Witch trials in medieval and early modern Europe were based on the assumption that “witches” were Devil-worshipers. Black Mass figured in popular imagination from the Baroque period onward. But did such a thing as Satanism ever really exist, in any form, before Anton Szandor LaVey invented the Church of Satan in the late 1960s?
Obviously there’s Aleister Crowley previous to the 1960s. But overall, I suspect that LaVey mostly owed his ideas to the Hellfire Club and anarchism.
Neither the Hellfire Club nor Crowley worshipped the Christian devil, nor does LaVey’s Satanism. So really there never has been a cult of Devil-worshipers up into modern day.
According to Brian Levack (author of The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe) there are three components necessary for a large scale witch hunt. Note: Places like Portugal had all three of these but never experienced large scale witch hunts.
#1. Maleficium (harmful magic). #2. Inquisitorial justice system. #3. A belief in diabolism.
Diabolism wasn’t just the idea that an individual was worshiping the devil but that there was a conspiracy of devil worshipers that were hellbent on challenging not only God but the state as well. While there are certainly plenty of confessions in the records of accused witches detailing their Sabbaths with the devil and other witches, honestly, I can’t think of any modern scholar on magical beliefs or witch trials in early modern Europe that believe there was wide scale devil worship.
In 1921 Margaret Murray’s Witch Cult in Western Europe was released. Murray didn’t argue that the witches persecuted were devil worshipers but she did claim that they were remnants of Europe’s pagan religions. While this belief is pretty common in modern neo-Pagan circles it is not held by most scholars and her work on this topic is not held in high regard.
There is the fascinating case of the Benadanti in the Fruili district of northern Italy. They were a strange fertility cult that believed they could fight evil witches in their dreams and prevent their crops from being ruined. They would have considered themselves to have been good Christians though the Inquisition eventually convinced them otherwise. None of them were executed for witchcraft though.
Odesio
PS: During the middle ages there really was no concept of diabolism, or, at least, not on the scale that existed starting around 1450. If you told a priest in 1100 AD that you and your friends meet in the woods with Satan he would have thought you were delusional not a witch. Diabolism really took hold in early modern Europe.
I don’t see why not. If people believed there were such things as witches, then you have to figure a few of them would decide they wanted to be one. Sure there was a danger of being arrested and executed but you also have the potential for gaining power or other rewards from your Satanic allegiance. Satanism would have been the medieval equivalent of joining the Mafia.
Wherever there is a widespread belief in the efficacy of witchcraft and Black magic, you will find people feeding off of it - either by posing as black magicians/witches as a way of fraudulently bilking the gullible, or out of genuine belief in its power (or a combo of both).
I read that there was an outbreak of interest in satan-worshipping black magic among the aristocrats of the court of Louis XIV - dunno how true any of it is, but it would not surprise me.
The affair had very serious consequences - among which was the alienation of Prince Eugine of Saxony from France – his mom was accused of witchcraft and poisioning:
The Chinese and Japanese have words that are often translated into English as “demon”, but these aren’t Christian demons by any means. They existed previous to the introduction of Christianity and are reputed to have different qualities than Christian demons. Christianity doesn’t have a lock on the word “demon”.
Believing in demons doesn’t make someone secretly Christian nor a Christian Satanist. It just means that you believe in the existence of some sort of group of evil spirits.
By all reports, Satanism has nothing to do with the Christian Satan and hence the demons referred to by them are unrelated to Christian demons.
Being women who, for some reason or another, had attracted the jealousy and/or suspicion of their fellow townsfolk/villagers, whether that was because they provided herbal abortifacients for other village women or because they were “crazy cat ladies” or even that they were just lonely, scary old women. Add in self-described “witch finders” who got paid per witch found and you’ve got a recipe for absolute horror.
It’s my understanding that LaVeyan Satanism (and most of its offshoots) don’t even go as far as actually calling “real” demons. The CoS is practically a form of ritual atheism/egoism…what they call “Satan” is actually their own personal ego, and that’s not some deep subconscious psychology…LaVey actually writes about it in the Satanic Bible.
The whole “Satan” thing in the Church of Satan is about one step up the ladder from high school kids dressing in black and sacrificing pinkie mice in a half-assed pentagram where an adult is sure to find the remains. Shock value.
Some may simply have been practicing traditional folk magic. That might have had pre-Christian roots, but many practitioners probably thought of themselves as Christian.
I agree with Little Nemo The motivation of many dabblers in Satanism throughout history was probably the same as it is today – Thumbing their nose at the establishment, and demonstrating to themselves and others what badasses they were. Christianity simply falsely projected its own degree of organization and structure onto its imagined nemesis.
I suspect a lot of it was that. But I’d be surprised if there were not “genuine” practitioners of black magic as well (“genuine” in the sense of claiming such powers of course ). By “black magic” I mean te use of magical arts to curse rivals as a means of doing them harm, or the use of magic to gain power for oneself at the expense of others.
After all, most traditional-folk cultures believe in the powers of various sorts of magic and superstition, and no culture lacks people who are evily-intentioned towards others. Magic, poisioning and feuds with hated rivals probably all ran together - the problem being, of course, that the primitive and credulous judicial system, freely employing torture, produced so many false positives that it is difficult to find any genuine evidence. After all, it was probably an even more effective tactic to work harm on rivals to accuse them of witchcraft, as to practice it yourself …
As to the content of such magic - it was probably an amalgam of local superstitions mixed with concepts borrowed from Christianity. My mother in law, an immigrant from Ukraine, very much 'folk" religious (Ukranian Catholic), practices a sort of witchcraft - good witchcraft of course - using burning of wax candles mixed with various herbs gathered at night to magically protect herself. She’s a firm believer in bad witchcraft as well, and I’ll bet she knows the traditional ways to curse someone (though of course would never do it … ).
That’s exactly what I was wondering: How much Black Mass, etc., was really going on? And, if it was real, were the participants really hoping to curry favor with Satan, or just playing a blasphemous game for the excitement of it?
Apparently there was also, in medieval and early modern Europe, a recognized category of “cunning folk,” practitioners of folk magic for more beneficent ends, who neither regarded themselves nor were regarded by others as “witches,” and who even sometimes functioned as witchfinders.
I know ceremonial magicians (such as Crowley) sometimes call on what they call “angels” (and by Hebrew names such as Ariel, etc.). I’m not clear on whether they recognize any distinction between “angels” and “demons.”
Actually I think that many of the early Satanists were sincere. They lived in a time when people really believed in the power of Satan to make bargains and offer rewards for service and they decided to accept the supposed offer. So they weren’t just tried to shock public opinion - they probably even tried to conceal what they were doing.
Only tangential to the thread topic, but of some interest: The values of Lavayan/Church of Satan Satanists are not simply the inverse of Christian morality. If they were, Satanists would take it as their duty to do evil for evil’s sake – harm people, vandalize property, etc. Maybe the kind of teenage “Satanists” who sacrifice kittens to their heavy-metal album covers do think that way, but the CoS has these “Nine Satanic Statements”:
And “Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth”:
And “Nine Satanic Sins”:
What all this expresses is definitely a value system, in the sense that Plan Nine from Outer Space is definitely a motion picture. It is in some respects the reverse of Christian values, e.g., in the substitution of pride for humility; but in other respects arguably parallel to it or completely orthogonal to it.
). By “black magic” I mean te use of magical arts to curse rivals as a means of doing them harm, or the use of magic to gain power for oneself at the expense of others.