(Z) _The Satanic Witch_/Satanic Feminism

[nocTifer]

49970915 aa2 Hail Satan!

this is a post by Brenda Mobley to satan...@necronomi.com. she started
the discussion and this was a later post of hers in response to me. I
thought it valuable enough to let it stand on its own as an indicator of
the tone and style of material which should appear in zazas-l. it is
perhaps on the longish side, as it was originally two posts, but I think
it contains a number of important speculations on Satanism and society.

blessed beast!

ty...@houseofkaos.abyss.com (nocTifer)
--------------------------------------

Orig-To: satan...@necronomi.com
From: Brenda Mobley <BK.M...@m.cc.utah.edu>
Subject: Re: The Satanic Witch/Satanic Feminism

[permission received to repost -- tn]

On Sat, 2 Aug 1997, ty...@houseofkaos.abyss.com (nocTifer) wrote:
> 499070802 aa2 Hail Satan!

Hail Satan!

> Brenda Mobley <BK.M...@m.cc.utah.edu>:
> # [re LaVey's] _The Satanic Witch_.... ...also reacting to the article by
> # Blanche Barton, "Satanic Feminism," in a recent issue of _The Black Flame_.

> I've done a pretty thorough skim of TSW and have a copy here in the haus,
> the article in TBF I've not yet seen.

> # ...LaVey's work as a whole; it is very modern, very rational, and still
> # connects to those inner fires of will that make the other two possible.
>
> perhaps I've excerpted out of context but I don't understand 'the other
> two' (fires?) here. my bias is that I like LaVey's humor and style,
> though I don't consider it to be 'modern' except in the sense of a clever
> sell to the atheist, hedonistic materialists (the bulk of modern US).

Not two fires of will, just my poetic idea that modernity and rationality
require the will in order to exist, yet they can also be used in ways
destructive of the will. Here I use "modern" in the sense of a cultural,
aesthetic, and philosophical phase: automobiles, glass box buildings and
Hemingway, for examples.

But we ourselves are not, in this sense, "modern," unless we are using the
Internet to communicate by accident. I tend to expand the my idea of the
post-modern to include Information Age attitudes and technologies in general.

The average American is not philosophical enough to be an atheist and not
independent enough to be a hedonist. Outside of the educated classes,
the norm is a bizarre mix of nihilism and conservative Christianity, not
well thought out enough to be properly called agnostic. This norm is also
too conformist to be hedonistic or even liberal. It is the contradiction
and tension between nihilism and "traditional" values that is used to
propel the shadowy half-eroticism used in mass marketing. I call it the
alchoholic mind, somewhat similarly to Terence McKenna (although I don't
share his adulation of psychedelics, they are certainly post-modern as I
define it).

It seems, if I understand what I've seen of LaVey's writing lately, that
he is evolving out of modernism as well. But his earlier writing is
absolutely modern as I understand it. It's my opinion that actual
modernity never filtered down to the masses in much of the U.S. and that
many of them are still in the Victorian Age psychologically. The
Europeans seem to have fully made it to modernity, though. By this kind
of definition I don't think LaVey is even accessible to the average
American, so I have to disagree with you there. Anyone who is really an
atheist and a hedonist is far, far from the herd.

> it depends on what you want his text to be. as philosophic explorations
> they are very meager. as religious tracts they are pretty representative,
> though in his preferred paradigm. this is why I think of them as cons --
> they play on the religious' need for answers and point toward liberated
> perspectives but offer a kind of tar baby to the fanatics. in this they
> are quite useful (tying up the minds of fanatic Satanists for decades,
> enlisting their power to serve LaVey, etc.), but to liberated Satanists
> (rather than org- or herd-varieties), they are of minor importance beyond
> being a catalyst to greater efforts.

Before I react to this I should point out that my background, in contrast
to that of many Internet Satanists, is not ceremonial magic, but rather
Jungian shamanism. Having said that, from my point of view what LaVey is
doing in his earlier books is not at all a con, but a method of
self-reprogramming in a style accessible to the 60's and 70's. I view
individual maturation in antinomian terms, using the equation thesis plus
antithesis equals synthesis equals thesis. It doesn't have to be
philosophical at all to have profound philosophical effects. And LaVey
is not a nihilist. I don't have a good impression of some of his
groupies, but that to me seems a flaw in the kind of person who is
willing to be an eternal groupie - why shouldn't he make use of them?
Some people wouldn't know how to be self-centered even if their survival
depended on it.

