Spectres Haunting Europe

Two important ideas are expressed in the idea of “Satan”. The first is the one before this concept of a personified adversary comes into being, one required for it to form. This is the fundamentally Augustinian moral world, one in composed of an inside against an infinite outside. Morality here is a binary based on of-God and not-God. Augustine summarizes this best in his vision of the afterlife, unity with God vs exclusion, Hell being a state of lacking. The second is that this entire outside, though being infinite and chaotic against an enclosed order, is reduced to a single substance, that of Satan. Satan’s role in this schema is to unify all of the outside, all of plurality, into a single object with which to grapple, thereby reaffirming the inside, inverting it subtly to make the inside that which is not-Satanic.

This subtle inversion is part of the cause of the neurotic type of judaic morality. With the good being at once enclosed from an infinite evil and that inside being defined by its lack of evil, evil is at once absent, outside, and inside, present. In doing so, evil is perceived as present everywhere, prompting a treadmill response, as one uncovers themselves becoming more and more enclosed on all sides by evil operating as present and absent, inside and outside. Such is the reason for moralistic purification, an embodiment of this neurotic-purity, a feeling of being enclosed upon, suffocated, drowned, compacted by an ever shrinking safe space amidst an abyss of uncertainty.

This cosmology - visualized perfectly by the Codex Gigas’ image of Satan opposite the image of Heaven, a snarling, squatting beast opposite a geometric, well-ordered heaven - began to truly take hold at the dawn of capitalism. As the medieval era ended, the figure of Satan in tune with this idea of the world exploded in popularity across the newly bourgeois world, the idea’s first great show of force being as the gripping neurosis of the witch hunters. This is no coincidence. By making Satan both the inside and outside, the present and the absent, God has become completely absent from theology. In this new enlightenment theology, true Satanism comes into being by completely forgetting God, turning all of life into a struggle between the individualist selfhood and Satan.

This Satanism is evident in all children of the rationalism which created in. The youngest branch on the tree of Satanism, leftism, shows this elegantly in ‘occupy syndrome’ and ‘the vampire castle’, the repeated pattern where a directed action of the left turns into nothingness by their own Satanic death-drive. In occupy syndrome, the goals turn meaningless as they are recognized as being never good enough, as the revolutionaries attempt to make a complete demonology, which of course, would be infinite. In doing so, they lose all ability to fight, as their list of demands or goals spirals outwards to encompass the entire world including themselves. In the vampire castle, the group spirals inwards, recognizing their own impurity and sin within themselves and each other. Locked in a closed loop of their social group, their neurosis feeds off each other, replaying the dynamic of endless schism and increasingly minute denominations and sects first made famous by certain genres of protestantism.