To judge by the despondency of several of my friends and colleagues, some of whom claim to be caught in a state of “post Satanism,” there’s a great malaise plaguing modern Satanic religion. Most of it seems to stem from disillusionment over Satanic groups and leadership not turning out to be all they’re cracked up … Continue reading Something Hollow in the State of Satanism
Author: devilsfane
What’s Ailing Modern Satanism?
Hot on the heels of the success of his best-selling 1970 Christian prophecy book The Late Great Planet Earth, Dispensationalist author Hal Lindsey came out with a sequel in 1972 entitled Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth. Lindsey attributed his motivation to pen the follow-up to years spent during the 1960s working for … Continue reading What’s Ailing Modern Satanism?
Satanism: The Contra(ry)religion
In this long series of posts on Satanic religion as I see it, I’ve argued for Satanism as a kind of contrareligion (contrary religion?). Its principal aim: to unpack and dismantle sociologist Peter Berger’s “sacred canopy” and all similar neophobic, endocentric constructs of delayed-return worldview and religiosity. I’ve argued that this essentially destructive enterprise is … Continue reading Satanism: The Contra(ry)religion
A July 4th History Lesson: We’re Still on Repeat
Well, it's Independence Day here in the States, and of course folks are on social media sharing all kinds of distorted and revisionist history. In response to one such post on Twitter where the OP was suggesting we can look back to a bygone era in this country when immigrants had it easy compared to … Continue reading A July 4th History Lesson: We’re Still on Repeat
Animum nodis exsolvere: Unknotting the Mind and Freeing the Self from Self-Imposed Bonds, Part III or How Religiones limit personal experience
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. … Continue reading Animum nodis exsolvere: Unknotting the Mind and Freeing the Self from Self-Imposed Bonds, Part III or How Religiones limit personal experience
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 … Continue reading Immediate-Returnism and Delayed-Returnism as Exocentricity and Endocentricity, Respectively
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 … Continue reading Neophilia & Neophobia, Fear v. Wonder: Differential Effects of the Sublime on Closed and Opened Minds
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 … Continue reading Animum nodis exsolvere: Unknotting the Mind and Freeing the Self from Self-Imposed Bonds, Part II, On Novelty, Fear, Death, & Wonder
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 … Continue reading Animum nodis exsolvere: Unknotting the Mind and Freeing the Self from Self-Imposed Bonds, Part 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 … Continue reading Tiamat
