The Limits of Satanism

A love letter

1.

I first joined The Satanic Temple in 2017. I had just deconverted from Christianity, and while my skeptical mind could no longer believe in the existence of a God or affirm the core creeds of the faith, I recognized that Christianity gave me a constellation of symbols, rituals, and community that structured my life. I knew that I would be lost without a religious scaffold going forward.

My partner and I discovered The Satanic Temple (TST) via recommended videos on YouTube during my deconversion process, and I was captivated. It was weird, and I am weird. It was transgressive, and I am drawn to the transgressive. It has seven fundamental tenets, all of which struck me as profoundly good and noble. Most of all, it met my deepest yearning: it married religious iconography and practice with a rigorous skepticism and nontheism.

The Satanism of The Satanic Temple, and modern Satanism more broadly, does not believe in a literal God or Satan. These are, instead, powerful symbols and stories that help Satanists orient their lives. Instead of the symbol of the ultimate evil, Satan is the icon of the heroic unbowed will withstanding arbitrary authority. And rather than the Satan of the Bible, TST's mythology is rooted in the Miltonian Satan of Paradise Lost and the Romantic Satanic literary tradition that emanated from that core text.

There is ongoing tension over whether TST is a trollish political group or a sincere religious community. The same organization that launched an abortion clinic called “Samual Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic” – a move calculated to offend (and one, frankly, I don’t approve of) – is the same organization that hosts private rituals, has a vast online library of religious and occult texts, and an international body of ministers who serve the spiritual needs of the community. I’ve witnessed this paradox break more than a few brains. Usually, people choose to favor one side of the paradox over the other, failing to apprehend the full complexity of this new religious movement.

Despite this ambiguity, for me, TST has always been religion. What drew me to the Temple wasn't its extravagant political activism, but the religion of Satanism itself, which appealed to my outsider status, relentless skepticism, and deep yearning for religious structure. When I first encountered the Temple, I understood its political activism — even its offensive activism — as an emanation of its core religious values.

Having been demonized for years as a gay person in the church, it was only a matter of time before I came to feel a kinship with the mythological demons. I have endured exorcisms, ex-gay therapy, and an all-consuming theology that taught me I was intrinsically disordered for a condition I did not choose.

In his magisterial history of Satanism Children of Lucifer, Religious scholar Ruben Van Luijk describes this process as moving from attribution to identification. The Satanic was attributed to me for my homosexuality. I then took on that attribution deliberately, alchemizing it into a humanizing, powerful identity. Recasting Satan as a hero, a misunderstood champion of freedom and liberty, was a way of recasting myself as a valuable part of society worthy of dignity.

It is at this point that Christians inevitably splutter that Christ, too, is an outsider and champion of the downtrodden. Why could I not have found my refuge in him?

I still love the person of Christ, but religion is not rational: it is as much about culture, context, and temperament as it is about reason. Christ, in our culture, isn’t a freak as I was a freak. He isn’t monstrous as I felt monstrous. He isn’t the ultimate outsider in the religion that so tormented me and told me I was fundamentally disordered. He is the very centerpiece of the hegemony that relegated me to the fringes. I needed an otherworldly religion that was as stigmatized as I felt. Christ couldn’t meet that need.

Contrary to what the Apostle Paul wrote, Christians cannot be all things to all people, and neither can Christ. Christianity is vast and beautiful, but I needed something it simply could not give me.

It’s also incredibly hard to remain a Christian as a skeptic. In the final days of my faith, I tried to forge a nontheistic Christian path. This has precedent and can be done, but I found this path an embattled war zone. Confessing specific supernatural beliefs has been at Christianity’s core for two millennia, and I no longer believe those creeds. I had already spent a decade fighting for the acceptance of gay people in Christianity, and I had fought with my life to retain a faith that was slipping through my fingers like sand. By the time I reached this final battle: the fight for a nontheistic Christianity, I was too tired of being at war with my religion. I finally dropped my sword and left the battlefield. Satanism was there to welcome me in my strangeness, atheism, and outsider status.

