The Art of Reversal (Commentary on Gabriel’s Anarcho-Satanism)
From Aleph's Heretical Domain by Aleph Skoteinos
Satanism and anarchism have a long history together, despite the relatively recent history or rightoid or fascist Satanist movements beginning with the Church of Satan, and anarchist Satanism remains a strong and relevant current, perhaps now more than ever. So it is always important to explore the possibilities of anarchist Satanism, and in this regard I would like to bring attention to a talk was given by an anarchist Satanist (or “anarcho-Satanist”) named Gabriel at a conference on anarchist theory called the BASTARD Conference in 2017, whose contents were published in a book called Evil, The BASTARD Chronicles 2017 by Ardent Press. I had only recently heard of its existence, and had only seen the conference in the last weekend. I’ve been told that I can’t get that book anywhere anymore, but the conference is still available in the form of podcasts on the Immediatism website. Given the importance of anarchist Satanism, I believe it is worth examining Gabriel’s concept of Anarcho-Satanism.
To begin with, though, we might as well start from the end of Gabriel’s lecture, because that’s where he addresses the definition of his Anarcho-Satanism. For Gabriel, Anarcho-Satanism is essentially a reinterpretation of satanic mythology through the lens of anarchist political thought in order to a create a vehicle through which the cultural values of anarchism might be communicated. These form him include anti-authoritarianism, voluntary association, mutual aid, solidarity, autonomy, and direct action. It is also framed as the pursuit of a positive social movement away from injustice and oppression (which basically means that he sees anarchism as a form of the Positive Political Project), which is effected by undermining religious apologetics for injustice and oppression. Gabriel also defines Anarcho-Satanism pretty rigidly as atheistic and anti-theistic opposed to “elite mysticism” and any belief in the supernatural (Reddit). Of course, it also critiques the state and corporate hierarchies as being basically based on the hierarchy of the church, which all rely on the cultural preconceptions of a celestial hierarchy. And of course, Gabriel treats Satan as an archetype, a symbol of anarchism, because Satan opposes the hierarchies of God. Gabriel imagines a Satan organising angelic labourers against the boss that is God and struggling for equality as either a political prisoner in Hell, an escaped fugitive, an illegal immigrant, or a refugee, making an unauthorised crossing into Eden (mind you, he never intended on making Eden his home). I suppose I can’t help but think, bold of him to assume the whole third of the heavenly host were workers, as though there were ever workers among angels.
Anarcho-Satanism is seen as something that utilises the allegory of Satan in both scripture and romantic literature to highlight the imbuement of religious narrative in popular culture. Satan is the most recognisable and almost universally accepted symbol of rebellion against divine hierarchical authority. Gabriel argues that myths connect the conscious and unconscious desires of individuals and cultures through symbolic association, and further extolls Anarcho-Satanism as using “reason and logic” to see beyond hierarchy and find ways to deconstruct hierarchical institutions, but also imagine beyond its scope, and the reimagining of the dominant cultural framework is taken as the logical starting point for it. Already, then, one can see that Gabriel’s project operates in rigid conformity to the presumptions of the Enlightenment, and is destined to encounter the problems that plague the dogma of rationalism. Reason in abstract remains the central value determinant by which to organise the social body.
There are two initial questions in that begin his lecture. The first question is, “is God evil?”. The second question is, “is Satan good?”. The operative point is that to simply ask these questions is to enter the territory of blasphemy, an offense to God that is still restricted or criminalised in at least half the world, and is even still punishable by death in some theocracies. Even the government of the United States, which is at least in theory supposed to be a secular government, leans heavily upon the authority of God (what Gabriel calls “the Abrahamic deity”) for all formal displays of political power and legitimacy as well as the historical bases thereof: oaths to office, Presidential speeches, flag pledges, predictive currency, the swearing in of witnesses in courts of law, Manifest Destiny expansionism, the christening of warships, all invoke the Christian God as a matter of course. For Gabriel, these are deliberate evocations, meant to forge a spiritual link between the worldly hierarchy of the state and the hierarchical authority of God. Human states borrow from God’s authority to legitimise their existence and their actions, and in so doing they attempt to borrow the implications of God’s authority, such as God’s alleged attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and eternity, and this is at least partially in order to protect the conditions and effects of hierarchy from being dissolved or even just reformed.
