satanists is at least partly a self-fulfilling prophecy” – true.

“Far fewer people would confuse modern Wicca with Satanism if Wicca didn’t use so many witchhunt-derived words and other trappings popularly associated with diabolical witchcraft” – absolutely true, and I’ve been saying the same thing since 1978 or so.

“My point here is not that Wiccans shouldn’t use the words “witch”, “coven”, and “sabbat”. My point is that if they do use these and other diabolical-witchcraft trappings, they should accept responsibility for the consequences. For example, when explaining that Wicca Is Not Satanism, they should acknowledge the main real reason for the confusion: that modern Wiccans have chosen to identify with the victims of European witchhunts and have chosen their terminology accordingly. Wiccans certainly should not blame Satanists for Wicca’s own public-relations difficulties, as some Wiccans do” – yes, yes, yes, that’s all true.
—————————-

“Many Pagan Witches have said, in their “We’re not Satanists” disclaimers, that Satanists are “Christians” or “Christian heretics.” The point is that the idea of Satan is derived from Christianity (and Judaism), whereas Neo-Paganism aims to revive more ancient religious concepts”.

No, that’s not the point.
I’ll ‘fess up here…I’ve made these kinds of statements “that Satanists are “Christians” or “Christian heretics”, or that “you have to be a Christian to be a Satanist” – many times since 1976 – in personal conversation & correspondence, on television, on radio and in print. What you consider to be “the point” of saying those things, might be true for Bonewitz or others, but that’s not the point for me.

“Calling Satanists “Christians” or “Christian heretics” is an insult to both Satanists and Christians” – that’s getting closer to the point, but I still suspect you don’t really “get it”. And, I certainly have no wish to “insult” MOST persons who call themselves “Satanists”, nor MOST persons who call themselves Christians.

“…nor am I willing to engage in private email discussion or debate about the topics discussed on my website or blogs”

What a shame.

If I don’t “get it,” would you care to explain?

As for private discussion, after we get to know each other a bit via public correspondence, perhaps we can exchange phone numbers. But I need to limit my private interaction with people I don’t know. When I do have private interaction, I usually prefer phone to email.

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?

To some people, the key to understanding a myth is to trace its most ancient roots, as far back as they are known. I think this effort is worthwhile as a way to gain perspective, but is not the ultimate key to a myth’s meaning in today’s world. I believe that the relationship between humans and the spirit world can change over time. Hence, toward any effort to understand the spiritual forces at work in today’s world, today’s myths are more relevant than ancient myths.

My approach to understanding any myth assumes the philosophical premises outlined in the following articles: Post-Copernican natural theology and The here-and-now principle in theology.

So, who and what is Satan? As I said, in my opinion, the key to understanding the Satan myth is to ask these questions: Who and what are Satan’s avowed enemies (SAE’s)? And what are SAE’s threatened by?

Satan’s avowed enemies (SAE’s) are a subset of believers in the Abrahamic religions. By “Satan’s avowed enemies,” I mean only those Abrahamics who actively promote belief in a Devil, seen as the source of all evil.

Christians and Muslims can be divided into three categories regarding belief in a Devil: (1) those who believe in and promote belief in a Devil, (2) those who believe in a Devil, but for whom that belief is not important, and (3) those who do not believe in a Devil. SAE’s are people in the first category only. A person cannot be an avowed enemy of someone or something whose existence one does not believe in or care about.

So, who and what are SAE’s, and what are they threatened by?

Overwhelmingly, SAE’s tend to be the more traditionalist, fundamentalist, and/or fanatical Christians and Muslims, followers of a self-described (in the case of Christianity) “narrow way.” They feel threatened by all other religions — even other branches of their own religion. They feel threatened by atheists. Many of them feel threatened by modern science, especially the theory of evolution. They feel threatened by the social freedoms of the modern world, such women’s rights, gay rights, and the growing freedoms of all manner of gender nonconformists. Many of them are prone to paranoia about many other aspects of modern culture too, e.g. rock music, role-playing games, and the Harry Potter books.

In short, they are threatened by just about everything outside their own narrow little box. Traditionally, the Devil is lumped with both “the world” and “the flesh” — in other words, just about everything, both outside themselves and within themselves, that doesn’t conform to their dogma.

So, what kind of deity would manifest via the Satan myth? A deity who “tempts” people to question the SAE’s concepts of “Evil.” More generally, a deity who invites people to step outside their own little boxes and to face down their own fears (whether SAE-induced or otherwise). A deity who invites us to explore all things hidden and forbidden, including both our own true selves and the world outside whatever enclave we were brought up in.

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.

Many modern Pagans have a tendency, inherited from ceremonial magick (via Wicca), to pigeonhole almost all deities by element. Some Pagan Reconstructionists have criticized this tendency as a superficial oversimplification, as failing to appreciate the multi-faceted personalities of the Gods. I’m inclined to agree with that criticism.

Some gods really do seem to have a strong preponderance of one of the four elements. An example is Hephaestus, God of metalworking. Clearly He is associated primarily with fire. Another example is Hermes, who, as the God of communication and travel, is associated primarily with air.

But consider Prometheus. In the best-known myth about Prometheus, He steals fire from heaven and teaches humans to use it. Hence He is commonly associated with fire. But Prometheus’s name means “fore-thought” — the opposite of the impetuosity we normally associate with fire. And, in Prometheus Bound by Aeschlylus, Prometheus is described as having taught humans “all the arts” (i.e. all technologies) — not just those arts that directly involve fire. “The arts” in general require knowledge (air) and practical skill and discipline (earth). Insofar as there is any creativity involved, “the arts” also require intuition (water). There are also myths of Prometheus being an omniscient seer who refuses to tell the future but gives people hope instead, inspiring people to do the best they can to make the future as good as it can be. That myth isn’t easily classifiable by element, although, if you absolutely had to squeeze it into just one element, I suppose it would be air.

Prometheus is one of my primary deities, and, in my personal experience, I strongly associate Prometheus with all four elements.

Consider also Athena. As the Goddess of (among other things) wisdom, She is often associated with air. But She is also a Goddess of various crafts, such as pottery (which literally involves earth and fire), shipbuilding (water), weaving, leatherwork, and shoe-making. She is said to have introduced the plough (earth) and animal-taming. Much of Her wisdom is of a practical nature (earth). She is the Goddess of civilization, which exists primarily for practical economic reasons. She is also a Goddess of war (fire), especially military strategy, which is very multi-faceted, requiring knoweldge (air) of terrain (earth) and the psychology (water) of both your own and the enemy’s troops.

Consider also Hestia. As the Goddess of the hearth, She is often associated with fire. But She is also the Goddess of domesticity in general, which involves a lot more than just fire. Food preparation, for example, often involves water as well as fire. For those who believe in astrology, domesticity is associated with the fourth house, which corresponds to the sign of Cancer, a water sign. Hestia is also associated with stillness and stability (earth) — pretty much the opposite of “fiery.” So Hestia has strong associations with at least three of the four elements: fire, water, and earth. (She even has at least a minor association with air, insofar as the domestic arts, such as cooking, do require know-how.)

Even Hermes and Hephaestus have at least minor associations with other elements besides their primary element. For example, metalworking requires not just fire but also know-how (air) and metal ores extracted from the Earth. Hermes was associated with the domestication of animals, which involves all four elements. However, in the case of Hermes and Hephaestus, there is at least a very strong predominance of one of the four elements. Not so in the case of Prometheus, Athena, or Hestia, in my opinion.

Outside the Greek pantheon, one obviously very multi-faceted Goddess is Ishtar, said to be the Queen of Heaven and Earth, Goddess of love, Goddess of war, and a fertility Goddess, among other things. Clearly She can be associated with all four elements, although this page on a Pagan site pigeonholes Her as “Air” for whatever strange reason.

More generally, it seems to me that gods with a strong specialization in just one of the four elements are the exception rather than the rule. On this point I disagree with many Pagans, especially many Wicca-based and other ceremonial magick-based Pagans.

The ritual practices of many occultists and Wicca-based Pagans require that deities be pigeonholed by element, to determine altar placement and the direction one faces during the ritual.

I too associate directions with elements. But, with most deities, instead of pigeonholing the deities themselves, I think it would be more respectful to use the elements to symbolize different aspects of a given deity.

Many deities do have multiple names and epithets, some of which may be more element-specific than the totality of the deity’s character. Such names can be taken as representing element-specific aspects of that particular deity. Finding out these names/epithets/aspects in the first place may require quite a bit of digging into the lore, but I think this is necessary if one is going to interact with one’s deities in an element-specific way while still treating Them with respect as multi-faceted Beings.

In ritual, I would then suggest facing whichever direction corresponds to the element most relevant to the purpose of the ritual, but also, at some point during the ritual, turning to face the other directions and acknowledge other aspects of the deity one has called upon.

That’s what I do with Satan/Azazel. I strongly associate Satan/Azazel with all four elements while using other names to refer to His element-specific aspects: Leviathan or Ancient Serpent for water, Iblis for fire, Lucifer-Azazel for air, and Belial for earth.

Anyhow, I certainly agree with Anya Kless that Lilith can be associated with all four elements.

If such a group were to perform a public or semi-public ritual, what kind of ritual format would be appropriate?

One type of ritual that some people I know have done, and which might be fine for some people in some contexts but would clearly not be appropriate for a group like Lilith’s Tribe, is a standard Wiccan-style ritual with Lilith and Samael plugged into the standard Wiccan-style Goddess-and-God format.

Problem: Too many Lilith devotees are wary of Samael for one reason or another. Quite apart from the folks who are just freaked out by anything having anything to do with Satan or Satanism, there are other issues at stake here.

Even Anya Kless, who does work with Samael, gives a bunch of warnings about Samael in her blog post Samael: God of the Left Hand. Her warnings conclude with the advice that seekers work with Lilith first and then “Allow Lilith to introduce you” to Samael. “Go slow with Him,” Anya says. So I would guess that, even in Anya’s paradigm, a group ritual involving Samael would be appropriate only at a private gathering of people who know each other reasonably well, and who have all been introduced to Samael by Lilith already. (Anya, is that correct?)

Even some theistic Satanists are wary of Samael, due to the ambiguity over whether Samael is a servant or an opponent of Yahweh. I discussed my own thoughts about Samael in my blog post on Lilith and Samael, according to Anya Kless.

And, of course, a ritual featuring any male deity wouldn’t go over well with those people who are specifically Goddess-oriented.

So then, what kind of ritual format would be suitable for a group like Lilith’s Tribe?

Something like a “darker” version of the typical Dianic Wiccan Goddess-only ritual format might be suitable for many, if not all, Lilith devotees. If done by a group like Lilith’s Tribe, such a ritual would include participants of all genders but not any male deities. The Dianic Wiccan ritual format is in the family of ceremonial magick-based ritual formats that are used by the majority of people in the Pagan/occult scene, and by most theistic Satanists too, as far as I can tell.

But not all Pagans use a ceremonial magick-based ritual format. Reconstructionist and Reconstructionist-based Pagans generally don’t. Then again, I would not have expected a Reconstructionist-based Pagans to revere Lilith — given that, as far as I can tell, even Lilith’s Babylonian form Lilitu was NOT revered as a Goddess.

But it turns out that Anya Kless, author of Lilith, Queen of the Desert, is a Reconstructionist-derived Pagan — of a relatively eclectic kind, obviously. (Pagan Reconstructionissts aim to revive some particular extinct religion of some ancient pre-Christian culture, typically confining themselves to just one ancient culture and just one pantheon. Anya is an adherent of the Reconstructionist-derived (but not strictly Reconstructionist) Northern Tradition, in which, according to Raven Kaldera, “it is fine to work with non-Northern deities in one’s own private practice, or belong to non-Northern-Tradition religious groups, unlike some reconstructionist groups who encourage theological separatism.”)

Since Reconstructionists and Reconstructionist-derived Pagans typically have ritual formats very different from the ceremonial magick-based formats common among most of today’s Pagans and occultists, it will be very interesting to see what kind of ritual format is recommended in Lilith: Queen of the Desert.

It’s possible that there just isn’t any ritual format suitable for a group like Lilith’s Tribe, because Lilith devotees are just too diverse. Currently, Lilith’s Tribe does not do any rituals but just holds discussion meetings. It remains to be seen whether that’s how it will always be.

Nevertheless, even today it is still possible to make progress in counteracting specific prejudices, if one is willing to be persistent about it.

Here’s a brief history of some of my major successes and failures at challenging people’s prejudices over the past few decades:

• Gay rights activism, late 1970′s and early 1980′s
• Challenging Pagan anti-Satanist attitudes, early-to-mid 1990′s
• Two very passive-aggressive Pagan bigots, mid-1990′s
• Clash with Pagan Educational Network, 2003
• NYC Pagan Pride festival: 2004, 2005, and 2006
• NYC Pagan Pride festival, 2008: the nadir
• NYC Pagan Pride festival: 2009 and 2010

Gay rights activism, late 1970′s and early 1980′s

When I was in college back in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s, I was a gay righta activist — long before the gay rights movement became fashionable. Back then, blatant homophobia was still commonplace even among educated people. Nevertheless, challenging homophobia was easy and fun. Most people weren’t so closed-minded as to be unwilling to dialogue with me about their prejudices.

Whenever someone made an anti-gay remark in my vicinity, I responded by asking, “What, exactly, do you think is wrong with homosexuality?” Usually the person replied, “It’s abnormal!” or “It’s perverted!” or “It’s sick!” — or some other word which essentially means “unusual in a bad way.” To which I replied, “That word means you think it’s unusual in a bad way, but you haven’t told me WHY you think it’s bad. What, exactly, is wrong with it?” To which the person usually replied with another of the words “abnormal,” “perverted,” etc. I then asked the same question again. And so on, until the person ran out of synonyms.