I believe that society needs a third way between secular atheism and theistic religion. TST was the first community that taught me that such a middle way was possible.

Despite my terrible experiences in the church, my Satanism was never anti-Christian. It was post-Christian, moving on from Christianity while retaining some core elements and symbols. Instead of seeing Christianity as my enemy, I saw it as my parent.

Beyond my kinship with the symbol of Satan, I was also deeply moved by TST’s intellectual roots, especially the gorgeous novel Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France, which is considered primary reading for the Temple.  I was also attracted to TST’s reformation spirit, updating the old-school Satanism of Anton Lavey into something compatible with my modern progressive values of equality, compassion, and minority rights.

Perhaps one of the most crucial reasons I fell in love with TST, and why I will always love this particular lineage of Western esotericism, is its emphasis on the marriage of opposites.

The central symbol of TST is the Baphomet, first drawn by French occultist Eliphas Levi. The sabbatic goat is an occult yin and yang, representing the marriage of light and dark, angelic and demonic, masculine and feminine, up and down. This reconciliation of polarities traces all the way back to the Emerald Table of the mythical occult figure Hermes Trismegistus: “as above, so below.”

I am drawn to the Baphomet because I feel profoundly seen by it. I am masculine, and yet I am feminine. I am a man, and yet I have sex with men. I am an atheist, and yet I am deeply religious. I am drawn to both transcendent beauty and to horror and carnality. I am also interested in the reconciliation of irreconcilable worldviews and treading the interstitial space between them. My podcast, after all, is called “Sacred Tension.”

I write all this to push back on the notion that my Satanism was just an adolescent dalliance with edge lord nonsense. I don’t think anyone can read my work on the subject and sincerely come to that conclusion.

I know that Satanism is frightening and alienates many onlookers. I have empathy for anyone who just cannot look at it, cannot understand it, cannot comprehend my involvement in it. But I also will not acquiesce to the notion that there isn’t real depth to be found here, or that I have not benefited from it.

Since joining TST in 2017, I have served the TST community for close to six years, and I have been an ordained Minister of Satan for three years. It has been an enormous, all-consuming part of my life. And, despite all the complications that come from being part of such a radioactive community, I am grateful for it. Many people balk at my involvement in a religion so dark and scandalizing, and the stigma of Satanism will follow me for many years to come. But I can only be honest: it met me in my skepticism and loneliness when other spaces could not. Human beings are simple creatures: we go where we are wanted. I felt wanted by the Temple.

And yet, once again, I feel my spirituality shifting. Every religion, being made by humans, has limits. No tradition can be the omni-religion — all things, all truths, all consolations, all symbols. 

2. 

Last year, I wrote an article called The Three AM test. It asks: do you have the skills, practices, community, and wisdom to get you through the darkest night of your life – the three AM? The article was motivated by the painful realization that, for me, Satanism did not pass the three AM test.

When I am awake in the middle of the night, alone, frightened, feeling hopeless about my future, and ashamed of my past, Satanism doesn’t console me. It had gotten me through a lot in the past, but not anymore. I need more than what Satanism can offer me.

The Limits of the Myth

As I have developed in my spirituality, I first resisted, but have now come to accept, that the symbol of Satan is incomplete for me personally and must be paired with other mythologies. Rebellion can be noble, but it is just a fraction of the good life. I have found myself starving for other myths:

The myth of Christ, who came to earth to serve humanity, preach compassion, and model the ultimate ego death by dying on a cross with criminals. In doing so, he upended the order of civilization: the first shall be last, and the last shall be first.

The myth of the Buddha, who confronted all the temptations and terrors of the human condition. Despite this onslaught, as Joseph Campbell wrote, "the mind of the great being was not moved." In being so unmoved, he transcended the unsatisfactoriness of life, recognizing that all things that have the nature to arise will also pass away.

 The myth of the Jewish people wandering the desert, accepting the burden of choseness from a vast and incomprehensible God. In doing so, they taught the necessity of community, tradition, and family.

