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The devilish appeal of Satanism It preaches radical individualism

Satan still has the power to offend. Credit: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty

Satan still has the power to offend. Credit: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty


January 14, 2025   6 mins

Jared Mammon is not the sort of person you’d associate with the Prince of Darkness. A mild-mannered Floridian with a day job in finance — hence his alias — he could easily pass under a demon hunter’s radar. Yet when he isn’t making sales, the 41-year-old folds away his suit and transforms into a reverend for the Church of Satan (CoS). Wallowing in the aesthetic of the dark side, he conducts destruction rituals to channel moments of anger and has attended public Satanic rituals complete with a “nude altar”.

Mammon also works hard to apply his diabolical ethos to everyday life, reading the Satanic Bible and doing all he can to resist the Nine Satanic Sins. Contrary to popular wisdom, this doesn’t involve sacrificing babies and drinking bats’ blood. Rather, the CoS tenets involve “kindness to those who deserve it”; “undefiled wisdom”, and “vital existence instead of spiritual pipe dreams”.

It’s less about the devil, then, and more about the rebel angel. While there are many different Satanist organisations, each with their own emphasis, the common denominator is a heightened sense of individualism, a repurposing of religious iconography, and a rejection of tired social norms. Satanists may not believe in a literal Satan, but they do find a lot of power in the surrounding symbolism: not least the power to offend. That’s a gift to anyone who likes their non-belief served up with a side of spooky theatrics, or who boasts a well-honed trolling instinct.

As Mammon puts it: “You’ll find militant atheists who are so anti-theistic that they can’t allow for any fun in their lives. We do not believe in any supernatural anything. But we love a good show. We love a good time.”

The upshot is that, in recent years, Satanists have thrived across the West and beyond. Mammon’s CoS keeps membership numbers a guarded secret, but the Satanic Temple (TST), a rival organisation appropriately headquartered in Salem, Massachusetts, now boasts around 600,000 subscribers to its mailing list alongside a host of lively congregations. That’s echoed, too, by pushes for more formal recognition. Late last year, for instance, the Temple of Satan: Satanists and Luciferians of Chile applied for recognition as an official religious organisation, five years after TST achieved similar status in the US. According to UK census data, the number of practising Satanists grew almost threefold between 2011 and 2021.

It’s a far cry from centuries past, where devil worship was feared and despised. “In the Middle Ages, and into the Reformation period, the devil was understood as a creature that could physically manifest himself in the external world,” explains Professor Darren Oldridge, a historian of religion at the University of Worcester.

In practice, these ideas could manifest themselves in bewildering ways. The Devil became a useful scapegoat for dissent, with heterodox groups frequently accused of Satanism. Take the 13th century German “Luciferians” who were supposed to have defecated on sacramental bread. Between the 14th and 17th centuries, hundreds of innocent people were accused of allying themselves with Satan, often for reasons as tenuous as having a third nipple or a sick cow nearby.

This kind of unease re-emerged in the Eighties with the Satanic Panic, when contemporary social anxieties once again took the form of paranoid, devil-fearing narratives. Conspiracies about Satanic cults were rife, while the police passed on “educational” materials about how to spot a devil-worshipper. Although the panic started to dissipate in the Nineties, the Pizzagate scandal in 2016 showed us these fears are never too far from the surface. Mammon argues that, for Satanists, this cultural malaise serves as a kind of “shield”, deterring people who “are just going to judge a book by its cover”.

Not that everyone persisted in characterising Satanism so crudely. Thanks to the Scientific Revolution, what Oldridge calls the “external devil” was largely replaced by an “inner” adversary inveigling hearts and minds. By the Enlightenment, educated people were starting to doubt the devil’s very existence. Romantic thinkers, writing in the wake of the French and American revolutions, therefore began to reframe Satan as a kind of rebellious anti-hero. Under their reading of Paradise Lost, John Milton’s epic 17th-century poem, Satan becomes less the embodiment of evil, and more a courageous freethinker opposing God’s arbitrary tyranny. As William Blake put it, Milton “was of the Devil’s party” without realising.