> # ...all too often I see people, on-line and in print, using TSW as
> # prescriptive religion.
>
> this is what I meant above about a 'tar baby'. the fanatics seize the
> proffered 'answers' and obsess about them as the Revelation of Truth,
> naive and without exposure to the broader context of the debate which
> LaVey may be addressing yet barely delves.

This kind of thing used to bother me. Now my feeling is that anybody
over 25 who's still this conformist and uninformed deserves the result
they've chosen. It's my hope that younger folks will be too cynical to
remain fundamentalist about anything for long, except as a game. I
suppose what all of this proves is that some people are so conformist
even an argument of anti-conformity can be ground up to make herd hamburger.

[snip]
> # The Clock descriptions in TSW map the (more-or-less) Jungian functions of
> # animus and anima on one axis, and of extroversion and introversion on the
> # other, creating a series of gradations. Each position is assigned a
> # demonic opposite. So, using myself as an example, a nine o' clock
> # extroverted woman would have as her demonic (which is much like the
> # Jungian animus) an inner, egghead-type man who is at 3 o'clock.
>
> I suspect that this is a misperception of Jungian ideology but am not
> studied sufficiently to know for sure.

I'm not trying to misrepresent Jung, nor is TSW doing so, since he is not
mentioned. Rather what I am saying here is that the vertical axis of the
clock is similar to animus/amina in some ways. More carefully, the axis
seems to be a simplification (and perhaps an oversimplification) created by
mapping the animus/anima, the persona, and the shadow together
linearly. I'm not saying this is something Jung himself would ever have
done.

> I've been looking more and more
> closely at expressions (Jung's, others) on the Shadow, the Anima and
> Animus, and while I got the impression that they are sometimes
> conflated or overlapped, I don't think 'demonic' is a natural part of
> the description of the Anima/us unless certain problems are contained
> within the psyche of the individual (particularly a kind of hatred of
> the 'opposite' sex).

"Demonic" is what LaVey gets by combining functions on the vertical
axis. Calling it such is not at all meant to be perjorative. Should the
Satanist embrace his own "dark side," he will have achieved a synthesis
much closer to his potential Self, and in this LaVey seems to be in
agreement with the Jungians. Since most people remain immature, their
shadow is unacknowledged, and easily used against them, which is
basically the entire premise of TSW. Since in modern and pre-modern
American culture the persona and shadow are extremely gendered, it is
possible to map them linearly onto gender/anima without creating too much
inaccuracy - for a while.

> thus, it may well be that what LaVey describes is pertinent to many
> human beings in urban society, but I think the model he describes is
> not so general as it is targetted toward the most manipulatable of
> its citizenry. those who are not caught up in these problems will
> not be affected by the suggested methods and the witch will be seen
> for the (juvenile) manipulator she is, even if her victim plays along.

What I would say is that there are more and more people who don't hold
onto their persona (conformity) so hard anymore, allowing their shadow to
be integrated more readily, and allowing themselves to be more
self-aware. Manipulation, like denial, is indeed "juvenile" in the sense
that it requires self-ignorance in the target in order to work. Such
people have so little to offer me that I'm not interested in whatever I
might gain by manipulating them, but then again I am myself finally
mature enough to have some self-sufficiency. To me the primary flaw in
TSW is the idea that someone with a fully embraced demonic would still be
so dependent as to prefer manipulation to creativity/strategy as a
method to power.

> # ...LaVey's other good argument... manipulative magic can be classed
> # in three functions, the sexual, the sentimental and the sense of wonder.

