Satanism

The umbrella current of modern Western Satanism: a family of symbolic, non-theistic, activist, and theistic paths that use Satan as a figure of self-sovereignty, revolt against inherited guilt, and the individual as their own authority.

Most readers meet Satanism through someone else’s fear of it. Practitioners usually start with a different question: who owns the self? In modern Satanism, Satan is less often the horned ruler of a Christian hell than an emblem of refusal, appetite, pride, and self-authorship. LaVeyans treat him as a symbol, not a being. The Satanic Temple uses the name for a public religious identity built around conscience, pluralism, and resistance to theocracy. Theistic and traditional Satanists may approach Satan as an actual presence. These currents disagree sharply, but they share enough grammar to belong in one Lineage article.

A modern current, not a single church

Modern Satanism transmits institutions, texts, public gestures, ritual forms, and self-descriptions. It isn’t one organization, and no institution speaks for all Satanists. At least three live currents shape the field.

LaVeyan Satanism begins with Anton Szandor LaVey and the Church of Satan. It is atheistic and symbolic: Satan stands for carnality, rational self-interest, indulgence, personal sovereignty, and refusal of what LaVey saw as life-denying religious guilt.

The Satanic Temple is also non-theistic, but its center of gravity is different. It uses Satan as the figure of the rebel against arbitrary authority, then carries that figure into public religion, church-state litigation, public ritual, and civic performance.

Theistic or traditional Satanism treats Satan, or an allied adversarial figure, as real. It is less centralized and more varied than either public institution. Some practitioners approach Satan devotionally; others frame the relationship as alliance, patronage, or initiatory contact.

The word Satanism therefore names a field of argument as much as a doctrine. The first argument is always over whether Satan is a symbol, a mythic figure, a legal-religious emblem, or an actual being.

Origin and historical development

Before the twentieth century, “Satanism” was usually an accusation. Churches, courts, and pamphleteers used it to name heresy, witchcraft, blasphemy, political revolt, or any religious otherness that could be made frightening. That history matters because modern Satanists inherit the charge and reverse it. They take the adversary’s name and ask what becomes possible when the figure of rebellion is chosen rather than imposed.

Organized modern Satanism begins in San Francisco on 30 April 1966. That day Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan and declared the Age of Satan. LaVey was a showman, organist, writer, and self-mythologizer; public theater was part of the method. Black masses, shaved heads, the Baphomet seal, and press-savvy ritual made the Church visible. The Satanic Bible (1969) gave that visibility a text: aphoristic, anti-Christian, materialist, theatrical, and written for people who wanted permission to stop apologizing for desire.

The next major split came in 1975, when Michael Aquino and other members left the Church of Satan and founded the Temple of Set. The schism clarified the first great internal division. LaVey’s Satan was a symbol and a mirror. Aquino’s Set was an objective metaphysical intelligence. After that split, no serious account could treat organized Satanism as one thing.

A third public form emerged in the 2010s with The Satanic Temple. Founded by Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry in 2012-2013, it adopted non-theistic Satanism as a public religion of dissent. Its seven tenets stress compassion, bodily autonomy, justice, scientific understanding, and personal conscience. Where the Church of Satan cultivated elite individualism and theatrical provocation, The Satanic Temple built a civic and legal project around the Satanic outsider as a defender of pluralism.

Main figures and organizations

• Anton Szandor LaVey is the founder of organized modern Satanism. His importance lies less in inventing every idea than in giving the movement a church, a book, and a public style.
• The Church of Satan is the parent institution of LaVeyan Satanism. It remains the guardian of LaVey’s symbolic, atheistic, individualist interpretation.
• Michael Aquino is the schismatic figure whose departure created Setianism and forced the symbolic-versus-theistic distinction into the open.
• The Satanic Temple is the most visible recent institution, especially in the United States, where its campaigns test the legal status of minority religions and challenge Christian privilege in public life.
• Theistic and traditional Satanists are not one body. They appear in small groups, private practice, online communities, and adjacent Left-Hand-Path circles, often rejecting both LaVey’s atheism and The Satanic Temple’s political focus.

Major works and institutions

Core teachings and contributions

The currents differ, but several themes recur.

The self as final authority. Satanism treats the individual’s judgment, appetite, and conscience as primary. In LaVeyan form, that means rational self-interest and refusal of guilt. In The Satanic Temple, it means bodily autonomy and personal conscience. In theistic forms, even relationship with Satan is usually framed as alliance rather than submission.

Satan as adversarial mirror. Satan reflects what the surrounding culture has rejected: pride, pleasure, doubt, dissent, and refusal. LaVeyan Satanists use that mirror symbolically. The Satanic Temple uses it politically and religiously. Theistic Satanists may treat the mirror as a window into a real spiritual presence.

