Manifesto for a true Romantic Satanism.

This article is extremely long (38 A4 pages!). To make it easier to read—and to allow for printing and reading on paper—I have created a PDF version, available below. Please note that the text was originally written in French; unfortunately, given its length, I had to rely on automatic translation, although I did review it to avoid the most obvious distortions of meaning.

When I apostatized from my former Catholic faith in 2016, I particularly didn't miss two of its components: Tradition, and the fascination with the doctrine that stems from the interpretation of this Tradition and the "Word of God" (the Gospels) by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church: the endless discussions surrounding their nuances and intricacies. Satanism is a religion that has only existed for a few decades, practically still in its infancy, with relatively simple content. And I discovered at that time that I liked simplicity.

That said, if it doesn't confront the difficulties of its application, and if it doesn't learn from the shock of facing reality, from dissent and outright contradictions, simplicity quickly transforms into simplistic thinking, or even worse, into dogmatism. And it must be said that this flaw undermines most Satanist denominations (yes, Satanism has denominations: I'll come back to that later).

Note: on an individual level, there are Satanists, often isolated, who think a lot, but clearly not the (relatively) large organizations.

Tired (again) of the intellectual sclerosis and internal wars of my current religion, I have started to reflect on myself and have tried to formalize and develop what I personally mean by “Satanism”: the reasons why I have chosen to stop following Christ and to identify with his “Adversary” and some of his disciples, who are very diverse and heterogeneous.

One of the sources of my initial interest in Satanism, when I was still a student some thirty years ago, besides metal and role-playing games, lies in my discovery of Romantic Satanism, and in particular of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake and ofThe End of Satan by Victor Hugo. I will therefore begin this long text with a twofold return to my sources: autobiographical, and also to the origins of what was not yet religious Satanism, by examining the literary rehabilitation of the devil by various poets of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Then I will set forth my grievances against the two main atheist Satanist organizations. And finally, I will outline in seven points what I now consider to be the intellectual and spiritual content of “my” Satanism.

Summary:

I) Definition of Romantic Satanism p.3

II) Romantic Satanism and Contemporary Satanism: Grandeur of the former, baseness of the latter p.8

1. The Satanic Temple: Is skeptical and rationalist atheism a religion? p.8

2. The Church of Satan's “codification” of Satanism and the alleged impossibility of Romantic Satanism p.11

III) Guiding principles of a truly romantic religious Satanism p.14

1. My Romantic Satanism rejects the status quo p.14

2. My Romantic Satanism is opposed to Christianity p. 16

3. My Romantic Satanism does not idealize the figure of Satan: it accepts him with his flaws, and rejects moral realism p.20

4. My Romantic Satanism is mythological and spiritual p.23

5. My Romantic Satanism is methodologically optimistic, and utopian p.25

6. My Romantic Satanism unites metaphysical revolt and political critique p.29

7. My Romantic Satanism explores the margins and listens to the oppressed p.33

IV) Some texts cited on p.36

I) Definition of Romantic Satanism

Romantic Satanism initially referred to a literary movement that emerged in England in the 1780s and 90s from a circle of radical intellectuals and artists gathered around the publisher Joseph Johnson (1738-1809). It primarily consisted of an attempt to rehabilitate the figure of Satan. According to the historian of Satanism, Ruben Van Luijk, this rehabilitation was twofold, directed both against the role Christian mythology assigned to Satan and against the first-class burial and relegation to the realm of superstition conferred upon him by Enlightenment rationalism. The central reference point for this rehabilitation was a reinterpretation of theParadise Lost(1667) by John Milton (1608-1674), who, against the explicit intentions of the latter, exalts the rebellion of the fallen angel Lucifer, reappropriated, at the time of democratic revolutions, as a political symbol.

Romantic literature scholar Peter A. Schock argues that this rehabilitation project was made possible by the sharp decline in belief in the literal existence of the devil. However, as Van Luijk notes, this movement's metaphorical use of Lucifer is not (at least not always) simply a continuation of Enlightenment skepticism. From the Romantics' perspective, the artist, particularly the poet, plays a role comparable to that of a priest or prophet. Imagination, their instrument, is not merely a faculty of invention, detached from the weight of reality, but is imbued with Neoplatonic and Hermetic connotations: it is what grants access to Platonic Ideas, that is, to ultimate reality. The reformulation of myths through poetic writing is not merely a work of fiction, but an attempt to express, through language that circumvents the limits of rational discourse, truths of a supernatural order. As Van Luijk notes, William Blake, inThe Marriage of Heaven and Hell, has the prophet Ezekiel say, during a dialogue with Isaiah: “we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you know call it) was the first principle and all the other derivative”.

Some important authors associated with or inspired by this movement:

William Godwin (1756-1836), considered a precursor of anarchist thought, and his wife, the feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), participated in the dinners organized by Johnson at his home. The first achieved fame in 1793 with the publication of his essay Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Modern Morals and Manners. This book includes, among other things, a reinterpretation of Milton's poem, in which, according to Schock, Godwin performs an ideological filtering of all the negative aspects of Satan in the Paradise Lost (his authoritarianism, his pride, etc.) to project his own values ​​and aspirations onto him: his desire for justice, his rejection of arbitrary authorities, etc. A year earlier, in the second chapter of his own book The Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft rehabilitates Eve, against Milton’s Paradise Lost, as a feminist rebel. In a note in the same chapter, she writes, about Adam and Eve, whose initial happiness she compares to that of children or animals playing: “Similar feelings has Milton's pleasing picture of paradisiacal happiness ever raised in my mind; yet, instead of envying the lovely pair, I have, with conscious dignity, or Satanic Pride, turned to hell for sublime objects”.

William Blake (1757-1827) is the most famous representative of romantic Satanism, and the one who has most directly influenced me. His central work from this point of view is the Marriage of Heaven and Hell(1790-93), which presents itself as a gospel of hell written, in some passages directly, from the demons' point of view. Here again, the author claims to be reading Milton in reverse: “the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.” This poem also frequently takes a stand against Swedenborg. Indeed, in 1790, while Blake was working for Johnson as an engraver on an illustrated edition of Paradise Lost, Johnson's circle clashed with a local Swedenborgian church for political reasons. The Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church, with which Blake was initially close, condemned political revolutions and openly displayed its conservatism. The poem was, in part, a parody, inverting the values ​​of Swedenborgianism and of the book Heaven and Hell by its founder, from the skeptical and revolutionary perspective within the Johnson circle. But it was also much more than that, and constituted one of the cornerstones of a myth Blake constructed throughout his life. He considered himself a Christian, and in his later poems, Satan took on a more traditional role as the story's villain, but his celebration of "energy" and condemnation of "restraint," and his profound aversion to institutional churches, persisted throughout his work. In stark contrast to the professed rationalism of some contemporary Satanist organizations, the "god of reason," Urizen, as he calls him in his mythology, is the false God and the true Satan, this time in the pejorative sense of the term. Against both institutional religion (especially the God of the Old Testament, not without anti-Semitism unfortunately) and rationalism (Blake gradually distances himself from the materialism and skepticism of the Johnson circle), “the Devouring”, he values ​​“the Prolific”, the creative imagination, especially of poets.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), a few decades younger than the previous names, co-authored with Thomas Jefferson Hogg in 1811 a pamphlet entitled "The Necessity of Atheism" which caused a scandal and led to his expulsion from university and then a falling out with his family. That same year, at the age of 19, he married Harriet Westbrook, and then met William Godwin in 1814. Shelley admired the book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, with whom Godwin had by then distanced himself, and which Van Luijk notes he takes up “almost verbatim” in his own essay, A Defense of Poetry, the defense of Milton’s Satan. Previously, his poem Queen Mab (1812-1813) is marked by anti-Christianity. Laon and Cythna (1817), renamed in 1818 The Revolt of Islam, develops a dualistic mythology, which describes the confrontation between two spirits: that of Evil, initially victorious, described as “a blood-red comet” or an eagle, and that of Good, designated as “the morning star” and described in the form of a serpent. Shelley here reverses the Christian symbolism of the struggle between God and Satan. The rest of the poem describes an attempted revolution against a tyrant, located in the Near East but clearly inspired by the French Revolution, by a brother and sister, Laon and Cythna. Shelley’s most celebrated poem, Prometheus Unbound (1820) brings the mythological figure of Prometheus closer to Milton's Satan. According to Peter A. Schock's analysis of his preface, Shelley wished, through the writing of this hybrid mythological figure, both to distance himself from Aeschylus's original version and the final reconciliation between humanity's liberator and oppressor that it suggests, and to purge the Champion of Resistance Against Tyranny of the manifest character flaws of the Satan of Paradise Lost: "the taints of envy, ambition, revenge, and the desire for personal aggrandizement." Although, unlike Blake, Shelley was an atheist, Van Luijk qualifies their apparent opposition: "in a note to Queen Mab, Shelley had stated that his antitheism 'must be understood solely to affect a creative Divinity,' and he professed his continuing belief in a 'pervading Spirit co-eternal with the Universe.'" Like Blake, he also affirmed the superiority of poetry over the "grosser sciences” of the “calculating faculty” and believed that through the use of myths and inspiration, it could change society.

Lord Byron (1788-1824), who met the Shelleys in 1816, although an aristocrat and a critic of democracy and revolutionary radicalism, became politically involved on several occasions against what he perceived as the political oppression of his time, in England alongside the Luddites, in Italy with the Carbonari and in Greece. His major contribution to Romantic Satanism is the play Cain 1821), in which the eponymous character joins forces with Lucifer to lead a revolt against God, responsible for the universality of death. Its publication falls within the context of a conservative reaction in England against blasphemy, denounced by the writer, himself a Romantic and friend of Coleridge, Robert Southey (1774-1843), in his book A Vision of Judgement (1821), under the name “Satanic School of Poetry,” that is to say, notably Shelley and Byron, to which the latter responded the following year with a satirical poem bearing the same title. To return to Cain, Van Luijk points out that this is one of the most ambiguous works of Romantic Satanism. His Lucifer borrows not only his main features from Milton, but also from the Mephistopheles described in the play Faust by Goethe. It represents the philosophical and scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment, but in a more pessimistic and destructive form that leads Cain to despair and the murder of his brother. Van Luijk points out that this play seems to overturn the “Blakean doctrine of the redemptive imagination.” It is this very doctrine that leads to despair. William Blake, in his own poem The Ghost of Abel(1822), responds: “To LORD BYRON in the wilderness [...] Can a Poet doubt the Visions of Jehovah? Nature has no Outline, but Imagination has. Nature has no Tune, but imagination has. Nature has no Supernature, & dissolves: Imagination is Eternity.” It is noteworthy, however, that in this poem, Jehovah and Satan resume their respective traditional roles of Good and Evil. Peter A. Schock, at the very end of his book, sees in this a killing of the modern myth of romantic Satanism by one of its own creators.

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, who died in childbirth. At the age of sixteen, she was seduced by Shelley, who was still married to Harriet Westbrook, which caused a break in relations between him and her father. She married him in 1816, after Harriet's suicide. Her very famous novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus(1818), although the devil is not one of its protagonists, presents several traits that bring it closer to romantic Satanism. The “Satanic Scholar” (see bibliography at the end of the article.) emphasizes that the creature, rejected as Satan by his own creator, takes some of his words from the latter's own mouth: "I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil then became my good." The creature also explains to Frankenstein that he has read Paradise Lost and felt close to Satan. Although cruel, abandoned, deformed, and consumed by loneliness, and as such a highly ambivalent version of romantic Satanism, far removed from the idealized figure of Lucifer as the first to resist divine tyranny and the savior of humanity, he is also, according to the reading of the Satanic Scholar, a victim of his creator's negligence, which is largely responsible for the evil he ultimately embraces through his actions. In this sense, a satanic reading of Frankenstein, which partially sympathizes with the creature/Satan and radically criticizes Frankenstein/God, remains possible, albeit tenuous (in my humble opinion, this novel can primarily be read as a rather harsh, albeit internal, satire of romantic Satanism at a relatively late stage of its existence).

George Sand (1804-1876): Despite its temporary “death” in England, romantic Satanism later spread to the continent. Van Luijk gives, among other things, the example of the novel Coonsuelo (1842) by George Sand. The singer and gypsy Consuelo, at one point in the novel, meets survivors of the Hussite heresy in Bohemia through a man named Albert, whose actions she compares to those of the French Revolution. Satan appears to Consuelo in a vision and describes himself in these terms:

“Suddenly, it seemed to Consuelo that Albert's violin was speaking, and that it was saying through Satan's mouth: "No, Christ, my brother, did not love you more than I love you. It is time you came to know me, and instead of calling me the enemy of humankind, you rediscovered in me the friend who supported you in the struggle. I am not the demon; I am the archangel of legitimate revolt and the patron of great struggles. Like Christ, I am the God of the poor, the weak, and the oppressed. When he promised you the reign of God on earth, when he announced his return among you, he meant that after enduring persecution, you would be rewarded, conquering freedom and happiness with him and with me. It is together that we were to return, and it is together that we return, so united to one another that we are now one."”