> it would help to reference specific locations of these ideas for review.
> the copy of TSW I have doesn't have an index and it has been several years
> since I perused it in any depth.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Orig-To: satan...@hollyfeld.org
From: Kerry Delf <k...@efn.org>

TSB: p. 112-113, "The Theory and Practice of Satanic Magic"

TSW: p. 15-18, "Choose an Image"
p. 121-125, "You Don't Have to Be Ugly"

I'm sure there are more references to this concept, but this is what I
came up with on a quick glance through.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

> # The first third of the book makes for a light and practical applied
> # Jungian psychology and is worth reading, but LaVey undermines his own
> # results with assumptions tied more to the culture of a particular place
> # and time than anything more enduring.

> I think they are less tied to a particular place and time than they are
> tied to particularly vulnerable personality-types. the model generalizes
> in a way which exploits the weaknesses inherent to modern society and
> projects these on the masses. while some portion of it may apply, I think
> LaVey is exaggerating for the benefit of making the book attractive.

Such immature personalities used to be even more common than they are
now. I don't think LaVey is exaggerating, so much as he's not seeing
past circa 1970 in his use of the persona/shadow split. When society
changes, so do the persona and the shadow.

================================================================
[originally two posts; here they are spliced together - tn]

On Sat, 2 Aug 1997 ty...@houseofkaos.abyss.com (nocTifer) wrote:
> with this I very strongly agree. in fact, I think the whole idea begins
> to break down at a certain point once one meets up with another witch, and
> that this must be understood. the glamor only goes so far, and those with
> the eyes to see will not be so easily fooled. there is a place and a power
> in switching to *honesty* and disarming vulnerability, no less for men than
> for women. more on this last below.

Yes, very. In some ways this is merely a question of using a different
set of tactics for a more able opponent. But there is another level
here, the one on which honesty is necessary to alliance.

[]
> the nerdy hermit may *think*
> of hirself as a member of some grandiose elite, but when push comes to
> shove she is too anti-social and full of dreams without connections to
> materiality to really exercise this. more often than not the engineer
> is the tool of the realm dominators in society (often corporate execs).

I'll respond more on this in a later post, except I will say here that
the stereotype of a socially inept, impoverished nerd is more than a
decade out of date. Silicon Valley is a notorious party town.

[]
> Brenda Mobley <BK.M...@m.cc.utah.edu>:
> # ...People embrace their own demonic like never before, and move off
> # the clock, leaving them within the referents only of class and culture.

> I doubt this happens very often, though we might like to idealize that
> it does. especially those who read this book will want to fantasize that
> we are in control of the whole shebang, integrating all of the cast-out
> parts (Jungian Shadow), and able to muster the force to apply this power
> in the world.

I hope you won't take it wrong here if I say something that may appear
somewhat ageist, but - sure, if you're looking at a room full of college
seniors or a bar full of drunks, you're not going to see a lot of
Jungian individuation going on. It is a task for the mature. For those
persons, it is not at all a fantasy. I am happy to say I have a number
of older friends who are fine examples of individuation in process. Many
of them don't call it that, of course. They just know that now, they
know what they want and can see through many of their own assumptions to
the other side.

[]
> # the next generation's ruling class, you'd better know, or at least know
> # about, mathematics and hard sciences.
[]
> I think that most Discordians are rebels without a clue. they are cute,
> and sometimes geniuses in terms of art and literature, but more often
> those who identify *as* Discordians (if this is what you mean) are just
> misfits without connection to material-world application.

What I'm referring to as Discordian is a dance WITH science, chaos
and change, rather than running from them in fear the way certain
authoritarian types, being brittle and therefore fragile, tend to do.
Given that such a dance was well described over two decades ago by the
Discordians, including Robert Anton Wilson, it seems fair to give them
at least part of the credit.

I can't say who you've met who are calling themselves Discordians, but
the ones I ran into (back when when the Illuminatus/Discordian/SubGenius
in-jokes were staples on the infant Net) were all into engineering,
computer science, or some kind of hard science. That is, they knew
enough math to understand Zen mathematical humor. I wouldn't call them
disconnected from materiality at all. You seem to think such people
are hopeless losers, but to me they look like creatives.

> I am not saying
> this to place myself in the elite category. I may well be one of these
> misfits, for example. I'm still testing this.

