Why I'm Not A Satanist, continuedI recieved the following response to my article on 11/5/05 from a UK correspondant who writes about his own reasons for not being a Satanist: I read ( and was thrilled by) Anton Lavey's 'Satanic Bible' back in my idyllic 1970s childhood but even at the age of 12 or so I quickly realised the shortcomings of Lavey's often stylish and inflammatory diatribes - it was essentially unsatisfying and inconsistent even if old Anton himself was a decidedly interesting fellow. I quite agree with you that a guy as intelligent as Lavey could only have been aware that he had painted himself into an ideological corner with his Satanism in the end. My guess is that by the end he was frustrated by the whole tiresome phenomenon he'd come to represent. I will admit that over the years I too have at times been preoccupied with those kinds of Satanic/Luciferian ideas but in the final count I have had to conclude that they simply represent an ingrained complex of arrested spiritual adolescence, a naive knee-jerk gesture of mindless rebellion and that the compulsion to enact such antinomian gestures of 'liberation' from conventions over and over again is actually pretty tiresome, boring and futile, not liberating at all! In a culture as saturated in materialism, ego-hypertrophy and unbelief as modern Western society I think it is true to say that authentic teachings such as those offered by traditions such as Buddhism, Sufism and Christianity are actually far more subversive of the norm than the immature gestures of pseudo-revolt enacted within modern Satanism! I think that Anton Lavey's strengths were his sense of aesthetics, his personal style, undoubted humour and great gift for image-projection - but as to his 'philosophy', as you have very ably demonstrated its pretty weak and contradictory stuff - most unsatisfying! The paradoxical thing about all this rebellious Satanic posturing is that it simply winds up affirming that which it purports to deny so strenuously! And their naive elevation of 'Evil' puts me in mind of Simone Weil's wise words: 'Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.' So true! I think one has to be pretty sceptical about Satanism's exaltation of and apologia for the base human ego - that part of us which Saint Paul calls the 'carnal mind' and which the Islamic mystics call the Nafs, the lower self with it's petty agendas of self-aggrandizement - this is less a state of 'liberation' than bondage to a childish tyrant whose selfish demands are in the final count a cycle of unhappiness, compulsion and suffering. A much more luminous insight and path of true liberation is surely expounded in the words of the Gospel of Matthew: "He who finds his life shall lose it. And he who loses his life for My sake shall find it." A vastly more subversive message in every way - a genuine spiritual emancipation as opposed to the mock-revolt and tantrums of the ego extolled by modern Satanism! |