Tag Archives: my writing

The Inner God

I haven’t written much about this most important part of my practice, because it’s highly personal and hard to explain. I came to it mostly through personal gnosis, and while it shares some commonalities with ideas from other traditions, it’s sort of my own weird idiosyncratic thing.

I conceptualize my being as a triple soul, a common occult practice. In Kabbalah the parts of the soul are called Nefesh, Ruach and Neshema. Psychoanalytic theory might term them ‘id,’ ‘ego’ and ‘superego.’ These models aren’t perfectly equivalent but you sort of get the idea– you could call them body, mind and soul, although that still isn’t perfectly accurate. The Kabbalistic model is closest to what I use but I still don’t fully understand it, because… Kabbalah.

The Inner God can be thought of as the soul, the higher self. The way I work with it is sort of similar to how Thelemites work with the Holy Guardian Angel, I think, but at the same time, not really.

Basically it’s like this. Most of the time, we are ruled by the conscious mind. That’s the part of me typing this post, the part of me that thinks and analyzes the world, the verbal part. I use the Kabbalistic term Ruach for this. It’s a wonderful thing, but it’s also the part of me that fucks me up.

My basic, animal self, the selfhood of the body, has a tremendous amount of wisdom the mind tends to ignore– physical needs, gut-level instincts, “I’m hungry,” “I’m tired,” self-care stuff my mind is often only too happy to blow off. This is the part Kabbalists might call the Nefesh.

(Here I pause the writing because I haven’t had breakfast yet and the meat is getting angry and I only noticed because the mind accidentally called itself out.)

The mind is also really good at coming up with super self-defeating and fucked up thoughts, because my mind is mentally ill and also an alcoholic. (I say the mind is an alcoholic, not the body, because the body actually instinctively hates all that crap I used to do to myself and feels betrayed by it. The mind, with its neurotransmitters, is where the ‘fun’ parts of addiction take place.) The mind is powerful, and aside from all the great stuff it can do for me, it can also use seeming logic to rationalize pretty much any horrible idea it might have.

So I choose not to be ruled by the conscious mind alone. I choose to consult my spirit, my soul– the part of me which is eternal, is divine, is God.

The trick to doing this, for me, is to realize that I can’t logic and rationalize and think my way into contact with my soul. I have to pray. I have to meditate. The mind has to shut the fuck up, for a little bit, and listen to something else.

Apotheosis, for me, is part development of a more perfect soul– and part seeking to be closer to a soul that is already more perfect than my mind.

What is the nature of the Inner God? I do not know. But I do know this much–

When I pray to the Inner God for strength, for courage, for healing, for patience, for clarity, for any type of inner or emotional resource, I always receive it.

And when I make a regular effort to commune with my Inner God, I find myself being a better person than I thought I could be. I’ve also found myself able to not take a drink or a drug even when people literally shoved them into my hands. (My Inner God is also my AA Higher Power.) Six years of sobriety, and of not being the asshole I used to be, are the only testament I personally need to my Inner God’s existence, because it has done things for me that I believed were impossible, and that were impossible for me until I learned to pray. (You don’t want to know how many relapses I had before I got clean. I don’t even know how many relapses I had. It’s probably in the hundreds. I tried everything to no avail, yet as soon as I was desperate enough to pray sincerely? It suddenly worked.)

I have given my Inner God a secret, sacred name, which I never write or utter in human hearing. Thus, I need a stand-in for this forbidden name, a sort of public magical name that is roughly equivalent. For this purpose I use the name Antichrist, not because I have pretensions to being the only begotten son of Satan and bringer of the apocalypse or some shit, but because it is a name that gets across my aspirations of divinity better than anything else I could think of (aside from the forbidden name itself).

I didn’t exactly choose the forbidden name– I stumbled across it in reading, and immediately knew it was perfect. I assumed it during my Satanic initiation/baptism.

I use the forbidden name to construct wards, imagining a mesh of burning letters whirling all around me. I breathe it into my spells when I am certain no mortal is around to hear. I meditate on its perfection– the word itself has many fascinating properties due to the connotations of the letters involved and their arrangement. Since it happens to be a palindrome, the name itself has the character of a circle of protection. I have sigilized it, and use that sigil in certain workings that require my magical signature (for instance, I used it to sign the pact I made with King Paimon). It can be a mantra. It can be a word of power, like “abrahadabra.” I use it the same way ceremonial magicians use the sacred names of YHWH. My theory is that every time I use my forbidden name with reverence and power, and every time I keep it secret from all others, I endow it with more meaning, more might.