I'd rather be a misfit than a conformist. The only measure of "elite" in
American society that matters in the long run is cash, so any intelligent
misfit can learn to buy his way in as an entrepreneur. There is no other
reliable way to cash in - climbing the corporate or governmental
hierarchy is just a well-carpeted ladder to serfdom, or, these days, a
layoff.

> the fools are now on television somnambulizing the herd. now the
> corporation calls the shots, pulling political and media strings and
> still resisting androgynic symbolism. it is simply too profitable to
> dispense with facile gender roles.

Uh-oh, evil corporates. The corporation's days, as we know it, are
seriously numbered. You would never know this from watching the media,
of course; but even now most existing companies are younger than I am.
The multinationals and every other rigid bureaucracy on the planet,
including the U.S government, are setting themselves up to lose bigtime.
Rigid hierarchies and economies of scale belong to the Industrial Age,
which is OVER everywhere except on network TV. GE, as old as it is, may
be one of the survivors if it can hold onto its belief in autonomous
smaller groups for action. I was totally delighted by the corporate
culture I encountered when I was working at GE last summer.

We're about to head into serious cultural change and violence, because
the herd still thinks it is in the Industrial Age, while the reality
becomes constant change based on information, a dynamic state for which
most, being couch potatoes as they are, are unprepared. I fully expect
something like civil war before it's over, at least at a slow cold boil.

> # Where does this leave the manipulatress?

> given the immature state conditioned by the culture,

This is a valuable point. The immaturity in this culture is created,
rather than necessarily inherent to a Western society.

My argument is that advertising is capitalizing, not on sex drives, but
on their destruction and denial, while holding up little fragments of
what's left, crumbs we are meant to pursue desperately and spend money
on. Spending money to get your own sexuality back is probably the
biggest con since the dawn of time!

Maturity can't be just acting, as a really mature person will see through
it. The game for its own sake is still there, but it's no longer taken
seriously. It's just a game.

[]
> I think it is more than merely Christian. the extreme dualism and
> Orphic self-hatred (body-hate, sex-hate, etc.) is present to a certain
> extent in many American women, for example, probably conditioned thru
> television -- another reason to avoid it. if the religious vanished,
> I think the asceticism would still be present. there are also new
> versions of Christianity all the time, some with feminist leanings
> that dispute the skeletal-beauty standard, for example.

Television didn't grow up in a vacuum. What we have now is the product
of heavy censorship in a medium that is afraid to offend the ignorant.
The "new versions" of Christianity have not made it out of the urban and
coastal regions and don't offer an effective counterdialogue.

[]
> I don't think that Jung ever connected the Anima/us. what I've seen so
> far indicates he thought that these were left-over biological gene-remnants
> which polarized in response to the selection of gender at conception.

I'm not so much worried about whether Jung was very determinist or not,
given that most modern Jungians don't seem to be. However, Jung
certainly described the anima, persona and shadow in cultural terms.
This means they are a moving target. What was meant to be steady were
the archetypes, but they seem to some extent also to be in motion now.

> how I presume he'd describe the conditions are that the Anima/us is
> increasingly demonized, becoming more and more a part of the Shadow.

Yes.

> I think this is one of the reasons that some tantrics and Satanists may
> focus on wrathful gods of opposite gender to their biological structure
> (as I do in dedication to Kali). it is an attempt to simultaneously
> integrate the Shadow and the Anima/us.

I've done some of this, though I was after the animus rather than the
shadow, with Northern deities. To get back to the original article to
which I was reacting, the process you describe seems to be what Barton is
suggesting in her recent article, in which Satan becomes the archetype
with whom the feminine witch will make contact.

> # If we are to find the authentic patterns of desire, locked up in our
> # mammalian brains under the piles of mental damage inflicted on almost all
> # of us by Christian upbringings, we must go deeper into the Satanic than
> # we have had courage so far to do.

> I think this 'Satanic' must involve the challenge of taboo, activities
> which are at times considered 'perverted' or 'insane' to the average
> joe and jane citizenry (BDSM, witchcraft, blood rites, etc.).

Yes.

> # When we find these patterns, they will be violent, but not abusive;
>
> on the initial pass I would recommend caution, however. sometimes the
> Anima/us which is integrated to the Shadow can be incredibly abusive.

