"Hail Satan?" (2019)

[Belacqua]

A wonderful book about pre-LaVey Satan:

The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte. Be sure to get the edition with additional writing by Gerard de Nerval.

Nerval was the real deal. Way too independent-minded to join a feel-good group. Wrote great prose and difficult poetry. Learned eastern languages in Cairo, where he owned a slave. Narrowly escaped marriage in Istanbul. Made it all the way to Baghdad back when it was difficult.

Picked up several times in the streets of Paris for having strange mystical experiences, but always treated kindly by the police. (Parisian police were sympathetic to mystical experience in those days.) Eventually hung himself.

A great man.

---

Yeah, sure, satanism is basically protestantism..instead of it's rejection.  Brilliant thesis.

........WTF?..................

*its

[The Grand Nudger]

Spelling nazism isn't an excuse for being balls to the wall crazy, nutter.

[EgoDeath]

Yeah, sure, satanism is basically protestantism..instead of it's rejection.  Brilliant thesis.

........WTF?..................

There's plenty wrong you could find with Satanism if you wanted to, depending on who you ask. I think it's logically pretty coherent but you could certainly disagree with some of its tenets on a fundamental level depending on what type of person you are.

But to arrogantly dismiss Satanism as something edgelords got into in the 70s for the "shock value" of it is a bit short-sighted and wholly ignorant of what the philosophy is actually about. I have to suspect Yon didn't read the book so much as he looked at words, turned pages and put it out on his coffee table to seem "dangerous."

If anything, LaVey would turn people away who just wanted to scream "Hail Satan!", dress up in black robes and read The Satanic Bible in public. Those people are nitwits who would be mocked by people who actually understand the philosophy. I've heard it said by Satanists before that, "If you knew a guy in high school who was a 'Satanist,' he probably wasn't anything close to it."

A lot of these people in the original Church were doctors, lawyers, law enforcement agents, artists etc.

So, the point I'm getting to is that yea, some of them did things that normal Americans did, while also doing plenty of things that normal Americans didn't. That is totally beside the point.

But, I suppose I'm preaching to the choir.

[Belacqua]

I think it's logically pretty coherent but you could certainly disagree with some of its tenets on a fundamental level depending on what type of person you are.

Since you didn't want to teach me about post-LaVey Satanism, and Gae only told me about what it has in common with Protestantism (e.g. self-reliance), I went ahead and read a little bit about it. You were right that my ideas of Satanism were not based on the popular American brand.

LaVey's version seems to grow pretty clearly out of the Romantic movement. Remember when Blake did his "demonic" reading of Milton he said that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it." After that the Romantics began to take a different look at Satan, with the idea of the doomed Romantic hero in mind. Shelley set the image for this by associating Satan with Prometheus, making both of them into heroic figures who dared to defy the powers that be out of a love for independence and self-determination. After Shelley this view of Satan appeared in literature a fair amount, but I didn't realize that somebody had started a religion about it.

The difference between LaVey's version and the Romantics, apparently, is that for the Romantics Satan's defiance was always tragic. Punishment is always an intrinsic part of the Satanic or Promethean story. There is something at stake--risk, skin in the game. To remove that is to take it down to the level of a comic book. 

Satanism in Europe continued to say that there was danger involved, whether it was literary or religious Satanism. Goethe made it clear that Faust had a price to pay. French Satanists like Pèladan believed they were risking sempiternal damnation. Or even inviting it. 

Probably the change in the tragic theme began with Nietzsche's Übermensch. As an atheist, Nietzsche didn't believe that we are punished for our transgressions. In a sense, he says that we are all pre-punished by the fact that the world is chaos, and, as he has Silenus say in The Birth of Tragedy, it's better never to be born. So the Übermensch is one who faces this from the beginning. Overall, though, the Übermensch is very much a Romantic figure, a defiant genius who's just head and shoulders above us normies. 

So it looks as though LaVey has continued this tradition by making it more palatable for Americans. There is no risk of damnation. There is no punishment built into the heroism. Satan becomes a sort of symbol of independence and self-determination. The trouble here, though, is that as so often happens, complete deracination means that any unique meaning is lost. If Satan is no longer associated with damnation, then what makes him any different from Harry Potter or Iron Man? 

This reminds me of a routine that Slavoj Žižek does. (Sometimes Žižek does serious philosophy, but then sometimes in speeches he has sort of comedy routines, like an intelligent version of George Carlin.) He talks about how America is the country where you can find coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat, "meat" made of tofu, etc. In serious moods this leads up to the fact that America has religion without responsibility, war without sacrifice, voting without democracy, etc. And we can add Satan without damnation. 

The Wikipedia page about LaVey's Satanism says that he intended it for non-conformists. You let us know that conformists are also welcome. I believe you must be correct in this, since any movement that grows and becomes popular becomes impossible for non-conformists, by definition. And the fact that this group of Satanists in the movie commercial (in the OP) want to get their group recognized by city government and get a statue on the lawn means they are seeking conformity with the structure of their community. Since their Satan is a deracinated, safe Satan, however, I don't see what would stop every little group from demanding its own statue. Whenever two or more of you are gathered in his name, you can declare a Harry Potter religion or a Hobbit religion or whatever. Eventually the whole lawn would look like the granite version of a Disney gift shop. 

Ever since Sigmund Freud's nephew got tobacco companies to pay Suffragettes to smoke in public, American movements for independence have been integrated into the commercial economy, or they get shut down by the forces of capital. Now I guess it's Satanism's turn. The documentary makes this group into a Disney story -- a rag-tag group of misfits who are misunderstood by the community, but who don't pose any threat, and are really good at heart. The happy ending comes when the small town mayor acknowledges that we can all just get along. Success here is measured by how well the group integrates itself into the mainstream. As I see it, this actually eliminates what used to be an alternative to the mainstream. 