Satanists talk a lot about self-worship and apotheosis, but figuring out what that looks like in practice can be difficult. I share these parts of my practice in the hopes that it may give others ideas. Worship (yourself) in your own way, of course.

May the Devil-God within you light your way always.

 

Death of a Familiar

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This is Wednesday. She was my beloved baby. Just before Christmas, she died of congestive heart failure. She was seven years old.

Wednesday was a wonderful cat and a wonderful friend. Sweet and eerily empathetic, she could always sense the saddest person in the room and would respond by promptly going to cuddle them. She loved snuggling, playing fetch (yep, that cat played fetch) and staring out the window at all the birds she wanted to murder (but could not, as she was an indoor cat).

I loved her as much as I have ever loved anyone, and more than I have loved most.

But this post is not just a eulogy for a beloved pet. Wednesday, as it turned out, was more than a pet. She was my familiar.

While she lived, I sometimes referred to her as such, although I was usually partly joking. I wasn’t conscious of how much she was doing for me. As soon as she was gone, however, I felt a howling spiritual void open up in myself. I wasn’t just emotionally shattered, I was suddenly magically hamstrung. I realized, then, that in mostly passive ways, Wednesday had been feeding me energy and acting as a sort of spiritual signal booster– a little furry modem, if you will. With her death, my connection grew vanishingly faint.

Before she died, she reached out to us. Vix and I were lying in bed together, in his old house in Providence, RI. I had left Wednesday in California in the care of friends. I remarked to Vix how much I missed her. Instantly I heard her trademark chittering mew come from the foot of the bed, the little mew she always made before jumping up on something, as if it were necessary to her propulsion.

“That’s weird,” I started to say, “I just hallucinated hearing her meow–”

“No,” Vix said firmly, “I heard it too.” He pointed to the exact spot from which the sound had come, which I had not indicated to him.

I should have known that something was coming. That she was crying out for help.

A couple days later, I got the horrible phone call. From thousands of miles away, I had to interact with the vet, demand tests to be run, grasp at straws of hope and finally accept that she wasn’t going to recover. I made the decision to put her to sleep. It was the kindest thing I could do for her. I was not there to hold her.

Lucifer has held me many times in my grief– in the last two years I have lost four beloved friends, including one partner, and he has been there for me every time. But with Wednesday gone, I could not reach out to him. I could not feel him. I was deadened, weighted down by the limitations of cold materiality. Vix said he could feel Wednesday’s presence with us from time to time, but I could not. I was trapped in the mundane.

I came to understand that this could not be the end. I needed her, in so many ways. Calling the spirit of my familiar back into my life became the most crucial magical work at hand, the only magical work I could even attempt without her.

And why not? The Egyptians worshiped cats, mummified them and cherished them even after physical death. The familiars of the European witches were more often spirits than embodied animals. I couldn’t feel much else but I could feel her missing me, longing for me as I longed for her.

I also had the sense that in some way she had ascended, becoming even more magical and powerful by having transcended flesh. We weren’t done with each other yet.

Some might call it denial, others might call me an insane cat person. I don’t care what anyone calls it. I knew what I had to do.

I obtained a beautiful little urn for her ashes. It is a sculpture in the shape of a black cat. I prepared an altar space for her. I got myself a cat-themed tarot deck through which I hoped to continue communication. These things began to draw her nearer to me again. I would sit and stroke her urn, petting her just as I used to stroke her warm furry little body, talking to her soothingly. I could sense her gratitude.

But it was not until today that we were truly reunited, because it was not until today that I was able to retrieve her remains.

Receiving the box that held her ashes was a wonderful and terrible moment. It was terrible because it is awful to see someone you adored reduced to a little bag of gray dust. But it was also wonderful because, holding that box, I was holding her again. I knew it, I could feel it. I hugged it in my arms and I could feel her purr. The whole ride home I held that box in my lap and stroked it the way I used to stroke her spine, and I felt that purr continue. I felt her energy too, prickly heat entering my fingertips, the raw power and love of that fierce little creature, and I wept with relief and joy because she was coming home!