As I see it, the significance of this understanding of the state is that it presents the state or social hierarchy as a kind of magical activity, or at least based at root upon a particular kind of magical activity. The central purpose of this activity is consolidate power and authority by identifiying it with the authority of God, the One God Universe, or perhaps something functionally equivalent. Since the God of Christian monotheism and similar religious systems is supposed to be situated beyond the judgement of his creation, so powerful as to be literally invincible, and so benevolent as to be utterly beyond reproach, it makes sense for human states to attempt to borrow from God’s authority by invocation in order to legitimise both their existence and their actions, in the hopes of also borrowing God’s alleged attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and eternity, thus allowing them to perpetuate their power and authority indefinitely. But all of this also entails the replication of God’s hierarchical cosmos on Earth by humans, populating the world with the will and authority of God. Gabriel is in this sense describing the arcanum of the Right Hand Path within “Western Occutlism”; that is, the “Great Arcanum” described by the occultist Eliphas Levi, in which the goal of magic is seen as gaining authority, power, or rulership over the whole universe by identifying yourself with the Godhead (which usually still just means the Christian God).
The conception of the state as being linked to God’s authority also means that to defy the authority of the state would also be to go against God himself. In the Biblical or at least Christian narrative, such defiance is obviously represented by Satan, the chief antagonist of God. One of Gabriel’s most importants points is the reversal of the moral position of Satan within this very narrative. To that end Gabriel establishes that Satan is assumed to be malicious because Satan always resists and conspires to destroy God’s divine authority, and that this assumption rests on no one ever comparing the actions of God and Satan together. Gabriel then of course makes exactly this comparison, but in so doing we also revisist the nature of the Christian God and thereby the ontological authoritarianism of the One God Universe.
Gabriel illustrates astutely that one of God’s first creative acts, besides the alleged creation of the universe, was to establish fundamental inequality in Heaven by creating a stratified hierarchy with himself at the top and a division of classes consisting of progressively less powerful beings under himself, who in turn exist only to glorify and perpetuate his will. Those beings are what we refer to as the angels and archangels. Then God creates humans, who, despite being supposedly the most beloved of God’s creatures, being made “in his image”, are nonetheless the lowest order of the spiritual hierarchy, being below the angels and far below God himself. As Gabriel pointed out earlier in his lecture, within God’s hierarchy, angels are God’s lieutenants, humans are God’s subjects, and demons are God’s enemies. Gabriel argues that, despite the cultural Christian assumption to the contrary, the existence of such a hierarchy surely impacted on Satan’s desire to rebel against God. It seems sensible to follow from this, though, that angels must have some desires of their own despite their purpose being to glorify and execute the will of God. After all, Satan wanted to contest the authority of God, and a third of the heavenly host wanted to join him. But while Satan is accused of envious motives, but God openly proclaims himself to be a jealous god in his transmission of the Ten Commandments. And that’s the least of God’s issues, if you remember God’s coveting, his penchant for mass murder, him being responsible for literally everything that happens in Exodus, his refusal to share knowledge with humans, him procreating with at least one human girl without her consent (and this is after he condemns some of his angels for having sex with human women), and, of course, his consistent failure and/or refusal to prevent countless tragedies and atrocities suffered by the humans that he claims to love so much.
One of the really interesting things about Gabriel’s project here is the parallel that he draw between the character of Satan and the historical anarchist projects. In the Christian myth, Satan rebels against God and is initially (at least apparently) defeated, but then goes on to tempt Adam and Eve to disobey God in the form of the serpent by convincing them to eat the apple of the tree of knowledge. Gabriel argues that this parallels with the historical experience of anarchist projects represented in the Spanish Civil War, the Free Territory of Ukraine, and other anarchist defeats in various wars and conflicts, on the grounds that anarchists know that even defeat does not end the ongoing struggle for liberty against oppression. With this comparison, the parallel in play is that both Satan and anarchism can be seen to embody Non Serviam (“I will not serve”) by itself for itself. Even if Satan and the anarchists may be defeated, they don’t care that they are defeated, because simply being defeated is not the end of their struggle. They fight anyway, they fight without end, because resistance goes on and the struggle is life. Non Serviam is the creed of Satanists, Luciferians (insofar as there is a difference), and, in many ways, anarchists as well, in that both Satan and anarchy speak at least one truth: resistance, or rather rebellion.
