Anti-Serenity
my effort at a path
I neither condemn nor elevate suffering. To generalize about a suffering person is to render him or her one-dimensional.
Having lived in New York City nearly all my life, I encounter suffering that is sometimes confrontational. Recent to this writing, something of value was said during such a confrontation. It was with someone who wanted money and who I had inadvertently pissed off. She got up in my space and said something I liked:
“Change what you cannot accept.”
“I dig that,” I said.
She thought (wrongly) that I was making fun of her. “You dig that? Do you know what that is?”
“Yes, it’s the Serenity Prayer. . .”
“It’s the Serenity Prayer in reverse,” she said. “Do you know the Serenity Prayer?”
I assured her I did. And I liked her iteration. It is at the back of my search.
Most Western spirituality stems from Abrahamic traditions—Judaism-Christianity-Islam—along with variations of Vedic, Taoist, shamanic, or Buddhist teachings. At a turning point in my search around 2018, I found these expressions, in both traditional and esoteric iterations, unsatisfying.
I sought a more self-driven path. One of attainment, proteanism, and self-expression. Although I did not embark on my search with this intention—nor with foreordained resistance—I found that my approach coalesced with an outlook sometimes called the lefthand path.
In classical terms, lefthand practice is rooted in Tantric Vedism and roughly comparable to heterodox traditions such as Sufism in Islam and Kabbalah in Judaism, which themselves have many variants. “The name of the left-hand path,” surmises historian Dave Evans in his 2007 The History of British Magic After Crowley, “seems to derive from this practice being linked to the left-hand side of the face of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.”
I cannot venture a direct connection, but in another ancient parallel, the Hebrew spelling of Samael, archangel of death (sometimes conflated with Satan), סמאל, differs by one /s/ phoneme, samech (ס), from the term for left, שְׁמֹאל, which begins with shin (שׁ). Shin can mean creator or destroyer.
In modern parlance, the lefthand path is an ethical and spiritual outlook that could be described as “My Will Be Done.” This concept is, I believe, a more honest philosophical antonym to the Scriptural invocation “Thy Will Be Done,” which is often invoked with the same meaning covertly or, just as often, unconsciously.
We wish to attain—broadly defined —and hope that our strivings comport with those of a Higher Power, or what I call a Greater Force, featured here in a variant of the 1789 Grand Etteilla Tarot, sometimes Le Jeu de Toth (“The Game of Thoth”) or Livre de Thot (“Book of Thoth”)—the first deck expressly designed for divination.
The phrase lefthand is rooted in the Vedic Sanskrit vamachara (“lefthanded attainment”). Its adoption in the West originated with occult explorer Madame H.P. Blavatsky (1831-1891) in volume I of her 1888 The Secret Doctrine, which popularized the reverse or “horns-up” pentagram in connection with lefthand philosophy; the upside-down pentagram also appears in earlier Western works, such as Eliphas Lévi’s 1855 Ritual of High Magic and Franz Hartmann’s 1886 Magic: Black and White.
Contemporary Christian scholar John Smulo—who has been called a “Left-Hand Christian philosopher”—agrees with this historical entry point but intriguingly adds: “another possible origin of the term could be found in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus speaks of placing the sheep (followers of Christ) at his right hand, and the goats (those who didn’t follow Christ) at his left hand (Matthew 25:33).” [1]
There likewise exist longstanding folk associations, as noted by Evans:
However useful it would be to have maintained this moral equivalence, history intervenes here, with the left-hand side having long been ascribed to the negative, with dexterous being a right-handed term and sinistrous, hence literally sinister, being left-handed. A minority of people are left-handed, perhaps less than 10%, although the right-handed hegemony is something that was taught, often forcibly, in British schools in the earlier 20th Century.
