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Among the questions I’ve often seen asked of Satanists are variations of “Why associate yourselves with the icon of evil and enmity towards humanity?” That question contains an assumption that I think needs to be examined before the question containing it can be fairly asked or answered, and that assumption is that evil and enmity are necessarily and unavoidably what Satan symbolizes. That’s certainly a popular symbology and an entirely possible one, but it should be obvious at this point that I don’t believe it to be the only possible one.

Long-time listeners of the show will likely be familiar with my division of Satanic symbology into two archetypes, Satan the Accuser and Satan the Adversary. I’ll do a quick review of those archetypes before continuing, for those newcomers among my audience.

Satan the Adversary is the Miltonian, Luciferian notion of Satan, the antihero of Milton’s Paradise Lost (Milton, 2005), 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” (2019).

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” (2018).

Let me now add to that a third archetype, Satan the Deceiver. This 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, but as far as the metaphysics goes, I don’t think that such an entity actually exists, and as far as the symbology goes, I don’t believe that Satan the Deceiver is any more viable or biblically-based than any other Satanic symbology, and in fact I think that it is in many ways not very biblically-based at all. But I offer this stipulative definition so as to facilitate the following discussion regarding the different understandings of Satan and their relationship to the Christian church.

The LaVeyans out there will likely have recognized that the title of this episode is taken essentially verbatim from LaVey’s Ninth Satanic Statement:

Satan has been the best friend the church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years! 2005

I have my disagreements with LaVey, as I’ve described elsewhere, but this is one point where I’m in complete agreement. My objective here today is to explore that relationship with as much nuance as I can manage.

Looking at this chronologically, well before we have the notion of Satan as a distinct supernatural entity of any sort and before even the notion of monotheistic religion, we have ancient Semitic polytheism, the family of polytheistic religion practiced by the various Semitic peoples of the Middle East. I haven’t been able to find any good sources on this; I don’t think that it’s something that anyone at all knows very much about. The Wikipedia page on ancient Semitic religion has a list of gods, but this list isn’t cited and I haven’t been able to find anything reliable with which to verify it. Biblical scholar Mark S. Smith has a couple of books on the subject that I’d like to acquire and read. From what I’ve been able to gather looking at what’s available on Google Books, he claims that the ancient Israelite god Yahweh was one among a pantheon of other gods who came to be worshipped as the primary god and then later as the only god (2002, 2004). What I’m particularly curious about is whether there were any gods among that ancient pantheon who may have influenced the development of the earliest conception of Satan, that being Satan the Accuser. The Wikipedia page on Satan says that the archetype of Satan the Deceiver began appearing during the Intertestamental Period—the period between the authorship of the latest books of the Old Testament and the earliest books of the New Testament—and may have also been influenced by the dualistic Zoroastrian religion of the Achaemenid Empire (“Satan,” 2020). While I haven’t been able to verify this either, it seems very likely to me that this would be the case, as the Achaemenid Empire was one of the largest and most powerful empires in history and included the land of the ancient Hebrews.

But looking at polytheistic religions more generally, among the various pantheons I’ve examined, the notion of there being good and evil gods—in that dualistic, binary fashion—requires a modern perspective that I don’t think reflects their understanding during the periods in which these religions were actually practiced. It seemed more that, while some gods were more favorable to humanity than others, none of them displayed the absolute and dualistic morality that we find in contemporary Abrahamic religion. Taking the ancient Greek god of the underworld, Hades, as an example, we find that, while he is not exactly a friend to humanity, he isn’t an enemy either. The book Who’s Who in Classical Mythology states:

Though the Greeks and Romans conceived Hades as a grim, cold deity, ruthlessly applying the rules of his kingdom to all without discrimination, they never thought of him as evil, Satanic, or unjust. His ‘house’ is therefore in no sense a hell, though it is a prison and Hades a jailor. Grant & Hazel, 2002, p. 235

And indeed, I can find no figure in Greek mythology who fills the role that Satan the Deceiver does in Christianity. The thing is, when you have a pantheon of deities rather than just one or two, you have room for more shades of morality, room for something that more closely approximates human moral possibilities and complexity. A monotheistic religion only has room for a perfect good unattainable by humans. We can’t even describe what “perfect good” would mean in any consistent way, let alone understand it well enough to attain it. I’d imagine perfect good to be something that someone might accomplish once in a great while, but it would be rare at best, and still beyond our conceptual grasp. So, certain reconciliations are necessary. For example, the atonement theology of Christianity. Humanity not only cannot aspire to the perfection of godhood but sinned in having tried to do so (Genesis 3:22), and so God, in recompense, sacrificed himself to himself.

