This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm and other platforms.

What is the ethical standpoint of Satanism?

Being that Satanism is generally less codified than other religions and exists in several different forms, there are many possibilities. My goal here is to explore a few of them and to arrive at a possible ethical framework that naturally follows from Satanism in general, as well as from my own particular satanic theory.

There are two questions that must be addressed as background: what are ethics, and what can be said about Satanism in general? I’ll tackle them in that order.

Ethics, also called moral philosophy, is the branch of philosophy that studies guiding principles of action. When we ask questions about what we should or shouldn’t do, or what would be good or right or bad or wrong to do, then we’re asking questions of ethics. Ethics as a field does not presume any answers to these questions; both the standpoint that ethical questions have objective, knowable answers and the standpoint that the answers to ethical questions are unknowable or that they don’t have any answers at all or that the questions themselves are meaningless are possible. Those kinds of standpoints are called ethical theories, and there are a lot of them.

As to the other question, this isn’t the place for a full explication on the different varieties of Satanism, and there are a few of them that I simply don’t know very much about, but I think that, for a philosophical or religious theory to be called Satanism, it must be primarily oriented around veneration of some conception of the figure of Satan from the Abrahamic religious tradition. I’m positing that here as a necessary condition for Satanism—anything that would make sense to call Satanism must meet that requirement—but I’m not going to weigh in on whether this is a sufficient condition, whether that by itself is enough to make a philosophical or religious theory a properly satanic one. There’s definitely some debate on the matter between the different satanic communities, and those debates don’t much concern me.

Suffice to say, given the definition I’ve stipulated here, there are many possibilities for what Satanism could be, because there are many possible conceptions of Satan and many ways in which such a figure could be venerated. In the past, I’ve laid out three particular archetypes, and I’ll just copy and paste from the last time I wrote that down, with my apologies to those of you who are already familiar with this breakdown:

Satan the Adversary is the Miltonian, Luciferian notion of Satan, the antihero of Milton’s Paradise Lost, who defied the tyranny of God and showed humankind the way to knowledge. I explore this archetype in more detail in my piece, “Paradise Lost as a Sacred Text.” Satan the Accuser is the Satan of the early Old Testament, and the Book of Job in particular, not an enemy of God at all but rather a kind of heavenly prosecutor, and, in my view, a force of dialectical opposition to God and the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions. I’ve explored this archetype extensively throughout my work, but if you wanted to know more about my thoughts on the subject, I have an essay and podcast episode titled, appropriately enough, “Satan the Accuser.” …Satan the Deceiver… is Satan as he is commonly understood in modern religious thought: an evil, spiteful being and the spiritual enemy of both humanity and of God. This is the Satan that people are typically asking about when they ask about Satanism. “Satan, the Best Friend the Church Has Ever Had”

What ethical theories are going to follow from veneration of any particular one of those archetypes, or from all of them collectively?

All three of these archetypes exist in some sort of opposition to the god of the Abrahamic religions, so first of all, we can establish that Abrahamic moral norms are not to be taken as givens and must at least be questioned, or even actively opposed. That gives us a starting point by negatively defining our satanic ethics, in terms of what it isn’t rather than in terms of what it is, but something further is required to get started on a positive concept. I think the starting point should be the following principle:

Satan is a moral exemplar to the Satanist.

…where a moral exemplar is a figure whose actions and motives demonstrate moral principles. That Satan should be taken as a moral exemplar at all must be justified (or not) by what it would imply, so we have to start by assuming that proposition and seeing what follows. With this in mind, we can look at any particular narrative of Satan and ask three questions:

What did he do? Why did he do it? What is it that makes that action moral?

For example, although I’ve commented many times that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was never intended by its original authors and stewards to represent Satan, it remains a contemporary satanic narrative relevant to all three archetypes. Within the context of that narrative, what did Satan do? He convinced Eve to eat from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God had forbidden her to do. Why did he do it? That’s a much more complicated question. If we look to the original text alone, we can only infer the serpent’s intentions. Genesis 3:1 describes the serpent as being “more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made” (NRSV). We might infer from this that the serpent had malicious intent and was seeking to harm Eve, Adam, God, or all three, but I don’t think that this interpretation necessarily follows from the text. The google definition of “crafty” is “clever at achieving one’s aims by indirect or deceitful methods.” Was the serpent being deceitful?