Some contemporary seekers who identify with the lefthand path believe neither in deity nor extra-physicality but use ritual and symbol for the focus of will. This practice of radical selfhood can be highly integral, such as when working to overcome a limitation or achieve a hallowed form of self-expression. Lefthand practices are not necessarily about “getting stuff,” although I defend that approach since an individual’s private needs, whatever their nature, may be essential and substantive. Those who walk the lefthand path are often critical of mainstream religionists and “white magic” New Agers who, they say (with validity, I believe), often use obfuscatory or “sacred” language to pursue perfumed self-interest.
A Zen prison minister (now dead) offered a story I value. He was visiting some inmates and one approached him: “I’ve read all your books and I can’t believe I’m meeting you!” The minister replied, “It’s not the man but the message.” Later, he felt remorse. This inmate had a moment of joy—yet he erased it for some pious “lesson.”
In spiritual culture, I distrust overuse of terms like “ego,” “non-attachment,” and “nonidentification.” They are concepts that limit our outlook to decisions made, and for centuries repeated, within Western and Eastern religious frameworks. Such decisions may not be your own.
Relatedly, I am uneasy around religionists who avow dedication to “service.” Personally, and after many years on the path, I have never encountered someone claiming the mantle of service who was not concealing a shiv behind his or her back. I write that as plainly as I have experienced it. In short, every spiritual principle (and the company espousing it) requires scrutiny by seekers in every generation.
All religions, whatever universal truths they offer, arise from and respond to particular cultural circumstances. Cultural circumstances facing most ancient believers involved almost certainly dying within the same caste they were born into. The invisible world was a leveler and means of justice. I reject that perspective: of temporal life as illusory and the ineffable as absolute truth. I consider life, seen or unseen, one whole, united by the principle that invests existence with purpose: self-expression.
The lefthand path is often conflated with the “dark side” or Satanism, although these comparisons are usually proffered with too little subtlety and understanding to prove meaningful. While the lefthand path is not necessarily Satanic, it by no means precludes exploration of Satanism on a seeker’s own terms.
The concepts of Satan—rooted in the Hebrew השטן (ha-sa-taan), literally “The Satan” or the adversary (sometimes the prosecutor), or the Latin-derived Lucifer—helel ben sahar or הֵילֵל בֶּן־שָׁחַר (shining one, son of dawn), which originated in Isaiah 14:12 as a condemning metaphor of the Babylonian throne as falling star—are, I realize, cultural landmines.
While the term Satanism, depending on your perspective, summons images of maleficent darkness, absurdly fictitious abuse scandals [2], anti-conformist libertinism, or any number of other associations, there is, I believe, an authentic, if diffuse, esoteric tradition of Satanism in the West, from antiquity to modernity, encompassing intellectual, ethical, literary, and spiritual dimensions.
In addition to re-soundings of ancient themes, I find the esoteric tradition of Satanism enduring in the work of Romantic poets and writers, such as William Blake (1757–1827), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), and Lord Byron (1788–1824), who posited the Satanic as a force of rebellion, usurpation, overturning of staid or calcified structures, persistent questioning, rejection of conformity, and refusal of hive mentality. This is my perspective.
An antecedent for this outlook of radical selfhood appears in John Milton’s (1608–1674) 1667 Paradise Lost, where Satan famously declares: “Here we may reign secure, and in my choice/ To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:/ Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.” In actuality, the precursor to Milton’s lines may come from the mouth of Julius Caesar (100–44 B.C.), at least as posthumously recorded by ancient historian Plutarch (c. 46–119 A.D.):
We are told that, as he was crossing the Alps and passing by a barbarian village which had very few inhabitants and was a sorry sight, his companions asked with mirth and laughter, “Can it be that here too there are ambitious strifes for office, struggles for primacy, and mutual jealousies of powerful men?” Whereupon Caesar said to them in all seriousness, “I would rather be first here than second at Rome.” [3]
Yet I also distrust a go-it-alone approach to life. I believe in cosmic reciprocity, or what is sometimes called karma. [4] My spiritual, by which I mean extraphysical, outlook abides a core of human commonality, something reinforced by my interest in psychical research. Hence, my search is nonviolent. That does not mean abstaining from self-defense but rather doing nothing to knowingly deny another the same reach for human potential that I reserve for myself. In that regard, I do not seek to love my neighbor. But I do seek to leave him alone; except if solidaristically called to his defense.
