Friday, December 08, 2006

Again with the Satanism Questions

A few comments on other threads got me thinking about what, if any, connection modern Satanism has to traditional views of (how shall I put this) adversarial gods. I'm thinking particularly about Darkhawk's statement:

quote: "the Temple of Set is, as modern interpretations of Big Red completely divorced from context go, really quite excellent as a way of putting forth His goals for people. Unfortunately, the context dropped is all the checks and balances on His goals as established within the system."

Never having heard of the Temple of Set before, I popped over to their site to have a look. I came away with two impressions:

1. This isn't the Big Red I know. ("Set is the lord of the subjective universe" -WTF?) Actually, there was very little written about the nature of Set himself.
2. Arrogant much? The front page fairly oozes superiority. Apparently I have to join an occult order to learn to be self-reliant and develop as a person. Dressing it up in italicized foreign words doesn't impress me much.

I admit I'm thinking mostly of Set here, but I guess this also applies to other similarly inclined gods. Is it just me, or did these Satanist groups more or less say "ooh, adversarial" and pick one as a mascot?

And what about the "checks and balances"? (Darkhawk, would you mind expanding a bit on that? :-) ) From what little I know, modern Satanism could easily swing into "You ignorant peasants are so totally beneath me" territory; is there anything pulling in the other direction?

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