How do you change a western world where blasphemy is illegal? By way of subversion.
In the first instalment of this series, we discussed how the wicked decided that the West needed to change. This is a statement that many people struggle with because progress towards a greater future is just assumed by many people, whether on the left or the right.
This is one of the reasons why it is so hard to have this conversation with some people, because so many people do not understand just how inverted the world in which we live is, they do not realize that we have given up much that is good, and received bad in return. Most people are avowed modern supremacists, who think our modern society is just inherently superior to the past.
So, what I am going to do here in part two of this series is first give a simple illustration which highlights just how inverted out modern culture is, and then I will begin to summarize how the West was made from Christendom into Satandom, with more to follow in future articles.
People are generally poorly equipped to question the cultural assumptions of the society they grew up in. In an era where history is poorly taught, this inability is only exacerbated. So, perhaps I can step outside of our topic to use an illustration from C.S. Lewis that will help us here.
In his powerful book Mere Christianity, Lewis makes a series of arguments that show the intellectual soundness and solidness of the Christian faith. While making his case for the superiority of the Christian perspective on sexuality morality, to try and highlight just how fallen his culture was, he reaches into what he considers to be the realm of absurdity to make his point:
You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act—that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?”[1]
What I find fascinating about this illustration here is that when C.S. Lewis first published this in 1952 the entire premise of his illustration was ridiculous; and that is precisely the point. Lewis is seeking to highlight in Big Neon Letters that something had gone wrong with the sexual appetite of the western man, and the way he can think to best describe this is to highlight how crazy it would be to the man of 1952 to see a world where people gathered around to watch food revealed to a lusting audience.
I find this so fascinating because without intending to, Lewis has described our western world today. This is what many competition cooking shows are: food lusting events where people gather around to drool over the fancily prepared blow-torched whatever it is. We are a culture of gluttons. Whether in the Church or outside the Church, many of our instincts for what is good, and what is not have been thoroughly inverted.
Meditate on this for a second: the most ridiculous morally dystopian world that C.S. Lewis described is the world we currently live in. Evil is wickedness, it is rebellion, it is that which stands against God, but it is also craziness, insanity, stupidity, because at heart evil is rebellion against God and his good order. That which creates chaos is foolishness, foolishness often with wicked intent. So, the fact that our society reflects in high definition detail the absurdity of C.S. Lewis’s illustration is a big sign we have been directed down an evil path, even more so, than when Lewis was alive.
Lewis’ world was not perfect, by any means, it was the era of Stalin, Hitler, and of Churchill bombing civilian centres like Dresden, and leaders lying their peoples into destructive wars, and much, much more. But it is clear we have digressed even further since Lewis’ day in many ways. If we have not become more violent, we have become more decadent, and there are scores of the unborn dead who would dispute that we are not more violent…if they had a voice that is. Now that we have established that we are not necessarily morally superior to our predecessors, we will reflect on how we got here.
Let’s situate ourselves in the early modern period, England in the 17th Century. This is an era where blasphemy is still quite illegal, and even if you subscribe to one of the various Christian sects, you may still be labelled a heretic, or dissenter and punished. In various decades whether or not you were a Presbyterian, Anglican or Catholic was of imminent consequence, and if you were Baptist then in every decade of the 17th Century England you were unpopular[2].
Legislation like the Test Acts of 1673 was designed to weed out Catholics and other dissenters from public office.[3] This was the era that the famous Baptist preacher, John Bunyan was imprisoned for unauthorized preaching,[4] that Cromwell replaced the monarchy for a time, that Anglicanism was seeking to establish it’s hold over England, and various other Christian movements vied for legitimacy, if not supremacy. It was an era where blasphemy was dangerous.
Indeed, even the famous Acts of Toleration in 1689 did not grant full religious rights to dissenters, even dissenters who were thoroughly Christian, like Bunyan.[5] So how do you direct a western world toward Satanic values, when to even express such values is punishable in many ways?
