Children of Lucifer; The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism by Ruben van Luijk

Author:Ruben van Luijk [Luijk, Ruben van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PRECURSORS AND INSPIRATIONS

LaVey presented his Church of Satan as “the first above ground organisation of Satanism.”27 He probably did so in good faith. Yet his Satanic church was not the first religious group venerating Satan in the twentieth century, not even the first above-ground one. Even if we pass over rumors and newspaper reports that lack further corroboration, there are a few well-documented cases of Satanist organizations that antedate or are contemporary with LaVey’s.28 Principal among these is the “Temple de Satan” that had sprung into being in the permissive atmosphere of Interbellum Paris. Founded in 1930 by Maria de Naglowska, a Russian noblewoman who had fallen on hard times after her morganatic marriage to a Jewish violin player, it featured colorful sex rites, a touch of millennialism, and strident feminism. The “Order of the Knights of the Golden Arrow,” as it was officially called, unabashedly operated in the open.29 Its founder held regular audience in La Coupole and gave weekly conferences in Studio Raspail, rue Vavin 36, while the movement issued a periodical entitled La Fleche: Organe dAction Magique (“The Arrow: Bulletin for Magical Action”).

In its curious assembly of doctrines, Naglowska’s Temple of Satan was a clear heir to nineteenth-century esotericism. Not at all anti-Christian in its outlook, the Order of the Golden Arrow professed to propagate the reign of the “Third Term of the Trinity,” the Holy Spirit. For Naglowska, however, “Holy Spirit” was synonymous with “Woman.” She also liked to refer to the “Esprit Saint” as “Esprit Sain”—the Wholesome Spirit instead of the Holy Spirit—pointing to the more benevolent attitude toward the human body that the new era would bring.30 The idea that the coming Age of the Holy Ghost was to be a feminine era had already been propagated by esotericists like Flora Tristan, Eliphas Levi, and Jules Bois, and before them by several medieval mystics. Women, Naglowska held, sought to “organize” life instead of trying to dominate it, as the male impulse was; only the end of male domination and the establishment of matriarchy would bring harmony to the world. The Third Term of the Trinity would establish the “right to be different” for women, so they would be able to concentrate on those functions that they alone were capable of fulfilling.31

Naglowska spoke of herself as “Priestess of Satan” and did not hesitate to describe the first stage of her ritual system as a “satanic initiation” that gave access to the “Truth of the Wholesome Satanic Doctrine.”32 In this sense, her order was undoubtedly Satanist. But Satanism was only one component of her religious system, which could probably best be described as an intricate semi-Hegelian compound of Christian, occultist, and Satanist elements. God, Naglowska held, was Life, and Life, God, ever changing, ever becoming, never static.33 Against this eternal “Yes” of God, Satan positioned itself. Not to be understood as something “living outside of us,” he represented the co-eternal “No,” which stood for destruction and, by application, human reason—the Goethean spirit “der stets verneint” and that unceasingly tries to deconstruct creation.

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