THE QUESTION OF SATANISM
Among those who pride themselves on being more or less 'modern' it is the convention not to speak of the devil without a smile of disdain or an even more contemptuous shrug of the shoulders. There are those who, even while holding certain religious convictions, are nevertheless not the last to adopt such an attitude, perhaps from fear of being considered 'backward', or perhaps in a more sincere manner. These latter are in fact obligated in principle to admit the existence of the devil although they would be quite embarrassed if they had to affirm his effective action, for that would too greatly upset the restricted range of ready-made ideas in which they are accustomed to move. This is an example of that 'practical positivism' alluded to before. Religious conceptions are one thing, but 'ordinary life' is something else, and between the two care is careful to establish a bulkhead as watertight as can be. 'I'his is, in fact, as much as to say that one behaves like a veritable unbeliever, though without the logic. But how else can one act in a society as 'enlightened' and as 'tolerant' as our own without running the risk of being treated as one 'deluded'? A certain prudence is no doubt often necessary, but to say prudence is not to say negation 'a priori' and without discernment. Yet in defense of certain Catholic circles we must admit that the memory of some only too well known hoaxes, such as Léo Taxil's, is not unrelated to this negation; the pendulum swings from one excess to its opposite. If this is still a ruse of the devil to get people to deny him, it must be agreed that he has not done too badly. For our part, we approach this question of satanism with some repugnance, but not for the kind of reasons we
have just indicated. Ridicule of this kind concerns us very little, and since we take a definite stand against the modern mentality in all its forms we do not have to be too ceremonious. But this subject can hardly be treated without stirring up things one would rather leave in the shadows; and one must be resigned to doing this in some measure, for there is a risk that total silence in this regard would be misunderstood.
We do not believe that conscious satanists, that is to say true worshippers of the devil, have ever been very numerous. The Yézidi sect is often cited, but that is an exceptional case and it is still not certain that the matter has been correctly interpreted. Everywhere else one finds only isolated cases, sorcerers of the lowest category, for one must not believe that even more or less straightforward sorcerers or 'black magicians' fall equally under this definition; there may even be among them those who in no way believe in the devil. On the other hand there is also the question of Luciferians; certainly there are such, even apart from the fantastic accounts of Léo Taxil and his collaborator, Dr Hacks; and perhaps some remain in America or elsewhere. If they have established organizations, this would seem to go against what we have just said, although not necessarily, for if men invoke Lucifer and perform his cult it is because they do not consider him the devil but rather the 'light-bearer', [1] and we have even heard it said that they go so far as to call him 'the Great Creative Intelligence'. But strange as this may seem to those who do not go to the heart of things, these people, though in fact satanists, are only unconsciously so, for they are mistaken as to the nature of the entity to whom they address their worship. And unconscious satanism in its various degrees is far from rare. As to the Luciferians, we must call attention to a singular error: we have heard that the first American spiritists recognized a relationship with the devil, to whom they gave the name Lucifer. In reality, Luciferians can in no way be spiritists, for spiritism consists essentially in believing in
communication with 'disincarnated' humans, and denies the intervention of any other beings in the production of phenomena. Even if it happens that Luciferians use procedures analogous to those of spiritism, they are not thereby spiritists. The thing is possible, though the use of properly magical processes may be more probable. If spiritists for their part receive a 'message' signed by Lucifer or Satan, they do not hesitate for one moment to attribute it to some 'mischievous spirit' since they profess not to believe in the devil, and they are vehement in their denial. To speak to the spiritists of the devil is to risk awakening in them not only disdain but, even more so, fury, which is moreover quite a bad sign. What the Luciferians have in common with spiritists is that they are quite limited intellectually and are equally removed from all truth of a metaphysical order. But they are also limited in another way, and there is incompatibility between the two theories. Naturally this is not to say that the same forces cannot be at work in the two cases, but the respective ideas are completely different.
