From: Tagi@cup.portal.com (Tagi Mordred Nagashiva)
Newsgroups: alt.satanism
Subject: Re: Satanism and Demon Worship
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 92 14:01:38 PDT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)

9209.28 e.v.


Bill Ellis (the cartographer) writes:

One topic that I think ought to be discussed 
...is what relationship (if any) satanism ought to have to
the universal religious-experience/validation-principle of demon worship.


Response:

The original topic-line is quite simplistic.  Satanism can never be addressed
as an 'ought-to' because it presupposes resisting authority.


Bill:

Let me start by stressing that "demon" should be read in the Greek sense as
a spirit superior in intellect and power to humans that can be contacted and
to some extent employed as a source of information and control over the
environment.  


Response:

***** APPLAUSE *****


Bill:

There seem to be several variations on the theme:

* Channeling, or direct dialogue with spirits.  Examples: Dr. Dee's messages
from the "angels," shamanic trances in which problems are laid before gods,
spiritualism, "prophecy" as practiced by Christian Pentecostals, the Seth
materials.


Response:

Don't forget conversations with the Holy Spirit, Crowley's relationship
with his HGA, Aiwaz, and the relationship most shamans have with both
the Great Spirit and their 'allies'.


Bill:

* Spirit possession, in which spirits temporarily "take over" individuals'
bodies.  Examples: Voodoo (the real thing, *not* Hollywood), Pentecostal
"baptism in the Holy Spirit" aka speaking in tongues or glossolalia, demon
"possession" as diagnosed (or, probably, induced) by exorcists, lycantrophy,
multiple personality syndrome.


Response:

I think we might also include the fervent expostulation of the preacher here.
Some call this 'witnessing'.  I call it the oppression of Yahweh.


Bill:

* Mediated contact with spirits, in which contact is limited to people with
some kind of official authority to invoke the demons.  Examples: Greek
oracles (who seem to have engaged in glossolalia "interpreted" by official
custodians of the shrines), Papal infallibility, the Morman councils who
seek and receive God's advice on doctrinal issues.

* Historically removed contact with spirits, in which contact results in a
document that is thereafter assumed to be authoritative and which makes any
further dialogue with spirits either unnecessary or evil.  Examples: The
Mosaic Code, Gospel, Book of Morman, Koran, etc.  as "the infallible,
inspired word of God." (Of course, since all these documents are in some way
ambiguous and in need of revision to include current historical events, some
form of mediated spirit contact is needed to supplement this belief.)


Response:

Don't forget the East here also.  Buddhists of all shades and many many
Hindus, Taoists, etc. qualify for many of these last two.


Bill:

I gather that many genuine satanists would disclaim all of the above as
totally binding sources of ethical impulses.  


Response:

Not I, but I don't know what a 'genuine satanist' is, either.


Bill:

But LaVey seems to give
invoking "demons" and Enochian magick (derived from Dee's "angels") some
credibility.  It seems that many Wiccans too would grant some validity to
the spirits they invoke as empirically real, not just archetypes or means of
creative visualization.


Response:

Note the connection between Wiccans and LaVey.  While I'd agree here, I'd
also mention that true demons are not always a barrel of laughs.


Bill:

But as satanism is frequently associated with "devil worship" in the public
eye, it seems to me that there needs to be some careful thinking on this
topic.  Whatever the source of "spirits," it seems clear that there is some
genuine experience behind channelling and spirit possession that seems to
the experiencer to be empirical evidence for demons, both benevolent and
malevolent.  I've done a lot of reading of works by Pentecostals involved in
exorcism, and many (not all) of them seem intelligent observers who are
witnessing something out of the ordinary that seems to justify belief in
superhuman personalities that can infest human personalities.


Response:

Most of this is displaced repression.  In other words, the poor Christian
represses the best parts of themself (sexual, natural, etc.) and it comes
out in some other way without their 'permission'.  It is all part of the
'war on the unconscious, natural mind', which the Church has been carrying
out for eons in an attempt to 'break' the minds of modern people so as
to produce the type of slaves which Margaret Atwood described in her
book, _Handmaid's Tale_.


Bill:

(Julian Jaynes's _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
BicameralMind_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976) has some interesting things
to say about "muses" and "holy spirits" except that he makes the mistake of
assuming that something happened between ancient times and today that
eliminated all these phenomena; he might have dropped in at the local
Assembly of God church to find all the modern data he needed to suggest that
many people even today are still "god-run.")


Response:

Yes, I think Jaynes was overly focussed on TEXTS rather than on people.
For this reason his theory lacks force.


Bill:

The problem, as I've seen it in my reading, is that the groups that are the
most intense about defining satanists as devil worshippers are exactly those
who are the most deeply involved in their own form of demon worship.  They
are often aware that there are problems with the materials they receive from
their gods (prophecies fail to come true; a certain number of parents get
told to put their children inside ovens; prophets tell their followers to
drink cyanide).  And they seem genuinely concerned that the satanists have
worked out their own direct line with demons and have gotten the knack of
getting the results they want.  


Response:

Nicely put.  I suggest that most Western religion is psychotic in its
separation of God and Nature (among many other divisive separations which
serve only to move the individual who accepts their dogmas to psychosis).


Bill:

See how *good* the pre-conversion Mike
Warnke is at hexing his enemies and getting free drugs and sex in _The Satan
Seller_ (and how lousy he is at keeping his marriages or his priestly
projects together in the _Cornerstone_ expose); see how *good* the
devil-worshippers are at committing totally undetectable murders and child
abuse in any "survivor" story (and how lousy satan-hunters are at getting
any tangible evidence of their crimes).


Response:

Wonderful.  This is, I think, explainable by the 3-fold law of return which
has so many Witches enslaved and cowed.


Bill:

As with Santa-ism, the problem with demon worship is that it doesn't work very
well, either for good or bad.  So the temptation is for those who are trying
to carry on with it in a fallable way to imply that the *bad* demon worshippers
are much more successful with it, so they should be stamped out because they're
making the duffers look bad.

Reactions?


Response:

The way you've defined it here, I'd say that whether or not it 'works well'
is a matter of perspective.  

What happened to the typical 'let's summon a demon into this pentacle'
type of occultist/teenager?  I think that Enochian stuff is INCREDIBLY
loaded with potential.  Here is how I'd describe what such people are doing:

1) They are objectifying a repressed subset of their mind.

2) They are naming it and giving it personal qualities which make it
 more approachable (much like giving Cthulhu a name gives the ILLUSION
that S/He is somehow comprehendable).

3) They are summoning it before their waking mind, thus bringing this
part of their mind into the conscious arena.

4) They are dealing with it in the best way they know how.  If there
was truly a demon summoned, then, like in some of Robert Asprin's books,
the mage would have to perform a 'battle of wills' in order to
come to some resolution.  Once this resolution is concluded, the mage
may either absorb the demon-energy or keep it objectified for as long
as necessary.  Of course, one alternative is that the mage will be
overcome by the demon, in which case it might make hir do something horrible,
like MASTURBATE!  (:::hiding face:::)


This is precisely what the Satanist is doing with respect to society.
The Satanist BECOMES the Demon which the oppressive orthodoxy begins
to summon in its ignorance.  The Satanist simply attempts to manifest
the repressed energies.  Sometimes this can result in nasty powder-
burns.  ;>


Thyagi
------------------------------------------------------------------
'Possession' is a life-long process of self-actualization.  It is
unfortunate that many modern Americans who practice stylized Afro-religious
paths do not recognize this.
Newsgroups: alt.satanism