THE SATANIC CURRENT

Ave Satanas! Hail Satan!

Ok, for those of you who have not clicked off to a porn site, let me explain where I’m going with this.

There is a major controversy in Chaos Magick circles about Satan and the Satanic Current. There are those who really like it and there are those who consider it to be a an inferior form of religion-based magick that appeals to adolescents with nothing better to do with their time.

And there are those image-conscious ninnies who get all weirded out about everything. Those folks we can ignore right now, they don’t matter.

So why am I putting this thing on this site? It’s very simple. Of the major currents in Chaos, it is the easiest one to write about because all the work has been done already!

Let me start by saying I consider Satanism to be a major current, as I just said. All modern magick has some elements in it, going back to the blessed work of Uncle Al Crowley. It has been a part of the underground magick stream since the despised Xtians conquered the Roman world and civilization died for ages with it. So if we do magick, we cannot escape this current. It is part and parcel of it even if it is not named. Even the traditional Solomonic Theurgists, with all their names of God in garbled Hebrew, (and no language has been made more hash of), in the end deal with angels fallen and impure. Even the high, ceremonial magicks of the Golden Dawn types have it hidden in there and the poor, deluded Wiccans, Lucifer help them, spent a number of years trying to find an identity and yes, Satanism played a role. One of their major, founding books, Mastering Witchcraft, by Paul Huson, had as part of its self-initiation process the genuinely traditional (in a belief structure with more phoney traditions than the despised Old Guard) saying of the Lord’s Prayer backwards, which was supposed to call up The Devil! (In fact when I found my old copy I discovered that I had made a notation in the margin, “If the devil appears, that’s your problem.”

So if we do magick, especially in a BDSM context, we cannot forget Old Nick.

So how do we deal with him?

First we have to define him. For our purposes we can forget the Xtian notion of the fallen Archangel. We are dealing here with a massive Godform, an egregore, created by millions of minds concentrating on him. If he did not exist before Xtianity, he did afterwards, just like the Virgin Mary (because if the historic mother of Jesus was anything, a virgin sure weren’t it). And it is as this egregore that we draw the Satanic current from.

So let us view Satan not as an angel but as a god, as much a god as Loki, Kokapelli, Odin and Krishna. He’s out there, he has a personality and he does things for people. And he is an energy source.

For our purposes, Satan is to be regarded as the god a rebels, of individualists, of the intellectual creative process (which requires absolute independence of thought) and, lest we forget, sex and sexuality. Satan is the supreme eroticist.

He is the god of freedom and self-indulgence.

Is it any wonder that such a force would be considered threatening? Broader cultures do not like freedom. It makes things complicated. So such a deity is going to be the Bad Guy and the God of Bad Guys.

But there are those who cannot live without freedom and will broke no opposition to indulgence and they find in Satan their patron and their support.

Now, historically, S&M and Satanism were pretty closely intertwined. The original Gardnerians were Satanists who just did not have the guts to use the name and Gardner himself had a very interesting personal museum on the Isle of Man with a figure of Satan as the goat-man prominent in the center of it. There was a reason for this. People, particularly of the social class that could indulge in S&M (as opposed to the scum from the factory floor who merely beat their wives out of the brutality associated with their class) were also very heavily acculturated in a world that was extremely sexually repressed. We must not forget that the notion of sexual freedom as a basic human right is very very recent, as late as 1963 the psychiatrist who wrote the introduction to The Velvet Underground said, in all seriousness, that the only purpose of sex was procreation. We would view that idea as total nonsense, but at that time, and before, that was very much the dominant view.

Coming out of such a culture, people needed something to get their consciences out of the way, especially if they were into S&M. Ordinary extra-marital fucking was bad enough, but to add floggings... So such folk often gravitated to minor Satanist groups and cults, hidden in the dark rooms of large cities. If you should ever see the cult sequence in Eyes Wide Shut, you will get an idea of what these groups were like. The ritual was a way of making everything all right.

This continued well into the 1980s. In fact I had a porno bondage magazine purchased in 1973 which had a photo-section based on a fake Satanic ritual. And in the late 1980s I was a guest at parties in a house where the dungeon furniture had lot of Satanic symbolism on it, particularly the goat head. And while there was, by that time, no ritual other than the ones we now associate with racking and whacking, there is not a doubt that there were other things going on that we were not a part of.

All well and good, but what does this mean to us?

The invocation of gods brings power to magick and to the magician. It is like we become a part of them and they can work through us to bring about our ends. As our ends and theirs are defined as the same by the choice of deity, it becomes a mutual arrangement advantageous to both parties. And we are absolutely free to choose whichever source we want at the moment. Remember, everything is permitted. For BDSM in particular, the Satanic Current is particularly useful and desirable.

BDSMers are rebels against a social norm. That is part of our self-definition. Now, admittedly, some do a rather poor job of it because they get into D/S and that requires that they affirm authority, but pure BDSM, binding, beating and raising consciousness and getting our rocks off all at the same time, is still very much a counter-cultural act. By invoking Satan, by connecting to the Satanic current, we affirm that rebellion. For Satan is the god of Rebels.

There are few forms of personal expression more individualistic than BDSM. Everyone has their own style and way of doing things. Satan is the god of Individualists.

As far as the creative process goes, well everyone into BDSM uses that. It is necessary to keep from getting bored!

Sex and sexuality, that goes without saying.

There is no question, but that for BDSM, Satanism definitely works! The Invocation of Satan can provide a level of energy to a scene that no other belief structure can match.

And just think of all the fun you will have in the local playspace when you call upon Satan as you begin to flog your submissive. If that doesn’t send the nervous nellies out the door faster than breath play I don’t know what will.

Regia Satanas, Ave Satanas, Hail Satan.