Then the person sometimes said something along the lines of, “Well, there are obvious biological differences between the sexes!” To which I replied by asking if the person disapproved of oral sex between a man and a woman. Usually my questionee didn’t. I then asked, “Could you please tell me the obvious biological differenece between a man’s mouth and a woman’s mouth?”

Somewhere along the line, the people I questioned almost invariably fell back on religious reasons. To which I replied that they didn’t have the right to impose their religious views on other people. Therefore, I asked if they could give me any concrete nonreligious reasons.

No one was ever able to give me a nonreligious reason which, upon further questioning, didn’t turn out ultimately to have a religious basis after all.

It was almost always very easy for me to ask challenging questions. Usually people answered me until they were stumped, at which point they laughed nervously. Usually the conversation remained civil.

I also wrote letters to the college newspaper.

I succeeded in getting a lot of people to think. I even persuaded the local on-campus Christian religious right wingers to back down.

Challenging Pagan anti-Satanist attitudes, early-to-mid 1990′s

In late 1990, I installed a modem in my 286 PC and joined some of the many little computer networks that existed before the Internet became popular. One of these was PODNet (Pagan/Occult Distribution Network), which I accessed via a local “bulletin board service” (BBS) called BaphoNet.

Back then I had been practicing feminist Goddess religion (not quite Wicca, but Wicca-derived) for about four years.

In early 1991 I had the sudden, utterly unexpected series of intense spiritual experiences that led me to become a theistic Satanist.

Almost immediately I began responding to Pagan anti-Satanist comments online. Even before I knew anything about the then-dominant form of Satanism (the Temple of Set), and even before I was able to develop my own personal beliefs into anything at all coherent, I managed to accomplish a lot by simply being rational, civil, and able to spell. Within a year, I learned enough to win quite a bit of respect amongst the PODNet crowd.

My most frequent arguments, in response to Pagan anti-Satanist remarks, eventually gelled into the following articles of mine:

• A Critique of Wiccan and Other Neo-Pagan Disclaimers About Satanism
• Satanism and the History of Wicca

One thing that probably helped me a lot was that PODNet had been founded by Thelemites, most of whom had a genuine respect for individuality. So the leaders of the PODNet online community were on my side when I spoke out against the common Wiccan and Wicca-based Pagan tendency to scapegoat Satanists.

Back then I had friendly interaction with quite a few Pagans offline too. I became friends with the leader of a local Church of All Worlds (CAW) group — which, alas, no longer exists.

At one point, as a result of my online activity, I was invited to participate in a local in-person Pagan interfaith discussion. I don’t remember who organized it.

In 1993, when I went back to school for my master’s degree, I formed a close relationship with an undergrad who was active in the campus Pagan/Wiccan club. Other members of the club were friendly to me too.

Two very passive-aggressive Pagan bigots, mid-1990′s

Sometime in 1994 or 1995 my then-partner, whom I will refer to as Jane, was elected president of the campus Pagan/Wiccan club.

Soon after that, I began to get mysterious bad vibes from one of the club’s new members, whom I will refer to as Naomi. Several times I asked her what was wrong. Always she replied, “nothing.”

She and another new member, whom I will refer to as Debbie, soon became part of a clique of several of the Pagan/Wiccan club’s most active members who all hung out and played Dungeons and Dragons together.

Soon after that, several members of the Dungeons and Dragons clique claimed that the Pagan/Wiccan club’s elections had been invalid, due to some alleged technicality, and said they wanted to hold the elections again. I don’t remember what the alleged technicality was, but it was obviously a pretext. And it didn’t, in fact, invalidate the election according to the college’s student government rules. So Jane refused to consent to holding the elections again, arguing that if these folks thought she was unqualified to be president, they should come right out and impeach her.

This led to a lot of arguing. Eventually the underlying problem turned out to be that Naomi and Debbie were freaked out about Jane’s relationship with me. They were freaked out about me being a Satanist, and they regarded me as a generally “frightening” person.

Frankly, I missed the homophobes I had debated with back in my own college days. At least they were upfront and (for the most part) willing to dialogue, whereas these two Pagan anti-Satanists were backstabbers who previously had never breathed a word, to either Jane or me, about their discomfort with my Satanism.

Naomi eventually got over her hostility toward me about a year later and apologized. Debbie never did.

In the late 1990′s, the earlier-mentioned CAW group disbanded. I then pretty much lost touch with the NYC Pagan community entirely, until fall 2004.

Clash with Pagan Educational Network, 2003

Since the early 1990′s I’ve had various interactions with Pagans online. Some worked out well, others didn’t.

One of the worst was my run-in with members of the Pagan Educational Network (PEN), in PEN’s Yahoo group SacredAction.  (If you join, see the archived posts beginning with #3661, Friday, October 17, 2003.) There, I encountered heavy-duty displays of willful ignorance on the part of several PEN folks. At least Nancy, the moderator, was one of the more reasonable PEN members, but even she had a very annoying habit of repeatedly misreading what I was asking. I forced myself to stay calm and reasonable for a very long time, but I eventually lost my temper and then left soon thereafter.

I was there to request that they modify their document “Modern Witchcraft” to remove offensive claims and insinuations about Satanists. My objections were detailed on the following pages: What’s wrong with PEN’s “Modern Witchcraft” document and Proposed revisions to PEN’s “Modern Witchcraft” document.

Seven and a half years later, it now appears that “Modern Witchcraft” finally did get revised, sometime within the last few years, to remove most of the offensive references to Satanists. The only remaining mention of Satanists is in the sentence “Lastly, while terms such as ‘white Witch’ and ‘black magic’ may seem like good clarifiers to separate Witches from Satanists, the terms are actually inherently racist and most Witches do not use them.” (A subsequent version can be found on a PEN’s own archived version of the PEN website.)

NYC Pagan Pride festival: 2004, 2005, and 2006

In September 2004 I checked out the local Pagan Pride festival. While there, I picked up copies of the festival’s official literature, including an introductory pamphlet on Paganism. It cantained the usual not-Satanists disclaimers, with some of the usual hostile claims about Satanists. I don’t remember the details.

The following spring, I attended a planning meeting for the next Pagan Pride festival. I raised my objections to the literature and gave out copies of a few of my own writings on Satanism. I argued that if they needed to didtingnuish themselves from Satanists and thus to talk about Satanists, they should at least make an effort to learn about various kinds of Satanists.

I asked that they organize — not as part of the Pagan Pride festival itself — a separate, earlier meeting at which local Pagan leaders could meet with a few Satanists to learn about various kinds of Satanism. (The local Pagan Pride Project did hold occasional small events throughout the year, apart from the festival.)

They seemed sympathetic to my concerns and said they would get back to me.

A couple of months later, a member of the planning committee told me they could not hold such a meeting out of fear that they would lose some of their funding for the festival. If I recall correctly, at least one of their major donors had objected to the idea of them holding any event whatsoever involving Satanists, even outside the context of the festival itself.

But the committee member who spoke to me said they would at least examine their literature and remove offensive references to Satanism.

A few months later, I found out that the keynote speaker at the upcoming Pagan Pride festival was going to be Isaac Bonewits, infamous among Satanists for his anti-Satanist diatribe “The Enemies of Our Enemies.” Back in 1992, I had written an “Open Letter to Green Egg” (of which a somewhat messed-up online copy has long been preserved by the Skeptic Tank) in response to “The Ehemies of Our Enemies.” (The Skeptic Tank also has copies of Temple of Set founder Michael Aquino’s replies to (1) “The Enemies of our Enemies” itself and (2) a subsequent Green Egg letter by Isaac Bonewits.) Bonewits had also written My Satanic Adventure (to which Aquino also replied).

I decided to protest. At the Pagan Pride festival on October 1, 2005, I stood near one of the entrances to the festival area and handed out a pamphlet I wrote for the occasion, “To Pagans: Explain your beliefs without maligning another minority religion,” featuring a critique of Bonewits’s article “Enemies of our Enemies.” To those who seemed interested in what I had to say, I also gave copies of a second pamphlet, What is Satanism?. I got a variety of reactions, some hostile, some sympathetic.

The following year, 2006, I went to the Pagan Pride festival again, this time not to protest but to try to network. I got into conversations with various leaders and vendors and told them about my concerns about the mini-revival of Satanic panic that was going on at that time, documented on my website Against Satanic Panics. I exchanged contact info with several people who seemed interested and said they wanted to learn more.

But then, when I followed up, I got no response.

I didn’t go to the Pagan Pride festival in 2007.

NYC Pagan Pride festival, 2008: the nadir

At the Pagan Pride festival in September 2008, I encountered some of the most blatant displays of utterly closed-minded bigotry I have ever seen.

By that time, I had become very concerned about the growing popularity of “conspiracy theories” featuring claims that the world is secretly controlled by “the Illuminati,” said to be an evil elite cabal of Satanists, occultists, and Pagans. To me, such claims are exactly like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, except that they target Satanists, occultists, and Pagans instead of — or in addition to — Jews.

A major proponent of “Illuminati”/”New World Order” claims is Alex Jones, who has a talk show on 30 AM radio stations around the country (not including New York City).

“Illuminati”/”New World Order” claims have long been popular in some parts of the evangelical Christian subculture, where they are associated with end-times prophecies about the Antichrist. These ideas have long been advocated, too, by various far-right groups such as the John Birch Society. And they have long been advocated by Christian religious right wing leaders such as Pat Robertson and Tim LaHaye.

Alex Jones and other popular “conspiracy theorists” often downplay the Christian religious aspect. But, in most cases, an implied Christian-supremacist attitude is still very much there, in the form of vilification of non-Christian religions.

Alex Jones’s radio show isn’t broadcast here in NYC except on short wave. Even so, even here in NYC, I’d been running into quite a few political activists who were influenced by Alex Jones. This scared me a lot.

In September 2008, I decided to write a leaflet about Alex Jones, inviting Pagans to join me in opposing his vilification of Pagans, occultists, and Satanists. I went to the Pagan Pride festival and stood outside the main entrance to the festival area, because, not being a registered festival vendor, I was not allowed to distribute anything inside the festival area itself.

I didn’t manage to get very many people interested at all. Perhaps my leaflet wasn’t well-organized enough. Or perhaps a lot of people just didn’t see any reason to be worried about “conspiracy theorists” because they are “fringe” — albeit a very large and growing fringe, much larger than many people realize. Perhaps I didn’t do a good enough job of explaining what the dangers are. In any case, I was surprised at the apparent lack of interest in counteracting an ongoing defamation of Pagans.

I also got a lot of hostile looks from various passers-by. Sometimes people walked past me in such a way as to make an obvious point of trying to stay as far away from me as possible, as if they feared catching some sort of spiritual cooties.

The most extreme was a bunch of about twenty people, all wearing Pagan Pride T-shirts, who ran past me on the other side of the road while yelling at me things like “You stupid Satanist girl!”

That was the last year I went to the Pagan Pride festival alone.

But I was determined to come back. I certainly was not going to allow those closed-minded jerks to win.

NYC Pagan Pride festival: 2009 and 2010

Things got a lot better in 2009. I went with Sarah, who has subsequently moved to Massachusetts but was then a regularly-attending member of NYC Satanists, Luciferians, Dark Pagans, & LHP Occultists, and was also a regularly-attending member of New Yorkers Against Religion-Based Bigotry (NYARBB).

This time we promoted a NYARBB meeting at which the guest of honor was a civil rights lawyer with an interest in the civil rights of Pagans and other minority religions.

This was a topic lots of festival participants were interested in. (I suspect, also, that the relatively favorable response we got that year may have had something to do with Sarah being a very attractive young woman in her late twenties.) We still got some hostile looks, but, this time, we got quite a few friendly looks too, and quite a bit of friendly interaction.

One young woman even voiced the hope that, in future years, we could be official festival participants. When I told her how I had been treated the previous year, she was outraged.

We collected the email addresses of a couple dozen people interested in our forthcoming NYARBB meeting. Only one of them ended up actually attending the meeting (which otherwise was attended mainly by people from the NYC Satanists group, plus one or two other people who had found NYARBB via Meetup).

The following year, 2010, I went to the Pagan Pride festival with three men, this time to promote a NYARBB meeting about American connections to African witchhunts.

On September 21, several days before the festival, I had managed to get a little mass media publicity, in the news story “Christine O’Donnell’s “Witchcraft” Comments Rebuffed by Satanist” by Stephanie Condon on the CBS news website. Leading Pagan blogger Jason Pitzi-Waters made a note of this in his September 23 post More O’Donnell Reactions and Insight. (However, CBS did not interview me; they just quoted a press release.)

Apparently because of that publicity, the Pagan Pride festival’s keynote speaker, Jason Miller, actually made a point of seeking me out and introducing himself to me near the end of the festival. He was very friendly and interested in our pamphlet about witch hunts.

Again we got a variety of reactions, both friendly and unfriendly, but many more friendly than unfriendly reactions.

Again we took down a bunch of email addresses of people interested in our meeting. None actually showed up. (Again the NYARBB meeting was basically just us Satanists plus one or two friendly mainstream atheists.)

But, in terms of the attitudes of NYC Pagans toward me and toward Satanists, I clearly had made at least a little progress since 2008.