For similar reasons, I question the imperative of forgiveness. I believe that the moral suasion to forgive often places the individual in an unnatural position and produces inner division that gets diverted into other, often hostile or self-negating behaviors. That does not mean forgiveness is unwarranted in given situations. Nor that it has not healed wounds. It means only that I reject forgiveness as a blanket rule, spiritual requirement, or ethical necessity. I find a more natural and realistic ethic in abiding: using injustice as a goad to something greater.
New Thought mystic Neville Goddard (1905-1972) observed in a lecture of March 17, 1972, the year of his death, that a drama teacher once cruelly debased him. The British-Barbadian youth, who had traveled alone to New York City at age seventeen to study theater, spoke in an Anglo-Caribbean accent, which his instructor deemed a career-killer:
My own disappointments in my world led up to whatever I am doing today. When the teacher in my school, I could ill afford the $500 that my father gave me to go to this small school in New York City, and she made me the goat. She called me out before an audience of about forty students. And she said, “Now listen to him speak. He will never earn a living using his voice.”
She should not have done that, but she did it—but she didn’t know the kind of person that she was talking about. Instead of going down into the grave and burying my head in shame, I was determined that I would actually disprove her.
It did something to me when she said to me, “you will never earn”—to the class, using me as the guinea pig to show them what not to do—and so, she said, I spoke with a guttural voice and I spoke with this very heavy accent, and I will never use my voice to earn a living. . .
We all went to this school and this teacher simply singled me out to make some little, well, exhibition of what I should not be doing in class. But I went home and I was so annoyed that I had lost my father’s $500 or $600 that he gave me for the six-months course, but I was determined that she was false, that she was wrong.
So, I went to the end. I went to the end and actually felt that I was facing an audience and unembarrassed that I could talk and talk and talk forever without notes, no notes.
When I first wrote about Neville in 2005 for Science of Mind magazine he was a near unknown even within many New Thought circles. My boss, himself a New Thought minister, needled me that I was only interested in the teacher due to his obscurity and that my article might find commensurate readership. I used his comments in the same way that Neville used his drama teacher’s. As it happened, the article ignited a Nevillelution. Neville is today one of the most highly regarded spiritual orators of the twentieth century—and among the most widely read metaphysical voices of our own. His vast range of recorded lectures amass hits in the millions online.
The mystic taught a radical system of thought causation in which your imagination is God. He used expressly Christian terms and points of reference, even if dramatically redefined. This has led some seekers to ask how I can consider myself a student of Neville’s thought.
I sometimes maintain correspondence with incarcerates. One who was freed recent to this writing wrote me in April 2022 the below passage. Although it is not necessarily how I would put things myself, I found her observation keen. An outsider may see my work better than I do. It is quoted with the writer’s permission:
. . .you really aren’t deviating from the teachings of Neville Goddard, and I find it amusing that people miss that. He, as you know, taught about Christ consciousness and that if you want it enough you can manifest it. You have taken this teaching and put it as “My will be done,” over “Thy will be done,” and yet it is the same teaching on manifesting. The phrase “Do what thou wilt, an it harm none” is much the same words.
My correspondent’s closing reference is from the Wiccan Rede, an ethical code enunciated in 1964 by English Wiccan Doreen Valiente who employed elements from Gerald Gardner and Aleister Crowley.
