Our History in Brief

A quick guide for those who wish to know how we came about, and why we did, it all comes back to a few stories of the development of Satanism. Azag and I met quite a while back, and at first, we really did not like each other, and Azag was none too fond of Satanism as a whole. Eventually, after much posturing and talk, we became pretty good friends and started conversing regularly. Azag was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a sect formed by the infamous Aleister Crowley, but was formerly a Satanist. After talking with him, I came to realize that he wasn't so much dismayed at Satanism as he was at Satanists. Though Lavey presented his ideas pretty clearly, the lack of affiliation with a genuine mystery school made it so that there was no regulation to who was and was not calling themselves Satanists, and there was certainly no measure of how to "test the water", so to speak, if this person was or was not. Most people might be familiar with this as the time period in 1975 where Lavey closed himself up and refused to admit new members to the Church of Satan because murderers and other felons would be found with a CoS membership card, and Lavey was tired of dealing with the publicity. He shunned everyone for a while, Dr. Acquino and other top-ranking CoS members left him, and he became very bitter.

My belief, and Azag's, was that without the legitimate tie-in of a mystery school or some form of transmitting knowledge clearly, and having a way to mark progress, the actual value of being a "Satanist" was clearly diminished. In effect, anyone could, at any time, call themselves one, and there was no way to say, "No, you're not a Satanist." Outside of the 9 Satanic Statements and the 9 Satanic Sins, which would be loosely configured out to make some sort of "Satanic Check-list", the problem still lacked in showing how someone could legitimately call themselves a Satanist. Some have tried to counter this by saying that "I can call myself anything I want", (like calling myself "Dr. Ryan"?), when it implies to Satanism, but these are the same people who will go online and slander others and say their not true Satanists, and most certainly, when questioned about some infamous pseudo-Satanists who have murdered or done other horrible deeds, they most ardently will defend that they are indeed not Satanists. An example of this kind of contradiction can be found by this pop philosophers who say that on the one hand, Satanists are purely individualistic, so they can't join any group because that violates their individualism. Yet on the same hand, they label anyone they don't like as part of the "herd group". The dichotomy is present because saying that Satanists should be free to be anything they want, so long as they are not part of the "herd" is a contradiction, you can't say you're free to be anything, then say you can't be "one of them." Besides that, if we go on this ruling, everyone is a part of "the herd", unless you have managed to seclude an island to yourself off the coast somewhere.

So, what's someone to do? Certainly the CoS can't claim that they don't believe certain people aren't Satanists, after all, they have a Bunco sheet on it, as does Tani Jantsang on what she considers Satanic. In fact, each Satanic group and each Satanic leader will have some varient definition whom really reaches that Satanic "pinnacle" of achievement, but with no mystery-school, no inner order of learning, no real tie-ins, all we know is revolved principly upon free-association, you are as Satanic as someone tells you that you are, or as Satanic as you think that you are. Even then, rest assured, you do anything to cross this group or their leader, and you will lose any and all Satanic qualities which you once had. Amazingly, Satanism has become the one social movement where you can lose your "Satanic" status in just one blink of the eye, and then gain it back in the next. If the CoS won't accept you, try the Satanic Reds, the Temple of Set, or just keep shopping around and eventually one Satanic org will declare you the true Satanist, for whatever worth that title may have attached to it.

You can see little "who's the biggest Satanist" break out on various message boards and chat-rooms, yet somehow we're supposed to believe that under this pile of rubble there's an objective standard?

To start things off and be a little helpful, we defined what the term "Left-hand Path" means, though some will prefer to go to the Indian root of the word, which I doesn't feel makes any sense, LHP and RHP in Tantra are the same thing, only they rely upon different methods, but "LHP" in Tantra is more of a means of accomplishing a goal than a philosophy. Unless someone actually practiced Tantra, the meaning would also be moot. Thus by connecting this to the mystical Kabballah, not only do we have the real origin of it, but also an actual philosophical difference in concepts.

Our next problem came from within the Satanic community itself, that is to say, many Satanists didn't have a clue about their own traditions and where they came from, even some of the most basic and mundane aspects of Satanism were totally unknown to them. Those basic aspects not limited to but also including things like the history of Satan, the history of Satanism, what LHP meant, who Aleister Crowley was, etc. Let's not even get to full discussions about things like philosophy and magick. Suffice to say, there were no guardians of the Gnosis, there was no one who was really there to make sure that people at large understood what Satanism was about, and most importantly, that included Satanists themselves!

The next part was even worse. Entire groups that didn't understand the most basic concepts of Satanism were now adding ridiculous political parties onto the ideology and making it some sort of cruscade for their cause by picking the "afflicted" name of Satanism. It's your basic scape-goat strategy, everyone is out to get you, you're the victim, everyone else is evil. So, by adopting the name of Satanism, they hoped to create "empathy" in a curious fashion that reminds me of psychological "self-defeatists". You see this in tennis players who intentionally play against opponents too skilled for them, if they lose, they can just chalk it up to the better skills of the tennis player rather than any loss on their part. They want to be intentionally scorned so they can chalk it up as them being the victims. I won't point out who these neo-Nazi wannabe's are, but their detriment to Satanism as a whole was made completely clear to me when I talked to Europeans who live next to these wannabe's. There's nothing Satanic about self-defeating ideologies or purposefully screwing people over.

So, before there would be any adoption of poorly devised political Nazi systems coined onto poorly improvised theological/philosophical systems, we decided to make an actual system which is based upon real knowledge, real information, and all of that knowledge, philosophical and historical, which compose our primary body of evidence for our knowing what we are doing and guiding people, (no matter how good or smart a group is, they can only guide, the ultimate success is up to the individual), people to individual success and a state of Gnosis. What people decide to do with this knowledge is entirely up to them, and to them alone.

Also, we wanted to obtain a level of objectivity in this by representing a greater portion of the Satanic Community at large than just one particular orientation or inclination. I consider myself a "Laveyian" Satanist, in most senses of the word, Azag is a Thelemite, Dr. D. is a Gnostic Luciferian, and Geifodd is a Setian. This grouping allows us great incite into what each particular group thinks, so that there are no misconceptions on each groups ideas and thoughts on a subject. Thus, we hope to create a total package that will help us to create a positive step-forward in Satanic ideology and rules. Naturally, one may be inclined to dismiss this all as pointless pontificating and philosophical meandering, perhaps humanistic hubris, but I challenge the reader to find any Satanic organization that puts forth as much information as we do, or that constantly updates that information as often as we do, and let the results speak for themselves. Our goal and our aim is serious enough, the next step is entirely up to the person.