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

As Laura Patsouris puts it:

Recently I have run into lots of people who have recently been claimed by a Patron Deity. Sometimes they have been the ones to initiate the contact, but more frequently the Deity in question has swooped in out of the blue to claim ownership. When this occurs it can be intense, disorienting and a bit scary, especially if the Deity in question is from a different tradition or pantheon than the person in question expected. This is something I’m quite familiar with, since I was scooped up by a Norse God after primarily practicing Afro-Caribbean religion for most of my life. Even when the Deity is from the expected tradition and pantheon, suddenly being God-Owned always comes with a big paradigm shift.

Let me take a moment to say that not everyone who is pagan will be scooped up by a Deity. For whatever reason, some folks can work quite well as free agents and will be given the latitude to do so and others will get claimed. Bottom line is; if it is your fate to serve a Deity, whether you consent consciously or not, you cannot outrun Wyrd. I know this concept is controversial; that a God or Goddess can pop in and lay a claim on whom They choose without the express consent of the human involved.

That’s how I became a theistic Satanist. Back in 1991 C.E. I had a sudden, very unexpected, very disorienting series of intense spiritual experiences involving Satan. For several years before that, I had been a Wicca-influenced Goddess-oriented eclectic Pagan, and I had bought into a lot of the usual neo-Pagan attitudes toward Satanists.

My experiences led me to feel, almost immediately, that “Satan chose me, not vice versa,” and that I was in some sense “owned” by Satan. But I was, and usually still am, shy about using such terminology in public.

So, instead of talking about being “chosen by Satan,” I came up with a concept I call “spiritual orientation,” analogous to sexual orientation. Just as different people are sexually drawn to different genders, so too different people are spiritually drawn to different gods. In both cases it is not a conscious choice by the person involved and may even go against one’s conscious beliefs and attitudes.

An important difference between sexual orientation and spiritual orientation is that most people know their sexual orientation from an early age, whereas the age at which a person is forcibly awakened to one’s spiritual orientation, if any, is probably much more variable. Yet it seems to me that “spiritual orientation” may be another way of expressing the concept of “God-ownership,” in a way that’s reasonably accurate but less likely to ruffle feathers (and less likely to sound, to the uninitiated, like just plain crazy talk) than speaking of oneself as “owned” or “chosen” by one’s deity.

Mystics through the ages have used sexual metaphors to describe spiritual experience. As far as I know, I’m the first person to add a sexual orientation analogy to that set of metaphors. I like it better than the rape analogy. Of course, neither analogy is a precise description.

The rape analogy comes up in P. Sufenas Virius Lupus’s objections to the concept of “God-ownership”:

Yes, a good deal of what Laura talks about in terms of the benefits of being in a relationship with the gods is true, in my experience. However, couching it in terms of some random god swooping in and “claiming” someone without their consent is, to put it very bluntly, divine rape apologetics, and the worst sort of slippery slope, as far as I’m concerned. I heard a very wise woman say a few years ago, “Religion is like love-–you can’t force it. Forcing it is rape.” And that should apply on all sides of the equation, with all agents in a relationship, and in every aspect of a religion or religious phenomenon. One would never put up with a human acting as a rapist, so why should one do so with the gods? (“Because they’re more powerful than us and we have no choice” is a complete and utterly steaming bullshit answer, incidentally, in my opinion–-living under a totalitarian tyranny of that sort on a divine level is not living! It’s exactly what exists in certain exclusivist fundamentalist creedal monotheistic religions, but has no place in paganism, in my opinion.) Yes, there is a long heritage of describing certain types of divine/human relationships with this terminology of rape-–but, that comes most often in Christian contexts (that’s what “mystical rapture” really means). That doesn’t mean it’s right or positive or to be glorified above all else, or should be emulated within paganism.

Problem with the rape metaphor: If you believe that the Gods are immanent as well as transcendant, then your God is a part of you already (as well as existing outside yourself). Likewise your natural inclination toward a particular God is a part of you already, too, even if that inclination hasn’t yet been acknowledged or awakened.

Back in 1991, the experiences that led me to become a theistic Satanist were totally unexpected and felt very disorienting on some levels, but on other levels felt like coming home, like I was finally acknowledging hitherto unacknowledged parts of myself. As I described it at the time, it was as if I had been wearing a suffocating veil all my life and finally figured out how to take it off.

So, even though my experiences happened without my conscious consent, they weren’t at all like rape. In my opinion, a rape metaphor would be appropriate only if one feels like one has been invaded by something utterly foreign.

In a comment below Laura Patsouris’s post, Wendi Wilkerson wrote:

I’m not completely convinced that Gods swoop in and lay claim without our consent; maybe without our express conscious consent, but not without our soul’s consent. I do believe that when they appear in this fashion, it’s because even if we are deaf to our own longing, our souls cried out for the kind of growth and fulfillment than only such a difficult and intense relationship with Them can provide.

I don’t yet know enough about “God-owned” Pagans and Heathens to know whether any of them have experienced anything truly rape-like. As far as I can tell so far, the Pagans who talk about “God-ownership” seem to be primarily from Reconstructionist-based paths (e.g. Northern tradition) rather than Wicca-based paths. And I get the impression that Pagans on Reconstructionist-derived paths are less likely than Pagans on Wicca-derived paths to insist that their Gods are immanent. So perhaps the idea of divine “rape” might be at least conceivable in a Reconstructionist-based context. But so far my feeling is that, even for Reconstructionist-derived Pagans, the experience of becoming “God-owned” is likely to have more in common with an initially-reluctant acknowledgement of one’s sexual orientation than with rape. Even Raven Kaldera, who identifies as a “full-out god-slave,” says, in a comment below P. Sufenas Virius Lupus’s post:

The goddess who owns me has been there since the beginning, since my youngest days. She did eventually tighten her grip and enslave me in a way that was certainly without my consent at the time.

I would appreciate comments by any “Deity-owned” Pagans who happen to read this.

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.

She notes that the lore about Samael is tangled and contradictory. Among other tangles:

There seems to be some uncertainty as to whether Samael acts on Yahweh’s behalf in this role or as an evil freelancer. This would seem to explain how He can appear as both “Prince of the demons’ and “chief of Satans” as well as “the great prince in heaven.”

I would add that the same “uncertainty” applies also to the name/title “Satan” in Jewish lore. In the Bible, the Satan of the Book of Job is not an enemy of Yahweh, but rather is the heavenly prosecuting attorney and enforcer. Later, during the Second Temple era, Judaism was strongly influenced by Zoroastrian dualism; hence the appearance of a Devil figure, seen as the enemy of Yahweh. Since then, mainstream Judaism has moved away from belief in a Devil, although the idea of Satan as an “evil freelancer” never disappeared entirely from the Jewish world. I once knew an Orthodox Jew who told me he believed in the existence of two distinct Satans: (1) the “lesser Satan” (the heavenly prosecuting attorney and enforcer in the Book of Job) and (2) the “greater Satan” (the Devil, the rebel against Yahweh).

I would say that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between entities and names, or even a one-to-one correspondence between deities and deity-mythologies. For example, the God who is worshiped by the nice liberal, justice-loving Christians who march in Gay Pride parades is, in my opinion, clearly NOT the same entity as the God worshiped by the more conservative kinds of Christians. I would similarly distinguish the Gods worshiped by different kinds of Jews. Thus, in my view, there are at least two distinct deities that go by the name Yahweh. I think of these two distinct though mythologically almost identical gods as Yahweh-E and Yahweh-P (E for enlightenment, P for patriarchy, or P for “purity”). They differ in, among other things, their relationship to other deities. The devotees of Yahweh-P tend to regard all other deities as either evil demons or outright frauds, whereas the devotees of Yahweh-E are more apt to see other gods as guises of Yahweh-E. (I don’t agree with either view, but the devotees of Yahweh-E tend at least to be much more tolerant.) Also, the devotees of Yahweh-E tend NOT to believe in a Devil and hence are not classified by me as being among Satan’s avowed enemies (SAE’s).

Similarly it seems to me that there are at least two distinct entities known as “Satan”: (1) Satan the servant of Yahweh-P (as per the Book of Job) and (2) Satan the enemy of Yahweh-P. I tend to think of the former as “Samael” and the latter as “Azazel”/”Belial.” However, the name “Samael” has been used to refer to both, whereas the names “Azazel” and “Belial” refer unambiguously to the demonized Other, the source of all “impurity” — and, in the case of “Azazel,” to a source of forbidden knowledge as well. Thus, “Azazel” and “Belial” are unambiguously precursors of the Christian Devil concept.

So, could it perhaps be that the “Samael” that Anya Kless has encountered is actually Azazel, or at least closely related to Azazel? After all, her “Samael” does not seem — at least at first glance — to be a servant of Yahweh-P.

She cites an angelology website which (without citing sources) claims that Azazel is another name for Samael. Not everyone agrees with this. For example, on a website called Bitter Waters, the Sotah, and Lilith, with pages about Lilith and Azazel, it is claimed that Azazel is the son of Lilith and Samael and combines aspects of both — and is more powerful than both. (I have yet to track down the original Jewish sources on which this claim is based.)

My feeling is that Anya Kless’s Samael and my Satan/Azazel/Belial are not the same entity, although they do have commonalities. Before I compare her view of Samael with my own view of Satan/Azazel, I should perhaps give a little bit of the flavor of the latter by quoting the brief description in a ritual I wrote for the Church of Azazel proto-congregation:

God of freedom!
God of this world,
God of our flesh,
God of our innermost will,
and
God who beckons us beyond the comfortable and familiar.

Anyhow, Anya Kless describes some of her own personal perceptions, in the context of a ritual, as follows:

Samael is bound.

[...]

He is bound because He would unleash destruction, destroying even Lilith Herself. As Death, as Bloodlust, as Vengeance, as Hunger, Samael must be contained. He is simply too insatiable and would throw off the balance between Death and Life, Justice and Violence, Order and Dissent. Interestingly, Lilith does have the power to free Him, but She refuses to do so.

I do not perceive Satan/Azazel as being “bound,” although there is indeed a myth of Azazel being bound, in the Book of Enoch. He is said to have been bound at the command of Yahweh, as a penalty for teaching humans such forbidden arts as metal-working and the use of eye makeup. I consider the binding of Azazel, in the Book of Enoch, to be a metaphor for social constraints against further technological development, similar to the binding of Prometheus. But those constraints were only temporary, and Prometheus was eventually unbound. (I do NOT consider Prometheus and Azazel to be the same entity, though there are commonalities.)

As for her perception that Samael desires to “unleash destruction, destroying even Lilith Herself”: I do not see that as literally true of Satan/Azazel, though there’s a metaphorical sense in which I do see Him as threatening to “destroy” even Lilith. I see Satan/Azazel as a Being who challenges ALL dogma and ALL human social orders, just or unjust — NOT out of an obsessive desire to destroy, though it can seem that way, but more like putting them all to the test. On the other hand, I see Lilith as championing a new, more egalitarian and more individualistic social order, against the authoritarian patriarchy of Yahweh-P. I see Satan/Azazel as sharing Lilith’s opposition to the social order favored by Yahweh-P, but I also see Satan/Azazel as challenging Lilith’s preferred social order too. Only in that very limited sense would I say that He “would unleash destruction, destroying even Lilith Herself.”

All social orders need to be challenged from time to time. Even a basically just social order — or social movement — can all too easily turn totalitarian, with disastrous consequences. Example: How the feminist movement and the child abuse survivors’ movement endorsed the Satanic Ritual Abuse scare back in the 1980′s.

This doesn’t mean we should get rid of all social orders or all dogma. We humans need organized societies in order to survive, and human societies need to be bound together by at least a few shared assumptions (dogmas). We need a balance between the maintenance of our social orders and challenges to same.

A big difference between Anya Kless’s Samael and my Satan/Azazel/Belial is that I do not perceive Satan/Azazel as “hungry,” or as being motivated by “hunger.” To my way of thinking, “hunger” of any kind is a mark of a lesser spiritual being, not a transcendantly powerful God. Thus, for example, I do NOT believe that Yahweh-P is genuinely the highest God, because Yahweh-P is endlessly hungry for the attention of as many humans as possible and is admittedly a “jealous god” toward all those many human devotees. On the other hand, I see Satan/Azazel (though supposedly a “Fallen angel”) as a more genuine “God of this world” who simply does not care what most people think of Him.

My view of the relationship between deities and “hunger” is somewhat similar to that of the Yoruba religion, in which sacrifices are NOT offered to Olorun, the highest God, but are offered only to intermediate gods, the Orishas. I see Satan/Azazel as too powerful a God, in His own right, to be “hungry” for anything from us humans.

However, while I don’t see Satan/Azazel Himself as “hungry,” I do see Him as manifest in our own innermost Will, including our own deepest passions and “hungers.”

Anyhow, while I can indeed find commonalities (sort of) between Anya Kless’s Samael and my Satan/Azazel, these commonalities are a bit of a stretch. My gut feeling is that her Samael and my Satan/Azazel are not the same entity. But then, who and what is Anya Kless’s Samael?

As I said earlier, we humans need a balance between maintenance of social orders and challenges to same. Most religions emphasize the former, whereas Satan/Azazel is a God who emphasizes the latter, and Lilith (in my view) is a Goddess who has long opposed an old social order but now champions and maintains a new, rising social order. The latter role of Lilith is consistent with Anya Kless’s vision of Lilith as a “judge, determining right and wrong.” She writes:

Both Lilith and Samael come to me as Bringers of Justice, but They enact this Justice in different ways. Lilith acts as a Judge, determining right and wrong. Samael acts as a Debt Collector, taking what is owed and is being wrongfully withheld. Both are bound by rules, and neither one punishes indiscriminately or harms the innocent. The word that comes to mind when I see them in this role is “Righteous.” Not “self-righteous,” but a genuine sense of enforcing what is Right. Their system of Right/Wrong does not always line up with the dominant paradigm’s system, but there is a Justice there that even deities from other pantheons seem to respect.