Story…
You change society by telling stories, and you do it in such a way that you can get around the blasphemy codes. This is precisely how Satanic feminists and socialists did it from early on.
We all recognize the power of story. Hollywood is famous for pushing certain agendas through the medium of story-telling. Both good, and bad, but mostly bad. I remember growing up one of my favourite films was John Wayne’s, The Green Berets. I used to watch it as a kid. But when I got a little bit older, I realized it was some over-the-top pro-Vietnam war propaganda.
Hollywood and propaganda are well-known bedfellows, indeed, much of our modern morality has been driven by the values represented on the silver screen. Some people may wonder what comes first: the values as presented in the movies or the movies that present the values? Well in some cases it might be both, but regarding feminism, there was a clear push from certain literary figures to influence society in a certain direction through story.
Per Faxneld’s well researched work Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture shows a large proportion of how this change was pushed. In fact, part of his case is that Satanism has not been given the credit it deserves for our modern society.
He shows how Satanic feminists subverted the idea of Lucifer being the agent of wickedness in the garden and transformed him into the ‘Lightbringer’, the ‘Prometheus’, the enlightener, or liberator and specifically the liberator of women. And he shows how this was instrumental in destabilizing Christianity’s dominant role in West.[6]
Faxneld[7] traces this trend as far back as Milton. Though he does not claim that Milton was a Satanic revolutionary himself, he suggests that when you combine Milton’s ambiguous representation of the devil in his Paradise Lost, with the context in which Milton was a republican revolutionary and Oliver Cromwell’s private secretary, you can draw the conclusion that Milton is making the revolutionary Lucifer the hero of the story, rather than the villain.
Afterall, was Milton not himself a revolutionary and part of a plot to overthrow a king? Does he not also present the Devil as simply convincing the woman to eat the fruit to raise her lot, and achieve equality? Something many moderns see as righteous and just, and a foundation stone of republican ideals.
But this conjecture aside, explicitly “…the phenomenon of writers declaring themselves to be of the Devil’s party first arose among German and English-speaking Romantic poets in the late eighteenth-century and would soon become observable all over the western world.”[8] It is important to understand that this was not a fringe movement in literary circles, rather it was “…both highly visible and stemming directly from writers that were among the most famous of their time.”[9] Just as today’s Luciferian morality is pushed by the most famous and most loved actors and performers…
Milton himself argued that his intent was to ‘justify the ways of God to men’ and not at all to glorify lucifer”[10], and scholars generally accept this as correct. However, this did not stop others interpreting Milton’s Lucifer as the ideal revolutionary and being inspired to write with this intention in mind. For example, inspired by Milton:
Goethe’s poem ‘Prometheus’ (written in 1772-74, published 1789), in which the Greek Titan expressed his defiance of God (Zeus) and relished his own independence, displays a congruent spirit of rebellion against an oppressive divinity, but cloaks it in a less offensive Greek garb.[11]
Goethe took what he saw in Milton to another level. Faxneld lists an impressive array of writers who were similarly inspired by Milton’s Lucifer: Edmund Burke, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Schiller, Goethe, Robert Burns, and William Godwin, among others.[12] Godwin even wrote, “Poetical readers have commonly remarked Milton’s devil to be of considerable virtue.”[13] He then goes on to argue,
[Why] did he rebel against his maker? It was, as he himself informs us, because he saw no sufficient reason, for that extreme inequality of rank and power which the creator assumed. It was because his prescription and precedent form no adequate ground for implicit faith.[14]
In other words, Satan presumed to be as great as the one who was better than him. Godwin, here, has identified Lucifer as his ideal hero, who stands against what he considers illegitimate and inherited authority.[15] The ultimate symbol of revolution! In the circles which Godwin ran in, his views on Lucifer were considered acceptable.[16] Indeed, Godwin’s feminists bona fides are top notch, as he is notable for later marrying the “first” feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, herself.