In this regard I see fit to interject on the subject of the LaVeyan Satanism, and similarly rightoid or outright fascistic versions of Satanism, who all position their Satanism as the ideology of Social Darwinism, by which is meant the idea that humans should be organised in social hierarchies where “the strong” have the right to oppress “the weak” (which they seem to view as the antithesis of Christianity, no doubt based on their subgraduate readings of Friedrich Nietzsche). These kinds of Satanist are clearly silly. If LaVey had even one point it’s that stupidity should be painful, if only so that LaVey himself should have suffered quite a violent seizure before ever getting around to writing his “Pentagonal Revisionism”. It is truly stupid to think that Satan ever believed that “the strongest” deserves to rule. If he did, then, if we were to follow the standard narrative of the Fall, Satan would surely not have tempted Adam and Eve in Eden, let alone sent temptations to the rest of humankind, because such actions would be inconsistent with that belief. If Satan was defeated by God and his angels, exercising their self-professed right to rule Heaven by force of arms, and if Satan believed that the strongest have the natural right to rule, then to consistently observe that ideology would mean acquiesing to God as the rightful ruler/dictator of the universe, on the grounds that defeating him grants him the right to dominate the universe, whereas repeatedly contesting God’s rule through temptation implies a denial of God’s professed right to dominate the universe and the power that supports this right. But, of course, there is still the question, was Satan defeated? As we will see, the answer is not so simple, even for Christianity.
Another operative point for Gabriel is that demonisation through mythology plays a role in social marginalisation. Those who identify with the good characters of myth frequently weaponise the notion of evil against marginalised groups by associating them with evil characters, which in turn creates a kind of social leverage for oppressors. Switching the position of good and evil, by recasting Satan as good and God as evil, is meant to disrupt the moral weaponisation of mythology and question how the mythological positioning of good and evil are constructed. This may be how anarchists have often used the myth of Satan’s fall to express anarchist principles. It’s hear, though, that we see a clear extension of the Romantic Satanist tradition, given the reference to the Miltonian Satan and the legacy of “satanic” poetry afterwards. It is clearly still a relevant tradition, but I think it does not quite go far enough. To go further still would be to flip the script on good and evil itself, and not just by association with the characters of God and Satan. Instead I would say that we could pursue another direction: not simply the idea that God is evil and Satan is good, but rather to associate all the violence, terror, and horror of God’s rule with the effect of the principle of his “good” and his “order”. But in this, Satan does still figure as a mythological personification of resistance against authority.
Another interesting parallel yet again focused on God more than Satan concerns a comparison between the coercive threats of divine law and those of human law. In this, Gabriel refers to a comparison attributed to George Byron (better known as “Lord” Byron). In this argument, God’s threat to punish people by eternally damning them to Hell is a reflection of worldly threats to punish people by incarcerating them in prisons. The punished subject is in both cases disembodied, whether supernaturally or in the sense of being cut off from the body politic. Both God and the state label people as demons or devils, whether that means sinners or simply criminals (and a criminal is just someone who happens to have broken the law, and that means any law), in order to disempower those individuals by cutting them off from the order of human life as linked to the order of God. Gabriel argues that Byron’s embrace of Romantic Satanism in his poetry serves to demonstrate how this process of demonisation can be internalised in such a way that allows it to be reclaimed as a source of personal empowerment instead of social disempowerment. Very basically, this is the concept of reclamation, or, alternatively, detournment, in effect. In the same Gabriel presents another relatively simple connection between this Satan and later anarchists, who face the violence of the agents of the state (or the collective violence of capitalist nations/societies) with the fulsome support of the Right.