Just a little bit, if we don't take it too far, there are parallels with gay rights. I am absolutely in favor of equal treatment and equal rights for everyone. At the same time, bringing gay people into the world of expensive weddings, expensive divorces, traditional bourgeois marriages, etc., homogenizes society. André Gide, for example, wrote eloquently about how the world of gay men and women in Paris was a counter to the mainstream, a different set of relations with a different set of values. There was the open and mundane world, and there was the underground gay world, and he valued them both. It was the same in Edo Period Japan, and remained so in Mishima's day. Again, to be clear, I am against discrimination, but I am in favor of alternatives. And real alternatives don't petition the government to have their statues put on the court house lawn.

When the Satanists start demanding that they can serve openly in the military that will be really funny. The movement based on a Promethean independence figure will go abroad to serve US petroleum imperialism. 

[EgoDeath]

You're so arrogantly stupid that it's a little amusing, but more annoying than anything.

When you actually have some rudimentary understanding of what Satanism is, maybe I'll discuss this with you via PM or in another thread. Maybe.

But you're still so off-base that your words aren't even worth directly replying to. When you can humble yourself a little bit and admit that you're still talking out of your ass, with your half-assed Wikipedia analysis and comparisons to Christian heretic movements that have little-to-nothing to do with Satanism, I might be willing to talk about this.

Right now, your arrogance and complete misrepresentation tells me that you're not trying to learn about Satanism so much as fit it into your preconceived notions about Satanism. Which is wholly unoriginal and in no way some intellectual analysis of its tenets.

I'm really not sure why you keep trying to push this, I tried to stop talking to you and you keep quoting me. I'm not interested in a discussion with you at this point. You think what you think and leave it be, or at least leave me out of it. Your stupidity is radiant in this thread and you're so unaware of it I honestly feel a little sorry for you.

Don't quote me, don't mention me. If you do, I'll delete the alert and won't bother reading your words. You're not interested in having a conversation. You're clearly very interested in proving to me that even though you aren't educated on the topic, your initial feelings about Satanism were spot on. And even after "study" you were proven to be right because you're just so observant. The problem is, you're still completely wrong. But, you're clearly looking for some kind of "win" here, so get in the last word if you like.

[Belacqua]

complete misrepresentation

If you'd like to teach me the truth I'd be happy to listen.

[Belacqua]

from The Society of the Spectacle, by Guy de Bord:

59

Behind  the  glitter  of  the  spectacle's  distractions,  modern  society  lies  in  thrall  to  the  global domination  of  a  banalizing  trend  that  also  dominates  it  at  each  point  where  the  most  advanced forms  of  commodity  consumption  have  seemingly  broadened  the  panoply  of  roles  and  objects available  to  choose  from.  The  vestiges  of  religion  and  of  the  family  (still  the  chief  mechanism  for  the passing  on  of  class  power),  and  thus  too  the  vestiges  of  the  moral  repression  that  these  institutions ensure,  can  now  be  seamlessly  combined  with  the  rhetorical  advocacy  of  pleasure  in  this  life.  The life  in  question  is  after  all  produced  solely  as  a  form  of  pseudogratification  which  still  embodies repression.  A  smug  acceptance  of  what  exists  is  likewise  quite  compatible  with  a  purely  spectacular rebelliousness,  for  the  simple  reason  that  dissatisfaction  itself  becomes  a  commodity  as  soon  as  the economics  of  affluence  finds  a  way  of  applying  its  production  methods  to  this  particular  raw material.

[prhill]

I like The Satanic Temple. They embrace things like atheism, science and compassion and they fight to keep church and state separated.  I am glad the film HAIL SATAN is getting such good reviews.   I did look into LaVeyan Satanism and even joined the Church of Satan but got turned off by all the Might is Right stuff and most of all by all the occultism and pseudoscience and ritual magic and supernatural stuff as I do not believe in any of that sort of thing

[vulcanlogician]

@Belaqua Y'know, when these Satanists are talking to a documentarian and taking themselves seriously... they say things like "We're a rejection of mainstream culture."

...and perhaps they sound a little douchey.

But maybe (when they aren't taking themselves seriously) and they're petitioning to put a Baphomet statue up in front of some podunk courthouse that is crawling with fundamentalist imbeciles, they might just hit some of those "antinomian Christian" notes that you so much appreciate.

[Belacqua]

@Belaqua Y'know, when these Satanists are talking to a documentarian and taking themselves seriously... they say things like "We're a rejection of mainstream culture."

...and perhaps they sound a little douchey.

But maybe (when they aren't taking themselves seriously) and their petitioning to put a Baphomet statue up in front of some podunk courthouse that is crawling with fundamentalist imbeciles, they might just hit some of those "antinomian Christian" notes that you so much appreciate.

The French Satanists and occultists I've read about were fascinating people. They were also very knowledgable about antinomian and mystical traditions in Christian culture. Most of them were raised seriously Catholic, and some of them went back to Catholicism in time. This was not a pose for them, or a club for their pals. 

No doubt there are serious people among American Satanists as well. My skepticism was about Satanism as a deracinated dress-up version, with nothing much at stake. An American Disney Satanism. 

Again, if you want to put up your statue as an equal or alternative government-approved association for nice people, I see no point in calling on Satan. 

It was disappointing to me that nobody here was willing to teach me about American Satanism. I suspect there would be interesting things to learn.