Van Luijk reminds us that George Sand was a disciple of the socialist Pierre Leroux, and interprets this novel as an attempt to overturn the conspiratorial theories of counter-revolutionary circles, according to which the French Revolution was the result of the efforts of anti-Christian secret societies dating back to the Manichean heresy. The conspiracy exists, but it is dedicated to the pursuit of justice. As the above quotation shows, Sand, like Blake, although critical of conservative forms of Christianity, sympathized with the Gospel figure of Jesus Christ. Several other French authors also drew inspiration from romantic Satanism around the same time, such as Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863) in Eloa (1823), or Jules Michelet (1798-1874) inThe Witch (1862). Even political thinkers like Proudhon or Bakunin briefly refer for rhetorical purposes to this reversal of the Christian myth.

Victor Hugo (1802-1885) is the principal French example of the continuation of Romantic Satanism.The End of Satan (1854-1862), an unfinished poem, like its English predecessors, links the mythological saga of Satan to the recent revolutionary past, and in particular to the storming of the Bastille. Satan is described as an ambivalent and broken character, neither truly positive nor entirely evil, who “only lacked happiness to be good.” But from one of his feathers is born the angel of Liberty. And in one of the final fragments, he is finally forgiven by God: “The archangel rises and the demon is finished, And I erase the infamous night, and nothing remains; Satan is dead, be reborn, O heavenly Lucifer!” As Van Luijk points out, Hugo’s approach shares similarities with Blake’s. In particular, both equate poetic writing with prophecy and give it an almost religious dimension. Hugo distanced himself from Christianity. Like Blake and Sand, he respected the person of Christ, but he particularly rejected the idea of ​​eternal damnation and was a proponent of apocatastasis, universal forgiveness, as illustrated by the last fragment of The End of Satan. Like Blake, he despised religious institutions. “Every church has murder infiltrated into its flagstones; the pulpits below cause useless scandals.” Hugo was, however, drawn to alternative forms of religiosity, and the death of his daughter Léopoldine led him to spiritualism and various forms of esotericism. According to Van Luijk, “there can be no doubt, then, that Hugo’s project was religious in nature; in fact, it seemed to have been intended more or less as the proclamation of a new religion.”

Peter Schock, however, points out that the Romantic Satan is an “unstable figure,” whose heroism, courage, and magnificence are exalted, but whose evil traits are also highlighted: selfishness, pride, and dictatorial tendencies. This ambivalence is often preserved in the numerous reformulations of Romantic Satanism in popular culture today, for example in thec comic book Lucifer by Mike Carey, whose influence the Satanic Scholar openly acknowledges in his undertaking to reinterpret Romantic Satanism.

Romantic literary Satanism, in the works of several of its most notable representatives, thus possessed a significant religious dimension, far stronger and more explicit in my opinion than in the current majority forms of so-called religious Satanism. However, according to Van Luijk, this is not enough to make them Satanists in the religious sense of the term. Both their personal lives and their works lack a "sufficiently consistent and coherent use of the symbol of Satan." “They were simply “not all that.”" Romantic Satanism is, at best, only an embryo of future religious Satanism, though there are moments when a foreshadowing of it is directly perceptible.

Is this enough to condemn, as some do not hesitate to do, any attempt at a Satanist reappropriation of their heritage? Certainly, the goal of all these authors was not to found a Satanist religion, and most were Christian or atheist. They fundamentally belonged to a time of transition: the religious and ideological grip of Christianity had weakened sufficiently to allow one to dare not only to explicitly question it, but to rehabilitate its Enemy and even identify with him; however, it remained strong and omnipresent enough that it was difficult to imagine religious alternatives, even if attempts were beginning to emerge, such as spiritualism. The situation truly began to change towards the end of the 19th century, which also corresponds to the first documented attempts at religious Satanism (in particular Stanislaw Przybyswewski (1868-1928)). There is, I must say, something quite absurd, even dishonest, in the accusation sometimes leveled at those Satanists who today attempt to reclaim Romantic Satanism that they misinterpret the intentions of its authors. Indeed, this entire movement was born from a reading of the Paradise Lost who knowingly and superbly contradicted Milton's explicit intentions and true project. Taking what suits our time and ignoring what no longer seems appropriate in Romantic Satanism, while exploiting and attempting to transcend some of its internal contradictions, is not going astray, but rather continuing the initial undertaking. It is replicating with its authors what they did with Milton to begin with.

Returning to the context of the time, Van Luijk notes that, in theory, it was perfectly possible to support Western revolutions and maintain allegiance to Christian institutions. In practice, the vast majority of established Christian denominations condemned the revolutions and what they represented, forcing most Westerners to take a stand “between the old faith and the new values.” In this sense, Van Luijk points out that it is hardly a coincidence that important Romantic poets suddenly began singing the praises of Satan. The situation of Christianity today is perhaps even worse, with major denominations that have completely locked down their doctrine and functioning to prevent internal recognition of the rights of sexual and gender minorities and sometimes openly support the worst dictatorships. It is therefore not surprising that the 2010s saw a relative resurgence of interest in religious Satanism, particularly among these minorities. Satanism should have taken advantage of it, and unfortunately, the absolute nullity of the main religious Satanist proposals prevented it.

II) Romantic Satanism and Contemporary Satanism: The Grandeur of the Former, the Baseness of the Second

My experience is that the overwhelming feeling when one seeks initiation into the mysteries of Satanism is often one of disappointment. Whether drawn to it by black metal, the fantasy worlds conveyed by various forms of popular culture, occultism, romantic literature, or simply by a very bad previous experience with Christianity, many yearn (this was certainly my situation some thirty years ago) to plunge into a completely new world with unprecedented experiences. They anticipate wondrous and terrifying secrets, a complete re-enchantment of their perspective, and at the same time, a greater, dizzying, and overwhelming awareness of their finitude and fragility. They think they are entering the forbidden recesses of our ordinary reality, plunging down a new Alice's rabbit hole, only far more frightening. In reality, everything is flat, banal, watered down, rationalized, sanitized, and often skewed towards the most reactionary and narrow-minded worldviews imaginable.

1. The Satanic Temple: Is skeptical and rationalist atheism a religion?

When it emerged around 2013, the Satanic Temple raised immense hopes. Hopes for a left-wing Satanism, for an active and effective Satanism that would transform society, or even for a legal loophole that would neutralize the efforts of evangelical and traditionalist Catholic activists. But also hopes for a return of Romantic Satanism. Various heterodox projects aimed at formulating a new Satanism that was more intellectually and morally satisfying than the dominant attempts had emerged from obscurity, such as that of theSatanic Scholar or evenThe Devil’s Fane (very different from mine, and opposed on some points), only to return there a few years later, when it turned out that the fireworks anticipated in the Satanic Temple were in fact just a flash in the pan.

This was, of course, primarily due to the discovery that the Satanic Temple was the opposite of what it claimed to be, and that its leaders lie. I won't go into detail here about the heart of the problem, which is so well-known today in Satanic circles that those who continue to support The Satanic Temple are either new to the subject or, for various reasons, acting in extremely bad faith. I refer you to the essential video in the bibliography: The Lies of the Satanic Temple, by Dead Domain, which isn't even exhaustive.

I wish to highlight here a fundamental contradiction between the project of the Satanic Temple, which influences many of its dissident movements, and what was the Romantic Satanism to which it often referred.

Philosophically, the Satanic Temple's main influence is clearly the skeptical rationalism of New Atheism. This brings it closer to certain aspects inherited from the Enlightenment of Romantic Satanism (anti-Christian skepticism, the tactical use of blasphemy, etc.) but cuts it off from its romantic dimension, that is to say, its visionary and prophetic aspects. Paradoxically, it is precisely the religious dimension of the texts of Blake or Hugo that completely eludes the Satanic Temple, which nevertheless claims to represent an entire religion and even to redefine what religious feeling and belonging are in general, as Joseph Laycock, in my opinion in vain, attempted to demonstrate in the monograph he devoted to this organization. The “seven tenets" of this organization claim, with only slight variations, to adhere to scientific rationality and the most ordinary humanist principles. It takes the most widespread philosophical and political opinions found in militant atheist and skeptical circles, adds iconography and names inspired by Satanism and Goetia, and calls "rituals" happenings entirely conventional, albeit blasphemous, and proclaims that a “sense of identity, culture, community, and shared values” and deep convictions are enough to constitute a religion. And it christens the whole thing “Satanism.” Once the benefit of the doubt and time for reflection have passed, it all ends up going around in circles and falling flat, and if the significative turn over of this organization is primarily explained by the utterly odious personal behavior of its leaders and their unspoken far-right agenda, the emptiness and superficiality of its content would certainly not guarantee its longevity, were it not for the serious abuses of the Christian right that make Satanism so appealing to a segment of the American left. The approach of the Romantic poets who reclaimed the figure of Satan was, as we have seen, quite different. Their undertaking had obvious political aspects, but also, for several of them, a metaphysical dimension that aspired to truths of an extra-scientific nature and that sometimes directly opposed skeptical rationalism, particularly in Blake, as this passage from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell demonstrates:

“Those who restrain Desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or Reason Usurps its place & governs the unwilling.

And being restrained, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of Desire.

The history of this is written in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or Reason is call'd Messiah.

And the original Archangel, or possessor of the command of the Heavenly Host, is calld the Devil or Satan, and his children are called Sin & Death.

But in the Book of Job, Milton's Messiah is called Satan.

For this history has been adopted by both parties

It indeed appear'd to Reason as if Desire was cast out; but the Devils account is, that the

Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss

This is shown in the Gospel, where he prays to the Father to send the Comforter or Desire that Reason may have Ideas to build on, the Jehovah of the Bible being no other than he who dwells in flaming fire

Know that after Christs death, he became Jehovah.

But in Milton; the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses. & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum!

Note. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it”

Everyone is, of course, entitled to their own opinion, and it is perfectly possible and acceptable to be an atheist, rationalist, skeptic, and left-wing human rights activist, and to believe that using Satanic imagery, or even claiming to be a Satanist, to score points in the political arena against Christian conservatism is an excellent idea. And while this is unfortunately not what The Satanic Temple actually does, I know many of its dissidents who seek to perpetuate this strategy, and for whom I have the greatest personal respect, even admiration in some cases.

I have read enough academic works on the subject to know that “religion” is a problematic term, that the three Abrahamic religions are far from being the only possible models, and that it is not enough to say that a system of beliefs and practices does not correspond to the structure of, say, Christianity—for example, that it does not worship one or more identifiable deities, does not proclaim dogmas, or does not seek to construct an orthodoxy—to deny it the label of “religion.” It seems to me, however, that the idea of ​​religion—if we are to retain this term, and this is indeed what the various contemporary forms of Satanism do—does not only involve a certain relationship to social and political life, even if this relationship may have been predominant at certain points in history, for example, in the ancient Greek religions. It seems to me that it also involves a certain discourse, sometimes implicit, on the nature and structure of reality, and our place within it, our destiny or lack thereof, if you will. And certainly, atheistic skepticism is one such discourse. But it seems to me that it doesn't quite fit the connotations suggested by the word "Satanism" in such a context. Indeed, the latter suggests a state of revolt, a refusal of the status quo, a desire for always more, for something that the modalities of daily life, or even the natural condition, cannot fulfill. "More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man," proclaims William Blake in "There is No Natural Religion" (1788), an early poem directed against Locke. In Satanism, there is certainly a rejection of divine authority, even of the very notion of religious institutions, but there is always, it seems to me, an aspiration for the afterlife: Satan doesn't just seek to overthrow God. He also wants to take His place and manage Creation in his own way: to reconquer the absolute. Whereas in atheistic rationalism, there is more of an idea of status quo: to accept reality as it is without expecting anything beyond or transcendence. It seems to me that the idea of ​​Satanism adds nothing to this, even politically, because, it must be said, blasphemous happenings in the style of The Satanic Temple are a long-since stale gimmick, and their concrete results are not at all convincing.

Conversely, making Satanism the “religious” form of atheistic skepticism dilutes one of its most interesting aspects: not only the political challenge to the institutional power retained by the major monotheistic religions, but also the very questioning of our place in the world as dictated by the current compromise between scientific and religious authorities. This is not about rejecting science itself, nor about endorsing any form of irrational discourse devoid of critical thinking, but about examining how Christian-inspired preconceptions continue to permeate the “obvious” truths of even atheist or irreligious minds. I will elaborate on my position on this subject in the following section. In any case, this explains, in my view, why Satanism in the style of The Satanic Temple, despite a relative fad starting in the late 2010s, hasn't really taken hold, neither with the general population nor even within Satanic circles: its definition of Satanism (basically, if you're an atheist, think science is good, and Christian conservatism is bad, you're a Satanist) seems forced, far too broad, and superficial. Satanism appears as a label tacked onto something that has little to do with it, intended to shock and generate discussion, but without any real added value.

