H. P. Blavatsky’s influential The Secret Doctrine (1888), one of the foundation texts of Theosophy, contains chapters propagating an unembarrassed Satanism. Theosophical sympathy for the Devil also extended to the name of their journal Lucifer, and discussions conducted in it. To Blavatsky, Satan is a cultural hero akin to Prometheus. According to her reinterpretation of the Christian myth of the Fall in Genesis 3, Satan in the shape of the serpent brings gnosis and liberates mankind. The present article situates these ideas in a wider nineteenth-century context, where some poets and Socialist thinkers held similar ideas and a counter-hegemonic reading of the Fall had far-reaching feminist implications. Additionally, influences on Blavatsky from French occultism and research on Gnosticism are discussed, and the instrumental value of Satanist shock tactics is considered. The article concludes that esoteric ideas cannot be viewed in isolation from politics and the world at large. Rather, they should be analyzed both as part of a religious cosmology and as having strategic polemical and didactic functions related to political debates, or, at the very least, carrying potential entailments for the latter.

Using ethnographic method combined with analysis of primary sources like mass media appearances, song lyrics and websites, the article ex-amines ritualized self-injury in the Black Metal milieu. It is shown that this type of ascetic mortification is no aberration in the history of religions, but diverges from older forms of Satanism. Self-injury functions in Black Metal Satanism as a symbol of transgression and virile bravado, and as a means to display allegiance to the Satanic cause by permanently marking the body. It is typically described by practitioners as a blood sacrifice to Satan. This ritualization of self-injury, where it is explicitly framed as a practice completely different from anything occurring in a secular context, is part of a broader endeavor in the milieu, which seeks to re-enchant a late modernity perceived to be devoid of spiritual values. Increasing mass media attention to self-injury, there postulated as a (secular) mental health problem among adolescent girls, has therefore lessened its usefulness as a sacralized and masculine transgressive symbol. This, it is argued, explains the declining emphasis on it in the Satanic milieu in recent years.

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.

The article discusses how feminists, in particular in the period circa 1880–1930, have employed Satanism (i.e., a positive portrayal of the Devil) as a strategy in their endeavors. The central theme in this context is the construction of a counter-myth to the hegemonic Christian myth of Eve’s interaction with the Serpent/Satan in the Garden of Eden. This narrative has traditionally been used by conservative Christians to legitimate the subjugation of women. By making Eve and the Serpent heroic rebels against an oppressive patriarchal God, the social implications of the original myth are attacked. An important background for much of this insurrectionist rhetoric was the esoteric and pro-Satanic counter-myth constructed by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, chief ideologist of the influential Theosophical Society. Equally crucial was the fact that Satanism, as the article demonstrates, was well-established as a language of resistance, and had been employed by dissidents like Shelley and various socialists to provoke the bourgeoisie and display a complete rejection of hegemonic discourses. Concluding the article is a discussion of the paradoxes inherent when a counter-discourse is created, such as the reification and perpetuation of existent mythologies.

The article discusses some of the debates over the construction of gender taking place in the satanic and Left-hand Path (LHP) milieu, in particular the different varieties of upvaluing of “the feminine.” This includes disputes over what the term feminism entails, what the best strategies for women to gain more power are, and if “feminine” is an essence that can be contrasted with a fixed “masculine.”

Notions of gender polarity as necessary for magical practice or cosmic balance are given special attention, as are borrowings from feminist terminology (e.g. “patriar- chy”) by figures that are far from feminist in orientation. Aside from tex- tual sources, the article draws on communication with 44 informants.    

Three basic approaches to gender can be discerned in the milieu:  1) Gender as an insignificant category, 2) Gender as a natural polarity, 3) Gender as false consciousness. Of these, number two is the most common, while number one is quite seldom seen—gender is a major issue, one way or another. Femininity is frequently discussed by both men and women, while masculinity is a less popular topic. Femininity, then, is a particularly contested matter in the milieu.

Overall, the dominant view of gender is that the two sexes should be strictly dichotomized. The article concludes that with some exceptions most organizations in the milieu are numerically dominated by men. However, some important groups have periodically been led by women, and there are several female key producers of ideology. The partly reactionary views concerning gender issues held by some female leaders indicate that female leadership does not necessitate that a conventional feminism would permeate the organization. Further, it is difficult to see any absolute correlation between female leadership and upvaluing of the feminine in mythology. Moreover, the article demonstrates, such upvaluing does not in itself always signify an underlying ideology of political feminism.

The article discusses the innovative form of Satanism that arose in theNordic Black Metal milieu around 1989–1990. Its focus on theistic wor-ship of Satan, and evil as the highest value, set it apart from most otherknown forms of Satanism. Drawing on fanzines, records and interviews,it is demonstrated that this counter-discourse positioned itself in oppo-sition to LaVeyan Satanism – which was perceived as too humanitarian,positive and soft – to a greater extent than it focused on anti-Christianpolemics. The possible influence of role-playing games is also scruti-nized, and it is found that there are certain connections between BlackMetal Satanism and this phenomenon. Finally, the paradoxes inherentin a counter-discursive project like the celebration of evil are highlighted.

Around the year 1900, European discourse on art was becoming increasingly 'esotericized'. The 1890s saw esoteric art salons create a sensation in Paris, and art critics and theorists painted a picture of the true artist and the esotericist as overlapping figures. There was also at the time a conflict regarding mediumistic art, a phenomenon initially made popular through Spiritualist mediums. This debate, as we shall see, had interesting gendered dimensions. In what follows, I will discuss how the Swedish female esotericist and artist Tyra Kleen (1874-1951) attempted to situate herself in connection to the concept of the artist as a magus, and the tensions between the positive view of mediumism in Spiritualism and the more negative or cautious approach to it in Theosophy, as well as in relation to the attendant gender issues.

The article discusses the view, held by many nineteenth-century authors, of Leonardo da Vinci as an esotericist, and his La Gioconda as mysterious, sinister and filled with hidden signs. This “esoterization” of the painting and its creator was part of a broader tendency to view artists, both historical and contemporary, as magicians and mystics in some sense. Hereby, art became integrated into the endeavors of various esoteric groups and thinkers, and an originally secular Renaissance work was absorbed into a nineteenth-century “occulture” or “cultic milieu.”

Artikeln diskuterar uppfattningar om islam i svenska esoteriska grupper med inriktning mot satanism och left-hand path. Den amerikanska bakgrunden till ateistiska satanisters synsätt skisseras och kontroverserna som omgivit black metal-låttexter med islamfientligt innehåll analyseras. Hyllandet av den islamikata minoritetsreligionen yezidism i Sveriges mest inflytelserika left-hand path-rörelse får exemplifiera esoterikers försök till interkulturell konkordans. Yezidier kan härvid lyftas fram av dessa som “Mellanösterns satanister.” Ett nyckeltema är esoterikers önskan att förbli opolitiska (eller åtminstone fjärmade från dagspolitiken). Detta, påvisar artikeln, ter sig dock i dag svåruppnåeligt när det gäller förhållningssätt till islam.

A study of which types of Satanism were present before the founding of the Church of Satan in 1966. The conclusion is that very few individuals or organisations prior to 1966 could reasonably be labelled Satanists, but that a few examples can in fact be found, and that some of these should be considered important for the development of the forms of Satanism that we can observe today.

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.