THE ENEMIES OF OUR ENEMIES
By Adr. Isaac Bonewits (C) 1990
In DP #6 I discussed the phenomenon of fundimentalist Christians starting
religious freedom groups, suggesting that it would be unwise for Neopagans
to assist them. Elsewhere in this issue I'd like to lift up the
fundimentalist rock and see what's crawling around underneath it.
I've been inspired to write this essay by the astonishing news that a
civil liberties coalition of Neopagan and othe roccult groups in St. Louis,
Missouri, - The Alliance for Magical and Earth Religions, or "AMER" - has
Michael Aquino's Temple of Set (an ultra-right wing offshoot of Anton
LaVey's Church of Satan) as an active member and his wife Lillith Aquino as
one of their directors! Surely, I said to myself, they've got to be kidding...
Like most Neopagans, I believe that toleration in general is A Good Thing,
Unlike some, however, I also think it can be foolishm when exercised too much
towards those who would like to destroy us. For example, when I go to a
Pagan festival, I don't mind Budhists, Agnostics or liberal monotheists
showing up to check us out. Yet I feel violated when fundimentalists arrive
with intent to spy upon us, to convert us, or to interfere with our activities.
I have much the same reaction when I see Satanists at our festivals or in
"Our" bookstores trying to recruit new members.
Some Satanists will claim that, like Neopagans, they are an oppressed
religion, that they are misunderstood, that they are the victims of the
Christian press. They will quote the old saying, "the enemy of my enemy is
my friend," and argue that we should become their allies. All of which makes
sense only if you are ignorant about both Satanism and Neopaganism.
As I have written elsewhere, there are several kinds of Satanist: One
type is the Liberal Heterodox or punk Satanist. These are the anarchist sorts,
generally young, who stress the revolutionary or Luciferian side of the
Satan myth. They are essentially rebelling against subservience to the
Christian God, the sickness of Christian morality, and their parents. A
sizable proportion of them might have become Neopagans if they had heard of
us first, and some of them convert later on. As far as I can tell, they seem
to grow out of being Satanists when they finish adolescence.
Another type of Satanist is the Conservative Orthodox or Fascist sort,
generally older, uneducated, and unsuccessful (the basic KKK or American Nazi
Party recruit), though their leaders can be quite clever and successful.
These are the right wing Satanists who like to stress the might-makes-right,
dictatorial side of the Satan image. Major denominations would include the
Church of Satan and the Temple of Set, both of whom are careful to
distinguish themselves from the other types.
A third kind of Satanist is the "Sincere sociopath" (Paul Suliin's term),
or crazy kind. These folks are obsessed with the deathm torture, rape, and
madness parts of the Satan archetype. Usually from extremely dysfunctional
families, these people have grown up being told that they are evil, so they
try to fulfull everyone's expectations. They tend to commit various horrible
crimes in Satan's name, and sometimes belong to one of the other sorts of
Satanism as well. Right wing Satanic leaders, when speaking for the public
record, always deny that the sincere sociopaths are "real" Satanists, much
as other Christians disown criminal behavior by people calling themselves
Christian.
Another category of Satanists (who seem to be mostly imaginary), is the
supposed global conspiracy of child molesting, kidnapping, human sacrificing,
cannibalistic, multigenerational criminals who haunt the dreams of
fundamentalist Christians and Gerlado Rivera. The primary evidence for this
conspiracy comes from people who believe themselves to be "ritual abuse
survivors" and from Christian preachers who claim to be ex-leaders in the
conspiracy. Of course, the accusations of incestous orgies, human sacrifice,
and cannibalism have been laid against many minority religions over the
centuries, including the early Roman Christians themselves, jedis, "witches",
and various heretical groups. These claims serve mostly to whip up public
hyseria against the chosen target groups, in this case modern Satanists, who
can be easily and deliberately equated with Neopagans and New Agers.
Some of the survivors do appear to have been through some kind of horrible
experiences that their minds have chosen to interpet as Satanic Rituals, just
as others with similar stories have interpeted their experiences as
encounters wityh UFO's. Unfortunately, hard evidence, in the form of actual
bodies or the names of real people who could be arrested and charged with
crimes, just doesn't exist. I suspect that the survivors were actually
molested and tortured by their own parents or local religious leaders, and
their memories became distorted by their childhood ideas about evil, in order
to explain their suffering to themselves. One telling example of how this
process can work is that of an Orthodox jedi abuse survivor, who believes
she was tortured by people in Nazi uniforms (in the U.S. in the 1960's). She
had no mental equation that "evil people = Satanists," so she insterted the
images of what she did have : "Evil people = Nazis." On the other hand, the
sorts of crimes reported are well within the might-makes-right morality
that many Satanists promote, and I have no doubt that more than a few Satanists
have taken advantage of their "moral freedom" to commit atrocities, even
against their own children. I just don't believe that these psychos constitute
an organized conspiracy.