2. The Church of Satan's “codification” of Satanism and the alleged impossibility of Romantic Satanism

A meme published on r/satanism, a subreddit largely committed to the theses of the Church of Satan, by Reverend Robert Leuthold a year ago, under the title “for those in the back, there is no such thing as "Romantic Satanism"”, set out to refute in advance the purpose of this manifesto.

In reality, he is targeting certain statements made by members of the Satanic Temple and adjacent groups, which he groups under the label: “neo-romantic Satanism”.

However, according to him, this neo-romantic Satanism says nothing new: therefore the "neo-" label is dropped. It is not actually linked to the Romantic "period": therefore the "romantic" label is dropped. Finally, it is not Satanist: therefore the "Satanism" label is dropped.

I do not think that not being linked to the “romantic period” (I suppose the late 18th and early 19th centuries) is enough to invalidate the “romantic” label, and I suspect that Reverend Leuthold is not a great expert in the history of art or the history of ideas.

I have also just argued that Satanism in the style of The Satanic Temple is not Romantic Satanism, and the first and third parts of this manifesto detail why I believe that a truly Romantic Satanism is possible and even desirable today. So I will not return to that point.

I will respond here to the last part of the argument: “neo-romantic” Satanism is not Satanism.

The Church of Satan maintains that its founder, Anton Szandor LaVey (1930-1997), created, defined, and codified religious Satanism in the Satanic Bible(1969). Anyone who identifies with its content and puts it into practice is a Satanist. Anyone who adheres to other conceptions of Satanism is not a Satanist at all. There are no denominations within Satanism. There is the Church of Satan, and imposters and charlatans like the Satanic Temple, or other religious traditions that are wrongly conflated with Satanism, such as Aleister Crowley's Thelemism, or, more recently, the cult of Santa Muerte. There is no such thing as "LaVeyan Satanism," because that is a pleonasm: every Satanist is by definition LaVeyan or is not a Satanist at all.

This assertion has implications, some of which are breathtakingly absurd. For example, a priest who secretly worships the fallen angel Satan, consecrates and then desecrates consecrated hosts during blasphemous black masses, and works to destroy the Catholic Church and promote an inverted parody of its teachings, in the manner of Canon Docre in the novel La-bas by Huysmans would, so to speak by definition, be not at all a Satanist but a “devil worshipper”, that is to say something quite different, according to the personal, never really argued and quite gratuitous and arbitrary assessment of the Church of Satan.

Even the most formalized and institutionalized religions have experienced internal divisions and reforms. Saint Paul, and later the various Councils, introduced elements of doctrine, rules, and prohibitions that were not observed by the early Christians, even those who knew Christ directly. The profound reforms introduced by Zoroaster within Mazdeism did not, however, cause it to cease being Mazdeism. Christianity and Islam, unlike Satanism, are revealed religions, with, in principle, a "deposit of faith," as Catholics say, to be preserved, whereas Satanism claims to be based on science and the evolution of human thought. It should therefore be more difficult to introduce new currents and changes within them. Yet, both now have many different denominations and have undergone numerous reforms in their doctrines and practices, while the Church of Satan completely rejects them. Hinduism did not cease to be Hinduism when Advaita Vedanta, under the influence of Buddhism, introduced new philosophical perspectives in the 8th century. All forms of Buddhism, despite their profound differences, are Buddhism. Only the Church of Satan is said to have a doctrine codified once and for all, even though its content lends itself particularly well to divergences and reformulations.

One of its members, named Mildon, likes to repeat on social media that “if everything is Satanism, then nothing is Satanism.” Certainly, but, on the one hand, between “everything is Satanism” and “LaVey codified Satanism, which therefore has no denominations,” there is a vast gulf that can be bridged by other, more nuanced (and more convincing) viewpoints. On the other hand, even if such a viewpoint were used, what would make the difference would not be chronological precedence but the explanatory power and depth of the proposed version. The Christianity of Saint Paul is undoubtedly not the oldest version. It prevailed because it offered an interpretation of the teachings and life of Christ that was particularly satisfying to the minds of its time.

Is LaVey's version of Satanism so satisfactory? He published five books:

• The Satanic Bible(1969) is composed of four parts. The Book of Satan is a well-known plagiarism of Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard. I am aware of the opinion held by some academics that the way LaVey expurgated certain particularly racist, anti-Semitic passages, etc., constitutes sufficiently elaborate editorial work to avoid accusations of plagiarism. I am not at all convinced, especially since LaVey maintained very good relations throughout his life with far-right activists, as, for example, the book Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege by Spencer Sunshine (Routledge 2024). The Book of Lucifer is similar to what would be perceived today as an anthology of mid-tier level blog posts. The Book of Belial is by far, in my opinion, the most interesting part of his books, and yet it doesn't convince me. I think that, generally speaking, rituals don't function as "intellectual decompression chambers" but, on the contrary, reinforce predispositions to exceptional experiences and esoteric worldviews. The Book of Leviathan, apart from the hymns at the beginning, is a completely useless read, and this is not just my opinion but that of practitioners of Enochian magic, which is its main subject.

• The Satanic Witch (1971) is an insult to the intelligence of its readers, and in particular its female readers.

• Satanic Rituals (1972) is a “companion” of The Book of Belial, interesting but dispensable, the best pages of which were not written by LaVey.

• LaVey's last two books,The Devil's Notebook(1992) and Satan Speaks! (1998) are of the same caliber as The Book of Lucifer, only worse.

Is Lavey's life more edifying and inspiring than his writings? Inspiring no, edifying yes, in spite of itself.

Donald Werby, a member of the Church of Satan's governing body, the Council of Nine, pleaded guilty in 1990 to sexually abusing minors to avoid a rape conviction. Far from distancing himself from him, LaVey continued to benefit from his wealth and arranged for him to buy back his house in 1991 so he could continue living there. I note that LaVey's second daughter became pregnant at the age of 13 and gave birth at 14. Even assuming that her son was born from a consensual union with a teenager of her own age, this paints an extremely lax and irresponsible picture of LaVey's behavior as a father, given that he had married his first wife when she was 15 (with "parental permission") and had married three times, each time to women much younger than himself. Zeena, in a text published shortly after LaVey's death (which she boasted of having magically caused), transparently accused Werby of raping her son at the age of four. She also accused LaVey of lying about his skills as a tamer of ferocious animals and of mistreating his pets, including his famous lion Togare. LaVey was forced by the courts to give Togare to the San Francisco Zoo. In the book The Cats of Shambala, a ctress Tippi Hedren mentions her encounter with a lion she names Togar, describing his initially difficult behavior due to mistreatment by his former owner. It seems this is indeed Togare.

LaVey seemed to take his “religion” much less seriously than his current followers. A 2020 article from Politico Magazine, titled “Satan, the FBI, the Mob—and the Forgotten Plot to Kill Ted Kennedy,” reveals that following a false accusation of conspiring to assassinate a senator, LaVey was visited by the FBI. He told them that he was only interested in Satanism for the money, and that most of his followers were “fanatics, cultists, and weirdoes.” Certainly, a visit from law enforcement and the risks it suggests can encourage minimizing behavior. But all these examples demonstrate the absurdity of claiming that LaVey “codified” Satanism once and for all and that alternative versions cannot be proposed. On the contrary, it is clear that LaVey ruined Satanism, and that it is practically a moral, intellectual, and aesthetic duty for anyone who identifies with Satan to consign LaVeyan Satanism to the dustbin of history and contribute to rebuilding this religion. I hold LaVey's mediocrity partly responsible for the seduction wrought for several decades by the Order of the Nine Angles, which I consider, besides the abjection of its ideas on moral and political levels, hollow and pretentious from a philosophical point of view, but which the vacuity of LaVeyan Satanism manages, by comparison, to give the appearance of intelligence and depth.

Ultimately, like the Satanic Temple, albeit in a different way, the Church of Satan advocates a Satanism of status quo which aims more to reinforce the prejudices and lifestyle of its members than to broaden their horizons and change the world. This is evidenced by LaVey's utterly idiotic assertion (which reverses a statement by Tertullian): "One does not become a Satanist; one is born a Satanist," and his defense of a stratified society founded on a strict and conservative social order. This Satanism does not celebrate a rebellious and revolutionary Satan, but a conservative one who upholds proper social norms.

III) Guiding principles of a truly Romantic religious Satanism

Before detailing the main articles of My Satanism, which you are asked to learn by heart and recite every morning and every evening in front of a reproduction of a painting by Gustave Doré or William Blake, I will remind you of two basic presuppositions:

• The “true Satanism” denounced by Christians does not exist and has never existed, just as the hypothesis of Satan to explain the existence of evil in the world is neither credible, nor useful, nor interesting, as I elaborate on in point 3 below. The Holy Catholic Church, as well as its sister denominations, has erred, as it often does.

• I dispute the idea that a relevant Satanism would be one turned towards evil, in the manner of the Order of the Nine Angles or the Satanic black metal of the early 1990s. I explained this in my post “Pourquoi le satanisme n’est pas, et ne doit pas être considéré comme la religion du mal.”

1. My Romantic Satanism rejects the status quo

By “status quo” I mean the idea that “reality is what it is” and that one must either hope realistically or not hope at all. And I understand it in its two dimensions: the political one: life is unjust, and one must resign oneself to it and not try to change the social order. And the metaphysical one: there is nothing beyond matter and death; the world is absurd and governed by chance.

This parallel might, at first glance, raise two objections. First, social order is contingent and modifiable, even if history shows that it is a project much easier to formulate than to achieve. Whereas the nature of reality is fixed and immutable: a sovereign can be coerced by numbers or force of arms; one cannot control time or death, but at best can only marginally reduce the risk of premature death. Second, it has been customary on the left, at least since Marx, to consider hopes of a metaphysical nature as an obstacle, not a complement, to the aspiration for social change. At best, they constitute diversions that distance the mind and will from the recognition of concrete, material oppressions and the urgent need to put an end to them. At worst they constitute a “false consciousness”, which naturalizes injustices and believes it can detect a higher truth and good order behind their existence: such as the “natural law” of Catholics which consecrates the heterosexual social norm as the expression of a symbolic differentiation of the purpose of each sex which would be inscribed in human nature.

I will elaborate below in point 6 on what I mean by a metaphysical revolt, but I would like to challenge the validity of these objections.

From my perspective, rejecting oppression, perceiving it as the odious confiscation of potential in oppressed lives, of their capacity to live their lives as fully and openly as they wish, presupposes the assertion of each individual's freedom to determine the best choices, the best way of life, the best system of beliefs and values, to make the most of the time they have left on this earth, within the limits of the same freedom, formally speaking, enjoyed by other individuals. Certainly, from the perspective of the means necessary to eliminate or at least reduce oppression, prioritizing the collective over the individual, and examining the material relationships between social groups that constitute the mechanism of oppression, is undoubtedly necessary. But for me, the ultimate goal of any just policy is to allow everyone to determine their life as they see fit, with as little social pressure as possible to conform to a common standard of living, and as little material pressure as possible to submit to the will of others and to devote time—the content of which they do not choose—in order to earn a living. For each person is responsible for the meaning they give to their life, the joys they seek, the interpretation they give to their suffering and the injustices and tragedies they endure, what kind of life they want to lead before death, how they face the prospect of it, and what legacy they wish, or do not wish, to leave once their life is over. And this is all the more true, and even more imperative, if there is absolutely nothing after death.

However, there are constraints that even the best system of social organization, after a hypothetical revolution, will not, it seems to me, be able to overcome, and which will always be a source of injustice and oppression: death, for starters, which comes suddenly and brutally, or very slowly, sometimes to the young or very young, sometimes around the age of one hundred, which shatters hopes and families. Then there are personal antipathies and covetousness, which may perhaps be resolved on a societal level, but certainly not on an individual one, in the secrecy of families and offices. Finally, there are differences in personality and abilities, or resources, which create social hierarchies and sometimes give the most privileged and the luckiest a taste for dominating others. And so on. This obviously does not imply giving up and not doing everything possible to reduce the boundaries of death and servitude. And indeed, enormous progress has been made over the centuries, both in terms of formulating new rights and improving our material living conditions. But alongside this essential effort, the fact remains that each and every one of us is in fine alone before the certainty of death and injustice, and has, or at least must have, the sovereign freedom and responsibility to choose the means of dealing with it.

