Help me make sense of this Satanic stuff right here.

Factual Questions
1

So I’ve discovered this obscure religious tract, written by (of all things) a Danish dairy merchant back in 1906.

In it, the author – Carl William Hansen, a.k.a. “Ben Kadosh” – lists a bunch of odd titles and nicknames for the devil, including “the hunted wolf,” “the skeleton in the human body,” “the big child,” “the spirit at the monstery’s gates,” “poverty’s Mercury or protective spirit,” “the red moon,” “the light in the raven’s head,” “the moonlight in the ruins,” “the human wolf followed by the red dog” and “the burning schin” (as in the Hebrew letter shin, I’m guessing…?).

For the life of me I can’t recognize a single one of these as being Biblical and/or traditional names or nicknames for the devil… Can you?

He also quotes, without providing a cite, a description written in the first person of a meeting with the devil, which goes a little something like this:

  1. A guy meets the devil and attacks him. Each time, the devil beats the ever-loving shit out of the guy. This is repeated several times over.

  2. Finally, the guy’s body is completely broken and destroyed, and so the devil gives him a new body – this time, an AWESOME body, kinda like the devil’s own.

  3. The devil then gives the guy a hug, and shouts out “I LOVE YOU!” Cut to black.

This story, too, puzzles me: I’ve just never heard anything like it! Have any of you? Are there any precedents that you know of, any similar stories – be they Biblical, traditional, from ye olde Germanic fairy tales or what have you…?

2

Despite a fair amount of familiarity with occult/metaphysical/religious topics and literature, I got nothin’.

Actually, I do have a guess. Goes like this:
Dairy farmers got cows.
Cows leave cow patties.
Certain time of year, bluish fungus grows on them cow patties.
After that, you could meet all sorts of interesting people, who may or may not be known as Old Scratch.

Or have tentacles.
EDIT: On reflection, it may have some connection to “The Devil Went Down To Georgia”-type stories. In the fine tradition of recreational boasting.

3

Great username/post combo!

4

Sounds like the kind of self-referential nomenclature/vocabulary occasionally suffered by someone with schizophrenia.

(Guy I grew up with developed schizophrenia and thought he had a claim to half the village. When talking about it he consistently referred to it as “Capital L.A.N. capital D.”)

5

Hehe, well shit, anything’s possible, I guess!

After all, people did do all kinds of crazy drugs back then – occultists most certainly included. Absinth, opium… Why not throw some cow dung 'shrooms in there, too, and see what happens?

6

Steken~~Show us a scan, or a full quote.

I for one am curious.

7

They used to illustrate alchemical formulae with really bizarre rubus-like pictures, with various actions meant as metaphors for particular kinds of chemical reactions. Could be something like that.

8

How very weird. I’ve just a few weeks ago become acquainted with the Satanic dairy merchant myself. Talk about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

I can’t help you with Carl Hansen’s names for the Devil - I can say that none of them are (or to my knowledge, were) used in Denmark. The same goes for the story.

I don’t think he was mentally ill, by the way. He simply tapped in on the general flow of esoteric ideas that were in vogue at the time.

A few tidbits: During the Danish Census in 190something he registered himself as “Luciferian”, the only person to do that. (His wife and children registered as “Lutheran” or something similar). He carried out extensive written communication with various intellectuals from all over Europe - among others playwright August Strindberg, IIRC.

9

I can do that, no problem. Give it a day or two though, need to swing by the library and pick up the book again.

That’s certainly a possibility. The guy did dabble in alchemy, that much is certain.

Quite right! That’s the guy.

Best part of the whole tract, though, is where he writes that if there’s anybody out there who’s interested in hearing more about his master the devil, and maybe even wants to receive the “keys to his kingdom,” then hey, feel free to just pop by the dairy shop down at something-something-street number something-something, and have a nice ol’ chat…! A rather hospitable fellow, that Hansen – none of that don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you super-exclusive elite secret society stuff!

He wasn’t really all that effective when it comes to the whole “charismatic cult leader” thing, though – his “black inner circle” apparently consisted of something like three or four guys, and as you pointed out, he couldn’t even convince his own wife to join in!

Eventually tried setting up his own irregular Masonic lodge in the 1920’s (much to the chagrin of the real, regular, actual Masons, of course, who felt this kind of wanton copyright infringement cheapened the brand, as it were), but got excommunicated by his own disciples in 1930 anyway, and died, bitter and alone, some years later. Almost makes one feel a little bit of… Sympathy for the devil(-worshipping Danish dairy merchant).

10

I can tell you this: “Carl William Hansen” can be anagrammed to “I am carnal; Hell wins.”

And “Ben Kadosh” makes “bonk Hades.”

I must say, for some reason Luciferan sounds much more lyrical to me than “Satanist.”

11

So, I don’t know much about 19th century Denmark, but who the F buys milk from a Satanist?

Seems sketchy at best.

12

I don’t think people knew. He wasn’t sporting pentagram tattoos or anything. He was just a milk man who worshipped Satan in his spare time. Most people would probably just have found him to be a local “character” - slightly odd.