That sense of nonconformity is clear when you speak to Satanists today. As Mammon himself says, he “agreed with absolutely all” the Satanic Bible when he first encountered it as a young person. For him, there was something galvanising about finding a text that meshed with his iconoclastic impulses. Not only was it atheistic, criticising religion as a man-made construction; it was a lot of fun, promoting a heady blend of ritual and personal exploration.

“That sense of nonconformity is clear when you speak to Satanists today.”

The Satanic Bible is the work of Anton Szandor LaVey, who founded the CoS on 30 April 1966. A provocateur who courted media attention, he painted his house black, dubiously claimed Transylvanian lineage, dressed in plastic horns and a cape, and was supposedly implicated in Jayne Mansfield’s fatal car crash — via a curse he placed on her boyfriend.

Yet despite his diabolical posturing, LaVey wasn’t interested in evildoing. In an echo of the Romantics, rather, he wanted to take a stand against Judeo-Christian dogma, which he saw as flecked with ignorance and hypocrisy. Taking the basic premise that there is no God, and that the universe is blindly indifferent to human affairs, he sought to create a model of human flourishing that placed the personal will at its centre.

Drawing on Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, LaVey crafted the Nine Satanic Statements, a collection of aphorisms such as: “Satan represents vital existence instead of spiritual pipe dreams!” and “Satan represents undefiled wisdom instead of hypocritical self-deceit!”. Some years later, he followed up with the Nine Satanic Sins. These include stupidity, pretentiousness, herd conformity and — gallingly for those who haven’t mastered their Halloween costumes — lack of aesthetics. “Satanism is the world’s first carnal religion,” is how Mammon puts it. “It’s the first religion that’s only about your human experience here, and enjoying life as you define it.”

For LeVey, then, Satan serves as a figurehead for humanity’s revolutionary instincts. Though he always had esoteric leanings — he said magicians could harness natural forces that had yet to be discovered by science — he certainly wasn’t affiliating himself with the conceptions of Satan familiar to cowl-clad peasants. Rather, the CoS, along with TST, doesn’t see Satan as anything more than an archetype. “The original Hebrew word Satan meant adversary, opponent or accuser,” explains Mammon. “You see it in the Old Testament all the time. It’s not referring to a specific deity or even to the Christian bad guy.”

And if that speaks once more to the lure of Satanism — not as an organised faith but as a way of rejecting the mainstream — you can spot similar flexibility in the religion’s rituals. All CoS ceremonies must have something to indicate their start and end, usually a bell or a gong. But beyond that, it’s up to the individual Satanist. TST, founded in 2013, is similarly open-ended. While it’s the occasional Black Mass that commands the headlines, practitioners are encouraged to simply participate in practices they find personally meaningful. A common example is the “unbaptism” — a rejection of religious rites performed on you as a child — which may use fake blood and “skin safe fire gel”.

And while CoS rejects overtly political gestures, the TST has brought their iconoclasm to the public sphere. Notable stunts have included erecting an eight-foot-tall bronze statue of Baphomet, a response to a Ten Commandments monument in Oklahoma State Capitol. The TST has also founded After School Satan Clubs, challenging Christian programming in public schools. And where the religious Right has sunk its teeth into abortion rights, TST has opened online abortion clinics for people who want to take part in its “religious abortion ritual”.

In Chile, members of the Temple of Satan have become infamous for defying norms in what remains a deeply Catholic country. It’s one thing, after all, to use Satanic iconography in broadly secular countries like the UK: even here, the Evil One’s sigil and pentagram retain the power to shock. It’s quite another to do in Chile, where 51% people believe in the reality of the devil. Here, local Satanists assemble in small groups to chant and burn black candles.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these actions have provoked a response from angry Christians. In the US, to give one example, a “national prayer ministry” called Intercessors for America prayed that a TST gathering would be foiled. In Chile, the main Christian denominations have joined forces to denounce the Temple of Satan. “The history of Satanism is well known [and] it has often been the cause of tragedies,” wrote their leaders in a joint statement.

