MY SECOND INTERVIEW WITH SATAN

ENDING THE COSMIC WAR ONE PRINCE OF DARKNESS AT A TIME

MY SECOND INTERVIEW WITH SATAN: IN WHICH WE DISCUSS A VERY SERIOUS ISSUE

CW: Rolling Stones joke

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An extra special welcome back to the Prince of Darkness, Lord of the Material World, Ruler of Hell and all-time fun guy: SATAANN!!! (\m/ \m/ horns are thrown, dry ice fills the room, Black Metal music plays, and Satan appears).

Me: Kia Ora Koutou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War with me, Karen Effie. And a hellishly warm welcome back to you, Satan. Today I want to cover modern and contemporary Satanisms, talk about who actually follows you, and raise a serious issue with regard to the Cosmic War.

Satan: Some would say it is in the modern era that I really come into my own. Rationalism, humanism and Enlightenment values did not get rid of me. I got fatter on folk beliefs, Romanticism and eventually actual Satanists worshiping me, which was a twist I had not expected.

Me: Haven’t people always worshiped you then? What about the old image of the sorcerer, the magician treating with unholy powers to gain power for themselves? The Faustian bargain?

Satan: Do your homework. Those magicians were high-minded. They were prepared to work with demons, or beings that were considered to be demons by those who misunderstood them. But their aims weren’t Satanic. They were technicians of power. They knew if you got the stars right and said the right things using all the right tools, you got what you wanted. Mostly they wanted wisdom. They were the descendants of those Zoroastrian magi you like so much. They would have been horrified to think of themselves as Satanists. And on the dark side, if you like, if you look at the grimoires, the spell books from the early modern period, they are spells for manipulating people or harming people. But this is farmhouse magic. Folk magic. It is no worse than fighting or stealing or any of the other non-magical things people do.

Me: Fair enough. I have before me my copy of The Grimorium Verum, supposedly written in 1517, is notoriously evil. It contains spells for things that to me seem trivial, like “Secret for travelling twenty miles an hour”, and how to win at dice, and stop a dog from barking, and not be afraid of fire. Along with the more serious things like resuscitating the dead, and calling up demons, much of it done in the name of God. It is bad magic; the methods are gory and violent and often unnecessary. It is worldly stuff, as you say. But it could kill people or mess them up, if you tried it.

Satan: It could mess up the person trying it, you mean! But murder kills people, obviously, and straightforward murder and theft and assault and fraud and so on are much more common. You don’t need the blood of six different animals and a prayer to a saint and a talisman when a blunt instrument would do the trick. Traditionally I am in the magic spell, OK, but I am also in the weapon and the fists. I am in the bad things people do. I really began during the early days of Christianity by tempting saints and the holy. Then I was everywhere, tempting everyone to licentiousness and vice, and also to heresy. And I became a king, the ruler of hell, in medieval times, with hosts of lesser demons beneath me, a parody of heaven.

Me: This brings me to whether or not people believed in you and worshiped you. As opposed to people saying that other people worshiped you. It was the poor and marginalised who were accused of worshiping you. It was always other people, not good folks like us, whoever we are. I am back to Norman Cohn and his books about medieval nocturnal ritual fantasies and Jews and witches and people out of place. Then we come to the early modern period, and the birth of science, which was also weirdly the renaissance of magick among the ruling classes, and also the beginnings of humanism and rationalism. How did you deal with that, then?

Satan: Hah! That was a good time to be the master of chaos. The Black Plague was fun. The breaking up of Christianity was fun, with those old Protestants fighting among themselves. Martin Luther was one of my favourites: he famously threw his ink well at one of my demons. I was everywhere! Sowing discord. Preying on the grieving and the resentful. And the witch hunts, great stuff. All the rubbish people said about each other, all the betrayal and the accusations, such fun. Hundreds of people were killed for it. For nothing. It might have been the birth of the Enlightenment, but for me it was the birth of new ideas about how I might work in the world, not through temptation of holy people into sin or heresy, but through messing with the fabric of society, making scandals and accusations spread, causing social madness.

Me: Were there any actual Satanists, though? We know that people were tortured into confessing to witchcraft, but were they Satanists? Heretics, and you have to remember how seriously people took heresy on all sides, how they were accused of being satanic by their enemies, but none of them said they were Satanists, quite the opposite. And then there are the genuine magical practitioners. Even into the modern period, cunning folk had a neutral role in Britain, for example. They could heal and harm. They were magicians for hire. They were not quite society, but not aside from it either. And none of them claimed to be Satanists.

