Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page would have been more qualified he inserted mystical symbols into the band’s imagery, owned an occult bookshop in London and was a keen collector of the works. The Rolling Stones expressed their Sympathy and called an album Their Satanic Majesties Request, but nobody considered them serious satanists. To be labelled “the devil’s music”, as jazz, blues and rock’n’roll all were, was the best possible branding. Only occasionally has he been taken as a literal figure of evil more often, the devil represents the outsider, the provocateur, the one with the best tunes. You could say that is in keeping with Satan’s place in pop culture.
“The rebel against tyranny, who stands in stark contrast to that mindless superstition and that mob mentality that causes people to give themselves the moral self-licensing to create the ‘other’… and thereby victimise people.” The Satanic Temple’s interpretation is closer to that of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, Greaves says. It really does speak to us in a very pointed and poignant way about our place in our culture and what our affirmative values are … and, of course, it defines what we oppose: these kinds of theocratic norms and authoritarian structures.” So why call it “satanism”? “The metaphor of Satan is just as important to a lot of us as it would be to anybody who takes it literally because we grew up in a Judaeo-Christian culture. The first of its seven tenets, for example, is: “One should strive to act with compassion and empathy towards all creatures in accordance with reason.” The Satanic Temple is nontheistic, and its principles are broadly liberal humanism. Nor does he sacrifice babies or serve a secret coven. Greaves doesn’t believe in God, Satan, “evil” or anything supernatural, he says. The Great Beast: the occultist Aleister Crowley. “Up to that point, it had been E pluribus unum – ‘from many, one’ – which was a much better motto.”
The words “under God” were added to the US pledge of allegiance in 1954, and “In God we trust” first printed on US currency in 1956 – so as to differentiate the US from the godless communists. There is no mention of God in the US constitution, he points out, but there is a first amendment protecting freedom of expression and religion. Harvard-educated, he often sounds as if he is reading from an academic text. Pale-skinned, well-groomed and dressed entirely in black, and with one clouded eye, he could have walked off the set of a teen vampire series. Greaves is exactly what you would expect the earthly ambassador of Satan to look like. That’s just a scary circumstance for us to be in.” “More and more, they try to whittle away the rights of others and define us as a Christian nation, to the extent that religious liberty applies to them alone. “It became very apparent that there was a real need for what we were doing,” says Lucien Greaves, the Satanic Temple’s spokesman and de-facto leader. And when the Oklahoma state capitol permitted the installation of a Ten Commandments sculpture in its grounds, the Satanic Temple campaigned to erect its own 8ft-high statue of Baphomet, the goat-headed, cloven-hoofed deity. When the Child Evangelism Fellowship set up the pro-Christian Good News clubs in US public schools, the Satanic Temple introduced its own After School Satan clubs – promoting scientific rationalism. The council chose to drop the prayers altogether. Where the city council of Phoenix, Arizona, began its meetings with a Christian prayer, for example, the Satanic Temple demanded that satanic prayers should also be said.
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Those forces would also include the 20,000 people who recently signed an online petition condemning the Amazon TV adaptation of the cult novel Good Omens – about a demon and an angel – as “another step to make satanism appear normal”. There’s the Trump administration, in league with the US religious right, which has been aggressively pushing anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ legislation, not to mention engaging in overt Islamophobia. They include such groups as the Westboro Baptist church, notorious for its hate speech against LGBTQ people, Jews, Muslims and other groups, all of which it condemns as “satanic frauds”. The forces aligned against Satan have become so objectionable that he no longer looks like the bad guy. But recently, to paraphrase the Rolling Stones, the nature of his game has been puzzling us. O ver the past century of popular culture, Satan has acquired the souls of delta blues musicians, incited youth rebellions, possessed small children and goats, impregnated unsuspecting women and transmitted evil through backwards lyrics on heavy metal records.