A Girardian Approach to LaVeyan Satanism: Theological Perspectives

Introduction

After centuries of obsession with the workings of ‘the malignant one,’ the Enlightenment put an end to concern with Satan, at least amongst the educated elites. Satan no longer elicited fear, and instead became a harmless humorous figure. If anything, any talk of Satan was considered reminiscent of the barbarous superstitious past, the ‘childhood of humanity,’ as Kant would have it.

Yet, as Baudelaire famously commented, perhaps the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. ¹ We needn’t believe in incubi, witches on flying brooms, or possessed young girls, in order to take the devil more seriously. If Satan represents evil, then we should most definitely consider talk about the devil with more seriousness. For, evil is real, and refusing to believe this would easily lead to a moral relativism that is grossly destructive.

Thus, despite common scold against any real consideration of the nature of the Satanic, two authors of the 20th century took Satan seriously, each with their own unique interpretation. One, Rene Girard, approached Satan from the angle of Christianity, but gave it a slightly new interpretation, while still preserving the orthodox teaching about Satan’s dangerous nature. The other, Anton LaVey, approached the devil from a very different perspective, championing Satan. Yet, despite their very different approaches, both authors did converge on some important points.

In this article, I shall lay out the understandings of the concept of Satan by both authors. Interestingly, in their approach to Satan, both authors relate to the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche, so that will serve as a connecting point in the analysis. Furthermore, some Girardian scholars have also provided relevant concepts that may serve as tools in order to further analyse LaVey’s approach to Satan. Some of these concepts will also be discussed.

Satan according to Girard

Rene Girard was Catholic, although in matters of personal faith, we cannot be certain as to what his private beliefs were, and neither should we speculate. Most of his followers and experts on his thought now agree that Girard himself was not strictu sensu a traditionalist when it came to doctrine. ²

The official teaching of the Catholic Church, as laid out in the Catechism, is that the devil is a real being. ³ Girard never expressed any opposition to this particular teaching, so it is safe to assume that, in continuation with Catholic doctrine, he accepted the existence of Satan. In fact, he disagreed with Rudolf Bultmann’s aggressive programme of demythologization, ⁴ and indeed considered that Satan is a real being.

While it is not altogether clear that Girard considered Satan as a personal being, he nevertheless accepted it as a very real phenomenon, thus defining it: ‘Satan is absolutely identified with the circular mechanisms of violence, with man’s imprisonment in cultural or philosophical systems that maintain his modus vivendi with violence. That is why he promises Jesus domination provided that Jesus will worship him. But Satan is also the skandalon, the living obstacle that trips men up, the mimetic model insofar as it becomes a rival and lies across our path . . . Satan is the name of the mimetic process seen as a whole; that is why he is the source not merely of rivalry and disorder but of all the forms of lying order inside which humanity lives. That is the reason why he was a homicide from the beginning; Satan’s order had no origin other than murder and this murder is a lie.’ ⁵ Perhaps the issue of whether or not Girard considers Satan a real being can be settled by appealing to Wolfgang Palaver, a close disciple of Girard. Palaver does think that, in Girard’s theory, Satan ought to be a considered as a personal being: ‘As a personal entity, Satan expresses the presence of real scapegoats, the victims of collective violence, as well as the real motive of the persecutory mob.’ ⁶

Girard identifies the devil as both the destructive power of mimesis and mimetic rivalry, and the scapegoating mechanism that temporarily suspends rivalries. Girard’s mimetic theory is centred on two basic tenets: human beings, by imitating each other, ultimately end up desiring the same objects, and this leads to rivalries and conflicts.

As these conflicts grow out of control, a scapegoat mechanism takes place: a victim is selected, and communal violence is drained towards her, thus temporarily freeing the collectivity of its own rivalries and conflicts. ⁷ It is important to keep in mind that, in Girard’s analysis, this dynamic is at the root of human culture, but it has multiple variations. In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Girard focuses on the way this scapegoat mechanism operated on a microlevel (small bands of hominids), and ultimately, it became the foundation of hominization in the evolution of our species.

Yet, once societies acquired larger statures (based on the constant repetition of the scapegoat mechanism), scapegoating had a different dynamic. As more complex societies arise, scapegoating violence is no longer directed against individuals belonging to small bands, but rather becomes clashes between different social groups, and phenomena such as this lie at the root of xenophobia and racism. These are the kind of scapegoating examples that Girard thoroughly studied in The Scapegoat.

