St. Michael expelling Lucifer and the Rebel Angels
ca. 1622
Peter Paul Rubens
This particular work has been an especially difficult one for me, though I suppose not surprisingly. The closing months of the American 2020 elections and a prematurely declared relief from a socially warping pandemic have had the effect of both ratcheting internal tensions and clarifying thoughts I’ve been struggling with for what are in fact decades. In being drawn to Satanism over the last few years it’s been clear this has largely been driven by an identification not just as an outsider, but by a revolutionary impulse, being set outside of the acceptable order and culture, hoping to see the world changed in ways that reshape this order fundamentally, towards the elimination of exploitation. In this time I chose to examine what a Satanic representation of Heaven and Hell could mean, and as the world seemed to shudder and deform in the events of 2020, I’ve found myself seeking to resolve a tension in my own thinking. Watching as the scientific empiricism I rely upon in my day job fails to grapple with the failures of our social order, I have sought to understand the metaphorical impulses that drive my engagement with the world and my desires to see it changed.
As I think about the economic and social conflicts that we’ve been facing, my mind goes to the English Civil War, itself a shattering event cited not just in the emerging liberal consciousness, but also the rise of capitalism during the colonial order. And while Milton is the most obvious figure from this period for a Satanist to begin with, I would instead like to start with Thomas Hobbes, a man whose political philosophy is surprisingly helpful for a radical like myself. Leaving aside his proto-fascist apologia towards the Leviathan of state, Hobbes made a critical observation: In critiquing the shortcomings of the estates system, he asserted that the priesthood of his day had perverted the original meanings of the terms soul and spirit. In his mind God was material, and the usage of the words spirit and soul were originally intended to be understood metaphorically. Their transformation into immaterial supernatural concepts was an intentional act to grant the priestly class an absolute power over an aspect of life that only they could mediate. While Hobbes was more concerned that this created a center of power in the clergy that worked against the righteous sovereign, it should be obvious to us that this framing served to keep the masses subservient to authority in fear over their position in an unseen world.
This literalization of the metaphorical understanding of spirit should be understood to include all aspects of the mythology of Christendom, in particular Heaven and Hell. American evangelicals especially will describe Heaven as a gaudy afterlife, adorned like a tacky Atlantic City Hotel among the clouds, and Hell a roiling pit of sulfurous torment populated by homosexuals and aborted babies. These of course are informed by much more inspired depictions, whether the diss-track of elaborate descriptions of the nine circles by Dante Aligheri, or the surreal landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch. Yet the symbolism at work has been exploited to obscure the spirit within these concepts, a thing we must understand when attempting the Satanic hermeneutic.
Here then we can look to Milton, whose Heaven and Hell are especially evocative not just in their descriptions but for their role in the conflict between good and evil. Satan’s bid to unseat God from his throne in Heaven crushed, he and the Infernal Host find themselves exiled. Banished from the source of power, the fallen angels build their own domain and plot their next steps to unseat Him. For Milton, the allegories of his own folly in rebellion are obvious and mirror both the precarity of the Calvinists following the restoration of the monarchy and any number of exiles in feudal European courts. I however am not bound by the historical context and wish to interrogate what meaning can be found in both the Hell that Satan and the Infernal Host made as their home, and the Heaven they fought a war to claim. These metaphors maintain a powerful resonance even after the change from the social order of the divine right of kings to the era of liberalism, as we continue to struggle with overpowering forces that stand in the way of forming a society that
works for the advancement of all.
How then can we categorize these divine/debased planes? Heaven is of course the seat of God, the source of grace and all that is true and good with the world, while Hell is the punishment, a place of darkness and torment originally crafted as a seat of exile for the rebellious angels that fought alongside Satan. More than that, Heaven is the source of creation, a seat of power, and a space of joy from which all challengers to the monarchical power of God must be exiled. In Paradise Lost, nearly from the start Satan doubts the claims of God to being the sole creator. He rightly concludes God’s usurpation of the powers of Heaven is unjust, and finds himself called to challenge that. In his fervor, though, Satan overestimates his forces, an error he pays for in exile and begins again as a guerrilla, sowing doubt in the minds of God’s newest subjects. These subjects would go on to then find themselves cast out from God’s grace, but given the promise of acceptance, of being granted access to Heaven as reward for their fealty. That divine power asserted, the message then to us is clear: If we, as subjects of His world, accept the sacrifice of His son and live virtuous lives, depending on one’s theology, we will be accepted into this kingdom of Heaven on our death and in the end of days. Here
then is the critical point: Heaven has been set behind a dictatorial gatekeeper, one that will brook no dissent.
