Theistic Satanism

well the theistic Satanism of satanic panic is mostly drawn from that intersection of hysterical fundie Xtians and heavy metal shock tactics (I thought you were pretty familiar with the latter?) But Satan for Xtians is never particularly about death (Xtians love death! leads to eternal life dontchaknow) but about punishment, damnation etc. Death is kinda not relevant.

Kind of. I was mostly curious if "devil worshippers" in the classic Christian definition really existed anywhere or if Satanism truly is just indulgent humanism with Satan as a figurehead for 99% of them.

Mostly cos I would find it hard to rectify believing in God and the Devil, being threatened with Hell, and choosing Satan anyway. No matter how much you hate you some God, most would grin and bear it rather than be flambeed.

But I suppose that's why most of them don't exist outside of soccer mom fantasies re: satanic panic.

Xpost

if Satanism truly is just indulgent humanism with Satan as a figurehead for 99% of them.

yeah it's this

Death worship mainly seems to be for those who favor pro-capital punishment while wearing the image of a man publicly executed on a crucifix and pretending to drink his blood on a weekly basis.

do actual death cults exist in history, not worship of a death-related deity but an actual theology of annihilation? or is this just something ppl use to describe theologies (like ISIS, which Obama recently called a death cult) that they don't like?

America as a country seems pretty death cult-y tbh

but no I believe it's the latter

pro-capital punishment != death cult behavior imo, except in the histrionic partisan sense, since they don't call for inmate execution as itself a valorous fulfillment of death, but as punishment/justice.

I don't really see how a theology of annihilation would actually propagate, one would assume all of its adherents would shortly be dead

http://vhemt.org/

pro-capital punishment != death cult behavior imo, except in the histrionic partisan sense, since they don't call for inmate execution as itself a valorous fulfillment of death, but as punishment/justice.

― Mordy, Wednesday, May 27, 2015 1:56 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not interested in the justifications behind anti-human practices. Killing is killing, I thought God said that was bad.

God said murder was bad. He mandated death penalties in the Torah for a variety of crimes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_capital_crimes_in_the_Torah

God kills a shit ton of people

not breeding /= death cult imo

death cult theology must be something like: compulsory auto-annihilation following total annihilation of non-believers - just to be internally consistent

Maybe Final Fantasy X or something.

http://anti-cosmos.orgfree.com/download/Temple-of-The-Black-Light.pdf

The tradition represented by the TOTBL can best be described as the essence of Anti-Cosmic Gnosticism expressed through the sinister forms of traditional Diabolism. Within our tradition, the Dark Ones (Gods and Goddesses of Sitra Ahra) represent the anti- archonic impulse of the Deus Absconditus and the manifested aspect of the second and left emanation from the Ain Sof. Thus, for us, Satan-Lucifer is the first and highest manifestation of the Black Light, and the opposer and destroyer of the cosmic prison/causal structures established by the tyrant demiurge.

totally incoherent cosmology. the sitra ahra doesn't have 'gods' and 'goddesses,' and I've never heard of a 'second and left emanation' from the ain sof. maybe it means second and left in the sefirah order which is... hod - splendor/glory.

lol

maybe they just mean evil gods? in general. i don't really understand any of it. i looked them up when i was searching for info into the leader of the band Dissection. he was way into that group. before he committed suicide in a ritual satanic way.

tbh i don't expect much from satanists in the way of a complex theology + kudos to the guy for having the ultimate courage of his convictions

Within the TOTBL many forms of magical systems are studied and practiced, parallel to each other, as it is our conviction that the keys that will unlock the prison gates of the cosmic archons are spread throughout many different esoteric traditions. Our main goal is therefore to rediscover, remanifest, adapt and create the antinomian forms of spiritual practice that will lead the adept to Gnosis, hastening the revolution back towards the Unbound Fullness that was before the ordering of Chaos and the fall into causality.

very catholic which i like

stupid causality! when will we be free of it

A true Death Cult seems mostly like a fabrication. Even if one existed, it would kill itself off, possibly leaving no trace. Heaven's Gate seems like a legit example, though the motivations were a little more complicated than simply wanting death (transcending the human body into UFO's).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_%28religious_group%29

yeah Heaven's Gate didn't worship death, they were just a variation on the standard Xtian immortality riff

death was a means to an end, not the end in itself

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Muerte

has there ever been a movement in any portion of the world of any stature that actually resembled the Theistic Satanism that soccer moms feared actually existed in the States in the 80s?

No and there never has been. It is an age-old strawman that has existed to justify xenophobia and the supremacy of a strict status quo. The Moral Majority was going by the same playbook they have used for a thousand years.

