Jared Mammon is not the sort of person you’d associate with the Prince of Darkness. A mild-mannered Floridian with a day job in finance — hence his alias — he could easily pass under a demon hunter’s radar. Yet when he isn’t making sales, the 41-year-old folds away his suit and transforms into a reverend for the Church of Satan (CoS). Wallowing in the aesthetic of the dark side, he conducts destruction rituals to channel moments of anger and has attended public Satanic rituals complete with a “nude altar”.
Mammon also works hard to apply his diabolical ethos to everyday life, reading the Satanic Bible and doing all he can to resist the Nine Satanic Sins. Contrary to popular wisdom, this doesn’t involve sacrificing babies and drinking bats’ blood. Rather, the CoS tenets involve “kindness to those who deserve it”; “undefiled wisdom”, and “vital existence instead of spiritual pipe dreams”.
It’s less about the devil, then, and more about the rebel angel. While there are many different Satanist organisations, each with their own emphasis, the common denominator is a heightened sense of individualism, a repurposing of religious iconography, and a rejection of tired social norms. Satanists may not believe in a literal Satan, but they do find a lot of power in the surrounding symbolism: not least the power to offend. That’s a gift to anyone who likes their non-belief served up with a side of spooky theatrics, or who boasts a well-honed trolling instinct.
As Mammon puts it: “You’ll find militant atheists who are so anti-theistic that they can’t allow for any fun in their lives. We do not believe in any supernatural anything. But we love a good show. We love a good time.”
The upshot is that, in recent years, Satanists have thrived across the West and beyond. Mammon’s CoS keeps membership numbers a guarded secret, but the Satanic Temple (TST), a rival organisation appropriately headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts, now boasts around 600,000 subscribers to its mailing list alongside a host of lively congregations. That’s echoed, too, by pushes for more formal recognition. Late last year, for instance, the Temple of Satan: Satanists and Luciferians of Chile applied for recognition as an official religious organisation, five years after TST achieved similar status in the US. According to UK census data, the number of practising Satanists grew almost threefold between 2011 and 2021.
It’s a far cry from centuries past, where devil worship was feared and despised. “In the Middle Ages, and into the Reformation period, the devil was understood as a creature that could physically manifest himself in the external world,” explains Professor Darren Oldridge, a historian of religion at the University of Worcester.
In practice, these ideas could manifest themselves in bewildering ways. The Devil became a useful scapegoat for dissent, with heterodox groups frequently accused of Satanism. Take the 13th century German “Luciferians” who were supposed to have defecated on sacramental bread. Between the 14th and 17th centuries, hundreds of innocent people were accused of allying themselves with Satan, often for reasons as tenuous as having a third nipple or a sick cow nearby.
This kind of unease re-emerged in the Eighties with the Satanic Panic, when contemporary social anxieties once again took the form of paranoid, devil-fearing narratives. Conspiracies about Satanic cults were rife, while the police passed on “educational” materials about how to spot a devil-worshipper. Although the panic started to dissipate in the Nineties, the Pizzagate scandal in 2016 showed us these fears are never too far from the surface. Mammon argues that, for Satanists, this cultural malaise serves as a kind of “shield”, deterring people who “are just going to judge a book by its cover”.
Not that everyone persisted in characterising Satanism so crudely. Thanks to the Scientific Revolution, what Oldridge calls the “external devil” was largely replaced by an “inner” adversary inveigling hearts and minds. By the Enlightenment, educated people were starting to doubt the devil’s very existence. Romantic thinkers, writing in the wake of the French and American revolutions, therefore began to reframe Satan as a kind of rebellious anti-hero. Under their reading of Paradise Lost, John Milton’s epic 17th-century poem, Satan becomes less the embodiment of evil, and more a courageous freethinker opposing God’s arbitrary tyranny. As William Blake put it, Milton “was of the Devil’s party” without realising.
That sense of nonconformity is clear when you speak to Satanists today. As Mammon himself says, he “agreed with absolutely all” the Satanic Bible when he first encountered it as a young person. For him, there was something galvanising about finding a text that meshed with his iconoclastic impulses. Not only was it atheistic, criticising religion as a man-made construction; it was a lot of fun, promoting a heady blend of ritual and personal exploration.
The Satanic Bible is the work of Anton Szandor LaVey, who founded the CoS on 30 April 1966. A provocateur who courted media attention, he painted his house black, dubiously claimed Transylvanian lineage, dressed in plastic horns and a cape, and was supposedly implicated in Jayne Mansfield’s fatal car crash — via a curse he placed on her boyfriend.