Some people, quite rightly, choose to be content with the lot they are given and have neither curiosity nor interest in questions of an afterlife and the material world. But it seems to me that not only can such a state not be generalized, under any social or material conditions whatsoever, but that it is entirely undesirable to try to do so. William Blake lost his younger brother Robert when the latter was nineteen years old, and from this death he drew the conviction that he had seen him ascend to Heaven and his interest in angels. As we have seen, the sudden death of his daughter Léopoldine drew Hugo into the orbit of spiritualism. Certainly, one can discern, with a degree of plausibility, an element of illusion or even denial in such reactions. But one can also judge, and this is certainly my point of view, that each person is sovereign in the way he or she manages the prospect of death and the loss of loved ones, one of the worst sufferings there is, and that there is no need to impose “better” attitudes than others, even if of course some people grieve without leaving atheism, and I know some, for whom I have a lot of respect, whom this tragedy in their life has reinforced in their atheism or their antitheism. But I think that we cannot rank reactions, and for many others believing in an afterlife becomes all the more necessary. In any case, refusing the scandal of death and hoping, if not for an afterlife, at least for a broader meaning, and expressing a desire for eternity and the absolute, is consubstantial in my view with a deep and true demand for justice: refusing evil everywhere, in the actions of men and in the workings of nature.

If I had to name an absolute opposite of my thinking in the current intellectual landscape, I think it would be Nick Land. In an article entitled “The no-human future“,” the philosopher Vincent Lê, who is a specialist in his work, emphasizes the importance of death, understood as the ultimate horizon and definitive cessation of all existence, as a criterion for the capacity of any philosophy to reach reality:

“Humanity is destined to die. This fact, Land writes, ‘is amongst the most basic thoughts, and no more than the most elementary qualification for philosophy, since to think on behalf of one’s species is a miserable parochialism.’

Herein lies Land’s solution to overcoming post-Kantian phenomenology: make death the criterion for judging every philosopher’s credibility. No one can claim to have truly grasped reality if they have not acknowledged the finitude of their own thought. Instead of Kant’s transcendental idealist critique of thought’s attempts to go beyond itself (by subsuming the things in themselves under the concepts of reason), Land proffers a transcendental materialist critique. He criticises most philosophers for failing to look beyond their own reflection. He does this by anchoring philosophy in a material reality that thought cannot fully subsume – namely, death, which marks the complete cessation of thinking.”

This intuition of the insurmountable nature of death gradually led him to conceive of the capitalist alienation he initially denounced as a constitutive fact of reality that must not only be accepted but embraced and affirmed, and to become one of the main theorists of neo-reaction and the “Dark Enlightenment” (the expression is his):

“The difference is that Land thinks we can do nothing about this, so that the moral outrage of anti-capitalists is in vain. He also thinks that we should affirm such dehumanisation, at least if our goal is to grasp the real by stripping it of all anthropomorphic dissimulations. Seen from this more inhuman and critical perspective, anti-capitalist struggle is but the last-ditch effort to prevent or at least slow down the human species’ extinction. That is, anti-capitalists have correctly identified the radical power of capitalism, but waste their energy trying in vain to rein it in. Understood in this way, the anti-capitalist Left are now the conservatives, while the libertarian Right have become the revolutionaries as they struggle to unfetter capitalism from all restraints.”

Of course, Nick Land is an extreme case that doesn't represent all atheists. And I confess that, in my current state, I myself believe that there is nothing beyond death and that the laws of entropy are the ultimate meaning of our existence and our dreams. But faced with the apparent divinity of death, as perceived by our rational minds, and the weight of reality, I say "no" and "Non Serviam", and I choose the dream and creative imagination of the Romantics.

2. My Romantic Satanism is opposed to Christianity:

It is undoubtedly tempting at this stage, for some people who read me, to point out that some of my main references (Blake, Hugo, or even Weil below) are in fact Christian, that refusing the prospect of death is also a very Christian intuition, and that it would be simpler for me to accept it and claim to be part of a form of esoteric and progressive Christianity, rather than persisting in calling myself a Satanist.

As I explained almost ten years ago in my post “Pourquoi je suis devenu sataniste,” I didn’t really choose to be a Satanist. I didn’t, for example, rationally deliberate by weighing the respective merits of the worldviews proposed by Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas Aquinas on the one hand, and Anton LaVey or Michael Aquino on the other. I was briefly a Satanist in the late 1990s. Then I (re)became Catholic in the early 2000s. If I returned to Satanism at the very end of 2015, something I really didn’t want to do until then, it’s because my Christian faith was exhausted by the adversity I encountered in the Catholic Church and among certain Evangelicals, or "Attestants" (an homophobic subgroup of mainline French Protestants), to the point where almost nothing remained of it. Between the end of November 2015, when I had just discovered The Satanic Temple right after the shock of the November 13 attacks, and November 2016, I continued to struggle with myself. I wanted to remain Catholic. I didn't want to give in. On March 25, 2016 (the day after my birthday), I was still writing, in a post titled "Je déteste Pâques" (in which I was responding to the post of the same title by the late Ash Astaroth):

“Easter, for me, is therefore a time of celebration, which corresponds to some of my best memories (and also the time when I relax some efforts, it must be said).

I must admit that this year things haven't gone quite like that, and I've gone through a period of withdrawal, even distancing myself, from religious practice. I hope it won't last.”

Two months earlier, I had attended my paternal grandfather's funeral mass with my family and felt Catholic, though somewhat out of sync and profoundly weary. The next ceremony for me was All Souls' Day on November 2, 2016, again because of my grandfather's death, and I no longer felt anything of my former faith. I almost wondered what I was doing there, beyond supporting my parents. In the meantime, I had become absorbed in my research on Satanism and esotericism, a world I had left a quarter of a century earlier and which, once again, suited me much better than Catholicism. A few days later, Trump was elected, and I discovered with fury, but without surprise, that a majority of American Catholics had voted for him. I don't think I wrote this in my previous posts, but this was the turning point that made me renounce the Catholic faith definitively and led me to explicitly post on social networks, where I had many Christian mutuals, my then affiliation with the Satanic Temple.

I don’t feel like I chose to stop being Catholic and become a Satanist: it literally fell on me, and imposed itself on my soul.

I hate the Catholic Church. I want it destroyed and erased from collective memory. My primary complaint is that its leaders and defenders lie about its workings and objectives. When I was Catholic and the discussion turned to the difficult points of its “teaching,” I often heard references to its “prudence” (ecclesia semper reformanda etc.) and to its experts who think and work behind the scenes. When I wanted to understand in 2011 why it opposed gender studies, I found that she relied primarily on ad hoc pseudo-experts (like Anatrella!) to reinforce ideological presuppositions, and above all, hierarchical relationships of power within its own ranks. When I became interested in 2014 in how it justified its moral and religious authority, I discovered that far from listening to those of its theologians who tried to honestly confront its contradictions and offer nuanced solutions, it very regularly excluded them from any position of influence, as was the case in the recent past, for example, during the 1990s and 2000s. When, starting in 2016, I wanted to verify what the exorcists, whose seriousness and prudence had been so highly praised to me, were saying, I found a handful of charlatans working without supervision, who didn't know the first thing about Satanism and the occult, on which they were perceived as authorities. And it's always the same: at first glance, Catholic doctrine appears as a cathedral of erudition, reflection, and prudence, but as soon as you start pulling on a protruding stone—and there are quite a few—the whole edifice threatens to collapse. And I perceived all of this even before learning about the numerous lies surrounding the abuse crisis. Already a Satanist, I naively believed that the allegations of pedocriminality against various priests and Catholic communities were exaggerated, and that Benedict XVI had initiated a major purge. Then, like everyone else, I discovered the Preynat affair… and everything else.

I then accuse the Catholic Church of dehumanizing those of its faithful most concerned with “consistency” and fidelity to the authority of its “magisterium”: of corrupting their desire to do good and turning them toward evil. By asserting that certain of its unrevealed pronouncements are connected to revelation and must be held definitively, it marks finite and contingent ideas with the seal of eternity and infinity, and commits an act of idolatry. Concretely, this means that by requiring a “theological assent of faith” from all the faithful, under penalty of heresy (CDF, ​​Doctrinal Note illustrating the concluding formula of the Professio fidei, Summer 1998) to human opinions, historically situated and for many manifestly false and harmful, the Catholic magisterium paralyzes their moral discernment and locks them into a form of double conscience: opposing that of the possibility of evil to that of the possibility of heresy, and forcing them to choose between sincere, consistent and effective concern for their neighbor (including women, LGBTQ+ people etc.), and obedience to the Church, whereas the former should enlighten and condition the latter and the latter facilitate and support the former.

It will be objected that I clearly have a major personal problem with the Catholic Church, but that there are many other ways to be Christian and that there is no need to apostatize and call oneself a Satanist to hold positions close to mine. Firstly, Catholicism is the faith in which I grew up, which shapes my perception and understanding of Christianity, and it is not so easy to turn away from such a heritage. When I tried to join the United Protestant Church of France (EPUDF) in 2014, I failed because I didn't really feel at home there. I also admit to being somewhat influenced by an argument of Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890) concerning what he calls "historical Christianity," in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). From what I understand, he seeks to demonstrate, contrary to his own experience as an Anglican theologian, that it is not so easy to dissociate the original message of Christ from the history of its transmission and interpretation up to the present day, which in the West is largely identified, up until the 16th century, with the history of the Catholic Church. I truly lack the theological expertise to engage in a precise discussion of his argument, but I think that two types of people manage today, despite everything, to remain Catholic, or even more broadly, Christian: the first have abdicated all genuine moral discernment in the name of their fidelity to the Magisterium (or to other forms of ecclesiastical authority in the case of other denominations) and are, in my opinion, trapped in the denial of the moral consequences of their choices. The second, on the contrary, seem to have succeeded in dissociating an original message from its realization in history, which they partly condemn. I don't have the kind of mindset that allows me to operate that way. I don't think they're necessarily wrong, and it's possible that the majority forms of Christianity can reform themselves, even if, in my opinion, in the case of the Catholic Church, everything must be called into question for such an outcome to even be conceivable, down to the very meaning it gives to its sacraments. Furthermore, I read with interest on social media a number of theologians who know far more than I do, who have a wealth of very interesting nuances to offer on the workings of the Catholic Church, and who seem just as aware as I am of its many problems and eager to find a way out. And yet, in a way, they irritate me a little. I'm sure that in a platonician realm of Ideas, one can make Catholicism say many beautiful things, but the same problems keep recurring so systematically, and everything is so tightly controlled, even getting worse, that it's difficult not to draw conclusions, especially from an institution that claims to represent Christ on earth. And I can't forget 2012-2013 in France, when so many open-minded and reasonable Catholics suddenly became hypnotized by the authority of the Church, suddenly spouting horrors and clearly incapable of even accepting that one could profoundly disagree with them without being completely idiotic or misinformed, only to awaken a few years later from their fascination, all surprised by what had happened, nor by the crimes committed by several governments against LGBTQ+ people and women, with the tacit or explicit complicity of Catholic authorities. I will never, ever, forgive the Catholic institution.

Generally speaking, I believe there is no inherent essence to any one religion, and that most are capable of both the best and the worst, depending on the historical circumstances their followers face—Christianity included. But I cannot force my personal will to remain Catholic. What I have seen of the current state of Christianity, particularly through Catholicism and also through that particularly extreme manifestation which is evangelical fundamentalism, weighs heavily, invincibly, on my conscience and makes the very idea of ​​remaining Christian, of sharing a name and beliefs with such people, unbearable.

From a more doctrinal point of view, I am against the very notions of catholicity and orthodoxy. In a recent post, entitled “Réflexion sataniste sur "l'unité" de l'Église catholique,” I wrote:

“I deeply believe in the creative capacity of men and women, and in their ability to invent, throughout the ages, new forms of good, new manifestations of beauty, and even new conceptions of truth that enrich the world and society. This is why I have been interested since childhood in the cultural and political manifestations of the margins, of minorities, of the “people” much more than in fixed and “academic” conceptions (which here has the meaning of consensual for the wealthy and “cultured” social classes).

This is why I am for the proliferation of religions, spiritualities, and heresies, and against the very notion of orthodoxy: for me, good is not a deposit to be protected, but an inquiry and a conquest to be constantly renewed. Even if, unfortunately, the proliferation of new forms of good is met with the proliferation of new forms of evil, in an incessant struggle and dialectic. This, for me, is the structure of reality, and not an argument against multiplicity.

I consider the diversity of religions and spiritualities an asset, not a danger, even if some ways of believing or being spiritual are harmful, whether in mainstream or marginal forms of religiosity. This is why I disagree with the Guénonians on the need to distinguish between “true” esotericism and counterfeits such as, according to them, occultism. I believe that all forms of searching for meaning and the absolute, even the most seemingly rudimentary, deserve a chance to surprise us in a positive way. “The Spirit blows where it wills,” I would say if I were still a Christian. And that is why the way in which, from the first decades of its history, Christianity has striven to define an orthodoxy and to condemn and make it impossible to confess anything that deviates from it, is repugnant to me, even though I am well aware of the difference in historical context. Like Blake, I distrust religious institutions on principle, and like him, I think that: “As all men are alike, though infinitely various; so all Religions: and as all similars have one source the True Man is the source, he being the Poetic Genius.”All Religions are One, 1788).