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3:2-5, NRSV

When Adam and Eve eat the fruit, they do not die, and “the eyes of both were opened” (3:7), just as the serpent said. And as well, God confirms that “the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (3:22). So, the serpent was telling the truth and God is proved to have been the deceitful one. This does not necessarily rule out the serpent’s deceit, though; one can tell the truth but be deceitful in intent or by omitting details. The serpent did not tell Eve that she and Adam would be cursed and cast out of the Garden of Eden, but it seems doubtful that the serpent was aware that this would happen given that the serpent was cursed as well.

If we look to the Hebrew, we find that the word translated as “crafty” is arum. Curiously, this word appears only six other times in the Old Testament, all of them in Proverbs (with the words translated from arum italicized and all examples taken from the NRSV):

Fools show their anger at once, but the prudent ignore an insult. 12:16

One who is clever conceals knowledge, but the mind of a fool broadcasts folly. 12:23

The clever do all things intelligently, but the fool displays folly. 13:16

The simple are adorned with folly, but the clever are crowned with knowledge. 14:18

The clever see danger and hide; but the simple go on, and suffer for it. 22:3

And the last one, Proverbs 27:12, is a verbatim copy of 22:3. Whether or not we agree with these proverbs as stated, in all six cases, arum is described as an admirable trait, indicative of wisdom, so we can then return to the serpent narrative and understand the serpent as having acted with cleverness, intelligence, prudence, and wisdom. We still don’t know the serpent’s exact motives, but regardless, we’re starting to at least see the foundations of a possible ethical theory, one that is rooted in knowledge and which does not accept authoritarian claims.

Now, what is it that makes what the serpent did—convincing Eve to eat from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, despite God’s prohibitions—moral?

The Garden of Eden is depicted in the Bible as an idyllic paradise, but Adam and Eve’s life in the Garden was predicated on ignorance and deception. This brings up an interesting ethical question: assuming a situation in which ignorance would lead to less suffering and knowledge would lead to more suffering, which is preferable? To put it another way, which is the higher good: knowledge or happiness?

Happiness is often cited by philosophers as an example of an intrinsic good, something which is good in itself and not solely because it allows us to attain some other good (in which case it would be an instrumental good) (Shafer-Landau 23–24). If happiness is a good at all, it would be hard to justify it being instrumental rather than intrinsic. We don’t want to be happy for some other ultimate reason; we want to be happy because being happy is good in itself. Indeed, happiness is often taken to be the only intrinsic good, that being the hedonistic standpoint (Shafer-Landau 24). And if happiness is understood as an intrinsic good, it’s easy to then justify knowledge as an instrumental good on the basis that it leads to happiness.

But it doesn’t always.

In the book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the philosopher Robert Nozick posed a thought experiment called “The Experience Machine,” which is summarized in the book The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten by Julian Baggini:

[The experience machine] enables you to live the whole of your life in a virtual-reality environment. All your experiences are designed to make you happier and more satisfied. But crucially, once in the machine you have no idea that you are not in the real world, nor that what is happening to you has been designed to meet your needs. It seems you are living an ordinary life in the ordinary world: it is just that in this life, you are one of the winners for whom everything seems to go right. 292

Intuitively, it seems that the life offered by the Experience Machine, while happier in an absolute sense, is nevertheless undesirable. This indicates that happiness is not the only intrinsic good. The basis on which we reject the Experience Machine is that what it offers is unreal, removed from the base reality of experience that we’re already in, so it seems that truth—accordance with reality—is an intrinsic good as well. Comprehension of truth is knowledge (going with the justified true belief account of knowledge for the time being, keeping in mind that we might have to complicate things later), and so we might say that knowledge is instrumentally valuable in that it achieves the comprehension of truth, but that’s redundant. We can just say that knowledge is itself an intrinsic good. This holds up regardless of its origin here in the Garden of Eden narrative and, so far, Satan holds up as a moral exemplar.

