Culture & Ethics
Pentagram
A pentagram is a five-pointed star figure used in different religious and esoteric settings. Orientation and surrounding imagery matter, but do not establish one universal meaning.
Results for “pentagram”
Devotional Practice
Altar
An altar is a designated place or surface used for religious devotion, ritual, offerings, sacred objects, or symbolic focus. Altars occur in many religious traditions, but their forms and meanings vary widely. In modern theistic Satanism an altar may function as a place for Prayer, Ritual, Offerings, meditation, spirit work, or the display of symbols connected with Satan and other beings.
Devotional Practice
Banishing rituals
Ceremonies intended to clear, delimit, or reorder a ritual setting, with methods that vary by tradition.
Culture & Ethics
Baphomet
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…
Culture & Ethics
Satanic symbolism
The images, names, and gestures used by Satanic traditions, whose meanings depend on their religious and historical setting.
History
Éliphas Lévi
A nineteenth-century French occult author associated with ceremonial symbolism and the influential image of Baphomet.
Devotional Practice
Ritual in theistic Satanism
Ritual is patterned action given special religious, symbolic, social, or transformative significance. Ritual can mark time, establish sacred space, communicate with a deity, express commitment, create community, memorialize the dead, enact a transition, or focus attention on a chosen purpose. In theistic Satanism, ritual commonly includes devotional action directed toward Satan or other spirits…
Culture & Ethics
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.
Organizations & Traditions
Church of Satan
The Church of Satan is the organization founded by Anton LaVey in 1966. Its official account describes Satanism as atheistic and gives Satan a symbolic role.
Culture & Ethics
The Devil (tarot card)
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.
Theology & Cosmology
Wicca
Modern Pagan religious witchcraft, its Gardnerian and Alexandrian traditions, ritual practice, and relationship to Satanism.
Culture & Ethics
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.
History
Occultism and Western esotericism
Occultism and Western esotericism provide an important historical and intellectual background for many forms of modern Satanism, but neither term is a synonym for Satanism. Western esotericism is an academic field encompassing currents such as Renaissance Hermetism, alchemy, astrology, Christian theosophy, Kabbalistic reception, Rosicrucianism, ceremonial magic, spiritualism, occultism, and later…
Devotional Practice
Sigils
Sigils are graphic signs used in particular magical systems. Historical spirit seals, ceremonial figures, and modern personal signs should be distinguished.
Demonology & Spirits
Decarabia
A Goetic marquis appearing as a star, associated with plants, stones, and bird-like apparitions.
History
The Devil
The Devil is the principal personification of evil in much of Christian tradition and a major source for later Western images of Satan. The term is not identical with every historical use of Satan, nor does it describe one unchanging character across the Bible, theology, folklore, literature, art, and modern religion. In contemporary speech “the Devil” often functions as a proper name for Satan, but…