The Invention of Satanism by Asbjørn Dyrendal, James R. Lewis, and Jesper AA. Petersen (review)

2016 was a fruitful year for scholars interested in the history of Satanism. Two different, but equally important volumes on the topic appeared that year from the Oxford University Press—Ruben van Luijk's Children of Lucifer and The Invention of Satanism by Asbjørn Dyrendal, James R. Lewis, and Jesper Aa. Petersen. The two books complement each other. While van Luijk concentrates on the historical construction ofSatanism primarily during the nineteenth century, the authors of the current volume focus on contemporary development of Satanism as self-identity and organized phenomenon beginning with the founding of the Church of Satan in 1966 (3).

That does not mean, however, that the volume completely ignores the precursors of twentieth-century Satanism; these are addressed in the first two chapters. The first chapter examines what the authors call "the folklore of Satanism," i.e. a construction of narratives about a "sinister, anti-human force within the society that allied with powers of darkness;" narratives that have existed in the majority of human cultures, for instance, as stories about evil witches (13–14). The second chapter deals with the Romantic image of Satan as developed in the writings of such authors as John Milton (28) and remained popular throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

After this necessary introduction, the authors turn to Anton LaVey's efforts to create an organized Satanic community, the Church of Satan. Chapters 3 and 4 are dedicated, respectively, to its history and to its pivotal text, The Satanic Bible. The Church of Satan is presented as the central actor in construction of "satanic milieu," a concept proposed by Petersen as a development of Colin Campbell's model of "cultic milieu." According to Petersen, satanic milieu emerged in the late 1960s in large part due to the efforts of LaVey and, with respect to cultic milieu, was a separate but closely connected phenomenon (64). This concept of "milieu" highlights that Satanism from the very beginning existed not as a solid organizational structure with a clear hierarchy, but as a movement that included a gamut of voices sharing some common ideas but differing substantially in other respects. The role of the Church of Satan then, according to the authors, was not so much to incorporate all satanists within its organizational structure but to promote Satanism as a self-identity that was then spread and developed by others.

Satanism is presented by the authors as a religious phenomenon, specifically as a form of "self-religion" similar to those associated with the New Age movement, in which the central concern is "not a God distinct from and outside human life, but a this-worldly focus that sacralizes the individual self" (4). With the loosely organized structure of the "milieu" and the clear focus on individualism, schisms have been inevitable in the Church of Satan since its creation. One such schism, led by Michael Aquino in the mid-1970s, resulted in the creation of an alternative satanic organization, the Temple of Set. The authors maintain that while LaVey sought to establish "an antinomian self-religion for productive misfits, with a (cynically) carnivalesque take on life, and no supernaturalism," Aquino decided to turn back to the esoteric roots of the Church of Satan and "constructed an esoteric order for students of the occult, designed to school new generations of'isolate intelligences' to emulate Set and survive the body" (70). The split illustrates the difference between "rationalist" (LaVey) and "esoteric" (Aquino) types of Satanism. There is also a third type, "reactive" Satanism, "a catch-all category of popu-lar Satanism, inverted Christianity, and symbolic rebellion" (5).

Following the historical development during the next decade, the fifth chapter portrays the Satanism scare of the 1980s, also known as the satanic panic, that emerged, in part, as...