Why I am not a Satanist

[imomus]

From time to time, Satanists and Occultists seem to take an interest in me. Perhaps it's because my bid to chart a single in the UK Top 40, back in 1989, was called "The Hairstyle of the Devil". Perhaps it's because Momus is the name of a non-Christian deity, or because I sing about "the old religion", or because my name appears on the Famous Non-Believers List. Or perhaps it's simply because my name is Nick and I'm old.

Well, I have to thank someone called Jason Louv for sending me the book he edits, Generation Hex (Disinformation), an attempt to connect alternative culture to the occult. "Magic is what sprouts up between the cracks in the modern world and its ideologies," Jason writes in his introduction, 'Towards an Ultraculture'. "Its branches and leaves curl forth from underneath the halls of church and state, from our television and computer screens, from every bookstore and tabloid rack—if we know how to look." Jason also included a DVD of "Disinformation: The Complete Series", the TV show made by the Disinformation Company and broadcast by Channel 4 in the UK, "which Richard Metzger wanted you to have". Metzger is the co-founder of Disinformation, the missing link between Adbusters and Beelzebub, between No Logo and Belial. On the cover of the video he lifts a quizzical eyebrow, like someone convinced of his own enormous charismatic power. On his blog, though, he seems like a fairly normal yuppie; he's just discovered reggae dub, for instance, and is "buying several new CDs a week and generally driving my girlfriend to utter despair".

I found the shows pretty silly, to be honest, rather like long-forgotten Channel 4 tabloid TV shows Rapido and Eurotrash, with some kind of diluted post-Seattle-Satanism replacing frenchness as the structuring gimmick. But actually, it would probably be more subversive, in today's America, to come across as a Frenchman than to drop vague hints that you worship where it smells of sulphur.

Actually, the hints aren't all that vague. "Things you'll never see on television!" boasts the DVD sleeve, then lists "Satanism!" as the very first item. There's a familiar cast of alternatives and iconoclasts featured in interviews and the conference clips on Disc 2: Genesis P. Orridge, Douglas Rushkoff, Robert Anton Wilson, Marilyn Manson, Kenneth Anger, Grant Morrison. Now, some of these people are friends of friends, or people I've heard are admirers of my work. But it's somewhat disturbing to see them all collected together to vaunt irrationality as a solution to the world's problems, and Satan as a binding force for the subculture. It's as disappointing, in its way, as reading biographies of David Bowie and realising that cocaine and LA occultists really did make him a bit insane for a couple of years in the 70s (he saw Satan's face in his swimming pool, believed witches were collecting his sperm, and was terrified to see a demonic white hand around his wife's waist in an old photo).

It's always disappointing when you hear how credulous and irrational your heroes are. For instance, I've spoken in this blog before about a certain admiration for Genesis P. Orridge. The man has style, and has made some great work, so he's welcome to read Aleister Crowley books all day if he likes. But I was a bit disappointed to hear—from a member of a famous goth band, as it happens—that Gen, on the night of the fire at Rick Rubin's house in which he fell from a window and was later awarded a million dollars for his injuries, had been burying voodoo dolls in the ground. Jesus, was all that satanic abuse stuff that made him leave Britain true, then? You know, how... silly.

Yes, Satanism just strikes me as... silly, I'm afraid. Why abandon the idiocy of God if you're not also going to abandon the idiocy of The Devil? Sure, I love mystery, and I love "the old religion", the Greek pantheon, the Celts, Shinto, all that stuff. What I hate, though, is the way Christianity vilified fertility religions and made them "evil". You can still see the result of that in the way various speakers at the Disinfo conference, included on the DVD, have a certain "evil glow" in their eyes, or believe they possess an "evil charisma". America's idiotic binary culture forces you to be good or evil, with or against, constructive or destructive. The result is that alternative culture people internalize the stigma of otherness, becoming Fashion Goths and Slayer fans.

Just as the principal danger of anti-capitalism is that it makes you think like a capitalist, so the principal danger of Satanism is that it makes you think like a Christian. I am very, very evil, you think. Well, no you're not. If Christianity is silly, just walk away from it, and from its stigmas too; its dark underbelly, its Satanism. I mean, I'm all for people like Rushkoff reviving ethics and comparing the early internet to the Talmud. Interesting metaphor. And I must say Robert Anton Wilson comes across in his clip like a sweetie, an old Silenus or Pan type. But—well, here comes the inevitable Japan bit—I'm really so over this Western demonization of paganism, this I'm-so-evil thing. Shinto in Japan is a quiet, gentle, mainstream influence, and you can embrace its fertility messages, its nature messages, and its animism messages without having to become an outsider, or waggle your eyebrows like a second-rate magician practicing in front of the mirror. In other words, what in the West would be an alternative culture which you'd have to be a deviant or a nut or an outsider to embrace is, in Japan, something central which you can conform towards.

