I like a
good Satanic conjuration as much as the next bloke. But, after a number of years experimenting
with LaVeyan magic—which admittedly has a lot to teach on many levels—I can’t
be involved with it anymore. I say this
for a spiritual, metaphysical reason, but not for a superstitious one. I don’t believe my soul is in peril. I could just as easily write, “The Problem
with Christian Fundamentalism,” and make the same arguments about Yahweh. Fortunately, I haven’t had much experience
with that. So I’m going to stick with
LaVey and his pet creation, Satan.
The problem is simple and binary: either I’ve made Satan up and am using him as a convenient archetype in my magical sendings or he has an objective independent existence. He’s either a chaos-magic construction dependent on my magical creativity or a unique being separate from that creativity. More critically, if he’s a unique being and I’m calling on him, who am I calling?
If I make Satan up, I’m doing what LaVey did, using the figure of the Devil as a way to troll society and focus my magical energies. LaVey was an atheist reacting to certain sanctimonious trends in 1960s and early 70s pop-culture. He built an image of Satan to facilitate that, much like the current Satanic Temple does in response to conservative Christianity and its political overreach.
Throughout his leadership of the Church of Satan, LaVey seemed to vacillate as to whether he believed in a metaphysical Satan or in magic at all. Around 1975, he began to treat all magic as perceptual manipulation (Lesser Magic) and seemed to collapse the “Greater” form into the “Lesser,” selling priesthoods in the CoS to pay the bills and writing cynical things about the metaphysically credulous. LaVey’s post-1975 materialist-atheist approach to magic, treating it as just manipulation, ultimately turns every conjuration into stage magic.
By contrast, his earlier, metaphysical, Satanic Bible approach makes Satan into a magical tool reminiscent of a sigil or a servitor—a popular archetype resonant with Taylor Elwood’s famous “Invoking Buffy” pop-magic concept. In that view, Satan isn’t real like you and me. He’s a character, a cultural meme with a name and image I can imbue with vital force when I need to energize my magical efforts. Like Buffy or Nyarlathotep or Darth Vader, Satan can be whatever I want him to be, whatever is convenient and fits my magical purposes.
In other words, if I take on the non-stage-magic philosophy of early LaVeyan Satanism, I’m inheriting the energy model of Satan-as-rebellious-social-archetype. And, for better or worse, I’m operating in LaVey’s essentially chaos-magical, carny-themed, countercultural current. Satan won’t be an independent entity. He’ll be the symbol I need and want in order to do stimulating black magic and maybe troll some evangelical Christians along the way. This is why LaVeyan Satanism is sometimes called “symbolic Satanism.”
That’s well and good if I don’t feel I’ve ever met an authentic spiritual being with an independent existence; though, I may run into problems if I don’t like the chaos “energy model” of magic because, without that, I’ll be left with a metaphysically empty psychodramatic set of gestures done in a dark room just to make myself feel good. I’ll have to wonder why I’m messing around with such pointlessness instead of using more socially acceptable and refined cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, or NLP to address my derangements and desires.
But what if I feel I have encountered an authentic spiritual being with an existence independent of my assumptions and cultural framing? What if I’m not relying on the energy model of magic but on the older, scarier spirit model? Then it’s incumbent upon me to learn who this spiritual being is, its nature, its history, its personality, and its aims. If it exists objectively separate from me, I can’t merely ascribe convenient attributes to it and invoke its name accordingly in my rituals. I have to meet it on its own terms. I also have to consider: maybe it doesn’t want to be invoked. Maybe it doesn’t like me. Maybe it would like to torture me if given the chance. And maybe, just maybe, it’s smarter and far, far older than me.
The reason I can’t practice LaVeyan magic is that I encountered a fallen angel with those attributes, a spirit that I didn’t create merely for my magical convenience, that I would never have created. To be honest, after several decades of working with grimoire daemons, djinn, angels, and devils, this spirit scared me. I didn’t summon it. It came to me on its own. And it taught me a valuable lesson, since angels, even the fallen ones, are messengers: there is a metaphysical world beyond our subjective constructions, beyond our postmodern word games. And when we speak a name from that world, the name is heard.
This doesn’t mean, by implication, that the Judeo-Christian cosmology is authoritative. It also doesn’t mean that Yahweh is the absolute highest divinity. What it means is an old grimoire maxim: do not summon that which you cannot put down—because there are such things. It means you are not all-powerful just because you decide you are. Some entities are bigger, meaner, and smarter than you. And you are not a god; though, every human may be partly divine.
As Ice-T puts it, “I don't claim be/ The hardest motherfucker on earth/ Catch me slippin’, I can even get worked.” Little did Ice-T know he was also describing a magical ecosystem that refutes Anton LaVey’s dangerous, somewhat presumptuous, essentially new age assumptions about how sorcery is supposed to function. You don’t want this fallen angel to catch you slippin’. The best way to avoid that is not to invoke his name and to pay scrupulous attention to the spiritual beings you call. Call those with a history of appreciating and helping humanity. Don’t call the monsters or you may get them.