It is kind of disheartening to see the trope live on in TV and movies to this day. A lot of people that should know better think there really were satanic cults. That stuff just makes for a good boogeyman. It gets your heart racing. You will have a higher chance of remembering the commercials.

you're on a Beelzebub kick tonight eh?

Yeah the straw that broke the camels back was an ad for something called "The Witch" only spelt "The VVitch". Turns out AV Club reviewed it today:

given the film’s self-advertised stabs at historical accuracy, one could read this singular shocker as something even more disturbing: a kind of fright-flick answer to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, presenting a revisionist national history in which true evil exists and religious hysteria is the proper response to it.

http://www.avclub.com/review/17th-century-horror-witch-troubling-multiple-level-232153

What if the architects and accusers of the Salem witch trials had it right the whole time? What if the women of their community really were in league with the devil, conspiring in black of night and deep of woods?

this is the fallacy behind all Satanic panic.

That is also basically the idea behind Lords of Salem.

^ Which was disappointing, but given Rob's dunderheaded will-to-sleaze, not terribly offensive.

a kind of fright-flick answer to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, presenting a revisionist national history in which true evil exists and religious hysteria is the proper response to it.

Fuck. I was really, really hoping it wouldn't take that angle. Wound up pissed of by (the otherwise decent) Bone Tomahawk and (the irredeemably shitty) Green Inferno for similar reasons.

The equivalent of building a movie around "but what if The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were TRUE?!?" or "but what if all black people really WERE voodoo drug rapists?!?" Yeah, fucking great, go with that.

OFF, pissed OFF

yeah idk that a fictional account of real salem witches is quite the same as elders of ziyon or black voodoo drug rapists

It's not the same as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But what contendo is saying is that its the same as creating a fictional movie that posits that book as being based in fact.

the same in that they're both taking forgeries/illegitimate panics and positing them as being true i agree, but not the same in that there aren't dozens of countries worldwide today where the salem witch trials are commonly accepted as true

there's a clear difference in the groups targeted/othered - with the Salem Witch Trials it wasn't all women or even a specific set of apostates that were targeted

Not big on fictions that cheerfully demonize the historically oppressed/persecuted/slaughtered. Matter of taste, I suppose...

oh don't be a disingenuous shit contenderizer, you're smart enough to understand the distinction

but not the same in that there aren't dozens of countries worldwide today where the salem witch trials are commonly accepted as true

But there are dozens of countries worldwide today where women are butchered daily for acting weird or looking at someone funny. Plus ca change...

I may be a shit, but never disingenuous. Being a delicate flower, I find such tales offensive.

u could just be like yeah i could see how making a movie about a book that is still a best seller in a number of countries is maybe a bridge farther than a fictional version of the salem witch trials that assumes it's true. you know, like this one

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMTI3MDI2NDc3Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNDQ2MzQyMQ@@._V1_UY1200_CR103,0,630,1200_AL_.jpg

http://images.redbox.com/Images/EPC/Kiosk/4934.jpg

Yeah, my pearl-clutching definitely occurs on a sliding scale.

in a way hocus pocus is even worse for making light of the terrible tragedy of the salem witch trials -- and intended for children too, which obv a horror film would not be

i think modern depictions do add to the general culture and sometimes in a bad way. look at how people were upset True Detective didn't "follow through" on its cult ambitions, all that stuff is just made up, yet people intuited there was some truth to it. also we can shrug off theism/satanism as things of the past but let's not ignore many of the lunatics running the country believe in this stuff literally and use it (whether the Scalia-style "the devil exists and is real" or "Hollywood/liberals are evil and have no morals") to oppress those typically oppressed by the long history of Satanic panic. reading through a primary source witch hunting book is a first-hand look at horrific abuse of state/patriarchal supremacy through the ages and a cultural status quo that still has its grip on the world, as many here have noted.

it isn't simply that women were targeted as witches, it underlines much greater and culture-wide problems with anyone outside the status quo. it is not limited to "witches" killed any more than modern state corruption is limited to unarmed people killed.

all that stuff is just made up, yet people intuited there was some truth to it.

that wasn't really the issue there, the issue was with shitty storytelling/plotting

i think we shouldn't make anymore movies that involve/use themes about culture-wide problems, esp horror films.

For stuff like Hocus-Pocus, more that it's kind of gross and embarrassing, sticks happy baby bunny flowers on a misogynist trope with unpleasant historical associations. I don't have to chortle my way through Song of the South, either.

I'm curious whether any metal bands ever played straight with the sociopath from the Torah. You know, all the good news like Psalm 137:9 "How blessed will be the one who seizes your young children and pulverizes them against the cliff!"