Once home I transferred her ashes tenderly into the urn. I lit some candles, put on “Cat People” by Bowie, did a little tarot spread. The cards told me of her relief. A time of suffering and trial was over for her. She was home, she could now relax.

I will always miss her warm little body, her passive-aggressive little mannerisms when she wanted to be fed, her tiny mews. But none of those things feel so far away anymore. I can feel her with me now, part of my home once more. I can feel her magic helping to sustain me, just as mine has always helped to sustain her.

Wednesday, this is not goodbye. Sweetest little friend, we will always be together. Welcome home, baby. Welcome with all my love.

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The Beauty of Chaos

It’s time for a little post about how I see the universe.

I think monotheism is a pretty, foolish lie that people like to tell themselves. I mean no offense to monotheists, and respectfully ask that any who are reading this tolerate my critique in the same spirit that I have learned to bear critiques of polytheism. It is widely said that polytheism is primitive and immature, an outdated mode of religion. This is my rebuttal.

I have seen and felt plenty of evidence of the spiritual nature of things, although it never tends to be evidence that one can reproduce under laboratory conditions. The spiritual resists empirical observation. However, I have never seen any evidence whatsoever that the universe is a fundamentally just place organised by a single supreme intelligence. Quite the reverse, in fact. The universe, as can be quite clearly observed, is made up of a multitude of entities and forces which are sometimes in cooperation, sometimes in collision, but most of the time perfectly indifferent to one another. It is individuation, not unity, which is the law of nature.

As above, so below– so say the Hermetics. On earth, we see the continuous conflict between the forces of repression and the forces of liberty,  between those of good and evil, of entropy and regeneration. I could list any number of other binaries, but to do so would be misleading because, in fact, these collisions are not always between two factors, but more often between three, four, or any number greater.

To believe that all of these seemingly random, chaotic and disparate forces are organised by the supreme will of one benevolent, omnipotent God is comforting, because that would mean that the universe is just, instead of random. But it also would fundamentally mean an unfree universe. Many a theologian has striven to reconcile the tension between an omnipotent God and human free will, just as they have tried to balance a benevolent God with the existence of evil. None of their arguments have ever been convincing to me. It seems a lot of work to demonstrate a conclusion which Occam’s razor will only shred to ribbons.

The belief in a just universe is not merely illogical, it can also lead to profoundly toxic effects. Recently, a wise demon (by the name of Agrat Bat Mahlat) whispered in my ear that I had learned to hate myself because I had suffered. It was easier to believe that I deserved it, to assign myself the role of a loathsome being worthy of only pain, than to except the premise of a random and unjust cosmos. But as a Satanist, I had already accepted that justice, like meaning, is what we make for ourselves– and that the lion’s share of the power is currently held in heaven by the God of tyranny, just as it is held by tyrants on earth. As above, so below.

When Agrat spoke this to me, I realized that my self-hatred was a relic of the worldview I had already rejected, one of deserved retribution and original sin. And it freed me to accept that I had been many times wronged– not by some single great cosmic force, but mainly by human beings acting quite independently. I was healed more in the instant of this revelation than I had been by years of therapy.

The belief in one God’s all-conquering will can also lead to deplorable passivity. What use is it to strive, to fight, to achieve anything, if all is governed by God’s ineffable plan? Under such conditions we are completely impotent. We really might as well all be sheep. All human activities save the pursuit of salvation would be completely worthless– in fact, in the opinion of the Calvinists, even this would be in vain.

(Of course I understand that many people do actually believe exactly what I have just laid out. If you are content with that worldview, there is really nothing I can say to you. It must of course seem similarly insane to you that I would rather risk eternal fire than submit to such a repulsive cosmic order. Let us agree to disagree.)

A chaotic universe is not as frightening as it sounds. “Chaotic” does not necessarily imply “hostile” or “evil” or “devoid of meaning.” It does imply randomness, and uncertainty, but we ought to be used to those things in life. It also implies freedom– and for those of us brought up to believe in one God, one supreme will that overrides all others, chaos is the essence of hope itself.

One might say that monotheists have traded liberty for security. In my view, this is the opposite of a mature action.