Ritual as directed theater. In LaVey’s account, ritual is psychodrama: a deliberate emotional technology for intensifying desire, rage, grief, or commitment. The ritual doesn’t have to call down a literal being to matter. It gives the practitioner a chamber in which forbidden feelings can be named, heightened, and released.

Antinomian ethics. Satanism is antinomian: it defines itself against inherited law, especially Christian moral law. That doesn’t mean “anything goes” in every current. It means the practitioner doesn’t accept obedience as a virtue by itself.

Practices, systems, and beliefs transmitted

LaVeyan practice centers on reading, ritual, aesthetics, and the cultivated self. The ritual chamber is theatrical by design. Symbols, candles, music, formal speech, and heightened emotion create an altered frame in which the practitioner can work on the self without pretending to be meek. The Church of Satan’s public material also transmits a style: black humor, disdain for herd morality, and a preference for competence over piety.

The Satanic Temple transmits a different practice pattern. Its rituals may be private or communal, but its most visible practice is public religious performance: invocations, monument cases, after-school clubs, holiday displays, and legal challenges that ask whether religious liberty applies to unpopular minority religion as fully as to majority Christianity. To supporters, this is Satanic religion enacted as conscience and pluralism. To LaVeyans, it can look like liberal activism wearing Satanic costume. The dispute is part of the lineage.

Theistic and traditional Satanists transmit more varied forms: devotional work, pact language, demonological study, private ritual, and contact with Satan or related adversarial beings. Some overlap with Luciferianism, some with demonolatry, some with broader Left-Hand Path practice. The boundary is porous, and practitioners police it differently.

Influence on modern spirituality and metaphysical practice

Satanism’s influence is larger than its membership because it supplies the most visible Western language for spiritual self-sovereignty. It gives the field a severe question: can a path be spiritual when it refuses humility, obedience, and surrender as ideals? The Left-Hand Path answers yes; Satanism made that answer public.

It also gave the antinomian wing a clearer taxonomy. The Church of Satan made symbolic, atheistic Satanism durable. The Temple of Set answered with theistic Setian initiation. Luciferianism distinguished the light-bearer from the Satanic adversary. Chaos Magick carried the same self-authorizing posture into a method with no fixed emblem at all. Taken together, those currents let practitioners distinguish symbolic rebellion, theistic contact, gnosis, and belief-as-tool rather than collapsing them into one dark aesthetic.

The Satanic Temple added a more recent contribution: Satanism as public minority religion. Whether one sees that as genuine religion, strategic performance, or both, it changed the public argument. A Satanist could now appear in court not as a criminal fantasy, but as a claimant asking whether pluralism is real.

Controversies, criticism, and legacy

Satanism’s public legacy is bound to confusion. Outsiders routinely flatten all Satanists into devil worship, criminal conspiracy, adolescent shock, or extremist fringe. The moral-panic version of that flattening belongs in Satanic Panic. The separate question of documented esoteric-fascist fringe material belongs in Esoteric Fascism and the Order of Nine Angles. Mainstream Satanic and Left-Hand-Path bodies reject being merged with either.

Inside the current, the disputes are just as sharp. LaVeyans often regard The Satanic Temple as political activism without Satanic depth. The Satanic Temple regards LaVeyan social Darwinism as morally thin and politically useless. Theistic Satanists may see both as refusing the very being whose name they use. Each current asks the others the same question in a different accent: are you honoring Satan, using Satan, or replacing Satan with yourself?

That argument is the legacy. Modern Satanism made the adversary a chosen identity, then kept disagreeing about what the choice means. Its place in the field is not a hidden cult behind history. It is a visible, modern, internally divided current that tests how far self-sovereignty can be carried before it becomes a religion, a philosophy, a ritual art, or a public demand for recognition.

Related Articles

Sources

• Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible (Avon, 1969) — the primary doctrinal and stylistic text of LaVeyan Satanism.
• Asbjorn Dyrendal, James R. Lewis, and Jesper Aa. Petersen, The Invention of Satanism (Oxford University Press, 2016) — the academic account of Satanism as a modern religious construction.
• Per Faxneld and Jesper Aa. Petersen, eds., The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2012) — essays on modern Satanism, the Church of Satan, Setianism, and related currents.
• Massimo Introvigne, Satanism: A Social History (Brill, 2016) — broad historical survey of Satanism’s development and public reception.
• Joseph P. Laycock, Speak of the Devil: How The Satanic Temple Is Changing the Way We Talk About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2020) — the main scholarly account of The Satanic Temple’s public-religion strategy.
• Church of Satan, “Frequently Asked Questions” and “The History of the Church of Satan” — primary self-description of LaVeyan Satanism and its institutional history.
• The Satanic Temple, “About Us” and “Seven Tenets” — primary self-description of the Temple’s non-theistic religious identity and ethical frame.