Is Satanism dangerous? Should legal measures be introduced against it? Or is even Satanism protected by freedom of religion or belief?
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 1 of 6.
Should Satanism be outlawed? Or does the general principle of freedom of religion or belief protect even the Satanists? Many who discuss the issue seems to be quite confused about what Satanism is really all about.
Satanism is often discussed by the media, but exaggerations and inflated statistics abound. This series of articles offers a definition of Satanism, and reconstructs its history through a pendulum model. When Satanism becomes visible, it generates a reaction in the shape of an anti-Satanism that easily falls into exaggerations and excesses, thus becoming discredited and opening the way to the birth of new Satanist groups. They will in turn generate new reactions, and so on.
This model is applied respectively to a proto-Satanism, born at the court of French King Louis XIV (1638-1715); to a “first Satanism,” of the 19th century; and to contemporary Satanism, inaugurated with the foundation of the Church of Satan in 1966 and currently divided into a number of sub-currents.
The articles are based on my 600+-page textbook “Satanism: A Social History,” published by Brill in 2016, and on several conversations with colleagues that followed the publication of the book. Satanism is a phenomenon that easily generates attention and concern in many circles. In the journalistic literature, it is often confused with such diverse phenomena as Medieval and early modern witchcraft, ceremonial magic, Wicca, neo-paganism, and the “Thelemic” current originating from the ideas of the English esotericist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), from which it should instead be carefully distinguished. In the journalistic literature, any finding of ritual remnants (red or black candles, figurines, chalices) is often immediately referred to Satanism, while it could be in fact evidence that other forms of magic or religiosity were at work.
Satanism in the strict sense is a movement that takes an interest in the character called the Devil or Satan in the Bible, and makes him the main focus of its rituals. “Satan” may be considered simply a higher state of human consciousness (as in “rationalist” Satanism, which sometimes tends toward militant atheism), or a preternatural character (in “occultist” or “theistic” Satanism). In both cases, the centrality of Satan in discourse and ritual is essential for characterizing a group as “Satanist.”
Outside of my investigation remains “romantic Satanism”(on which Swedish scholar Per Faxneld published in 2017 an almost definitive study), which includes poets, novelists, social activists, artists who showed some sympathy for the Devil and used Satan or Lucifer as a symbol of almost any possible rebellion: against superstition, mainline religion, anti-feminist patriarchy, moralism, conventional academic art, capitalism. They normally did not create organizations and rituals and it is doubtful that they really “worshiped” Satan.
As mentioned earlier, Satanism moves through history in a pattern that can be described as “pendular.” Small groups of Satanists rise to the headlines. Since the explicit worship of Satan is, by definition, intolerable, the presence of Satanist groups—no matter how small—determines reactions that quickly manifest themselves as disproportionate. They attribute to the groups that practice Satanism a dimension, a prominence, an ability to influence social and political events that they do not actually have.
This organized anti-Satanism—easily infiltrated by imposters—ends up being discredited by its own excesses. The discredit into which anti-Satanism falls allows the re-emergence of new groups of Satanists, for a time tolerated by society, until a new backlash is determined, and so on.
A proto-Satanism first manifested itself in a group active on the fringes of the court of France’s King Louis XIV around Catherine Deshayes, aka La Voisin (1637?–1680), and other fortune-tellers and seers, part of a thriving magical subculture in Paris at the time. This underworld also counted on the help of renegade Catholic priests, such as the Abbé Étienne Guibourg (1603–1686), who provided the consecrated hosts deemed essential to the success of the rites.
To understand what exactly happened, we should consider that a flourishing occult subculture existed in Paris in the late 17th century, with soothsayers and marginal priests selling at the same time poisons, abortions, horoscopes, magical swords, rituals for finding hidden treasures, and pistoles volantes, i.e. coins “baptized” by priests that, when spent and given to another person, would magically reappear in the pocket of the owner.
If one believes the police documents of the time, which may contain exaggerations and accuse innocents, and should be read in the context of the magical subculture of the time, La Voisin organized the first “Black Masses” for ladies of the court, allegedly including Françoise Athénaïs, Marquise de Montespan (1640–1707), the main mistress of the king and the mother of five of his children. The expression “Black Mass” originated on this occasion.
Reportedly, the Devil was worshipped to obtain favors or material advantages, not for philosophical reasons. After the discovery, the repression, entrusted to a special tribunal known as the “Burning Chamber,” was halted for fear of too thorough investigations into the ladies of the court. However, La Voisin, along with other seers, was sentenced to death, while Guibourg died in prison.
This scandalous but circumscribed episode gained enormous European notoriety thanks to the gazettes, at a time when the press was beginning to become socially important. Thus imitators arose, albeit in modest proportions.
In Italy, the excitement about the French case was one of the roots of the 18th century scandal involving Father Domenico Costantini (1728–1791?), a Reggio Emilia priest of the Congregation of the Oratory who was accused of seducing young girls by proposing to initiate them into a Satanic cult. The case duly inspired later writers and painters.
In England, a parody of Satanism was organized by Sir Francis Dashwood (1708–1781), Chancellor of the Exchequer (i.e. Minister of Finances) of King George III (1738–1820). Despite persisting rumors, his Society of Saint Francis, meeting in the abbey of Medmenham, was never called “Hell-Fire Club” nor was it truly Satanist. Theirs were just anti-Catholic parodies and libertine parties, whose spirit was captured by William Hogarth (1697–1764) in his portrait of Dashwood, which represented him as an “inverted” version of Francis of Assisi (1181–1226).
In Russia’s rich 17th and early 18th century esoteric and masonic subculture, the fascination for the character of Satan in “Paradise Lost” of John Milton (1608–1674) led many to speculate on Satan or Lucifer as a liberator of suffering humans. But these intellectual speculations did not generate a real Satanist movement, and rather belong to “romantic Satanism.”
In any case, this proto-Satanism determined an early epidemic of anti-Satanism, which ended up attributing to the occult action of Satanists two phenomena in different ways shocking to the Christian world: the French Revolution and the extraordinary success of Spiritualism.
Of course, a distinction must be made between philosophical or theological interpretations that considered the Devil’s action to be the remote cause of the French Revolution and the success of Spiritualism, and conspiracy theories that saw behind every Jacobin and every Spiritualist medium the direct action of the Evil One through his agents who remained in the shadows, the Satanists.
While the first literature proposed serious meditations on the nature of evil, the second quickly fell into primitive simplifications and grotesque excesses. This style of thinking ranges from the anti-Revolutionary works of the priest Jean-Baptiste Fiard (1736–1818) to the paradoxical texts of Alexis-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier (1764–1842), who saw behind every negative event the work of Satanists capable of transforming themselves into “farfadets,” i.e., invisible “imps.” Such conspiracy theorists discredited anti-Satanism. My pendulum theory would predict that, in some form, Satanism would quickly resurface.