Though the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did not call himself a Satanist (and likely wouldn’t have, Satanism being then associated with the Romantic, which he detested), his role as a virulent critic of religion and culture, as well as his intelligence and radical individualism, have made him an icon of Satanic thought. His works appear on the official Church of Satan reading list, and it’s clear that the Church’s founder, Anton Szandor LaVey, was heavily inspired by Nietzsche’s thought. To such a degree as Satanism concerns freedom, Nietzsche’s ideas are highly relevant, as he advocated throughout his works for what he saw as the path towards becoming a truly free spirit.

In this series, I’ll be looking at selections from Nietzsche’s extensive body of writing and considering them in the context of modern Satanism.

To call Nietzsche a genius would be somewhat understating the point. The University of Basel in Switzerland granted him a professorship in classical philology when he was only 24, before he had even been awarded a doctorate, which the University of Leipzig provided on an honorary basis soon after. The clarity of this thought relative to his peers is nothing less than astounding; to truly appreciate Nietzsche’s brilliance, read whatever you can find of late 19th century literature and philosophy (and especially his predecessors like Kant and Hegel), and then read anything that Nietzsche ever published (with the exception of his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, though Nietzsche’s own criticism of that work is itself a brilliant piece that makes its failings almost worth it).

Nietzsche has been denounced as a proto-fascist, and indeed he was known to have been admired by Adolf Hitler, but his writings were relentlessly critical of Germans, German culture, and nationalist sentiments in general, and at the same time surprisingly (especially for the period) defensive of the Jews. He was, however, an unrepentant misogynist, and even his most faithful translator, Walter Kaufmann (whose translations I will be using primarily), seems to be shaking his head in the notes whenever Nietzsche talks at all about women. I don’t understand that part of him; it seems an entirely non-trivial stupidity in contrast to an otherwise nearly universal brilliance and insight. To be clear about the disparity here, his best writing is on par with the greatest philosophical writing in human history, whereas his writing about women, at its best, rises to the level of the comments section of a YouTube video. He makes mistakes elsewhere in his work but none of them so consistently and so deeply as the mistakes he makes about women.

I have even heard Nietzsche called a nihilist, one who rejects all belief and meaning, but this is far from the truth. Nietzsche was adamantly opposed to the nihilism he saw as associated with religious doctrine but also the nihilism he saw resulting from the fading influence of religion as his world became increasingly secular. He had little positive to say about religion, but the nihilism that would come from its unreplaced departure seemed the greater specter to him. As a response, he advocated for the most passionate affirmation of life. I think that part of the role of the Satanist is to be, in the spirit of Nietzsche, a kind of anti-nihilist, a powerful and passionate affirmation of life in the face of (largely religious) opposition to this life and this world. For my part, I intend not only to tolerate religion, but to embrace it, but in that, there is a necessary opposition to the doctrinal institutions of religion who deny this life and this reality in favor of some other life and some other reality.

My favorite work of Nietzsche, and the one I recommend to anyone reading his work for the first time, is The Gay Science. He described it as his most personal work, and it seems almost to act as a hub to which his myriad other works act as spokes. It contains clear statements — some of the most clear in all of philosophical writing — of all of his most famous ideas, and also neatly refutes what is most commonly thought about him. A near-invalid at times due to relentless health problems, he was nevertheless overjoyed at life. In the preface to the second edition of the work, he wrote:

This whole book is nothing but a bit of merry-making after long privation and powerlessness, the rejoicing of strength that is returning, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future, of impending adventures, of seas that are open again, of goals that are permitted again, believed again.

The Gay Science is a vastly important philosophical work; here he treats it almost trivially. He almost comes to apologizing for how exuberant he is, having survived for a while longer. His confidence in this is found in the first section of the book proper, where he draws on Darwin, whose revolutionary book On the Origin of Species was published a couple decades earlier. He says that everyone, even those he finds contemptible, are acting, however unknowingly, for the benefit of the whole of the human species, any other such behaviors having been necessarily weeded out by natural selection. And what are we to take from this Darwinian chorus? “‘Life is worth living,’ every one of them shouts; ‘there is something to life, there is something behind life, beneath it; beware!’”.