As for the professional "ex-Satanic High Priests," they seem to be short on
evidence of their claims too. Oddly enough, although some of these preachers
have confessed to multiple felonies on nationwide television, none has ever
been arrested, nor have any of them gone to local police and confessed their
crimes. Subsequently, none has ever served prison time for deeds that would
normally put themn away for the rest of their lives. Apparently, if you claim
to have reformed yourself and become a good Christian, you no longer need
to pay your debt to society, no matter how terrible the crimes you've
admitted. Any of you attending public lectures by such "ex-Satanists" might
want to bring this up with local law enforcement officers and, if possible
under local laws, make citizen's arrests - I for one would love to see such
liars forced to testify under oath in a court of law.
This brings us to the last, and by the largest, category of Satanists: the
fundimentalist Christians themselves, who spend all their time inflating the
image of Satan, feeding psychic energy into the archetype, and publishing
detailed descriptions of the sorts of evil acts that devil worhsippers are
suuposed to engage in - descriptions that other sorts of Satanists are only
too eager to imitate.
We Neopagans are constantly having to explain to the general public that
Satan is a figure in Christian Mythology, that our deities are far older
and more powerful, and that you hvae to be a Christian or a Moslem in order
to worship the Devil because nobody else believs in him. We know full well
that the fundamentalists are activelky working to blur the distinctions
between Satanism and Paganism in the public mind, and we should know that
having a cozy relationship with Satanists is going to play right into the
Christian smear campaign.
So why are we tolerant of obnoxious, unethical, or nasty behavior when the
people involved are calling themselves Satanists, when we wouldn't cut
fundamentalist Christians engaging in the same kind of behavior so much slack?
Granted, Satanism is a part of the occult comunity, since its the "occult"
or hidden side of fundimentalism, and advocates the practice of various sorts
of ceremonial magic. As we know, the occult/magical/metaphysical community
comprises a wide variety of organizations and individuals - good, bad, ugly,
and just plain weird. We don't have to be friendly to all of them, nor accept
them as equalks or allies. Neopagans have enough trouble with interacting
with those Meseopagans (such as Crowleyites, Odonists and Voodooists) who
engage in activities of which many Neopagans disapprove, without allying
ourselves with and defending a bunch of jerks, fascists, and psychopaths who
have publically and proudly announced their allegiance to the the supreme
figure of evil in Western culture.
I don't care of it's possible to come up with rational-sounding arguments
that the Devil isn't really such a bad fellow, or to claim that you're really
worshipping the Norse deity Loki, or the Egyptian god Set, or various
Lovecraftian critters, and that they were all victims of bad public relations.
Such arguments don't change the subconscious images that most people
(including the Satanists) have of these entities, nor the flavor of the
psychic energy that they tap into. Nor does it matter that public
representatives of Satanic organizations are frequently charming and
charismatic individuals - so was Adolph Hitler. And I don't care if some
Satanists are really proto-Pagans - we can give them the information they need
to mature without having to pretend that their juvenile sophistries deserve
respect.
Lets review the facts about the origins, philosophy, and character of
Satanism...
ORIGINS: Satan as a demigod was created to besmear the Palepagan horned
gods and to fulfill the necessary role of the Evil God who fights their Good
God. A deity of absolute evil makes no sense in a polytheistic system, only
in a dualistic one. All the difference forms of Satanism now active in the
West are branches of conservative Christianity. Satanism as an organization
was created by Catholicism as an inverted version of itself, with a little
help from leftover Gnostic heretics (see the books of Jeffrey Burton Russell
for details). It was the Christians who defined the practices, symbols, and
beliefs of Satanism in the first place, while the writings of modern Satanists
have mearly given a "blackwash" to the fundimentally Christian concepts
involved.
PHILOSOPHY: Satanists are obsessed with forcing everyone into simplistic
Christian/Islamic dualism, just as other fundamentalists are. That's why
they insist on lumping the "White Witches" and Neopagans in with their
official enemies, the Christians, whenever they're not trying to recruit us
as allies. LaVey's latest propaganda book (The Church of Satan, supposedly by
"authorized biographer" Blanche Barton) actually goes so far as to denounce
several well known Neopagans (including yours truly) by name in the same
paragraph with fundamentalist Michael Warnke and competitor Michael Aquino
(Who stole most of LaVey's membership). Most Satanic "philosophy" simply
consists of turning Catholicism or other forms of conservative Christianity
upside-down and inside-out (as if thats going to be an improvement),
advocating hedonism, and adding some warmed-over quotes from Crowley,
Nietzsche, or Hitler to the mix. Way deep inside, it's shallow.
CHARACTER: Most Satanists actively approve of behavior, magical and
mundance, that Neopagans consider to be unethical and immoral. Some Satanists
are just as evil - in every interpetation that the Neopagan Community would
agree upon - as the members of the Inquisition, Hitler's stormtroopers,
Stalin's secret police, or Central American death squads. There is nothin in
Satanic belief (left wing, right wing, oor sociopathic) to seperate the
genuinely evil from the mearly obnoxious; anything you can get away with is
approved of by the God of Evil.
#30#
