Satan calling up his Legions, William Blake, circa 1800-1805..
When surveying the landscape of America in 2020, it’s hard not to conclude that we are living in a time of major realignments, and this has also been true for the world of Satanism. For over half a century, Satanism has been defined by the Church of Satan, and as a result has been directly associated with libertarianism, resulting in its limited appeal and finding company with any number of crypto-fascist organizations. Yet central to the story of Satan’s rebellion and challenge to God is an allegory for individual struggle against unearned authority that has resonated with many people on the political Left, and forms the core of a number of independent Satanic organizations. My own collective, LORE, is intentionally organized around Anarchist principles, though you might ask what that really means. Its all well and good to label oneself an “Anarchist,” but as a political ideology with an established history it is important to explicate just how we see our place in that tradition.
Specifically, our group is dedicated to two particular principles of political Anarchism: the elimination of hierarchical power structures, and the empowerment of the individual through collective action and community responsibility. How do these goals fit with the writings of prominent Anarchist thinkers? As I sought to find where ours and sister organizations fit, I consulted the writings of two foundational Anarchists, Mikhail Bakunin’s “God and the State”, and Emma Goldman’s “The Individual, Society and the State”.
Bakunin works as a good starting point as he directly addresses the role that religion has had in the subjugation of mankind. For many Satanists this work is tempting, if only for his statement that “God admitted that Satan was right; he recognized that the devil did not deceive Adam and Eve in promising them knowledge and liberty as a reward for the act of disobedience which he had induced them to commit”. The lazy reader would slap Bakunin’s face on a Slayer shirt and move on, but his critique of the role the church played in legitimizing the state and justifying the position of humanity as subjects to arbitrary authority is a critical observation, and one held by many Satanists, including myself. He takes this critique further, noting that while plenty have sought to look for an egalitarian core of Christianity in pursuit of a progressive liberal order, he suggests that the Christianity of these “idealists” cannot bring true freedom. “God appears, man is reduced to nothing; and the greater Divinity becomes, the more miserable becomes humanity.” Specifically, he argues that this is due to the abstract ideal of service to the higher authority of God. The creation of a cosmic order wherein all humanity is enslaved to a mystical figure is easily used by earthly powers to justify the subjugation of others by claiming direct authority from that higher force.
Mikhail Bakunin
Bakunin however seems more concerned that the existence and rights of a collective of individuals as a check against authority be championed, then he is with the role of a collective in organizing to perform that role. This imperative to work for the rights of the individual through the practice of collective action is better explicated by Emma Goldman. Working from the idea that the fundamental unit of action throughout history is the individual, she argues that individuals have historically organized into groups—first families, then communities, and eventually into States, a force which orients itself so that a few people at the tops of the hierarchies dictate what is possible to the people below them. This only works because of a practical and implied consent, based on “the belief in authority, in the necessity for it”, because without it the communal order would fall apart due to a propagated belief that people are intrinsically “evil, vicious, and too incompetent”.
Here then Bakunin argues that the State and Religion find themselves working together, since the religious institutions recreate in a spiritual plane that same hierarchy to legitimize the State and elevate the fear of people as impure. “In former days religious authority fashioned political life in the image of the Church”, she writes, and even going so far as to give the State its own quality of divinity. Challenging the State, Goldman contends, is as dangerous as challenging the church: “Enquiry was condemned as blasphemy. Servitude was the highest virtue. By such precepts and training certain things came to be regarded as self-evident, as sacred of their truth, but [sic] because of constant and persistent repetition.” This part being critical since for the State to endure it must deny people the freedom to question their rulers. Otherwise, once people recognize their capacity to organize their society on their own terms, the necessity of the State falls away.
Emma Goldman
Anarchism is not, critically, a movement of “individualists” or radical libertarians. “That corrupt and perverse ‘individualism’ is the strait-jacket of individuality. It has converted life into a degrading race for externals, for possession, for social prestige and supremacy. Its highest wisdom is ‘the devil take the hindmost.’” Here, the Anarchist philosophy stands in direct opposition to the philosophy of the old guard LaVeyan Satanism. In this, Bakunin would agree. While critiquing the claims of the “idealists” of his times, he argued that invoking a form of divinity within each person was insufficient, and that any elevation of God by necessity crushes regular people through its celebration. Further, elevating each person as a God would be “a contradiction which would imply a mutual destruction of men”. In this we have the most direct rebuke to the Satanic maxim that “you yourself are a God,” and a position central to LORE’s fourth value “Collective Autonomy”. Our experience of understanding the ways in which religions smear away the individual for the advancement of the group demands that we elevate the individuality of our members. That can only be done through collective effort, the work of our group exists to lift up each and every one of our members and our greater communities. This is an impossibility if we cling to a childlike notion that we are our own private gods.
