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.”

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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.

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.

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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.

Recently, the label has made multiple forays into the gothic, not least by mining the aesthetics of climate collapse for several recent shows. (As one women’s magazine enthused: “Balenciaga brought the apocalypse to Paris and we’re here for it.”) So perhaps brand managers expected the disturbing imagery of young kids surrounded by bondage gear to be treated as just another subversive juxtaposition in the service of selling things. This time, however, the bourgeois were not so much thrillingly épaté as absolutely bloody incandescent — because they assumed that childhood itself was being sold.

Internet sleuths quickly tracked down details of an earlier Balenciaga campaign, in which background props had included a Supreme Court ruling on the illegality of child pornography, as well as a book by an artist controversial for depicting tortured children in his work. The two separate campaigns were quickly conflated by commentators, jointly presented as a case of paedophilic imagery gloating lasciviously in plain sight. Some observers went further, interpreting the placing of lettered packing tape in the most recent campaign as spelling out a reference to Baal, the Canaanite god who demanded child sacrifices.

In some quarters of the populist Right, where the legacy of QAnon still looms large, Christmas had come early. Tucker Carlson weighed in, bravely putting his own history of joking about child rape behind him, to connect the incident to groomer discourse and admonish the world to “stop sexualising kids”. Creepy geezer-bro Andrew Tate argued that Balenciaga was being deliberately open and explicit about paedophilic sympathies because the “people who are in charge of these brands, and of the Western world” are “Satanists” who deliberately “tell you what they are doing” in order to avoid karmic retribution for their sins. (Any reflection by Tate on earlier frank admissions of his that “I am absolutely sexist and I’m absolutely a misogynist” went unrecorded.)

Though — of course — I don’t know the truth of what actually happened at Balenciaga, it seems to me that the “deliberately paedophilic” interpretation is probably wrong. But that doesn’t mean the whole thing was an accident. As others have suggested, rather than acting as a direct manifestation of a paedophile conspiracy, it seems more likely that the campaigns were offering knowing nods to the aesthetics of paedophile conspiracies. Viewed in this light, the problem is not so much the imagery but that the proles on the internet hadn’t done a Masters in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths.

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This interpretation is in keeping with the modus operandi of high fashion. The higher the couture, and the more luxurious the brand, the more effort must be made to signal this status to the world. One traditional way to do this is by using hand-embroidered silks and other gorgeous fabrics to make clothes. But a reality-transcending brand image can also be achieved by dressing women up in totally impractical garments they can’t walk or get through doors in, or — as Balenciaga also recently did — by inducing a celebrity such as Kim Kardashian to wear ridiculous facemasks in public on a number of occasions.

As Louise Perry has argued, fears about paedophilia are often viewed by liberals as classically low-status, and associated by them with the “ignorant and credulous working classes”. And so, ironically sneering about low-status cultural fears about paedophiles, in a way only detectable to a few knowing onlookers, is automatically high-status. Job done. Or it would have been, had it not proved understandably impossible for most onlookers to tell the difference between representation and reality.

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As with Balenciaga’s attraction to the gothic, the fashion world more generally has long played about with savagery and psychic darkness for the purposes of selling people things they don’t need. In practice this often means glamourising various terrible things done to women. Alexander McQueen’s first two (visually stunning) collections were called “Jack the Ripper and his Victims” and “The Highland Rapes”. A 2007 Dolce & Gabbana ad campaign was highly suggestive of gang rape, and a 2003 Sisley campaign of bestiality between a woman and a bull.

Generally speaking, the fashion industry is littered with pictures of young women with a sexualised, exploited, fetishised, or downright quasi-paedophilic vibe. And female consumers apparently lap it up — perhaps because they tell themselves, accurately, that promoting abusive sex is not the direct point. As with everything else in the fashion world, nothing is positively asserted, but only referred to obliquely or quoted in order to generate interest in the clothes.

Yet when you look at some of the blank-eyed skeletal young models who still tend to be preferred by designers, it’s impossible to maintain that the casual brutality dished out to women in the representational realm of fashion doesn’t have consequences for the real one. Models are treated by the fashion world as living dolls you can pick from a book purely on the basis of appearance, then dress them up, choose their poses, control their food intake, and fly them around the world to serve you, until you don’t want them anymore. Granted, not every model is skinny or young these days, but even those who aren’t are just as heavily objectified — every personalised aspect of them being diminished to a commercially favourable appearance, interchangeable with some other commercially favourable appearance, should the originally-booked girl have a breakdown or get a breakout.

But at least most models are adults, technically anyway. For me, an under-explored aspect of the Balenciaga scandal is the apparent fact that parents somewhere have let their very young children be photographed in these campaigns. It is bad enough to represent grown adults as slack-jawed, vacant children, but a lot worse to turn children into slack-jawed, vacant little adults. Generally speaking, I marvel in horror at parents who use their children to make money by modelling or acting in adverts. No matter how much fun children allegedly have doing it, or how much money goes into their trust funds because of it, there is nothing about having one’s appearance objectified by strangers for money that’s compatible with healthy childhood development.