“People speak of socialism,” wrote political theorist Michael Harrington (1928–1989) in his 1989 coda Socialism: Past and Future. “We should speak of socialisms.” The same could be said of Satanism. One-dimensional use of the term, often hitched to self-elevating fantasies of anti-Satanists (who vastly outnumber their imagined targets), is as ridiculous as equating Bernie Sanders and Pol Pot because both are called socialists. Based on personal experience, most anti-Satanists dwell upon lurid accounts of abuse, filled with historical and legal gaps and inventions, in ways I have never witnessed among those they target. I venture that some who collect and brandish these records nurture a prurient interest of their own, perfumed and reprocessed through activist “research.”
The most sensational and longest-running case to emerge from the Satanic Panic—and also the longest running in U.S. history—involved California’s McMartin Preschool, of which journalist Heather Greene wrote in her 2021 Lights, Camera, Witchcraft:
In 1983, accusations were made against owners and childcare workers at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. They were accused of ritual child abuse, including sodomy, rape, and other forms of molestation. Stories circulated of animal sacrifice, secret tunnels, blood drinking, the placing of pentagrams on children’s bottoms, and more. In 1984, 384 McMartin preschool children of the 400 interviewed were diagnosed as having been sexually abused. Arrests were made. Despite all early doubts as to the credibility of the children’s testimonies and the legitimacy of various reports, the McMartin trial continued for seven years, becoming the most expensive and longest-running criminal trial in American history.
All charges were dropped in 1990. No one can restore the lives stolen from the falsely accused. Despite repeated historical, legal, and journalistic discrediting, related canards endure in willful suppositions and circumstantial leaps of conspiracy narratives. Implications sometimes emerge on the geopolitical stage. In justifying his attempted annexation of four regions of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin announced in a speech of September 30, 2022, “The repression of freedom is taking on the outlines of a ‘reverse religion,’ of real Satanism,” claiming that Western liberal outlooks amounted to “denial of man.” [5]
As alluded, I am attempting to redefine the Satanic in more esoteric terms, according to concepts, principles, and points of view understood by Romantic poets and writers who framed the Satanic current as one of legitimate rebellion, rejection of received concepts, and pursuit of what Crowley termed True Will. Historical and esoteric reading of Satanist metaphysics or philosophy is defensible on those grounds.
Many of us grew up learning the story of humanity’s fall from grace in the biblical parable of the Garden of Paradise. The serpent—long culturally associated with Satan—seduces Eve, and then she Adam, into eating forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This ur-myth appears in the sparsely detailed Genesis 3. When revisiting the formative story, you will find, in virtually any translation, that the serpent’s argument is based in truth: the first couple do not perish for eating the apple and their eyes are, in fact, opened to good and evil. Or, as William Blake wrote in another context in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “the doors of perception were cleansed.” Moreover, Eve, contrary to a cultural shibboleth, does not seduce Adam who requires little coaxing. The serpent suggests, as augmented in other texts, that Yahweh displays cruel hypocrisy by forbidding illumination of mind, even as its availability sits in the garden’s midst.
It is not clear whether the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life, both of which appear in Genesis, are two distinct trees or one and the same. One of the earliest exponents of the “one tree” theory was German theologian Karl Budde (1850–1935), followed by bible scholar Claus Westermann (1909–2000), both traditional figures, widely recognized in the field. What if the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life are one thing? What kind of life are Adam and Eve conscripted to in paradise without knowledge of good and evil? In such a state, they could not create, compare, produce, and measure. Also true is that they do not know friction. They eat from the tree, they are expelled from Eden, and they beget two sons, Cain and Abel. Differences are introduced into the world. Cain explodes in rage at his brother with whom he had deep fissures. His brother is pious, theological, and favored by God. Cain is independent, a loner and a rebel, and unsuited to worship. Cain loves his brother yet harbors radical differences with him because their parents ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Cain does something he regrets for the rest of his life. This pathos is reexamined from Cain’s perspective in Lord Byron’s 1821 closet drama, Cain.