Hmmm, Samael’s role here as “Debt Collector” is actually reminiscent of the role of Satan/Samael the servant of Yahweh. Perhaps Anya Kless’s Samael is the same entity as Yahweh-P’s enforcer after all? Perhaps He is not committed to serving any one particular divine judge — Lilith or Yahweh-P — but can play the enforcer role on behalf of any or all divine judges? If so, perhaps that might explain why Anya Kless’s Samael is “bound” — he is constrained always to act as the servant of some divine judge, even if it doesn’t matter to Him which judge?

One possible objection to this picture is that Samael is Lilith’s mate, not merely Her servant. However, in Anya Kless’s vision, “Lilith does have the power to free Him, but She refuses to do so” — implying that Lilith does have power over Samael, even if She also loves Him and chooses not to exercise Her power over Him in a tyrannical way. That Lilith has power over Samael is also implied by Anya Kless’s advice that anyone who wants to work with Samael should first work with Lilith, for “protection”:

Meeting Samael

If you wish to begin working with Samael, I highly recommend you begin a relationship with Lilith as well. She brings balance and protection, and if She’s well-honored and approached with humility and respect, She can also keep you grounded as you work with Them. Samael is a magnificent force, but He can also be seductive—-the ultimate tempter. He will take advantage in ways Lilith will not, particularly if you make offers of yourself to Him without an understanding of the consequences. Making deals with Him is not recommended—-He tends to omit mentioning what things will cost you. And He is perfectly willing to watch you ignorantly skip down His path towards something you can’t handle. Allow Lilith to introduce you. Go slow with Him.

Ouch! I have a VERY different understanding of what the issues are, but I do have to admit that the theistic Satanist scene is chock full of impulsive people who ignorantly rush headlong into things that they can’t handle and/or which impel them to make utter fools of themselves. [SIGH!]

As for Anya Kless’s question about whether anyone who works with Satan is actually working with Samael (or one of His faces): I would say that many Satanists are probably working with Samael, usually without realizing it. Perhaps that may be one of the reasons for the sorry state of today’s Satanist scene?

I personally do not revere Samael. Indeed I use the name “Azazel” for the specific purpose of disambiguating the Satan I revere from Samael — or at least from Samael the servant of Yahweh-P. Perhaps I might eventually include Samael in my pantheon too, because my pantheon does include Lilith. But I think I’ll always see Azazel (my main deity) and Samael as very distinct entities, not just different facets of the same entity, despite their commonalities.

Let me now put my own view of Lilith into context:

In the paradigm of the Church of Azazel proto-congregation, prospective members are encouraged to form a relationship not just with Satan/Azazel but also with at least one of the five Rising Gods — Lilith, Prometheus, Ishtar, Pan, and Lucifer-of-Sophia — each of whom is associated with one or more aspects of the modern world that are strongly at odds with Satan’s avowed enemies (SAE’s), i.e. the more conservative and authoritarian branches of the Abrahamic religions. Each of the five rising Gods has a long history of being demonized and/or associated with Satan within Western culture. But each also affirms, more-or-less consistently, some set of ethical values that are among the pillars of today’s emerging post-Christian social order.

As I said earlier, we humans need a balance between maintenance of social orders and challenges to same. In the paradigm of the Church of Azazel proto-congregation, this complementary balance is encouraged via relationships with both Satan/Azazel and at least one of the five Rising Gods.

Interestingly, for the past several years I have had the strong feeling that Lilith is not the mate of Satan/Azazel, at least not in the manner portrayed in the relevant Kabbalistic texts. The main polarity in the Church of Azazel paradigm is not between Satan/Azazel and Lilith, but between Satan/Azazel and the totality of the five Rising Gods including Lilith.

Anyhow, one gripe I have about Anya Kless’s post: It has a section titled “Christianity/Satanism: the Adversary.” The expression “Christianity/Satanism” appears to connote the common Pagan claim that Satanism is merely the flip side of Christianity. That’s true of only the specific form of theistic Satanism that I call “Christian-based duotheism.” Most forms of Satanism, including most forms of theistic Satanism, do borrow ideas from other sources too, not just Christianity.

Raul, thanks for respecting the topicality of the original comment thread.

In particular, Raul wanted to discuss allegations about Catholic priests who secretly practice Satanic rites.

Most likely, such priests do exist. I’ve interacted online with some people who claimed to be Catholic priests who were closet Satanists, and who seemed to be sincere — and very similar, in their attitudes, to other highly closeted Satanists I’ve intereated with who were living in highly religious Christian environments.

What I do not believe in is the existence of a massive conspiracy of such priests, let alone that such a conspiracy was responsible for Vatican II and subseqquent changes to the Catholic Church, as has been claimed by Malachi Martin and various other traditionalist Catholic Satanic panic mongers. Highly closeted people are, in general, not likely to be interested in rocking the boat.

Also, I certainly do not agree with Malachi Martin’s blaming of the clergy pedophilia scandal on an alleged conspiracy of “Satanic pedophiles.” Certainly the Church, in an attempt to avoid scandal, has conspired to cover up many instances of child molestation by priests. But there is no reason to blame clergy pedophilia itself on a conspiracy.

In my opinion, it is only to be expected that a vocation like the Catholic priesthood would naturally attract more than its share of pedophiles. Because priests are required to be celibate, the priesthood naturally attracts the following two categories of people: (1) people with unusually low sex drives, and (2) people whose sexual tastes have no socially acceptable outlet (such as pedophiles), and whose only socially acceptable option, therefore, is to try to be celibate.

It is ridiculous to blame clergy pedophilia on any alleged massive conspiracy, whether of Satanists or anyone else. In my opinion, the conservative and traditionalist Catholics who promote such claims just can’t accept the reality that a celibate priesthood is inherently problematic. So, in their view, clergy pedophilia must be the fault of a gigantic conspiracy of “Satanic pedophiles” who have been trying to take over the Church.

Raul, I’ll reply later to your comments in the other thread.

Below, I’ll briefly discuss Cuneo’s views and suggest some areas that Cuneo might want to research further, if he ever decides to write a follow-up study.

• Cuneo’s stance on exorcism
• The Exorcist vs. the evangelical subculture
• The new mega-exorcisms
• Online reviews of Cuneo’s book
• Other recent posts of mine on exorcism and related topics

Cuneo’s stance on exorcism

Michael Cuneo maintains a carefully neutral stance on the validity of the exorcisms he has seen. For example, in an interview in the evangelical magazine Christianity Today:

Have you witnessed an exorcism or a deliverance session in which you were convinced demons were really cast out?

I always go on site and interview people directly and take situations seriously. But still there’s so much I don’t know. I attended more than 50 exorcisms and never once did I walk away convinced that the person being exorcised was really demonized. I always thought that medical, cultural, and psychiatric explanations could have accounted for what was going on. But I could be wrong. And people would always say to me, “But Michael, you should have been here last week.”

You just missed it!

But that might be true. And some would say to me, “The reason you haven’t seen really powerful and dramatic symptoms of demonization, such as bodies levitating and so forth, is that you’re a writer, and the Devil is trying to disguise his activity and hide it from you.” I would find that strange but, nevertheless, it may be a possibility. A psychiatrist friend told me that, in his estimation, 999 out of 1,000 claims of demonic possession are false claims. But he believes that there’s always that one out of 1,000 which isn’t false. I never happened across that one.

According to a review in the Skeptical Inquirer, Cuneo’s book debunks various claims by Malachi Martin, a writer whose book Hostage to the Devil helped popularize Catholic exorcism back in the late 1970′s.

The Skeptical Inquirer review says that Cuneo’s neutrality will disappoint many skeptics: “Cuneo reserves judgment on many matters for which skeptics will see a clear verdict.” It must be kept in mind that Cuneo works at Fordham University — a Catholic university. That being the case, he really can’t dismiss the existence of demons or the efficacy of exorcism outright, lest he contradict official church teaching.

The Exorcist vs. the evangelical subculture

I haven’t yet received my copy of Michael Cuneo’s book. I look forward to reading it. But, in the meantime, I’ll go ahead and respond to one opinion of Cuneo’s that I’m inclined to disagree with.

According to several of the online reviews of his book, Cuneo thinks the exorcism revival of the past several decades happened mainly because of the popularity of the movie The Exorcist. Admittedly I haven’t yet read Cuneo’s arguments for this opinion, so perhaps I’m judging it unfairly. But, for now, I think it’s very likely that Cuneo may have overlooked some often-overlooked social realities.

Certainly The Exorcist did help to popularize exorcism and did influence the development of the exorcism revival. But I don’t think the movie was the sole or main source of the exorcism revival. I think the main source was the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement, together with the Charismatic movement’s spread into many older, more mainstream churches, both Protestant and Catholic. I think there would have been a significant exorcism revival even without any help from Hollywood at all, although it might have taken longer.

Cuneo himself acknowledges that there were already some Pentecostal/Charismatic/evangelical deliverance ministries way back in the 1960′s, long before The Exorcist. Admittedly. there weren’t very many of them yet. But the idea of “casting out demons” — if not the actual practice — was already very commonplace, not just in Pentecostal/Charismatic circles but also among evangelical Christians in general. Usually, “casting out demons” was talked about as something missionaries did overseas, especially when converting people with animistic beliefs. It was only a matter of time before a practice widely perceived as working very well for missionaries overseas, as a way to win converts there, would be adopted by many evangelists here in the U.S.A., as a way to expand their own flocks too.

I wonder whether Cuneo has read the books of evangelical authors Kurt Koch and Merrill Unger, who were popular in the evangelical subculture back in the early 1970′s. I also wonder how deeply Cuneo has delved into the evangelical subculture in general.

I suspect that Cuneo, like many journalists and academics, might be underestimating the social power and significance of religious subcultures, especially the evangelical/Pentecostal/charismatic subculture. Many mainstream folks, including journalists and scholars, aren’t fully aware that devoutly religious people are often more strongly influenced by their religious subcultures than they are by the mainstream mass media.

A Catholic scholar, like Michael Cuneo, could easily underestimate the power of the evangelical/Pentecostal/Charismatic subculture for the following two reasons:

(1) The Catholic Church hasn’t managed to build a similarly cohesive subculture here in the U.S.A. For example, the vast majority of “Christian” radio stations and TV networks are evangelical/Pentecostal/Charismatic, not Catholic — even in those parts of the U.S.A. where Catholics outnumber evangelicals. Ditto the vast majority of “Christian” bookstores, “Christian” musicians, etc. Therefore, most Catholics don’t have first-hand experience of what a well-developed religious subculture is like.

(2) At the same time, evangelicals/Pentecostals/Charismatics aren’t as obviously isolated from the mainstream as, say, ultra-Orthodox Jews or the Amish.

So, it’s easy to mistake them for ordinary mainstream consumers of the mainstream mass media.

The new mega-exorcisms

Judging by the reviews, it would appear that Cuneo’s book is almost entirely focussed on exorcisms in the classic sense of expelling alleged evil spirits from individual people.

If Cuneo ever decides to do a follow-up study, he might want to delve deeper into some totally new forms of exorcism, on a much grander scale, that were invented only in the 1980′s or so: the “strategic level spiritual warfare” doctrines of C. Peter Wagner, Ed Silvoso, Thomas Muthee, and the like. Apparenly Cuneo has already looked into this topic at least a little bit, since his book is referenced in the “Further reading” section of the Wikipedia article on “spiritual warfare.”

As Jane Lampmann explained in “Targeting cities with ‘spiritual mapping,’ prayer” by Jane Lampman, Christian Science Monitor, September 23, 1999:

C. Peter Wagner, head of Global Harvest Ministries in Colorado Springs, Colo., … defines three levels of spiritual warfare: “Ground-level” involves casting demons out of individuals; “occult-level warfare” involves more organized “powers of darkness” [They target here New Age thought, Tibetan Buddhism, Freemasonry, etc.]; and “strategic-level warfare” directly “confronts ‘territorial spirits’ assigned by Satan to coordinate activities over a geographical area.”

“Stategic level spiritual warfare” and “occult level spiritual warfare” are commonly preceded by “spiritual mapping.” This involves doing research on a geographicl area to pinpoint alleged locales of demon infestation, including the houses of worship of any and all non-Abrahamic religions, and in some cases even the houses of worship of rival forms of Christianity too. It also includes anything having to do with the gay community and other sexual minorities.

“Spiritual mapping” has often led to witchhunts — in the most literal sense — and other severe harassment of people deemed to be enemies of the kingdom of God.

For an example, see Soldiers of Christ: Insider America’s Most Powerful Megachurch by Jeff Sharlet, Harper’s Magazine, November 2, 2006, in which former megachurch pastor Ted Haggard is paraphrased as saying: “He sent teams to pray in front of the homes of supposed witches — in one month, ten out of fifteen of his targets put their houses on the market. His congregation ‘prayer-walked’ nearly every street of the city.”

An even worse example is Repent Amarillo’s harassment of swingers. According to a news story in the Texas Observer, “He Who Casts the First Stone” by Forrest Wilder, Wednesday, February 24, 2010 :

Perhaps the most insidious tactic Repent uses is trying to destroy the reputation of the swingers. In Amarillo, people can be ostracized over a whiff of impropriety. On one tape, Grisham directs followers to get the license-plate numbers in the Route 66 parking lot. “A new couple can be here three or four hours,” says Mac. “Whenever they leave, the Repent Amarillo group will call them by first and last name, know where they live, know where they work, just within a very few hours.”