I dislike Satanism for aesthetic reasons too. Occult sections in bookstores are usually magnets for the spottiest, stupidest, most badly-dressed people. Occultist websites are appalling cautionary tales, evidence that, whatever else he does, Satan makes you commit every graphic design sin known to man. But I particularly resist precisely this thing that Jason Louv is advocating in Generation Hex, the stringing together of Satanism and alternative culture. I resist it because it's just fucking boring to see the counterculture summed up with a skull. But also because alternative culture has some important work to do, work it needs rationality and clear-headedness to carry through, and work which it needs to believe in its own ethical goodness to bring to mainstream acceptance. Wouldn't it be terrible if everyone, for instance, who thought there were other shibboleths than endless economic growth, all turned out to go to secret meetings and make secret signs to each other and think they were "evil"? Wouldn't it be a bit of a blow to the open source software movement, for instance, if you could say of its hobbit-like proponents, as these Satanist kids josh about Jason Louv, "Jason Louv drinks with nobody but the devil, I tell you! Satan mixes his cocktails! A horned beast with a dark and terrifying cock stirs his vodka martini and a putrid she-devil with monkeys for tits pours his lager! No man on earth dare sip from the same cup!" I mean, that wouldn't just be disinformation and defamation, it would be something much worse: distraction.

Comments

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

You do realize that the Church of Satan denies the existence of the Devil, right?

[zotz]

I am never able to understand why that's supposed to make them less childish as opoosed to more so.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Momus devotes a paragraph above to criticising satansists for believing in satan. Drawing spurious conclusions about the supposedly obvious connection between appearances and motivations. While I realize that facts are decoration at this blog, it's worth making fun of them for the right reasons.

[zotz]

I wouldn't say that his criticisms are off the mark. The devil is a silly concept as an object of actual worship, and even sillier as the sort of metaphor the Church of Satan et al are into. WI didn't take any of it as implying that any of them necessarily believed in the existence of an actual devil, and frankly it applies just as well both ways anyway.

Anyway, which paragraph were you referring to?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I don't mention the Church of Satan at all.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'd totally forgotten that Jason Louv interviewed me (http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id2274/pg1/) for the Disinformation site in May. One question that didn't make it into the final piece (because I had nothing to say about it, really) was this one, which explains their interest in me:

"Your family had roots in the Plymouth Brethren, a heavily evangelical, Puritan sect. And I looked it up and it turns out the other luminary to come out of that group was the magician Aleister Crowley, who was raised in it in the late 19th century. And it may seem an odd comparison, but the two of you seem to have quite a bit in common–global bohemianism, a certain anti-Puritan occupation with sex as politics (he wrote homosexual porno poems in "White Stains," you wrote "Coming in a Girl's Mouth"), a preoccupation with transcending "socialisation processes" as you mentioned above, certainly shamanism and construction of multiple selves for fun & art's sake. I wonder if this is a parallel you've ever drawn."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

What am I talking about, that interview was May 2002, not this May! (But all Mays pulse with the same evil febrile fertile phallus-energy, don't they?)

[backmasked.livejournal.com]

while i agree with yr appraisal of pop satanism --and the silly vibe of the disinfo dvds- i have to wonder from yr comments if you even watched the dvds or read the book.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

If I did that my soul would already be Satan's. No, I peeped into both, then thought I'd let you have my prejudices while they were still fresh.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

When I wrote the line about "the missing link between AdBusters and Beelzebub" I hadn't read this quote, which rather confirms my prejudice:

"It was Occult study that first led me to major in Marketing. The way I see it, it's just magick by another name... I think that Marketing is simply the legitimate face of occult study - the last socially acceptable way to understand magic theory. If more occultists got involved in it, I think there would be a lot of growth in the way we interpret, present, and understand ideas." --Jedediah Walls, Chicago AdBusters

(from an Amazon customer review (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1932857206/002-8499063-7203227?v=glance) of Jason's book.)

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I also find satanism extremely silly. It's all Rocky Horror Picture Show to me.

Someone here mentioned that those in the Church of Satan don't actually believe in Satan. It's true that the 'church' set up by LaVey are basically atheist with a touch of Vincent Price. Houellebecq writes about this in Atomised, too. Satanists, he says, are merely atheists. All the Satan nonsense is used to recruit people in a dramatic way and to decrease their inhibitions. At the centre of it the secret is to do with acts of nihilism such as Dosotoyevsky dealt with in Crime and Punishment.

I see 'mainstream' atheism and Satanism equally as 'slave religions' - as part of Christianity. All very depressing.