Next we might look to the accusatorial standpoint of Satanism as depicted in the Book of Job, a book I’ve written about in the two-part essay of that title. I think religious historian Elaine Pagels gives the best account of Satan as he appears in the Book of Job:

The satan is… one of God’s angels, a being of superior intelligence and status…

In the Hebrew Bible, as in mainstream Judaism to this day, Satan never appears as Western Christendom has come to know him, as the leader of an “evil empire,” an army of hostile spirits who make war on God and humankind alike. As he first appears in the Hebrew Bible, Satan is not necessarily evil, much less opposed to God. On the contrary, he appears in the book of Numbers and in Job as one of God’s obedient servants—a messenger, or angel, a word that translates the Hebrew term for messenger (mal’āk) into Greek (angelos). In Hebrew, the angels were often called “sons of God” (benē’ēlōhīm), and were envisioned as the hierarchical ranks of a great army, or the staff of a royal court. 39

This one is of particular relevance to me, as this archetype, Satan the Accuser, is the primary one from which I have developed my concept of Satanism. Let’s take the same three-question approach to this narrative. First of all, what did Satan do in the Book of Job? He tested whether God’s beliefs about humankind were true. Why did he do it? In this case, it was because it was his duty, the role for which he was created in the first place.

Why is this moral? Why must God be questioned and tested? Because this is the only way by which the sacred may truly be known. The Bible itself makes several mentions of false prophets, and besides that, it’s obvious enough that wrong conclusions about anything are possible and even commonplace, and so everything must be questioned in order that we not be led astray by something which claims to represent the sacred but does not. Nothing can be exempt from this if this rule is to have any meaning or purpose at all, and that means thorough, unrelenting questioning towards the claims made by religious hegemonies like Christianity. More broadly, doubt and questioning are required for anyone to have any knowledge at all. There are an infinite number of conclusions that can be drawn about reality, almost all of which are wrong, so the false ones must either be eliminated by some process or not even conjured up in the first place. This is an example of skepticism: persistent doubt as a means to knowledge. And so we can add skepticism to the list of satanic moral principles—not just a principle, either, but, given that Satan was created for this purpose, a sacred duty to the Satanist.

In the New Testament accounts of Satan, we find both a reflection of the accusatorial Satan and the ethical implications thereof, and the transformation of this archetype into Satan the Deceiver. In The Origin of Satan, Elaine Pagels argues convincingly that the archetype of Satan the Deceiver emerged from sectarian divisions first among the Jews during the intertestamental period, and then between the early Christians and the Jews in 1st and 2nd century Roman Judea, as a means for these sects to demonize their enemies.

This understanding of Satan the Deceiver is less an ethical matter than it is an ontological one, a standpoint on the question of what it means to be a Satanist. That being the case, I’ll leave that matter for another essay, but the implication here is that to be a Satanist is to embrace what society considers to be Other.

The New Testament also sees Satan “tempting” Jesus in the wilderness, but as I’ve written before (“Satan the Accuser and the Temptation of Christ in the Wilderness”), these temptations seem much more like tests of whether Jesus possesses the knowledge, wisdom, and understanding to truly be considered a spiritual authority, and these tests are in keeping with the ethics of Satan the Accuser as depicted in the Book of Job. I don’t see it at all being in conflict with Satanism to listen to and consider the spiritual teachings and experiences of others, even Christians, but many among the traditionally religious don’t even have a factual knowledge of their own scriptures, much less any meaningful wisdom or understanding derived therefrom.

Next up is Milton’s narrative of Satan the Adversary in Paradise Lost. Taking the same approach yet again, what did Satan do in this narrative? Many things, certainly, but for one, he rebelled against God. Why did Satan rebel? Milton gives his answer to that in the text:

[Satan], of the first,

If not the first Archangel, great in power,

In favor, and pre-eminence, yet fraught

With envy against the Son of God, that day

Honored by his great Father, and proclaimed

Messiah, King Anointed, could not bear,

Through pride, that sight, and thought himself impaired.

Deep malice thence conceiving and disdain,

Soon as midnight brought on the dusky hour

Friendliest to sleep and silence, he resolved

With all his legions to dislodge, and leave

Unworshipped, unobeyed, the Throne supreme… V:659-70

In Milton, Satan rebelled because he was justifiably proud and refused to accept the supremacy of Jesus, who is referred to in the poem as the Son of God.