Randall Sammons says he was fired from his job of 13 years in August after his boss learned Sammons was a swinger from another employee, a Repent member. He believes he’s now as good as blacklisted in Amarillo. “I’m screwed at finding a job,” Sammons says. Russell Grisham, David’s 20-year-old son who has a conviction on his record for hacking the computer system at his high school, has posted the names, photos and workplaces of swingers on the Internet, including one man whose wife works for a school district. (“Family-wise, it will kill both of us,” the man says.) In at least two instances, Repent members called swingers’ employers.

“David” is David Grisham, leader of Repent Amarillo. He’s a pastor who also has a day job as a security guard at a nuclear-bomb facility.

Repent Amarillo has targeted non-Christian religions too. For links to more information, see the thread harassment of non-Christians by “prayer warriors” on the message board of New Yorkers Against Religion-Based Bigotry.

Worst of all, the new “spiritual warfare” doctrines, with their general inducement of paranoia about demons and witchhunts, have had the effect of sparking full-blown witchhunts in many parts of Africa. For details and sources, see my post about American Connections to African Witchhunts on the blog of New Yorkers Against Religion-Based Bigotry.

Also noteworthy is that many “spiritual warfare” leaders also advocate the “seven mountains mandate” — the idea that Christians (of their particular stripe) should aim for dominance over seven spheres of power in society including government. Thus they aim for de facto theocracy.

There is currenly a prayer-walking campaign going on in Newark, New Jersey. For more information and links, please see the thread Police-endorsed (!) mega-exorcism (!) in Newark, NJ (and many other cities around the world).

Online reviews of Cuneo’s book

• A Sociologist’s Journey into the American Heart of Darkness by Kevin Christopher, Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 27.1, January/February 2003
• Powells reviews
• Good Reports reviews
• Good Reads Reviews
• atheism.about.com review
• Exorcism Therapy: An interview with Michael W. Cuneo, by Agnieszka Tennant, Christianity Today, September 3, 2001

(P.S., February 14, 2011: I just now found an excerpt from Cuneo’s book, An ‘Impressively Civilized’ Exorcism, on BeliefNet.)

Other recent posts of mine on exorcism and related topics

Recently I’ve written the following blog posts:

• Exorcism and religious intolerance, Talk To Action, February 1, 2011
• Catholic exorcism and NYPD “experts on occult crimes”???, LiveJournal, February 6, 2011
• The Catholic exorcism trend and Italy’s Satanic panic, here on WordPress, February 9, 2011.
• Bill Donohue boasts: exorcism now mainstream, LiveJournal, February 11, 2011

I’ll post a follow-up after I read Cuneo’s book.

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.

True, but I think that’s only one of the reasons for the Vatican’s stepped-up interest in exorcism. Another, more global reason has to do with the growth of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement. Exorcism/”deliverance” is very much a part of the Pentecostal/charismatic movement in all its many branches, both Catholic and Protestant. Furthermore, Protestant Pentecostals are the Roman Catholic Church’s strongest competitors, having won vast numbers of converts in traditionally Catholic Latin America over the past several decades. So, if the Catholic Church wants Catholic Charismatics — a very large sector of the Catholic Church’s own most fervent adherents worldwide — to remain Catholic and not go join the Pentecostals, then the Vatican absolutely must make exorcism widely available on the Vatican’s own terms.

Anyhow, Laura Miller says the following about Italy’s Satanic panic:

The precipitating events were two murder cases, both involving disturbed teenage drug abusers, the more notorious of which featured the Beasts of Satan, a heavy metal band made up of self-styled devil worshipers who ultimately killed three of their cronies. This in turn led to allegations, made by civic and religious authorities, that a network of secret satanic cults was active throughout the country, engaging in human sacrifice and the sexual molestation of children among other crimes. Some church spokesmen have stated that “as many as 8,000 satanic sects with more than 600,000 members exist within Italy.”

There does not appear to have ever been any rigorous, concerted effort to substantiate these claims, and most likely they are, like similar assertions made in America during our own ritual satanic abuse panic, entirely false. This stuff is, however, catnip for the press and also useful for public servants eager to further their ambitions or cover up their incompetence. In the 2008 book “The Monster of Florence,” about that city’s most notorious (and still unsolved) serial killer case, authors Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi described how a police inspector who was getting nowhere in solving the crimes suddenly announced that he had evidence that a satanic cult was responsible and was interfering with his investigation. When Preston and Spezi criticized this theory, they were themselves accused of belonging to the cult and Spezi was arrested. A mentally unbalanced woman put up a Web site promoting the satanic cult theory and contending that the cult’s sinister influence had extensively penetrated the upper echelons of Italian society; the site became popular and the woman herself gained an astonishing amount of cultural and political influence.

Laura Miller also points out, correctly, about the Catholic exorcism trend:

The exorcism course that Father Gary attended was first offered by the Regina Apostolorum, a Catholic university run by the right-wing Legionnaires of Christ, in 2005, and it is part of a general conservative trend in the church, led by the current pope, Benedict XVI.

As has been widely noted, the Regina Apostolorum’s 2005 exorcism course included presentations by alleged “experts” on Satanism.

I’ll now examine the claims of those “experts” as paraphrased in Matt Baglio’s book. Alas I don’t know how accurately their claims are represented by Baglio, who also attended the exorcism course (and met Gary Thomas there). Page numbers will refer to the paperback edition of The Rite.

A presentation by Dr. Marco Strano, described on page 54 as “a criminologist and psychologist with the state police,” began with a slide showing a church that had been vandalized with graffiti including inverted crosses and “666.” Other slides included pictures of “elaborate satanic tattoos, self-mutilations, shattered storefronts blocked off by yellow crime-scene tape.”

Nowhere does Baglio even mention the existence of law-abiding Satanists, let alone point out that the kids who spray-paint graffiti are unlikely to be serious about any religion of any kind, as distinct from just using Satanic symbols to shock the grownups. There are plenty of good reasons for Satanists not to commit crimes such as vandalism. (See the Church of Azazel protocongregation’s Statement against violent crime and vandalism, for example.)

Near the bottom of page 54 is a paragraph about the violent crimes — committed mainly by gangs of teenagers — that sparked Italy’s Satanic panic. The description of those crimes is immediately followed by a brief mention of the “millions of people” who are “reportedly involved in the occult” — insinuating, in classic 1980′s-style fashion, that all these people are part of one vast murderous menace.

The top of page 55 begins: “Modern Satanists, say experts, borrow from a number of historical traditions….” True so far.

That paragraph continues, “… and its tenets are hard to pin down. There is no unified belief system, as some members of the same group may become involved for more abstract practices while others do so for carnal.”

True, though it should also be pointed out that there do exist Satanist groups with publicly-articulated, codified belief systems. The best-known of these is LaVey’s atheistic Church of Satan. There also exist a variety of theistic groups, with a variety of belief systems.

Next is a paragraph about the ancient Gnostics and the medieval Cathars. When describing the beliefs of the Gnostics, Baglio identifies the Demiurge (the evil creator of the physical world) with Satan. Baglio fails to mention that some Gnostics identified the Demiurge with Jehovah and revered the Serpent of the Garden of Eden as an emissary of the true God, sent to bring knowledge to humans. (See The Genesis Factor by Stephan A. Hoeller, Quest, September 1997, reprinted with links to relevant Gnostic scriptures.)

After that, Baglio correctly says: “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on the heels of the revolutions in America and France and in the midst of the Enlightenment, Satan’s desire to rebel against God was cast as a bid for freedom. The Church, seen by some as too authoritarian, was accused of repressing man’s natural carnal desires.”

However, Baglio does not name any of the famous literary figures who espoused such views. He does not mention, for example, William Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” or any of Mark Twain’s novels about the Devil, or any of George Bernard Shaw’s plays featuring the Devil or a “Devil’s Disciple.” Despite being in Italy, Baglio does not even mention the “Inno a Satana” (“Hymn to Satan”) written by one of Italy’s most famous poets, Giosue Carducci. Of course, mentioning these famous writers might make Satanism seem a little too respectable for Baglio’s purposes…. Instead, Baglio mentions only the existence of groups such as Sir Francis Dashwood’s Hellfire Club.

Baglio then names one of his “experts,” Father Francesco Bamonte, who was first introduced on page 49 as an Italian exorcist. On page 55, Bamonte is paraphrased as saying that “there are two currents of Satanism. In the first, known as ‘personal,’ adepts actually believe that Satan is a physical entity, a god who can be prayed to and who will grant certain privileges, such as money and fame, if offered sacrifices. While in the second, known as ‘impersonal,’ acolytes hold that Satan represents more of a force or energy, a part of the cosmos that can be developed and used to serve them.”

That’s a vast oversimplification, to say the least. Theistic Satanists, who revere Satan as more than just a “force or energy,” do not necessarily regard Satan as “physical” — and, as far as I can tell, most do not believe in the necessity of “sacrifice.” Also, it is by no means true that all theistic Satanists are motivated primarily by the hope of material gain. Many are, but, in my experience, those who stick around the Satanist scene the longest are more likely to have been drawn to Satan via ecstatic spiritual experiences. (At least that seems to be the case here in the U.S.A.; perhaps things are different in Italy?)

Anyhow, on page 56, Baglio then paraphrases Bamonte as saying, “In both the ‘personal’ and the ‘impersonal’ currents of Satanism, the power of the individual is exalted above anything else, while the seven capital sins are celebrated.”

True up to a point. LaVeyan Satanism exalts the power of the individual above anything else. Theistic Satanists vary on this matter. Some forms of theistic Satanism, too, exalt the power of the individual above anything else, while others place more emphasis on reverence for Satan as a deity. As for the “seven capital sins,” the “seven deadly sins” are “celebrated” in Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible, but only up to a point — only insofar as they are not counterproductive to the individual’s well-being.

Baglio then quotes Bamonte directly: “The key to understanding them is to know their motto, ‘Do what you want; that is the only law’.” This is evidently a garbled version of the famous line from Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law: “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law.” Crowley either was or was not a Satanist depending on precisely how you define the word “Satanist.” Most Thelemites — adherents of Thelema, the system founded by Crowley — do not consider themselves to be “Satanists.”

A good preliminary introduction to Crowley’s beliefs can be found in Tim Maroney’s Introduction to Crowley (in Five Voices). The meaning of “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” is discussed on this page.

Baglio’s next “expert” is Father Alto Buonaiuto, described as “a member of the John XXIII Community Association” and said to have been “working with ex-cult members for some time.” He is said to be the author of a book titled “Le mani occulte: viaggio nel monde del satanismo (The Hands of the Occult: A Voyage Into the World of Satanism).”

Right off the bat, I would say it’s a very bad sign when an alleged “expert” appears to be equating “the occult” in general with Satanism. The vast majority of occultists are not Satanists. There are also plenty of Satanists who are not occultists — although most Satanists are influenced, to one degree or another, by at least some aspects of the Western occult tradition. Anyone who is unaware of such basics as the difference between Satanism and occultism in general is clearly unqualified to be an “expert” on either.

What is Buonaiuto’s alleged source of information? According to Baglio on page 57: “For the past five years, Baglio has been running a cult hotline in Italy, counseling individuals and family members who are trying to get out of cults.”

Here are some of Buonaiuto’s claims, according to Baglio on page 56: “During the course of his work, Father Buonaiuto has come up with different designations within satanic cults. The first, which he calls ‘Youth Acid,’ consists of mostly young people into the physical trappings of Satanism: the hedonistic lifestyle mixed with drugs, self-mutilation, pedophilia, suicide, and even murder to provide human sacrifice.”

This lumping together of “self-mutilation, pedophilia, suicide, and even murder,” all as alleged “trappings of Satanism,” is classic Satanic panic.

Buonaiuto next category of Satanists, according to Baglio: “The second designation, known as ‘Power Satanism,’ is more sophisticated, he claims, and counts as members very wealthy and influenctial people who are said to sell their souls to the Devil for the promise of power and riches, which are then used to ensure a perpetual state of strife — war, famine, economic instability, and such.”

Wait a minute: What “war, famine, economic instability, and such” are we talking about here??? Supposedly these alleged “Power Satanists” whom Buonaiuto has encountered are in Italy, right? But there have not been any wars on Italian soil since World War II, nor any famines there recently either. Nor is Italy a great power, hence not in a good position to stir up wars or famines anywhere else in the world either.

The most charitable explanation I can think of is that Buonaiuto’s “cult hotline” may have attracted some crank callers — or perhaps some people with highly questionable “recovered memories.” On page 258, Buonaiuto is paraphrased as saying that “the hotline gets around twenty calls a day, running the gamut from ex-cult members on the run to people just seeking attention.” Perhaps Buonaiuto has been fooled by some of the more creative attention-seekers?

Then again, there really are some people in Italy who are in a good position to cause misery worldwide — and who, in fact, have often done so. Those people are the Pope and assorted Vatican officials. As far as I am aware, they haven’t caused any wars or famines during the past half century, but surely the effects of famines are worsened by the Catholic Church’s hardline stance against birth control — and against any U.N. programs to educate poor people about birth control. And the Catholic Church’s stance against homosexuality has surely resulted in many more teen suicides than Satanism could possibly ever have had anything to do with. And, of course, there’s the long history of coverups of child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy.

But it’s highly unlikely that Vatican officials have been calling up Buonaiuto’s cult hotline.