In his book Breaking the Spell, philosopher Daniel Dennett cites sociologist of religion Rodney Stark and his book One True God (which I have included in my own references) in describing one way in which Satan is necessary to Christianity:

[Stark] even proposes that a God without a counterbalancing Satan is an unstable concept—”irrational and perverse.” Why? Because “one God of infinite scope must be responsible for everything, evil as well as good, and thus must be dangerously capricious, shifting intentions unpredictably and without reason.” Dennett, 2007, p. 192; Stark, 2003, p. 24

Godhood has a historical trajectory that has mirrored our own quest for perfection. The more we came to know, the more we expanded our ideas of what God could be. Except, sometimes, people get stuck. While I don’t posit this as anything more than a hypothesis, perhaps the more perfect our notions of God become, the further they get from our own human frailty and capacity for attainment, and it would make sense for people to latch onto notions of God that they can at least understand even as such notions become obsolete and limited relative to new, more expansive understandings.

But getting back to Satan and the Church, one of the citations that keeps cropping up in my work whether I expect it or not is a quote from The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington, who writes, concerning the lines of identity that result in the boundaries and fault lines between civilizations, “We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against” (2011). As I’ve explicated before, belief and identity are inextricably intertwined (“Belief and Identity,” 2019), and so religious congregations have a vested interest in defining enemies in order to help establish and maintain cohesion and obedience. This is the subject of The Origin of Satan, by religious historian Elaine Pagels, which I’ll quote here, including Pagels’ quotation of William Scott Green’s essay “Otherness Within: Towards a Theory of Difference in Rabbinic Judaism,” which appeared in the book To See Ourselves As Others See Us and which I’ll cite directly and include in my references for this essay (and I can’t do nested quotes in WordPress, so this is going to look a little clumsy, but here it is).

Pagels: Much of the time, as William Green points out, those who so label themselves [as “human”] and others [as “inhuman”] are engaging in a kind of caricature that helps define and consolidate their own group identity:

Green: A society does not simply discover its others, it fabricates them, by selecting, isolating, and emphasizing an aspect of another people’s life, and making it symbolize their difference. Neusner et al., 1985

Pagels: Conflict between groups is, of course, nothing new. What may be new in Western Christian tradition… is how the use of Satan to represent one’s enemies lends to conflict a specific kind of moral and religious interpretation, in which “we” are God’s people and “they” are God’s enemies, and ours as well. 1995, p. xix

And Satan had to be appropriated for that role, because it’s clear from the Book of Job and other early texts that the earliest understandings of Satan did not cast him as that kind of spiritual enemy to humanity. Rather, it seems to me that Satan the Accuser was a remnant of the complex morality allowed by ancient polytheistic religion, who was appropriated and repurposed as the ultimate enemy. Pagels goes into great detail about how this situation came about over the history of the Jewish people: the literature of the various early Jewish sects described their non-Jewish enemies in terms of mythological monsters, dehumanizing them, but something more intimate was required to describe their Jewish enemies, those of rival sects.

…when the Israelite writers excoriated their fellow Jews in mythological terms, the images they chose were usually not the animalistic or monstrous ones they regularly applied to their foreign enemies. Instead of Rahab, Leviathan, or “the dragon,” most often they identified their Jewish enemies with an exalted, if treacherous, member of the divine court whom they called the satan. The satan is not an animal or monster but one of God’s angels, a being of superior intelligence and status; apparently the Israelites saw their intimate enemies not as beasts and monsters but as superhuman beings whose superior qualities and insider status could make them more dangerous than the alien enemy. 1995, p. 39

Consider, then, that Christianity was, for a long while, a sect of Judaism, and the early Christians used this symbolic approach as well in order to delineate the boundaries of their social and religious order.

