Researching my three-part piece on Satanic cults on film for Brutal as Hell has led me to dust off a few of my old books on devilment. My own contribution to the genre, Lucifer Rising, came out way back in 1999, and there’s been considerable water down the Styx since then. I was struck when I started researching the book in the early 90s how few books on the subject there were – even fewer of any real value. There’s been a steady growth of literature on the topic since, and I’ve picked up most of them over the years. Among this motley paper crew was Gareth J. Medway’s Lure of the Sinister, which attracted many positive reviews when it was published in 2001, though I recall being somewhat underwhelmed. Coincidentally, I was also browsing the Oxford University Press list of forthcoming titles the other night, and came across a book scheduled for release in January of 2013, entitled The Devil’s Party, which caught my eye…
I didn’t think Lure of the Sinister was the classic a number of – largely academic – reviewers did. However, I remembered that Medway was good on the development of Satanic sensationalism in British tabloids, something that would be useful for my Brutal as Hell essays. When I located the volume on my shelves I was also curious as to why I hadn’t taken to it a decade-or-so back. I couldn’t remember the specifics of my irritation, and wondered if it might just have been the case of one writer (namely yours truly) being unconsciously uncharitable to a perceived rival? (‘Surely not!’ I hear you cry.) Meanwhile, the OUP book intrigues me because it seems destined to be something of a landmark tome, in bringing a new level of academic scrutiny to Satanism – introducing newfound intellectual authority to the serious study of devilment – something largely conspicuous by its absence when I wrote Lucifer Rising. But is this a good thing?…
In all fairness, Lure of the Sinister is very much a curate’s egg. The parts that Medway gets right are models of clarity and wit, just as the sections he doesn’t are truly lamentable misfires. Much of the problem, perhaps, lies in the book’s subtitle – ‘The Unnatural History of Satanism’ – because Medway conspicuously fails to deliver in that department. Had he subtitled his work ‘Satanic Conspiracy Theories and Tabloid Sensationalism’ or somesuch, the author would have been on safer ground. For Medway does a good job of showing how generations of amoral media hacks, Christian crackpots and sundry opportunist politicians have been peddling from an almost identical handcart of bullshit for so long, pausing occasionally only to add even more improbable and disgusting details to the bill. What is amazing is not that all of this is garbage, but that people ever took any of it seriously.
Medway skewers this paranoid mythology effectively, but retrospectively disposing of such manifest nonsense is akin to plugging sluggish fish with a sawn-off 10 gauge in a particularly small barrel. Suggesting that absurd fantasies concocted by neurotic Christians and repeated in newspapers like The Sunday Sport (the UK’s answer to The Weekly World News) are lies is one thing. Identifying the nature of authentic contemporary Satanism more of a challenge, and one our author largely decides simply to neglect. ‘There is no need here to add much to the great weight of paper that has been filled with accounts of Anton Szandor LaVey and the Church of Satan’, Medway shrugs, as if coverage of the most significant figure in 20th Century Satanism were somehow barely relevant to an ‘Unnatural History of Satanism’. I know that by no means everybody regards LaVey with the respect and affection I do, but even if you simply wish to denigrate or deride San Francisco’s Black Pope, attempting to wholly sideline his role is surely either ignorance or perversity.
At the risk of sounding partisan here as an honourable Reverend in LaVey’s Church, even if Medway didn’t wish to contribute to ‘the great weight of paper’ on the topic, he might have done well to read a little more of it. In the limited coverage he does give, Medway follows the Church of Satan’s history as given by the Satanic schismatics in the Temple of Set. According to them, they walked out of LaVey’s Church en masse in protest at the sale of priesthoods. A more balanced view suggests that the chief tension concerned LaVey’s avowed atheism – that Satan was simply a symbol – which some members, craving an authentic supernatural entity to worship, couldn’t tolerate, and thus set up their Setian Temple in direct competition. Significantly, perhaps, in his introduction Medway reveals that he is ‘a Pagan and a priest of Themis in the Fellowship of Isis’. This makes our author far more sympathetic to a more traditional occult outfit like the Temple of Set than the cynical, carnivalesque Church of Satan, who’ve long made a point of treating self-styled pagans like our ‘priest of Themis’ with amused disdain.