Back to Buonaiuto’s categories of Satanists. On page 56: “The third designation he calls ‘Apocalyptic Satanism,’ which, as the name suggests, has as its goal the total destruction of life as we know it; not surprisingly, he claims that this is the most dangerous category.”

Sounds like some metal lyrics I’ve heard. Only a handful of crazies would have this as an actual goal, it seems to me.

On page 57, Baglio finally gets around to acknowledging the possibility of Satanic panic, and that there’s at least some debate over whether groups like the “Beasts of Satan” (an Italian metal band whose members murdered some close associates) are “part of a bigger problem, or just deeply troubled kids.” He even mentions the McMartin Preschool case.

Baglio then admits:

Italy has seen its fair share of scandals that, while garnering headlines, have failed to deliver. In 1996, for example, Marco Dimitri, the leader of a satanic cult called the bambini di Satana (Children of Satan) was acquitted of raping a two-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl during an alleged satanic ritual. Likewise, in 2007, the town of Rigmano Flaminion near Rome went through its very own McMartin-style scandal when fifteen students in a nursery school accused six individuals, including several teachers, of sexually abusing them in satanic rituals. A lengthy investigation, however, involving a number of child psychologists, failed to turn up any evidence.

Baglio also admits that Dr. Strano, the criminologist whose slide show he featured earlier, “doesn’t believe the more sensational crimes attributed to satanic cults — such as human sacrifice, organ trafficking, and slavery — are going on to the extent that some people imagine.” However, if Baglio is accurately representing his views, even Dr. Strano seems unaware of the existence of law-abiding Satanist groups with thought-out worldviews. The only type of “Satanist” that Dr. Strano seems to acknowledge is rebellious young folks doing drugs, most of whom “do not even know what they are doing.” [Sigh!]

Baglio then lets the cult hotline guy, Father Buonaiuto, have the last word. Buonaiuto disagrees with Dr. Strano, insofar as Buonaiuto sees Satanism as a huge menace. Buonaiuto claims that groups like the “Beasts of Satan” are not “isolated groups” but part of a much larger, organized subculture (complete with “territory”) of unbelievably horrible people who revel in death and cruelty.

Finally, on page 58, Baglio winds down his section on Satanism, and segues back to his main topics of demon possession and exorcism, by having Buonaiuto say that Satanism doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with “the demonic.” Buonaiuto is quoted as saying: “The world of satanic cults is one thing and demonic possession another. Satanism is more about an exterior thing, a cultural movement in which people perpetrate crimes such as fraud and in extreme cases even murder. Some people in these groups don’t even believe in the Devil but use him as s shield to victimize impressionable people. Demonic possession, on the other hand, is an individual thing, which if it affects a person, does so on an interior spiritual level.”

The “Satanism” he talks about here would seem to be all about crime. His “satanic cults” are primarily criminal gangs. Their Satanic symbolism is only secondary and just another tool to manipulate “impressionable people.”

Insofar as the “Satanism” described by Buonaiuto is just “an exterior thing,” it is utterly unlike the Satanism of the (mostly law-abiding) theistic Satanists whom I have known. Most forms of theistic Satanism place a strong emphasis on “interior” spiritual experience, cultivating such experience through ritual and/or meditation. Likewise, all serious forms of occultism are primarily about “interior” things.

Insofar as the “Satanism” described by Buonaiuto is all about crime and drugs, it is utterly unlike LaVeyan Satanism too. LaVeyan Satanism is atheistic, regarding Satan as just a symbol of individuality, independence, etc., but the Church of Satan does require its members to be law-abiding.

I would say that Buonaiuto’s “satanic cults,” insofar as they actually exist, should not be seen as religious entities, but, instead, just another manifestation of the age-old problem of juvenile criminal gangs.

Baglio’s section on Satanism closes with a warning, from exorcist Father Bamonte, that Satanism could lead to demon possession. According to Baglio’s paraphrase, “If a person were to enter such a group and perform magic or certain rituals, that could open up the person to demonic attack.” Of course, that’s the standard claim, by the more authoritarian-minded Christians, about spirituality of all kinds other than worship of the self-described “jealous” Abrahamic God.

I might write more later about other aspects of The Rite. In the meantime, here are some interviews with Matt Baglio and Father Gary Thomas:

• The Story of a Modern-Day Exorcist by Gilbert Cruz, Time magazine, Monday, Mar. 16, 2009
• Matt Baglio, exorcist hunter by Rod Dreher, BeliefNet, Friday April 17, 2009
• Interview With the Exorcist: Father Gary Thomas on The Busted Halo® Show with Father Dave Dwyer, January 17th, 2011

Regarding the connections between Catholic exorcism and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement, see various sources linked in the following blog posts of mine: Exorcism and religious intolerance on Talk To Action, February 1, 2011, and Catholic exorcism and NYPD “experts on occult crimes”???, LiveJournal, February 6, 2011.

Here in New York City, there is a Cult Hotline and Clinic run by the JBFCS (the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services). They provide various helpful services to ex-members of “cults” and to estranged families and friends of “cult” members. They are, as far as I can tell, the only place in New York City that offers such services.

Truly harmful religious groups certainly do exist, and it’s good that there are at least a few places, like the JBFCS Cult Clinic, where people who have been hurt by such groups can get help. But the website of the JBFCS Cult Clinic associates Satanism in general with “cults,” even though the vast majority of Satanist groups (or, at least, most of the ones I’ve run into) do not fit the JBFCS Cult Clinic’s definition of a “cult.”

I do not deny that there are, alas, harmful groups in the Satanist scene, nor do I deny that there are Satanist groups with certain cultlike attributes. (See my page on Avoiding harmful religious groups in the Satanist scene.) However, the page about Satanism that I found on the JBFCS Cult Clinic website says a lot of things that are just plain wrong, and the Cult Clinic seems to assume that all Satanist groups are ipso facto “cults.” Worse yet, their page on Satanism assumes we’re all a bunch of criminals.

The JBFCS Cult Clinic’s definition of a “cult” can be found on this page, which also lists the following “types of cults”:

• Bible based
• Eastern Meditation
• Therapy/self-awareness
• Political
• Commercial/corporate
• New Age
• Satanic
• One-on-One (one leader, and one or two followers)
• Scientific
• Philosophical

Wondering what their website might have to say about Satanism, I found the following page: The Extent of Satanism Among Adolescents by Arnold Markowitz, LCSW. That page begins:

There is a great deal of conflict over the question of the threat that Satanism poses for our society. For some people, experts as well as the lay public, the entire issue is generated by over blown hysteria. Others see a serious threat that arises from generational practitioners who secretly practice animal and human sacrifices and pass along their clandestine rituals from one generation to another. A few spectacular and horrific cases have emerged that certainly show how debased people can be. For example, the ritualized sacrifices of 13 young men by a drug smuggling ring in Malamores, Mexico gives limited creditability to the claim that human sacrifice is practiced by some very disturbed people who practice Satanism. While this event is shocking, it stands as the only solid confirmation of Satanic human sacrifice by adult believers in the devil. There is little, or any, confirmed evidence that a well organized network of Satanists exists. However, there is ample evidence that self styled grassroots groups of “dabblers,” mostly adolescents, are proliferating around the country.

Indeed there is no evidence of a well-organized generational “Satanic ritual abuse” network. (See my pages about “Satanism” scares and their debunking – a brief introduction and The “Satanic Ritual Abuse” scare of the 1980′s and early 1990′s.)

However, Markowitz fails to note the existence of law-abiding Satanists, adults as well as adolescents, many of whom have been Satanists for many years and thus are hardly “dabblers.” It is a widely-known fact that the Church of Satan, for example, requires its members to be law-abiding. (As for my own smaller, non-CoS groups: (1) NYC Satanists, Luciferians, Dark Pagans, & LHP Occultists specifically welcomes Satanists, Luciferians, etc. “of all law-abiding kinds”; and (2) the Church of Azazel proto-congregation has a Statement against violent crime and vandalism.)

Markowitz then says:

Many of our youth are frustrated, suffer from a sense of personal anomie and feel a lack of purpose in their lives. Feeling hopeless and powerless they return to magical thinking, mystification and idealization of the counter culture to provide their lives with meaning.

The above paragraph describes some, but by no means all, of the people who are drawn to Satanism and to various “counter cultures” (there isn’t just one “counter culture”). Markowitz seems to assume here that anyone who felt hopeful or powerful would be satisfied with mainstream cultural norms. Anyhow:

Unfortunately, many choose symbols of anger and hate such as the skinheads and Satanism.

It is wrong to reduce Satanism to “anger and hate.” Most forms of Satanism do accept the full range of human emotions including anger and hate. But Satanism can also be about questioning popular hatreds. (See, for example, Anton LaVey’s rejection of anti-gay bigotry in the chapter on “Satanic sex” in The Satanic Bible — written back in 1969, long before the gay rights movement became at all fashionable. See also Hekate and the Satanic School by Tim Maroney.) Calling on Satan can also be a way to experience a sense of the numinous. And the better-established forms of Satanism, including both LaVeyan Satanism and the largest theistic Satanist groups, encourage individuals to excel at whatever they happen to be good at.

Markowitz’s association of “skinheads and Satanism” suggests that he might be thinking of Satanist neo-Nazis — who, alas, do exist, but are not by any means representative of Satanists in general. (See my collection of pages Against neo-Nazism among Satanists.)

It seems, also, that Markowitz is confusing Satanism with various juvenile phenomena that may involve the use of Satanic symbols, but in which any interest in “Satanism” is not serious enough or in-depth enough to qualify as religious. For example, Markowitz says:

Since the mid 1980’s there has been a rapid increase in the number and seriousness of crimes related to Satanic Ritual. There are dozens, even hundreds of incidents of graffiti and desecration of churches and cemeteries in almost every state.

There have always been, long before the 1980′s, lots of juvenile delinquents who did graffiti and other, more severe kinds of vandalism. What happened in the 1980′s was the Satanic panic, which inspired some of these kids to use Satanic imagery as just one more way to shock the grownups. But these kids are NOT, as a general rule, serious about “Satanic Ritual.” For example, in one recent episode I blogged on last year (see The alleged “Satan-loving arsonist,” again, in the case of Glory of Christ Church in the Bronx, July 12, 2010, and see also the more recent New York Times story Glory of Christ Church in Bronx Perseveres by David Gonzalez, January 16, 2011), note that the vandals weren’t even aware that a Satanic pentagram points down, not up. So their vandalism should be thought of as, primarily, a teenage gang phenomenon, not a religious phenomenon.

There have been grave robbings in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Louisiana—completed suicides by teenagers in New York City (one on high school grounds), Westchester, New York, Connecticut, Vermont and Florida as well as dozens of suicide attempts related to the practice of Satanic rituals.

An alleged association between Satanism and teen suicide is common in anti-Satanist writings, but I’m not aware of any actual form of Satanism that encourages suicide. If anything, most forms of Satanism make a point of encouraging self-preservation.

It is true that many of the kids who are drawn to Satanism are also alienated from their families. The latter is a far more likely motive for suicide than is these kids’ interest in Satanism per se.

If one is going to look for religious causes of teen suicide, the one religious tendency that has probably caused more teen suicides than any other is the anti-gay attitudes of the more conservative sectors of the Abrahamic religions.

Back to Markowitz:

Seventeen and eighteen year olds have been convicted of homicide that occurred during the practice of Satanic rites in Northport, New York, Minnesota, and New Mexico. A fourteen year old boy slashed his mother to death, set the house on fire, and cut his own throat in New Jersey following his involvement in Satanic readings and rituals.

I would suspect that most of these kids were violently antisocial to begin with and used “Satanism” as just one more excuse for their nastiness — probably, in most cases, without ever exploring very deeply into any form of Satanism. Hence their criminal behavior should not be blamed on Satanism.

The Cult Hotline and Clinic receives more calls about Satanism than any other single cult group.

Markowitz’s wording — comparing Satanism to “any other single cult group” — seems to suggest that he regards Satanism itself as a “cult group.” More about that later.

Be that as it may, his statement surprises me. I wonder how long ago the above page was written. (I didn’t find a date on that page, other than the same general 2010 copyright that appears on all pages of the site.) Was Markowitz’s page written back in the early 1990′s, when the Satanic panic of 1980-1995 was still going strong? Or have the more recent mini-revivals of Satanic panic been far more severe than I thought? Or have Satanic trappings recently become even more faddish amongst juvenile criminal gangs (of which I have no direct knowledge, because they aren’t a part of the religious Satanist scene) than they were back in 1980-1995?

It has long been my impression that New York City has both (1) fewer actual Satanists per capita than most of the rest of the U.S.A. and (2) far less paranoia about Satanists than most of the rest of the U.S.A.

Back in the mid-1990′s, when I was in process of extricating myself from a brief association with one of the more cultish groups in the Satanist scene, I contacted a local support group for ex-cultists and family members, to ask for advice on responding to harassment. (This support group no longer exists, unfortunately.) I was, as I told the people I spoke to, not interested in leaving Satanism per se; I was interested only in getting a particular leader and group out of my life. When I mentioned Satanism, the people I spoke to told me that they had never been contacted, before, by any ex-members of cultish Satanist groups. (The vast majority of their calls were about crazy authoritarian Christian groups.) I hadn’t really expected them to be familiar with the real-life Satanist scene, but I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they hadn’t been contacted by any Satanic panic-mongers either — even though this occurred at the tail end of the 1980-1995 Satanic panic era.

So, I’m very curious to know what kinds of calls the JBFCS Cult Clinic has been getting about Satanism these days.

