Devil Worship
Satanism, or devil worship, refers to two distinct phenome-
na: (1) the worship of Satan or Lucifer, the Christian antideity,
and (2) the worship by non-Christian peoples of deities that to
Christian observers have a devil-like character. The worship of
Satan has never been a widespread activity, and most reports
of Satanism seem to originate in the imagination of Christian
believers.
The idea of devil worship emerged in the fifteenth century
when for various reasons the powers of the Inquisition were
turned upon ‘‘witchcraft.’’ The task of the inquisitors was to
ferret out heretics, Christians who held unorthodox opinions,
and apostates, former Christians who had renounced the faith.
Outside the mandate of the Inquisition were those believers in
other religions who had never been Christians. Before the year
1484, witchcraft had been defined as paganism, the worship of
the old pre-Christian deities. Pagans had never been Christians
and were thus immune to the mandate of the Inquisition.
However, in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued an encyclical
that redefined witchcraft as devil worship, hence apostasy. The
encyclical was followed two years later by publication of the
Malleus Maleficarum (The Witch’s Hammer), a volume that de-
fined devil worship as an elaborate parody of Christian wor-
ship. Malleus Maleficarum became the sourcebook for the mas-
sive action against people identified as witches/Satanists.
Substance was added to the perspective by the numerous con-
fessions extracted under duress from the accused. Although
Malleus Maleficarum was published only a generation before the
Reformation, Protestants accepted its perspective and were as
active as Roman Catholics in the persecution of people be-
lieved to be worshiping the devil and practicing malevolent
magic.
As devil worship came to be understood, it included gather-
ings of people, often in groups of 13 (a parody of Christ and
the 12 apostles), and the performance of a ‘‘black mass’’ that
might include the repetition of the Lord’s Prayer backward, the
profanation of a eucharistic host, the sacrifice of a baby, or sex-
ual debauchery. While many were accused of participation in
devil worship, the first solid evidence of the existence of a devil-
worshiping group came in the court of French king Louis XIV
(1638–1715). With the assistance of a defrocked priest, Cather-
ine Deshayes, better known as ‘‘La Voisin,’’ constructed black
masses to help members of the court—including one of the
King’s mistresses—retain their positions in the royal society. La
Voisin was also a purveyor of poisons and assisted women in
aborting unwanted babies. The situation came to light at the
end of the 1670s but created little impact because of the rela-
tively quiet manner in which the investigation and judicial pro-
ceedings were carried out. A star chamber was established that
considered evidence and issued verdicts in secret in order to
keep the scandal from destroying the government.
In the years since the La Voisin affair, the worship of Satan
or diabolism has emerged periodically, only to quickly pass
from the scene. In the twentieth century, it became the subject
of some successful novels, especially those of Dennis Wheatley,
who wrote a series of stories based on the existence of a world-
wide satanic conspiratorial organization. There is no evidence
that such an organization exists (or ever existed) outside of
Wheatley’s imagination.
A new era for devil worship began in 1966 with the organiza-
tion of the Church of Satan. The church redefined Satanism
as the epitome of American values of individualism and pro-
moted a philosophy built around hedonism, pragmatism, and
ego development. The traditional Black Mass was celebrated,
but it too had been transformed into a psychodrama aimed at
teaching participants to release inhibitions that kept them from
reaching personal fulfillment. Anton LaVey, the church’s
founder, also operated openly and demanded that church
members do nothing to violate the law.
The Church of Satan enjoyed a period of growth and public-
ity through the early 1970s, but soon fell victim to a series of
schisms that cost it many members and led to its adopting a low
profile. Among the several divisions, the most substantial and
the only one to survive into the 1990s is the Temple of Set.
Temple founder Michael Aquino rejected the neo-Satanism of
LaVey and developed a more traditional approach built upon
identifying the Christian Satan as the Egyptian deity Set (or
Seth). Aquino has constructed the most sophisticated form of
modern Satanism and has attracted to the temple a small but
faithful following. Like the Church of Satan, the Temple of Set
and Aquino (an officer in the U.S. Army) renounce all actions
that break the law.
Public interest in the Church of Satan had largely died by
the end of the 1970s, although a new wave of concern about Sa-
tanism emerged. Through the 1980s a number of individuals,
primarily women, came forward with stories of, as children and
teenagers, having participated in satanic rites at the insistence
of their parents. The abuse they received had been forgotten,
but several decades later was being remembered. At the same
time, a number of accusations were made that various people
with control over children—day care workers, divorced
spouses, grandparents—were practicing satanic rituals on
young children.
By the mid-1980s rumors and accusations of satanic ritual
abuse emerged in every part of the United States and by the
end of the decade had been transplanted to Europe. They led
to several trials, the most important being the lengthy trial of
the owners and workers of the McMartin Day School in Man-
hattan Beach, California. All defendants in the McMartin case
were acquitted, and further research on the growing number
of accusations found no basis for the widespread allegations of
Satanism. The issue was seemingly laid to rest in 1994 when two
researchers—Phillip Shaver, a psychologist at the University of
California-Davis, and Pamela Freyd of the False Memory Syn-
drome Foundation—reported after their investigation of more
than twelve thousand accusations that no evidence of any satan-
ic cults had been uncovered.
Modern Satanism is largely the product of Christian theolo-
gy, as Satan is primarily an inhabitant of the Christian religious
worldview. For the most part, the documents on Satanism—
descriptions of its reported beliefs and practices—were written
by professing Christians who never met a Satanist or attended
a satanic gathering. Their descriptions of Satanism were an ad-
mixture of material drawing from older Christian texts and
their own imaginations.
Be weary of contradictions and dualities and dichotomies due to christian influence and bias. Like Anh has posted, christianity is relatively new but it's hard to find good sources due to how much of paganism they have destroyed, and many of their followers have edited ancient texts and altered and butchered its meaning.
Most websites will end up saying pretty much the same thing once you'd read enough. Then it's time to take up valuable skills such as Astral Projection, scrying, praying, etc to reach this pantheon of deities.
