Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology (review)

Compared with the broader field of neopagan religion, in which it is sometimes (and incorrectly) subsumed, religious Satanism remains an under-researched and underreported topic. More work has probably been done on the illusory satanists conjured by ritual abuse fabulists than on self-proclaimed and practicing satanists, a deficiency that Jesper Aagaard Petersen is aiming to remedy with this anthology devoted to contemporary currents of religious Satanism. The book, which is principally sociological in orientation, is divided into three main sections: studies of "history, tradition, and legitimacy"; regional examinations, primarily of Northern and Eastern Europe satanic subcultures; and a collection of emic satanic documents. Along with practicing satanists, the book's contributors include practicing journalists, professional sociologists and anthropologists, and scholar-practitioners.

Setting the stage with a thorough introduction, Peterson establishes the important point that contemporary Satanism has largely divorced itself from the Christian context that once lent the satanic current the bulk of its meanings and much of its frisson. For this reason, the interpretation of Satanism's strictly oppositional rhetorical characteristics needs to be balanced with a more constructive and sociologically nuanced account of what different varieties of satanists think and do. Beyond the generally inchoate if forceful adolescent Satanism that Peterson dubs "reactive," he sees two main categories for this edgy but often high-minded cult of the individual: a rationalist strain, established and typified by Anton LaVey, that emphasizes a realist and even skeptical Epicureanism; and an esoteric strain, which more closely resembles other theistic and occult currents.

To characterize the particular religious orientation of Satanism, Peterson invokes a useful concept that Paul Heelas developed to explain the far different domain of the New Age: that of a "self-religion." Both satanists and New Agers are devoted to the psychospiritual realization of the self, although the satanic self is a far more adversarial, individualistic, and self-gratifying beast. In the more esoteric strains, the satanic self becomes mystically reified as well; as Asbjørn Dyrendal shows in his sharp discussion of the neo-Satanic Temple of Set later in the volume, the Setian path aims at the transformation of the practitioner into a solitary metaphysical monad. This satanic individualism is one of the reasons that Peterson is keen to remind us, toward the close of his introduction, that satanists, for all their rebellion, are in some ways quite at home in the contemporary world. Indeed, satanic and neosatanic paths can be considered exemplary if unusual demonstrations of how religious forms positively engage an era defined by late capitalist ideology, widespread disenchantment, and the paradoxical drive to ground meaning and agency in a self that the Internet alone ensures is increasingly flexible.

The volume opens with an essay by Graham Harvey that, building on observations he first made in a seminal 1995 essay on British Satanism, focuses on the practice of othering that simultaneously characterizes how satanists position themselves in society and how they are constructed by outsiders, and especially by their sometimes hysterical accusers. The rest of the essays in the volume's first section focus on the crucial legacy of LaVey, a trickster showman who stumbled into greatness. James R. Lewis looks at LaVey's best-selling The Satanic Bible (1969), demonstrating how this rather hodgepodge and hastily constructed text continues to serve—rather ironically, given its purported opposition to religions of the Book—as an authoritative scripture, at once a continually relevant source of doctrine and an organizational tool in the contests of legitimization that followed the inevitable eclipse of LaVey's charismatic command—a process of fragmentation, routinization, and institutional contests that Maxwell Davies ably delineates in his contribution to the volume. In what could be read as an example of how far LaVey's "word" has spread, Kathleen Lowney beautifully describes her encounter with a group of mall-haunting teenage satanists in a small town in the southern United States, though she unfortunately spends more...