From the "Man, Myth and Magic" series
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_SATANISM_

'Satanism advocates practising a modified form of the Golden Rule.
Our interpretation of this rule is: "Do unto others as they do
unto you."' This comment from "The Satanic Bible" by Anton Szandor
LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan in San Francisco, neatly
illustrates the principle on which Satanism is based. Things
which are backwards, upside down, the wrong way round, are
symbolically connected with the Devil as the power which seeks to
overturn the order and worship of God, and the essence of Satanism
is the reversal of Christian and conventional values. It is now
the Christian God who is evil and the Enemy who is good. The
Prince of Darkness is the true Lord of Light, Lucifer, 'light-bearer'.

Christian moral values are also stood on their heads. For the
Christian virtues of compassion, loving-kindness, patience, self-
restraint, the Satanist has nothing but contempt, as dreary, down-
trodden, spiritless ideals. To Christian otherworldliness he
opposes this-worldliness, the ruthless struggle for power and
pleasure on earth, and in and through the flesh. The weak, the
chaste and merciful he disdains, and he devotes himself to
dominance, cruelty, dirt, lust, and all fierce and passionate
emotions.

Perhaps the two Christian virtues which most infuriate the Satanist
are humility and purity. To humility he opposes pride for which,
after all, his Master was expelled from heaven in the first place.
To the Christian tendency to regard the body and its passions as
sinful and unclean, he opposes an uninhibited delight in all pleasures
of the senses -- and the more perverse and disgusting to the
conventional mind, the better. Not that Satanists are always
consistent, any more than other people are. They can be found,
for instance, insisting that all forms of sexual indulgence are
good provided other people are not hurt, while in another context
they are preaching the delights of brutality.


_The Galilean Serpent_

Satanists are few and far between, since not many people want to turn
all of society's accustomed standards upside down. Modern Satanism
has received much of its impetus from 19th century literature, from
the 'decadent' enthusiasm for scarlet vices and unnameable sins,
from the rebellion against Victorian bourgeois values, especially in
relation to sex, from the fierce hatred of Christianity....

The root ideas of Satanism go far back beyond the 19th century to the
Gnostic sects.... They were not Satanists either, for far more people
have been accused of worshipping the Devil than have ever actually
done so, but they saw the world around them as profoundly evil, as the
real hell, and life on earth as a sentence served in a prison. If the
world is evil, then the power which made it and rules it must be evil
too, and some of the Gnostics identified this evil power as the God
of the Jews, who is described as creating the world in the book of
Genesis and whose behaviour in the Old Testament they found impossible
to reconcile with Christian principles. The good God, they said, 
lives far away in some distant heaven and we on earth are in bondage
to the evil Yahweh.


_The God of this World_

They could draw some support for this opinion from the New Testament.
In the story of the temptation in the wilderness, the Devil offers
Jesus 'all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them' (Matthew,
chapter 4), with the clear implication that the gift is his to make.
In St. John's gospel (12:31) the Devil is called 'the ruler of this
world', and St. Paul calls him 'the god of this world' 
(2 Corinthians 4:4). And the belief that this evil god of the world
was Yahweh could have been supported from another passage in St. John
(8:44), where Jesus tells the Jews that their Father is not God but
the Devil.

Gnostics generally regarded Jesus as a Saviour sent by the good God to
rescue men from enslavement to evil, but the identification of Yahweh
as the evil power naturally turned the Old Testament upside down.
Patriarchs and prophets and servants of Yahweh turned into villains,
and Cain, Esau, the Sodomites and other opponents of Yahweh became
heroes. The serpent of Eden was now a messenger from the good God,
sent to bring Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil so that
their eyes would be opened to the evil nature of Yahweh's creation.
Some Gnostics, or so their Christian antagonists said, attacked Jesus
as the evil Son of the evil Father and glorified Judas Isacriot for
betraying him.

If God the Father was an evil deity, then it could be deduced that the
Ten Commandments, and the other moral rules laid down by him were also
evil, intended to keep men in subjection to him. Some Gnostics led
austere lives of self-denial to disentangle themselves from the wicked
world, but others were accused of atempting to escape from bondage to 
evil by breaking all conventional moral rules. Some said that once a
man had received the gnosis, had understood the true nature of things,
he could indulge in all his lusts and desires without fear of corruption.
Writing in the late 2nd century, St Irenaeus accused one group of 
Gnostics of maintaining that the soul could only free itself from the
Devil's world by exhausting every possibility of human experience, by
doing 'all those things which we dare not either speak or hear of, nay
which we must not even conceive in our thoughts'.

