Recent years have seen a significant shift in the study of new religious movements. In Satanism studies, interest has moved to anthropological and historical work on groups and inviduals. Self-declared Satanism, especially as a religion with cultural production and consumption, history, and organization, has largely been neglected by academia. This volume, focused on modern Satanism as a practiced religion of life-style, attempts to reverse that trend with 12 cutting-edge essays from the emerging field of Satanism studies. Topics covered range from early literary Satanists like Blake and Shelley, to the Californian Church of Satan of the 1960s, to the radical developments that have taken place in the Satanic milieu in recent decades. The contributors analyze such phenomena as conversion to Satanism, connections between Satanism and political violence, 19th-century decadent Satanism, transgression, conspiracy theory, and the construction of Satanic scripture. A wide array of methods are employed to shed light on the Devil's statistical surveys, anthropological field studies, philological examination of The Satanic Bible, contextual analysis of literary texts, careful scrutiny of obscure historical records, and close readings of key Satanic writings. The book will be an invaluable resource for everyone interested in Satanism as a philosophical or religious position of alterity rather than as an imagined other.
Author
Per Faxneld is Swedish Historian of Religion he holds a ph.d. in History of Religions (obtained in 2014). his field of specialisation is Western esotericism, new religions and "alternative spirituality" (e.g. Satanism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, New Age, the sacralization of physical excercise, etc), with a particular emphasis on how they are formed in tandem with processes of modernization (especially secularization). he has also worked from a sociological perspective with questions pertainng to strategies of legitimation, religious authority and identity formation. Other interests include religion and popular culture (reflection my background in cinema studies), folk religion (e.g. editing a critical edition of a folkloristic classic), gender issues, globalization and religion and violence. A key theme in his research is the relation between Western esotericism and art/literature. My doctoral dissertation (Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture, awarded the Donner Institute Prize for Eminent Research on Religion, and later re-published by Oxford University Press) adresses how anti-clerical feminists – primarily during the time period 1880–1930 – used Satan as a symbol of rejecting the patriarchal traits of Christianity. I emphasized how these women were inspired by the period's most influential new religion, Theosophy, and how the anti-religious discourses of secularism impacted feminism.