Yes, and this is part of the damage that leaves people estranged from
their sexuality.

> # aesthetic, but not materialistic; animal, but not anti-intellectual.
>
> not materialistic in a self-destructive or obsessive sense, though I do
> think that aesthetics should include materialism as a hefty part of
> sensate experience (enlightened or self-interested hedonism). I agree
> strongly with the latter portion of your text. we are talking,
> especially if adhering to Jungian models, of an 'individuation', what I
> understand as the integration of repressed psychic contents and a real
> separation from the herd on the basis of uniqueness and self-knowledge.
> this is to what Greater Black Magick should lead, apparently even by
> LaVeyan descriptions.

Thank you for your agreement, and yes.

> # ...the Christian mind is profoundly damaged. ..._non-consensual_
> # dominance and submission and the damage is re-introduced to another
> # broken generation. Few of these people have enough mentation or will
> # left to be useful to technological society.
>
> I have some difficulties with the above attitude if I understand it.
> first, society in its present configuration is integral to the problem.
> parental technocracies intentionally maximize through education and
> media-steering the immaturity of the herd so as to retain consumers.

It's the industrial age game being played in the media and by the
government. It is about to start breaking up, but the media is doing its
best to pretend it won't. Hahaha. All these consumers are going to be
useless, talentless, waste. Fortunately for the rest of us,
their facade of civilization will collapse, giving us an excuse to get
rid of them in "self defense." I just regret some good people will go
out at the same time.

> it is the *emotional* center which is most damaged within at least
> modern American culture.

totally. People with strong feeling can't sit in front of the television
all day.

> asceticism makes no room for real expressions
> of emotion, or if they do these are increasingly exascerbated through
> constraint to limited channels and roles. I don't think that it is
> a mere coincidence that Christian religion makes such a big deal about
> Jesus residing 'in the heart'. in some way the religious are attempting
> to grapple with this problem too, though often without knowing what they
> are doing.

Until they become willing to acknowledge their role in creating the
problem, they just add to it. Some of them are starting to do better.

[]
> # For this reason, I reject what passes for male and female in the culture,
>
> very wise, though you are not addressing LaVey's real point. I got the
> impression that his point was that if there exists a vulnerable spot in
> the culture we live (and you seem to strongly agree with thim about this
> vulnerability, this damage you attribute to Christians and I attribute to
> organizations generally), then we can learn to exploit it in order to
> get what we want. I think this is more of an opportunity for women than
> it is for men and that this is why LaVey focusses on 'the Satanic *Witch*'
> rather than on 'the Satanic Warlock' or whatever one would desire to call
> the male counterpart.

True. But this, for me, is where I lose interest, as I don't like being
around damaged people very much. I suppose if someone didn't want to
challenge her own damage and disarray she'd be sufficiently dependent to
be willing to put up with it. There are limits to what you can do with
the herd. They exist mainly to be milked. I'd rather be able to avoid
them at other times.

> that is, while I agree that as a Satanist and/or witch it is extremely
> VALUABLE to do as you are doing -- essentially dismissing the artificial
> constraints of gender roles and with what we associate them, by ignoring
> them completely you also ignore a set of triggers which might easily be
> used against the herd to your advantage. compare this to phone sex and
> the blatant eros-focused media hooking into male Anima-repression.

Well, there is that. I suppose it's that while I'm perfectly willing to
wear makeup and a low neckline, I don't make a career out of it. Then I
don't find myself relying on something I may need to make mashed potatoes
out of later on. I will get back to this as I respond to the
next post. I don't mind the biological part of erotic cueing, just
some of the cultural aspects.

> # in search of what is male and female in nature;
>
> I don't think you'll find that. check out feminist literature of the
> more lesbian styles and you'll begin to see androgyny being touted as
> an ideal (as the book of this name by June Singer).

There are a LOT of feminisms out there, including some that are not
androgynous. I'm a bisexual femme, and during the 80's took a lot of
heat from lesbian feminists for being insufficiently enlightened.
However, that kind of dogmatism is on its way out. Barton thinks _The
Satanic Witch_ should get the credit for the return to gender and sexy
glamour, which I think is claiming too much. However, it has no doubt been an
influence on gothdom, where people are happy to do extremes in gender
and cross-gender.