Towards the end of his career, Girard also focused on yet another dynamic: scapegoating processes amongst states. This particular variant was very concerning to Girard, for, as he expressed in his last book, Battling to the End, this kind of scapegoating violence could have deep apocalyptic implications, given the enormous destructive power that modern states now have.

Yet, in all these variants, the process that Girard called ‘Satan’ was present. Girard thus understands Satan as the representation of this dual process of mimetic rivalry and scapegoating violence. In both processes, mimesis plays a key role: in rivalries, human beings imitate each other’s desires; in the scapegoating mechanism, human beings imitate each other in their channelling of violence towards the victim.

According to Girard, this representation of Satan is very clear in the gospels, most especially in Mark. In a confrontation with the Pharisees over an accusation of being in league with the devil in order to perform exorcisms, Jesus says: ‘Now if Satan casts out, he is divided against himself; so how can his kingdom stand?’ (Mark 3:26). Under Girard’s hermeneutics, Jesus is exposing this dual process of mimetic violence and partial resolution through scapegoating: ‘the kingdom of Satan is none other than the violence that casts itself out . . . [The] unanimous and spontaneous murder of a scapegoat.’ ⁸ Girard further states: ‘What is strange is that the founding principle and the principle of ultimate destruction are one and the same . . . We know already that the principle of mimetic desire, its rivalries, and the internal divisions it creates are identical with the equally mimetic principle that unifies society: the scapegoat.’ ⁹

The New Testament’s apocalyptic language of a confrontation with Satan should be understood, so Girard claims, in this context. Jesus’ claim that he sees ‘Satan fall like lightning’ (Luke 10: 18) in fact refers to the failings of the scapegoat mechanism. Both myths and Biblical literature portray collectivities cleansing themselves of violence by executing scapegoats. But, whereas in myth, the victim is portrayed as guilty, in the Gospels’ narrative of Jesus’ death, the victim is innocent. This is a major accomplishment, as ‘the Gospels disclose the falseness of the accusation; they unmask Satan as an imposter.’ ¹⁰ By revealing the victim as innocent, the scapegoat mechanism becomes ineffective, as scapegoaters are no longer willing to kill a victim once they understand she is innocent. By demystifying violence, Satan is thus defeated.

Paradoxically, in Girard’s view, the defeat of Satan further increases violence. If the scapegoat mechanism is no longer effective, then human beings do not have the traditional means of resolving disputes, but this is a necessary step in the ultimate arrival of a truly enduring peace: ‘The Cross, by revealing the lie at the bottom of Satan’s game, exposes human beings to a temporary increase of violence, but at a deeper level it liberates them from a servitude that has lasted since the beginning of human history.’ ¹¹ The reason why this dynamic works this way, is because mimesis operates as in a cycle. The scapegoating mechanism can never be a final solution to the problem of violence because it ultimately relies on violence to try to attempt to cure violence. This is very similar to homeopathic remedies in medicine, which have been proven to be inefficient. ¹² Consequently, the real solution to the problem of violence can only be absolute withdrawal from violence itself.

Girard’s last book, Battling to the End, is centred on this theme. Christianity’s effect on history runs the danger of being corrosive, inasmuch as humanity no longer has the traditional means of suspending violence. For the first time in history, we run the risk of self-annihilation as a species, as rivalries escalate. This is because nuclear technology is now so powerful that any small confrontation could easily escalate and thus elevate the risk of using massively destructive weapons, thus increasing an existential threat to our species. ¹³ While Satan as the representation of the scapegoat mechanism has been defeated, he has not been fully defeated as the representation of mimetic rivalry and conflict. Thus, Girard claims that ‘Satan is the other name of the escalation of extremes,’ ¹⁴ and unless we fully embrace Christ’s teachings and example of love and forgiveness, this Satanic threat will become increasingly dangerous.

The Intersection of Girard and Nietzsche

Throughout his academic career, Girard was fascinated by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Girard saw in Nietzsche a philosopher with great insights about the essence of Christianity. Whereas most Enlightenment and 19th-century critics of Christianity (Voltaire, Feuerbach, Marx, etc.) accused Christianity of being in league with oppressors, Nietzsche also criticized Christianity, but for exactly the opposite reasons. He despised Christianity precisely because it is the religion that shows the greatest concern for victims. And, that was exactly the point that Girard made in most of his Christian apologetic writings.

