Satan is reality

[MadMaxStirner]

Regardless, the real test of Satanism’s continued success will be intellectual and philosophical rather than economic, cultural or political and the way forward along this path can only consist in the further development of Satanism as a philosophical project by individuals, rather than the organization of large numbers of people to perform public acts of blasphemy and conjure up controversy for the sake of attention. By publishing this book I will have made my contribution to the further expansion of our Satanic Repertoire.
This leads us to the question that should be on everyone's minds in the movement: what is Satanism and what makes it what it is? Satanism is usually understood as a secular mock-religion that Anton LaVey made up or at most as an edgy interpretation of Epicureanism which sees Satan as an archetype symbolising personal independence and critical thinking. These understandings aren’t wrong but they do miss the point and frequently merit questions as to why LaVey named his philosophy Satanism rather than humanism or egoism. Some have even concluded that it was because Objectivism is a trademark of Ayn Rand’s estate and LaVey would’ve faced civil suits for selling his philosophy as objectivism.
The real reason it is called Satanism rather than humanism or even objectivism is simply because it is neither of those things. Satanism is explicitly anti-humanistic and distinct from Ayn Rands Objectivism.

As LaVey pointed out, the elements of Satanism had already been around for millenium before he was ever born and his accomplishment consisted in codifying these elements and giving them a definite social structure to boot. These elements have culminated over many centuries into a de facto philosophical tradition which stands in opposition both to Traditional Religion as well as to Secular Society, seeing both as dogmatic and superficial and seeking to go beyond them. This satanic tradition has included a wide variety of Satanists and quasi-Satanists each with their own perspectives and methodologies, but was given most of its form and function by German Idealism and Victorian Romanticism.
A perfect example of this is someone like Friedrich Nietzsche who blasted Christianity for its irrational beliefs and inverted values but who also railed against secular philosophies and ideologies, claiming that atomistic materialism “is one of the best refuted theories ever put forth” and criticising Darwin’s Theory of Evolution as being unfactual and unproven, stating that in reality life forms do not exist merely to reproduce but to “expend all of their forces” in expressing their “will to power” which Nietzsche thought all existence was made up of.
Another example is Arthur Schopenhauer, whose philosophy inspired the young Nietzsche to take up philosophy as his life’s mission. Schopenhauer was an atheist who denied the existence of God and the validity of religious revelations, but he also rejected materialism as a metaphysical system, instead arguing that the world was the representation of a metaphysical will in a book entitled “The World as Will and Representation.” Instead of appealing to dogma and tradition for his arguments, Schopenhauer used logic and epistemology to argue against materialism, pointing out that “matter” is just a concept which we apply to phenomenon but which is separate from the phenomenon themselves and that any scientific theory which tried to explain consciousness in terms of interactions between particles of matter would be logically flawed because it would amount to circular reasoning by trying to explain consciousness in terms of an abstraction which exists only in consciousness itself. In this case the solution which makes the fewest assumptions is to explain consciousness in its own terms.
Schopenhauer then attempted to apply this theory in order to prove the existence of the supernatural in another book entitled “The Will in Nature.” If the world is will and representation then it stands to reason that spells and magic would be able to have an effect on it and that entities such as ghosts might have some kind of existence, although Schopenhauer was skeptical of traditional occult beliefs and practices, claiming that ghosts are not the souls of the dead but echos of their will (since Schopenhauer was a determinist who thought that time was an illusion, he concludes that a persns will can leave an imprint n the envirnment) and that sigils, prayers and rituals do not have power on their own but are rather akin to training weels on a bike which alow a person to refine and focus their will and which may not be helpful at all once a person had attained a certain level of training.
If any of my readers have noticed a similarity between this view and that of Aliester Crowley’s Thelemic Will, this is because Crowley was directly inspired by Nietzsche who built on the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Consequently LaVey was the intellectual inheritor to Schopenhauer's philosophy by merit of Crowley's influence.
Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Crowley, Lavey saw skepticism, and not faith, as the real escape route from a meaningless worldview of existence as particles interacting. In “The Satanic Bible,” he writes:
“It has been said “the truth will make men free.” The truth alone has never set anyone free. It is nly DOUBT which will bring mental emancipation. Without the wonderful element of doubt, the doorway through which truth passes would be tightly shut, impervious to the strenuous poundings of a thousand Lucifers.”