To be a polytheist is to affirm the possibility of multiple powers– and in the same breath, perhaps even one’s own power. Certainly this is true for my stripe of polytheistic Satanism! Our most important divinities must always be our selves. Indeed, we principally revere and love Lucifer because it was he who first whispered to us this fact, who offered us the apple with the words “Thou shalt be as God, knowing good and evil.” He set our divinity free, made us rogue agents in what had been, moments before, an arbitrarily ordered cosmos. With this, he upset God’s scheme, and permanently undermined the divine dictatorship.

Or at least, so goes the story. I do not believe it to be literally true, but it is a parable that beautifully illustrates a truth nonetheless. We are meant to be free, and freedom begins with the assertion of one’s own will, and the deployment of one’s own power to determine right from wrong.

So we strive, day by day, to become as God, and to know good and evil. We determine our own actions, and consult our own consciences. (As a side note, this is why I think it is foolish to ever have any list of Satanic “commandments.” Ethics are too important and too situational for rules of thumb to neatly apply, and we ought to have the sense not to need them.)

But as a polytheist, I accept that I am not the only god. Thou art god, and thou art god, and yes, even thou. Each and every one of us is a free agent and a sovereign soul, masters of our fates, gods unto ourselves. This is what it means to be human. No one among us can claim a greater share of divinity than any other. Some of us have merely worked harder towards the goal of self-realization, and this is no foundation for any type of smugness or superiority, since such traits are not attributes of divine perfection. Anyone who cherishes these thus immediately disproves their premise.

And I do not believe only in human gods. Every polytheist pantheon has gods to represent the most powerful forces in life– gods of rain, and wind, and fire, and death, and war, and love. It makes complete sense to me to personify the forces I see at work in the world.

For example, when I stood and gazed upon Kilauea, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Pele was real, even though I am not Hawaiian and do not practice that religion. I was only a visitor, but I was utterly convinced of her reality. I could see her, I was looking right at her and her works.

In the same way, I know the God of Tyranny and repression is real. His priests are everywhere. And I know the Devil is real, and I adore him, because I know that curiosity, knowledge, rebellion, justice, and pleasure are real and good. I see him in the fire and lightning, hear him in rock n roll, feel him whenever I fuck. He is looking over my shoulder whenever I read. In the culture in which I was raised, he is the god of life, of passion, of vitality, of music and dance and sex and laughter, of all things physical and satisfying. He is the Lord of This World, and not called so for nothing. And he is the Lightbringer, the beacon of wisdom, of learning, of justice and defiance. This means he is not merely a god of the physical, but of the most profoundly spiritual– the great teacher of good and evil, the revealer of occult secrets, the initiator on the perilous path of apotheosis, and the scourge of cosmic justice.

And alongside him stand legions of the fallen, demons who preside each over their own special areas of expertise, who have their own attributes, personalities, and agendas– demons who, in short, like all other gods, embody forces that are perfectly real and manifest in the physical realm.

Eisheth, the End of All Flesh, the mother of holy death, Our Lady of the Guillotine, Mystery Babylon clad in purple or in flame and wielding the poisoned sword of painful truth. Lilith, who would not lie below, adopter of stillbirths and abortions, patroness of divorce, fierce androgyne and craver of equality. Naamah, beautiful beyond words, who presides over divination, prostitution, and the forging of metals for adornment or weaponry. Agrat, daughter of illusion, weaver and dispeller of artifice, dancer on rooftops, young laughing Agrat, bred from the union of Lilith with Naamah. King Paimon, with his camel and his crown and his noisy caravan, teacher and traveler, with a face so beautiful it was said to be a woman’s. I name here only a few. There are seventy-two demons in the Goetia, and many more that Solomon never bagged!

And shall we neglect to honor Eve, liberator of all? What of her son, Cain– first criminal, but also, first magician?

Why not go further? Worship rock gods, worship great poets and writers and artists, worship revolutionaries! Raise up and deify your heroes! Build shrines to your ancestors and beloved dead! Let joyous idolatry infuse your every moment!

How much more beautiful, how much more profound, to have many gods than one whose name is “Jealous!” And how much better a free universe, teeming with deities, than one of monotheism and predestination!

Here endeth the sermon. Go forth in idolatry! Thou art god!

 

 

 

 

Where to find me

I’m gonna try to stay on tumblr for as long as they’ll let me. 

However if I get purged, you can find me/my zines/my church at…

WordPress

Facebook

Etsy (for Lucifer zine)

My Podcast

And I am constantly in 

The Devil is Here discord server

Find me there as L’ange du Mal.