All these myths have comforted me in a way the myth of Satan has not. For so many years, Satanism was my singular identity. But one can live on rebellion for only so long. Eventually, I needed more: stories of self-sacrifice, stories of self-discipline, stories of community, and stories of self-transcendence.  My mythopoetic landscape has expanded to encompass a greater variety of meaningful stories while retaining the story of the Romantic Satan as an important piece.

I have also learned that all myths, including those above, fall short. Man cannot live on symbol alone. The myths are dead without an active spiritual practice that presses one up against the numinous.

The limits of Satanic ritual

Despite being an atheist, I still experience and yearn for the divine. In this context, the "divine" is the numinous, the mysterious, and the holy greater than oneself. A belief in the supernatural is not necessary for such transcendence. If the word "divine" is too laden with dogma for you, then perhaps the word "spirituality" will suffice.

TST has a rich occult lineage and embraces ritual as an important form of community bonding and emotional catharsis. The Temple community has several powerful rituals helpful for emotional catharsis and release from bondage, primarily The Black Mass, the Destruction Ritual, and the Unbaptism, all of which can be found in Shiva Honey’s book The Devil’s Tome. The Ministry of TST is continually innovating ritual practices, and it’s incredibly exciting to see the growth of new spiritual traditions in this new religious movement.

And yet, here again, I have found a need for broader spiritual practice. While Satanism is growing and might someday reach the transcendent, I can’t wait for it to get there.

I need something more than symbolic ritual and emotional catharsis. I need awe, self-transcendence, and rituals sufficient to pass the 3 AM Test.  I need practices that press me up against the truly numinous, the real mysteries of the cosmos. Black Masses are extraordinarily powerful rituals with an important history, but I just need more.

I have found this “more” in two places: secular Buddhism and the religious rituals of my Jewish partner.

Secular Buddhism provides a tangible, daily practice with precise instructions for self-transcendence. Meditation, as transmitted by the master teacher Sam Harris, has done just that. Through meditation, I experience the illusion of the self, the vastness of consciousness, and the mysteriousness of the cosmos. No symbol or no story needed — just a simple teaching.

Judaism provides daily, weekly, and yearly rituals that ground one to the earth and to simple human conditions like rest, food, and family life. There is such consolation in these rhythms, even as they destabilize my ego. People have observed the Shabbat for thousands of years, and they will continue to do so after my partner and I are gone. I am not special for taking part. I am one pair of feet in a great river of human life which has carved a path through ancient stones.

The limits of individualism

Satanism, as envisioned by Anton Lavey and carried forward by The Satanic Temple, is unapologetically one of individualism. The philosophy of Ayn Rand permeates the work of Anton Lavey, and while it is softened in TST, that rugged individualism remains. This was exactly what the doctor ordered as I was coming out of religious fundamentalism. I needed a radical, rebellious individualism to discover myself.

But I am now, as a man, confronting the harsh fact that I need people. I am not more heroic, but less so without them. The depth of my interdependence on communities, friends, mentors, and family is only now becoming apparent to me. I owe all of who I am — my values, my habits, my successes, my very life — to other people.

I still believe that the individual is the most important unit of society, and that respect for individual autonomy is the foundation for all human rights. This is the most important feature of Satanic individualism that remains for me. But such individualism must be paired with a recognition that each person is a shadow of themselves without community.

I want a spirituality that recognizes this fact, and I find that Satanism at present struggles in this regard. The heroic individual is still a valuable part of my life, but it is only part.

The limits of adolescent Satanism

Religious scholar Jesper Peterson identifies 3 types of modern Satanism:

1. Rational - best exemplified by The Church of Satan. It is a Satanism that values reason, atheism, and skepticism.

2. Esoteric - Best exemplified by The Temple of Set. It is often (though, in my opinion, not always) theistic and takes a mystical approach to the symbol of Satanism.

3. Adolescent - best exemplified by Satanic metal bands. This is Satanism that is purely reactionary — a teenage “fuck you” to authority.

All three strains are woven together into a confounding cord in TST. My threads are rational and esoteric, but they were bound up with the adolescent in the Temple.