• The Satanic Bible, Introduction to the book of Lucifer

This still leaves us with the question as to why Satan would be so important to this religion if LaVey, his predecessors and successors, did not believe in a literal Satan and sought to surpass Christian mythology rather than simply inverting it. To give this transformation more context, let's digress into the topic of Satan and the Antichrist in Christian Theology and Eschatology and how these concepts relate to pre-Christian religions and post-Christian philosophy.
Every religion and culture has some sort of concept of an evil inhuman essence which intrudes upon human reality and imposes itself in occult ways, but in Christianity this concept has taken on a significance far more encompassing than in any other religion except for the ones that were influenced by Christianity such as Islam or Mormonism. In fact, if I had to identify one concept in Christianity which made it different from every other religion and which all other theological issues arise from, it would have to be the concept of Satan because every other distinguishing concept such as original sin, salvation, heaven and hell, the apocalypse or the redemption of the world, can all be traced back to a distinct emphasis on the concept of Satan or the Devil so that Christianity would not be what it is without him. African tribesmen may believe in evil spirits, witches and vampires, Native Americans may have myths about evil spirits, curses, skinwalkers and wendigos and Hindus may have myths about Kali, demons, curses and evil gurus but if they gave these beliefs up they wouldn’t lose their entire worldview along with them and the rest of their theology would still work.
The Christian worldview consists in seeing all of existence as the battleground of a cosmic conflict between good and evil so that human life is considered to have significance only as an extension of its relevance to this conflict and the allegiance of one’s soul with either God or Satan. This is also why Christianity teaches that any sin can be forgiven except that of not believing in Christianity and therefore that serial killers and child molesters can be redeemed simply by putting their faith in Christ whereas nonbelievers who live moral lives are believed to go to Hell; one’s allegiance with the faith is considered to be more ethically significant than one’s actual behavior.
The only worldview that is remotely similar to this is that of Zoroastrianism, with its dualistic perspective of existence as a perpetual conflict between “light” and “darkness,” but even Zoroastrianism doesn’t take this view to the lengths that Christianity and its derivatives have because of its consistency, lack of grandiose apocalypticism and emphasis on personal conduct rather than allegiance to the Zoroastrian religion.
Christianity can only be what it is by blurring the lines between monism and dualism without allowing any room for a consistent theology and theodyssey. The craftsmen of this worldview liked the Jewish idea of an all powerful God with a grand plan for all of existence but didn’t like its optimistic universalism and wanted to combine it with the Zoroastrian idea of a perpetual conflict between good and evil, although they disliked its emphasis on personal ethics rather than grand crusades. The result is a religion which exists as a psychological antagonism between the Apocalypticism of Judaism and the precarity of Zoroastrianism.
This is in stark contrast to its supposed origin in Judaism, which views humans as the ultimate moral agents of the universe in a purely monistic scheme wherein nothing can happen outside of God’s will and the entire universe is therefore considered to be purely good as it is nothing but a reflection of the will of a purely good God. Because of this, many Jews even before the rise of Reform Judaism rejected the concept of the devil altogether, most notably Maimonides, who considered the devil to be an illusion produced by the human mind and nothing more than a psychological projection of our “Yetzer Hara” or tendency to do evil.
Those Jews who do believe in a literal metaphysical Devil (most of whom are Kabbalists) do not consider him to be the source of all sin since “angels” in Judaism are not supposed to have free will. Satan doesn't hold the same importance in Judaism because he is considered to have ethical significance only by extension of his relationship to human choices (the exact opposite of Christianity). In fact most Kabbalists do not believe that angels are even conscious entities at all but that this perspective is a misinterpretation arising from Christian mistranslations of the Masoretic Text; the Hebrew word for an “angel” simply means “ministering spirit” and could refer to anything from a random person to a bullfrog to a rock or to a tree, so that all biblical references to “angels” are considered to be synchronicities and not entities.