And quite simply, I've lost my faith. Christ and the Christian tradition no longer mean anything positive to me, and I draw what little joy and hope I have left from the figure of Satan as he was rehabilitated in Romanticism, then in popular culture and certain occult movements. I'm not going to pretend to be a Christian again when my former faith has completely withered and dissipated, and when Satanic identification has imposed itself on my conscience, to satisfy social pressure.

3. My Romantic Satanism does not idealize the figure of Satan: it accepts him with his flaws, and rejects moral realism

Stanislaw Przybyszewski (1868-1928), who does not belong to the literary movement of Romanticism but to Decadence, but who is considered by the researcher Per Faxneld as the first historical Satanist “stricto sensu" wrote in The Synagogue of Satan (1897):

“Satan, as the Paraclete, in the sense of what the Holy Spirit is, is nonsense. Satan who creates life, destroys it again; he creates evolution and continually destroys it again, Satan cannot be a savior.”

As we saw above, Romantic Satanists were also aware of the ambiguity of the character, to the point that Shelley ended up preferring the similar but less arrogant figure of Prometheus.

This realization can be compared, on a more mundane level, to the very current idea, which I share, that we must be wary of saviors and heroes, of providential figures, and that we must avoid personalizing struggles. However generous and saintly a figure may appear, it always ends up disappointing, and one only has to look at the recent history of the Catholic Church to be convinced of this. All the more reason, then, not to identify too closely with the figure of Satan and place all our hopes in this identification: besides the fact that he is a mythological character and not a real person, he is anything but a saint, and even in his most benevolent representations, he reflects some of the worst tendencies of human pride, even if he also manifests some of its most noble.

Perhaps more interestingly and fruitfully, this fundamental ambiguity of the character can be linked to William Blake's critique of moral realism. In an article entitled “Cruel Holiness and Honest Virtue in the Works of William Blake,” scholar Harry White demonstrates that William Blake was a nominalist who criticized the tendency in rational moral systems to make good and evil into real qualities.

“Blake thus attacked the moral virtues from a nominalist standpoint, showing that one of the most dreadful consequences of the sleep of Ulro is the belief that the abstract terms good and evil denote actual characteristics within persons—a belief no different in kind from the equally erroneous opinion that material substance refers to a thing that actually exists in nature or that Nobodaddy identifies a being abiding in the distant sky. “Goodness or Badness,” Blake noted, “has nothing to do with Character” (On Homers Poetry, E 269).

Like all other abstractions, good and evil are created by “the Reasoning Power,” in this case by taking “the Two [real, existing] Contraries which are calld Qualities . . . / . . . [and naming] them Good & Evil / From them . . . [making] an Abstract, which is a Negation” (Jerusalem 10:8-10, E 152-53). Here and elsewhere, Blake used the term negation, meaning an “unreal thing, a nonentity” (see negation in the OED), to identify any abstraction which the reasoning faculty creates and which men then mistake for an existing entity or quality. “Negations [like good and evil] Exist Not,” although rationalists often presume that they do because their reasoning power has produced a “false appearance which appears to the reasoner” (Jerusalem 17:34, E 162; Milton 29:15, E 127).”

Note: despite the attacks below against “Reason”, it is important not to caricature Blake as an irrationalist anti-science, as White shows in his other article “Blake’s Resolution to the War Between Science and Philosophy”.

Blake's critique does not concern moral content itself, but rather the common intellectual analysis of it. He does not deny that certain actions and behaviors can be evil and cause suffering, and that others can be objectively beneficial. What he rejects is the idea that good and evil (or even sin) are characteristics inherent in any particular individual or category of people. If I write that a certain individual is tall or bald or has blue eyes, I am describing a quality that they actually possess. But if I write that they are good or bad, even if their personal behavior amply illustrates this, I am not describing a quality, but a state. This individual inhabits the state of good or evil or sin. But they are not inhabited by it. This state has no intrinsic existence but is an abstraction of particular behaviors. Certainly, for Christian theology, and since Saint Augustine, evil and sin are neither substances nor qualities, but result from the rejection of good by a perverse will. But this rejection alters the moral qualities of creatures and places some beyond Grace. This is what William Blake rejects, and Augustine's doctrine of original sin in particular.

Another criticism Blake levels against rational moral statements is that they operate according to the principle of non-contradiction: for example, moral virtues generally function as pairs of opposing opposites. Yet, according to him, “opposites are equally true,” “everything that exists is holy,” and both the anger of the tiger and the meekness of the lamb please “God.”

“Disputes can never occur among contraries, but when contraries are redefined in moral terms, when, for example, gentleness and meekness are said to be good, it follows necessarily—it is a simple matter of logic—that their contraries wrath and wildness must be thought of as evil. Explicit moral praise of anything implies a condemnation of its contrary. As soon as you define some joy or desire or belief as good, you negate and therefore condemn its contrary as evil, for unlike contraries, the negations that men derive from them cannot possibly function in harmony and are always at war”

As White later points out, Blake doesn't object to the content of moral systems themselves, but rather to how they operate. He thinks, like you (most of you, at least) and me, that murder is reprehensible. Not because killing someone is "evil", but because it imposes restraints on others. The aim isn't to formulate a moral system that defines and distinguishes between good and evil, but to advocate for a society where restrictions are minimal and tolerance is maximal (I develop my own political perspective in points 5 to 7 below).

I have greatly simplified the points made in White's text, which I encourage each of you to read. Here is what I have taken from it for my own purposes:

Even if, after the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake returns to a familiar use in his poems of the figure of Satan to designate everything he condemns, beginning with the rational moral systems of traditional religions, it seems to me that, in light of such moral nominalism, the very idea of ​​a creature personifying Evil—an idea that so many Christians, and even Muslims, like to present to us Satanists daily on social media as self-evident—is fundamentally problematic and questionable. Frankly, all that sustains the idea of ​​the devil is the content of biblical texts, which, as an apostate, I don’t give a damn about, and the assumption that evil is a sufficiently unambiguous and objectifiable reality for a single creature to personify it and constitute its source, which is neither self-evident, nor proven, nor a desirable idea, as explained in the preceding paragraphs.

On this subject, I may be extremely stupid, but I've never understood how the devil's hypothesis could answer the question of evil without calling into question divine omnipotence or goodness. If the devil fell, it's because God allowed it, which contradicts his goodness, or because he couldn't prevent it, which contradicts his omnipotence. If it's because a greater good must come from this fall, for example, the triumph of human freedom, then it was inconceivable that this triumph could occur without Lucifer's fall. If it's because it wasn't possible, this again limits divine omnipotence. If it wasn't desirable, then divine goodness is called into question. In any case, the invention, if I may put it that way, of the figure of the Devil explains nothing, resolves nothing and seems useless, at least to the non-theologian and apostate that I am.

To return to Satanism, and to quote Przybyswewski’s opening statement, “Satan, as the Paraclete, in the sense of what the Holy Spirit is, is nonsense.”

One of the interesting ideas in Satanism is precisely that it suggests a way out of the kind of worldview that posits good and evil as unequivocal and real predicates. One of the most common intuitions among the enormous diversity of Satanists around, aside perhaps from the Order of Nine Angles and some black metal bands of the 1990s, is to reject the idea that Satan is the personification of a reality that is Evil. But if I reverse this representation and make Satan the personification of a new Savior fighting against divine tyranny, I am not fundamentally leaving this worldview: I am simply changing the words.

Let's consider progressive Christians who believe Trump is the Antichrist, that through his submission to the forces of Mammon (money), his alliance with pagans (and unfortunately, pro-Trump Pagans and Satanists are all too easy to find), and his alliance with false prophets (the Christian right), he is the personification of Evil and is carrying out Satan's work on Earth. As a progressive Satanist, I completely agree that he is a scumbag with an immeasurable amount of blood on his hands, and I too hope that the rest of his reign will be extremely short and that he and his allies will receive exemplary punishment.

Now, if I write that he is the personification of Christian tyranny, as evidenced by his alliance with evangelicals and traditionalist Catholics, and that the figure of Satan and his revolt against God in Paradise Lost is a useful model for thinking about resistance, I am not fundamentally departing from this type of philosophical representation: I am simply reversing the terms without actually altering the approach or the content. If Satanism is to become more than a strategic gimmick and become a school of thought to be reckoned with, we must think more deeply about the questions of good and evil, and differently (by the way, and before any real philosophers stumble upon this article and crucify me upside down, yes, I know that there are more nuanced and intellectually satisfying reflections than what I have just described in current Christian theology. All the more reason for Satanists not to be satisfied with them either).

4. My Romantic Satanism is mythological and spiritual

Against gravity: the absolute. There is a lowest common denominator between Christian theology, the literary current of romantic Satanism, the various Western esoteric currents, and among them different forms of occult Satanism: and that is the influence, to very diverse degrees, of Plato, especially in his neo-Platonic interpretations.

In an article entitled The Neoplatonic Tradition on the English Romantic Poetry. 1757-1850, José Miguel Vicente Pecino demonstrates the importance of Neoplatonism, in the versions of Plotinus and Porphyry, on various authors and intellectual currents of the 17th and 18th centuries, which in turn exerted a strong influence on English Romantic poetry. He attributes the following characteristics to Plotinus's Neoplatonism: the overcoming of Platonic dualism through the procession of the soul to the body, the formulation of the principle of Unity, pure intellect, movement, and vitalizing force beyond matter, the theory of emanations, and the development of the Platonic idea, introduced into theTimaeus of the Soul of the World, which had an enormous influence on the whole of Romanticism, and the concept of hypostasis. Although criticized under the word of paganism by Christian theologians, Neoplatonism has survived, both through its contrary influence on them and through periodic reappearances within different currents of heterodox thought, including Jewish Kabbalah. Among these, the author cites, for the period he examines, Newton's anti-mechanism, the Cambridge Platonists, the panentheistic and pantheistic philosophies of Swedenborg and Spinoza respectively, the "mysticism" of Jacob Boehme, and the alchemical naturalism of, again, Newton, and the Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave. According to the author, poets like Blake, Shelley, and Coleridge were sensitive to the Neoplatonic influence of all these heterodox currents, "but also to the vast spiritual movement that underpinned the French Revolution and the post-Kantian idealism of German metaphysics." He notes that Shelley, although a skeptic, is considered the "most Neoplatonic" of the Romantic poets, in contrast to Byron, and adopts several of his themes, such as the quest for ultimate truth, the longing for the One, and the fascination with the idea of ​​the World Soul. He also points out that Blake was familiar with Neoplatonism through the Cambridge Platonists, and also via Swedenborg, but sees in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell a rejection of its influences. However, one can consider that the influence of Neoplatonism, which Blake knew particularly through the translations of Thomas Taylor, persists throughout his work, notably in the Songs of Innocence and Experience and the prophetic poems. If we consider the French Romantics, Neoplatonism is also an important influence on Victor Hugo, considered by his specialists to be particularly identifiable in the Legend of the Ages. It also seems that Neoplatonism was a known influence on George Sand, perceptible in novels such as Spiridion or Laura.

Satanists attempts to appropriate Platonism have been documented since at least Michael Aquino, but I am particularly interested in a much more recent approach, which tries to bring the theurgy of late Neoplatonism closer to contemporary occult reinterpretations of goetia.

Jake Stratton-Kent (?-2023) is the author of an important two-volume work entitled Geosophia (2010). This book falls within the framework of an occultist movement called the Grimoire Revival, which focuses on the tradition of grimoires, that is, magic manuals composed between the Middle Ages and the 18th century: for example the Key of Solomon, the Picatrix, theGrimorium Verum, theBook of Abramelin the Mage etc. According to Stratton-Kent, behind the Christian and Kabbalistic veneer, this tradition derived from Pagan beliefs and practices, which he traced back to the Greek magical papyri, a collection of syncretic texts written between the second century BCE and the fifth century CE. I am far from qualified to judge the validity of his historical analyses (and I am always somewhat wary), but one of the implications of his work is to bring the goetia of the grimoires closer to, and thus rehabilitate, the theurgy of the late Neoplatonists, beginning with Iamblichus.

Late Neoplatonism differs from that of Plotinus and Porphyry on the question of the soul's embodiment. To simplify, the latter consider that the soul descends only partially into bodies and remains in direct contact with the intelligible realm. Whereas for the former, the soul descends completely into bodies and loses its contact with the intelligible. This has two direct consequences: the soul can no longer ascend to the contemplation of the One through intellect alone, and, inextricably linked to the material world, it must contend with it, which implies a revaluation of the soul compared to the positions of Plotinus or the Gnostics. And it is here that theurgy becomes important. Iamblichus borrows this ritual practice from a set of texts of Middle Platonic inspiration known as the Chaldean Oracles, whose authors, in the second century CE, were a father and son both named Julian. This is a set of techniques designed to purify the soul and then gradually elevate it towards divinity. One of the central ideas justifying these practices is that bodies constitute a condensed form of the soul and function as signatures of the intelligible world. The sensible world is not merely our prison, but also the key to escaping it. Stones, animals, plants, and incense all form signs or synthemata which correspond to certain groups of gods or groups of gods and which will facilitate union with them, for example through rituals including statues in their image made of certain materials. The gods, who exist at the level of intelligible realities, then allow the theurgist to participate in them through their mediation. This ascent involves a number of intermediary deities, known as daimones. These generally have a positive connotation in Platonic and Neoplatonic texts, even though Porphyry, in particular, distinguished between good daimones who assisted the men and the bad daimones who sought to mislead them. The early Christian theologians, notably Eusebius of Caesarea and Saint Augustine in the City of God, took the opposite stance to this view and systematically denounced the daimones, whose existence they did not question, as deceptive beings who seek our damnation, mixing them in passing with the shedim of Hebrew religious texts, to define the entities that we know today as demons.