― Sanpaku

Funeral Mist - Blessed Curse. Lyrics are all verbatim Deuteronomy verses, and the sample is from an exposition of Psalm 75:8.

I'd place the root at Zoroastrianism

That's were the monotheistic religions obtained the devil, afterlife, heaven, hell, messianism, and free will

since we are leaving Satanism and the that heirarchy of spiritual beings / magical knowledge, you can easily look past Zoroastrianism. Akhenaten instituted a monotheistic cult in Egypt a thousand years before your date, and had existed for a thousand years before then. the religion of the ancient Egyptians features heavily in the OT, famously as Moses had a showdown vs Egyptian magicians, who could pretty much match everything YHWH can do. clearly the people who wrote the Books of Moses were studied in the Egyptian mysteries. the Egyptian religious tradition itself date back to at least 3000BC. The Book of the Dead dates back to 2400BC and includes a heaven (The Field of Reeds or The Horizon) and afterlife with a final judgement (the weighing of the heart by Ammit the Eater of Souls) as well as complex metaphysical cosmology with evil forces battling good. Osiris is the sort of central Christ figure, the son of God, a virgin birth who is betrayed, killed, and brought back to life.

when discussing Theistic Satanism imo the monotheism/polytheism dichotomy becomes meaningless. once you accept a heirarchy of multiple supernatural entities all w unique personalities interacting w one another then is it really monotheism anymore?

Adam can you rec some book(s) on these Egyptian-Old Testament crosscurrents? (Well not crosscurrents I guess... currents).

Egypt was the hedgemon over Palestine for much of the Bronze age, so I wouldn't discount an influence, but the scholars seem to think the OT arose from the Canaanite tradition, with El as the father/sky god, Asherah his consort, Baal as the Osiris/Christ-like son and reborn character. Each locality had its patron that syncretized El with local flavor: Chemosh in Moab, Bethel in Tyre, Yahweh in Edom and thence Judea. The priests of the Jerusalem temple took the unusual stance forbidding worship of other members of the pantheon, but the populace largely ignored this until after the priestly castes returned from Babylon in 539 BCE.

However, the question for this thread is where did a devil, a force of evil, come into the picture. Its largely absent from the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, or Canaanite pantheons. No such creature appears in the older parts of the Torah. ha-Satan was a member of El/Yahweh's court, a legal adversary, but not a force of evil. Only with the 2nd century BCE Septuagint is "ha-Satan" translated as the Greek diabolos (slanderer). So, somewhere between when most of the OT was redacted in the 6th century, and sometime in the 2nd century, did a force of evil come into its interpretation.

Egypt was week during this period. Achaemenid Persia was the suzerain. And the state religion of Persia had a devil like entity, Ahriman.

http://i43.tower.com/images/mm100761259/book-dead-e-a-wallis-budge-hardcover-cover-art.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61iTLcVVr%2BL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

These are pretty good. I don't know what people think of E. A. Wallis Budge, many of the esoteric writers were of questionable character, but I find his translations pretty intriguing. Any book on late dynasty Egyptian art will probably have good stuff on Roman-Christian influences and conquests. Coptics and other groups gouged away at temple carvings, destroying entire walls of art and culture thousands of years old, as well as placing Coptic graffiti on top of the Egyptian artwork. In some temples this messy mix of cultures creates and interesting layered effect, looking through time, akin to looking at a cross-section of the Earth in the Grand Canyon.

I don't think where did evil come from is the question of this thread. There has been different forms in cultures all over the world. It is a universe thing, just as a creation myth.

I thought this thread title dealt with specifically: age-old Satanic death cults, the boogey man that the Inquisition, Ronald Reagan, and Geraldo warned you about: are they real?

No, they aren't, and never were.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51NeZf9XSnL._SX327_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

This should be required reading for the thread. Compendium Maleficarum is a witch-hunter's manual written in Latin by Francesco Maria Guazzo, and published in Milan, Italy in 1608. It's like the worst police blotter ever, all crimes stamped with "Unsolved".

I do not like green eggs and ham
My soul belongs to Abalam
Hell's fire pit will soon emerge
You'll feel the sting of Apollyon's scourge
Behold the Antichrist's rebirth
His armies shall invade the Earth
Fire, screaming, gnashing teeth
Our future home, it lies beneath
As for your delicacy
It is a triviality
Put down that plate of eggs and ham
And lead the Horde, oh Sam-I-Am

This American Life 666: The Theme That Shall Not Be Named

Goat blood taste like shit

goat blood: not the greatest of all time

I'm just gonna leave this here:

https://goatsmegma.bandcamp.com

What a name

Every time this thread gets bumped I'm reminded of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YErFwJX0HKE

Notice me!