Yet if knowledge of good and evil had not been introduced into paradise by the adversarial force, not only would there have been no differences between Cain and Abel but in a very real sense there would have been no Cain and Abel because everything and everyone would be extensions of a certain sameness. There seems no purpose to creation absent distinctions of evaluation and measurement, of production and counter-production, and of friction, which inevitably arises from choice, will, and agency.
Hence, it is possible to view Genesis 3 through a different lens. It is not a Jewish book or a Christian book—those are early modern terms—it is, like all primeval mythical works, a parable of human development and selfhood. All great spiritual works emerged from humanity seeking origin and purpose. If we approach Scripture that way, we can detect across history a slender thread of insight that invites new understanding of our foundational Western myth.
I encounter some seekers who embrace my defense of occult or metaphysical practices by which they feel understood but reject any consideration of Satanism because that word for them, as with the word occult in general culture, is so sullied by convention it cannot be revisited. When I began my explorations in 2018, the marketing director of a Manhattan New Age center told me that a “beloved astrologer” threatened to sever ties with the venue unless I canceled or altered the name of a talk on Satanism. I refused and my talk went as planned. The world kept turning.
The last place to look for ethics is in what people say. Any person or organization, particularly of a spiritual or religious bent, can point to strictures and declare, we stand for service or peace or social justice or universal love or some generally meaningless macro-virtue. The Talmudic book Pirkei Avot or Ethics of the Fathers cautions, “Beware the man who bespeaks his own virtue.”
The greatest act of empathy I have experienced in a religious context goes back to when I knelt before a life-sized statue of St. Jude at a Midtown Manhattan Catholic church; I was in agony. As I was walking out, a young man on his knees, probably from Central America, gave me a fist bump. I cannot tell you how much love was in that act. I am not against Catholicism—I love Catholicism. Those who hate or proffer conspiracy theories about Catholicism do so because it contains aspects of the Universal Religion, if there is such thing, and I believe there is.
Contemporaneously, an artist of devotional religious paintings orchestrated a whispering campaign against me that resulted in my being severed from the Association for Research and Enlightenment, or A.R.E., the group dedicated to the teachings of Christian mystic and psychic Edgar Cayce. My talks and writings were erased from organizational media; I was dropped from its prison ministry; a book I wrote gratis as a fundraiser, Mind As Builder: The Positive- Mind Metaphysics of Edgar Cayce, was pulled from publication. This is because I am a Romantic Satanist. I have never witnessed an act more bereft of love. It summons a lyric from Jethro Tull’s sardonic “Hymn 43”: “If Jesus saves/ Well he better save himself/ From the gory, glory seekers/ Who use his name in death.” I have also received private expressions of support from many A.R.E. members for whom I feel deepest warmth. One staffer wrote me, “They may erase you from the website but they cannot erase you from our hearts.”
I am working to reform this prejudice. It may be a windmill too great to tilt at; but my effort is underway and you do not turn back once you have embarked on an errand. In a humorous domestic kerfuffle, I was told, “You’re not gonna convert Western civilization to Satanism!” Point taken.
Amid such considerations, it may be fairly asked: What about sacrifice for others? What about “giving back?” These things arrive of their own volition, often (more often, I aver) without proclamation or intention. If you realized how many beings underwent sacrifice, suffering, and death for the circumstances that allow you to read these words in material comfort, you would place a different value on your life and what debt you owe for it. I find that most sacrifices, where they actually occur, are intimate and silent.
There exist a handful of diffuse Satanic organizations, from the foundational and, today, professedly atheistic Church of Satan formed by magickian and artist Anton LaVey (1920–1997) in 1966 (Anton was less cut-and-dried on questions of theism); to the more occultic and spiritual-oriented Temple of Set founded by the recently deceased Michael Aquino (1946–2019); to the activist-driven Satanic Temple, which focuses on First Amendment rights and countering Satanic Panic fictions. I value these and other groups but belong to none and write as a solitary seeker. Aquino observed that a mark of success in any Satanic organization is that everyone yearns for independence.