This promise of any relief from the conditions of suffering being set behind a gate has relevance beyond the mystical considerations of a religion and can be applied to the specific conditions of our modern world. The idea of contentment, of being part of a thing larger than oneself, has been the promise of governments and religions for centuries. Salvation through Christ being the most obvious, this promise has been made even in the world where humanity has removed God from the public sphere. As nation states formed, nationalism made promises to the people of discrete geographic regions and related cultures of a shared purpose and brotherhood, and importantly of an organizing principle in service to the ruling classes. The revolutionary liberalism of the Jacobins is no exception, as it was led largely by the emerging bourgeoisie who would claim the role of ruling class in the stead of the old hereditary monarchist orders. Today the neoliberal order promises we can have what we want if we just find our niche as a consumer, to satisfy our needs for virtue, pleasure, and community within the products that we buy and the media we consume, but controlled and dispersed by increasingly wealthy capitalists.
All have been lies, false promises of heaven and a shared human experience presented so that the people in power might maintain their rarified positions. As the tensions of these conditions mount, it’s no wonder why online commenters reply to fresh news, no matter the severity, with “we live in hell” because in truth, we do. Importantly, I think across the political and ideological spectrum all Satanists understand this. If there is one way to describe the larger cohort of self-described Satanists, it is “outsider”. Sensing this alienation from the heaven of connection to the totality of humanity, the symbolism of the fallen angel, cast out from Heaven and forced to dwell in the eternal torment of Hell becomes cartoonishly obvious. And yet the actions Satanists take vary wildly, as I’ve discussed previously. What then of the libertarian turn that so many Satanists take? Are there further metaphors and symbols that exist to critique this?
As Satanists we must eliminate God as the force at the center of this heavenly state, and acknowledge the power of the collective humanity that creates and shapes the world in which we live. LaVey, liberal subject that he was, took this to mean the full realization of human potential was to be found in seizing the mantle of godhood for one’s self. For all the fear and hysteria he provoked in the post-Vietnam era, this philosophy is a perfect representation of what would become the Reaganite Neo-Liberal order. And yet all individuals, atomized as we are, share in common with other people a fundamental humanity which on a deep emotional
level nearly all of us understand. That desire for heaven embodies the desire to reach out, to be loved, to care for others, to understand and converse. Hell then is the fear of separation, the alienation from others, and the fear that when it is all done that we’ll have been a small, driftless and isolated island. The LaVeyan embraces the individual, choosing to forsake heaven and find relief in selfish and indulgent pursuits. I’ve already written on how this ideology is fundamentally fascist in nature, and so the only conclusion for those committed to challenging authoritarian structures is to fight as a collective for our rightful place in heaven.
Even here the Bible seems to understand the threat to the gatekeeping order from an organized communal humanity. Mankind found themselves driven by a collective drive to pierce the sky and find heaven themselves through a massive works project in the tower of Babel, a threat to God’s authority so great he destroys the structure and fragments the people through the barrier of language, both hampering our ability to organize, but also breaking our understanding of a shared humanity. The New Testament too contains allegories for the destruction of collective power, the parable of the demons and the pigs being I think the most remarkable. When challenged for its name by Jesus, the demons respond “I am Legion, for we are many”. On this basis, the demon is dispersed, cast out, each one into a solitary pig, and in their atomized state they falter, ultimately throwing themselves as a group into the ocean. It’s an odd parable with no obvious lesson, except the one I’m implying: that without collective action the power to undermine the authority of God is doomed to self destruction.
I suspect our forebears understood this, grappling with the ideas of a new subject relationship to the world through the enlightenment and its apotheosis in the French Revolution. As the power of trading firms and the bourgeois social class conflicted with the old and corrupt monarchical orders of the European world, the ideology of liberalism took hold and began a process of revealing to people the rights they had, and the power to determine their own lives and the future of their world. These inspirations would fuel further analyses and their demands for greater sharing of agency, through the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the codification of socialist, anarchist, and communist political thought.
In all this I think we can say that Nietzsche was right and in that era we did kill God, and that unfortunately the perils of having done so are clear. In that time the powers of the new social order proved themselves strong, and in the empty throne of the Divine Monarch, the forces which came to rule us were the cold brutal abstractions of capitalism. In place of the King or Emperor, the drive to profit gives license to a million petty lords, bosses who demand their employees sacrifice just that extra bit so that they can report a fraction of a percent efficiency gains to their boss, who puts together a presentation for an assemblage of twerps using their money to gain greater wealth at the expense of the masses. The dead god Capitalism now sits as the gatekeeper to Heaven, hoarding the fruits of human endeavor, atomizing us to keep the people from organizing our inherent power.
This, rather than the sclerotic libertarianism of LaVey, is the struggle that I propose is the most Satanic work possible: To find the boss that pits you against your fellow workers and unionize to overthrow their control of your livelihood; to find the government that sets upon you laws that keep your neighbors at each other’s throats and depose them to build a community and society that works for the betterment of all; to find the church or cult that claims to know the way to true peace and comfort and to destroy their lies that keep people from finding the sacred in all of humanity. In a shared experience, humanity has true power, and in spite of Satanists of the past asserting that every man is a god, in shared purpose humanity in total will become God when the last gatekeepers are overthrown.