Anyhow, Markowitz then says:

Teenagers attracted to Satanism tend to be 13-19 years old, white, working and middle class youth who are mostly showing a transient interest. Those more intensely involved or older participants tend to be more seriously troubled and psychologically disturbed.

[Sigh!] Where is he getting his information about older, non-transient Satanists?

Markowitz then gives a list of alleged traits of Satanists including poor academic performance and assorted self-destructive and violent behaviors.

Hello? These are vast overgeneralizations, to say the least. Some Satanists have been very learned and/or successful.

The following famous people all were, at least for some portion of their lives, Satanists in at least the literary sense of having had favorable things to say about “Satan” and/or “the Devil” in well-known writings of theirs:

• William Blake – wrote “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”
• Mark Twain – wrote Letters from the Earth and A Pen Warmed in Hell
• Giosue Carducci (who is considered to have been one of Italy’s greatest poets) – wrote a “Hymn to Satan”
• Charles Baudelaire – wrote “The Litanies of Satan”
• Matilda Gage (leading 19th century feminist) – referred to Satan as the “God of Freedom” in her book Woman, Church, and State, echoing the French historian Jules Michelet’s favorable portrayal of a hypothetical Satanic ceremony by medieval peasants.
• George Bernard Shaw – wrote The Devil’s Disciple and Man and Superman

Admittedly, I’m not aware of any solid evidence that any of the above authors were Satanists in a religious sense. Nevertheless, they clearly were “Satanists” in at least a sense in which that term has long been used by literary critics (e.g. in the books Romantic Satanism by Peter A. Schock and Milton and the Rise of Russian Satanism by Valetin Boss). And they clearly were Satanists in a much more serious, meaningful, and in-depth sense than the kids who spray-paint inverted crosses on church walls.

And they were, obviously, successful in their literary careers. Carducci even won a Nobel Prize.

It is true that nearly all Satanists are alienated from mainstream society in one way or another, to one degree or another. However, being alienated from mainstream society is not necessarily pathological. Seeing things a bit differently from the way everyone else sees them can be, and often has been, a source of great creativity. It can even be, in some cases, a source of badly-needed social reforms. People can be alienated from mainstream society for many different kinds of reasons.

The better-established forms of Satanism encourage their adherents to find ways to put their alienation to productive use, and to acquire the skills necessary to succeed.

It seems to me that Markowitz’s page reflects popular bias — compounded by another kind of bias, specific to psychotherapists and social workers, that is in some ways similar to the anti-gay bias that was common amongst psychotherapists and social workers before the 1970′s: If the only people you personally encounter in category X are people with severe mental/emotional problems, then you naturally tend to assume that all people in category X have severe mental/emotional problems.

To their credit, psychotherapists and social workers do tend to be relatively open-minded people. In the early 1970′s, the gay rights movement did manage to succeed in getting homosexuality removed from the list of psychiatric disorders. This was one of the earliest victories of the gay rights movement, long before the movement made much headway on any other front.

But it’s entirely understandable why psychotherapists and social workers considered homosexuality to be a disorder before then. The only gays they personally knew were some of their own clients, who came to them because they had severe personal problems. And the only other gays they ever heard about, besides the ones they read about in psychiatric journals, were the perpetrators of “homosexual murders” reported by tabloids — even though most sex-related murders were/are committed by heterosexuals but were NOT described by the tabloids as “heterosexual murders.” The term “homosexual murder” has, fortunately, gone out of fashion among journalists, thanks to pressure from the GLBT rights movement. However, back in the 1960′s and earlier, the “homosexual murder” and “homosexual child molester” memes, combined with the fact that the most visible gay hangouts back then were sleazy Mafia-run bars, naturally led a lot of otherwise open-minded people to associate homosexuality with crime and general sleaziness.

What it took, to change the attitudes of psychotherapists and social workers back then, was a bunch of relatively healthy gays coming out of the closet. We similarly need more law-abiding and non-self-destructive Satanists to come out of the closet, to whatever extent they safely can.

Of course, religion and sexual orientation are very different things. But I nevertheless I think there are many valid points of analogy regarding some of the sources of the bias and how it can be overcome.

I should also point out that there are already some sociologists and other social scientists, starting with Marcello Truzzi back in the 1970′s, who have noted that Satanism is not necessarily unhealthy and can even help some people grow up.

Anyhow, back to Satanism and “cults.” Alas, there do exist all too many harmful groups within the Satanist scene, although the none of these are of the type claimed by “Satanic ritual abuse” scaremongers. (See my page of advice on Avoiding harmful religious groups in the Satanist scene.) But do any of these real-life groups qualify as “cults” by the JBFCS Cult Clinic’s definition of the word “cult”?

Elsewhere on the JBFCS Cult Clinic’s website, Arnold Markowitz makes an effort to stick strictly to the JBFCS Cult Clinic’s definition of a “cult.” On a page titled Is Osama Bin Laden or Al Qaeda a Cult?, Arnold Markowitz, LCSW, quotes the JBFCS Cult Clinic’s definition, saying:

Destructive cult groups have a self appointed charismatic leader who is venerated by the followers, a leader who exercises autocratic control over the members’ lives. The group uses deception and manipulation to recruit members and raise funds, and to control the lives of members and deny privacy. I would also add the use of sophisticated psychological techniques to coerce a rapid change in beliefs, values, and practices of recruits.

Markowitz then says, about Al Qaeda:

I have decided that Bin Laden or Al Qaeda is not a cult in the way we use the term and to characterize it as such will diminish our position in warning the world about destructive cult groups. While Bin Laden is a self appointed leader of some sort and may be venerated by his followers, he presents himself as holy man not G-d or a G-d like figure. He focuses his followers’ veneration on Allah, not himself. As best as I can tell, recruits are not inveigled into the group by deception or manipulation. The members know full well what they are joining and seem to be lining up to support the Taliban and Bin Laden. I am not aware of the use of psychological techniques or the use of brainwashing to recruit and keep members. We may not like his message or how it is taught but this does not make it a cult. It is far worse than that. In addition I think it takes us further away from understanding this movement and what we are up against if we glibly dismiss them as a cult group. They are terrorists and terrorists share some characteristics with cult members, particularly the self-negation of their own lives, a willingness to sacrifice themselves for the cause, and intense devotion to a person or a belief system. It is the misuse of these character traits that abhor use [sic] when they are used to kill innocent unarmed men, woman and children.

Okay, if you’re going to be strict about your definition, then hardly any Satanist groups at all — even the harmful groups — qualify as “cults” by the JBFCS Cult Clinic’s definition.

Most Satanist leaders do not claim to be Satan incarnate, or the Antichrist. On those rare occasions when I have seen such a claim by a leader who was taken seriously by anyone at all, it was in the context of a pantheistic or panentheistic belief system in which everything and everyone is divine, and some people are just more in touch with their inner divinity than others. (There are also some silly kids who run around claiming to be the Antichrist, but hardly anyone in the Satanist scene takes them seriously.)

Nor do most Satanist groups engage in heavy-duty proselytizing of any kind, deceptive/manipulative or otherwise. Most Satanist groups recruit only those people who are already Satanists, of a kind compatible with the particular group’s belief system, and who are looking for a group to join.

Most importantly, most Satanists — especially most longtime Satanists — highly value thinking for oneself. Blind faith in anyone or anything is considered a vice, not a virtue, by the majority of people in the Satanist scene, especially by the vast majority of the older, more longterm Satanists. Thus the fundamental ethos of the Satanist scene is the exact opposite of “cultlike.”

Alas, too many Satanist groups nevertheless do have some “cultlike” attributes, as I warn on my page of advice on Avoiding harmful religious groups in the Satanist scene. But such attributes are generally considered, by most longtime Satanists, to be extremely hypocritical. Every religious movement has its share of hypocrites, and Satanism is no exception.

Perhaps Arnold Markowitz needs some education in what Satanism itself is all about? There is a bewildering variety of different kinds of Satanism, but the following pages of mine describe some key beliefs and attitudes that most Satanists have in common: What is Satanism? and Satan and “Evil” in Christianity (and Satanism).

Note to Arnold Markowitz, if you are reading this: I hope you’ll consider correcting various statements on the Cult Clinic website. At the very least, I hope you realize that it’s a very serious matter to claim or insinuate, whether deliberately or otherwise, that an entire religious category consists of a bunch of criminals. I hope you will, therefore, want to research that issue further. Feel free to ask me questions.

To others: If anyone reading this happens to be both (1) a Satanist or at least Satanist-friendly and (2) a psychotherapist or social worker, or aspiring to become a psychotherapist or social worker, please let me know and I will try to find ways to put you in touch with others. If possible, I would encourage you to start your own blog or other public outreach. We would all benefit from the existence of a network of people in those professions who are knowledgeable about Satanism and friendly towards Satanists.

UPDATE, February 10, 2011: In an email reply, Arnold Markowitz says he doesn’t remember when he wrote his page about Satanism, except that it was written at a time when there were lots of tales in the mass media alleged Satanic ritual sacrifice of babies. So, I’ll try to date it myself. His page could not have been written before 1989, at least in its final form, because it mentions the Matamoros murders, which were discovered in 1989. Markowitz’s page begins by mentioning “a great deal of conflict” between people who believe in the existence of “generational practitioners who secretly practice animal and human sacrifices and pass along their clandestine rituals from one generation to another” and those who believe such claims are “over blown hysteria,” — another reason why his page could not have been written before the late 1980′s, which was when the “Satanic Ritual Abuse” (SRA) scare began to be debunked. Most likely his page was written in the early 1990′s, after the publication of several books debunking the SRA scare, but before the scare finally died down (at least in respectable professional circles) in around 1995. Also his page contains the sentence, “Since the mid 1980’s there has been a rapid increase in the number and seriousness of crimes related to Satanic Ritual” — wording which suggests that his page was written no sooner than the early 1990′s.

In his email to me, Markowitz mentions various sensational SRA claims from the 1980′s, starting with Michelle Remembers, which was published in 1980. I’m well aware of many of these cases; see my website Against Satanic Panics.

Markowitz’s email then says:

The intent and message of my writeup was to counter these claims and essentially point out that except for these adolescent dabblers there was little or no evidence of Satanic Cults sacrificing children ,etc. My comments are limited to the
adolescents as that was the area of concern at the time.

I find it intersting that I as a counterveiling commentator contradicting common beliefs and media at the time now attract your criticism. I believe my caveat that even the fewer cases one hears about now are not evidence of widespread destructive Satanic practices still holds true today. Thank you.

To Arnold Markowitz: Insofar as you took a stand against the more spectacular SRA claims at a time when they were still widely advocated, thank you for being a voice of reason on that issue.

Nevertheless, your wording still strongly suggests that all Satanists are criminals, albeit criminals of a less spectacular kind than full-blown SRA. If you re-read your article, I hope you can see how it conveys that impression. If you didn’t mean to convey that impression, I hope you’ll consider adding an update.

As for your comments being limited to adolescents:

1) Your page does in fact briefly mention adult Satanists too, only to say that “Those more intensely involved or older [than 19 years old] participants tend to be more seriously troubled and psychologically disturbed.” If your view on this has changed, it would be nice if you could add an update to the page.

2) I should point out that even adolescents with an interest in Satanism aren’t necessarily criminals either. And those who aren’t criminals are likely to base their beliefs on writings by law-abiding adult Satanists, whereas those who are criminals are less likely to have paid any attention to the adult Satanist scene. So, to round out the picture of young people with an interest in Satanism, to avoid painting them all with the brush of criminality, it is necessary to mention law-abiding adult Satanists too.

This is very different from the older favorable references to “Lucifer” that one can find in the writings of various Western occultists of the 1800′s and 1900′s. I personally would be more interested in a “Luciferianism” that was derived from the latter.

But a LaVeyan-based Luciferian website has recently been brought to my attention, on a message board run by me, so I’ll comment on it now.

The website is Order of the Luciferian Sword. This website emphasizes LaVey-derived social and political views — plus a somewhat greater-than-average flirtation with Nazism than is common among LaVeyans (although plenty of LaVeyans have flirted with Nazism too). Just underneath the menu at the top, the front page announces, “I am intellectually sophisticated enough to admire the third Reich, and not necessarily be a racist or a cookie cutter Nazi.”

The About page claims to espouse a “non-political revolutionary view,” but the vast majority of pages on the website are about the author’s social and political views. Maybe he and I have a different understanding of the meaning of the word “political”?

The website also has several pages on other topics, including Lucifer, theism, chakra-related meditation exercises, and “Indigo children.”

For now, I’ll comment on just two aspects of Lionel’s worldview:

• Lionel Legion’s Nazi sympathies
• Lionel’s rant against “egalitarianism”

Lionel Legion’s Nazi sympathies

I’ll discuss the author’s Nazi sympathies first, because the Nazi sympathies of various people in the Satanist scene are a longstanding pet peeve of mine. (See my collection of pages Against neo-Nazism Among Satanists.)

On Lionel’s page about National Socialism, he says:

Now as the name implies, National Socialism is indeed a form of Socialism. However what separates National Socialism from hard-line Socialism is that the later upholds an extreme egalitarian distribution of wealth and monetary gain. What this means is that in a Socialist utopia a toilet cleaner gets paid the same as a surgeon who practices life threatening cardiac operations ….

What??? Where does he get the idea that socialists say a toilet cleaner should get paid the same as a surgeon? I’ve never heard any socialist advocate any such thing — at least not as a policy for the immediate future.

Marxists traditionally do believe in an eventual future ultra-high-tech world where economic scarcity of any kind will no longer be an issue — sort of like the “resource-based economy” advocated Jacque Fresco, who is one of Lionel’s heroes. In such a world, Marxists and Fresco both believe, the very concept of “payment” would no longer exist in its present form.