Why piece together an individual lefthand philosophy? Why not simply embrace Aleister Crowley’s Thelema (“do what thou wilt. . .”) or Ayn Rand’s radically capitalistic Objectivism? I deeply respect Thelema and share much with it; but I harbor general aversion to some of the more stringently ceremonial and liturgical expressions of Crowley’s thought. This may result, in part, from an orthodox bar mitzvah as a youth, an experience I cherish but do not wish to retread. In any case, I like a statement by philosopher and critic of science Paul Feyerabend: “I am for anarchism in thinking, in one’s private life, BUT NOT in public life.” [6]
Regarding Ayn Rand, I am smitten with her persona, which I consider an act of protean self-creation that represents her greatest work (and compares well to another iconic Russian, Madame H.P. Blavatsky). But I am not in line with philosophical materialism or atheism, which are at the heart of Rand’s outlook. I believe we participate in both tactile and extraphysical realms. As I see it, our ancient ancestors were right in identifying and personifying energies or intelligences in nature. I seek relations with a Greater Force.
Recent to this writing, an artist I love, Duncan Trussell (who calls Lucifer “diet Satan”), asked whether there isn’t risk in what I am attempting? Especially given mainstream interpretation of the Satanic. I venerate an unprejudiced question, our rarest resource. I abhor rhetorical questions, a device that falsifies this precious means of exchange.
I responded to Duncan’s question in two ways. First, religious models—like scientific ones (e.g., string theory, cosmic wormholes)—are just that: models of reality, not reality itself. What we call time is just measurement of time—the thing itself is vastly more elusive. Neither I, nor any seeker, is obligated to abide conceptualizations, no matter how oft repeated. Familiarity is not truth. Never confuse tradition with habit. In that vein, readers may notice paucity of a common word in this discussion: Devil. The Devil is an Old-English term. It is steeped in exoteric prejudices. Beyond proper names or vernacular expressions, I rarely use it. I have been sweetly called a “Devil worshipper.” That misses the mark.
But I am not indifferent to larger cultural attitudes. Hence, I must respect the question of risk, which I have asked myself. In short, I determined several years ago that I may be courting risk. I accept that. I privately elected to follow this road as a seeker—I vowed to follow it—and to testify to what is found. That is my self-chosen effort.
If the lefthand path possesses an operating principle it is uttered by the Great Rebel of Paradise Lost: “Can it be sin to know?” I will never defer to thought systems or customs that forbid the fruit of measurement or punish its consumption.
An October 5, 2019, New York Times column, “How to Sell Your Soul to Donald Trump” by Frank Bruni, referenced the popular legend of medieval wizard Faust pledging to serve Satan in exchange for power and renown. “Selling your soul” to Satan ranks among the most familiar parables in Western culture. But where does it actually come from?
There exist many versions of the Faust drama, most notably by playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). The latter is widely considered dramatically superior and subtler.
For his part, Marlowe was writing within a backlash against Renaissance occultism. His Doctor Faustus is a lyrically beautiful if monochromatic morality tale about the dangers of dabbling in dark forces, for which the protagonist pays with damnation. Goethe’s Faust is more psychologically and ethically layered. In it, Mephistopheles and Faust circle each other, sharklike, neither quite trusting the other. They finally strike a bargain in which the Dark Lord agrees to grant Faust unbounded happiness and knowledge—with a peculiar catch that binds Mephistopheles to his word: if Faust ever occupies a moment so splendid that he wants to live in it forever only then will he go to his death and vest his soul to Satan. That moment never quite occurs and the sorcerer is saved.
Was there a real Faust? Very likely, but historians have never fully agreed upon who. Rough consensus settled around Johann Georg Faust, a German alchemist, astrologer, theologian, and magickian who died around 1541. Central European legend held that the mysterious figure made a pact with Satan for knowledge and power. This Faust probably formed the model for Marlowe’s stage character.