Whereas Nietzsche uses the concern for victims as an argument against Christianity, Girard uses it as an argument in favour of Christianity: ‘[Nietzsche] does not see that the Gospel stance towards victims does not come from prejudice in favour of the weak against the strong, but is heroic resistance to violent contagion.’ ¹⁵ Satan as a concept is lacking in most of Nietzsche’s writings, although, as Giuseppe Fornari makes clear in his study of the German philosopher, Nietzsche did come close to embracing Satanic values: ‘In his eagerness to rebel theologically, a sentiment shared by most people in the modern world, Nietzsche could hardly fail to touch on this point as well; . . . he tells the story of the original sin from the only viewpoint that he believed could, and should, be valid, the serpent’s viewpoint, that is, from the viewpoint of what the Christian tradition defines as Satan.’ ¹⁶

Girard very cleverly shows that Nietzsche’s characterization of Dionysus is in fact very close to Girard’s own understanding of Satan. Nietzsche was fond of contrasting Dionysus with Apollo, expressing clear preferences for the former. Nietzsche claimed to favour Dionysus on the basis that this god represented vitality, but Girard’s analysis effectively shows that Nietzsche’s preference for Dionysus relies on the god’s association with the scapegoat mechanism and the disdain for victims.

In Girard’s assessment, ‘[Nietzsche] opposes, so he believes, the crowd mentality, but he does not recognize his Dionysian stance as the supreme expression of the mob in its most brutal, and its most stupid tendencies.’ ¹⁷ Nietzsche was also fond of comparing Jesus to Dionysus, and for Girard, this is very relevant, inasmuch as ‘while Dionysus approves and organizes the lynching of the single victim, Jesus and the Gospels disapprove.’

So, in an important sense, Nietzsche upheld the Satanic stance (as understood by Girard), but did not go as far as to properly call it such. Nietzsche has had many unfortunate followers in the 20th century (Girard is quick to point out that Nietzsche cannot be so easily excused from his intellectual use by Nazism), but even the most morally objectionable did not dare to openly call their ideas Satanic. ¹⁸ There is, however, one exception: Anton LaVey.

Satan according to LaVey

LaVey was not a philosopher in any conventional sense. He was above all, a showman who had a gift for publicity stunts, and had a strong sense as a businessman. He accurately noted that in an age of intense secularization in an emerging post-Christian West, the spiritual void could still be filled by emerging and profitable religions.

Seizing the commercial opportunity by a renewed popular interest in the devil, LaVey founded the Church of Satan on 30 April 1966. LaVey had been mastering his publicity techniques ever since he was an obscure musician, and he used those techniques to scandalize not only California (whence he came), but the whole world.

His sensationalist strategy paid off. He shaved his head and proclaimed himself high priest of the new Satanic religion. He invited journalists to be present for Satanic rituals that imitated the ceremonies that were part of the imagination of witch hunters of previous epochs. Nude women served as altars, in emulation of various aspects of the Black Mass; however, the ceremonies did not incorporate all the repugnant elements that inquisitors attributed to them in the preceding centuries.

LaVey held a Satanic wedding for two of his followers, and he also organized a Satanic baptism and a funeral. He began a new calendar, taking as year 1 the foundation of his Church, the year of Satan (Anno Satanas). This was done for the purpose of marking the beginning of the Age of Satan, as other religious traditions use a particular event in order to mark the beginning of a new era (e.g., the Hegira in Islam). He wore horns on his head to more closely resemble the devil, and in front of cameras he frequently assumed a seductive and enigmatic gaze. He walked around with a leashed lion. He assumed the title of ‘Black Pope’ (as he was apparently not aware that this is actually a title used by the Superior General of the Society of Jesus).

It all became a gigantic media circus. Predictably, the public reaction was also carnival-like. Most people felt curiosity and amusement with the new religion. In fact, the new Church of Satan was more about aesthetics than about religion. Its members’ beliefs were not as important as the impact of its aesthetic manifestations.