It is useless to reproduce the spiritists' innumerable denials-or those of the occultists and the Theosophists-on the question of the existence of the devil; one could easily fill a whole volume, which would be monotonous and without great interest. We have already seen that Allan Kardec taught that 'bad spirits' will improve progressively; for him, both angels and demons alike are human beings, though found at the two extremes of the 'spiritual scale'. And he adds that Satan is only 'the personification of evil in allegorical form. [2] For their part, occultists appeal to a symbolism which they hardly understand and which they accommodate to their fantasies; furthermore, they generally class demons with 'elementals' rather than with the 'disincarnated'. They at least admit beings that do not belong to the human species, and this is already something. But here is the somewhat unconventional opinion (not fundamentally so, but by the appearance of erudition in which it is clothed) of Charles Lancelin, whom we have already mentioned. He summarizes as follows 'the result of his research' on the question of the
existence of the devil, to which moreover he has devoted special works: [3]
The devil is only a phantom and symbol of evil. Primitive Judaism was ignorant of him; moreover, the tyrannical and bloody Jehovah of the Jews had no need of this foil. The legend of the angels' fall is found in the Book of Enoch, long recognized as apocryphal and of late composition. During the great captivity of Babylon, Judaism received the impression of evil divinities from oriental religions, but this idea remained popular and did not penetrate into dogma. Lucifer is still the morning star and Satan an angel, a child of God. Later, if Christ speaks of the Evil One and of the devil, it is simply to accommodate the popular ideas of his time. But for him the devil did not exist. . . In Christianity, the vindictive Jehovah of the Jews became a Father of goodness. From that time, next to him, other divinities became divinities of evil. As it developed, Christianity came into contact with Hellenism and from it received the idea of Pluto and the Furies, and especially of Tartarus, which it adapted to its own ideas, confusedly assimilating all the bad divinities of Greco-Roman paganism and of the various other religions with which it came into contact. But the devil was really born in the Middle Ages. In that period of incessant turmoil without law and without restraint, the clergy were led to make the devil the gendarme of society in order to check the powerful. They revived the idea of the Evil One and the divinities of evil, blending them all in the personality of the devil and making him the bugbear of kings and people. But this idea, of which he was the representative, gave him an unquestionable power; he was rapidly caught in his own snare, and from that time on the devil existed. In the current of modern times his personality was affirmed, and in the seventeenth century he reigned as master. Voltaire and the encyclopedists began the reaction; the idea of the demon declined, and today many enlightened priests regard him simply as a symbol. . . . [4]
It goes without saying that these 'enlightened' priests are all plainly modernists and that the spirit animating them is strangely similar to that affirmed in these lines. This more than fanciful manner of writing history is quite curious, but all told it is the same as that of the official representatives of the so-called 'science of religions'. It is clearly inspired by the same 'critical' methods and the results do not differ greatly. One must be quite naive to take seriously men who make the texts say everything they want them to say, and who always find the means to interpret them in conformity with their own prejudices.
But let us return to what we call unconscious satanism, and to avoid all error let us say first of all that a satanism of this kind may be purely mental and theoretical, implying no attempt to have dealings with any entities whatsoever, the existence of which is in many cases not even considered. It is in this sense that every theory that notably disfigures the Divinity should in some measure be regarded as satanic; and conceptions of a limited God and of a God who evolves should here be placed in the front rank. Moreover, the one is only a particular case of the other, because to suppose that a being can evolve obviously requires that it be conceived as limited. In this context we say 'a being' because in such conditions God cannot be Universal Being but only a particular and individual being, implying a certain 'pluralism' wherein Being in a metaphysical sense can find no place. All 'immanentism' more or less openly submits the Divinity to becoming. This may not be apparent in older forms such as the pantheism of Spinoza, and perhaps this consequence was contrary to Spinoza's intention (there is no philosophical system that does not contain, at least in germ, some internal contradiction). In any case, all this is very clear in Hegel, that is to say ever since evolutionism made its appearance; and in our own times the conceptions of the modernists are particularly significant in this respect. Today the idea of a limited God has many avowed supporters, either in the sects mentioned at the end of the previous chapter (the Mormons go so far as to maintain that God is a corporeal being, assigning him a definite place of residence, the imaginary planet Colob), or in certain currents of philosophy, from the 'personalism' of Renouvier to the ideas of William James, which the
novelist Wells tries to popularize. [5] Renouvier denied the metaphysical Infinite because he confused it with the mathematical pseudoinfinite. For James it is quite otherwise, his theory taking its point of departure in a thoroughly Anglo-Saxon 'moralism'. From the sentimental point of view it is advantageous to represent God as an individual, with moral qualities comparable to our own. It is therefore this anthropomorphic conception which must be held as true according to the pragmatist attitude, which consists essentially in substituting utility (whether moral or material) for truth. Furthermore and in conformity with the tendencies of the Protestant mind, James confuses religion with simple religiosity, that is to say he sees nothing in it but the sentimental element. But in the case of James there is something more serious still, and this above all concerns what we have said regarding 'unconscious satanism', an expression which so exasperated some of his admirers, especially in Protestant circles mentally disposed to receive such ideas. [6] It is James's theory of 'religious experience' which makes him see in the 'subconscious' the means by which man communicates with the Divine. It will be agreed that it is only a step from there to condoning the practices of spiritism, conferring on them an eminently religious character, and to considering mediums as the instruments par excellence of this communication. Among widely diverse elements, the 'subconscious' incontestably contains all that which, in the human individual, constitutes traces or vestiges of the inferior states of being and with which it most surely puts man in contact, that is to say everything in our world that represents these same inferior states. Thus, to claim that this is a communication with the Divine is really to put God in the inferior states of being, in inferis in the literal sense of this expression. [7] This then is a properly 'infernal' doctrine, a reversal of