So, whatever Milton intended, is besides the point. The entire corpus of
Romantic Satanism was based on an interpretation of the Miltonic Lucifer as a hero, and there are instances where feminist scholars themselves return to Milton and apply their own combination of Romantic Satanism and late-modern ideologies of women’s liberation.[17]
In other words, by arguing from the Devil’s perspective, unknowingly or not, Milton inspired an entire following of literature gurus to take up that argument and carry it on to its logical conclusions. What did they say that Satan argued for specifically?
In Gilbert and Gubar’s reading of Milton, Satan and Eve share a preoccupation with equality, and both stand to gain from a rebellion against the hierarchical structure epitomized by God the Father and Adam the Husband. This interpretation of Paradise Lost, they further claim, was widespread among nineteenth-century woman authors…their basic assertion is indeed accurate.[18]
So where did this grand movement of feminist equality in the West stem from, according to Paxneld? The Bible, as many modern Christians like to assert? No, at least not in the sense that they intend. Rather, it was inspired by Lucifer’s offer to the women in the Garden, as expounded by Milton, and interpreted through the Romantic poets. Lucifer’s offer to the woman of equality with God, and usurpation of her husband’s role was the impetus for feminist revolution; the literal beginning of the modern chant: “Down with the patriarchy!” This always meant, down with God and man, and it was literally inspired by the Devil. The prophecy of Scripture was surely fulfilled: “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he will rule over you.”[19]
Milton’s story, inspired many, literally Satanically minded people, to take up a cause, that is nowhere spoken of in a positive light in the Bible; that of equality, and specifically feminist equality. Milton did not originate the idea of equality, nor even the modern conception of it, but he did inspire radically minded people to take up the torch of enlightening the world with this Promethean idea.[20]
There are great examples of this, but the poet that I want to focus in on, and one who stands above many in influence, is Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Shelley, who married Mary Shelley, the famous author of Frankenstein, and who was Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s son-in-law, was not ambiguous about his love for Satan at all:
Nothing can exceed the grandeur and the energy of the character of the Devil as expressed in Paradise Lost…Milton’s Devil as a moral being is far superior to his God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent, in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, – not from any mistaken notion of bringing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the open and alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments.”[21]
Shelley is smitten with the devil. This is not to say that Shelley, or even many other Satanic feminists, genuinely believed in the being called Lucifer, many did not. But that is beside the point, the issue is that they were inspired by him and all that he stood for. They wanted to push society in a direction which was consistent with Satanic values, rejection of a biblical worldview being one of those values. For some, their lack of belief only made some of them less restrained in their approach to push against the structures of society, and they particularly pushed their views through the mediums of story and poetry.
Shelley’s most notable example of this is his poem The Revolt of Islam, dedicated to his equally famous wife, and capturing her father’s sympathy for the devil, and her mother’s feminist ideas.[22] Though Shelley does not use any of the traditional names of Satan in the poem, it is evident who he is writing about, and that he presents Lucifer as the hero:
A serpent battles with an eagle in the sky, but is defeated and falls from the heaven. These two animals are the shapes taken by the spirits of good and evil respectively: ‘Two powers o’er mortal things dominion hold/Ruling the world with a decided lot, Immortal, all-pervading, manifold.’ The serpent is identified as the Morning Star, making it obvious just who the figure is.[23]
Consistent with the writer’s loyalties, it is the Serpent who is identified as the good guy by the peoples of the world, in Shelley’s poem.[24] God is blamed as the originator of death, earthquakes and blight, and “his enemy the serpent in the benefactor of mankind and the enemy of all oppressors.”[25] It is abundantly clear who Shelley views as the liberator. Can you now see the inversion at work?
Shelley did this cleverly, as blasphemy is still punishable in this period. He “made God the author of evil and Satan the bringer of good, while simultaneously removing himself to some extent from Christian mythology by not using their actual names.”[26] It is thinly veiled blasphemy, designed to subvert in a Christian world.