As bisexual, rather than lesbian, feminisms become more articulate and
more published, I think we'll be seeing even more explorations of gender,
cross- and transgender, and androgyny as a multi-dimensional field of flux,
rather than as the forced choice between polar and non-polar gendering so often
seen in the 80's.

> there are many
> other connections to this ideal, such as in alchemical drawings (heiros
> gamos) and even the Levi Baphomet (who is drawn with breasts and
> phallus). yet my understanding is that the real goal here is not
> locking onto yet *another* static category, another set of 'correct
> gender role assignments', but liberating ourselves from identifying
> any of them with particular gender characteristics, being so
> conversant with all aspects of what are today called 'gender roles'
> that we can manifest them ourselves per our desires and needs.

This is great if you can do it, and I certainly do a lot of this as part
of my own shamanic approach. However, I found from working with
orientation that many people really are biologically gendered in fixed
ranges. Finding out what they are, and whether they are purely
individual or occur systematically in populations, will be interesting. I
will always state the common ground is much, much larger than the
variations across the sexes.

[]
> is 'feminist' now a 'naughty' label? :> in the Satanist community? that
> would demonstrate some of the latter's fear of the feminine.

I regret to say that the print evidence I have suggests that it is indeed
a naughty label in at least part of the CoS. Two examples from the
recent _Black Flame_ (Vol. 6 1 & 2), both by Barton:

"More and more young women are going through process of exploring
feminism and Wicca, seeking feminine pride, identity and power, and
discovering only impotence, limitations and puritanical
self-righteousness." (p. 3) Most of the rest of her article views
feminism stereotypically. She has a point where PC and Wicca are
concerned, but feminism itself is a collection of philosophies, none of
which totally agree about anything. Later on she is quoted as saying,
"Satan is Not a Woman...My Male self taunts me, whips me, challenges and
rewards me. The feminists have cheapened this internal/external
interaction until both men AND women now feel tainted with new
feminist-imposed insecurities and expectations." (p. 23) This,
interestingly, seems to me to contradict _The Satanic Witch_, in which
the male who taunts and punishes is viewed as a masochist hoping someone
will get angry and lash back. Certainly I don't think of "taunting" as a
dominant behavior. Online we have, at
http://www.satannet.com/bunco.html, the warning: "Some other groups to
watch out for: A) Feminist, Wiccan-oriented, consciousness-raising groups who
practice more male-bashing than magic..." I can appreciate not liking
Wicca, but not all feminism is Wicca, not all feminisms are male-bashing,
and some feminisms are hard-headedly materialistic. Anyway, the
anti-feminist stance strikes me as anti-philosophical and anti-liberty as
well as anti-female, and I find it unattractive.

> it is quite
> likely that what is contained within TSW applies more within the Satanist and
> BDSM communities (where hedonism and gender-specific imagery are encouraged)
> than in mainstream society (where it would be rejected based on its erotic
> content unless skillfully muted).

Well, I'm IN the BDSM community to some extent, and I think they'd reject
TSW rather harshly for mapping Dominance/submission onto gender so
rigidly, and for equating consensual and unconscious masochisms. There
are certainly gendered D/s people; the Gorean Society comes to mind.
But consensuality and negotiation require an underlying equality. Still,
I agree with you that mainstream society, of which TSW is a somewhat
dated but accurate picture, would nonetheless reject it.

[some good remarks deleted]
> some business or political arena are pretty common. convincing other
> people is a major skill in sales, and so as you can imagine there are
> a host of texts available to instruct one on this occupation.

I will list one old one I still like in the references after the .sig.

[]
> thanks for bringing up this topic. I think it's very valuable.

You're welcome, and thanks for responding. I really enjoyed your comments.

--Brenda Mobley
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/1866

References:

_The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse
of the Welfare State_, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, 1997.

_Dancing the Wheel of Psychological Types_, Mary E. Loomis, 1991.

_Twenty Steps to Power, Influence and Control Over People_, unknown (at
least to me - the last time I had a copy of this was in 1985; probably
published in the seventies).

EOF
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