I’ve backed up ALL of my original text posts. 

I’m working on a google drive of Luciferian and Satanic PDFs for everyone to enjoy. 

If you want access to any of that drop me a line at morningstarcongregation@gmail.com.

Review: The Satanic Bible

It finally happened. 

I finally read LaVey’s Satanic Bible. 

And, huh boy, do I have feelings and reactions. What a weird fucking book. 

First off, to answer the inevitable question: As a non-LaVeyan Satanist, do I have to read this? No, you don’t have to, but you probably should. It’s the single most influential text on modern Satanism, after all. 

Is it a good book? For my money, no. But it’s not without its pluses. 

First, the positives. LaVey was very sexually open-minded for the 1960′s. His attitudes towards kink and homosexuality were far ahead of his time, at least for a heterosexual male. (His attitudes towards women? Eh, not so much.) 

Also, I find some of his ideas on magic very useful. They aren’t particularly original, but he streamlines them and lays them out in a fresh, clear way. The Book of Belial contains a tidy and lucid approach to ritual magic that honestly looks like it could be quite effective. It’s simple. It’s elegant. I like it. I’ll probably try it. 

I like, and use, his idea of one’s own birthday as the most important Satanic high holy day. 

As for the negatives? A lot of it has been articulated before, but dragging LaVey never gets old, so here we go again. 

For those who don’t know, the beginning of The Satanic Bible is absolutely plagiarized from an odd text called Might Makes Right which has been described as everything from “egoist anarchist” to “fascist” and “white supremacist.” The end of The Satanic Bible is just a dubious re-writing of John Dee’s Enochian Keys. Both of these segments were tacked on to make page count to satisfy LaVey’s publisher because he didn’t have enough original content.  

As for that original content, it’s… not all that original. Much have been made of how LaVey’s philosophy is mostly Ayn Rand with some devil horns stuck on, and that’s largely true. 

His scholarship is super dubious– he treats accusations of Satanism from the renaissance witch craze and the “affair of the poisons” in the court of Louis XIV as if they were indisputable fact. Of the witch craze, he states, without evidence, that all the “real” witches were “sleeping with the inquisitors.” Which, ya know– sexual seduction is most of how LaVey defines witchcraft, so the statement makes sense in a tautological way. Based on how he redefines words to suit his own purposes, it’s hard to argue with him. 

On that note, yes, he is in fact sexist as shit. (And if The Satanic Bible doesn’t convince you of that, read a few pages of The Satanic Witch.)

He indulges in some weird soft-polytheism, and just straight-up sticks a lot of deities onto the list of “The Infernal Names” who have no place being there. (Thoth? KALI? Really?!)

The point at which I lost patience, however, was when I came to the Enochian keys. LaVey has rewritten the English translations– “corrected” them, he claims– to make them Satanic. For those who don’t know, the Enochian keys were allegedly channeled, from angels, by John Dee and Edward Kelly. Since they are absolutely and obviously referring to the wrathful God of Christianity, just changing the name “God” to “Satan” makes little sense. In my opinion, they don’t reflect Satanic values at all. 

Without evidence, LaVey also claims that the “angels” of John Dee were actually “angles.” Nine angels/angles, corresponding to nine eons, are mentioned. Now I think I know where a certain neo-fascist Satanic group got its name. Ugh.

It was at the 18th key that I lost my shit. 

In his introduction to his version of the keys, LaVey speaks of replacing “arbitrary numbers” with blasphemous phrases– aka, he hates numerology, is lazy, and feels that channeled numbers have no significance and can be ignored or turned into whatever the fuck random words he thinks they should be instead. 

Here’s what happens when he does this. I’ve bolded the important parts. 

John Dee’s original translation of the 18th key (in archaic English):

O thow mighty Light and burning flame of cumfort which openest the glory of God to the center of the erth, in whome the Secrets of Truth 6332 haue their abiding, which is called in thy kingdome Ioye and not to be measured: be thow a wyndow of cumfort vnto me. Moue and shew your selues: open the Mysteries of your Creation: be frendely vnto me: for I am the servant of the same your God, the true wurshipper of the Highest.