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And of course, it’s not just commercial modelling. Famous for admonishing us against using other humans as mere means to our ends, Kant also warned that “parents cannot regard their child as, in a manner, a thing of their own making”. Then again, he wasn’t on Insta. The internet is full of influencers using their own children for likes and clicks. If social media has turned many of us into narcissists, then it seems to have turned our children into narcissistic extensions of ourselves — only there to say something flattering about who we are. A generation of kids are growing up, made supremely conscious of how their bodies and faces look as they go about their daily lives, before they really know anything else about themselves. And we made them that way.

Moral panics get off the ground partly because they pick up on unconscious forces genuinely rippling through a culture. It doesn’t seem to me a coincidence that there’s increasing prurient interest in paedophilia and grooming at the moment, when at the same time there have never been so many culturally acceptable ways to objectify your own child. Paedophilia — which of course exists, and nobody should pretend different — involves the egregious and permanently life-changing treatment of a living human child as a sexual object. But there are subtler ways to use children as means to adult ends. We can sign them up to a modelling agency. We can put them in a beauty pageant. We can upload their pictures with amusing captions on Facebook, in a way that makes us look like good parents.

So the original fear about Balenciaga — that they are selling kids — was perhaps not entirely wrong. If not kids, then collectively we are at least selling childhoods. And the hideous teddy bear fetish bags highlighted in the doomed ad campaign now seem to me to be an uncannily apt symbol of what we are doing. A much-beloved figure, originally invested with so much innocence, joy, and love, now turned into something to be used.

The whole story evoked The Exorcist, which came out a few years before I was born and was considered the ne plus ultra of shocking content into my tween years in the nineties. But even setting aside the fact that the other “side” seems to have won, Nobell’s story evoked less shock than nostalgia.

In 2021, even the idea of a priest as the main protagonist in a battle between good and evil feels, well, very 1973. These days, while there’s plenty of Satanist imagery about, overtly anti-Christian symbols seem either banal (Lil Nas selling Satan trainers) or just naff (WitchTok).

But if devilish imagery mostly feels a bit cringe, the Devil himself has gone mainstream. If being deliberately anti-Christian pour épater la bourgeoisie feels exhausted, for the new, post-Christian bourgeoisie Satan now reads like the good guy. And in the hands of this class, the Devil’s proverbial pride, self-regard and refusal to yield isn’t just celebrated — it’s on its way to becoming the established religion of the United States of America.

America’s Satanic Temple, founded in 2012, is still small in terms of absolute membership. But it hit the headlines last week when it announced plans to sue the government of Texas for restricting women’s ability to abort a pregnancy. In response, Salon magazine declared it the “last, best hope” for protecting abortion rights in the state. The Satanic Temple has an impressive track record in self-promotion via outrage, such as founding a Satanist after-school club. It goes without saying that in our febrile online political climate, the convergence of “abortion”, “ritual”, “lawsuit” and “Satan” resulted in a lot of publicity for the group.

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But how did we get to a point where an online magazine with 10 million monthly readers is hailing Satanists as last-ditch heroes? The truth is that our modern sympathy for the devil has deep roots. And Americans in particular are highly susceptible.

Perhaps Milton is to blame; Cromwell’s chief propagandist is famous for creating the most sympathetic Satan in literary history. In Milton’s 1663 Biblical epic Paradise Lost, Satan both longs for the Heaven he’s renounced, but stubbornly refuses to be ruled, declaring: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven”.

This matters, because Milton wrestled with core questions of law, authority and personal freedom that roiled at the heart of the Protestant Reformation. And the Reformation was foundational to the modern West (and especially to America). And tracing the history of that rebellion brings us, today, to the startling conclusion that post-Christian America is an increasingly Satanist regime.

Paradise Lost was written against a backdrop of religious ferment. Following Martin Luther’s 1517 rejection of the constraining, legalistic force of Catholic law, Civil War England was a chaos of competing sects. For in seeking to free Christians from a Church reformers claimed was rigid and corrupt, the Protestants opened themselves up to the possibility that all laws, rules and constraints might be replaced by faith. A great deal of early Protestant turmoil was driven by people arguing over what, if any, limits there should be to the rebellion against doctrine.

Some took it to extremes. One of Luther’s colleagues, Johann Agricola, preached in 1525 that even the Ten Commandments belong “in the courthouse, not the pulpit”. “To the gallows with Moses!” he declared. Luther was having none of it, dubbing this extreme rejection of legalism as “antinomian” heresy, meaning opposition to “nomos”, or law.

Laurence Clarkson, an antinomian contemporary of Milton, even wrote in one 1640 pamphlet that sin is fake news: “sin hath its conception only in the imagination; therefore; so long as the act was in God, or nakedly produced by God, it was as holy as God”.

As they say today: believe in yourself, and you can do anything. Though Milton painted such extreme rejections of authority and rules as — literally — Satanic, the appealingly anti-heroic nature of his Satan suggests he had mixed feelings. He wasn’t the last writer to be thus ambivalent. A century on, the antinomian celebration of self-expression accelerated in the Romantic era.

The engraver and poet William Blake declared in his 1790 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that “no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments… Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules”. Meanwhile, of course, across the pond Milton’s republicanism was a key influence in shaping the American rebellion against government from the Old World.