All of which may seem like a lot of hair-splitting over a book that’s over a decade old: Most likely because largely it is. But if, as the OUP’s The Devil’s Party suggests, Satanism is entering a renaissance of academic interest, perhaps correcting or at least addressing such issues of accuracy has become increasingly important. More likely, picking up Lure of the Sinister again pushed the same buttons it did when I first read it, and I felt moved in this idle moment or two to respond. Interaction between Satanism and the sundry neo-pagan movements in recent decades has seldom run smooth. In the ninth of his ‘Nine Satanic Statements’, LaVey observed that ‘Satan has been the best friend the Church has ever had, as He has kept it in business all these years.’ The same applies to a large extent to the hodge-podge of New Age religions that have sprung up over the past few decades pretending to represent pre-Christian revivals.
They’ve long made liberal use of Satanism as a scarecrow to show what they’re not. ‘People mistake us for dangerous devil-worshippers’, runs the neo-pagan mantra, ‘but in reality we’re just loveable nature lovers’. Anybody who cares to listen has probably got the message decades back. Anybody who doesn’t, will likely condemn you to Hell whatever you say, if it isn’t the Lord’s Prayer. Our Priest of Themis insists that his only prejudice against Satanism is that he doesn’t believe Satan exists. Newsflash Gareth, neither do most Satanists. Which he’d know if he’d actually read the impressive 17 page bibliography at the end of Lure of the Sinister, which includes all four of Anton LaVey’s books. If Medway had really digested the long list of texts he includes then we’d have every right to expect something a little more authoritative, though in all fairness he only guarantees that he has ‘seen’ them, leaving any impressions of erudition down to the reader’s discretion.
Again, if it seems like I’ve been a little harsh and abrasive towards a book which, I must confess has many virtues, then I should probably come clean on the section which above all I found startlingly ignorant. You will probably either agree or wonder why you wasted your time reading the past few paragraphs. In his brief coverage of authentic contemporary Satanism, Medway tells us that there are three varieties. The first are badly damaged drug addicts or psychiatric patients. The second variety are ‘religious Satanists’, such as those belonging to the Church of Satan (how a Satanist who doesn’t believe in Satan can be religious is not explained). The last category, in a term Medway borrows from Christian fanatics, he refers to as ‘dabblers’. They are, he says, by far the most common, before launching into a truly bizarre description of the breed. I hope you (and Mr Medway’s publisher) will excuse me if I quote the paragraph in its entirety.
‘They can be found at hard-rock concerts or hanging around the Slimelight Club on Saturday nights wearing black clothes – black T-shirts from haute couturiers Man at C&A are essential Satanist dress – black lipstick, and occult jewelry bought in Kensington Market. Among other occult practices, they listen to records by Ozzy Osbourne or the Bollock Brothers; watch Motley Crue videos, Hammer Horror films, and The Addams Family; make blasphemous remarks during “Songs of Praise” to upset Granny; walk in Highgate Cemetery during open hours; and recite the Lord’s Prayer backward as a party piece. These Satanists eat jelly babies (gumdrops), dismember Barbie dolls, chop heads off flowers, paint demons on their skateboards, turn crucifixes upside down, start Aleister Crowley’s Magick without Tears and give up after three chapters, torture the neighbours by playing bootlegs of The Damned, and give their girlfriends gold-plated necklaces from Camden Lock with the words “I tore this from the neck of a fresh corpse I disinterred last night darling.”’
As someone who wears a lot of black, loves Hammer horror and is somewhat partial to both Ozzy Osbourne and the Damned, perhaps I should be personally offended. I daresay numerous notably non-Satanic Goths and metal fans would find this faintly annoying, assuming they’re inclined to take a Priest of Themis, last seen exorcising Robin Hood’s grave here in Yorkshire, seriously. More seriously, while this kind of camp, nervous verbal lashing towards the nasty men in black leather jackets might cut it with campus nerds and media hipsters, it won’t wash as serious research. Or will it? ‘Recent years have seen a significant shift in the study of new religious movements,’ promises pre-publicity for The Devil’s Party. ‘In Satanism studies, interest has moved to anthropological and historical work on groups and individuals. Self-declared Satanism, especially as a religion with cultural production and consumption, history, and organization, has largely been neglected by academia… The book will be an invaluable resource for everyone interested in Satanism as a philosophical or religious position of alterity rather than as an imagined other.’ We wait with baited breath…