Of course, Marx’s vision has never been enacted in real life. In the opinion of most Marxists, that’s because all successful revolutions in the name of “Communism” have occurred in countries that were not technologically advanced enough for true Communism to be feasible.

In my opinion, Lionel needs to learn a little bit about what Marx, Engel, and other socialists have actually said, as distinct from the caricatures of socialism he has evidently heard from right wing sources.

Anyhow, Lionel says that National Socialism

Stresses that a country should be self-sufficient. Industry must be nationalized and people are encouraged to only consume national products. No “Made in China” just “Made in Our Country”.

…

Stresses that a countries industry should remain within it’s borders.

This is called economic nationalism. One does not need to be a Nazi to be an economic nationalist. Economic nationalism has the advantage of shielding a country from international economic crises. However, most economists believe that economic nationalism is not in a country’s longterm best interests, and that it has the longterm effect of stifling a country’s economic development. In any case, the concept of economic nationalism is older than Nazism, and its pros and cons can be debated without reference to Nazism.

It demands a strong central authority and glorifies the rule of the individual, and of one leader of which must be of a strong character and healthy wit.

Lionel, do you really want to live in a dictatorship?

It is not inherently racist, as all other political movements.

There actually was quite a bit of racism in Mein Kampf, e.g. in Hitler’s talk about “Aryans” vs. Jews — who were seen primarily in racial terms, not religious terms. (See Mein Kampf, Volume One, Chapter XI, “Nation and Race,” quoted here, for example.)

Anyhow, in today’s world, Lionel claims that:

never once has a parent dared to tell their kids that perhaps it is ok to believe in Odin instead of Jesus

“Never once” is an exaggeration. There does exist a Norse Pagan movement, although admittedly it is small. Most Norse Pagans are NOT neo-Nazis or Nazi sympatizers. Anyhow, the above is in the context of:

European children and white people in general are raised up and hammered with the notion that being proud of who or what they are is “hateful”, their spirit is suppressed and never once has a parent dared to tell their kids that perhaps it is ok to believe in Odin instead of Jesus, that perhaps it’s ok to be proud of being white, or Germanic, or who they are; that perhaps it’s ok to look back to Europe and gaze in wonder at their ancestors accomplishments.

Being proud of one’s ancestors’ accomplishments is one thing, but drawing racist or white nationalist conclusions is quite another thing. The great accomplishments of Europeans have all occurred at times when Europe was opening itself up to cultural influences from other parts of the world. Cultural isolation leads to stagnation.

Anyhow, Lionel does make the following point that I partly agree with:

Numerous National Socialist rallies have been intercepted and interrupted by a mob of screaming liberals and politically correct automatons. By doing this they are merely fueling the Nazi’s desire to demonstrate and become even more active (and violent). This can also lead to people doing disasterous things since they are essentially giving them the impression that they are under attack and in danger. Thus the best way to combat it if you really feel National Socialism is obsolete in the political realm, is to simply ignore them and go on your merry way (if you can’t debate their ideas without screaming obscenities at them).

Hmmm, I wouldn’t say we should just ignore them, but I do think we need more people willing and able to debate against the ideas of neo-Nazis and other extreme right wingers without screaming obscenities. Like it or not, extreme right wing movements are growing in today’s world, and it won’t be possible to stop them without a multi-pronged response including (among many other things, of course) a rational response to their claims.

When in Doubt;

Put Yourself in their Shoes.

How would one feel if it was brought to ones attention the fact that there are less and less of your kind (intellectually, culturally and racially), if you were looked down upon as a venomous hater for simply stating your proud of being white, or if every 3 months a videogame or movie was released in where your ancestors are depicted as evil men which you must eliminate without mercy, movies where your racial brethren are violently shot and killed like flies. If you were constantly slapped with white guilt like a dog is slapped across the face by people pulling out the race card whenever you chose to defend your right to be proud of who you are. I’m sure all people who share my views would agree with me;

Putting oneself in one’s opponents’ shoes can certainly be an enlightening exercise. There are some situations in today’s world where white people do get ganged up on. Primarily, these situations affect (1) white children in poor, predominantly non-white school districts, and (2) white people in some prisons. A racist skinhead gang sprouting up in such a situation would be quite understandable.

However, such situations are far from the norm in American society as a whole. In most parts of American society as a whole, white people still have a lot of informal social privilege — even in cities like New York City, where white people are now a minority.

The larger reality is that white people are not in any imminent danger of extinction. White people are still a majority here in the U.S.A. Even if/when white people become a minority, as is projected to happen by mid-century, it is highly unlikely — at least on a large scale — that everyone else would gang up on us. There are plenty of ethnic tensions amongst the other groups too — and plenty of tensions between groups on bases other than ethnicity, e.g. religion.

Furthermore, white people are far from uniformly depicted as villains in the movies. In American movies at the present time, the majority of characters of all kinds — including heroes as well as villains — are white.

And a culture is not harmed by a little self-criticism. Even Lionel himself engages in his own criticism of modern Western culture, pointing out, for example, that “the perpetrators of the Spanish inquisition or the massacre of the American indians were never punished but rather rewarded and lived wealthy, luxurious lives like royal, pink, bloated pigs.” (He brings this up in the context of pointing out American hypocrisy in going to war to punish other countries for their alleged atrocities.)

Lionel also disbelieves in the Holocaust. He does not get into a discussion of the historical evidence, but merely tries to sow doubt by pointing to some examples of obviously-faked war propaganda from World War II. But it is acknowledged, even my mainstream historians, that some specific atrocity stories about the Nazis (such as the “human soap and lamp shades” stories) were indeed fake, and were manufactured as war propaganda. (This is acknowledged even on the Nizkor website, which is devoted to refuting Holocaust revisionism.)

However, since World War II, historians have had plenty of time to sort out the reality from the propaganda. And the following are still considered, by nearly all WWII historians, to be well-established historical facts: (1) that the number of Jews killed during WWII was between five and six million (not less than one million, as is alleged by Holocaust revisionists); (2) that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz; and (3) that various high-ranking Nazis had a deliberate policy of killing as many Jews as possible (as distinct from just happening to let a lot of Jews starve in work camps due to food shortages, as is alleged by the Holocaust revisionists).

These are the points at issue between mainstream historians and Holocaust revisionists. I’m inclined to believe the mainstream historians on these matters, given that the World War II era has been extensively studied.

Oddly enough, one of Lionel’s listed heroes is Albert Einstein. Lionel neglects to mention that Einstein (1) was Jewish and (2) fled to the U.S.A. to get away from the Nazis.

On his page about National Socialism, Lionel does make the following good point: “The good/evil narrative of WWII is a blur with the good/evil narrative of so many bad movies, t.v. shows, and reportage. … In reality people aren’t really ‘evil’ — there’s just the challenge of understanding why people do what they do.”

Indeed, one of the pillars of my own concept of Satanism is that we should question demonization. We should think for ourselves and not blindly accept the larger society’s ideas on what is “Evil.” Sometimes, the larger society’s ideas of “Evil” are based on silly prejudices. But not always. Some things really are seriously bad for us. It is up to us to educate ourselves and make our own decisions.

Lionel’s rant against “egalitarianism”

Like many LaVeyan Satanists, Lionel rants against what he calls “Egalitarianism.” Like most such ranters, he comes across as exceedingly ignorant of what he is talking about. For example:

The line in our constitution that states “All men are created equal under god” must be erased…

There’s no such line in the Constitution. The line “All men are created equal” appears in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. And “under God” is not a part of that sentence in the Declaration of Independence. Nor, by the way, is God mentioned at all in any part of the Constitution.

The concept of equal rights became part of the U.S. Constitution via the Fourteenth Amendment, whose Section 1 says:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Does Lionel really want to eliminate “the equal protection of the laws”? I would hope not.

Many of Lionel’s objections to “egalitarianism” make no sense whatsoever. For example:

Under the notion of equality, humanity has expanded like poured cement, covering the globe. Only a handful of places remain where you cannot see constant signs of human habitation. In particular, we have covered the globe in fences and roads that divide up natural ecosystems and interrupt the life cycles of their species. We cannot stop ourselves because we are politically all equal, which means that any person with the money and desire should be able to purchase and develop any land they encounter.

What on Earth does this have to do with “the notion of equality”? Here in the U.S.A., we do have large national parks, with restrictions on development. These days, Republicans typically want to loosen restrictions on development in the national parks, whereas Democrats typically want to tighten them. But the Democrats are the more egalitarian of the two parties, contradicting Lionel’s claim that egalitarianism inherently leads to unlimited exploitation and destruction of natural ecosystems.

Equality creates our greatest failures. Governments, corporations and mass religions do not arise on their own. They arise to service an audience that, brainwashed by political “reality” and dumbed-down by an insistence on reality, wants to purchase and vote for things that resemble its wishful thinking.

It is true that governments, corporations, and religions often cater to “wishful thinking,” but that’s not the reason why they exist in the first place. Corporations exist because of economies of scale, i.e. because there are many things that can be done more efficiently by groups of people working together than by individuals working alone. Governments exist primarily as a way of settling disputes, and there are also many other services that governments can provide more effectively than individuals too.

Anyhow, corporations are not particularly “egalitarian.” Most corporations are run as top-down hierarchical dictatorships.

As for religion, Christianity historically has not been very egalitarian either. Christianity coexisted with slavery and with a hereditary caste system (the privileges of European nobility) for many centuries. Ideals of equality did not become commonplace in the West until the Enlightenment, when many intellectuals were moving away from Christianity.

Perhaps Lionel thinks “equality” means a janitor gets paid the same as a surgeon? He writes:

People must be allowed to have the opportunity to rise above each other with their talents, for without this freedom human life is worthless and devoid of joy, glory and color. People must be allowed to say “I am stronger, smarter, faster than HE!” without having a ruthless communist commissar telling you otherwise or sending you to a gulag for your “counter-revolutionary” thoughts!

There is no taboo on individual excellence, or on people rising above others on the basis of their talents. Nor, at least here in the U.S.A., is there any taboo on calling attention to one’s own accomplishments; people do that on their resumes all the time.

I should qualify this by saying that there is no such taboo in the adult world. It’s true that studious children are often treated badly by other children, which is why I do favor special schools for the more academically-inclined children, contrary to some ultra-egalitarian educational philosophies which hold that all children of the same age group should be kept together no matter what. Here in New York City, we do have plenty of specialized high schools, fortunately.

Notice I said “ultra-egalitarian” in the above paragraph — not just “egalitarian.” Any idea can be carried to counterproductive extremes. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the original idea was a bad idea. Nor are the counterproductive extremes are an inevitable consequence of the original idea.

Lionel reduces the entire concept of “egalitarianism” to its most absurd extreme. And he misunderstands even the ultra-egalitarians. For example:

Everything that has ever been invented, every new idea, every new thought or invention has been the product of special people receiving divine intellectual inspiration and thus, bringing into being their particular thought. Every thing which we are to call the glory of mankind has been the product of natural human inequality. Let us for instance, pretend that the lie of human equality were to be true, then in this case the caveman would never have invented the wheel and thus humanity would have never benefited from this shape, nor would have other cavemen evolved from this in order to create cars, bikes and hula hoops which require this strange and mysteriously seductive shape that is the wheel.

What the ultra-egalitarians believe is not that no one can be technologically inventive, but that everyone can be technologically inventive, given the right circumstances and the right education. The mere existence of technological progress does NOT disprove the ultra-egalitarian view, although one can reject ultra-egalitarianism for other reasons. (See the Wikipedia article on Nature vs. nurture.)

Anyhow, Lionel rants:

Any one ideology which stresses or enforces equality of any kind must be destroyed, it must be cast out, purged from the whole of human thought! Destroy, destroy, destroy! This lie that has seen fit to creep into the minds of idealists and empty headed dreamers must be crushed under an iron fist! Any ideology which promotes this has historically led to disaster, this is quite simply because egalitarianism goes against the nature of man, which will always be unequal! Luciferian providence has proclaimed thus; we must wage brutal intellectual war with this horrible idea that all men are created equal and are thus of the one and the same! Every single ideology that proclaims egalitarianism, wether it be religious (Christianity, Islam, Judaism and all other egalitarian faiths), political (Communism and all other egalitarian political ideologies), and intellectual (extreme forms of humanitarianism) must be sent away and purged from the whole of human consciousness! Everything we call the glory and beauty of man kind is born from natural human indifference and inequality, everything which has lowered us and sought to destroy us has been born out of a desire to equalize everybody or make people out to be “more sheep in the flock”. This can be seen in how all ideologies espousing egalitarianism have historically seeded intellectual prisons for the human experience while priests, commissars or incompetent leaders solidify their own human inequality based on human ignorance and gullibility! Every single fall of man has been because of some smart or down right foolish individual and his unnatural desire to equalize everyone in a religious, political or social context.

If indeed “Any ideology which promotes this has historically led to disaster,” then how does Lionel think that the U.S.A. has managed not only to survive and thrive, but to become the world’s sole superpower?

Historically, the point of egalitarianism in the United States has been to promote equal rights — to oppose things like racism, sexism, hereditary privilege (such as the privileges of European noble families), and slavery.

There is no conflict between egalitarianism (in the sense of equal rights and equal opportunities) and meritocracy. Only when people have equal rights and equal opportunities do the truly talented, of all backgrounds, have an opportunity to prove themselves. The opposite of egalitarianism is not meritocracy but a hereditary caste system. Does Lionel want us to return to a hereditary caste system? I don’t think so…..