Medieval and Renaissance grimoires incorporated this evolution by distinguishing between theurgy, which, according to them, involved invoking angels and archangels, and goetia, which sought to subdue demons or make pacts with them. Contemporary occultists of theGrimoire Revivalvare taking the opposite approach, returning to the Neoplatonic conception of daimonesand by challenging the distinction between goetia and theurgy. This undertaking has attracted the interest of various Satanists, mostly situated within occult circles. Besides the present text, one can cite, for example, the text by Aleph Skoteinos entitled “Pagan Theurgy for the Left Hand Path: A Short Case for Studying Proclus (and Iamblichus)”.

The late Neoplatonists were staunch polytheists, living in a time when Christianity was triumphant, and they took Greek mythology very seriously. This led one of them, Proclus, to rehabilitate myth. As Philippe St-Germain shows in an article entitled “Mythe et éducation : Proclus et la critique platonicienne de la poésie,” Proclus focuses in his Commentary on the Republic to highlight a superior use of myth, which serves as “mystical nourishment” for the inspired individual and to turn them into the spiritual truths hidden within it.

It seems to me that we could take advantage of all these considerations by reformulating the famous distinction between atheistic/rationalist Satanism and theistic/occultist Satanism in the form of the following pair of propositions:

• a romantic and platonic inspired Satanism in a restricted version, for people who do not feel an inclination towards the supernatural, and which would consist of the intellectual, political, artistic and perhaps even mystical exploration of the very rich and complex mythology around the devil and demons, to value for example the Blakean defense of vital energy and his condemnation of restraints in all forms.

• a romantic and Platonic-inspired Satanism in an expanded version, which responds to the need for transcendence and the absolute that some people, including the author of these lines, feel invincibly, or which gives meaning to spiritual experiences of contact with spiritual entities, and which uses the sensitive auxiliary of rituals and the principles of theurgy and goetia, in their ancient version or in the various contemporary forms of ceremonial magic, chaos magic etc., to try to make contact with hypothetical realities of a higher order.

5. My Romantic Satanism is methodologically optimistic, and utopian.

There is a book currently popular in left-wing occult and Satanist circles that I don't understand and that offends me somewhat: Revolutionary Demonology of the short-lived Gruppo di Nun. In the introduction, this collective of Italian academics presents its project as follows:

“The occult war is therefore fought on two irreconcilable fronts: the radical immanentism of a materialist neo-magic, which interprets the Kabbalah as a set of circuits aimed at regulating the energetic processes of the cosmic architecture it manifests, and the absolute idealism of an esoteric fascist tradition that identifies in Kabbalistic architecture a transcendent order emanating linearly from the matter of the universe. We have chosen to emphasise the radical difference between these two approaches by reappropriating the traditional distinction between the Right Hand Path and the Left Hand Path, with reference to their original Kabbalistic meaning, in order to highlight our schismatic tendency in contrast to the reactionary universalism that has characterised much of contemporary magical thought. Against the manic centripetal cult of the Western esoteric tradition, our demonology recognises that the Kabbalistic organism, like a golem self-assembled from mud, is born and extinguished in the materiality of the processes that produce it, which are essentially devoid of human intentionality. To quote Land again:

“Politically, qabbalism repels ideology. As a self-regenerating mass-cultural glitch, it mimics the senseless exuberance of virus, profoundly indifferent to all partisan considerations. Indifferent even to the corroded solemnity of nihilism, it sustains no deliberated agendas. It stubbornly adheres to a single absurd criterion, its intrinsic ‘condition of existence’—continual unconscious promotion of numerical decimalism. Qabbala destines each and every ‘strategic appropriation’ to self-parody and derision […]. Even God was unable to make sense of it.””

As indicated in the quote, one of the strong aspects of the project is to create a Nick Land versus Nick Land situation, to reclaim the young, anti-capitalist Nick Land from the CCRU era (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) against the reactionary one of Dark Enlightenment. The opening quote of this introduction is, in fact, from Nick Land, in the article “Meltdown” from the collection of textes Fanged Noumena: “Nothing human makes it out of the near future.” The name Gruppo di Nun parodies Julius Evola’s Gruppo di Ur. The introduction is preceded by a “ritual” entitled: “Every worm trampled is a star.” This is obviously a dig at the famous statement of the Book of the Law by Aleister Crowley: “Every man and woman is a star”.

In one of the first chapters of the book, the following suggestion is made:

“We propose Love for the cosmic process of disintegration and death as an alternative, refusing to articulate the reasons. Love generates itself indefinitely, precipitating, like a sinister spiral, the world into darkness. We love with our bodies burning like supernovae, shining and useless; with every breath, we feed the hungry Beast that wraps us in its dark coils.”

I have two problems with this project, which I may have misread and misunderstood. First, I find it reductive to simply equate the left/right and antifascism/fascism dichotomies with materialism/everything else. It was, after all, his conception of materialism that drove Nick Land into the arms of fascism. I'll come back to this point later in section 6. Second, it seems to me that one mobilizes more people and discovers more resources and means with an optimistic project than with a nihilistic one. I recognize that the current climate makes this exercise particularly difficult, and my own temperament in recent years has led me to believe that the world is absurd and that violence will always prevail. But regardless of "reality," history shows that progress seems possible, even when everything appears to be collapsing. The Empire, the Restoration, the July Monarchy, the Second Empire, and the Vichy regime—to focus on France—all attempted to definitively put an end to the legacy of the late 18th-century revolutions and the hopes they inspired. They all failed and collapsed. Certainly, progress is slow and fragile, setbacks frequent, and “democratic” regimes are riddled with oppressive measures and authoritarian mechanisms, but in two and a half centuries, awareness of oppression has grown and new rights have been won that would have seemed unimaginable before, for workers, for women, for people of color, and for LGBTQ+ people. Certainly, current events show us how ephemeral and fragile these advances were, but they happened, they were won, they saved many lives and made them livable (and every life counts), and they can be won again. There is something complacent and fundamentally wrong with retreating into nihilism and presenting defeatism as some kind of grandiose conquest in the name of reality.

Conversely, it seems to me that it is truly useful today to read Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), the author of theSpirit of Utopia and of the Principle of Hope. This author, who expresses himself within a Marxist, albeit heterodox, framework, presents two points of interest in my eyes:

• As mentioned, he is a thinker of hope, and even of utopia. As he indicates, a year before his death, in an interview with Jean-Michel Palmier (quoted in the Libertalia anthology):

“Utopia is not an escape into the unreal. It is the exploration of the objective possibilities of reality and the struggle for their realization. We must believe in the Principle of Hope. It is the very movement of humanity, the one that leads it toward a better future, toward a more humane world.”

Oriented towards the “not-yet-being,” Bloch’s utopian spirit does not consist of the unrealistic and chimerical daydreams of a “false consciousness,” but is an “anticipatory consciousness.” It “has within itself a not-yet-being whose coming we have the right to hope for; that is to say, it does not go around in circles and wander in a deceptive possibility, but psychically anticipates a real possibility.” The utopian imagination, for example in the case of a work of art, does not have the function of exhausting possibilities and situations, but of prefiguring, “on the basis of the latency on the other hand is yet to come” (Principle(underlined by Bloch) of possibilities not yet known. In an article entitled “Ernst Bloch and the Utopian Imagination”, the researcher Judith Brown writes:

“Bloch makes use of the Romantic theory of creativity, seen here as an understanding of the working of the imagination, when he delineates the stages of creative production: ‘incubation’, inspiration and explication.Incubation is preliminary and often lengthy. It establishes a ‘colouring.’ In it expectation becomes a directed receptiveness toward inspiration. Bloch criticizes the term ‘inspiration’ for the way it suggests a source outside the individual subject.His own phrase is the “surpassing expanding element”, by which he seems to mean an element of transcendence that remains consonant with materialist philosophy when understood as a consequence of human action in the world:

“Not only the subjective, but also the objective conditions for the expression of a Novum must…be ready, must be ripe, so that this Novum can break through out of mere incubation and suddenly gain insight into itself. And these conditions are always socio-economic and of a progressive kind.””

For Bloch, “wishful thinking” can “be informed” and “welcome revolutionary consciousness”, and it is from the alliance between the revelation by the utopian imagination of the “not-yet-being” and dialectical materialism that the new world of tomorrow can be born, a world which it is important to hope will be better.

• Ernst Bloch was also a thinker who, although a Marxist and notoriously critical of Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy after a brief period of enthusiasm, greatly admired the neo-Platonic and often esoteric philosophies of the Renaissance, which constituted the cultural bath in which the great utopian narratives appeared, and which, according to him, correspond to the constitution of a new world and a new consciousness, that is to say, to the prelude of the capitalist world and the emancipation of the bourgeoisie.

In an article entitled “Sympathy for the Occult. Ernst Bloch, Antifascism, and Marxist Debates on the Irrational,” researcher Mikheil Kakabadze argues, based in particular on an analysis of the book Heritage of Our Times, that Bloch had a genuine affinity for esotericism, striving to “distill the philosophically recoverable elements of occultism” and to “politically ‘reoccupy’ the irrational.” The latter is not reducible to reactionary stupidity or false consciousness, but is a consciousness in tension with the rationality of capitalist industry, which is contingent and historically determined and which constitutes a mode of organizing and managing the world. This irrational consciousness contains “valid sources of negation,” which the left, according to Bloch, must “occupy and rationalize” before they are co-opted by capitalism or fuel fascist reaction, and which embody a form of hope.Heritage of Our Times develops the concept of “non-contemporaneity”: certain social strata continue to live in different temporalities and according to modes of production that are, in principle, obsolete. This is not a matter of “backwardness,” and the anti-capitalist romanticism of the German peasantry of the Weimar Republic, for example, can constitute a valid form of resistance to capitalism. However, these non-contemporary forms of consciousness, which do not always have direct access to production, particularly among the middle classes, can constitute an “illogical space” that can be recuperated by reaction. However, while Bloch virulently criticizes anthroposophy and its collaboration with Nazism in this sense, he believes that “this exhausts neither the social content nor even the objective content, the content which, so to speak, relates to nature, of this neo-occultism” (Heritage p. 154). Against Engel, Bloche defends occult qualities as a valid formulation of the “problem of the thing-in-itself”, “matter not pierced by the mechanism” (Heritage p. 154), emphasis added by Bloch). Drawing on Paracelsus and Boehme's theory of signatures, he criticizes the Marxism of his time for having retained a mechanistic conception of nature, for both epistemic and political reasons: the non-contemporary strata of society precisely associate mechanism with their alienation. Marxism must be able to occupy this “irrational front.” Finally, Kakabadze connects these considerations to the debate on expressionism and Bloch's concept of “montage”: reassembling disparate elements of bourgeois culture to create more subversive associations.

In a more religious and theological, and less philosophical and Marxist, way, Nicholas Laccetti, in his surprising book The Inner Church is the Hope of the World: Western Esotericism as a Theology of Liberation, which proposes to unite Christian liberation theology in the tradition of Martin Luther King and Thelemic occultism in that of Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant and Frater Achad, to resurrect the utopian spirit of the Renaissance, after having observed an occult revival in left-wing American youth, concludes his work:

“Yet many legitimate expressions of the One Idea can be found in the world’s historical struggles for liberation - and these include religious expressions which are usually considered fringe, esoteric or occult. All these expressions across human history constitute glimpses of the glorified humanum, the citizens of the City of the Silver Star who have been freed from the chains of social oppression through the blossoming of a new society and of a new humanity. These shadows of a future aeon can be seen darkly in the magic mirror of Western esotericism. If there is a successful unity to my reflections here, it is to be found in this deep conviction.”

One can, of course, be skeptical about the advent of a society without oppression, and I express such skepticism in my first point, as well as in the one that follows. But history shows us that societies and consciousness can change profoundly, and for the better, provided we look to the future and hope, rather than wallowing in the certainty of death. And the whole ambiguity of religion and spirituality lies in the fact that, while they can certainly be instrumentalized—whether institutional and recognized or alternative—as a “false consciousness” to naturalize and accept oppression, they are also unparalleled in inspiring dreams and envisioning new possibilities, new “not-yet-beings,” and the more subversive they are, the easier this capacity becomes. This is why Ernst Bloch so admired the Anabaptist and revolutionary pastor Thomas Münzer, to whom he dedicated a book. And it is also why I am a Satanist.