Another very important aspect of Gabriel’s critique of Christianity is that God’s association with authoritarianism and state power was not necessarily the product of Romantic Satanist poetry or the Enlightenment, but instead (perhaps necessarily) goes back far beyond that era. Gabriel locates an early link between God and the state in the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine I during the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. According to Christian sources at least, in the year 312, Constantine looked up at the sun in the sky and saw the sign of the cross hanging above it, along with Greek words saying, “in this sign, you will conquer”, and then he ordered his soldiers to place that sign upon their shields. After this battle, Constantine assumed leadership of the Roman Empire, and less than a century later, with the Edict of Thessalonica in the year 380, Christianity became the official and sole state religion of Rome. This meant renouncing the former pre-Christian Roman polytheism, which along with all belief systems apart from Christianity was thus criminalised. When the Roman Empire collapsed, the Vatican hierarchy became the official centre of Christian religious authority of Europe (though, by the time the Roman Empire collapsed, the Catholic Church had already become more central to Christian spiritual life than the Roman emperor). The Catholic Church sought to convert as much of the world to its brand of Christianity as possible and authorised violent persecutions of polytheists and sometimes even other Christians in order to achieve this aim. The Catholic Church also sought to conquer the so-called “Holy Land” of Judea and opposed the growing influence of Islam in the Middle East, and thus issued a series of religious wars of conquest known as The Crusades to achieve its aims of capturing Jerusalem and asserting dominance over Muslims. Of course, the majority of these Crusades were failures, and the entire campaign finally ended in defeat for the Christian armies. That much and more is the effective history of Christian power: a religion whose mission to “save” the whole human species through conversion, married to an institution whose function is to expand its authority and influence wherever possible. It really is a match made in Heaven, isn’t it?
One other aspect of Gabriel’s argument that I think truly extends his Anarcho-Satanist critique concerns the image of the Baphomet as presented by Eliphas Levi. This discussion is preceded by the mention of the Roman god Faunus during the discussion of Roman Christianity. Faunus was one of the oldest of the pre-Christian Roman deities who was also indigenous to Roman culture, but he was also equated with the Greek god Pan over time. Faunus was a god of forests, plains, and fields who was also associated with sexuality and fertility, and he was apparently still worshipped in Rome during the decline of polytheism, even despite the criminalisation of polytheism by Christian emperors. Worshippers of Faunus may have preferred polytheism and whatever values they may have associated with it over Christianity and its associated values, being more inclined to the inherent diversity of polytheism over the restrictive singularity of monotheism. Then, from there, after discussing the Catholic Church, Gabriel goes over the basic story of the Knights Templar being accused of worshipping Baphomet, and then moves on to the subject of Eliphas Levi, who derived from the pagan imagery of Faunus, Pan, and the Egyptian Goat of Mendes, depicted Baphomet as a goat-headed humanoid creature with wings. This led to Baphomet’s strong and enduring cultural association with Satanism and the demonic, and it’s here that we get to one of the really interesting parts of Gabriel’s argument.
Gabriel argues that the image of Baphomet embodies several anarchistic characteristics by itself. Being a intersexed mixture of female and male body forms, the body of Baphomet defies the dominant socially constructed gender binary, and for this reason may make for an effective symbol of gender conformity in comparison to what is traditionally a strictly male, patriarchal, human Godhead. The meme that Jesus was trans just doesn’t work in that same way. Even the animal symbolism such as the goat head, the bird-like feathered wings, and the serpent can have a meaning beyond Eliphas Levi’s intended symbolism about the unity of opposites within the metaphysical binary of Western Occultism. Their mingling with the human form may also entail a disruption of the hierarchy between humans and animals, showing a plurality of species together, in addition to the traditional unity of opposites. This would position Baphomet as a symbol of natural biodiversity, against the anthropocentric worldview of Christianity and similar religions which is at the centre of the current ecological crisis. But then you get to “solve et coagula” and Gabriel’s argument starts getting clunky. The Latin words “solve” and “coagula” that appear on Baphomet’s arms, translated respectively as “solvent” and “coagulant”, were intended by Levi to refer to some of the principles of alchemy, but they can also be interpreted as a reference to the dichotomy between individualist and collectivist anarchist philosophies. Because the neither that dichotomy nor its complementarity have any real existence, I’d say this feels like a kind of shoehorning in a way that the rest of Gabriel’s argument doesn’t, in that the political context of that argument doesn’t necessarily mesh well with the alchemical context that Gabriel tries to pair it with. Overall, though, Gabriel positions the figure of Baphomet, and Satan by extension, as a cipher for the deconstruction of the dominant forms of monotheism as well as the hierarchies of the One God Universe and the state.
