Witching Social Justice

Ignorance is Satanism’s greatest sin. To Crowley, the only wrong a person could commit would be to deny oneself. To famed psychologist Carl Jung, all the demons and deities of the world were merely an extension of humanity’s subconscious.

So how can someone say that you can’t be simultaneously against social evils and a Satanist?

How can one try to make the argument that it is against Satanism to use its magick and its demons for the greater good?

How is it so hard to understand that the very figure of Satan is one who seeks to wake minds up and turn them away from falsities to usher in Aquarius?

I am proudly an “sjw” and I am proudly a Satanic witch. These two things are not mutually exclusive.

I’ll give you an example of how I do this. I recently made a spell jar for the families being separated by force while seeking asylum across the Mexico-United States border. I can’t give money because I’m struggling financially, and I can’t go there because I’m not in my best of health. So what else is there? Lending energy and thought. I do this via a simple construction that is all about intention and symbolism. White salt, rosemary, basil, and betony are for protection; lavender is to calm; pink salt is to send love and health; and then I wrote on two bay leaves the words “peace” and “freedom,” and then crumbled them into the jar. I placed the jar on my back deck facing South, on top of a sheet of paper with sigils for hope, freedom, and protection. On the side of the jar, I wrote “men, women, and children crossing US-Mexican border.” As an added bonus, I then performed a simple curse: I wrote on two slips of paper “ICE” and “Jeff Sessions,” took some “cursing oil” (vinegar, chili powder, olive oil, and boneset) and applied it to a pointed rock. I then vigorously beat the rock onto the sheets of paper, point down, expressing all my anger. Once done, I crumpled up the papers and spit on them, and threw them onto the ground.

To my average Leftist, all of the above might seem like a waste of time. It’s nothing concrete, is it? It’s not giving them water or food. It’s not affecting policy. It’s silliness masquerading as aid to those who are suffering; it’s an insult. But perhaps those in such dire straights are Catholics praying to their god. Perhaps in regions of Mexico, individuals versed in the ways of Santería are performing rituals of aid for their protection and salvation.

In that case, what they are doing and what I am doing are basically similar. I have an altar, I have deities, and I perform ceremonies in which I invoke these deities’ names and cast my intention over the victims so that they face no harm. In that same vein, I also cast my anger and desire for vengeance over the perpetrators and facilitators of the “camps.” Those who practice Santaría inherited these spiritual beliefs and rituals from the enslaved Yoruba and Lucimí tribes of Africa, as well as from the indigenous peoples of the region, and crossed them with Catholicism as a means of masking them from colonizers. I came into Satanism and kemetic paganism from books and the internet, and have thoroughly adopted and embraced several deities as my own. As they call upon their orichás, I call upon the netjeru (Egyptian gods), Astarte (Phoenician goddess of war and fertility), the King of Hell Belial, or Satan, just as a few examples.

It also harkens back to the famous legend of the dybbuk box, the supposed conjuring and binding of a demon to an old wine cabinet by Jewish people in an attempt to fight the Nazis. The occult is often the refuge of the vulnerable and the oppressed against the people, groups, institutions, and societal forces that commit violence against them.

Which is why it is so heinous that many fascist groups attempt to usurp and appropriate occult practices and deities from their victims. I first stumbled across this practice when I heard about the organization known as the JoyofSatan. Its website captivated me with its simple instructions to summoning the seventy-two demons of the Lesser Key of Solomon. But, as I would soon find out when I began to interact with pagan and occult circles, JoS was forcing these ancient spirits to do their bidding against their will, and in the name of hatred.

The Ars Goetia is part of a grimoire that was first developed by King Solomon. While it was a bit of a shock at first to think of the kindly old ruler of the “cut the baby in half” adage as being a badass occultist, I was curious. The lore of the Lesser Key of Solomon has been blurred throughout its many translations and across the ravages of time, but the premise is simple: The four-part book details the names of demons, their skills which can be an asset to the summoner, and how to summon them. Solomon is said to have trapped them inside a brass cauldron; modern demonolators (those who practice spirit work with demons) shy away from these means as being unethical to the spirits. The practice of evocation, i.e. forcibly calling a goetic demon before oneself, has fallen out of favor. Invocation, its opposite, relies on the occultist asking permission to the demon and hoping they decide to show up.

