A brief history of Satanism

Satanism and the concept of Satan has changed radically over the centuries.

Originally in Judeo-Christian traditions, Satan was seen as a part of creation, embodying the principle of freewill and defiance. Satan demonstrated that one could make choices contrary to God’s wishes. (In this context an ancient Jewish commentary notes that only when the potential to contravene God’s will arose, could creation become “very good” as opposed to merely “good”). Over the centuries this concept of Satan came to embody all that was evil and against God, a change attributable to two main influences:

• The view that everything had its opposite, and that God, all-good, must have an opposing deity too (preceding polytheistic religions also had their evil gods as well as good gods, Osiris and Set of the Ancient Egyptians being one example),
• With the spread of Christianity and Islam, Satan evolved as the embodiment of all that was trying to undermine God.

Allegations of organized worship of Satan can be traced to Europe during the Middle Ages. Fears of Satan worship surfaced during the fifteenth-century witchhunts, and Christian manuals were produced for depicting and combating Satanism, most notably the Malleus maleficarum (c. 1486) and Compendium maleficarum (c. 1620). Historians suggest the existence of a satanic cult in the royal court of Louis XIV that conducted “Black Masses” to mock the Catholic Mass.

In America, colonial-era New England experienced a period of witchcraft allegations and witch-hunting. Beyond the colonial witchcraft episode, satanic imagery has been perpetuated throughout American history by conservative Christian groups that believe that Satan is an active, personal presence in human affairs. Satan serves the function of explaining evil and misfortune, identifying heretical faiths, and bolstering Christian solidarity.

As Western society progressed from the reformation into the enlightenment period onwards (17th and 18th centuries), thinkers began to question the nature of evil, and Satan gradually transformed once again. Satanism came to signify a tradition which denied traditional religious paths in favor of a self-oriented path, rather than a path which favored evil.

In an older sense, Satanism also refers to unorthodox practices within Abrahamic religions deemed by an orthodoxy to be in opposition to the Abrahamic God. The earliest recorded instance of the word is in “A confutation of a booke (by Bp. Jewel) entitled An apologie of the Church of England,” by Thomas Harding (1565): ll, ii, 42 b, “Meaning the time when Luther first bringed to Germanie the poisoned cuppe of his heresies, blasphemies, and Satanismes.” As Martin Luther himself would have denied any link between his teachings and Satan, this use of the term Satanism was primarily pejorative. Many Satanists find such use of the term offensive.

References

• Gale Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd Ed. Macmillan Reference USA, 2004. ISBN 0-02-865733-0.
• Wikipedia article “Satanism.”