Why Satanism?: The Devil and Hell

Questions and Answers for where to begin on the Darker Spiritual Paths.

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Darkmuzzle
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Your favourite Demon?: Lucifuge Rofocale
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That was very in depth. I must say I laughed at the idea of demons trading our souls like Pokemon cards. :) I was raised Catholic, but never became a religious person nor followed it. Thank you so much for this insight.
Shershah.chowdhury
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Cult wrote:
Mon Mar 30, 2020 9:31 pm
How did I not see this gem until now? Jesus Christ.
Nyctophilia Raven wrote:
Sat Nov 16, 2019 8:13 am
There was also no devil in Christianity, to begin with - that was added in later by the church because people weren't converting and they decided to do three things - take pagan holidays and turn them into Christian ones, take their pagan gods and demonize them, and terrify people into believing that if they didn't come to church, they'd suffer in their afterlife.

There wasn't even a BELIEF in heaven or hell, to begin with... hell is a concatenation of a bunch of different mythological underworlds/lands of the dead from multiple cultures, and heaven comes directly from Greek mythology. The hebrew belief where Christianity started was that when you died, you stayed in your body. Sheol is literally "hole in the ground." And on the "last day" all those dead would rise from their graves at the will of God... but, and here's the kicker... ONLY JEWISH PEOPLE WOULD RISE.

So if you're Christain, sorry mate. You're fucked.
There was no institutionalized scheme by the church to do anything like that. Christianity didn't set out to steal holidays, traditions and other elements from pagan religions. That was done by the people themselves, who Christianized their own cultural traditions in an effort to preserve them while adapting to Christianity (eg. the hero/saint cult in Greece, the cult of the holy wells in various regions, a very large body of funerary traditions, the Luna al-Pashti of the Vlachs, etc--some churches in the Balkans even had specified areas within the cathedral for animal sacrifice around the early modern period). The church was largely against this, and to this day a lot of Christian-flavored folk traditions are viewed with a disapproving eye by ecclesiastical authorities.

That has also been done within pagan religions innumerable times before Christianity; syncretism runs deeply in the human spirit. The veneration of gods like Serapis is a result of syncretism. If you want to say the Christian holidays are stolen, then a) you have to say many pagan traditions are also stolen b) you have no idea how cultural development happens throughout history. And lol before I accidentally validate you, syncretism is not the same as being an eclectic who decontextualizes various spirits and traditions and amalgamates them into a practice that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense to any capacity.
Now let's move onto the perception of demons.

First off: Up until about the 1300's, angels and demons were the same things. They were an angel if they were on your side... and if they were on your opponent's side, they were a demon.
Where did you get that? It's true that the lines blur between what entities were what in the popular mind, but relegating them to being 'the same things' divorces the complexity of the spirits involved from the cultural context.
Now... keep in mind that I don't agree with any of this - that demons are angels who rebelled against God, or that hell exists as a singular place of suffering... but this is historically and religiously accurate from the Christian point of view. Remember what I said above, about taking pagan gods and demonizing them so people would be afraid to worship them and instead turn to the church? Yeah. Most of the demons we worship in Daemonolatry? Once, they were gods. Not angels. Not fallen angels. GODS.
You can only make the argument that maybe 2 or 3 of the demons listed in the grimoires were actually demonized old gods, and even that is based on nothing but shaky etymological similarities. What about the rest? Even if by some miracle you had a modicum of evidence for this, godhood wouldn't sanitize the nature of demons considering so many gods act in similarly cruel ways. That aside, if I can threaten your god with a black-handled knife, bind them to a brass vessel and banish them into Tartarus mid-evocation, then that's not a god. I can't do that to Hecate, Isis, Zeus, Loki, or the Christian god. If I can compel a demon into something as simple as not lying to me using nothing but the names of the Abrahamic god, then demons aren't gods; they answer to their own God, even.
Demons understand consent. They understand the importance of free will. They stress personal responsibility.
Nothing you've demonstrated here supports that unless you take on the black and white mentality of a 4 year old who thinks that as long as God is the bad guy, his enemies must be automatically good.
All you have to do, to understand why we work with demons, is to know the story of Azazel.

Azazel is the black goat who takes the sins of the people before Passover so they can all be ritually clean before God so he doesn't kill them when he... passes over. So they'd dump their sins on this poor innocent unconsenting goat, and then send it out into the desert to die. They did this every year for several thousand years. Eventually, all that sin and death collected, and the demon Azazel was born... Carrying all our sins.

