Results for “biblical interpretation”

Revelation and the dragon

Revelation 12 identifies its dragon with the Devil and Satan. The chapter’s imagery should be read in its apocalyptic narrative before being used to interpret other passages.

Life of Adam and Eve

The Life of Adam and Eve is a group of related apocryphal narratives about the first humans. Its versions expand the Eden story through accounts of repentance, the Devil’s hostility, illness, burial, and hoped-for restoration.

Faust

Faust 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.

Mastema

Mastema is a leader of harmful spirits in the Book of Jubilees. His appearances in the stories of Noah, Abraham, and Moses connect temptation, accusation, and hostility with a power that remains subject to divine limits.

Wicca

Modern Pagan religious witchcraft, its Gardnerian and Alexandrian traditions, ritual practice, and relationship to Satanism.

Black Mass

A term for ritual inversion of Christian worship, with Huysmans's literary portrayal and a modern distinction from Satanic Mass.

Satanic holidays

The different holiday calendars published by the Church of Satan and The Satanic Temple, with dates and organizational meanings.

Satanism and heavy metal

How Black Sabbath and Venom used dark or Satanic imagery, and why a song, stage character, and religious affiliation are different evidence.

Beleth

A Goetic king riding a pale horse, associated with desire and an elaborate ceremonial reception.

Ronove

A Goetic spirit associated with rhetoric, languages, servants, and social favor.

Gremory

A Goetic duke depicted as a woman on a camel, associated with hidden knowledge, treasure, and attraction.

Fraternitas Saturni

A German magical fraternity whose teaching gives Saturn a central symbolic and initiatory role.

Setianism

The religious philosophy associated with the Temple of Set, the Egyptian name Set, and the idea of Xeper.

Set

An ancient Egyptian deity associated with conflict and disorder, also reinterpreted in modern Setian religion.

Planetary magic

Magical systems using the seven traditional planets through timing, correspondences, images, and invocations.

Theistic Satanism

Theistic Satanism is a family of religious positions in which Satan is understood as an actually existing spiritual being, deity, intelligence, or metaphysical presence, rather than only a literary symbol or political metaphor. It is not a single church or creed. The term is best used as an umbrella for practitioners and groups whose beliefs differ on the nature of Satan, the status of other spirits,…

Modern theistic Satanism

Modern theistic Satanism refers to contemporary religious currents in which Satan is understood as an independently real deity, spirit, intelligence, or metaphysical presence and is approached through devotion, ritual, prayer, magic, contemplation, or other religious practices. It is part of the wider field of modern Satanism but differs from explicitly non-theistic movements that use Satan primarily as…

Left-hand path

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.

Order of Nine Angles (O9A)

Hermeticism

Hermeticism names several related traditions associated with Hermes Trismegistus. Philosophical dialogues, alchemical texts, and later occult systems require separate historical treatment.