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, [...]
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!
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 [...]
Satanism and Religion: Difficult Stretch or Easy Fit?
When European explorers invaded far-flung areas of the non-European world (or let’s just call it the world, shall we?), they quickly discovered that the terms and concepts of religion, so familiar and dear to themselves, constituted their own kind of terra incognita when compared to the lifeways and spiritual practices of the peoples they encountered. [...]
What Counts as Religion and How is Satanism One?
When you try to pin it down as far as meaning is concerned, the term religion often seems something of a chimera or even cypher, telling you more about the proclivities and concerns of the would-be definers than about any supposedly objective state of affairs in the external world. If we adopt the traditional so-called [...]
Nothing new under the sun, eh? How ‘bout among what lurks in the darkness, then?
Back in my days as a Classicist, I specialized somewhat in Hellenistic poets and poetry, as well as in the Roman expression of those same novel Hellenistic artistic sympathies in the so-called neoteric school, so dubbed after the Greek word for “newer.” So when I read modernist poet Ezra Pound enjoining his colleagues and posterity [...]
Make it New!
In a 1928 English translation of a Chinese Confucian classic, modernist poet Ezra Pound evinced what would become his characteristic injunction and the inspirational dictum of poetic modernism: “Make it new.” Some 2,228 or so years earlier, the Hellenistic poet Callimachus, scholar in the Ptolemaic institution that was the Library at Alexandria, Egypt, reported in [...]
The Satanics of Roller Skating III: Skating as Reverse Dominance
The 2017 documentary Roller Dreams details the emergence and ultimately downhill trajectory of the once thriving Venice Beach, CA, roller dancing scene. The film quotes its principal subjects, Mad (aka James Lightning) and Sally Piano (aka Sally Messenger)—among others, as noting that the hit 1979 rollersploitation disco films Roller Boogie and Skatetown USA, as well [...]
The Satanics of Roller Skating II: Getting Over Your Self Out on the Floor
Whether in the predominantly white all-female revival world of roller derby or the predominantly African-American revival world of “urban” “adult-night” skating in neighborhood rinks, another inherently Satanic aspect to the world of roller skating in general is both the flamboyance and the purely recreational aspect of identity construction. In roller derby, this play with identity [...]