Satan: Well, no, but as I pointed out, if you had bothered to listen, belief in me is not necessary and sometimes not even desirable.

But here I am reminiscing again, an old prince of darkness having a little fun hre and there. So, the Enlightenment. I stopped appearing in the world, at about the same time that God stopped appearing in the world, and I became a part of the human psyche. You could say we both set up residence in the human heart. That is where I thrive now. I am in all the petty vices, because most people are incapable of the big vices. And in the big vices and the big events too. Someone wise said a long time ago, that I drove a tank with a general’s rank, while the blitzkrieg rained, and the bodies stank. Don’t know who said that, presumably a virtuous and abstemious soul. But they got it right, whoever they were.

Me: Whoever they are. That virtuous and abstemious soul is still miraculously alive.

Satan: (nods head sagely) Ah, due to all the virtue and abstemiousness probably. Damn me, I hate those people.

Me: Are you driving the tank? Are you behind great world events as the conservative Christians, and The Zoroastrians and the Muslims too for that matter, would say? Are you manipulating world leaders and so on? Are you a puppet master pulling the strings? Or are you more in our hearts tempting us and leading us astray? Or both? I watched this program called “Evil” on TV. The idea is a priest, a psychologist and a technician, who is of course the sceptic, investigate strange and unworldly events on behalf of the Catholic Church to find out if there are demons behind them. It starts out as a monster of the week thing, where sometimes there are no demons, but it ends up with demons and Satan worshippers everywhere and layers of demonic evil within the Catholic Church and society, and at that point I gave up because it got ridiculous.

Satan: That is amusing! You know in early Southwest Asia, the answer was always demons. Mesopotamian literature is full of the little buggers. Got sick? Demons. Fallen out with your best friend? Demons. Died? The demons really got you good. Demons were everywhere, and the little buggers needed to be constantly contained and placated and just generally taken into account. Demons were kind of natural forces, just hostile to humans, like germs. They were not yet freighted with the idea of a grand evil. That came with Zoroastrianism, and I was born as Angra Mainyu, later to be called Ahriman. I have never been an aggregate of demons, I developed as my own entity, and by the medieval period I came into my own as king of Hell, with demons arrayed beneath me. As for being behind world events, you know there are people who see me everywhere. Everywhere! I think you call them Republicans, but I have also heard them called fundamentalists and evangelicals and so on. People like the lovely Paula White, senior advisor to the White House and Donald Trump’s personal spiritual advisor, whom I don’t doubt he sorely needs. Damn me I love Paula! And I love all of those guys, they just magnify my name and insert me into every goddam narrative. I am perfectly happy with that. The chaos goblin in me loves it. You could argue that I am more important than Jesus! Why am I saying that? Not just because I want to blaspheme. Think about it: these guys can get by without someone to worship, they could unbolt Jesus from the schema, or just put anyone else in there, but they can’t get by without someone to hate. Back in the day it was communists. Communists were literally demonised. Then it became liberals. They don’t see liberals as just the opposition or even the enemy, but as the ultimate enemy, the demonic enemy, who must be totally vanquished. Kamala Harris is a Jezebel spirit, and so on. You know I am behind the woke left?

Me: No!! I am appalled! After all I am your favourite libtard! You can’t tell me that!

Satan: (snickers evilly) That’s not what I say, it’s what they say. Was Jesus king of the Jews? Jesus never said that. It was not what Jesus said, it was what they said. I just stand back and hold their beers.

Me: Ok I get it. You really are a piece of shit.

Satan: Thank you, I do my best.

Me: I want to talk about how you exist in this secular age. Because it is a secular age, in the west, even in the USA. If you aren’t behind world events, if you are in fact fighting the Cosmic War mostly in the hearts of human people, then I suppose you do it by messing with people’s moral decisions. CS Lewis is often referred to here, because he was a Christian writer responding to increased secularisation in the middle of the twentieth century. He wrote a book called “The Screwtape Letters” which you really should read. It is written as a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior demon, to his noob nephew. Here is a quote:

“You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy (God). It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

So here is the issue. What is going on here is that people fall into your sway not by worshiping you, just by being weak and lazy and boring and pathetic, or just being unaware. It’s a secular age. People don’t even believe in you. It is like you are nowhere and everywhere at once. But I would have it that as belief in God declined, belief in you declined also. It is hard to fight the Cosmic War in hearts that are not troubled by the need for theological consolation.

Satan: So, show me some souls that do worship me. They won’t be measly things like the ones in the quote above. They will be grand souls, worthy of what it takes to be mine.