The attraction was generated by its colourful rituals (always law-abiding), the scandalous clothes, and of course, the counter-cultural stand that was quite popular in California during those times of juvenile instability. Television channels gave a lot of airtime to the Black Pope, and Roman Polanski used that setting to promote Rosemary’s Baby, the cult film about a woman who gives birth to a child fathered by Satan. LaVey claimed that he was a technical advisor to the movie, and even that he was the actor who played the part of the devil in one of the film’s most important scenes.

Yet, as it turned out, LaVey was not satisfied with this initial buffoonish approach to Satan. He had a philosophical agenda of his own. For him, Satan stood for some particular values that he was willing to uphold and publicly defend, as he in fact did over the next three decades in publications and media appearances. LaVey had no philosophical training whatsoever, his writings were frequently sloppy, and he even plagiarized a sizeable portion of his magnum opus, the Satanic Bible. But he did indeed have some philosophical interests, and he made a considerable attempt to link those philosophical interests with his aesthetic representation of the devil.

LaVey was influenced by the Romantic portrayal of Satan. He was delighted to cause scandal by wearing horns and proclaiming ‘Hail Satan!’ in his rituals, but he made it very clear that he was not a devil worshipper. For him, Satan is a symbol, very much as it was for many of the Romantics. ¹⁹ Milton, of whom Blake once said that he was of the devil’s party without knowing, ²⁰ portrayed Lucifer in Paradise Lost as a flawed anti-hero. In that portrayal, Satan’s pride ultimately leads to his own demise. Yet, as opposed to the traditional portrayals of the preceding centuries, Milton’s Lucifer has a disturbingly charismatic aspect, on account of his bravery, courage, and leadership. Milton never intended Lucifer to be a hero, but the succeeding Romantic writers interpreted Milton’s Lucifer as a seductive model of an inspiring rebel against God’s tyranny.

LaVey upheld this heroic approach to Satan. ²¹ In his understanding of the devil, Satan is not the representation of absolute evil, as Christianity would have it (most scholars believe that Satan is originally a Zoroastrian concept, ²² although some other authors believe the concept has more ancient roots ²³ ). Rather, LaVey claimed to bring Satan closer to its original Israelite roots as the adversary, just as he is portrayed in older books of the Hebrew Bible. And indeed, LaVey valued the role of the adversary, as the sort of countercultural hero that refuses to conform to the moralistic mediocrity of the establishment and fights for his own hedonistic liberation.

In that sense, much more than the Romantics, LaVey acknowledged his intellectual affinity with Nietzsche. ²⁴ In the cultural history of the devil’s artistic depiction, Dionysus, along with Pan, is one of the antecedents of Satan in Greek mythology. As god of wine and excess, for Nietzsche, Dionysus represented rage and hedonistic disinhibition, as opposed to the moral restrictions of Christianity. As previously mentioned, in his philosophy, Nietzsche admired precisely the values represented by Dionysus (furthermore, during his years of mental illness, Nietzsche signed some of his letters as ‘Dionysus’). Nietzsche did not endorse the literal existence of Dionysus as a god that should be worshipped. But Nietzsche did affirm the Greek god’s values. ²⁵ LaVey attempted something very similar, but instead of choosing Dionysus from Greek mythology, he chose Satan, from Christian lore. ²⁶

The values that LaVey highlighted in the figure of Satan also have a significant resemblance to the values that Nietzsche gathered from Dionysus. Nietzsche believed that the traditional distinction between good and evil was due to a distortion imposed by early Christians. Nietzsche considered that the Christian ethical system that emphasized mercy, charity, and helping the weak constituted what he called a ‘slave’s morality.’

According to Nietzsche, Christianity had limited humanity’s potential for self-realization. By emphasizing mercy and by belittling the pleasures of life (to be suspended until the afterlife), Christian morality had severely harmed human vitality. Human beings have an animal instinctive drive towards domination, but Christian morality, permeated by resentment, continuously represses such a drive. Christianity has imposed an ascetic ideal of renouncing life’s pleasures, and it has also suppressed the potential for action and life affirmation amongst human beings. In Nietzsche’s view, Christianity is fundamentally the religion of mediocre people who are happy to be driven as herds, although as Girard proves in his reading of Nietzsche, the German philosopher was not himself as removed from the herd mentality as he thought, precisely because he endorsed the mob scapegoating violence that Christianity rejects. ²⁷

In any case, in Nietzsche’s account, the liberation from this herd mentality is represented by the symbol of Dionysus. This liberation is about reaffirming aristocratic virtues, and it should come as no surprise that Nietzsche held democracy in contempt, something his contemporary leftist followers (most notably Foucault, Vattimo, and Derrida) seem to forget. Yet, as Girard acutely shows, these alleged ‘aristocratic values’ that Nietzsche had in mind are in fact closer to social Darwinism, i.e., exclusion of the weak from society.

