This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm and other platforms, and as a video on YouTube.
This episode begins a three-episode series that will explore the foundations of Satanic religion, as I understand it. Each episode will concentrate on a different aspect of Satanism and will be written in a different style. This one will be somewhat like my typical essays, especially those that focus most closely on Satanism and philosophy of religion, and here I’ll be exploring the religious philosophy of one of my most significant influences, the American philosopher William James. Next week will be a Satanic theology—or at least a preliminary outline of what such a theology would look like. And I’ll approach the final entry in the trilogy from a postmodernist, surrealist, and poetic style, without any housekeeping or announcements, and I’m going to open and close the episode with invocations performed on an Arabic lute called the oud.
I’m going to start this trilogy where this project really began, eleven years ago when I took a class on philosophy of religion. At the time, I had just been discharged from the Army and had seen the worst of religion up close and sometimes shooting guns at me, and I held closely to the anti-religious atheist skepticism of Sam Harris. I had my training in propaganda analysis and was lucky to have had some great teachers in high school who taught me critical thinking skills, but I had no training whatsoever in philosophy. At the same time, I was practicing meditation as a secular Zen Buddhist and had a deep interest in religion, especially with regards to several transcendent religious experiences that I had had at various times in my life.
The Varieties of Religious Experience by the American philosopher William James—an edited transcript of lectures given at the University of Edinburgh between 1901 and 1902—was the first text assigned for this philosophy of religion class. James’ text looks into religion from his perspective as a philosopher, psychologist, and a religious outsider, and though he has some concerns and in general sees it very differently than do most religious practitioners, he finds religion generally fascinating and wonderful. Much of my marginalia in the early chapters reflects a scathing skepticism and an unwillingness to accept James’ arguments in defense of religion. But repeatedly, James not only acknowledges arguments that Sam Harris would make a century later, but proves them either unconvincing or actually demonstrates quite effectively that they support James’ own position. What’s more, his writing spoke to my own religious experiences and offered numerous accounts of similar experiences of the same from various texts and letters. All in all, it completely transformed my understanding of religion and planted the seed for the theory of religion that I’ve been developing over the course of this project.
The first thing to understand about The Varieties of Religious Experience and about William James is that they are what you might call ontologically indifferent with regards to religious claims. In other words, James does not concern himself with whether the various ontological claims made by religion—claims about the existence of God, for example—are true or false, or with the epistemological status of those claims—whether their truth is knowable or unknowable. It might seem odd for a book about religion not to concern itself with religious claims, but to James, religion is primarily something that people experience (Taylor, 2002, p. 4), with the associated beliefs being secondary matters that don’t much concern him. He does touch on the subject in places (and, in concluding the book, gives a single clear and direct answer to one particular claim, albeit one that he spends several pages hedging in so that he’s able to answer it in such a way), but the primary questions he seeks to address are, one, what is the nature of religious experience? And two, what is the practical impact and value of such experience?
James begins his investigation by laying out its parameters and scope, and first up is a stipulative definition of the nebulous term “religion” itself. His purpose in doing so is not to provide a final, universal definition for the term—such would be impossible anyway—but rather to create one that is reasonable but also narrow enough to facilitate his discourse on the subject. And to that end, he stipulates the following:
Religion… shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.
1982, p. 31
He specifies further:
This sense of the world’s presence, appealing as it does to our peculiar individual temperament, makes us either strenuous or careless, devout or blasphemous, gloomy or exultant, about life at large; and our reaction, involuntary and inarticulate and often half unconscious as it is, is the completest of all our answers to the question, “What is the character of this universe in which we dwell?” It expresses our individual sense of it in the most definite way. Why then not call these reactions our religion, no matter what specific character they may have?
p. 35
These stipulations neatly serve James’ purpose, allowing him to focus on religion as personal experience rather than as institutional doctrine (which he largely repudiates).