There is one thing we can add to this, though, and it will be very relevant in advance since the theme of non-human life as a vector of subversion becomes all the more relevant in the rest of Gabriel’s argument. The Goat of Mendes was very much a symbol of lust and sexual desire (and more often than not male lust), which in turn was (a similar symbolism was also associated with donkeys, which often symbolised the god Seth Typhon), and in this light we should allow ourselves to see that sexual import as being in some way linked to that affirmation of animal or inhuman life against the anthropocentric “ego”. Those who allow themselves to feel and embrace their own lust or sexual desire are often likened to animals in such a way that implies a stature beneath “humanity”. That conception implies a notion of “humanity” that is strictly moral and ideological in substance: “humanity” is an ideology whose concern is not what kind of animal you are but what type of person you are. In other words, being “human” in practice is often not seen as a biological, naturalistic, or creatural description or condition, but instead a mental, social, political, or even spiritual construct. It is just this understanding that allows people across the political spectrum to separate between themselves, as humans, and their enemies, as non-human animals. In almost the same spirit as Gabriel, though, one can also locate a possibilty of reclamation, detournement, or reversal, but here this involves an anti-humanist ethos: in other words, working against the cage of humanity. It only makes more sense in the occult context of apotheosis: becoming divine in some ways means approaching the inhuman, such that staying bound to “your humanity” defeats the point.
One area of Gabriel’s argument where it really feels like he takes a page from Silvia Federici is when he starts talking about witches, or more specifically the medieval witch hunts and the institutional misogyny behind them. In this era, women, usually midwives or sometimes folk healers, would be accused of witchcraft and then arrested, tortured, and executed. Gabriel suggests that these women descended from an intergenerational oral tradition of folk medicine, passed down over centuries through the community by word of mouth. The fear of witches and their alleged conspiracy with Satan was invented and quickly exploited by Catholic authorities in order to allow them to completely remake society in the image of their theocratic and authoritarian desires, based on the sanction of religious patriarchy. The patriarchal fear not only of witches but also female sexuality, individuality, knowledge, and strength in general led to a concerted effort by Catholic and later Protestant Christianity to totally alter the cultural perception not only of witches but also the traits of independent women in general, to present these traits not only as undesirable but also ontologically evil. Gabriel argues that the witches of the medieval imagination were very often empowered women, who were independent and possessed both leadership skills and knowledge of folk medicine, and it is possible that they were viewed as local threats to patriarchal magisterial authority and the professionalisation of medicine.
It’s also worth noting the connections that Gabriel seems to draw between the concept of the “Witches’ Sabbath” and the background of medieval revolt. According to Gabriel, the medieval descriptions of “Witches’ Sabbaths” would sometimes tie in aspects of existing peasant revolts and sexual transgression, all portrayed as both a monstrous sexual orgy and a subversive political gathering or conspiracy, in which The Devil instructed witches to rebel against their masters, and the earliest of these descriptions also coincided with massive peasant gatherings and revolts that took place during the 14th century. In these revolts, Gabriel tells us, clandestine gatherings did indeed take place under the cover of darkness, and women were often leading agitators, but they did not worship The Devil in ritual orgies as Catholic authorities claimed they did.