LaVey took these philosophical observations very seriously, and he assimilated them as the basis to write his The Satanic Bible, which would be the doctrinal inspiration for his new religion. In this work, he repeats many of the Nietzschean themes, and explicitly criticizes Christianity for demeaning mankind’s potential, such as in this oft-repeated aphorism: ‘Behold the crucifix; what does it symbolize? Pallid incompetence hanging on a tree.’ ²⁸

Very much as Nietzsche, LaVey denied being a nihilist, as he did not call for the death of morality itself. Instead, he called for a new morality that would replace Christianity, and as opposed to the Ten Commandments, he proposed a set of rules, as laid out in Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth:

This code of ethics gives the appearance of being reasonable, and it certainly runs counter to some of the distortions that are frequently made about Satanism. For example, one common trope of opposition to Satanism is its alleged use of children in rituals, sometimes violently (we will return to this), but the ninth rule makes it clear that children should not be harmed. Likewise, it also takes a stand against sacrificial rituals (again, countering the traditional image of Satanism), by proclaiming in the tenth rule that animals should not be killed.

Yet, the fourth rule is very disturbing. Its exhortation of cruelty and lack of mercy is based on a very raw conception of retribution. Girard has extensively documented how retribution relies on mimetic escalation, and as mentioned above, this is precisely one aspect of the Satanic. LaVey believed this to be a virtue, but he was too naïve to see its dangers. LaVey was delighted to become a mimetic double to those who annoyed him, and in this sense, it was very much coherent that he would consider himself Satanic. Yet, his mistake was believing that something good could come out of this mimetic process, not seeing that an eye for an eye makes the world blind.

Similarly, the 11th rule calls explicitly for destruction. Here, LaVey acknowledges that, when we become mimetic doubles in escalation, we usually go beyond mere retribution, and we eventually seek total destruction of the counterpart. Again, he is very coherent to associate this with Satan, and Girard would most surely agree that the concept of Satan, as expressed in the New Testament, refers to this destructive escalation. Girard accurately observes that ‘if the escalation to extremes continues a little longer, it will lead straight to the extinction of all life on the planet’ ³⁰ (and according to Girard, that is precisely how we should understand the apocalyptic imagery of the New Testament). By embracing mindless retribution, LaVey seems wholly unconcerned with the destruction of all life. That stupidity is indeed Satanic.

LaVey sought to give a philosophical twist to the ritual inversions of Satanism and, in his doctrinal formulation, set out to invert the typical blessings laid out in the Gospels. Instead of blessing the poor and the weak (as in the gospel of Matthew) he writes: ‘Blessed are the strong, for they shall possess the earth; Cursed are the weak, for they shall inherit the yoke! . . . Blessed are the iron-handed, for the unfit shall flee before them; Cursed are the poor in spirit, for they shall be spat upon!’ ³¹ It is not difficult to see the Nietzschean themes here. Sympathizers of both Nietzsche and LaVey would be happy to call these ‘aristocratic values,’ but in fact, they are much closer to Social Darwinism.

Indeed, LaVey was not shy in expressing his sympathies for Social Darwinism. LaVey took much inspiration from novelist Jack London. ³² In some of his writings, London embraced Marxist views, and viewed himself as a representative of the working class. In other writings, London represents characters that, although brutal, end up being heroes because of their powerful personalities.

LaVey was very much interested in these types of characters. London’s Sea Wolf has been especially attractive to members of the Church of Satan. Sea Wolf tells the story of a philosophically minded mariner who, through severe beatings and punishments, manages to impose discipline on his crew. This mariner puts in practice a vision of the world that favours the strong, thus eliminating any vestige of weakness in the world, very much as Social Darwinism would have it.

