satanhaus:

              Last
night my coven attended the Witches Night Bazaar which was a collection of
vendors hosted at the Tangent Gallery in Detroit specializing in
witchcraft-related wares. It was an excellent event and very unique opportunity
for us, so we’re very grateful to hostesses The Pentacle Path and Hedgewitch Holistics
for putting this on and allowing us to have a space there. Our Adept Jeremy
sold all of his bone art, we gave out around one hundred informational fliers,
and we sold several copies of our new album on top of meeting many new people. I
would love to be a part of something like this again.

              There
are a couple things I want to reflect on. Mostly, I want to reflect on how deeply-ingrained
the fear of Satan is in our culture. It’s obvious that Christians are afraid of
Satan, for the most part. That much is clear. What’s less clear is how deeply
afraid non-Christians are afraid of
Satan. This is something I couldn’t have predicted when first getting involved
with Satanism. I really did think, naively, that Pagans would be accepting of
Satanism and possibly interested in us the way we are in them. While they’re
definitely more likely to be accepting
to Satanism than Christians (or at least not hostile to it), there are still a
great number of Pagans who are outright afraid of Satan.

              A woman came
up to our booth and took a look at our flier which is two-sided and has information
about SATANHAUS specifically as well as esoteric Satanism more generally. She
finished reading and she goes, “I don’t mess with any dark magick. Only light.
Never dark. But good for you.” And she put the flier back and walked away.

              Now,
what an interested comment. What is ‘dark magick’? What is that supposed to
mean? I’m skeptical of the idea that this person, or any person, has only pure
goodwill towards others and never has any negative thoughts about them, never
falls from grace, never wishes misfortune to befall a wrongdoer or lapses into
anger. Furthermore, I’m skeptical that this person practices such radical
forgiveness that they never use their spirituality as an outlet for these
feelings. I know that Wiccans (I’m
presuming she was a Wiccan since the light/dark distinction is most commonly
drawn by them) curse people. I know dozens of Wiccans and have known more throughout
the course my life. They curse people. They bind people. These spells and
prayers are prolific in their religion. I have no idea why they would even want to seek such Christ-like spiritual
purity. Maybe if you are a Wiccan you can help me out with this.

              I tend
to take comments like that in this way: “I
practice a good religion for good people and we only do good things, not like you bad people who do bad things with your bad religion.
But good for you.”

              And why
would a Pagan think Satanism is bad? What resources from within their own
religion would make them think that? Wicca and the Pagan reconstruction religions
don’t even have Satan, so how could
they possibly infer that Satan is evil unless they tacitly ascribe to at least some elements of Christianity? The only
people who should be afraid of Satan are Christians and possibly Muslims
because they’re the only religions that even have the concept of Satan (albeit
a political and ultimately incorrect one). I would not think worshippers of
Loki were evil, nor Seth, nor Kali. There were a good number of people who took
one look at our station, saw Satan, and immediately looked away; others responded
to our query of “Would you like to take this free flier, learn about Satanism?”
with a terse “No thanks, I’m good.” They actually seemed surprised that we were
there, at an event called the Witches Bazaar.

              To me,
this is so indicative of just how deep the fear of Satan is in our culture,
that even those who have consciously rejected Christianity are still afraid of
its main antagonist. I’m reminded of an event we once hosted, the Summer of
Satan party in Redford. During the communion portion of the ritual my Adept and
I were passing out the absinthe and black bread, and I offered some to this one
man who said something very interesting to me. He said, “I’m not ready yet.”
This was back in the summer and I think about it often. It was so frank, and
also so surprising to me, that it’s been a source of reflection for me since then.
I’m not ready yet. I think this
really captures what’s going on here. These people know there is no hell. They know
there is no devil in the sense of eternal tormentor. They know there is no Christ, and therefore
no antagonist of Christ. And yet, when confronted with it, they are actively
afraid of being condemned to hell. That’s how deep this indoctrination runs.

              This is
part of why Satanism is so confrontational in nature. Not just because we troll
Christians and their idiotic oppressive political regimes, but because force
people to confront their own beliefs about the afterlife and what they think
Satan is. The same people who will scoff at the idea that Satanism has any
meaningful purpose in our culture because Christianity itself is dying, won’t
eat a piece of bread if a Satanist gives it to them because they are still
afraid of sin and damnation.

              This was
actually the most enlightening part of the whole experience. I would ask that
Pagan comrades of ours do some serious spiritual deconstruction and confront
why they are so afraid of us, and why they even bother to draw this distinction
between light and dark religions when clearly this is an innovation of Christianity,
the very religion they are trying to escape. In return we will continue to
treat you with friendship and to patronize your businesses, they are some of
our favorites anyway.

Hail Satan.
Evyn Aytch.
SATANHAUS.