Eventually we come to a problem: the emphasis on defining anarchism as a moralistic philosophy. While discussing attempts by Christian clergy and others to present the witches as anarchists with the intent to slander them, Gabriel argues that the association of anarchism, Satanism and witchcraft combined in a “moralistic” philosophy can allow us hinder the weaponisation as these labels as tools of dehumanisation. This is where Gabriel’s anarcho-Satanism encounters a familiar problem: its embrace of mythological and archetypical “evil” as a source of empowerment is combined with the understanding of anarchism as a positive moralism. In my opinion, the attachment to moralism would serve only to contradict and hinder the flourishing of the satanic aspect, and ultimately the anarchism as well. It seems to me that there is not enough egoism in Gabriel’s understanding of both anarchism and Satanism.
In fact, the moralistic angle has some odd implications when we get to Gabriel’s appraisal of the Enlightenment, in the context where moral criticism of Christianity seems to create space for the reversal of moral polarisation. Of note is the way Gabriel cites figures such as Voltaire and Thomas Paine as examples of this era of moral criticism. The problem comes in when we look at a quote from Paine that Gabriel cites as a contribution to the reversal of the polarities of God/good and Satan/evil:
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
As I see it, Gabriel’s appreciation of that quote comes from a misunderstanding of the obviously Christian background of Paine’s objection to the Bible. In fact, in the above quotation, Paine is pretty clearly addressing the God of the Old Testament as a demon who cannot be the true Christian God. That the God of the Old Testament is a cruel demon to be contrasted with the benevolence of the Christian God is the exact same argument that the Christian dualist Marcion made during the 2nd century. Thus it is less Romantic Satanism (Paine certainly didn’t seem to have much interest in this project) and more like a rationalist version of Marcionite Christianity.
However, one thing that is insightful about Paine’s criticism of Christianity with regards to Satan, which Gabriel points out, is that, in The Age of Reason, Paine also wrote that the Christian theologists felt the need to support their faith by making Satan equal to if not more powerful than God, by granting him the power to liberate himself from the abyss and even expand his power after his fall from Heaven. Before his fall from Heaven, Satan is presented as merely an angel, of limited existence, and after his fall he seems to become omnipresent, existing all through the immensity of space, and able to defeat the power of the Almighty by stratagem in the form of one of his own creations, thereby implying an intellect superior to the supposed omniscience of God. Although Paine upheld a rationalist form of Christianity, centring on the New Testament strictly as a source of moral teaching, he did nonetheless establish a critique that might inform Satanism regardless. It tells us of Christian theology and narrative as a contrivance of storytelling and its logical necessities. It is built on a classic protagonist-antagonist power struggle dynamic, and this requires that even the “Almighty” God requires an equivalent or even greater power to rival his own. For this reason, Satan, as an entity capable of disrupting the will of God and the hierarchy of Heaven, emerged as the perfect antithesis.
This is also where parallels to anarchism are revisited. The Fall is a result of Satan’s direct action against the hierarchy of Heaven, thus emblematising the anarchist principle of direct action. Despite his exile from Heaven, his power is increased instead of being decreased, and his range of influence becomes universal rather than particular. This influence is an omnipresent anti-authoritarianism, or more preferably an omnipresent insurrection, that constantly threatens the authority and hierarchical power of God. Satan’s appearance in the form of a serpent may also connect him to the more of non-human biological life, possibly embedding Satan into the role of champion of biodiversity on behalf of all earthly interconnected ecosystems. Satan successfully utilises this animalistic aspect to counteract God’s ethereal authority. In my view, this is a bit more like it. We yet again approach the assertion of the inhuman against the anthropocentric ideology of “the human”. We also approach the narrative of Satanisms such as that of Stanisław Przybyszewski, who presented Satan as the god of the physical world, taking the form of Pan-Satyr-Phallus. It also invites comparison to the Buddhist figure of Mara, interpreted as the guardian of the whole continuum of generating life (procreation, growth, continuing, and death), or even a kind of “nature god”, who thought that the Buddha, in leading people into Nirvana, would end all life by empyting the universe of all living things. Mara and Satan have at least one other thing in common: as adversaries of their given religious contexts, they seem to be defeated (by either Jesus or the Buddha), but they do not accept defeat, and in fact continue to haunt their religious enemies despite their apparent victories.