Etymologically, “Satan” simply means “opponent” and could refer to literally anything depending on the context. “HaSatan” or “the Opponent” is not actually the name of an entity but a title which could be held by different entities at different times.
Traditionally, the role of “HaSatan” or “the Enemy” is believed to be held by an Angel named Sammael, which is Hebrew for “the Venom of God,” and who is identical with the Angel of Death. This view is codified in the Babylonian Talmud in Bava Bartra 16a, which states that:
“Reish Lakish says: Satan, the evil inclination, and the Angel of Death are one, that is, they are three aspects of the same essence. He is the Satan who seduces people and then accuses them,”

In Ancient Cosmologies, Death and Time are considered to be one thing just as time and space are considered to be one thing: this is why the Greek god Chronos as well as his Roman counterpart Saturn are often depicted holding scythes like the Grim Reaper. This conception may seem odd, but it actually makes sense if you think about it; time is a perpetual process of one moment dying to itself in order to become a new moment which dies just as quickly, hence Chronos, Saturn and Kali are most well known for cannibalising their own children. We are their children; we arise out of time and are ultimately consumed by time throughout our lives and finally with our deaths. This is why Saturn and the Gnostic Demiurge (which was often given the name Sammael after the Jewish Devil) have long been associated with each other if not equated as the same entity; the devil is identical to the physical world of TimeSpace which we live in.
In Kabbalah Sammael is a necessary component of creation because it is taught that the physical world of time, space and stuff was created by God withdrawing himself from his own being in order to create something which would be separate from him. The manifestation of this will to create is the physical universe and its converse is Sammael.
The missing link between the Jewish HaSatan/Sammael and the contemporary Christian Satan/Lucifer is the Gnostic Demiurge because Gnosticism was the first version of Christianity and its top down cosmic crusade.
Contemporary Christians frequently conflate Gnosticism with a particular subsect of Gnosticism called Docetism, which was the doctrine that Jesus was never a physical person who was born and died but a hologram or “Christ Consciousness” who came to earth to communicate psychic revelations to us. However, most Gnostics were not Docetists and different Gnostics believed several different things about Jesus depending on the sect; such as that he was a regular human person who attained enlightenment, a wizard with magical powers, a prophet, an angel, a demon or (my personal favorite) that he was the physical incarnation of Satan who came to crucify humanity but that the poor dears were so delusional that they convinced themselves that the opposite was happening. Instead, the difference between ancient Gnosticism and contemporary Christianity is that the Gnostics believed that the physical universe was created by Satan outright under God’s nose (and that the God of the Old Testament is Satan) whereas contemporary Christians believe that God created the physical universe but that Satan somehow commandeered his work despite being less powerful than him (and that the Old and New Testament Gods are identical despite obvious contradictions in their thoughts and deeds).
The Kabbalistic and Gnostic perspectives are closer to each other than to the current Christian perspective, but there are still traces of these perspectives in that of contemporary Christianity and one cannot understand Christian Theology without these traces. For example, the Apostle Paul described the Devil as “the God/Lord of this world,” claiming that Christians are not of this world but are mere pilgrims in it and that when the end of the world comes Christians should “look up for [their] redemption draws near,” although this perspective is contradicted by the claim that God has made all of the things of this world for our own enjoyment.
Nietzsche attempted to psychoanalyze and criticise this mindset in his book “TheAnti-Christ” wherein he wrote:
“Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes (“God,” “soul,” “ego,” “spirit,” “free will”—or even “unfree”), and purely imaginary effects (“sin,” “salvation,” “grace,” “punishment,” “forgiveness of sins”). Intercourse between imaginary beings (“God,” “spirits,” “souls”); an imaginary natural history (anthropocentric; a total denial of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or disagreeable general feelings—for example, of the states of the nervus sympathicus with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical balderdash—, “repentance,” “pangs of conscience,” “temptation by the devil,” “the presence of God”); an imaginary teleology (the “kingdom of God,” “the last judgment,” “eternal life”).—This purely fictitious world, greatly to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the world of dreams; the latter at least reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it. Once the concept of “nature” had been opposed to the concept of “God,” the word “natural” necessarily took on the meaning of “abominable”—the whole of that fictitious world has its sources in hatred of the natural (—the real!—), and is no more than evidence of a profound uneasiness in the presence of reality.... This explains everything. Who alone has any reason for living his way out of reality? The man who suffers under it. But to suffer from reality one must be a botched reality.... The preponderance of pains over pleasures is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion: but such a preponderance also supplies the formula for décadence....”

