"Hail Satan?" (2019)

[Belacqua]

I care about the facts.

And I'm convinced you're right. It's a very interesting situation, to see that contemporary Satanists wish to deny this. 

As I think about it, it all seems like a case study in what Fredric Jameson was warning us about, when he wrote about Postmodernism close to 30 years ago. He pointed out that the Postmodern condition combines an almost total lack of historicity with, paradoxically, the practice of making every new thing out of items from the past. 

So the obvious example was in architecture, where you get traditional cornices and columns painted funky colors and entirely divorced from the rational system of which they were a part -- out of which they evolved, for good reasons. 

The Church of Satan modern guys seem to fit this exactly. It made me sad to see, in the web site's video, a gift shop Shiva on an altar shelf with more or less random stuff from other cultures. And the Shiva is being used as a symbol of chaos. 

It seems likely that the notion of chaos they're using derives from Nietzsche, who made much of it in his early work. Then by ignoring the historical roots they can call this the same thing as Shiva. But in fact those things are different -- the foundations are different and the systems in which they work are different. And one of our tasks, I'm quite sure, if we want to improve our understanding of things, is to desynonymize -- to see that superficially similar things are in fact not the same, and to conflate them is to dumb ourselves down. 

The fact that they are eager to deny their own movement's history works along with this. They can claim to be new simply by denying that there was ever anything called Satanism before, and they can claim to be sciency and rational by conveniently forgetting that not long ago at all the top Satanists were casting spells in all seriousness.