Excellent goat’s milk, too, I suppose.

13

I’ve read or skimmed probably one of the most well known collections of incantation (A.E. Waite’s Ceremonial Magic) and nothing there sounds remotely familiar.

I like the alchemical analogy, but I would think even the early 20th century would be a bit late for something like that. Now I need to go find when Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus.

14

The names of satan Hansen gives seem a little too…lyrical…to be the product of schizophrenia to my ear. Neologisms in schizophrenia tend to be nonsensical - to give a real example, a patient might imagine he is being persecuted by the BritishDutch Confusia. There is a quality about the pronouncements that is inaccessible to anyone who does not grok the delusion, like the significance of the bizarre capitalisation in the word “land” given in an example above. Even when the patient tries to explain it, it’s just rambling and disconnected; you can’t attach meaning to it. Think of the TimeCube guy.

But the “moonlight in the ruins” or the “hunted wolf” are images that are accessible to the sane - a cold infusing spirit that illuminates destruction in the first case; a powerful, lonely yet feared and hated figure in the second. Some of the language may be esoteric - the symbols are not apparent unless one has them explained - but I don’t think they are insane in the sense of being delusional in quality (religious ideas can be pretty out there without being the product of mental illness).

Of course it is entirely possible to be very odd without being formally insane. I don’t doubt that Hansen was a challenge to be with. And I think I would have walked the extra 100 yards up the street to get my goat’s milk from the next guy.

15

Again: I do not think he was crazy - I think he attached himself to various “esoteric ideas” that circulated (and were quite popular) in his time. Granted - it does take a certain personality to come up with something like this; but IIRC none of his writings are really ramblings in the Time Cube sense of the word. I’ll look into it, if I can find anything else about him I’ll post it.

16

I always knew those Danish butter cookies were evil.

17

Carl William Hansen, aka Ben Kadosh.

Is your pamphlet the 1906 publication mentioned in Wikipedia?

18

Being Danish, he’d probably be in a black metal band if he were around today.

19

… Aaaaaand I’m back.

With quotes, this time, to back up the OP – in my own half-assed English translation from the original Danish.

And to clarify, the quotes are indeed from the pamphlet mentioned in Hansen’s Wikipedia page, i.e. “Den Ny Morgens Gry: Lucifer-Hiram: Verdens-Bygmesterens Genkomst,” or in English, “The Dawn of a New Morning, Lucifer-Hiram, The Return of the World’s Master Builder,” originally published in Copenhagen in 1906, but here in a 2006 edition by Kadosh Press.

First off, the story about how the guy gets beaten up by the devil, and somehow receives a new body in the process.

As stated in the OP, Hansen frames the story as a quotation (“her Brudstykket af en Beskrivelse om ham” – “here’s a fragment from a description”), without stating his source.

"And then finally I saw Satan (Lucifer) before me – glorious and wonderful to behold. Half-hidden amongst the bushes, he finally stood up – tall, dark-skinned, with shining limbs and nostrils flaming with desire. He stood in the burning, unbearable sunlight, I in the shadows of the bush. Wild and murderous was his gaze, shooting forth contempt for dreamers and dreams. He touched a cliff and it burst open with a noise like a falling ash. Strong was the magnetism flowing forth from his dark body; his enormous foot, well-shaped, with forked toes, lodged in the sand.

‘Come forth,’ he said with contempt, ‘are you afraid to meet me?’

I didn’t answer, but run up to him and struck him. But he beat me thousand-fold and burned and flayed and whipped me with hands of fire. My body lay dead, but happily I attacked again, this time in a new body. Again he turned towards me and beat me doubly and killed my new body. Again I run happily towards him. And yet again the same scene – with him beating me and annihilating my old body – repeated itself.

The bodies I draped myself in all sank down beneath me and stood as [???*] of fire around me, but eventually I threw them off.

The pains I felt in one body became weapons which I swinged in the next body, and I grew in strength.

Finally I stood perfected before him, with a body like his very own, and equal to him in strength, proudly and happily rejoicing. Then he embraced and said “I love you!”

And lo and behold! His form changed, and he knelt down and took me in his arms and lifted me into space and far above the tree-tops across the oceans, along the earth and spirited away below the moon – until we stood in paradise!"

As for the possibility of Hansen being mentally ill, I guess that’s a possibility – I really can’t say for sure either way. On the subject, though, one thing that is interesting to note is that his right-hand man during the 20’s, Grunddal Sjallung, with whose help he organized and led a number of irregular Masonic lodges and secret societies and so on, was in fact a psychiatrist by trade…!

  • No clue what this word means – “ham,” but with a capital “h” (that is, “Ham”), as if it were a noun…? Could a native Danish speaker help me out, per chance…? (Perhaps “cloak,” as in old Swedish “hamn”…?)
20

My guess is that it says “… som en Ham”, in which case it does indeed means “clothing, cloak.” As in: Loki’s cloak of feathers is called “fjederham” in old-ish Danish.