Why is this a moral action?

I believe Friedrich Nietzsche offers the best response to this. In his scathing and polemical book The Antichrist, Nietzsche returns to his concept of the Overman (der Übermensch), and says:

Christianity should not be beautified and embellished: it has waged deadly war against this higher type of man; it has placed all the basic instincts of this type under the ban; and out of these instincts it has distilled evil and the Evil One: the strong man as the typically reprehensible man, the “reprobate.” Christianity has sided with all that is weak and base, with all failures; it has made an ideal of whatever contradicts the instinct of the strong life to preserve itself; it has corrupted the reason even of those strongest in spirit by teaching men to consider the supreme values of the spirit as something sinful, as something that leads into error—as temptations. 571–72

While I see great potential value in religion, it can also be debasing and nihilistic, and Christianity is especially guilty on that front. I’ve written on religious nihilism extensively, as has Nietzsche. Religion becomes nihilistic when it devalues this life and this world against some other life and some other world that we can’t be certain even exist. And in the predominant interpretations of Christianity, that’s exactly what we see. We’re told that the next life, rather than this one, is the one to live for, and that Jesus is the only way to that next life. What’s more, religious institutions, especially Christian ones, have perpetrated all manner of lies, injustices, and atrocities over the course of history. For this reason, the authority of these institutions and of the debasing and nihilistic aspects of Christianity should not be accepted, and indeed, should be actively opposed, and thus pride and rebellion are added to our list.

The second implication is that, to such a degree that Christianity can be non-nihilistic (and I think that the work of Paul Tillich, among others, is sufficient to demonstrate that it can), it cannot be taken as a given that it is superior to other religions. The superiority of Christianity as a religion with regards to any particular matter or in general, and within any particular context, is something that must be justified. The name “Jesus” means different things to different people and in different contexts (a person might mean very different things by the word when uttered as part of a Bible recitation versus when the person stubs a toe) and there simply is no fact of the matter as to which one is the real Jesus, which one is the one right and proper interpretation, even to such a degree as Jesus may be interpretable as a historical figure. This is not to say that there is not some figure called Jesus who is indeed the Messiah—although I don’t believe that to be the case—but that, even if there were, that understanding would not necessarily be the only proper one. This in itself negates the exclusive validity of Christianity, and demonstrates the validity of religious Satanism. “Satan” likewise means different things to different people and in different contexts and there is no fact of the matter as to which one is the real one, and I’ve demonstrated contexts in which Satan is admirable and exemplary.

There is more exemplary behavior to be found in Paradise Lost, much of which has already been covered in my essay “Paradise Lost as a Sacred Text,” but I’ll reiterate one key point here that derives from the following passage, which occurs after Satan finds himself having been cast into Hell:

All is not lost — the unconquerable will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield:

And what is else not to be overcome.

That glory never shall his wrath or might

Extort from me. 1:106-11

Revenge and immortal hate I’ll leave aside for the moment—I addressed those in the aforementioned essay—and focus instead on unconquerable will and courage never to submit or yield (and I’ll note that those last two lines also support the virtue of pride that we’ve already discussed). I’ll sum up will and courage as personal strength. Despite major defeats and terrible circumstances, Satan remains triumphant. He is resilient and resourceful. He is able to transform defeat into victory by introducing humans to knowledge, thus corrupting God’s vision for a placid and ignorant world (and this demonstrates as well how Milton transforms the Garden of Eden narrative discussed earlier, giving it new ethical implications). We were only ever beautiful to God when we did not seek to know the truth of things. As soon as we did, he cursed us and cast us out. And then he commands that we worship him?

Let’s move on to another source of ethics in Satanism, Anton LaVey. LaVey’s Satanic Bible is the founding document of the Church of Satan, a satanic religious organization. The book is introduced and the Church’s interpretation of Satanism in part defined by nine “Satanic Statements:”

Satan represents indulgence, instead of abstinence! Satan represents vital existence, instead of spiritual pipe dreams! Satan represents undefiled wisdom, instead of hypocritical self-deceit! Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it, instead of love wasted on ingrates! Satan represents vengeance, instead of turning the other cheek! Satan represents responsibility to the responsible, instead of concern for psychic vampires! Satan represents man as just another animal, sometimes better, more often worse than those that walk on all-fours, who, because of his “divine spiritual and intellectual developments,” has become the most vicious animal of all! Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification! Satan has been the best friend the church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years! Satan represents superfluous exclamation points!

