How did Satan go from being enemy number one for God and mankind to being a romantic hero for poets, and artists and today an object of veneration and worship as well as the star of film and TV? Satan, as a Christian concept, was used to oppress people over centuries and it was only with the advent of secularism and independent thought did a change of attitude come about. This enabled a romanticised Satan to become the inspiration for those wanting to rebel against the dogmatism of the church and totalitarianism of the states.
Summary
How did we go
Stay tuned to find out…
Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca, and welcome to my Symposium.
I’m a PhD and a university lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of magic, witchcraft, and all things esoteric.
In this video, we will talk about the romanticising of Satan and how that evolved from the conceptualisation of him as the arch-enemy of God, which is – by the way – not found in the Hebrew Bible but in the New Testament if we are to endorse a collation between Satan and the Devil.
But this, along with the history of the worship of Satan, may be topics for future videos. In fact, leave me a line in the comment section and let me know if you’d like me to cover these areas.
Now we are going to discuss how Satan became a romantic hero for poets and artists and how that played a role in the rise of modern religious Satanism. My source for this video is going to be ‘Children of Lucifer’ by Ruben van Luijk, published by Oxford University Press. Yet, you are welcome to recommend and pursue the investigation of other academic sources.
As my long-time viewers know, I always encourage your independent research and to see my videos as appetizers rather than “the truth” on a matter. Research is always ongoing and it’s more important to master the skills to find and critically evaluate reliable sources rather than clinging to information as truth. As they might and will likely be obsolete in 50 years, sometimes in 5 years.
Right, premises out of the way! Let’s move on to the topic now…
According to Van Luijk, Satanism is an invention of Christianity as it was within the context of the Christian religion and of a society shaped by Christianity that the idea of Satanism first arose. Christianity played, in fact, a central role in the proliferation of the concept of Satan as the Devil as well as Lucifer, lumping together different – and diverging – adversarial roles and depictions found across the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. After all, if we define Satanism as the intentional religious veneration of Satan, it follows that there can be no Satanism without a Satan.
Another element that played a significant role in the conceptualisation and imagery of Satan was the demonising of the Pagan Gods and of their worship. The well-known image of the devil as goat-footed and horned is reminiscent of the Greek God Pan and of the Fauni and Silvani of the Roman forests.
In other parts of Europe, the devil has assimilated traits of native gods from other traditions. For instance, in a late medieval Dutch miracle play ‘Mariken van Nieumegen’ he appears as “One-Eyed Moenen” (“Moenen metter eender ooghe”), quite resembling the Nordic God Odin, whose worship had already been abandoned for centuries.
But when and how did Satan start to be seen as a heroic figure instead of the embodiment of pure God-less evil? Well, that happened after the Enlightenment and during the Romantic era.
As Van Lujik highlights, there were two main cultural changes that fostered a reshaped idea of Satan. And these are; Secularisation and Revolution.
The demise of the literal belief in Satan brought about by a more secular society was an essential prerequisite for the emergence of the Romantic Satan. Those who endorsed this poetic view of the Devil didn’t quite believe in the existence of a real Lucifer just as they didn’t espouse the reality of the Christian God.
This transition led to abandoning the perception that Satan constituted an actual threat and allowed cultural space for re-imagining its mythic role and the possible relatability to our human condition. And, what appeared to be domineering during the Romantic era if not rebellion against the status quo, in the form of Revolutions?
As Satan’s fall started to be associated with proud, unlawful insurrection against divine authority, that appeared to mirror quite nicely that sense of popular and political insurrection against oppressing monarchs and the subjugating systems of government of the time. Giving new meaning to his role in the grand scheme of things, the Romantic Satanists transformed the fallen angel into a noble champion of political and individual freedom against a supreme power that deprives people of their agency, leaving submission as the only option.
From the nineteenth century onwards, the romanticised perception of Satan has been linked to three key elements: sex and sexual liberation, science and reason, and individual freedom and agency. These elements, perceived as adversarial stances to Christian morality, have fostered the birth of both atheistic and theistic Satanisms. Satan, in his aspect of Lucifer the light- bringer now works against the dogmatism of religion and, as a fallen one, he got associated with Earth, nature, and “the flesh,” particularly in its manifestations of passionate love and sex. This sexually charged representation was informed by the Book of the Watchers in First Enoch, which embeds the Lust of Fallen Angels for the daughters of men in its narrative.
Van Luijk(van Luijk, 2016, p. 113) argues that there are three crucial ways in which Romantic Satanism contributed to the late rise of modern religious Satanism.
1. For once, they mark the first historical appearance in Western civilization of an influential cultural current that positively re-evaluated Satan.
2. Second, they show a new, post-Christian, and post-Enlightenment way of dealing with myth and meaning. This allowed for a resurrection and reconstruction of Satan as a cosmic symbol with which modern people could sympathize and even identify.
3. Third, romantic Satanism exerted a decisive influence on the shape of the rehabilitated Satan that would continue to haunt nineteenth-century counter-culture and eventually emerge in modern religious Satanism.
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REFERENCES
Luijk, R. van (2016) Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism, Oxford Studies in Western Esotericism, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press.
First uploaded 17 May 2021