In this special Devil’s Night interview, our good friends Bruce Alderman and Layman Pascal talk to Hofman and Daemon, former members of The Satanic Temple in New York, and founding members of the Satanic organization LORE: The Satanic Collective of NYC, about the history of Satanism and the new Integral and Metamodern-ish forms that are currently emerging.
These ain’t the baby-sacrificing satanists your mother was afraid of in the 1980s. They’re the sort of satanists who build statues of Baphomet outside of government courthouses in order to protect free speech and the separation of church and state from religious fundamentalists who are determined to legislate their own mythic morality. They are not anti-Christian, anti-spiritual, or even anti-religious — in fact they want to help integrate the apparent polarities between spirituality and sensuality, between masculine and feminine, and between light and shadow, pulling all of these together into a sort of “transcendent hedonism” that fully honors the dignity of the separate self even while plunging it into a far more expansive space of selfless awareness. Their approach is something we might call a “social tonglen” — becoming the darkness, playing the scapegoat, and consciously taking the hits, all in service of achieving greater social good.
In other words, it’s an “integral satanism” if ever there was one.
“Everybody kind of knows the Socratic ‘daemon’ — that there’s some kind of higher indwelling spirit that may have been unnecessarily excluded throughout history, and to which we might turn for real guidance in ourselves or as the essence of ourselves. But we also know what it means for a drug addict to go to a self-help program and says ‘he’s got a demon inside him’. So there’s a way for the darkness to draw you down, or to draw you up, and there’s an archetype or a figure that can represent either of those. And for most people they’re very conflated. People who are hyper-reactive against something like ‘satanism’ — even very sophisticated people can be weird about it — and one of the reasons is their own non-integrated shadow, but another reason is they’re aware that there’s a tangle between the evil they don’t want, and the evil they do want.” —Layman Pascal
So join us as we take a short walk on the dark side, where demons and daemons alike dance to the throbbing rhythm of a living, breathing, ever-evolving universe.
Text by Bruce Alderman and Corey deVos
Artwork by Sick Mick and Billelis, used with permission.
Intro music by Grails. Outro music by Seth from LORE NYC.
Reflections
ABOUT THE INTEGRAL STAGE
The Integral Stage (TIS) is a new media platform for hosting grassroots Integral content, featuring public debates, dialogues, panel discussions, presentations, interviews, musical or dramatic performances, and artwork. Bruce Alderman initially launched TIS as a Facebook group in April 2019, with the intent to host mediated debates on hot topics, to explore the edges and cracks of current integral thinking, and to highlight important work being done on the ground by individuals in the integral, and “integral diasporic,” communities. TIS has since morphed into a YouTube channel, with a small but growing number of self-produced episodes.
Currently, TIS is experimenting with several featured video formats: Polarity Dialogues, in which the debaters must each argue both for and against a position before coming together in generative dialogue around the issue; Wheel of Perspectives panel discussions, in which participants give brief formal presentations on a topic and then join together in one or more rounds of dialogue towards critical enfoldment of perspectives; Integral Stage Mindwalks, which feature intimate, deep-diving dialogues between typically two or three individuals; and loosely structured group dialogues, for more open-ended exploration among four or more participants. Not all content will follow these formats, and TIS intends to continue to experiment with forms until the most generative ones are identified.
Past highlights from The Integral Stage include the Polarity Dialogue, “What Good is God-Talk?”; a Wheel of Perspectives panel discussion on “The Status of States”; and the Integral Stage Mindwalk, “The Poetry of Growth,” featuring StAGES researcher Tom Murray in dialogue with Layman Pascal. Layman Pascal is a frequent guest and co-moderator on TIS, including on all three of these episodes.
Related Links
League Of Rebel Eve – The Satanic Collective Of NYC
The History Of Satanic Panic In The Us — And Why It’s Not Over Yet
The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, And Heretics
Elaine Pagels
The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism
Joshua Trachtenberg
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William Blake
Little Lucifers Of The Satanic School: Part 1 Of 2: Byron
The Miltonic In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, On The Novel’s Bicentenary
The Sorceress (La Sorcière)
Jules Michelet
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England
Carol F. Karlsen
Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture
Per Faxneld
The Invention of Satanism
Asbjorn Dyrendal, James R. Lewis, and Jesper Aa. Petersen
The Devil’s Party: Satanism in Modernity
Per Faxneld and Jesper Aa. Petersen
Children of Lucifer – The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism
Ruben van Luijk
Abridged Timeline of Literary, Political, and Romantic Satanism
1667: Paradise Lost – John Milton
c. 1790s to 1850s: Romanticism
1792: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin)
1793: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – William Blake
1793: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice – William Godwin
1808: Faust – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1820: Prometheus Unbound – Percy Bysshe Shelley
1821: Cain – Lord Byron
1821: A Vision of Judgement – Robert Southey
1823: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
c. 1850s to 1910s: Decadent movement
1857: The Flowers of Evil – Charles Baudelaire
1862: Satanism and Witchcraft (La Sorcière) – Jules Michelet
1873: A Season in Hell – Arthur Rimbaud
1882: God and the State – Mikhail Bakunin
1891: Là-Bas – Joris-Karl Huysmans
1893: Woman, Church and State – Matilda Joslyn Gage
Additional Notes
The Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth #8: Do not harm little children.
The Satanic Temple Is Helping Protect Children From Abuse
About Bruce Alderman
Bruce Alderman, MA, is an affiliate faculty at John F. Kennedy University in the Consciousness and Transformative Studies and Holistic Counseling Psychology departments. After years of moderating several integral discussion forums of his own, including Integral Postmetaphysical Spirituality and Integral Scholarship and Practice, he is venturing into production of integral video content himself.
About Layman Pascal
Layman Pascal was incarnated on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest. He used to be a meditation teacher, yoga instructor & public speaker — but he's feeling much better now.