And he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
—Matthew 25:32–33 What constitutes the difference between a Satanic ceremony and a play presented by a theatre group? Often very little.
—Anton LaVey, The Satanic Rituals, p. 18 Occult Studies is a haven for the impractical and inept, just as other useless tradesmen find asylum in other arenas.
—Anton LaVey, Satan Speaks!, p. 9
“T
he driving force behind black magic is hunger for power.” Thus Rich- ard Cavendish began his notable study of the occult tradition’s dark underbelly, The Black Arts. The magical practices Cavendish addresses are not the standard fare of anthropological studies, the naïve world of fertility rites, traditional superstitions, and folklore. Neither are they the love potions, charms, crystals, good luck, or healing spells of white magic. Rather, the aim of black magic is to tap into the secret, hidden, and frequently malevolent power of the cosmos to further one’s own ends. In doing so it eschews the selfless goals of white magic in favor of personal empowerment. Black magic is the ultimate forbidden fruit, the attempt to gain knowledge that will place the practitioner on a par with the divine. “Carried to its furthest extreme,”Cavendish writes, “the black magician’s ambition is to wield supreme power over the entire universe, to make himself a god.”1 The relevance to modern
Satanism hardly needs to be stated.
ORIGINS
The Western occult tradition can be traced back to its origins in early Neo- platonism, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism. One of its primary roots is Plato’s assertion that the world we see, that of material objects, is merely illusion. To Plato, the world most people perceive is nothing more than transitory and imperfect replications of a hidden, almost divine realm of endless, unchange- able forms. His belief that ultimate truth lay somehow beyond the material world was pervasively influential. The religious philosophy of Neo-platonism developed from its namesake’s philosophy to describe an all- encompassing metaphysical unity of reality in a vast, incomprehensible order described as the One. For the individual, unity with this order could only be reached through mystical experience, and only by the most dedicated. Gnosticism, with its focus on gnosis, knowledge, and a dualist description of the cosmos, was also heavily influenced by Platonic thought, although it stressed the cor- ruption of the material plane and purity of the spiritual. In the pessimistic vision of Gnosticism, the aim was to release the soul from its fleshly prison through the acquisition of knowledge. These schools of thought were readily combined with the mystical doctrines of Hermeticism. The flexible spiritual pantheism of Hermeticism incorporated an optimistic outlook promising the primordial wisdom of the ancient world, particularly that of Egypt. The pri- mary works of the Corpus Hermeticum are attributed to the mythic Hermes Trismegistus, a purported contemporary of Moses, thus giving the texts simi- lar sanctity to the Bible—to their enthusiasts at least. It is from Trismegis- tus’s alchemical text the Emerald Tablet that the occult dictum “As above, so below,” the foundation of astrology, derives.
Together, these philosophies articulated a captivating vision of a hidden world and hidden powers behind the material plane. With the coming of the Renaissance, many of these long-neglected doctrines, particularly the Her- metic writings, were rediscovered. They were reconciled with Old and New Testaments by use of a Christianized version of Kabbalah, medieval Jewish mysticism. Kabbalah, in this interpretation, validated Christian belief; witness Pico della Mirandola’s much cited refrain “no science can better convince us of the divinity of Jesus Christ than magic and the Kabbalah.”2 Scholar- magicians
such as Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) and John Dee (1527–1608) were cru- cial to this development, promoting a blend of astrology, alchemy, magic, esoteric knowledge, and philosophy. Agrippa’s encyclopedic Three Books of Oc-
knowledge. He emphasized the assertion of will as central to achieving magi- cal results. “[ H ]e that works in Magick must be of a constant belief, be credu- lous, and not at all doubt of attaining the effect.”3 Agrippa’s Welsh follower,
Dee, was an eminent Elizabethan mathematician and astrologer, immortalized by Shakespeare as Prospero and King Lear. As pious Christian Kabbalists, Agrippa and Dee were practitioners of distinctly white magic, despite rumors that gave them reputations as the blackest of conjurers.
Dee is the first explicit intersection of the occult and Satanism, arising from LaVey’s inclusion of Dee’s Enochian Keys in The Satanic Bible. Dee, with the assistance of associate Edward Kelly, claimed to be able to summon angels through séances. The results of Dee and Kelly’s endeavors were recorded in notebooks in the Enochian language, supposedly a proto-Hebrew script that God used to create the world. Both this claim and the integrity of his assis- tant, the seer Kelly, the only one to commune with the spirits, have been chal- lenged repeatedly. In regard to Satanism, however, the means of composition is of little consequence. The Satan-exhorting interpretation of the Enochian Keys in The Satanic Bible is assuredly a complete contradiction of any spiritual revelation that Dee experienced or wished to experience. Although his stud- ies made him acutely aware of the dangers of contacting the celestial realm of angels and divine figures, he had complete faith that the Kabbalah would protect him from demonic interference. LaVey regardless declared, on his own authority, that Dee’s version was a whitewash. LaVey’s translation alone exhibits the “true Enochian Calls, as received from an unknown hand.” Hith- erto, their meaning had remained hidden, “because occultists to this day have lain ill with metaphysical constipation.” Despite the transparency and sheer outrageousness of these claims, diabolical versions of “the Satanic paeans of faith” have become standard occult texts of any Satanic group, and remain widespread, presumably from overuse of metaphysical laxatives.4