I think that Gabriel ends up bringing this theme well into focus when discussing Giosue Carducci and his infamous Inno a Satana, which Gabriel describes as a call to resist the authority of the papacy. In Carducci’s hymn, he says that Satan breathes in his verses, which Gabriel argues establishes Satan as a literary rather than literal force and thus, in theory, aligns Satan with the atheistic and anarchist positions on religion. I would suggest that there is room to link him to more esoteric and ambient conceptions of Satan, such as you sometimes see in black metal. His conception as “the avenging force of human reason” is argued to posit Satan’s rebellion not as self-serving but on behalf of all humanity and all biological life on Earth. This of course is simply a humanist conceit, though such conceits were obviously endemic to Enlightenment rationalist thought. Still, that he should be framed as the guardian of earthly life has a resonance with Mara in Buddhism, who viewed the enlightenment of the Buddha as a threat to the generative world he governs, since it means souls leaving that world by passing into Nirvana. I would perhaps also stress that Carducci described Satan as a lord of nature, love, and the flesh, and linked him with pagan gods such as Adonis, Astarte, and Venus (while also identifying the Christian God with Jove).
In other cases, however, the comparison to anarchist principles can be a little stretched. An example of this is Gabriel’s discussion of Charles Baudelaire, the France poete maudit well-known for writing Les Litanies de Satan. Gabriel describes Baudelaire as having been seriously committed to a political radicalism similar to that of Pierre Joseph Proudhon, which at least implies anarchist leanings (to say nothing of the problem of Proudhon by himself), though in reality Baudelaire seems to have had almost no interest in politics except for his participation in the 1848 Revolutions as a journalist writing for a revolutionary newspaper. Gabriel suggests that, in Les Litanies de Satan, Baudelaire gives praise to Satan as the prince of exile and outcasts, possessing the attributes healing, knowledge, and even benevolence, being acquainted with and able to heal human suffering. This is something that Gabriel again links to anarchism by relating the generalised principles of solidarity and direct action, and its implication of reciprocal empathy between individuals, to Baudelaire’s language about Satan. In this case, though, I would be careful with taking the notion of Satan as a representative moral character at face value, in that it runs the risk of misunderstanding the general ethos of decadent poetry. To put it one way, I don’t think it is wise to treat the decadents as simply being radical moralists.
Then, finally, we come to the subject of revolutionary movements and anarchism, and here we definitely find some interesting examples of either reverse polarisation or simply criticism of Christianity. Emma Goldman, Moses Harman, Madalyn Murry O’Hair, Duddy Boukman, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and Subcommandante Marcos all seemed to view themselves as fighting against the Christian God in different ways, although not many of them went all the way and considered Satan the good guy. Of these, it was only Moses Harman certainly elevated Lucifer as the symbol of individualist anarchism and the hope of human emancipation from both the state and the Chrisitan God. From Emma Goldman, though we certainly do get the picture that anarchism is to be seen as rebellion against the Christian God, or the One God Universe, and in Marcos we see God presented as the author of the exclusion clause. But with Marcos’ example, Gabriel allows the possibility of retroactively reinterpreting the War in Heaven as the result of an angelic attempt to unionise Heaven. There is, though, an extent to which this idea rather defeats the point: what is truly satanic is not to reform the kingdom of God by making it fairer and more just and more equitable for the little guys in the heavenly hierarchy, because the point is to destroy God’s Heaven.
All in all, there is actually a lot to work with when it comes to Gabriel’s concept of Anarcho-Satanism, or at least when it comes to the basic aspect of reversal, or the reversal of moral polarisation, but it should be expanded beyond the ideological confines of Gabriel’s atheist/anti-theist Romantic Satanism, and thereby beyond those of its intended form as a literary response. The notion of evil as a sacred power capable of dissolving the order or domination associated with seemingly positive godforms such as the Christian God, or the One God Universe, would do much to enhance the “reversal” that Gabriel was trying to put forward. But I suppose, to put it simply, the attitude I would prefer is more like that of Mechanical Violator Hakaider: “if you are justice, then I am evil”.