6. My romantic Satanism unites metaphysical revolt and political critique

Politics needs dreams, but also concrete thinking.Simone Weil (1909-1943), a Christian convert but reluctant towards Catholicism, recognized in Marx this “great idea” (in Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale, written a year before her conversion):

“Marx's central idea is that in society, as in nature, nothing happens except through material transformations. "Men make their own history, but under determinate conditions." Desire is nothing; one must understand the material conditions that determine our possibilities for action. In the social sphere, these conditions are defined by how humans respond to material necessities by providing for their own needs—in other words, by the mode of production. A methodical improvement of social organization presupposes, as a prerequisite, a thorough study of the mode of production, to determine, firstly, what can be expected from it in the immediate and distant future, from the point of view of productivity; secondly, what forms of social organization and culture are compatible with it; and finally, how it can itself be transformed. Only irresponsible individuals can neglect such a study and yet presume to govern society; and unfortunately, this is the case everywhere, in revolutionary circles as well as in ruling circles.”

This praise, however, is included in a chapter entitled “Critique of Marxism,” which identifies in Marx “two distinct and even incompatible conceptions” of materialism, the other being his “conception of revolution” and, more broadly, his philosophy of history, which she considers “absolutely devoid of any scientific character” and which she compares to Lamarckism. She criticizes Marxists, for example, for not having truly sought to explain, at least at the time of her text in 1934, why capitalist oppression could not be maintained even once it became a factor of economic regression, why it is “invincible as long as it is useful,” why “the oppressed in revolt have never succeeded in founding a non-oppressive society,” and why “finally [Marx] completely leaves in the shadows the general principles of the mechanism by which one specific form of oppression is replaced by another.” However, in the conclusion of her work, she emphasizes that despite the oppressive nature of our civilization, there are “seeds of liberation of work” in the advancement of science and technology (but probably not in automatic machines), which requires an in-depth study of their history and possibilities, from a perspective that is no longer that of productivity but of the “relationship of the worker to his work,” stressing that even if such reflections remained without impact on future social organization, they would still be useful:

“(...) The future destinies of humanity are not the only thing worthy of consideration. Only fanatics could value their own existence solely insofar as it serves a collective cause; reacting against the subordination of the individual to the collective implies first refusing to subordinate one's own destiny to the course of history. To commit to such an effort of critical analysis, it suffices to understand that it would allow those who undertake it to escape the contagion of madness and collective vertigo by renewing, beyond the social idol, the original pact of the spirit with the universe.”

In a 1942 text entitled “The First Condition of Non-Servile Labor,” Simone Weil reflects on the nature of servitude. She observes that all work, even in a hypothetical egalitarian society, contains an “irreducible core of servitude,” because it arises from necessity and not from purpose. For we work to subsist, and “existence is not an end in itself for man; it is merely the basis for all goods, true or false.” A condition in which existence becomes the only conceivable end, and where days and years follow one another without change or any hope of change, is tantamount to slavery.

“We must not look for a cause for the people's demoralization. The cause is already there; it is permanent; it is essential to the condition of labor. We must look for the causes that, in earlier periods, prevented this demoralization from occurring.”

Beyond great physical strength, compensations are necessary to forget or temporarily mitigate this condition: forgetting theweek-endPurchases, licenses, narcotics. Weil emphasizes that as a revolt against social injustice, “the revolutionary idea is good and sound,” but that when transformed into a new passion for domination or presented as the definitive abolition of the condition of servitude inherent in labor, it is a lie and a new opiate of the masses. She also believes that the bourgeoisie naively thinks it can appease the oppressed classes by transmitting its own end, that of enrichment. Indeed, workers cannot desire more money without at some point wishing to leave the working class. Children can provide an end, but one that becomes painful when it most often appears that they are “condemned to the same existence.”

“The world in which workers live rejects finality. It is impossible for ends to penetrate it, except for very brief periods corresponding to exceptional situations..”

It is not enough to want to spare the oppressed classes suffering; they must also experience joy. Simone Weil's text then shifts to an explicitly Christian perspective, which I obviously do not share, but what is interesting are the paragraphs with which she initiates the transition:

“There is no choice of remedies. There is only one. Only one thing makes monotony bearable: a light of eternity; it is beauty. (...) Everything beautiful is an object of desire, but one does not desire it to be otherwise, one does not desire to change anything about it, one desires that which is. Since the people are forced to focus all their desire on what they already possess, beauty is made for them and they are made for beauty. Poetry is a luxury for other social classes. The people need poetry as they need bread. Not poetry confined to words; that, in itself, can be of no use to them. They need the daily substance of their lives to be poetry itself.”

So Simone Weil explains that this poetry can only have one source, which is God. I disagree. But what is important here is that, philosophically speaking, while she is Christian, Weil is fundamentally Platonic. For her, happiness is identical to participation in Being, which she identifies with God, and beauty is a “metaxu“ (a term she borrows from Plato), a bridge, between people, but also towards this participation. I share her view of joy and beauty as the ultimate goals of individuals, in the pursuit of social justice. The purpose of politics, in my eyes as in hers, is not only the end of oppression, freedom, and equality of rights, which are essential means and require collective mobilization to achieve this end. It is that individuals not only be able to live as they see fit, but also be able to empower themselves to behappyWhen they and I speak of beauty, we are not referring to the academic beauty of the “fine arts,” but to activities and meanings that enchant life, and that give it a meaning that resists the inevitability of death, that allows it to participate in a form of eternity. For a number of people, this beauty, this metaxu does not necessarily have an explicitly spiritual or religious value: it can arise from spending time in nature, from a passion for a form of art or philosophy, or from a sporting activity. But for a lot of people It has this spiritual or religious significance; they need it in their lives to cope with servitude and suffering, not only in their contingent social dimension, but in their necessary existential dimension: wherever and whenever, everyone dies, everyone loses loved ones, everyone fails and their dreams are dashed, even in the most perfect societies. Religious feeling is not simply a matter of false consciousness or a distraction from the need to change the material conditions of existence. It is indispensable for many people to confront the prospect of passing time and the end of existence; it is a basic need of their existence and not, or not only, instilled by any particular social organization, and this will probably never change, regardless of scientific and social advances.

In this sense, the left has historically gone astray by distancing itself from religious sentiment, both strategically, because it has cut itself off from a segment of the population for whom it is essential, without this being merely a matter of "backwardness," and morally, because it is necessary for many to make their lives bearable. I observe that it is hardly helped by the majority religions and their ties to established powers. I thus consider the current structure of Catholicism, both ecclesiastical and theological, as inseparable from mechanisms of oppression. As a result of dechristianization, we are witnessing the rise of all forms of religiosity, often influenced by Neoplatonism, which mainstream Christianity has condemned and excluded from the realm of acceptable beliefs and practices because they contradict or subvert its dogmas, and which are grouped under the name of esotericism. Undoubtedly, some of these beliefs are harmful, and many have been co-opted by the far right over the past century. This is neither universal nor inevitable. Engaging with them constructively and addressing them is unavoidable, insofar as they possess both the dimension of confrontation with the absolute, which is lacking in grand revolutionary theories, and the subversive character toward the oppressive mechanisms of the social order, which is absent in major institutional religions. Many representatives of left-wing youth have recognized this and taken up the issue. Left-wing and far-left activists are still making a historical error in considering this rise of left-wing occultism as a danger.

I expect that the reflections by Simone Weil that I have just transcribed will be read as defeatism and false consciousness. This same Simone Weil, while her social thought certainly displays a certain pessimism, worked in a factory, participated in the 1932-33 strikes by donating her entire teacher's salary to the strike funds, sheltered Trotsky in exile (without, however, seeing eye to eye with him), joined the fight against Franco in Spain in 1936, and, in 1942, having taken refuge in the USA with her parents, arranged to come to London to join the Free French Forces shortly before her untimely death. If we look at occultists, I will take two famous examples committed to the left, despite the significant reservations I have, albeit in different ways, about their political proposals. Éliphas Lévi, the founder of occultism, was one of the most virulent socialist activists before 1848 and served three long prison sentences for his ideas. Political engagement is entirely inseparable from the spirituality of Starhawk, the famous witch and ecofeminist, who engaged in numerous activist actions throughout her life and also went to prison for her beliefs. The claim that esotericism is harmful because it offers illusory solutions that distract its followers from a critical analysis of the material structures of oppression and from concrete action to change them is a dishonest and stupid false dilemma. While the capitalist and fascist co-optations of esotericism are evident, many left-wing esotericists are making a difference today and are able to reconcile spiritual practice with concrete political activism.

To return briefly to Satanism in particular, one of the difficulties of Satanist interpretations of Platonism, which is also a source of reaction within them, present even in Aquino, lies in the common identification of Satanism with what occultists call the “Left-Hand Path.” This idea has a complicated history: it is inspired by the Sanskrit termVāmācāra, which originally referred to heterodox tantric schools. It was appropriated by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who described herself as a follower of the Right Hand Path and identified the LHP with black magic. In his very useful little book Querying the Left Hand Path, the occultist Phil Hine points out that the fascist esotericist Julius Evola played a significant role in the reappropriation and redefinition, for the purposes of identification, of the concept of LHP. He wrote in the Yoga of Power:

“The ethics of the path of the Left Hand and the disciplines lead to the destruction of human limitations (pasha), forms of anomia, or of something 'beyond good and evil', which are so extreme that they make Western supporters of the theory of the superman look like innocuous amateurs... We are dealing here with a liberty that... has no equivalent in the history of ideas.”

Phil Hine highlights two aspects of Evola's conception of the LHP: spiritual virility (turns) and the project of becoming a god. This concept then spread to various Satanist or Satanist-adjacent authors: Stephen Flowers, Michael W. Ford, Thomas Karlsson, etc. The researcher Kennet Granholm had even suggested at one time that it be substituted for Satanism as an etic concept.

From the point of view of my manifesto, aside from the obvious aberrant political implications, this concept of LHP poses two problems, which leads me to suggest that Satanism as a whole should strongly distance itself from it:

• It dissociates and opposes, in a way that I think is artificial, the search for deification and that of union with a transcendent absolute, which leads some Satanists to denounce esoteric and philosophical texts that are quite relevant and inspiring, as “RHP”.

• It artificially proscribes, in the name of a false spiritual fulfillment, the cultivation of essential human qualities for personal growth and social life, such as compassion and ability to listen, presenting what is primarily conditioning toward ever greater mediocrity and blindness as a path to a higher form of humanity. To borrow Blake's terminology, one could see this as a restraint of his followers' energy based on abstract reasoning—the mark of Urizen. Two testimonies below illustrate what I mean:

Phil Hine's description in the cited book:

“It seems to be the case that advocates of the left-hand path can only maintain their sense of elite personhood by making extremely simplistic judgements about what they regard as conventional society. So its not unusual to hear proclamations that religious people are all unthinking, scientists are blinkered, or those who are unfit for a new order: the weak, the poor, those judged as deviant, should not receive state assistance, or even should be “culled”. It is this disdain for other people; the utter lack of compassion, the desire to elevate oneself and judge others from the lofty heights of a self-magnifying ideology that ultimately turned me off from the left-hand path.”

And that of the neo-pagan musician Abby Helasdottir, in her review of a book by Kennet Granholm on the LHP, entitled Dark Enlightenment but which has no connection whatsoever with Nick Land:

“Granholm peppers his analysis of the Dragon Rouge with quotes from its members who often come across as just a little insufferable. This is due to what one could call left-hand path arrogance, an undeserved confidence that comes from believing that your affiliation to an organisation that prioritises an antinomian spirit makes you unique and outside the bounds of normality; as if merely saying it makes it so. There’s the dismissive attitude to more light-aligned occultists, or the boasting about black magicians actualising by breaking free of imposed morality, ‘loving honestly’ with “a love for the living and not for the meek and dying.””

