My choice to end the previous installment in this interminable series of posts about Satanism and religion with a discussion of how my personal religio of veganism limits my experience of exocentricity forms the perfect segue to this new post, which is all about how religiones limit individual experience in negative and detrimental ways. [...]
Author: devilsfane
The Devil’s Fane is where we live our real lives, this world and our own bodies, where we take our pleasures as we may. There are no priests, no commandments, no dutiful false piety to empty externalities. We serve ourselves and let others do likewise. We are free. Ave Satanas!
Immediate-Returnism and Delayed-Returnism as Exocentricity and Endocentricity, Respectively
In a missive addressed to John Adams on August 15, 1820, a seventy-seven-year-old Thomas Jefferson responds to a “puzzling letter” he had received from the elder Adams the previous May dealing with weighty philosophical and spiritual topics like “matter, spirit, motion etc.” In answer to his correspondent’s complex “croud of scepticisms [sic]” which proved so [...]
Neophilia & Neophobia, Fear v. Wonder: Differential Effects of the Sublime on Closed and Opened Minds
When I was younger and entertained more grandiose pretensions of becoming a literary light than I do now, I wrote the following would-be aphorism about the difference between “intellectuals” and true-believing “fanatics”: An intellectual submits the narrowness of his mind to the breadth of experience; a fanatic submits the depth and breadth of experience to [...]
Animum nodis exsolvere: Unknotting the Mind and Freeing the Self from Self-Imposed Bonds, Part II, On Novelty, Fear, Death, & Wonder
In his 2014 book Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic that I wrote about last time, author Matthew Stewart is keen to trace a latter-day Epicureanism that he argues provided “heretical origins” to our own nation’s struggle for independence. He follows this tenuous thread as it weaves in and out of European [...]
Animum nodis exsolvere: Unknotting the Mind and Freeing the Self from Self-Imposed Bonds, Part I
I ended the previous installment of this blog series on Satanism as religion with seventeenth-century English poet Robert Herrick’s memorable phrase “wild civility.” So let me pick right back up and open this belated fourth post on that same note. Wild Men in an Eastern Wilderness As an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, I [...]
Tiamat
A year ago today, on Walpurgisnacht of 2018, I performed a small destruction ritual during which I read an original epyllion I wrote treating the myth of the destruction of the primordial chaos goddess of the saline sea, Tiamat, from a Satanic perspective. Seeing as to how the wheel has once more come round and [...]
Legacy Post: Finally Got My TX Card
Introduction I’ve migrated this piece over from a former personal blog I once kept on Tumblr that I resolved to shut down a few months back owing to that service’s decision to demonize and ostracize sex-workers. (See? Ain’t my Good Guy Badge all nice n’ shiny?) I wrote this essay during the winter of 2017, [...]
Satanism, Epicureanism, and the Unbinding of Religio
The philosophical school founded in the late fourth century BCE by the iconoclastic empiricist Epicurus was quite unlike its other major Hellenistic rival, Stoicism, despite the fact that the two shared a commitment to a physical or materialist view of the world, even up to and including the human soul. The Stoics, however, argued that [...]
Entremets: Where are all the good men dead? In the heart or in the head?
When actress Minnie Driver’s character Debi Newberry utters the words that form the title of this essay in the 1997 movie Grosse Pointe Blank, her concern is entirely personal. She wonders where the good men are out in the world and why the ones she feels attracted to, like “the man who vanished” Martin Blank [...]
The Questionable Merit of Tying Knots: How Religio has Us All Bound Up in Them
In order to begin attempting the Gordian knot of how my conception of Satanism, so keen on unknotting many of the ties that bind our delayed-return societies together in impersonal and abusive dependencies, might nonetheless comprise a kind of religiosity, we must first visit the issue of how religion came conceptually to involve the tying [...]