Put simply, the Devil is the personification of reality as imagined by a species which has demonised the real world and devoted itself to a world of fanciful abstractions and spiritual pipedreams. The devil is also by extension a personification of individualism and critical thinking because these are things that can only be developed by an interaction with the real world and a rejection of hyper-reality and spiritual missions. Whereas all are one in Christ Jesus, all are unique individuals in HaSatan.
A Satanist, therefore, is a skeptical occultist who accepts reality as it is without imagining a “true world” which we could escape to enable to avoid the difficulties we find here, all the while internalising this insight that our experience and conception of this world will always fall short of its actual reality. Rather than seeking redemption in the heavens or in the “Kingdom of God” we seek it in the depths of this reality (in the “bowels of the earth” which Christians have labelled “Hell” and “the Kingdom of Satan”). This is the meaning of “undefiled wisdom:” spirituality divorced from a spiritual world and doubt pushed to its logical limits

Ethically, Satan represents the prioritisation of principle over authority. In contemporary Christianity it is commonly believed that the serpent in the Garden of Eden is Satan and that his “big evil sin” which led to his fall from grace consisted in tempting Adam and Eve into eating from the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil rather than simply obeying God’s command to not eat of that tree, whereas in Judaism it is believed that this was a good thing because Adam and Eve were essentially animals before having done so and their obedience to God would not have been out of moral purity but rather out of pure habit. In Islam, on the other hand, it is believed that Satan fell out of favor with God because God commanded him to worship Adam and Satan refused because he believed it was wrong to worship anyone but Allah, prioritising loyalty to God over obedience to him. Ethically, a Satanist is someone who rejects humanistic values and human authorities, especially when they appeal to supernatural authorities, instead choosing to pursue a life of principle.

“In the world of ideas of the Christian there is nothing that so much as touches reality: on the contrary, one recognizes an instinctive hatred of reality as the motive power, the only motive power at the bottom of Christianity. What follows therefrom? That even here, in psychologicis, there is a radical error, which is to say one conditioning fundamentals, which is to say, one in substance. Take away one idea and put a genuine reality in its place—and the whole of Christianity crumbles to nothingness!—Viewed calmly, this strangest of all phenomena, a religion not only depending on errors, but inventive and ingenious only in devising injurious errors, poisonous to life and to the heart…”

“—With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its “humanitarian” blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal.... For example, the worm of sin: it was the church that first enriched mankind with this misery!—The “equality of souls before God”—this fraud, this pretext for the rancunes of all the base-minded—this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole social order —this is Christian dynamite.... The “humanitarian” blessings of Christianity forsooth! To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instincts! All this, to me, is the “humanitarianism” of Christianity!—Parasitism as the only practice of the church; with its anæmic and “holy” ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the cross as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard of,—against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of soul—against life itself.... This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found—I have letters that even the blind will be able to see.... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,—I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race.... And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality befell—from the first day of Christianity!—Why not rather from its last?—From today?—The transvaluation of all values!...”