And here’s LaVey:

O thou mighty light and burning flame of comfort!, that unveilest the glory of Satan to the center of the Earth; in whom the great secrets of truth have their abiding; that is called in thy kingdom: “strength through joy”, and is not to be measured. Be thou a window of comfort unto me. Move therefore, and appear! Open the mysteries of your creation! Be friendly unto me, for I am the same!, the true worshipper of the highest and ineffable King of Hell!

OH COOL, JUST STICK A RANDOM NAZI SLOGAN IN THERE WHY DON’T YOU, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE.  

Not that this was a total surprise. Earlier in The Satanic Bible, LaVey says this:

From every set of principles (be it religious, political or philosophical), some good can be extracted. Amidst the madness of the Hitlerian concept, one point stands out as a shining example of this – “strength through joy!”

So, look. He’s not a total fascist. He’s a libertarian who likes to flirt with fascist imagery to be “edgy.” Which is better, I guess. But still not good. 

To conclude this review, I’d like to state that I do not dismiss LaVey or LaVeyanism entirely. He and his church have been very influential. In some ways, he was a fairly groovy guy, for 1969. He certainly brought Satanism out of the closet, and for that I thank him. 

And, despite all its flaws, I would reluctantly include The Satanic Bible on any Satanism 101 list. I don’t think it should necessarily be the first thing you read, unless atheistic Satanism is what’s calling to you, but we all have to read it eventually. Love LaVey or hate him, as Satanists we all have to exist in relation to him. I would never call this book our true “Bible” (and I don’t think we should have one) but it’s important to know what’s in it. 

Video

Here’s a Christian Hymn with a beautiful melody that I re-wrote as a Satanic hymn. If you listen to the original lyrics, you’ll see why I picked this one. Some of it didn’t need much alteration at all. 

(And yes, this is where I got the name of my blog.)

Given the Christian tradition of taking secular melodies and turning them religious, I don’t feel too weird about this. 

Chorus:

Brightest and best are the sons of the morning,

Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid!

Star in the East, the horizon adorning,

Guide where our fallen beloved is laid!


Verse 1. 

Hail the bright dawn when the Great Liberator

Down with his legions from heaven descends.

Fresh from his battle with the self-styled Creator,

Lightning and thunder the firmament rends. 


(CHORUS) 


Verse 2. 

Cold on his body the dewdrops are shining,

Low lies his figure mid shadows of Hell.

Angels now scorn him, in sorrow reclining, 

Prince who so lately did proudly rebel. 


(CHORUS)


Verse 3. 

Say, shall we yield him, in costly devotion,

Flowers of Eden and offerings divine?

Gems from the mountain, and pearls from the ocean,

Dark, musky incense and sweet, blood-red wine?


(CHORUS)


Verse 4.

Vainly we offer each costly oblation, 

Vainly with gifts would his favor secure.

Richer by far is the world’s liberation,

Dear to the Beast is the cause of the poor! 

How to make communion hosts! (for Satanists)

So, you’re a Satanist, and you want to hold a Black Mass, so you need some hosts… but you feel like stealing wafers from your local church is just too risky and/or too much of an unnecessary dick move? 

Congratulations, I am here to help!

First of all, you can order hosts online. Or, you can make your own using the process below. Obviously they won’t be consecrated, but that’s OK. After all, as a Satanist, do you really want to rely on the blessing of a Catholic priest for your ritual supplies? Seize the power! Consecrate/curse your own hosts! (If you need ideas for ritual language, I will include a segment from the black mass in La Bas at the bottom of this post.)

So, how do you make a host? It’s surprisingly simple, and yet at the same time, a goddamn pain in the ass. 

First, preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Mix equal parts water and wheat flower into a batter. That’s it. Those are your only two ingredients. Sound easy? Well, here’s the catch– the resulting dough is sticky as all hell. It’s torture to mix and to knead. You will want to flour every surface it comes into contact with generously and repeatedly. 

So. Flour your hands. Flour a cutting board or cookie sheet (or cover it in butcher paper). Flour your rolling pin. Plop down that sticky, sticky Jesus dough and roll it out to a thickness of about 1/8 of an inch. Use a small cookie cutter to cut it into rounds. You will want to flour the cookie cutter. Feel free to curse as much as you need to during this process. You’re a fucking Satanist, after all. 

Once you have cut as many wafers out of that dough as possible, flour the tops of them lightly, and use a butter knife (or, if you are fancy, a stamp) to create the sign of the cross on top of them. 