When writing his The Satanic Bible, LaVey also plagiarized portions of Might is Right, by an author under the pseudonym Ragnar Redbeard. ³³ If it were not for LaVey’s plagiarism, that book would have fallen into oblivion. The book is mostly an extremely crude presentation of Social Darwinist philosophy, typical of the late 19th century. The book’s main thesis is that, given their lack of biological fitness, the poor and the weak must disappear, the sooner the better. Furthermore, the book makes frequent racist remarks, as it advocates that particular races must disappear, given their biological inferiority. Redbeard also claims that slavery should be reinstated, because inferior races cannot govern themselves, and the book also advises against miscegenation.

LaVey was careful enough to remove those passages that were too offensive. To his credit, LaVey left out some of the most offensive remarks, and there are no racist passages in the Satanic Bible. Nevertheless, LaVey’s plagiarism was massive. Indeed, even if LaVey’s Satanic philosophy was never explicitly racist, and some people of African descent joined the ranks of the Church of Satan (most notably, Sammy Davis Jr), LaVey’s Satanic philosophy has been used as inspiration by some neo-fascist groups that explicitly embrace an ideology of racial hatred. ³⁴

As mentioned above, Girard identifies Satan with the scapegoat mechanism itself. And, according to Girard’s anthropological theory, sacrificial rituals are a performative commemoration of the original collective violence against a surrogate victim. Satanists have long been accused of incorporating sacrificial rituals (usually with human victims), but for the most part, Satanists do not perform ritual sacrifices of any kind, and despite all the ritual elaborations that characterized his cult, LaVey went to great lengths in order to prohibit them in the Church of Satan.

However, we may wonder whether LaVey’s Satanic philosophy actually promotes another kind of sacrifice, not necessarily in an altar with ritual paraphernalia. For example, when commenting on Nietzsche’s approach to human sacrifice, James Williams argues: ‘[Nietzsche believed that] people must be willing to sacrifice human lives . . . He did not mean offering them in sacrifice on an altar, but sweeping aside the weak who were unable to contribute to creating new traditions and institutions and waging war.’ ³⁵ LaVey certainly embraced this kind of Nietzschean sacrifice, and unlike the Romantic poets, duly noticed that that is precisely what the concept of Satan stands for.

Further Girardian Approaches to LaVey

Interestingly, other scholars have taken Girard’s lead of cultural and theological analysis, and have incorporated theoretical tools of their own (but always ultimately relying on Girard’s foundations) that for our purposes are useful in shedding light on LaVey’s religious movement. Most notably, Jean Michel Oughourlian’s work as a clinical psychiatrist using Girardian approaches offers interesting concepts in this regard.

Oughourlian has long been interested in the mimetic dynamics of possession rituals and dissociative states. He interprets them as the paroxysm of mimetic rivalry. The subject hopes to imitate the model, to the point that he wants to embrace his whole personality, thus succumbing to a possession trance, in a vain attempt to fully seize the model. As Oughourlian describes it, ‘our feelings take on an extreme intensity; we want to melt into the other, take his place, rob him of his very being, of the secret of his luminous aura, of the autonomy that we dream of and that seems to be his. We want to dispossess him, which is to say, to possess him entirely. By taking possession of what the other is, the subject hopes to derive an increase of existence and of power that will guarantee him a final and exclusive happiness and the perfect enjoyment of his object. Acquiring the object is now only a means to acquiring the being of the mediator, which the subject has endowed with an imaginary prestige that one might even call a ‘hallucinatory sacrality.’ ³⁶

Although possession rituals have long been present in the history of occultism, ³⁷ LaVey’s religious movements never incorporated possession rituals as such. Yet, there was a significant element of hysteria in many of LaVey’s religious manifestations. The Church of Satan was characterized by rituals whose sole intent was to shock audiences, not unlike clinical cases of histrionic hysteria. As it happens, Oughourlian approaches clinical manifestations of hysteria as representations of the dynamics of mimetic desire: ‘Seen in this perspective, hysteria, for example, can be interpreted as a somatic representation of the other as rival, a representation that enables the neurotic both to deny the other and to vanquish him at the same time by submitting him symbolically to the hysterically manifested illness.’ ³⁸

Interestingly, Oughourlian’s descriptions offer a good perspective on LaVey’s own behaviour. His movement was clearly parasitic, in the sense that he desired to have the religious authority that established religions commanded. The fact that he called himself the ‘black Pope’ and sought to parody the ritual elements of Christianity (by re-enacting the infamous Black Mass) reveals that he was clearly entangled in mimetic desire. Oughourlian’s clinical observation of hysterical behaviour is relevant, to the extent that LaVey did become a neurotic in rejecting Christianity’s main message of compassion for victims, yet at the same time embracing some of its aesthetic and ritual aspects, by inverting them in the Church of Satan’s own rituals.