Elaine Pagels discusses the scene in the Gospel of Mark in which Peter denies Jesus.

In this dramatic scene… Mark again confronts his audience with the question that pervades his entire narrative: Who recognizes the spirit in Jesus as divine, and who does not? Who stands on God’s side, and who on Satan’s? By contrasting Jesus’ courageous confession with Peter’s denial, Mark draws a dramatic picture of the choice confronting Jesus’ followers: they must take sides in a war that allows no neutral ground. 1995, p. 28

Getting more into the specifics, there’s a fallacy in informal logic called “poisoning the well.” It’s when someone preemptively provides damaging but irrelevant information about an information source to an audience, so as to taint whatever they may say. To take an example, let’s say we have a politician who was treated in the past for a substance abuse disorder. Prior to debate on actual political matters, the opponent reveals that politician’s history and uses it to preemptively discredit anything that they might offer. That’s poisoning the well, and it’s something seen very frequently in political discourse. As another example, consider how often Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders get called socialists, even though neither of them has ever advocated for the workers controlling the means of production. But “socialism” has negative connotations in American politics, and I’d venture to say that most Americans don’t know enough about socialism to know the difference between actual socialists and social democrats who support strong public programs within the context of free market capitalism.

And it’s something we see in religious discourse as well. If you’re looking to suppress dissent, Satan the Deceiver makes for a highly effective well-poison. “Disagree with us, and you associate yourself with absolute evil.” And that association will result, the Church tells us, in literally the worst punishment imaginable: eternal torture in Hell. Hard to poison the well more thoroughly than that. And this is a tool that has historically worked very well for those who have implemented it. The Catholic Church, for example, has succeeded in getting away with all manner of bad behavior by invoking an authority that conflates dissent with blasphemy.

If you’re thinking about reading the Mark Twain novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, stop reading here because I’m about to spoil it for you. The narrator and titular character of the story, Huck Finn, has befriended the escaped slave Jim, and has also been taught that hiding and aiding escaped slaves is a form of theft, which (as he has been taught as well), is a sin worthy of damnation. And to be clear, Huck understands exactly what that entails: an eternity of unimaginable torture. His response, when he finally chooses between what he knows to be right and what religious indoctrination has taught him, is, for me, the fundamental clarion call of Satanism:

“Alright then, I’ll go to hell” (2019, p. 246)

Fortunately for us, we need not take the Church’s threats so seriously as Huck Finn did. We know better, so we can not only follow in Huck Finn’s defiant footsteps but also call the Church’s bluff, in effect. No, I don’t think that my Satanic beliefs are going to in any way condemn whatever soul I may have, but I’d rather take that risk than spend the only life I’m sure of failing to ask the questions that are most important. That seems the far greater risk.

Curiously, this sort of dualistic adversary figure doesn’t seem at all necessary to religion in general, as many religions both historical and contemporary have lacked anything of the sort. I’ve already mentioned the ancient polytheistic religions. Satan is not much a part of contemporary Judaism (Glustrom, 1989, pp. 22–24), and in Islam, Satan, as well as the concept of evil in general, play very different roles than they do in Christianity. In The Poetics of Iblis, which concerns Islamic interpretations of Satan, scholar of comparative religion Whitney Bodman writes:

Al-Shaytan is not the cause of evil; God ultimately causes evil and mortals immediately cause it. Al-Shaytan serves only to lure us to the many attractive alternatives to the straight path… Since good and evil cannot be discerned by reason and cannot be examined in those terms… the only question is that of rightly perceiving what God has commanded in any situation. In essence, in this view, there is no fundamental theology of evil in Islam. Instead, there is a theology of submission. 2011, p. 11