Lots of modern figures are rumored to “sell their souls”—many such stories populate folklore and literature. Baroque violinist Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) related one of the most alluring. The composer’s famously complex Violin Sonata in G minor, betterknown as the Devil’s Trill Sonata, was, he said, played for him in a dream by Satan. To his agony, Tartini on awakening could reconstruct only a shadow of the original. A similar mythos of Satanic inspiration surrounds the career of violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), who astounded audiences with his technical prowess and ability to play without sheet music.
In yet another exhibit of Madame Blavatsky’s omnipresence, the occultist adapted Tartini’s narrative into a short story, “The Ensouled Violin,” originally appearing in The Theosophist in January 1880 and in her posthumous 1892 collection Nightmare Tales. As it must, Blavatsky’s horror tale hosts a legend of its own, which is that it was cowritten, along with several other collaborations, by the hidden Cyprian adept called Master Hillarion.
One of the most popular modern iterations of soul selling involves American bluesman Robert Johnson (1911–1938). As popular legend goes, the guitarist met or conjured the devil at a crossroads and vowed to serve him in exchange for preternatural musical skills. Although Johnson recorded a song called “Crossroads,” it was not about soul selling but hitchhiking.
But another blues master, Tommy Johnson (1896–1956), performed a similar—though more elusive—act of magick, recounted by his brother LeDell to biographer David Evans in his 1971 Tommy Johnson:
If you want to learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where the road crosses that way, where a crossroads is. Get there, be sure to get there just a little ’fore 12 that night so you know you’ll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there by yourself . . .A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he’ll tune it. And then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s the way I learned to play anything I want.
Ledell does not specifically reference Tommy engaging in soul selling or encountering Satan. Rather, Tommy drew upon a practice found in the Black magickal tradition of hoodoo. Due to phonetic and cultural intersections, hoodoo is sometimes confused with Vodou. Vodou is an Afro-Caribbean religion with its own deities, priesthood, and liturgy, properly spelled Vodou in Haiti and Voodoo in the American South. The term hoodoo is lowercase. Its etymology is unclear. But hoodoo may come from huduba, a term used among the Hausa people of West and Central Africa meaning to arouse resentment against someone. In blues songs, singers sometimes lament being “hoodooed”—i.e., crossed and tricked by spell casting. Hoodoo was and remains a syncretic, spell-working system originated by enslaved people in the U.S. Within the framework of hoodoo, Tommy, at least in his brother’s account, was practicing a retention of Western and Central African magic in which a seeker summons a deific protector, sometimes in the form of Ellegua or Eshu, who guards the crossroads and dispenses wisdom and artistry, similar to Hellenic gods Hermes or Mercury.
A sketchy but intriguing online legend has Bob Dylan following Tommy Johnson’s footsteps and selling his soul to Satan for fame and artistry, at least according to his elliptical (and fascinating) 2004 interview on 60 Minutes:
Ed Bradley: Why do you still do it? Why are you still out here?
Dylan: Well it goes back to the destiny thing. I made a bargain with it, you know, a long time ago and I’m holding up my end.
Bradley: What was your bargain?
Dylan: To get where I am now.
Bradley: [laughing] Should I ask who you made the bargain with?
Dylan: With, you know, with the chief commander.
Bradley: On this earth?
Dylan: On this earth and in the world we can’t see.
This is, of course, a shaky interpretation. But Dylan, the perennial trickster (in the mold of Hermes and Eshu), won’t let on for sure.
Where, finally, does the idea of selling your soul to Satan originate from, at least in the Western mind? The likeliest and earliest source is the Old Testament book Isaiah 28:15, in which nonbelievers are said to elude bad tidings by striking a deal with nether-forces. It appears this way in a 1985 translation by the Jewish Publication Society (JPS):
For you have said, “We have made a covenant with Death, Concluded a pact with Sheol. When the sweeping flood passes through, It shall not reach us; For we have made falsehood our refuge, Taken shelter in treachery.”