So the original "christ" figure? Was a demon. And none of us think it's fair that he should carry that burden. We vote to carry our own flaws and faults. We CHOOSE not to lie, and we choose not to stand before a god that would accept a lie and cause such misery.
You know who else did that? The ancient Greeks. Sacrificial cleansing is an extremely old practice that predates Christianity and Judaism and exists in a multitude of cultures, but your resentment seems to only target Christianity and Judaism. The archetype of Christ has been pervasive throughout human history; Azazel was not by any means the first figure to embody that.
So yeah. We worship demons, and we work with devils, and we swear by the Ha Satan. Because it's THE RIGHT THING TO DO. Morally, ethically, Satan is the good guy, the better team. And if you really want to take a deep look at modern Christianity and how shoving the blame onto someone else so you can call yourself a Christian without being a decent human being is pretty much par for the course... you wouldn't want to be one.
Looking at it as a team of good vs. evil is the same cartoonish cosmology that many Christians have. Aside from the fact that dual observance is a thing, by blaming Christianity for everything and painting their God as the evil in this world, you're practising an identical form of scapegoating that you claim you're against.
His dad though? Still a murdering dick. You know how many people Satan killed in the bible? 10. You know how many people GOD killed in the bible? We lost count. That many. He committed a SHIT TON of genocide.
You'd think that if you're against murder, 10 people would still count as an atrocity. It's absurd to only selectively believe the Old Testament as far as it frames God in a bad light, all the while dismissing the text when it comes to Satan because he's just 'misunderstood'.
Now... last thing. Do Demons want your Soul?

Short answer? NO.

Look, there are things in this universe that can't be bought or sold. The soul is one of those things. Here's the thing. You have a spirit. That spirit is PART of a larger soul being. That soul being has multiple spirits out living material lives, gathering experiences to bring back to the soul. Since a soul belongs to multiple spirits, one spirit can't sell it.

Secondly, what the heck would a demon even DO with a soul? Do they eat it? Do they trade it like pokemon cards? Do they parade them around to show other demons how great they are at trickery?
That's total UPG presented as undeniable fact. There's innumerable pieces of lore that lend weight to the belief that the soul can be stolen, eaten, controlled, assimilated, worn away, or given up to another being, whether that's a demon, a god, a fairy, or another spirit. It's total ownership of who you are and while it's true that not every demon is out to take your soul, it's absurd to act like that can't or hasn't happened--both with demons and with other spirits. Numerous pacts involve bargaining for the soul.

Throughout the entire post you're oversimplifying Christianity in bad faith to try and pacify and proselytize a target audience that appears to be around the age of 5, judging by how you've worded it all. These were the most impressive mental gymnastics you've achieved to date.
Demons arent gods, they live and die like us. They just live thousands or hundreds of thousands of years longer than humans. I see my companions as a equal. Il never see them as "gods" or greater than me or me greater than them. Even the dark lords had a beginning and will have a end just like everyone else and everything else. everyone has their own belief.
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Lycana
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Patron Deities: Lucifer, Diana, Belial, Naamah, Sobek, Juno, Hethert etc
Your favourite Demon?: arachne, spectral, hellborn, void, mutilation. serpentine and tempest
Location: FL
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As someone who is a polytheist, I come from the perspective of angels and demons as just different types of spirits.
The word demon actually comes from the Greek daemon which literally just means spirit.
As Christianity viewed demons as earthly spirits that could be found in our world (since being cast there) it makes sense that they would adopt this name.

So I just see different types of spirits myself without giving two fucks generally about Christian dogma or faith.

I think on this one will find among different perspectives that ones mileage may vary.
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Lycana
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Patron Deities: Lucifer, Diana, Belial, Naamah, Sobek, Juno, Hethert etc
Your favourite Demon?: arachne, spectral, hellborn, void, mutilation. serpentine and tempest
Location: FL
Has thanked: 32 times
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Given that most gods are considered daemons (Hellenic polytheist say all gods are daemons but not all daemons are necessarily gods) it is easy to see why some gods became identified as demons later.
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Leo Sierra
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Patron Deities: Pazuzu, Lillith
Your favourite Demon?: Mutilations and Crypts
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Lycana wrote:
Tue Jul 06, 2021 4:37 pm
As someone who is a polytheist, I come from the perspective of angels and demons as just different types of spirits.
The word demon actually comes from the Greek daemon which literally just means spirit.
As Christianity viewed demons as earthly spirits that could be found in our world (since being cast there) it makes sense that they would adopt this name.

So I just see different types of spirits myself without giving two fucks generally about Christian dogma or faith.

I think on this one will find among different perspectives that ones mileage may vary.
That's the wonderful thing about polytheism. Different divine beings have different power levels, attributes and areas of influence.

Often there would be a chief God of a pantheon, but even they weren't immune to challenge or being overthrown.

I personally hate it when some modern Pagans think they need to claim their Gods are All-Powerful. Nope. One culture's pantheon is not stronger or better than another people's. Granted, I've only ever seen a few Norse Pagans do this, twisting Odin's title of All-Father to turn him into a Eurocentric replacement for the Christian god.


I consider the Demons S&S works with as Gods in another, utterly remote, Greater Universe i.e. the Outer Spiritual World. This isn't their Universe, but it is seeded with Demonic Souls from their Realms, so they take an interest in it.
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Leo Sierra
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Your favourite Demon?: Mutilations and Crypts
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Missed the edit window and wanted to add that I don't actually believe in any of the abrahamic gods. They all, Jesus, Jehovah and Allah, seem like amalgamations of various ancient Gods from the Middle East and Mediterranean.
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