Not only does JoS rely on evocation, it also uses language that is blatantly anti-Semitic. “Demons are the gods of the gentiles!” it proclaims, and, digging deeper, the site features a heaping dose of Holocaust denial and veneration of Hitler. Apart from these unsavory details, the very construction of the list of the demons heavily involved appropriation from ancient cultures. For example, the twenty-second goetic demon is Ipos, or the Egyptian god of death, Anpu or Anubis; the fifty-ninth is Orias, also known as Osiris; and there of course is Astarte, or her male incarnation, Astaroth, at number twenty-nine. That gods from religions of old, especially those from societies of color, should be called upon by reverent throngs to the Third Reich, should raise alarms in anyone. To the ethical occultist, trusting the likes of these practitioners is unacceptable.

Much the same occurs in circles that worship Satan. Contrary to what is thought by the majority of the public, classical Satanists abhor human and/or animal sacrifice. If blood is to be spilt, may it be one’s own. The better offering to the Adversary, however, is cuninlingus. It is thought by true Satanic worshipers that the act of stimulating the vagina and its sexual organs produces the ultimate infernal current, and the orgasm resulting from which a gateway into darker realms. In fact the best time to do so is when the owner of the vagina is having their period, as distasteful as that sounds to common folk. It is to honor both Our Father, Satan, and Our Mother, Lilith, to not only imbibe this sacred blood, but to do so during an activity that brings pleasure and leads to climax. You’ll notice, I intentionally made sure that I was trans-inclusive in my language because I have seen far too many Satanists who describe the giver as a man and the receiver as a woman. Heteronormativity and cissexism are not accidental by said persons, but a means of keeping out undesirables, namely trans persons. The Left-Hand Path can be a hostile environment to enter into by transgender worshipers and practitioners for these reasons.

To me, it seems antithetical to the basic ideals of Satanism to enforce a gender binary, or a heterosexist approach, because Satan represents knowledge. The forebears of today’s occultists — Crowley and his later disciples, Parsons and Hubbard — strove to unlock the secrets of the universe. Dee and Kelley, although working with angels rather than demons, are believed to have received the Enochian language in order to unlock portals. So many people have ingested psychedelics in order to open their third eyes and receive some profound truth from somewhere beyond. When famed psychologist Timothy Leary dropped acid and proclaimed he had spoken to aliens, they told him, amongst many other messages, that humanity would never evolve without cooperation. It’s odd that people who claim to have interacted with spirits, and my late hero, Dr. Stephen Hawking, a staunch atheist, held remarkably similar outlooks. So to those who would say that being a Satanist can’t coincide with being open-minded on gender, I would say, “you’re missing the point.”

Many an occultist I have spoken to has said that they perceive no gender in many of these spirits. It seems to be a common shared personal gnosis that Satan is agender, or gender neutral, or gendervoid, whichever you would like to call it. Some deities resonate as sapphic (attracted to women or feminine persons) or achillean (attracted to men or masculine persons). Others are read as asexual, like Anpu. Belphegor manifests as either an old man or a young woman, so many call him genderfluid. The point is that, why must a wavelength of energy, or an entity, that supposedly exists beyond the space-time continuum, have to ascribe to Western gender standards? Indigenous peoples such as the Hoichol of Mexico, the Achuar and Shuar of Peru, and African Bwiti shamans have utilized their own native hallucinogenic flora to part the veil for thousands of years. Did these people name their gods and goddesses in an attempt to enforce a rigid two-gender system? Most certainly not. As I’ve previously written, indigenous cultures were at the forefront of gender exploration and expression centuries before modern teens on Tumblr. So if we want to access these higher planes of knowledge, why must we stick to Western interpretations?

Modern occultists should be anarchists. These gods, no matter if we focus on the Norse, Hellenic, or Egyptian pantheon, came from a time before patriarchal order. Sure, we had cities, agriculture, and language, but we had no use for restricting institutions. Native Americans and First Nations people are at the forefront of many a social justice movement, from protecting their water to protecting their women. According to their belief systems, these are sacred, and so they must act to safeguard them. There is no line between spirituality and activism for them. As such, there is no line between my spiritual beliefs, my gods, and my activism.

The old days were the wise ones. We protected the environment. We protected our children. We had no borders. We had no arbitrary definitions that we had to abide by or face social ostracization. These days of the past are what the gods represent. They are within their energies and their words. I can be an activist and a Satanist because he respects the natural way of the world, the one without oppression, the one we all should strive towards.