SATANIC BOOK REVIEW: ‘SATANIC FEMINISM’ BY PER FAXNELD, Ph.D.

Hello everyone and welcome to the first edition of Satanic Book Review, wherein I read and review books by, about, and for Satanists. If you love magick, witchcraft, and Satan, this is the series for you. Feel free to like, share, and follow if you want more Satan. You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

Introduction

By now, it’s no secret that I’m excited about this book. I think I’ve posted about it five or more times across my different social media accounts. Though I was lucky enough to get a copy of it for Christmas (thank you to my other half), I first saw this book making its rounds on Satanbook (the Satanic community/ies on Facebook) around 6 or so months ago after it was initially released. I was admittedly a little skeptical at first; for one because there still remains so little actual scholarship on Satanism that I wasn’t sure if this was going to be an inaccurate outsider’s view of our history, and two because I am admittedly hesitant to admit men into feminist discourse. I didn’t know anything about Dr. Faxneld at the time, and for all I knew this was a historian with a Christian and anti-feminist bent, coming into two vulnerable, and perhaps misunderstood, communities and taking control of their cultural narratives. Furthermore, though Satanists definitely seemed excited about the book, I hadn’t met anyone who had read it yet. With such a gripping subject, and such an interested audience, why hadn’t I seen any testimonies from Satanists?

A quick look at the Amazon page for the book answered some of my questions. This book is a 500-page powerhouse of historical scholarship. These are not the musings of a layman, or the pop philosophizing of a pseudo-academic. In other words, this is a book by a scholar, for scholars, and I can see how the average person, though interested in the subject matter, might find this work somewhat intimidating and impermeable. That being said, this intrigued me, and alleviated some of my fears. In my experience, most writing by and about Satanists are amateurish to the point of being untrustworthy sources of historical and philosophical information. At best, they are genuine works by Satanists but are poorly cited and argued and therefore difficult to incorporate into genuine scholarship; at worst, they are Christianist propaganda meant to undermine the legitimacy Satanism as a religion and cultural/political movement. The fact that Satanic Feminism is published on Oxford University Press (and in their Studies in Western Esotericism series to boot!) was also comforting. By the time I received the book for Christmas I was very interested, though my guard was not completely down yet.

A little about the author before I begin. Dr. Per Faxneld is a Swedish historian who received his Ph.D. in History of Religion from Stockholm University in 2014. His interests are (obviously) Western esotericism including Satanism but also other New Religious Movements such as Theosophy and New Age, cinema studies, art, and literature amongst others (you can check out more information about his areas of expertise here). He has written numerous essays and book chapters on Satanism and other Western esoteric traditions. Finally, Dr. Faxneld is also a self-identified feminist and has previously written about feminism in religion (I personally am excited to look into his essay ‘"Intuitive, receptive, dark": Negotiations of femininity in the contemporary Satanic and Left-hand Path milieu’ as it seems we’ve had similar intuitions about this topic). Overall, it’s clear that Dr. Faxneld has the academic qualifications to write about such a topic and that Satanic Feminism appears to fit squarely into some of his most prominent interests.

Review

Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2017) is a historical text that sits at the fruitful intersection of religious history, sociology, art history, and women’s studies. Using a wide array of source material, such as novels, poems, political pamphlets, paintings, sketches, philosophies, and even personal letters and diaries, Faxneld traces the history of Satanism’s flirtatious dance with feminism, the two ideologies sometimes appearing to meet in the dark like secret lovers, sometimes openly flaunting their relationship with the daring of lesbian witches dancing under the silver moon. Recurring motifs include the re-interpretation and application of Lilith as a figure of anti-patriarchy, anti-marriage, and anti-procreation by lesbians and feminists; Lucifer as a symbol of free-thinking and reason for socialists, anarchists, and romantics; and the undeniable sexual imagery of the intersexed Baphomet, the Sapphic witch, and the New Woman that the miserable Decadents feared (and desired?) so greatly.

But we also see the quarrels and the tensions between Satanism and feminism. Many artists and thinkers who made use of Satanic iconography were also deeply misogynistic, as we observe in the chapter Subversive Satanic Women in Decadent Literature and Art. Faxneld is not one to take a source out of its historical context—just because subsequent feminists have re-interpreted some works as anti-patriarchal does not mean they were initially received that way. In his elucidation of the content and historical context of JK Huysman’s Là-Bas (1891), in which Satan is worshiped by a coven of female adherents, he explains to us, “[Huysman] does not elevate or whitewash Satan even through the words of the officiant at the Black Mass, but keeps the figure almost entirely evil and negative. The Devil is here a god of wickedness, not—even in the view of his adherents—a misunderstood angel of light” (310).

Faxneld’s authorial voice is clear, authoritative, and unpretentious. It takes no prisoners, but it doesn’t brutalize the reader by being obtuse and overly-wordy. He says what needs to be said about the source material and nothing more. And yet his conclusions are not open ends where anything goes. Every argument is supported with original source material, some translated by the author himself, and embedded in a specifically-defined historical context. Staying true to the source and investigating without imposing is a virtue exhibited by this author. Furthermore, his writing is neither dry nor flavorless, but rather quite rich and delicious indeed.

When reading this book, if there’s one piece of advice I can offer, it’s DO NOT SKIP THE INTRODUCTION. You should never skip the introduction anyway, but in this case I highly recommend you read it as this is where Faxneld clarifies terminology (such as feminism and esotericism amongst others), states his goals, and most importantly elucidates his particular methodology. It was here in the introduction that he wrote something that particularly stuck with me. He states,

“I consider endeavours to rewrite patriarchal or heterosexist mythologies and stories a fully reasonable task for feminism or lesbian activists that are, for example, authors of fiction, artists or producers of ideology within new (or, for that matter, old) religious movements. I am more reluctant to see it as an appropriate part of a scholar’s mission…The important thing is to always respect the integrity of the sources and resist any temptation to remake that which one finds displeasing. A scholar must naturally never misrepresent and distort…the content of the source material in order to make it a tool for political struggle” (22). [Emphasis my own]

I think it was important for him to make this distinction for several reasons. One of which is exactly as he stated, that we want to avoid creating new source material rather than investigating existing source material. The second relates back to one of my initial concerns, which is male voices taking over feminist discourse. By making it a goal to avoid personally inserting oneself into feminist art and discourse (which male scholars do often), Faxneld kept his own voice to a minimum and let the work of women and feminists speak for themselves. Even in instances in which he critiques the work of a feminist scholar, the goal is apparently not to argue that the feminist is wrong about the existence or severity of patriarchal oppression (which I would consider entirely inappropriate), but to ever sharpen and refine the scholarly discourse for the benefit of the body of knowledge. At no point did I feel that Faxneld was letting misogynists off the hook by appropriately contextualizing them at their moment in history.

Finishing Comments

This is the part where I let my hair down and get real: this book is fucking crucial. Reading this was an absolute delight and only strengthened the growing optimism I feel about the emerging area of Satanic Studies. Dr. Faxneld has done us (Satanists) a great service by compiling these sources and producing this work, as I know first-hand that our own communities are unsure of our cultural history, and struggle to find sources to put together a coherent narrative about where we came from and where we’ve been. If it sounds like my praise is effusive, well, sorry, that’s because it is. This book fucking rules, dude. I strongly STRONGLY recommend this book to any Satanist, any feminist, any student of religious history and philosophy, and I look forward to whatever Dr. Faxneld produces in the future.

If I had to give it a rating, I’d give it 666 horns up out of 10.

Hail Satan.

Evyn Aytch