At this point in my reading, I was satisfied that we in LORE had worked out a system that aligned well with the philosophy of Anarchism, but couldn’t help feeling this was insufficient. After all why even bother with Satan in the first place? Again the question every Satanist is asked, which I personally have been asked when I speak to my friends about this project: “Why Satan?” Why not work with a local Anarchist collective? In taking a second pass through the texts I was struck by a theme that emerged in both Bakunin’s and Goldman’s writing. Something that intersects with what brought us to Satan in the first place: the “abstract”.
In discussing how religion works in the formation of the State, Bakunin cautions that the work religion does to put mankind in service to an abstraction is also present in allowing government to be ruled by technocrats. While not using the term himself, he sees the danger in a rule of “savants”, who as scientists would end up turning the masses of people into abstract systems which they would then experiment upon. As he writes, “its licensed representatives, men not at all abstract… would finally fleece other men in the name of science, just as they have been fleeced hitherto by priests, politicians of all shades, and lawyers, in the name of God, of the State, of judicial Right.”
That we have seen this bear out in our own time living in a technocratic neoliberal order demonstrates the danger in allowing governing forces to make the people themselves a servant to any abstraction. Unfortunately, while acknowledging the role that these abstract concepts had in the institutions of religion to guide the behavior and actions of the people, or the discoveries of scientists working from abstracts to understand the material world, he provides no proposal on how to meet the needs of people for a motivating ideal.
Emma Goldman though saw the importance of an abstract ideal in motivating people. In her analysis the state itself is an abstract, which, as discussed above, historically justified itself through the theologies of religious institutions. Importantly, people do not engage with the material world and as an abstract: “In religion, as in politics, people speak of abstractions and believe they are dealing with realities.” Yet she notes that when people engage with the material and concrete facts of their lives they paradoxically lose some essential personal connection to the shared struggle, and thus the motivation to change things for the better. Here she observes, correctly in my opinion, that “the Ideal is the spark that fires the imagination and hearts of men. Some ideal is needed to rouse man out of the inertia and humdrum of his existence and turn the abject slave into an heroic figure.”
As Satanists, we frequently ignore the power that the story of the death and resurrection of Christ has for its adherents. The story of salvation through Christ was revolutionary precisely because of its personal nature. Long before the Enlightenment and the liberal political order, the faith of Christians put the personal experience of “the divine” front and center. Is it any wonder that it motivates so many people to action still? Whether the principled pacifism of Quakers or the radical work of Liberation theologists, these stories matter and motivate people to collective action. Our point of departure stands with the underlying structure of these stories, that, as Bakunin argued, “The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.” If then we find the need of a motivating ideal, what do we elevate? For Goldman: “Such an ideal I see in Anarchism. To be sure, not in the popular misrepresentations of Anarchism spread by the worshippers of the State and authority. I mean the philosophy of a new social order based on the released energies of the individual and the free association of liberated individuals.” This honestly strikes me as laughably insufficient. The power of religious myths are that they are at once abstract AND concrete. They are stories that through metaphor or allegory convey their abstract in ways that are emotionally resonant, and Anarchism, while a perfectly descriptive term does not meet this standard. We see today how from an emotional basis it is more widely associated with a kind of post-civilizational collapse than an egalitarian project.
This is why we at LORE venerate a radical Anarchist Satan, and must now write our own myth as our “abstract” to inspire us further. Building from the story told by Milton, much as Bakunin himself noticed, we see the figure of Satan as liberator of humanity, leading us to the skills of reason and undermining the work of the authoritarian God to keep us ignorant and servile. It is this symbolic act that informs our actions, and frequently forgotten is this was not done unilaterally in Milton’s telling. In the opening verses Satan is elected by the infernal host to seek out man and draw him away from God. This work of collective action is precisely why the Satan of other groups are incompatible. Milton as an Independent Calvinist wrote this act as a tragic event, the spiteful work of an angel jealous of God’s power and seeking to usurp it for himself. Through drawing his new creation of mankind from God’s grace he seeks to weaken Him so that he will one day be able to claim the throne in Heaven. We however are not bound to treat Milton’s words as canon. Instead I propose we look at both his appeal to democracy and contempt for God’s claimed authority. In this he is a true revolutionary, unlike the selfish “every man a God” ethos of the Church of Satan. Our Satan is just one figure who acts with the consent of his fellow travelers, who does not seek to steal the throne of God but to destroy it entirely.