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Left Hand Path, Part Two

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MP3 of the Day: Black Widow – Come to the Sabbat
-From their monster of a debut, Sacrifice. This one might surprise you, as it did me, in that it is more prog than it is Sabbath-like.


Lucifer Rising: Sin, Devil Worship, & Rock n’ Roll
by Gavin Baddeley


Finally, after a number of casual references on the blog and an unintended, long-winded introduction to this post, the book itself. It’s not literature, certainly, nor is it a thorough guidebook for prospective Satanists; it's more of a compendium of pop culture references as threaded through the eye of the Beast. It is considerably flawed, yet an entertaining read from start to finish, written by a card-carrying member of the Church of Satan.
“Christians longed for the blissful ignorance of the Garden of Eden, regarding the fallen Lucifer as the epitome of evil for tempting humanity with enlightenment.”

“Christianity, in common with many cults, was an apocalyptic sect that awaited the end of the world with glee.”

“If people knew of the role the Hellfire Club played in Benjamin Franklin’s structuring of America, it could suggest changes like: ‘One Nation Under Satan’, or ‘United Satanic America.’”
In the first chapter, Baddeley traces a line from the Garden of Eden and the birth of the Christian Church through the Gnostics, the Bogomils, the Knights Templar, early witch-cults, the depravity of the French Baron Gilles de Rais, the Faust legend, the Black Mass, the Hellfire Club, Ben Franklin, the Romantic poets from from Shelley to Blake to Byron to Keats, Baudelaire, Poe, Twain, Comte de Lautreamont, and Nietzsche.

All this and more in a rather dizzying initial eleven pages. Much like the rest of the book, it is a mile-wide but an inch-thick. The author covers so much territory that he can’t possibly explore any of these subjects to the extent that my curiosity requires. But then, details aren’t the point, for he is merely laying the historical groundwork for the romp through pop culture to come.
“Crowley’s ‘Do what thou wilt’ can be read as a maxim for Satanic libertinism, as well as a command to discover the true self.”
By the second chapter, A New Aeon, we’re already up to the twentieth century. Aleister Crowley, “The Great Beast” himself, is the focus here. If you’re not familiar with Crowley’s life and works, you may know him only as a significant influence on Jimmy Page, but having previously read a five-hundred page bio on Crowley (Israel Regardie’s excellent The Eye in the Triangle), I can attest to the fact that this was a highly complex, misunderstood, and painfully interesting man, who stood as one of the tallest figures of the century. To dismiss him as a mere devil worshipper is sorely missing the point.

Chapters three and four cover volkish occultism and Satanic links to Nazism and the sixties counterculture. Hitler’s links to the occult make for a rather compelling read, while hippie utopianism is thoroughly deconstructed and set ablaze. Even though a lot of this material was already familiar to me (Stones, Beatles, Manson, Beausoleil, Anger), it is by no means less absorbing. I am obsessed with this period in American cultural history—the crumbling of the hippie dream, circa ‘68-’72, of which the late Hunter S. Thompson spoke so eloquently in Fear and Loathing:
“What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create ... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.”

“We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Baddeley then delves further into this Zeitgeist, in which the freewheeling spirituality of the times morphed into something far more sinister. Manson’s ugly head arises again, and we are introduced to Robert de Grimston’s Process Church of the Final Judgement, as well as a significant number of lesser cults that arose from the ashes of the sixties. Here too we are introduced to Anton LaVey and The Church of Satan.
“The Church of Satan—unquestionably the most significant movement in modern Satanism—is a bizarre beast, sustained by a web of conflicting values and concepts. It is an anti-spiritual religion; a totalitarian doctrine of freedom; a cynical romanticism; a profoundly honest scam; a love of life, garbed in the symbols of death and fear.”
Founded in 1966, The Church of Satan was LaVey’s attempt to codify (and cash in on) the hopelessly incoherent and practically incomprehensible satanic tradition. To his credit, LaVey succeeded where many others before and since have failed. His success was due mostly to the straightforward, common-sense approach he took to his material. His Satanic Bible was written in easy-to-read language that could be grasped by anyone—far different from the willfully obscure texts of Crowley and other black magicians of the past.
“Much closer to a philosophy of pragmatism than any religious dogma, The Satanic Bible now reads like an early self-improvement manual.”
LaVey sneered at the hippies and their “half-baked Eastern mysticism and naïve philosophies of universal love, recognizing in the hippie ethos another Utopian movement—like Christianity—fatally flawed by its refusal to recognize the bestial nature of the human animal.”