The next stage in James’ investigation requires that he work in to this concept of religion what he calls the reality of the unseen. As James puts it:
The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims… in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space, and the ether soak through all things, so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant, and just.
p. 56
James is describing here the human reality of a physical world that exists within a realm of concepts and ideas which saturate the physical realm with meaning. These concepts and ideas constitute the bulk of our experience and are the primary entities according to which we situate ourselves with regards to the world. While they are not “real” in the physical sense, they are more real to us than the physical world, to the point of completely encompassing our conventional understanding of the word “reality”. For example, the desk at which I’m sitting is more real to me as a desk than it is as an objective, physical arrangement of matter, devoid of conceptual understanding. If you were in my office and I pointed to it and asked you what it was, you would say, “It’s a desk.” If I asked you if desks exist, you would say yes. But a desk isn’t what it really is but rather a collection of concepts that we apply to the physical object. You might counter that there is a near-universal agreement as to what desks are that doesn’t necessarily exist for other concepts; however, as soon as we approach objects of cultural artistry (in which I see religion included), we find that even as that near-universal agreement fragments, the conceptual understanding which was formerly agreed upon remains, to each of individually, fully real.
To understand that last bit and to see how this carries over to more abstract concepts like goodness and beauty and so forth, consider the following thought experiment: Imagine that I spent a podcast episode telling you about a book, let’s say, The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, and if you’ve read this book, pretend that you haven’t. It’s a detailed, straightforward account of the war fought primarily between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BCE. Let’s say that I don’t quote from the book at all in the episode but I give a very thorough and detailed outline of its contents, themes, ideas, and style. You might then be able to have an informed conversation about the book with someone who has read it, and the person with whom you’re speaking might not even be able to tell that you haven’t read it.
Now let’s say I do another episode on Beethoven’s 7th symphony, and if you’ve heard that piece of music, pretend that you haven’t. I don’t play any clips of the music or so much as hum a bar of melody in the episode, but I give a very detailed description of the music: what key it’s in, its overall structure, the relationship between its melodic themes, its historical context and performance history, and so forth. And again, you may now be able to have an informed conversation about this piece of music with someone who has heard it performed, but it is immediately apparent that this conversation would not be equivalent to the conversation about Thucydides. Given an arbitrarily detailed explanation of The History of the Peloponnesian War, I think we would agree that you would have a proportional understanding of the book, even if there are aspects of it (such as the “feel” of Thucydides’ prose) that you might not appreciate. But could we say that you really understand the symphony at all if you’ve never heard it? Again, given an arbitrarily detailed explanation, the person with whom you’re conversing about Thucydides might not be able to tell that you haven’t read it, but as soon as the discussion about the symphony turns to the affective states it causes—which are arguably the most important things that the symphony conveys—it will become evident that you’ve never heard it. Questions about affective states are not likely to arise in a conversation about Thucydides, and if they do, they can likely be circumvented without revealing that you haven’t read the book.
Let’s now further specify that you’re talking about the 7th symphony with someone who listens to it daily and loves it deeply but doesn’t know any facts about it that aren’t immediately evident from listening to it—all of the facts you learned about in my podcast episode, in other words. So, this person knows that it’s a symphony performed by a symphony orchestra but doesn’t even know that it was composed by Beethoven. Between the two of you, who does it seem is closer to the symphony’s “truth,” as it were? Whom do you think Beethoven would pick as being the one who really understands the music? The obvious answer to both questions seems to be the ignorant listener, rather than you, the knowledgeable scholar who has never once heard it. It is thus apparent that there is an aspect to the music—and not just any aspect but its most real and important aspect—which does not exist as a physical reality nor as anything that can be conveyed discursively. And even the relatively straightforward History of the Peloponnesian War might have a layer of meaning for you which is not part of the book’s constitution as a physical object. Maybe you had a weird childhood and it was read to you as a bedtime story, and in that case its reality as the bedtime book of your childhood and all the emotional content that would entail would be as real to you as its font or number of pages—perhaps even more so.
This is the unseen reality that James is describing, and part of this as well are the “quasi-sensible, apprehensible realities” which James describes as constituting the content of religious experience and which he documents at length throughout the book.