Me: Ok, let’s start with actual Satanists. Firstly, I will deliberately and maliciously conflate Satan and Lucifer even though I understand there are differences, because they are functionally the same here. Most importantly, I am going to set aside the Satanic Panic, and the QAnon movement. If anyone sees you everywhere, it’s that lot. But we can agree that there were no groups of Satanists sexually abusing them and eating them in the 1980s, and we can also agree that there are no Satanists among politicians and celebrities who drink the blood of kidnapped children now. That is one of the “So they say” things, right? It doesn’t happen, but because some people think it happens, it makes you look more important. Right?

Satan: (sniggers evilly).

Me: (With side eye) I will take that as a concession. Ok, the biggest two Satanic organisations in the world are the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple. The former is the organisation formed by Anon Lavey in the 1960’s. He wrote the Satanic Bible, which I actually found in my public library recently, bless them. His Church of Satan used the aesthetics of horror movies along with the ideas of Ayn Rand quoted wholesale. So, the Church leans right politically, towards a sort of hard libertarianism and lots of individual responsibility and hyperindividuality. It is still going today. Now, the Satanic Temple is essentially a leftie civil rights agitprop group. They protest in fun ways against Christian teaching in schools and Christians being exclusive in public places, and they support survivors of the repressed memory school of therapy, and ex addicts. They also have an abortion clinic. They are always in litigation of some sort, fighting for the separation of church and state.

Neither of these Satanist organisations believe in Satan. They both see Satan as a figure of liberation and transgression, and they reinterpret the stories about Satan in a way where Satan is the benefactor of humanity. They are worldly sorts. They are happy materialists. This kind of Satanism has its history in the romantic Satanism of the early nineteenth century. Poets and writers such as Percy Bysshe Shelley saw Satan as a liberatory character, especially for women. You could say some of the earliest feminists were Satanists. And they of course were influenced by Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Lucifer, who is basically Satan, is humanised. He represents our drive towards pride and independence and individuality – and power! Romantic Satanism asks what would happen if we gave these impulses their due. If we pretended Satan was real and then took the pretence seriously. What would happen if women took power seriously? What if Eve did the right thing, eating the fruit and bringing humanity to consciousness? It’s not an uncommon belief.

We can thus establish that romantic Satanists didn’t believe in you, and neither do these others who use Satan as a figure of transgression and liberation, such as the Laveyan Satanists. Satan is a name for the id, perhaps, or our secret desires. They might hold elaborate ceremonies and develop the right sort of aesthetic, but they are not worshiping you. They are worshiping themselves.

Then there are Satanists who are theistic or traditional Satanists. They believe in Satan in that they see Satan as an objective entity outside of themselves. It is hard to determine the extent to which they actually worship Satan. They might see Satan as a kind of psychic role model. They might also have Satan as part of a generally pagan pantheon. They might practise demonolatry and work with demons. I think the relationship tends to be transactional; they ask the powerful entity for something and give something in return. Often what they want is the same thing magicians have always wanted. Wisdom, knowledge, power to affect the world Anyway, to the issue of theistic or traditional Satanists, there are some organisations around. The Temple of Set are a proper offspring of the Church of Satan. and they are theistic, although they see Satan as the Egyptian god Set. There are many other small groups, mostly online; the internet has done its usual thing and become a source of the most wondrous diversity. There are also tragic examples of lone young men doing very nasty things because they want to be Satanists. And there are lone practitioners.

The magical work required to be a practising Satanist is hard. It is often a slog and it requires real discipline over years, and it is usually done alone. It is not for everybody and it’s not supposed to be. I don’t think theistic Satanists usually worship Satan exactly. Their influences are really diverse: Wicca, Enochian magic, Kabbalah, Gnosticism. They might consider Satan as part of a pantheon of demons or higher entities. Or as a demiurge, in Gnosticism. Satan might be a real entity, but what do you do with Satan? Respect, negotiate, request favours, ask advice, dedicate magical work to – it’s not worship, it’s theurgy. Satan is what you want to be when you grow up. If you act like Satan, free and powerful, you become like Satan.

Satan: What about Aleister Crowley? He was my guy, if anyone was.

Me: I don’t know. He seldom mentioned Satan. He certainly lived a life you would expect a Satanist to live, however, his aim was different. In the end he wanted to merge with the divine, a mystical aim, whereas the theistic Satanist aims to be a free cosmic individual outside of any influence of the divine. What do you think?

Satan: He was my guy, because his aim does not interest me or benefit me. His methods and his effect on the world around him were mine. He lived like he was mine even if he wanted something else. Conflicted desires are my bread and butter.

