Problem Attic. Insert witty tagline here.

Gnosticism and the Satanic Church

“As LaVey pointed out, all other churches are based on worship of the spirit and denial of the flesh and the intellect.”
— Introduction to the Satanic Bible, by Burton H. Wolfe.

Anton Szandor LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966. The second of the Nine Satanic Statements—which form the foundation of Satanism—reads “Satan represents vital existence, instead of spiritual pipe dreams!”

Obviously, I’m not attracted to a religion that worships destruction, power and domination. I just can’t get behind that. However, I think that the Church of Satan in general, and LaVey in particular, have hit a note of truth here. Christianity, at the time Satanism was founded, seemed to be missing something important. That something was a focus on the real, the physical, the solid.

Gnosticism 101

In the first few centuries CE a number of sects could be found under the label “gnosticism.” Many of these sects were heretical Christian groups. The word gnosis means “knowledge,” and the most basic aspect of gnosticism is a search for knowledge—often secret or arcane.

Gnosticism echoes Neo-Platonic greek philosophy very closely with regard to the nature of the world. Matter, so the story goes, is an unfortunate by-product, a pale imitation of the real, a distraction. the physical is simply an imperfect reflection of the spiritual; and it is the spiritual that one should seek. Gnosis is simply the necessary knowledge to escape the physical and become as we were “truly intended to be”—spiritual beings.

(Interesting sidenote: many gnostics tended to regard the serpent in the Garden of Eden as quite heroic, because it was trying to give Adam and Eve “the knowledge.” Yahweh didn’t want them to have that knowledge, which made the Old Testament god quite a villain in their eyes.)

The Problem

So… at one end we have the Satanic Church, representing “vital existence” rather than “spiritual pipe dreams.” And at the other end we have the Gnostic heresy, claiming that Jesus gives us the knowledge to rescue ourselves from a physical existence and return to the spiritual world.

The problem is, I think the Satanists are right, and I think Christianity has largely followed gnosticism.

What? Who?

Put your hand up if you’ve heard this before:

“when you die, it’s only your body that dies. Your soul leaves the body and goes to heaven to be with God”

I’ll bet you’ve heard it a few times; it’s a pretty common thing to hear whenever Christians start discussing the afterlife.

Right about now, you should have realised that that nice Christian saying is actually a pretty decent gnosticism. So right now, there’s two ways this could go:

1. Gnosticism was right all along, and Christianity has finally caught up, or…
2. Christianity, we have a problem.

What does the Bible say?

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
— Genesis 1:31

Right from go, the bible tells us that creation, the physical world, is good. Sure, it’s now fallen and corrupt, but the fact remains that God considered the physical to be good.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.
— Revelation of John 21:1

A new heaven and a new earth. Wait, who’s going to live on the earth if we’re all in heaven? (And why do we even need a new heaven? What’s wrong with the old one? Could it be that Satan’s war is taking a toll there too?) See also Romans 8:19–23—God plans to redeem creation itself. Once again, the physical world will be “very good.”

No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man.
— John 3:13

I’m not going to go into too much more detail, but I get the pretty firm impression that heaven is God’s place, and that we belong firmly in the physical world. Bodily resurrection would tend to reinforce that.

The Christian church’s preoccupation with the spiritual, at the expense of the physical, is clearly just a manifestation of a heresy that’s been around as long as Christianity itself. And a Christianity that focuses on formulae and gnosis like “The Black Book” (impressively heretical in itself) or the sinners prayer, and that lacks the practical, human presence that Jesus was always ready to offer, follows even further down the rabbit-hole of gnosticism.

Christianisty doesn’t boil down to saying the sinners prayer and maintaining an abstract belief in a historical figure. That’s gnosticism. Christianity boils down to this:

…to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.
— Micah 6:8