Reflecting his own sect’s apolitical stance, Mammon is unimpressed by the TST’s antics. Yet if the reverend doesn’t go out of his way to antagonise his Christian neighbours, you nonetheless get the feeling that he’s pushing back against his Baptist upbringing, along the way asserting his own sense of individual identity. As he puts it: “I was that six-year-old on Sunday who asked how penguins stayed cold on the ark, and couldn’t get answers from my teachers.”

Other Satanists reject their former faiths more explicitly, with many joining TST in response to religious trauma. “It’s only through a sort of Freudian, internalised, naturalised view of the devil that people can identify as Satanists,” Oldridge says of the “Hail Satans” and the Bible destructions. “They’re not actually worshipping external devils: they’re celebrating aspects of themselves that have been suppressed.”

It makes sense that many former believers, scarred by their evangelical upbringings, would be keen to unleash those inner demons. At a time when traditional religion is on the wane — and spiritual expression is becoming more personalised than ever — today’s Satanists have chosen to align themselves with a powerful symbol of autonomy and free thought.

It seems bizarre that in an era of declining Christianity and religiosity, Satanism would still be a form of protest, a way to see individuals and get away from the crowd. If your antitheses are declining, is it much more of a protest? But by being so untethered from modern society, Satanism has become a form of individuality in its own right, no longer representing the mere antithesis of Christianity. In an era of individualism, Satanism has a devilish appeal.


Abi Millar is a journalist, and author of The Spirituality Gap: Searching for Meaning in a Secular Age, due to be published in January 2025.


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Buck Rodgers
Buck Rodgers
2 days ago

Pretty amusing that satan appears to have convinced his followers that he doesn’t exist.

I’m not religious, but I’m in no way certain that I’m right. Just imagine the regret these people, who have convinced themselves that satan stands for the values of modern progressivism, would experience if they were to discover hell is real.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
2 days ago
Reply to  Buck Rodgers

I honestly think i’d prefer hell; i’d rather be fried than bored to death in heaven.

And of that, i’m absolutely satan..

jane baker
jane baker
2 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

I think either EltonJohn or Bernie Taupin got it right …cold as Hell. If you’ve ever had to wait half an hour at this time of year actually on a deeply freezing train platform in the dark shade of old industrial buildings for a late train you will FEEL the power of Mordor and know Hell is this cold that’s more than cold. But I do like Machiavellis answer when asked if he wanted to go to Heaven or Hell when he died. Hell he replied,because all my friends will be there,the Popes,the Cardinals,the Dukes,the Princes etc !

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
2 days ago
Reply to  jane baker

Sounds like my local railway station!

Maverick Melonsmith
Maverick Melonsmith
1 day ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Full of Popes and Cardinals?

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
2 days ago
Reply to  jane baker

Brilliant.

Caradog Wiliams
Caradog Wiliams
2 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

As I once said to another person from Manchester, on this site a couple of years ago. Satan is clearly where sentences contain a lot of ‘i’ instead of ‘I’. Pretentious isn’t strong enough.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
2 days ago

Sanctimonious is plenty strong enough though. Wear it.

Adam Bartlett
Adam Bartlett
2 days ago

Ok, though it does say in the Bible that laughter is the best Medicine. ( I think the ‘i’s were setting up the “Certain” joke.) Anyway, it was Baudelaire who first said about the Devils greatest trick being to convince mankind he didn’t exist, and according to some he too was of the Devil’s party. In Baudelaire’s time, the First Estate (Priests) had until recently enjoyed even more prestige than scientists had pre-Covid. This let to corruption, and corrupt clergy don’t naturally communicate the beauty of God’s love for us, hence I guess boring you & Baudelaireto death. I hope LL gets to experience the real deal soon.