7. My romantic Satanism explores the margins and listens to the oppressed

I would first like to make a clear distinction between these two propositions: “exploring the margins” and “listening to the oppressed.” On the one hand, the margins, in the sense of cultural and social margins, are not necessarily synonymous with oppression. If I take occultism, for example, studies quite consistently show that it is primarily prevalent among the educated middle classes, and some of its most emblematic figures come from the very wealthy (Aleister Crowley, for instance, whose fortune financed his numerous trips to Asia and who, at least during the first part of his life, did not need to work and could take the time to read and write). The historian of esotericism, Egil Asprem, also points out that speaking ostensibly from the margins, cultivating a contrarian image and deliberately shocking discourse, does not always have a social cost and can, on the contrary, represent a benefit. One doesn't have to look far in the news to find politicians whose entire strategy, often very effective, consists of claiming to be fighting against mainstream thought and “political correctness.” Satanism itself, nowadays, even if only in terms of imagery, appeals to many social classes and many political sensibilities, sometimes opposing ones, precisely because of its shock value. We must therefore avoid presupposing that because certain countercultural lifestyles or certain types of alternative beliefs or spiritualities are “rejected,” at least on a fairly superficial level, by a certain bourgeois norm, they are “oppressed.” I remember the ridiculous and abject way in which Lucien Greaves, one of the leaders of The Satanic Temple, in 2019, compared the vaguely negative portrayal of Satanists in the series Sabrina on Netflix to the “blood libel“. Satanists are not discriminated against in France today because of their religion. However, one could argue that both Jews and Muslims are discriminated against for the same reason. And oppressors can operate from the margins and derive a certain political power from it: this is the case with neo-Nazism, which is countercultural. Conversely, one can be, for example, living in precarious circumstances or be racialized and have no interest in countercultures, especially since a number of them, like everything related to metal, are strongly associated with the white middle class.

So, by identifying as a Satanist, I obviously link my life and my discourse to social marginalization and counterculture, but regardless of the negative image my religion may have, I am neither particularly oppressed nor qualified to speak about oppression. I am a white, heterosexual, cisgender man, a junior administrative assistant. I may be neurodivergent, but I am generally able-bodied. I have suffered from some so-called psychiatric problems (depression and alcoholism) which are now largely behind me.

That said, my Satanism explores the margins. If I consider, for example, the question of art, my two previous points, considered juxtaposed, contain a kind of tension. On the one hand, art, from Ernst Bloch's perspective, as a support for utopian imagination, which represents the not-yet-being (and Bloch, in the Principle of Hope, criticizes art in which “fantasy transcends itself in religion: through a breakthrough that tears it away from all creation, a breakthrough into a transcendent marvel that is no longer of this world”), and on the other hand, beauty as metaxu in Simone Weil's work, which connects the oppressed to the divine and to Being. Let's say that, with Weil and against Bloch, I don't see happiness and the end of servitude as purely material, and I believe that for many people (but not all, I'm aware), joy comes through a kind of relationship, if not always religious, at least spiritual, to a form of the absolute, which can be understood in different ways depending on sensibilities and cultures. And with William Blake, I believe in a prophetic art, which, through the use of creative imagination, can reveal new forms of relationship to this absolute. These forms of relationship, for me, often escape conventional and socially normative conceptions of beauty (the hideous "Beauty" of the French Catholic lobby Ichthus). The reappropriation and reshaping of traditional representations of evil, ugliness, and absolute confinement—through a process of saturation—can allow new manifestations of beauty, goodness, and freedom to emerge, sometimes contrary to their creators' intentions. This is why, although I haven't been a Christian for a very long time, I stand by many of the things I said on my old blog Inner Light (almost all of whose articles are listed in the section of the same name on this website) on black metal, which, whatever the intentions and convictions of some of its pioneers, is not, in my view, reducible to the expression of evil and nihilism, but suggests new forms of beauty and transcendence, contrary to the initial project. In this sense, I agree with an important point made by Bloch in the Principle of Hope:

“(...) because every great work of art is not limited to its manifest content but is also conceived on the basis of the latency of another side to come, that is to say on the basis of the contents of a future which had not yet manifested itself at the time when the work was born, and at the end of the contents of a final state still unknown.” (emphasis by Bloch)

This explains why black metal has reached far beyond its initial target audience, even some of those it designated as its enemies.

Similarly, I believe that Satanism, as a new religion, can, through the “evil” previously perceived, allow us to think about and formulate new forms of good, and through the ostensible rejection of “God” allow us to reflect on new forms of relationship to the absolute and to our individual and collective destinies.

In this sense, I formulate my own version of the “Left Hand Path“: to seek new forms of good in “Evil” and new forms of beauty in “ugliness”. And that is what I mean by exploring the margins.

Regarding listening to the oppressed, it's simply a matter of stating the obvious: those affected by oppression are always best placed to describe it and formulate relevant strategies to combat it. In this sense, it's not my role to reinvent the wheel and propose my own strategies or reinterpret theirs in a personal way, but rather to be available to change within myself what needs changing and to help where I can.

That said, why should I listen to the oppressed? Out of empathy, of course. From a strictly theoretical point of view, this requires clarification in relation to some of the preceding analyses in this article. In particular, I have discussed Plato and Neoplatonism extensively in this post. My implicit appeal to empathy finds little support, to say the least, despite a famous misquotation, with Plato, which tends to view it rather as a character flaw that corrupts political analysis. Generally speaking, the purpose of my post is not to definitively declare myself a Platonist, or even a Neoplatonist, but rather to try to revitalize Satanist “diabology,” a brand-new field of religious speculation with only a few decades of experience and already quite a few false leads, by engaging with a tradition of thought, and a kind of metaphysical spirit, that has permeated all of Western thought, particularly its alternative and esoteric aspects, and which encompasses many diverse variations and internal contradictions. I should clarify that I appreciate contradiction and tension within a line of thought or school of thought, and I find it healthy: for me, it is not necessarily a sign of failure but of openness and fruitfulness. I am wary of the dreadful “coherence” so often claimed these days. To return to Platonism, Simone Weil's is not Plotinus's, which is not William Blake's, which is not Iamblichus's, which is not Victor Hugo's, which is not mine, which is not Swedenborg's, which is not Plato's. And when, following William Blake, I contrast the free self-determination of energy with the restraints of a certain misguided use of discursive rationality, I situate myself on this point within an explicitly anti-Platonic framework. This is precisely the framework within which I celebrate empathy: as a healthy impulse of psychic life that draws us closer to others and is a source of personal and social fulfillment. To remain within the realm of my contradictions, which I embrace, claim, and celebrate: some attentive bad-mouth will inevitably notice that it is clearly not Platonism that influences my defense of empathy, but my former Christian faith, even though I call myself an apostate and a Satanist, and will see this as a kind of failure or suicide of my thinking. I strongly disagree. First of all, it is common for several religions to claim common ideas, through successive branches, while simultaneously distinguishing themselves sharply and taking opposing stances from one another. Examples include the three Abrahamic religions, as well as Hinduism and Buddhism. Secondly, to draw an analogy with Marxist dialectical thought, albeit in an idealistic transposition, one could consider Christian empathy as a historically determined moment in the history of empathy, a moment that is currently withering under the weight of its contradictions. Satanic empathy, which I did not invent but which is already present in Romantic Satanism (for instance "On Another's Sorrow" by William Blake) and in the various organizations that derive from the Satanic Temple, constitutes a dialectic overcoming of this Christian empathy, arising from its contradictions and aiming to correct them. In this sense, I do not defend empathy despite my Satanism, but my Satanism stems from my conception of empathy—a conception deeply wounded by my former Christian faith, which led me to apostasy—and this conception defines and guides it.

Glory to Satan!

IV) Some texts cited

I)

Ruben Van Luijk, Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism, OUP, 2016

Peter A. Schock, Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Steven Blakemore, “Rebellious Reading: The Doubleness of Wollstonecraft's Subversion of Paradise Lost”, https://www.enotes.com/topics/vindication-rights-woman/criticism/criticism/steven-blakemore-essay-date-winter-1992

John Stoszkowski, “William Blake and the Sacred Power of Imagination. A Creative Revolution of the Soul”, https://www.syntropology.com/p/william-blake-and-the-sacred-power

The Satanic Scholar, “The Miltonic in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, on the Novel’s Bicentenary”, https://thesatanicscholar.com/2018/01/01/the-miltonic-in-mary-shelleys-frankenstein-on-the-novels-bicentenary/

II)

1. Dead Domain, The Lies of the Satanic Temple, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lV8GLQtOTs

Joseph P. Laycock, Speak of the Devil: How the Satanic Temple Is Changing the Way We Talk About Religion, OUP, 2020

2. “for those in the back, there is no such thing as "romantic Satanism"” https://www.reddit.com/r/satanism/comments/1l8x7t6/for_those_in_the_back_there_is_no_such_thing_as/

Paul Wright, The Crime of Being Poor, part 2, https://wafreepress.org/66/crimeOfBeingPoor.htm

Zeena et Nicholas Schreck, “Anton LaVey, légende et réalité”, https://fr.scribd.com/document/23242703/Anton-LaVey-Legende-et-realite

David Gambacorta, Satan, the FBI, the Mob—and the Forgotten Plot to Kill Ted Kennedy, https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/01/12/fbi-satan-mobplot-kill-ted-kennedy-097180

III)

Darth Manu, Pourquoi le satanisme n’est pas, et ne doit pas être considéré comme la religion du mal, https://aigreurssataniques.eu/pourquoi-le-satanisme-nest-pas-et-ne-doit-pas-etre-defini-comme-la-religion-du-mal

1. Vincent Lê, The no-human future, https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-nick-lands-philosophy-of-accelerationism-really?fbclid=IwY2xjawTPGHVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEeJ_b9kWEZg8IGKCwLFwgd15iJOntAnO6nAR71J_vI10fEVqrhOOgMES9xG38_aem_fZK9dvn2fcBAqy8wLJH_Cg

2. Darth Manu, Pourquoi je suis devenu sataniste, https://aigreurssataniques.eu/pourquoi-je-suis-devenu-sataniste1

“Je déteste Pâques”, https://aigreurssataniques.eu/je-deteste-paques

Pourquoi je suis resté catholique, https://aigreurssataniques.eu/pourquoi-je-suis-reste-catholique

Réflexion sataniste sur "l'unité" de l'Église catholique, https://aigreurssataniques.eu/reflexion-sataniste-sur-lunite-de-leglise-catholique

3. Stanisław Przybyszewski, La Synagogue de Satan, Hexen Press 2020, trad. Nacht Darcane

Harry White, Cruel Holiness and Honest Virtue in the Works of William Blake https://bq.blakearchive.org/40.2.white

Blake’s Resolution to the War Between Science and Philosophy, https://bq.blakearchive.org/39.3.white

4. José Miguel Vicente Pecino, “The Neoplatonic Tradition on the English Romantic Poetry. 1757-1850”, https://www.academia.edu/19054763/THE_NEOPLATONIC_TRADITION_ON_THE_ENGLISH_ROMANTIC_POETRY_1757_1850

Jake Stratton-Kent, Geosophia: The Argo of Magic I&II, Scarlet Imprint, 2010

Aleph Skoteinos, Pagan Theurgy for the Left Hand Path: A Short Case for Studying Proclus (and Iamblichus) https://mythoughtsbornfromfire.wordpress.com/2026/02/08/pagan-theurgy-for-the-left-hand-path-a-short-case-for-studying-proclus-and-iamblichus/comment-page-1/

Philippe St Germain, “Mythe et éducation : Proclus et la critique platonicienne de la poésie”, https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ltp/2006-v62-n2-ltp1452/014283ar/

5. Gruppo di Nun, Revolutionary Demonology, Urbanomic, 2022

Ernst Bloch, Le Principe Espérance, extraits choisis, annotés et présentés par Joël Gayraud, Libertalia, 2026, trad. Françoise Wuilmart

Héritage de ce temps, Klincksieck, 2017, trad. Jean Lacoste

Judith Brown, “Ernst Bloch and the Utopian Imagination” https://www.monash.edu/arts/philosophical-historical-indigenous-studies/eras/past-editions/edition-five-2003-november/ernst-bloch-and-the-utopian-imagination

Mikheil Kakabadze, “Sympathy for the Occult. Ernst Bloch, Antifascism, and Marxist Debates on the Irrational”, https://brill.com/view/journals/arie/aop/article-10.1163-15700593-tat00031/article-10.1163-15700593-tat00031.xml?fbclid=IwY2xjawTYl1ZwZG9mBWV4dG4DYWVtAjEwAGJyaWQRMEgxZWVhS1piTEFnd2tUWjhzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEew7ZhoGkrr8kre33F_GbtjgVgrIUsWBiWerF7oGP1mErAukdDuN-B3gGW2WE_aem_XZ51F9ghEubFKlr3mYoggQ

Nicholas Laccetti, The Inner Church is the Hope of the World: Western Esotericism as a Theology of Liberation, Resource Publications, 2018

6. Simone Weil, Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale, Libertalia, 2022

Oeuvres, Payot, 2023

Phil Hine, Querying the Left Hand Path, 2024

Scriptus Recensera, “Dark Enlightenment – Kennet Granholm”, https://scriptus.gydja.com/dark-enlightenment-kennet-granholm/

7. Egil Asprem, “Rejected Knowledge Reconsidered: Some Methodological Notes on Esotericism and Marginality“, https://brill.com/display/book/9789004446458/BP000007.xml?srsltid=AfmBOoqRstXFkDC8vrA2aHI_CxqQluS7Q3gvKUKgpZxrfthuYlD9z62h

Darth Manu, Inner Light of Black Metal, https://aigreurssataniques.eu/inner-light-of-black-metal-2010-2015