It is undeniable that many people do indeed experience what might be called religious experiences (which also sometimes fall into a category that James calls mystical experience). In addition to James’ plentiful examples, I’ve seen them documented in numerous other sources, including those of the staunchest atheists (examples being Harris, 2005; and Dennett, 2007). I’ve spoken to many people who have had such experiences, and I’ve had and continue to have them myself.
This is the foundation on which James builds a model of religion as primarily involving psychological, rather than supernatural, phenomena. These experiences qua experiences—meaning, considered in terms of their being experiences—are entirely real. As James says in his conclusion to the book, “So long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term” (p. 498). Gods, then, as James understands them, can be understood as “half-metaphoric personifications of those great spheres of abstract law and order into which the natural world falls apart” (p. 58) and we may even treat “the abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship” (p. 57, citing Ralph Waldo Emerson).
Of course, as a Satanist, my understanding of the “abstract divineness” and “moral structure” of the universe are somewhat different than what James had in mind, but I’ll get to that a little further on.
Those familiar with the concept of pantheism and panentheism, which view the entire universe as being consubstantial with God, might note some overlap with the concepts that James presents here, but the model that James lays out in his book is, of course, not the way that the average religious person understands their religion, or religion in general. This is indeed a challenge for his theory, one which he responds to by outlining an account of how personal religious experience might evolve into an orthodoxy which then becomes an institutional hegemony, which
…can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration. Unless, indeed, by adopting new movements of the spirit it can make capital out of them and use them for its selfish corporate designs!…
The basenesses so commonly charged to religion’s account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to religion’s wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion’s wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theocretic system.
p. 337
James thus acknowledges that there are problems with religion, and he mentions several more of these throughout the text as arising from various other factors. His defense of what he believes to be the heart of religion is robust, but this is not to say that there aren’t challenges for his theory or for the text in general that he does not address. As the philosopher Charles Taylor described in a 2002 reevaluation of the book entitled Varieties of Religion Today, James mentions aspects of Buddhism and Hinduism but approaches religion from a very Western perspective, and overlooks as well the potential value of certain social or communal aspects of religion in his strict focus on religion as private, personal experience.
One might also question whether James is correct in claiming that religious experiences, and mystical experiences in particular, have the noetic quality that he says they do—whether they convey knowledge, in other words. This was my own concern on the first reading of the text, as well as a criticism by philosophers Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn in their generally excellent textbook How to Think About Weird Things (2014), which takes aim at a particular formulation espoused by physicist Fritjof Capra, author of the 1975 book The Tao of Physics:
Capra can’t claim that modern physics vindicates the worldview of Eastern mystics in general because the Eastern mystics don’t share a common worldview. Hindus and Buddhists have radically different conceptions of the nature of reality. In fact, mystical worldviews seem to be at least as various as mystical traditions themselves. Mystics, even Eastern ones, do not speak with a single voice. Consequently, it can’t coherently be maintained that modern physics confirms their view of things.
Even the more limited claim that modern physics vindicates the worldview of one particular group of mystics is problematic, for if one group of mystics is right, the others must be wrong. How, then, would we account for the fact that Christian mystics were mistaken? Is the answer that their experiences weren’t really mystical? But how would we distinguish real mystical experiences from false ones? Is the answer that the Christians didn’t interpret their experiences correctly? But how would we distinguish correct interpretations from incorrect ones? Once we admit that only certain mystical experiences are revelatory, we have abandoned the claim that all mystical experience yields knowledge.
