The process of becoming a "Satanist" thankfully isn't as simple as merely striking the hateful, "hard ass," neofascist posture that we see exhibited by some in current Satanic circles. Instead, it involves a recognition that one is both part of the human swarm AND at the same time unique. American author Henry Miller spent a lot of time pondering this paradox: "To be cured [of our societal neuroses], we must rise from our graves and throw off the cerements of the dead" he writes. "Nobody can do it for another--it is a private affair which is best done collectively. We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related."

I think it is the difference between these last two terms, "separate and self-hypnotized" versus "individual and related," that separates, in the first case, the unenlightened, neofascist pseudo-Satanist from, in the second case, the "real thing."

Miller's remarks are very interesting, especially his use of the term "born again." Famed occult Magus Aleister Crowley propounds a similar ascesis through what he calls the "Formula of I.A.O.," a "ceremonial self- initiation" which "consists in robing yourself as a king, then stripping and slaying yourself, and rising from that death to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel." While so many fascist pseudo-Satanists today seem intent on iron-plating the ego, showing how "strong" they are, etc., it is interesting that what we see in the thought of Miller and Crowley is a recognition that before true power, or "enlightenment," can be attained, there needs to take place a kind of, not empowerment, but de-powerment. The self as a work of art is the self that is reconstructed, refashioned AFTER this act of depowerment. Once in this state, Miller writes, one is "permanently removed--and protected--from the insidious death which seems to triumph all around him. He divines that the great secret will never be apprehended but incorporated into his very substance. He has to make himself a part of the mystery, live in it as well as with it. Acceptance is the solution: it is an art, not an egotistical performance on the part of the intellect."

Through this process, Miller continues, "one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery." In other words, one has expelled inculcated societal illusions and self-delusions, and can see things clearly, as they really are, for the first time. By ridding himself of the illusions of media, bourgeois materialism, political correctness, capitalism, feminism, Satanism, Nazism, Communism, anything that clouds his vision (and this is really is a life-long process, a spiral -- we have to continually jolt ourselves awake, or risk becoming self-satisfied and static), he arrives at a place "beyond good and evil," not as an intellectual concept to be spouted on Internet newsgroups, but as a lived, experiential truth (the only truth?).

One question that might arise regarding this experiential process of self-transformation is: "Is it wise for a Satanist, then, to totally give up on the collective?"

The answer is no. As the High Priest of the FCoS, John Allee, points out, if you do so, you may end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Miller, for instance -- a Nietzsche fan who often expresses contempt for the herd-like masses -- can also turn around and say this: "I wanted to enchant, but not enslave; I wanted a greater, richer life, but not at the expense of others; I wanted to free the imagination of all men at once because without the support of the whole world, without a world imaginatively unified, the freedom of the imagination becomes a vice." Likewise, the true Satanist can’t give way to hatred of the masses and solipsism. He desires ultimately the liberation of all, because only thus can HE be totally liberated.

The correspondence between the aforementioned ideas and Satanism becomes more apparent when one compares Miller's and Crowley's philosophies to the ideas presented by the Satanist group the Order of the Nine Angles (or ONA): "For us," the ONA says, "Satan is both an archetype or symbol of our defiance, and some-thing real - the re-presentation of what we describe as the 'acausal.' That is, we understand the darker forces as not simply a part of our psyche (as most modern so-called Satanic groups do) -- but as beyond our own, individual psyche" [side note: French philosopher Michel Foucault once outraged some of his anti-essentialist admirers when he spoke of "being bathed in the forgotten sparkle of primitive light," citing an "occult essence" which appears as a "kind of glimmering" at the limits of experience -- what the ONA here calls "the acausal"]. "These darker forces -- or the acausal -- are beyond us, as individuals" the ONA continues. "They are beyond our conscious control (and even real understanding) until we become a part of them. This does not mean a submission to those forces - but rather an expanding of individual consciousness, a development of individual consciousness, to include those forces. This expansion is what marks the genuine Satanic Master / Lady Master."

Now, what Miller and Crowley were also describing was, through what I called an act of "depowerment," contact with the 'acausal' (the ONA has many 'tests' that could also be called "exercises in depowerment," such as living completely alone with minimal accoutrements for 3 months). Miller's remark that through this process the seeker "divines that the great secret will never be apprehended but incorporated into his very substance," and thus must "make himself a part of the mystery, live in it as well as with it" seems remarkably close to the incorporation of the acausal, the "expansion of individual consciousness" that the ONA sees as defining the Satanic Master.

Yet another example of the incorporating of the ‘acausal’ comes from French philosopher Georges Bataille, who sees a division between the "natural" world and the world of man. He thought that mankind had reduced itself, through the elevation of bourgeois utility to a secular religion, to the status of a thing, and that recapturing one's animal nature -- through eroticism, for example, sex for animal pleasure and not for reproduction -- was the way to recapture man's original state of sovereignty. "So humanity, seen from the human, anti-animal standpoint of work, is that which reduces us to things, and our animal natures preserves the values of our subjective existence" he writes. "Animal nature, or sexual exuberance, is that which prevents us from being reduced to mere things." To "regress" to the animal state through sexual activity, then, was for Bataille a way to intentionally reconnect with the acausal. This notion was put into practice by Aleister Crowley through sexual magick and "love under will."

The ONA goes on to talk about striving to "be like Satan -- to become one with Him, to merge with the acausal itself, to become a 'nexion' for the acausal, for sinister energies," a process of "becoming-one." Interestingly, French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, big fans of Henry Miller (part 3 of Miller's trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion is indeed called Nexus), speak similarly in their classic book Anti-Oedipus of the human subject as a "desiring-machine," a "nexus" for the flows and energies of the acausal, these "capable of hallucinating history, of reanimating the races in delirium, of setting continents ablaze." Such a mode of being, says the ONA, is "dangerous, naturally -- but the ONLY means whereby that synthesis which is beyond the synthesis that is individuation can be achieved" ("individuation" in this case I think corresponding to the self-deluded, "separate and hypnotized" part of the previously cited Miller equation). The ONA goes on to say in such an experiential state, "there is thus a real, genuine transcending beyond 'good' and 'evil,' beyond 'light' and 'dark' . . . Anything else is mere affectation, mere pose."

A true Satanist, then, to extrapolate, is always the product of experience. While a person may have certain Satanic proclivities, he / she is ultimately made, not born. Becoming one's own author, one's own "Creator," through this mode of experiential self-fashioning, is the ultimate "Satanic" exercise.

FURTHER READING:

Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986.

Crowley, Aleister. Magick in Theory and Practice. Secaucus: Castle Books, 1991.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.

Miller, Henry. Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion I. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1965.