Apart from his occasional histrionic hysterical theatrics, LaVey also seemed to have components of pathological narcissism in his personality. Interestingly, other Girardian scholars have also approached the way narcissism is deeply embedded in the concepts that Satan himself represents. For example, Thomas Ryba considers that ‘Satan’s psychological state, prior to his fall, [can be considered] as metastable anxiety and trauma and his state, afterwards, as a narcissistic, malicious, self-induced pathology in order to explain Satan’s impossible rivalry with God, a rivalry that precedes hominization and has always endangered human existence.’ ³⁹

Indeed, it may well be that LaVey’s reaction against Christian ethics, and his ultimate desire to become himself a black Pope, derives from the ultimate rage that typically follows mimetic desire. In this, LaVey’s psychology was not altogether different from Satan’s own psychological state, as explained by Ryba: ‘a narcissistic wound is an injury to the narcissist’s grandiose self‑image. In humans it carries the aura of threat after the trauma has been experienced, and the after-effects of the trauma continue to contribute to the impairment of the narcissist’s judgment and perception of reality. Narcissistic trauma may issue in rage, and this rage is usually bound up with the desire to seek revenge on the offending party.’ ⁴⁰ The story of Satan’s fall represents this process, as Ryba further explains it: ‘If blockage had not been expected by Satan as a consequence of his unfaithful act, if because of his incomplete understanding of the stakes, he imagined that it was possible for God to forgive him for what he in part could not anticipate, then it is possible that a demonic analogue to anger (or rage) was his response to blockage. This rage might also be interpreted as the result of the demonic analogue to what psychoanalysts call a narcissistic wound.’ ⁴¹

This dynamic becomes clearly evident in LaVey’s approach to religion. Eager to form an institutionalized religious gathering, in imitation of Christianity, LaVey ultimately felt the frustration of not fully achieving his goal. He thus developed a ‘narcissistic wound’ (as in Rayba’s conception) that ultimately affected his own image of grandiosity and, consequently, held on to it with increasingly bizarre and outlandish theatrics and rituals. This narcissistic wound characterized many of his religious ideas and performances, and it informs his problematic ethical stances.

Conclusion

Largely as a result of LaVey’s cultural influence, the concept of the devil has been for the most part trivialized in our modern secular age. Satan no longer elicits the theological and philosophical concerns that were more common in previous epochs. The concept of the Satanic has been relegated to mockery and satire, not unlike the buffoonish approach that LaVey himself promoted in his rituals.

For example, in 2015, a statue of a winged goat with human torso, accompanied by two children, was unveiled in Detroit. ⁴² Originally, it was designed to protest the exhibition of a monument for the Ten Commandments in Oklahoma, but then it was finally exhibited in Detroit. The statue was exhibited with the clear intention of making a political point: the separation of Church and State must be upheld, and if public display of monuments that rely on Jewish and Christian traditions are allowed, then so should the symbols of other religious traditions, even if they represent Satan.

While this particular incident may have been an occasion to make a legitimate political point (upholding the separation of Church and State in a modern secular society), the use of Satanic imagery is very concerning. It ultimately trivializes what Satan represents, and this is particularly dangerous. There is an urgent need for modern society to reconsider the relevance of the concept of Satan.

Rene Girard’s work is very relevant in this regard. His theological oeuvre is a compelling example of how it is perfectly possible to uphold a modern outlook, and yet take seriously the threat of Satan. If, as Girard posits, Satan is ultimately the menace of violence in human nature (i.e., mimetic rivalries and the scapegoat mechanism), then this concept should not be trivialized. In fact, in our apocalyptic age, in which the very existence of the human species is at risk because of our greater capacity for violence, Satan should thus be assessed as a real menace, and not just the silly symbol that LaVey made it out to be. Girard himself makes it quite explicit in this relevant passage of Battling to the End: ‘Satan is not an obscure god. It is the name of a decomposing structure, the very one that Saint Paul called ‘Powers and Principalities.’ From this perspective, if we agree to follow Christianity, violence is laid bare, unleashed, and its sterility revealed in the eyes of all.’ ⁴³