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Fast forward another century on, and it’s not such a big step from thinking God’s grace gives you the freedom to do what you want, to dispensing with the God bit. The occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) pursued a doctrine of individual will unconstrained by law or stuffy morality. He called himself “The Beast 666”, experimented with sex and drugs and in 1923 was expelled from Sicily after an associate died in mysterious circumstances, reportedly after drinking the blood of a sacrificed cat.

We tend to think of such deliberately shocking behaviour as the essence of “Satanism”. But Crowley’s core legacy was stripping the last remnants of Christianity from antinomian rebellion. His most famous dictum, written in The Book of the Law (1909), was: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

He wasn’t the only one. Already in 1882, Friedrich Nietszche declared God dead and the human will to power as the only real source of good. In America, meanwhile, the individualist celebration of mankind became ever less Christian. Though she disavowed him later, the American writer Ayn Rand (1905-1982), called Nietzsche her “favourite philosopher” in the 1930s. Rand’s doctrine, Objectivism, argues selfishness is both noble and good: “It’s the hardest thing in the world – to do what we want,” argues one character in Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead, “And it takes the greatest kind of courage”.

Both Crowley and Rand pursued the liberation of individual will from taboo, custom, law and even (as practitioners of ceremonial magic hoped) reality itself. These influences fused again in 1966 California, with Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan. Lavey drew on both Rand and Crowley to reject all collectivist constraints on individual behaviour and emphasise the primacy of individual desire. “There is a beast in man,” he declared, “that should be exercised, not exorcised.”

LaVey, a former carnival worker, took a highly theatrical approach to exercising that beast, incorporating dark ceremonies and all the props you’d expect to find in a horror-movie depiction of Satanism (or indeed in quite a lot of heavy metal). But if he was still rebelling against Christianity, the core Satanist philosophy of radical, godless freedom took less provocative form elsewhere in 1966 California in, for example, the “self-actualisation” promoted by Abraham Maslow, at the Esalen Institute.

So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that individual autonomy and self-empowerment is the central aim of the Satanic Temple’s abortion ritual, the “ceremonial affirmation of self-worth and bodily autonomy” at the heart of the group’s current Texas court case.

But this doesn’t mean you need to become a devout Satanist to embrace the belief that self-empowerment is our real purpose in life, and that guilt is an unwarranted intrusion. Aleister Crowley wrote in The Book of the Law that “Every man and woman is a star”. And from Rand to Maslow to a trillion “empowering” Pinterest memes today, a variant of this dictum is a core message of the self-help industry.

Self-help writer Julia Cameron, for example, closely echoes Ayn Rand in her 1992 bestseller The Artist’s Way when she declares: “What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do”. Elsewhere, if you want a bit more ritual with your individualism, but the heavy-metal Church of Satan vibe isn’t your thing, there’s the occultism-meets-pamper-day aesthetic of Arin Murphy-Hiscock’s 2019 The Witch’s Guide To Self-Care.

Echoing Crowley, Murphy-Hiscock tells us: “Living as your authentic self means following a very individual path”. If, for instance, you find yourself plagued by inconvenient feelings of guilt as a consequence of doing exactly what you want, Murphy-Hiscock suggests a ritual for “releasing” those feelings.

No wonder the modern Satanic Temple is now (as the Guardian suggested in 2019) hard to distinguish from the liberal “good guys”. At its core Satanism is simply the doctrine of untrammelled individualism, shorn of any link to the divine. To put it another way: Satanists are just very, very liberal.

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Milton saw Satan’s refusal to submit to any law (however ambivalently) as the sin of pride. Now, in our post-Christian world of self-actualisation, pride is no longer a sin. Rather, it’s a vital part of becoming fully yourself. As body modification micro-celebrity Farrah Flawless put it: “I do not believe in God, I don’t worship the Devil, but yes I am a Satanist which means I am my own god. I worship myself’.

Indeed, it’s so far from being a sin that sacralised self-worship now has an annual religious festival. This new, increasingly pseudo-religious summer event, simply known as “Pride Month”, may have started out as a twentieth-century campaign for gay and lesbian equality. But what began as a justified and (at root deeply Christian) campaign for equal treatment for gay and lesbian people has long since morphed into a corporate-sponsored celebration of individualism that today horrifies many gay and lesbian people.

Pinterest, the internet’s motherlode of self-help platitudes, succinctly summed up the new faith in an official post this year. As a religious holiday, Pride isn’t about gay rights; it’s where we “celebrate identity and self-expression in all its forms”. Inasmuch as Milton’s ambivalence about rebellion lives on, it’s in the now-traditional argument about whether there are any forms of individual desire still off-limits for proud celebration.

At least on the now majority post-Christian East and West coasts of America, this sacralisation of individual freedom and desire is increasingly assertive in its efforts to expunge Christianity as America’s official faith.

A less overt challenge than those posed by Aleister Crowley or Anton LaVey, but a continuation of the same argument. This time, though, the boot is on the other foot. The side with imperial institutional and military backing is the faith of self-expression, individual will and indomitable pride.