Michael Mcelwee
Michael Mcelwee
2 days ago

To cling to the idea of Satin shows only what hypocrites Modernity makes of us, as if there were something (anything) to cling to. David Hume said: “It seems evident that men are carried by natural instinct to repose their faith in their senses and that without any reasoning, or even before the use of reason, we always suppose an external universe which depends not on our perception but would exist though we and every sensible creature were absent or annihilated. Even the animal creation preserve this belief in external objects. But this universal and primary opinion of mankind is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy, which teaches that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception, without any immediate intercourse between the mind and the object.” Heidegger likewise spoke of a “world view,” by which he meant not a view of the world, but rather the world understood as a view (a picture). “Existence as a whole is now understood in such a way that it only exists in the first place insofar as it is produced by man who perceives or produces it. The world view does not change from a formally medieval one into a modern one, but this very thing, that the world becomes a view, distinguishes the essence of modernity.”

Right-Wing Hippie
Right-Wing Hippie
2 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

They don’t give you what you want in Hell; they’d bore you to death there, too.

Maverick Melonsmith
Maverick Melonsmith
1 day ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

You’re right. I think Hell sounds a lot more fun.

Last edited 1 day ago by Maverick Melonsmith
Mike Rees
Mike Rees
2 days ago

.When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”― G.K. Chesterton

Ian Bates
Ian Bates
2 days ago

The usual MSM premise that Christianity is in decline. A lazy assumption. Stems from the usual Western-centric view of the world. While Christianity’s influence may be waning in certain Western societies, it remains a powerful and growing force worldwide. The religion is actually expanding significantly in the Global South, with projections showing an increase from 2.2 billion adherents in 2010 to 2.9 billion by 2050. Africa in particular is experiencing explosive Christian growth and is expected to become Christianity’s largest continental base by 2050.
Satanism may have evolved beyond purely oppositional religious protest into its own form of individualistic expression, this transformation likely stems from broader cultural shifts rather than Christianity’s supposed decline. In fact, Satanism’s appeal as a vehicle for individualism might better be understood within the context of increasing religious pluralism and the fracturing of traditional social structures, rather than as a response to Christianity’s global trajectory.
The “devilish appeal” of Satanism in an individualistic age may say more about changes in how people express nonconformity than about any fundamental weakening of traditional religious institutions.

Adam Bartlett
Adam Bartlett
2 days ago
Reply to  Ian Bates

I up voted your comment as it’s mostly true. But not sure there was lazy assumption in the article. The author’s implicitly talking about the West. And even in global South, it’s unclear that Christianity isn’t in decline in a spiritual sense, even if the numbers are looking rosy. (Actually we don’t have to worry much about the numbers even here in the West, at least not from a long term perspective – Demographic trends discussed in ‘Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?’ are now even more irreversibly baked in than they were when that book was published back in 2010.)
It’s harder to discern the spiritual health of our faith than it is to keep up with the demographics. But recently I’m increasingly hearing from Brazilians, Africans & Indians that faith in their countries has become a bit of a scam, that maybe it’s mainly Mammon folk are serving the world over. If you’re adverse to laziness that’s good, as there is much hard work & prayer for believers to do to restore the church to full health.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
2 days ago
Reply to  Ian Bates

I picked up on that misrepresentation too, particularly as data shows there to be a steady growth of Christianity over the past century, with an average annual growth rate of 1.25%. As of 2020, Christians made up approximately 31.7% of the world’s population. Over the last 150 years, Christianity has consistently comprised around one-third of the global population, even as its centre of gravity has shifted to the Majority World, for those interested in the source data see the Lausanne Movement.
I’m also interested in who people think Satan is? The ancient biblical authors offer subtle clues where this being is at work behind the scenes, animating division and hatred between humans. They also use a variety of images to describe this being. It’s a snake, or a sea dragon, or a dark desert creature, or the king of death and the grave. He’s also given many titles like, “tempter,” or “the evil one,” or “the devil,” which in Greek means “the slanderer.”
But is his name “Satan”? Actually no. “Satan” is not a name; it’s another one of these titles, which is why in Hebrew, it has the word “the” in front of it. “The satan” means “the adversary” because he isn’t for anything; rather, he’s anti-everything, working through lies to drag us back into darkness and disorder.
The modern day visual image of a horned red and black figure with cloven hooves is straight out of Dante’s Inferno.