Pop those little Christ cakes into the oven for 8-10 minutes. Watch ‘em carefully, you don’t want them to burn. They cook up fast. 

Remove from oven, let cool, and that’s it! 

To consecrate/curse, use the script below or come up with your own! I think the most important part of the language here is the very beginning, which I have in bold. Go ahead: command and compel Christ. Feel free to add “in the name of Satan” or similar, but it isn’t strictly necessary. Remember: thou art God. 

Happy blaspheming! 

“And thou, thou whom, in my quality of priest, I force, whether thou wilt or no, to descend into this host, to incarnate thyself in this bread, Jesus, Artisan of Hoaxes, Bandit of Homage, Robber of Affection, hear! Since the day when thou didst issue from the complaisant bowels of a Virgin, thou hast failed all thine engagements, belied all thy promises. Centuries have wept, awaiting thee, fugitive God, mute God! Thou wast to redeem man and thou hast not, thou wast to appear in thy glory, and thou sleepest. Go, lie, say to the wretch who appeals to thee, ‘Hope, be patient, suffer; the hospital of souls will receive thee; the angels will assist thee; Heaven opens to thee.’ Impostor! thou knowest well that the angels, disgusted at thine inertness, abandon thee! Thou wast to be the Interpreter of our plaints, the Chamberlain of our tears; thou wast to convey them to the Father and thou hast not done so, for this intercession would disturb thine eternal sleep of happy satiety.

Thou hast forgotten the poverty thou didst preach, enamored vassal of Banks! Thou hast seen the weak crushed beneath the press of profit; thou hast heard the death rattle of the timid, paralyzed by famine, of women disemboweled for a bit of bread, and thou hast caused the Chancery of thy Simoniacs, thy commercial representatives, thy Popes, to answer by dilatory excuses and evasive promises, sacristy Shyster, huckster God!

Master, whose inconceivable ferocity engenders life and inflicts it on the innocent whom thou darest damn—in the name of what original sin?—whom thou darest punish—by the virtue of what covenants?—we would have thee confess thine impudent cheats, thine inexpiable crimes! We would drive deeper the nails into thy hands, press down the crown of thorns upon thy brow, bring blood and water from the dry wounds of thy sides.

And that we can and will do by violating the quietude of thy body, Profaner of ample vices, Abstractor of stupid purities, cursed Nazarene, do-nothing King, coward God!”

Devil Worship in France

I’m currently reading “Devil Worship in France” by Arthur Edward Waite (yep, the tarot guy). It’s a lot of fun. It isn’t about actual Satanism, it’s an extended snarky takedown of Taxil’s hoax (basically a 19th century Satanic panic). However, it’s absolutely worth the read. I never suspected Waite would be such a sassy bitch.

Also, it’s the oldest text I’ve ever seen to make a distinction between Luciferianism and Satanism, so that’s cool (even though I no longer make that distinction for myself).

Do you think there’s any power in the black mass?

jakattax:

Hey.

As in a witches sabbat? Well yeh sure. I mean gone are the days when you would kiss Satan’s arse and suckle from his teat to receive diabolical powers, but any meeting of a coven has inherent power to it by numbers alone.

Naturally depending on the individual skill of each member, if it’s a particulary new coven of initiates then no, not really. A single occultist could easily be more advanced than a whole gathering. But a coven of learned experts? Well yes, then that would be a force to be reckoned with.

The Black Mass is distinct from Witches’ Sabbat.

The Black Mass was supposed to be performed by an apostate catholic priest. It was performed over a nude woman who served as an “altar.” It was a extended blasphemous parody of a Catholic mass, the high point of which was the desecration of the sacraments of the communion– trampling on the host, pissing in the wine, defiling them with sexual fluids, etc, etc. There were supposedly variations.

Just like the Witches’ Sabbat, it was a supposedly Satanic rite and just like the Witches’ Sabbat, we aren’t 100 percent sure it ever happened back in the day.

The Witches’ Sabbat was different because it was usually an outdoor affair, it did not require an apostate priest, it was more folksy/less formal/not reliant on an extended parody of Catholic liturgy. There are commonalities, such as the defilement of sacred objects, but it’s a different ceremony and different vibe. Witches’ sabbats were supposed to be performed by regular folks on the outskirts of small towns and in the countryside, Black Masses were rumored to be performed by the elites of society, such as members of the court of Louis XIV.