Me: I am getting the picture. You are the evil in the human heart. You are studied ignorance and cynicism and selfishness, and you cause death to the human spirit. It is debatable where or not you made evil, or you are just its personification. But who thinks they are evil? I think this is a really serious question. Satanists don’t think they are evil. They might think they are spiritual edgelords. They want to be transgressive and push the bounds of individual morality in order to know themselves better, and they want to be free from the constraints of others whom they consider to be inferior to them, but I don’t think they think of themselves as evil, unless they are psychopaths.

Satan: You don’t need to be a Satanist to be a psychopath. My point is always, why magic someone to death when a good blow to the head will usually do it.

Me: True, and I have met a few psychopaths and none of them are Satanists. There are a few people in this world whose intent I think is evil. By evil I don’t mean just very wrong or badly mistaken. Evil is a special category. I think it is quite rare. There are people in this world who I believe are fundamentally wrong and who behave very badly and want to harm others. But those people don’t think of themselves as evil. Often, they think they are the good ones. Today, we have hugely destructive billionaires who somehow identify with Luke Skywalker. Without taking the piss, they think of themselves as part of the small band of virtuous rebels. Presumably, everyone else in the world is Stormtroopers. Often, they think they are victims, even. I have had many people before me who have done very bad things, and they blame their childhoods, or try to say their intentions were good, or that they didn’t know what they were doing. Nobody has ever said to me, I did it because I am evil. So, and I am working up to a question here, what is the use of you? So far in human history you have not persuaded any but the very tiniest few that evil is desirable.

Satan: Some people have flirted with the idea, at least. They have a fascination with evil. The French philosopher and economist George Battaile had a thing for the Chinese form of death by torture known as slow slicing, or ling chi. He displayed a photo of a victim undergoing this on his wall. True story. Have you seen it, you might like it. Also, think of all the true crime stories and the police procedurals and serial killer nasties. Humans love them! You love this stuff. You may not be evil, but you love evil. You love me.

Me: I have seen that photo. I do not recommend it. Battaile had a thing for limit experiences, as he called them. He believed that severe pain led to transcendence. You can replicate that by ultra distance running or fasting. Limit experiences open you up to self-knowledge. Lethal pain, transcended, leads the sufferer to an ecstatic state. I think some of the early Christian church saints would understand that perfectly. They sought out the most terrible privations to become truly holy – and they tell us they fought you, Satan, and your minions, every step of the way. So, weird shit, but nothing to do with evil. As for the true crime stuff, I can’t watch it. I asked someone who watched a lot of it what they get out of it. They said they like to watch justice done. There’s that, but there are also the moral lessons, like don’t step out of line, especially if you are female, so the message is conservative. Order is restored at the end, once the perp is caught. Same message as the old slasher movies, I guess, or the urban myths about staying in your lane. So yes, I suppose we are excited by the thought of evil, but we other evil people. We see evil people as monsters. They are not like us, not at all. We could never do that, oh my gosh no, and so on. We are the good ones. We pay our taxes. So really, old friend, you have no leg to stand on. Very few people actually worship you, hardly anyone thinks of themselves as evil even if they do awful things, and all you can do is mess with people’s heads.

Satan: Well, that is damning, if you like. Except I have the last laugh, as always. Because you are trying to end the Cosmic War, is that right? And the Cosmic War goes on and on. Most end-of-the-world scenarios are secular these days. They are about climate catastrophe or the end of civilization or nuclear war. I am invisible there, and I like it. I can sit back and hold everybody’s coats while they fight to the death. It won’t be long now until the whole earth is turned into hell, with no effort from me, and I get to rule over it all. With that, I think we can end this conversation, can’t we? It’s been a delight, as usual, not.

(Satan swirls his cloak over himself and disappears in the puff of black greasy smoke, accompanied by snivelling minions, Black Metal music, demonic laughter etc etc.)

Me: (sighs) Well, folks, that was the prince of darkness, shoring up the fragments of his ruins, as TS Eliot would say. This is the major adversary, without whom we would not have the Cosmic War. If there is any further reason to abandon this old, messy, toxic Story, getting rid of Satan should do it.

Thank you for hanging in there, some of it was a bit sticky I am afraid. I hope to have you on board next time, ma te wa.

Further:

- For fun, Dr Angela Puca in her video interview with Dr Per Faxneld is great on the history of modern Satanism.

- Dyrendal, Asbjørn, James R. Lewis, and Jesper Aagaard Petersen. The Invention of Satanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Dyrendal is always good on new religions and conspiracy theories.