p. 83-84
It’s certainly true that logical problems result when we extrapolate discursive propositions from ineffable religious experiences, but I don’t find their argument here convincing. I would structure it as follows:
- If mystical experiences resulted in knowledge, then worldviews derived from mystical experience would always be the same
- Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian worldviews are derived from mystical experience
- Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian worldviews are different
- Therefore, worldviews derived from mystical experience are not always the same
- Therefore, mystical experience does not result in knowledge
It’s a valid argument, but the first and second premises are problematic, and even the third, as specifically explicated by Schick and Vaughn, has some potential challenges. Regarding the first premise: as, according to James, mystical experience involves the dissolution of concepts (1982, p. 417), one would not expect that non-discursive revelations would all look the same when described, and even the discursive revelations of science can take different forms. An example counterargument can demonstrate this:
- If science results in knowledge, then worldviews derived from science would always be the same
- The Bohr model of the atom and the quantum model of the atom are derived from science
- The Bohr model of the atom and the quantum model of the atom are different
- Therefore, worldviews derived from science are not always the same
- Therefore, science does not result in knowledge
This argument is likewise valid, but the conclusion is unacceptable, so one of the premises must be flawed, and as the second and third premises are rock-solid, the first premise is the only viable candidate. This means that the general form “If P results in knowledge, then worldviews derived from P would always be the same” cannot be accepted, as there is at least one clear counterexample. One might respond that the quantum model of the atom is a more advanced version of atomic theory that replaces the Bohr model, but the Bohr model is still taught in schools and many people believe that it is an accurate model of the atom, and if we counter with an argument that we know that the quantum model is the more accurate one, we’ve begged the question, assuming the truth of the conclusion as a premise in its own favor.
As Thomas Kuhn said in his landmark 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
If… out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge. If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today. Given these alternatives, the historian must choose the latter. Out-of-date theories are not in principle unscientific because they have been discarded.
(2014, p. 83-4)
My counterargument here does not affirm that James is necessarily correct, only that his thinking on this matter cannot be dismissed on the basis of this argument.
Now, on to the matter of how this material relates to my Satanic beliefs.
I’ve often been asked whether I believe that Satan “really exists,” and while that seems like a relatively straightforward matter—either I do or I don’t, one would think—it’s actually somewhat more complicated and neither a negative nor an affirmative answer would really convey what it is that I believe. While I understand the proposition “Satan exists” as being true, I don’t think that Satan exists in the way the person asking me the question likely thinks of deities in terms of existing or not existing, in terms of there being a being called Satan who is out there somewhere.
I’m going to go into more details about the specifics in the next two essays, but to put things in the language of William James, the abstract divineness and moral order of the universe exist for me as the quasi-sensible, apprehensible realities of God and Satan. My experiences of these things as God and Satan are as real to me as, for example, my experience of a sunset as beautiful, and for me to say that aspects of the universe exist for me as Satan is similar to my saying that the arrangement of photons hitting my retinas exists for me as the sun. To be clear, I acknowledge that my calling Satan a literal reality would be something of a stretch given how most people understand those words, but neither would it be accurate to say that I’m being purely figurative or metaphorical. My actual experience of the reality of Satan is something which transcends all other experience, such that the conceptual tools of religion are necessary to even begin to speak about or understand it.My having these experiences is clearly not an isolated incident. I’ve heard other Satanists talk about similar experiences (an example being fellow Satanist podcaster Stephen Bradford Long in his Sacred Tension episode “The Satanic Conversion”), and my readings in sacred texts have indicated to me that others throughout history have had them, and written about them, as well. I’ve found such themes in the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Qur’an, the Rig Veda, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita. Not all of their formulations have turned out the same, of course, but there are remarkable common threads between them, which I’ve explored over the course of this project, and, as we’ve already established, worldviews resulting from the same data don’t always turn out exactly the same. The narrative that best reflects my understanding is that of Satan the Accuser, and, as I promised, I’ll be going into further detail on that specific matter in the next two episodes.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited and Referenced
Dennett, D. C. (2007). Breaking the spell: Religion as a natural phenomenon. Penguin Books.
Harris, S. (2005). Sam Harris—The End of Faith_ Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2005, W. W. Norton)
James, W. (1982). The varieties of religious experience: A study in human nature (M. E. Marty, Ed.). Penguin Books.
Long, ~ Stephen Bradford. (2019, October 24). The Satanic Conversion. Stephen Bradford Long. https://stephenbradfordlong.com/2019/10/24/the-satanic-conversion/
Schick, T., & Vaughn, L. (2014). How to think about weird things: Critical thinking for a new age (Seventh edition). McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Taylor, C. (2002). Varieties of religion today: William James revisited. Harvard University Press.