In distinct contrast, Christianity needs Satan for the whole thing to hold together in the first place. Christianity’s big selling point is redemption, and in order for people to desire redemption, they need to believe that they have something from which they need to be redeemed. I mentioned earlier that Satan was appropriated and repurposed for that role, and nowhere is that more explicit than in the second creation narrative in Genesis, in which Satan tempts Eve to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. At least, that’s how the story is commonly understood. The source material actually makes no mention of Satan at all, nor does it even hint that the serpent who tempts Eve is anything more than a crafty animal. Furthermore, while Adam and Eve are afflicted and cursed by God for their transgression, there is no mention of original sin, or anything implying such as a consequence of their disobedience. But by retconning the second creation narrative, Christians hammer a very square peg into a very round hole and unify the complexity of the Bible into a single narrative in which victory in a cosmic war between absolute good and absolute evil hinges on individual humans’ acceptance of doctrine.

Still, one could imagine Satan absent from the narrative and original sin still resulting from the transgression, as a result of the temptation of the serpent. But Satan serves another purpose in Christianity as well: he allows for a substrate of cosmic struggle within the gospel narratives, and that of Mark in particular (later used as source material for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke), that is necessary for the depiction of Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God to make sense. Returning to Elaine Pagels and The Origin of Satan:

Satan, although he seldom appears onstage in these gospel accounts, nevertheless plays a central role in the divine drama, for the gospel writers realize that the story they have to tell would make little sense without Satan. How, after all, could anyone claim that a man betrayed by one of his own followers, and brutally executed on charges of treason against Rome, not only was but still is God’s appointed Messiah, unless his capture and death were, as the gospels insist, not a final defeat but only a preliminary skirmish in a vast cosmic conflict now enveloping the universe?… Mark and his colleagues combine a biographical form with themes of supernatural conflict borrowed from Jewish apocalyptic literature to create a new kind of narrative. These gospels carry their writers’ powerful conviction that Jesus’ execution, which had seemed to signal the victory of the forces of evil, actually heralds their ultimate annihilation and ensures God’s final victory. 1995, pp. 12–13

So we see that Satan has not only been the Church’s best friend, but that LaVey could actually have stated his point even more strongly. Simply put, Christianity could not exist without Satan.

My own view is that Satan is indeed a good friend to Christianity even beyond the “necessary enemy” that LaVey postulated, and for me, this is the intersection at which the religious system of Satanism arises from the concept of Satan. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in favor of religion in general and even Christianity in particular, but in addition to being beautiful expressions of human imagination and of our relationship to whatever may be sacred and unknowable about the world, it can also be a powerful tool of control or even a kind of socio-cultural weapon. In fact, I think that this is the dominant manifestation of religion in the world. And so religion needs its critics, its Socratic gadflies, and that’s exactly what I’m here for.

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

Belief and Identity. (2019, August 3). A Satanist Reads the Bible. https://asatanistreadsthebible.com/belief-and-identity/

Bodman, W. S. (2011). The poetics of Iblis: Narrative theology in the Qur’an. Harvard Theological Studies, Harvard Divinity School : Distributed by Harvard University Press.

Dennett, D. C. (2007). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Penguin Books.

Glustrom, S. (1989). The Myth and Reality of Judaism: 82 Misconceptions Set Straight. Behrman House, Inc.

Grant, M., & Hazel, J. (2002). Who’s who in Classical Mythology. Psychology Press.

Huntington, S. P. (2011). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order (Simon & Schuster hardcover ed). Simon & Schuster.

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

Neusner, J., Frerichs, E. S., & McCracken-Flesher, C. (Eds.). (1985). “To see ourselves as others see us”: Christians, Jews, “others” in late antiquity. Scholars Press.

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. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Satan&oldid=934485628

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

Smith, M. S. (2002). The early history of God: Yahweh and the other deities in ancient Israel (2nd ed). William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.

Smith, M. S. (2004). The origins of biblical monotheism: Israel’s polytheistic background and the Ugaritic texts. Oxford University Press.

Stark, R. (2003). One true God: Historical consequences of monotheism (2. print., and 1. paperback print). Princeton Univ. Press.

Twain, M. (2019). The adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Seawolf Press.