Tyler Durden
Tyler Durden
2 days ago

Good piece. Satanism will continue to expand in tandem with the renewed interest in Christianity amongst the young and the old.
However, I’ve always associated modern US Satanism with Gen X culture so I’m not sure how well it will translate for 20somethings now. After all, there is a difference between the black mass stuff and the feeling that the truly Satanic – or at least diabolical – lies behind the trans and assisted suicide movements.

jane baker
jane baker
2 days ago

Very stupid people,they will find out.

Dumetrius
Dumetrius
2 days ago

Cosplay for the blackened & befuddled.

Maverick Melonsmith
Maverick Melonsmith
1 day ago
Reply to  Dumetrius

Maybe, but it’s fun (unlike Christianity).

Benedict Waterson
Benedict Waterson
2 days ago

How genuinely transgressive is a certified ‘club for non-conformists’?
It just seems like a new form of conformism for a culture that overvalues non-conformism.
”Enjoying life as you define it” doesn’t seem like a very promising indicator of originality, it just sounds like a line which would fit in to any contemporary advertisement.
If the cultural mainstream is already stridently individualist, then how rebellious is it to flaunt some kind of silly group identity as a certified ‘individualist.’
When New Atheism was fashionable it became striking how many of the most vocal came from very oppressive religious upbringings, and how their new focus on atheism was really only a newly transmuted sort of evangelical creed.
The rhetoric and clothing might have been different, but the underlying psychology hadn’t changed at all.

Last edited 2 days ago by Benedict Waterson
Maverick Melonsmith
Maverick Melonsmith
3 days ago

That all seems like good, healthy fun!

Milton Gibbon
Milton Gibbon
2 days ago

The whole point of Paradise Lost was that Milton had been “of the Devil’s party” and did come to realise it so intensely that he used it to craft the greatest epic poem in the english language. William Blake was a poser who wrote pastiches of Milton’s own works without the breadth of experience or the depth of knowledge to understand the writer’s motivations. He admired what Milton had regretted.

jane baker
jane baker
2 days ago

On reflection those are yesterdays people. It’s now hip to join Christianity in particular the Orthodox form. The ones who do it to cut a striking and ‘cool’ figure,and many do,will be fleeing to Christianity soon. Because thats where the in crowd is now.

Right-Wing Hippie
Right-Wing Hippie
2 days ago

A provocateur who courted media attention, he painted his house black, dubiously claimed Transylvanian lineage, dressed in plastic horns and a cape, and was supposedly implicated in Jayne Mansfield’s fatal car crash — via a curse he placed on her boyfriend.
Bad aim?

John Tyler
John Tyler
2 days ago

“ an era of declining Christianity and religiosity”
Interestingly, periods of decline in the institutional churches (religion by codified rules and hierarchical organisation) original Christianity (worship in spirit and caring for each other) seems to survive and thrive.

Maverick Melonsmith
Maverick Melonsmith
1 day ago
Reply to  John Tyler

You know of a form of Christianity where people “worship in spirit” and “care for each other”? Where would we find it?

craig fagan
craig fagan
2 days ago

Was it not one of these two organisations that obsessed about covid masking?

Brad Mountz
Brad Mountz
2 days ago

Likely there are some pubically recognizable faces, especially USA politicians, who have joined this stupidity and adopted the philosophy of individualism as a pathway to a misguided hedonistic freedom.

“I the People …. “. That’s a wonderful manifesto for a Statanist and our Leftist Progressives who believe in individualism over history or duty. You might well piss on the heads of the Founding Fathers for even more enjoyment and good fun. Most people just want “good fun” to relax or to enjoy some relief from the daily grind. They go to the gym or stop and have a pint with a mate or take their family out to a park to blow off some steam and recalibrate for another day. Not not this clan. They find the meaning of life standing naked at an alter spewing foolishness and pretending everyday is Halloween. Fools will be fools!

This article depicts a version of Mardi Gras and is as empty and unappealing as those it describes.

mike otter
mike otter
2 days ago

The opponents of humanity and their false gods are: The Earth, the fauna and flora on the Earth and the greater universe beyond. So what “people of the ( Abrahamic) book” say when they mean Satan is “Nature”. I don’t think we need to guess who’s going to win in the end. The light will take all of us one day.