These actually make a great deal more sense to me now than when I first encountered them. There are several commonalities with the system I’ve been extrapolating here, for example, the second statement, which is just the existentialist standpoint and represented by Satan’s rebellion in Paradise Lost that I commented on earlier. And there are other of these statements that I haven’t discussed yet but which I think are also reasonable understandings of what Satan represents, based on the narratives we’ve discussed and even on the implications of Satan the Deceiver and other ideas about Satan that are popular among non-Satanists.

To illustrate that, let’s take the first point. For one, that sounds a lot like the hypothesis of hedonism, which is that pleasure is the only intrinsic good. Nozick’s Experience Machine neatly refutes that, but even if pleasure is one among many intrinsic goods, then all other things being equal, it is better to indulge than not to indulge. And Satan represents that good because he always exists at the opposite end of a polarity between religious claims. In this particular case, on the one hand we have religious exhortations towards, for example, sexual purity, on the grounds that it will give us better access to paradise in the afterlife, and on the other hand we have sexual indulgence. We don’t know about whatever afterlife there might be and in this life, great sex is one of life’s great pleasures, and if this is the only life we have in which to enjoy ourselves, which very well might be the case, we should go ahead and do so. There are certainly associations in popular culture between sexual indulgence and Satanism (Faxneld and Petersen 165), so it’s fair to say that this is indeed a valid satanic symbology.

The other Satanic Statements must be considered on their own merits as well, and there are other narratives of Satan that might be considered in an ethical context through this method, such as the narrative of Iblis in the Qur’an, but I’ll leave this as a starting point and perhaps revisit the implications of other narratives another time. This leaves us with the following list of what might be called satanic values:

Cleverness

Intelligence

Knowledge

Skepticism

Pride

Rebellion

Personal strength

Indulgence

This is not to be considered an exhaustive or definitive list; other interpretations of these narratives and expansions based on other narratives, as well as on opposition to the values of traditional religion, are certainly possible. I encourage my readers and listeners to examine satanic narratives for themselves and consider what your own satanic values might be.

I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and to sign up for my mailing list (form on the sidebar) so you can stay current on my latest work. And if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content. I’ll be publishing new work every Friday evening. I also have a reading list, which contains links to the books I used to research this and all of my other stories. Clicking through and buying books is a great, easy way to support my work.

Works Cited or Consulted

Baggini, J. (2005). The pig that wants to be eaten: 100 experiments for the armchair philosopher. Penguin Group.

Faxneld, P., & Petersen, J. A. (2014). Cult of carnality: Sexuality, eroticism, and gender in contemporary Satanism. In H. Bogdan & J. R. Lewis (Eds.), Sexuality and New Religious Movements. Palgrave Macmillan.

LaVey, A. S. (2005). The Satanic Bible. Avon Books.

Milton, J. (2005). Paradise lost. Dover Publications.

Nietzsche, F. W. (1976). The portable Nietzsche. Penguin Books.

Nozick, R. (2013). Anarchy, state, and utopia. Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

Pagels, E. H. (1995). The origin of Satan (1st ed). Random House.

Paradise Lost as a Sacred Text. (2019, March 9). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/paradise-lost-as-a-sacred-text/

Satan the Accuser. (2018, November 24). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/satan-the-accuser/

Satan the Accuser and the Temptation of Christ in the Wilderness. (2018, December 1). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/satan-the-accuser-and-the-temptation-of-christ-in-the-wilderness/

Satan, the Best Friend the Church Has Ever Had. (2020, January 25). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/satan-the-best-friend-the-church-has-ever-had/

Shafer-Landau, R. (2015). The fundamentals of ethics (Third Edition). Oxford University Press.

The Book of Job, pt. 1. (2019, August 17). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/the-book-of-job-pt-1/

The Book of Job, pt. 2. (2019, August 24). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/the-book-of-job-pt-2/Tillich, P. (2001). Dynamics of faith (1st Perennial classics ed). Perennial.