Gnostic ideas were kept alive in the East by obscure sects and were
eventually transmitted into western Europe by way of the Bogomils and
Cathars.... The Cathars identified the God of the Old Testament as
the Devil, the lord of this world which he had created, the master of
the human body and of all material and temporal things. They attacked
the Roman Catholic Church because it worshipped a being they regarded
as Satan, and because they considered it stained with the worldliness
and materialism inevitable in the service of the Evil One. But the
Church reversed the accusation and branded the Cathars as Satanists.

Perhaps some of the Cathars did reach the conclusion that if the God
of Catholics was really the Devil, then perhaps the Devil of the
Catholics was the true God. Certainly, the Church maintained that
they did. In the following centuries the same accusation was made
against other heretical groups, including the Waldensians, the
Luciferans in the 13th century, and the Knights Templar in the
14th.... A pattern of 'Satanist' belief and behaviur was built up,
whether or not any real Satanism was involved, its essential
ingredients being worship of the Devil and the reversal of Christian
values. A Satanist was one who renounced Christ and his Church, and
blasphemously maltreated its sacred objects, symbols and ceremonies;
who adored the Devil in the form of a man or a goat or some other
animal; who sang and danced in the Devil's honour and obscenely
kissed his person; and who revelled in child-slaughter and 
cannibalism, indiscriminate sexual orgies, perversion, homosexuality
and every species of crime and abomination. This same pattern of
accusations was brought against the witches.

The heart and centre of the persecution of witches was that they were
Satanists, that they had rejected the rightful God and given their
allegiance to his arch-opponent, and that in their 'sabbaths' or
meetings they worshipped the ruler of evil, carnality and filth.
Some of those accused as witches do seem to have taken the Devil for
tehir god, worshipping him as an equal opponent of the Christian God,
over whom he would eventually triumph. They looked to Satan for power
and pleasure in this world and for a happy future in the next, and
they vilified Christ as a traitor and a cheat, who had made promises
which he did not keep, and who had gone away to live in heaven while
Satan remained with his faithful on earth. The fierce hatred and
contempt felt for Christianity comes out in many of the confessions
extorted from witches and in accounts of the Black Mass, which they
were accused of performing at the sabbath, in adoration of the Devil,
as a blasphemous degradation of Christian ritual and as a celebration
of the flesh and matter, as against the spirit....

In modern times Satanism appears more often in print than in real life.
There is a vivid account of the Black Mass in J. K. Huysmans's novel
"La-Bas", probably drawn from life. In his "History of Witchcraft and
Demonology", Montague Summers quoted from an Italian newspaper a
description of a Satanic chapel discovered in the Palazzo Borghese
in 1895.

	The walls were hung all round from ceiling to floor
	with heavy curtains of silk damask, scarlet and black,
	excluding the light: at the further end there stretched
	a large tapestry upon which was woven in more than life-
	size a figure of Lucifer, colossal, triumpant, dominating
	the whole. Exactly beneath an altar had been built,
	amply furnished for the liturgy of hell: candles, vessels,
	rituals, missal, nothing was lacking. Cushioned 
	prie-dieus (kneeling desks) and luxurious chairs, crimson
	and gold, were set in order for the assistants; the
	chamber being lit by electricity... arrayed so as to 
	glare from an enormous eye.

A few Satanist groups still exist, here and there, and the survival
of Gnostic ideas is illustrated by a set of questions and answers
issued by one of them, styling itself Our Lady of Endor Coven, The
Ophite Cultus Sathanas. 'Satanism,' it says, 'is the position
opposed to the worship of the force that brought the cosmos into
existence as mind and matter out of the realm of pure spirit', in
other words, opposed to the worship of the Gnostic evil world-
maker, the Christian God the Father. Cain 'celebrated the First
Satanic Mass' and Satanism 'has no conception of sin, but rather
puts ignorance (the lack of the Gnosis) in the place of sin.'
Members of less unorthodox faiths may be relieved to hear that
Satanists hold aloof from the world ecumenical movement.

RICHARD CAVENDISH
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"Man, Myth and Magic", book16, RAS->SCI, heading for
 SATANISM, ed. Richard Cavendish and Brian Innes,
 M.Cavendish Corporation, 1995; p. 2283-5.
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