The Gay Science is written in short sections of, usually, just a few pages each, sometimes no longer than a single sentence or even just a phrase. Each one is laden with depth and meaning. Let’s consider, as an example and as the focus of this piece, section 108, titled “New struggles.”

After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave — a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. — And we — we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.

The statement “God is dead” is one of Nietzsche’s most famous, and this is the first time in his writing that it appears. Absent context, it can easily be misinterpreted. What Nietzsche meant by this is something similar to what one would mean if they were to say “Disco is dead,” though Nietzsche’s pronouncement is considerably more consequential. It’s not a matter of whether or not God is or was real or whether belief in God is valid or important or meaningful or necessary. What Nietzsche intended was that, whatever the consequences, the act of belief in God is intellectually dead. The weight of such a statement might not be clear now, almost a century and a half later. For Nietzsche’s philosophical forebears, belief in God was simply a given, and God’s existence was something that would have to be reconciled with each new philosophical theory. But God and belief in God were becoming less and less relevant to Nietzsche’s increasingly secular world, and Nietzsche intended to wrestle directly with the consequences of that.

The idea of “shadows in a cave” was likely drawn from Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”. Plato’s allegory features a cave in which several people are chained facing a wall, unable to move or turn away. There is a fire burning behind them and people pass objects in front of the fire which then cast shadows on the wall, which the prisoners believe to be true reality. When one of them escapes, they see that what they had thought was reality was in actuality only shadows of the true reality. Likewise in Nietzsche, the shadow of God is something that we must vanquish in order to uncover the truth.

It’s interesting that Nietzsche chose 108 as the section in which to make this pronouncement, in the context of a reference to the Buddha. Being a disciple of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche likely knew more about Buddhism than most Westerners did at the time. I think that it cannot possibly be coincidence that he chose one of the most sacred numbers in Buddhism (and in Eastern religions in general) for this purpose.

Linji Yixuan, known as Rinzai Gigen in Japan, the founder of the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism and a famous iconoclast, was known to say, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” I don’t know whether Nietzsche was familiar with this saying, but it seems very relevant to what he is saying here. Linji’s message is that what Buddha represents for the Buddhist is greater than just an idol, greater even than a great teacher, greater even than the historical Buddha himself. Whomever you meet on the road who call themselves the Buddha, they are such a pale shadow of what that symbol of the Buddha signifies that they should be killed on the spot (at least in the metaphorical sense of denouncing the person as not being higher than the teaching).

Nietzsche seems to be saying something similar, and something that is intrinsically Satanic: cast down idols and seek the truth behind them.

In Pauline Christianity (as opposed to the apocalyptic Judaism that Jesus taught), the teachings and the path of Jesus are subsumed by Jesus the Idol. Paul the Apostle did not advocate for and likely was not even familiar with the teachings of the historical Jesus, but his vision of Christianity, in which the spiritual being of Jesus must be petitioned for salvation regardless of whether the teachings are understood, is the one that ultimately became orthodoxy. Ask any modern Christian whether it is better for one to know the teachings of Jesus or for one to be saved by faith in Jesus, and they will choose the latter every time. This is idolatry; this is the shadow of God being shown on the walls of our caves.

In section 343, Nietzsche explains the further consequences of the death of belief in God. At first, these predictions are rather grim:

Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means — and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impending — who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth?

But Nietzsche tells us that these are just the initial consequences, and that the long-term prospects for those who are freed from the yoke of idolatry are much more optimistic. Nietzsche is often thought to be a grim and pessimistic philosopher, but this is yet another failure to properly interpret his writing. Nietzsche explicitly rejected the pessimism of his once-mentor Schopenhauer, and here we see him full of hope even in the face of impending catastrophe:

…we philosophers and “free spirits” feel, when we hear the news that “the old god is dead,” as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an “open sea.”

I have never put down one of Nietzsche’s books not feeling inspired. Sometimes troubled as well, but there’s always joy to be found in wrestling with these tensions and with Nietzsche’s often challenging but nevertheless exuberant vision for a life well-lived.