Sheol references the Hebrew concept of the afterworld—sometimes translated nether-world as in JPS’s 1917 translation—and is not synonymous with more modern concepts of Hell, the term used in the King James Bible. Although notions of a personified Satan had not fully taken shape in the biblical era, the idea of a maleficent pact spread among early Christians and probably formed the basis of “selling your soul.”
As a historian and participant in occult and esoteric movements, I never dodge the all-important question: does it work? Well, I have provided background and tools. Never permit past convention to curb current experiment. If your spiritual journey involves a relationship to some personified energy, from whatever time, place, or culture, I offer this observation: It could be that deity does not afford you favors but grants you the strength to attain favors. Or favors themselves may also come. Are you prepared for them? I prescribe no medicine I have not taken myself.
In closing, I know that some reading these words may find, as I once did, that their search seems at a dead end. They feel that they have cycled-out or failed to reach a wished-for destination.
Allow me a tangent: It seems to me that art is expression that plants new ideas in its witness. I was inspired this way seeing a production of Japanese underground theater maestro Shuji Terayama’s play Duke Bluebeard’s Castle at the Japan Society in New York. (I have also experienced this with the work of musical expressionist Geneva Jacuzzi.) As I viewed Terayama’s play, I realized how to end this essay—with a prayer of salutation for any who wish to use it. This address can precede your petition:
God of Wishes Fulfilled
God of the Outsiders
God of Reciprocity
God of Retribution
Grant what I ask
Which I am prepared to pay for
Remember: in some cases, payment has already been made—and the ask is earned.
Notes
[1] “Reaching Nietzschean Individualists” in Encountering New Religious Movements edited by Irving Hexham, Stephen Rost & John W. Moorhead II (Kregel, 2004)
[2] E.g., see “It’s Time to Revisit the Satanic Panic” by Alan Yuhas, New York Times, March 31, 2021; “I’m Sorry” [the recantation of a former child witness] by Kyle Zirpolpo as told to Debbie Nathan, Los Angeles Times, October 30, 2005; “Why Satanic Panic never really ended” by Aja Romano, Vox, March 31, 2021, and “The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial: An Account” by Douglas O. Linder at Famous-Trails.com. I consider the matter further in my 2023 Modern Occultism.
[3] Plutarch Lives, Vol. VII, Loeb Classical Library, translated by Bernadotte Perrin, Harvard University Press, 1919.
[4] My outlook on karma / reciprocity is explored in chapter three of Practical Magick; these are immense topics that cannot be adequately rendered in shorthand.
[5] “Putin’s speech on annexation paints a stark picture of a face-off with the West” by Anton Troianovski, New York Times, September 30, 2022.
[6] Against Method, fourth edition, by Paul Feyerabend (Verso,1975,1988,1993, 2010).
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I send any of my books free to incarcerates. If you know an inmate who would like to receive a book, send me the name and institutional address via the contact page at my website Mitchhorowitz.com. No DMs please.
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Wow Mitch, You are an intellectual Titan when it comes to this sort of thing. I enjoyed your subject matter so much this time around! I have spoke with you personally. Thanks for the well wishes I will always have the greatest respect for that correspondence. Albeit brief.
I too am a Satanist with my own personal ideology concept, but I am still learning something new everyday. I invite you to check out my website. (very small movement.) The Asherah Temple. I will email the link to you and anyone who emails me back. trisakna@gmail.com Sorry if you frown on self promotion in the comments. It is my wish to get my ideology structure to whom it may benefit.
Peace be with you,
World without end...
"In a humorous domestic kerfuffle, I was told, “You’re not gonna convert Western civilization to Satanism!” Point taken."
I'd convert to Romantic Satanism, but every time you revisit this topic, I think that I'm already there. I just never thought to use the label. Maybe I'll try it as an experiment in July and see if it changes anything.