Satanism: The Ungratifying Truth

To avoid censure on the grounds of anonymity, my name is Damien Tavis Toman, and was once a student of Satanism, following various schools, including that of the late Mr. LaVey. This article is a response to one titled “Satanism - A Misunderstood Religion.”

There are things that one may call egoism and narcissism, other than "Satanism." The Cult of the Self has been around for as long as selfish people have, i.e., since the dawn of the species - since the first act of pettiness, cruelty, or spite was performed by the first misanthropic lout. People believed in magic during society's pre-literate days too, and they certainly didn't call themselves Satanists. Even Anton LaVey had little reason not to refer to his skewed code of ethics as Nietzscheanism, Randism, or even Sadism (properly termed.) His only innovation, if it may be called that, was his retention of the Golden Rule that has appeared in every significant religious system for several millennia - "Do nothing to another that you would not like done to yourself."

If LaVeyanism had the backbone to be really egoistic, its creed would have been "Do what you want and pass off the consequences." You'll find that trying to straddle the line between the supposed Miltonian nobility of the Satanist, as LaVey defined him, and the basic corner-market hold-up man, is too precarious an effort to be worth your while. A belief system of sheer convenience and anarchic caprice is nothing to be aspired to in itself; it is merely a better belief system fallen into wagging decrepitude.

The semantics of the matter are one thing. What must be established is the intent behind the lexicon - the real reason why anyone would bother to associate himself with the stigma of Satanism. To say that Satanism is a misunderstood religion, is quite like saying that National Socialism is a misunderstood political view, or that White Supremacy is a misunderstood prejudice. We may be unable to understand them, simply because they are dubious from the outset, and they have never done their practitioners - or anyone else - any appreciable good. If an ideology does nothing to improve the state of either its adherents or society on the whole, how can it be either understood or rationally indulged?

As much as Satanism pretends - as the Marquis de Sade did before it - to be nothing but a return to man's most innate and inviolable instincts, humanity has largely adopted the nobler or higher forms of ethics - those that call for mercy, empathy, and altruism - because it has seen its animal nature already, and has recoiled from it in shame and abhorrence. Satanism is a toothless tiger: it seeks to be intimidating without being disagreeable; it roars very fiercely from within a self-erected cage. To be both audacious and impotent is to be made a clown. It is asking for derision from a society that has little time left for pursuing dead ends and sheer cliffs.

Men are advanced by believing in things that are greater than they are; by aspiring to eventualities that actually require hope, perseverance, and goodwill. The successes of egoism may be recounted in the forms of Rockefeller, Carnegie, or Ford, but whatever their private successes, these are the men who have aided the world on its seemingly inalterable course of self-annihilation, and have subjected the populations of their own nations and countless others to unutterable squalor, exploitation, degeneracy, and despair. Without digressing too far off-base, gross industrialism is only one of the unmistakable examples of what can be expected when men act selfishly and short-sightedly, and when they promise general benefit from a platform of salubrious self-interest.

Anton LaVey was never a sage, never a philosopher, and never a friend to anyone. He was a showman and an entrepreneur who degraded himself for the pernicious pleasure of watching others wallow with him into the dredges. LeVayan Satanism can hardly be called a religion, because unlike even the most elementary forms of paganism, there exists in it no possibility of either personal transcendence or external (supernatural) intervention. To propitiate oneself, so that one will act on one's own behalf, is too pointless and redundant to even be called hubristic by the most romantic of do-nothings. It is not even the blind leading the blind: it is the blind blundering alone.