Yet despite his diabolical posturing, LaVey wasn’t interested in evildoing. In an echo of the Romantics, rather, he wanted to take a stand against Judeo-Christian dogma, which he saw as flecked with ignorance and hypocrisy. Taking the basic premise that there is no God, and that the universe is blindly indifferent to human affairs, he sought to create a model of human flourishing that placed the personal will at its centre.
Drawing on Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, LaVey crafted the Nine Satanic Statements, a collection of aphorisms such as: “Satan represents vital existence instead of spiritual pipe dreams!” and “Satan represents undefiled wisdom instead of hypocritical self-deceit!”. Some years later, he followed up with the Nine Satanic Sins. These include stupidity, pretentiousness, herd conformity and — gallingly for those who haven’t mastered their Halloween costumes — lack of aesthetics. “Satanism is the world’s first carnal religion,” is how Mammon puts it. “It’s the first religion that’s only about your human experience here, and enjoying life as you define it.”
For LeVey, then, Satan serves as a figurehead for humanity’s revolutionary instincts. Though he always had esoteric leanings — he said magicians could harness natural forces that had yet to be discovered by science — he certainly wasn’t affiliating himself with the conceptions of Satan familiar to cowl-clad peasants. Rather, the CoS, along with TST, doesn’t see Satan as anything more than an archetype. “The original Hebrew word Satan meant adversary, opponent or accuser,” explains Mammon. “You see it in the Old Testament all the time. It’s not referring to a specific deity or even to the Christian bad guy.”
And if that speaks once more to the lure of Satanism — not as an organised faith but as a way of rejecting the mainstream — you can spot similar flexibility in the religion’s rituals. All CoS ceremonies must have something to indicate their start and end, usually a bell or a gong. But beyond that, it’s up to the individual Satanist. TST, founded in 2013, is similarly open-ended. While it’s the occasional Black Mass that commands the headlines, practitioners are encouraged to simply participate in practices they find personally meaningful. A common example is the “unbaptism” — a rejection of religious rites performed on you as a child — which may use fake blood and “skin safe fire gel”.
And while CoS rejects overtly political gestures, the TST has brought their iconoclasm to the public sphere. Notable stunts have included erecting an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Baphomet, a response to a Ten Commandments monument in Oklahoma State Capitol. The TST has also founded After School Satan Clubs, challenging Christian programming in public schools. And where the religious Right has sunk its teeth into abortion rights, TST has opened online abortion clinics for people who want to take part in its “religious abortion ritual”.
In Chile, members of the Temple of Satan have become infamous for defying norms in what remains a deeply Catholic country. It’s one thing, after all, to use Satanic iconography in broadly secular countries like the UK: even here, the Evil One’s sigil and pentagram retain the power to shock. It’s quite another to do in Chile, where 51% people believe in the reality of the devil. Here, local Satanists assemble in small groups to chant and burn black candles.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these actions have provoked a response from angry Christians. In the US, to give one example, a “national prayer ministry” called Intercessors for America prayed that a TST gathering would be foiled. In Chile, the main Christian denominations have joined forces to denounce the Temple of Satan. “The history of Satanism is well known [and] it has often been the cause of tragedies,” wrote their leaders in a joint statement.
Reflecting his own sect’s apolitical stance, Mammon is unimpressed by the TST’s antics. Yet if the reverend doesn’t go out of his way to antagonise his Christian neighbours, you nonetheless get the feeling that he’s pushing back against his Baptist upbringing, along the way asserting his own sense of individual identity. As he puts it: “I was that six-year-old on Sunday who asked how penguins stayed cold on the ark, and couldn’t get answers from my teachers.”
Other Satanists reject their former faiths more explicitly, with many joining TST in response to religious trauma. “It’s only through a sort of Freudian, internalised, naturalised view of the devil that people can identify as Satanists,” Oldridge says of the “Hail Satans” and the Bible destructions. “They’re not actually worshipping external devils: they’re celebrating aspects of themselves that have been suppressed.”
It makes sense that many former believers, scarred by their evangelical upbringings, would be keen to unleash those inner demons. At a time when traditional religion is on the wane — and spiritual expression is becoming more personalised than ever — today’s Satanists have chosen to align themselves with a powerful symbol of autonomy and free thought.
It seems bizarre that in an era of declining Christianity and religiosity, Satanism would still be a form of protest, a way to see individuals and get away from the crowd. If your antitheses are declining, is it much more of a protest? But by being so untethered from modern society, Satanism has become a form of individuality in its own right, no longer representing the mere antithesis of Christianity. In an era of individualism, Satanism has a devilish appeal.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/