Ethics, community, symbolism, art, music, identity, misconceptions, and relationships with wider society.
Featured from this topicFaustFaust is the scholar or magician at the center of a European legend about bargaining with the Devil. The 1587 Faust book, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and Goethe’s Faust give the story different treatments of knowledge, desire, damnation, and human striving.
The Devil is a tarot trump commonly numbered XV. Its imagery and interpretation vary between decks and writers. Waite and Papus connect it with material constraint, fatality, and occult forces, while tarot’s history begins in the world of playing cards.
The patented talking-board game, its pointer and commercial history, and research on ideomotor movement and implicit memory.
The public holiday of 31 October, including lanterns, visiting customs, disguise, and its Celtic and Christian histories.
The Gaelic beginning-of-winter festival, Irish customs of food and divination, and its place in modern Pagan practice.
Freedom of religion and belief in international human rights texts, including minority religions, nonbelief, and religious expression.
The different holiday calendars published by the Church of Satan and The Satanic Temple, with dates and organizational meanings.
How Black Sabbath and Venom used dark or Satanic imagery, and why a song, stage character, and religious affiliation are different evidence.
Baphomet is an occult figure whose history connects the medieval trial of the Knights Templar, nineteenth-century ceremonial symbolism, twentieth-century Satanic iconography, and the modern public imagery of The Satanic Temple. The familiar goat-headed, winged, androgynous figure is not a medieval portrait of a secret Templar god. It was created in the nineteenth century by the French occultist Éliphas…
Ethics in theistic Satanism concerns the moral principles, responsibilities, virtues, prohibitions, and methods of judgement developed by Satanists who regard Satan or related beings as real rather than purely symbolic. There is no universal Satanic ethical code. Theistic Satanism is decentralized, and its practitioners may draw on personal conscience, religious devotion, philosophical individualism,…
The left-hand path is a modern esoteric category used for religious and magical currents that emphasize themes such as individual self-direction, antinomianism, self-deification, initiatory transformation, or deliberate engagement with symbols rejected by dominant religious culture. It overlaps with some forms of Satanism, Luciferianism, Setianism, and modern occultism, but the terms are not synonymous.
Tarot developed as playing cards before becoming an influential tool of occult interpretation. The history of the cards differs from later claims about their hidden origins.
A religious myth can organize meaning while also receiving literal belief. Literary form, personal interpretation, and historical evidence should be discussed as related but distinct questions.
Milton’s Paradise Lost gives Satan an influential literary characterization. His persuasive speeches must be read alongside the narrator’s account and the consequences of his actions.