I understand and deeply empathize with those who are drawn to Satanism in an adolescent sense. I have a lot of time for people who are raging at their abusive religious upbringings. I’m also not willing to dismiss blasphemy as an important part of religious life.

Our religious and philosophical traditions are full of blasphemers serving deeper, sacred causes: Ezekiel shocking the nation of Israel with grotesque prophetic performance art, Martin Luther nailing the 95 Theses to the doors of the church, and even Jesus himself, who uttered such unconscionable blasphemies that he was put to death on a cross. I call this “transcendent blasphemy”, and it is a powerful and sacred tool. At its best, The Satanic Temple community approaches the transcendently blasphemous. And its worst, it is merely adolescent.

I have become progressively uncomfortable with sharing so much space with adolescent Satanism, especially when it is done as a form of public protest. I want to depolarize the world instead of further dividing it. I no longer believe that certain public acts, like naming the aborting clinic “Samual Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic,” are what our culture needs right now. I understand the intent behind these actions, and I still believe that blasphemy has a valuable place in this world. But right now, “fuck you” isn’t a solid foundation for the good life or building a better society.

I started to question if such association with adolescent Satanism was making me a better person. I have come to the painful realization that it wasn’t. Adolescent Satanism doesn’t align with my values and my vision for society.

It’s tiring to constantly explain my proximity to adolescent Satanism. My time is limited, and I have better work to do. My own Satanism was always of the rational and esoteric variety, but I find myself constantly having to do apologism for the adolescent varieties of Satanism. I want to spend the second half of my life pursuing good causes and bringing people together. I don’t have time anymore to explain why members of my church decided to do something polarizing.

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I don't believe that any of these experiences I've had with Satanism are intractable. Satanism is a young religion and has not had the time to develop the rich, life-giving tapestries of wisdom, myth, practice, and community that other religions have. I still believe that such a Satanism is possible. But, for now, I have had to expand beyond Satanism to accommodate my own spiritual and religious needs.

In mid-2023, I started to slowly remove Satanism from my public work. After an intensely challenging year in the Temple, I resigned from leadership in December of last year. I retain my membership in TST and still value the friendships and community, but I have taken a big step back from the organization to focus on other work.

Am I still a Satanist? In a meaningful way, I am. I have what might be called a Romantic Satanic temperament. I value free thought, free speech, and skepticism. I am drawn to dark aesthetics, I have a natural sympathy for the marginalized, and I continue to love the occult.

The symbol of the literary Romantic Satan, especially in the pages of Revolt of the Angels by Anatole France and Paradise Lost by John Milton, continues to inspire me. But this Satanism is now situated in a bigger pantheon of stories. If I am a Satanist, I am also a Middle-Earthist, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Stephen Kingist, a pagan, a Dostoyevskyist, and a Shakespearist. All of these stories provide a tapestry of myth that brings meaning to my life.

In perhaps a more important sense, I am not. If a religious scholar were to follow me around from the moment I wake up in the morning to the moment I go to sleep, I don’t think they would find much Satanism in practice. They would find, if anything, a secular humanist Buddhism: I meditate daily, and take that meditation practice into the rest of my life.

It is this very Buddhism that has taught me that I am emptiness. It doesn’t make sense to me anymore to describe myself as synonymous with my beliefs or temperament. I, the person, stand apart from whatever ideas I hold about the world. Am I the symbols that inspire me? Am I the systems of thought I adhere to? I don’t think so.

It is my sincere hope that the Satanic community will receive this essay in the spirit with which it was written: affection, honesty, and introspection. I have only love for the Satanic community, and I want the best for it. am not telling other people how to live their lives, I am simply giving a sincere accounting of my own. I have also been known for years as a Satanic content creator, and many have noticed the conspicuous absence of Satanism in my work. I feel that I owe my readers an explanation for that absence.

I want my life and work to reflect my spirituality: I want to cultivate a broad garden and bring together disparate communities to work toward respect for our shared humanity and struggles. Satanism is just a piece of that, has taught me an enormous amount, and I am grateful for it.