Month: October 2026

Part 13 deals with groups that critics call “cults”, members call churches, foundations or movements, and academic specialists call “new religious movements” (NRMs). The choice of word already takes a side. This chapter sets out the vocabulary used in the…

For most of the history traced in this Part, the “Satanist” was a figure other people accused. Faxneld and Petersen list early-modern “witches”, “abortionists and poisoners close to the court of Louis XIV” and “certain English rakes” as people “slandered…

The twentieth century produced the Satanist, and it also brought back the pagan. The new pagans presented themselves as survivors or restorers of pre-Christian religions. The movements that followed range widely. At one end is a nudist witch-cult in Hertfordshire,…

After LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966, organised Satanism did not stay a single movement. It split into currents that disagree on almost everything except their use of the Adversary as a symbol. Some are theistic and some…

Faxneld and Petersen write that “an enduring and public tradition of Satanism was first instated in 1966, with the founding of the Church of Satan”; earlier “Satanists” had mostly been figures of accusation, and the precursors of Chapter 119 founded…

Eliphas Levi rehabilitated Lucifer in theory (Chapter 119). Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) built a religion, a set of initiatory orders and a body of sexual magic around a revelation he said he received in Cairo in 1904. The Deep State Encyclopedia…

Modern Satanism rests on a long reversal. Through most of Christian history Satan was the enemy of humankind, a label pinned on others, not a figure anyone claimed. Over many centuries the Eden serpent, the fallen archangel and the “Light-bringer”…

Early modern Europe produced three images of people who chose the Devil deliberately: the scholar who signs a pact, the renegade priest who says Mass over a woman’s body, and the aristocratic rake who mocks God over claret in a…

The previous chapter followed the Adversary as a theological figure. This chapter follows his supposed human allies. Between roughly 1400 and 1750, according to the editor of the library’s main primary-source collection, “more than 100,000 people – mainly women –…

Every chapter in Parts 12 to 17 relies on a small set of names: Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, Ahriman, daeva, jinn, Iblis, shaytan. They were not coined together. Each comes from a different language, scripture and century, and later writers…