Satanism. The mere word conjures up all sorts of strange images: human sacrifice, sexual orgies and shadowy conspiracies. Unsurprisingly, as any scholar working on the topic will tell you, the reality of this phenomenon is more prosaic than what is commonly imagined. Certain aspects of it, which we will consider at the end of the chapter, are however almost as bizarre and startling as anything that can be imagined by paranoid Pentecostals or authors of lurid pulp horror. Between here and that point of extreme expressions, however, we first need to visit raucous English rakes, Romantic poets, anarchists, Decadents, a Danish dairy salesman, a supposed lion tamer and lover to Marilyn Monroe, a PSYOPS officer, and other colorful characters.

A fragmentation of self often informed the modernist quest for redefining the authorial self, a development explored in this chapter. The focus lies on the crisis of authorship as it manifested in the works of British writers and artists who claimed to have been inspired by fairies or even had their works produced by fairies. Occultist, antiquarian and artistic discourses concerning fairies could collide, as the chapter’s case study of William Butler Yeats shows. In a milieu where fairies were captured in photographs and cited as inspiration for paintings and literature, fairies could play an important role in experiments into fragmenting the authorial self, contributing to the modernist perception of the creative subject as passive and unstable, or even splintered, by ascribing artistic innovation to external entities.