LaVey’s Nine Satanic Statements:
  1. Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence.
  2. Satan represents vital existence instead of spiritual pipe dreams.
  3. Satan represents undefiled wisdom, instead of hypocritical self-deceit.
  4. Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it instead of love wasted on ingrates.
  5. Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek.
  6. Satan represents responsibility to the responsible instead of concern for psychic vampires.
  7. Satan represents man as just another animal—sometimes better, more often worse than those who walk on all fours—who, because of his “divine spiritual and intellectual development” has become the most vicious animal of all.
  8. Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification.
  9. Satan has been the best friend the Church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years.

I certainly do not stand behind most of these principles, but it certainly beats the typical media caricature of the devil worshipper. And while LaVey may have been a gifted and intelligent genius, he was also a world-class liar, manipulator, hustler, and charlatan. Although many of his grandiose claims were entirely fabricated, Baddeley dishes them out as if they were undisputed facts—another reason that it’s more than a little difficult to take this book seriously.

A brief run-down of the rest of the book:
  • Satanism in the cinema (Rosemary’s Baby, the Exorcist, the Omen, et al). A quick google would lead one to believe that an uncredited LaVey played Satan in Rosemary’s Baby, and I’ve long thought that as well, but apparently, this was merely one of his more widely believed legends.

  • “Satanic” music of the late sixties and early seventies (Coven, Black Widow, 13th Floor Elevators, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin).

  • Schisms and splinter groups in the seventies: The Temple of Set and other Satanic offshoots (Cathedral of the Fallen Angel, Brotherhood of the Ram, The Church of Satanic Brotherhood, Universal Church of Man, The Order of Satanic Templars, Order of the Nine Angles, to name just a few).

  • The PMRC and the Moral Majority. AC/DC, Kiss, Motley Crue, Judas Priest, Ozzy. Censorship, backward masking, the rise of religious fanatics in the eighties. Familiar stuff.

  • The “Genesis of Black Metal”: Witchfinder General, Mercyful Fate, Venom, Bathory, Witchfynde. When the music really started to get wicked.

  • Satanic Crime, Conspiracy, and the Ritual Abuse Myth. What is most disturbing about this chapter is the gullibility of the media and the public at large, who were led to believe in a non-existent worldwide Satanic conspiracy in the eighties.
    “None of the talk show hosts did as much to promote the Satanic conspiracy myth as Geraldo Rivera who, between 1987 and 1995, ran no less than four shows dedicated to Satanism. In the first of these, Geraldo claimed, ‘Estimates are that there are over one million Satanists in this country…The majority of them are linked in a highly organized, very secretive network. From small towns to large cities, they have attracted police and FBI attention to their Satanic ritual child abuse, child pornography, and grisly Satanic murders. The odds are that this is happening in your town.’”

  • Social Darwinism and Satanism in the 80s: The Werewolf Order, Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV, Coil, Current 93, Boyd Rice, right-wing fascism, Satanic links to high-ranking members of US and British Army Intelligence.

  • Thrash, Speed, and Death Metal: Metallica, Slayer, Possessed, Death, Cannibal Corpse, Deicide.

  • The “Second Coming of Black Metal”: Danzig (huh? black metal?), Emperor, Darkthrone, Mayhem, Burzum, etc.

  • War in Hell: The Death of Anton LaVey and Satanism in the 90s.

This book is fun and silly, if not an especially light-hearted read, but it plays extraordinarily loose with the facts, to its significant detriment. As for Satanism in general, there is certainly more to it than meets the eye, but it’s pretty difficult to take seriously as an ideology or doctrine.


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N/P German Oak - s/t

posted by Jonathan Wright at 9:02 AM EMAIL POST

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