By the way, a piece of gossip, dear. I was at a kind of talk given on Aleister Crowley and Charles Shaar Murray was there with his partner, and they both caused a bit of a scene because someone was smoking in the room (upstairs in a pub, as it happened). Hilarious. Very black magic, I'm sure.

[dutch-schulz.livejournal.com]

Maybe your attitude towards Christianity is a reaction to the strict religious background that, as you mention, your family had (and I suppose Crowley's certainly is)? Dogmatism, which does deserve disgust and is a sign of one's stupidity, may inhibit any system of values, any worldview. And, perhaps, a lot of it has been accumulated in Christianity over the centuries. I grew up in post-communist Russia, where there was no ideological pressure whatsoever - you could, basically, believe in anything, and noone would bother (as long as you don't eat human flesh etc). I had no idea what a religion is, neither did my family. So looking now at Christianity without previous experience and a prejudice, I see quite a lot of good stuff in it - and will probably continue to see as long as nobody is pressing me to conform to it.

And satanism seems to be an ingracious and childish attempt to escape the pressures of christian dogmatism by those, who had encountered it. You know, like beating up a chair that you accidentally fell over. Tasteless.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

throbbing gristle were pretty much into market research right from the word go. i've still got one of the questionaires that came i think with the second annual report album. does anybody want it? submit address and i send it to you. first cum, first serve. condition: don't sell it on e-bay. just smell the paper. oh by the way it's demis roussos weekend over at my blog.

[urban-ospreys.livejournal.com]

Re: anti-smoking Satanists. Planet Ned Flanders is scaring me more than Satan. It's a modern Purgatorio, and the motto is 'Do what thou wilt, just not in practice'.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Planet Ned Flanders?

I'm afraid I can't find it on Google.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, good to know that you don't let the facts get in the way of your, so called, worldview.

[zotz]

I see 'mainstream' atheism and Satanism equally as 'slave religions' - as part of Christianity.

In what way?

[dzima.livejournal.com]

Deal.

I also want the original concert ticket for the 1972 Emerson, Lake & Palmer tour in Germany.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

ok TG is fine. i'm warning you: you sell it on e-bay and you are in for some serious magick side effects, like being picked upon by a seagull.

i've swapped the ELP one for a bottle of whisky. sorry.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The devil took me to the top of a mountain. "See those seagulls down there?" he asked. "Well, one day they'll do your bidding."

[reptilebrain.livejournal.com]

Nick,

You Should watch the disinfo interviews, and not the series. The series was crap, but I thought the interviews were pretty good. Especially the ones with Robert Anton Wilson. Both Robert Anton Wilson and Grant Morrison would be particularly insulted to hear you lump them together with "Satanists." Neither of their views, or the massive amount of literature that both Wilson and Morrison put out, have anything at all to do with a supposed "satanic philosophy."

one more thing

[reptilebrain.livejournal.com]

Grant Morrison, (a big fan of yours) has some nutty ideas. However, the main idea that he champions is that egos should not become static and the personality should be a fluid thing. We should allow ourselves to change. This has nothing to do with the occult.
And it sounds ALOT like a lyric of yours:

"Because being of one mind is a capital crime. I will pack and unpack at the drop of a hat."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I watched them both. They were both sweet, they had soothing voices. I liked Wilson's priapism. I could just picture Grant's library, though, full of books about the "bicameral mind" and stuff like that. I've been around so many people who take coke and rave about the bicameral mind, like the guy "The Hairstyle of the Devil" is about, Martin Heath (I put a backwards message in that song that says "Acid house is the vehicle of Satan, also known as Martin Heath"). They're usually into marketing too, those types, and they're "young businessman of the year" with their record label or their TV company or whatever, as I imagine Metzger is. I just wish they'd all go and read Bruno Schultz or Andre Gide or Oe Kenzaburo or something.

some witches like rainbows

[300letters.livejournal.com]

While most satanists are really christians who prefer to wear black, there is a large segment of American occultists, neo-pagans, whatever you wish to call them, who remove themselves from the dilectic entirely. My girlfriend, a Wiccan of many many years finds those people to be truly humorous, "rejecting christianity" to worship a christian deity.

The flip side of all this is practical. You should watch Grant Morrison's lecture on the disinfo DVD if you have not already. His point, echoed by many is entirly practical. If it works, magic is a useful tool for effecting change. Even if the only way it works is in harnassing your will to effect change in your life. If the tool works, why throw it out of the toolshed? Some of the more interesting stuff borrows from situationist theory (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/alison.pollard/thedrift.htm) and can be a quite useful symbolic structure to affect change.

Besides, a nice dose of non-rationality is often a good thing.

Gide

[(Anonymous)]

Morrison has referenced Gide in a few of his comics.