This serpent, that is cast to the earth, takes on a sexual relationship with a woman. This is significant that the freedom loving Satan’s primary ally in the story is a woman, because Shelley is harking back to Milton, and the Serpent in the Garden with Eve. In the poem, “Woman and Satan are both part of nature, while God and males are connected to a hierarchical, unjust civilisation.”[27] In other words: down with the patriarchy, but less obnoxiously presented than a modern feminist.
The main part of the poem presents two siblings, Cyntha and her brother Laon, who struggle against a tyrannical sultan, for liberation. The story presents Cyntha as a breaker of gender stereotypes, hell bent of the liberation of women, and as the leader of the insurrection that takes the fight to the oppressive Sultan. The revolt fails, however, and Cyntha and her brother are burned at the stake, as revolutionaries often were in the past.[28]
In this story, Shelley was actively seeking to push against the positions of the Church on women’s issues and gender roles, and presenting Cyntha in the heroes role as the rider on the glorious steed who rides to her brothers rescue highlights this.[29] As Shelley tells us he writes “in the view of kindling within the bosoms of my readers a virtuous enthusiasm for…doctrines of liberty and justice.”[30] Read: social justice, but before the term was coined.
Shelley believed that one day all gender distinctions would be abolished, and so he presented this “utopia” in some of his works.[31] While it did not sell well by itself, Revolt went on to influence many later nineteenth century feminists, and was even described by some as the greatest feminist poem written in English.[32] It was also disseminated widely in collections of Shelley’s writing, and was not his only work so explicitly lauding feminist ideals.[33]
Of course, more examples can be given, and Faxneld does provides many. But we can start to see how society was slowly influenced towards change; through story.
Stories are rarely, if ever, neutral. Most of us think that propaganda has only been pushed more blatantly in modern Hollywood films as the left gains more ascendancy. But it has always been an undercurrent of pop culture and indeed film making, and hard left agendas are anything but new.
To paraphrase the comedian Owen Benjamin’s analysis on Mary Poppins, for example: this beloved children’s classic is about a witch who flies into town, to help administer behaviour modifying drugs to children, who are always behaving badly, because their mother is more focused on getting voting rights, than raising her kids. And, rather than admonish the mother, the film admonishes the father for taking his job seriously. This is blatant feminist propaganda, woven into a beloved Children’s fantasy tale.
These ideas have been subtly and often not so subtly, pushed into people’s homes, from at least the times of the Romantics. As many historians have noted, the success of Christianity in the West did not eliminate Satanic religion or ideas, it simply pushed it underground. How do underground movements gain power? Through subversive means, and frankly many of us in the West, and in the Church have been slow to wake up to this.
Satanic Feminists used story to help subvert and invert the West. People imbibed them whether in prose, verse, or novel form, or any other media. And this has accelerated with film. Indeed, the conservatives who eschew story telling should learn from this, our entire society was undone by story tellers with wicked intent. Was it one of the Greek philosophers who said control the poets, control society? At the very least, we need to recognize how this process was done, so that we can think how to undo it.
Story is powerful, and it can be used by either side. We need to recognize when it is being used against us, and it is a tool we have to take up if we wish to see evil’s work undone.
[1] Lewis, C.S. 2002, Mere Christianity, Harper Collins Publishers: p96
[2] Ah, the good old days of all the Baptists standing side by side against the man!
[3] Trevelyan, G.M. 1997, Life Under the Stuarts, St Edmundsbury Press: p338.
[4] Weaver, C.D. 2008, In Search of the New Testament Church: The Baptist Story, Mercer University Press: pp11-12.
[5] Ibid, p12.
[6] Faxneld, P.2017, Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture, Oxford University Press: p5.
[7] Ibid, p75.
[8] Ibid, p74.
[9] Ibid, p74.
[10] Ibid, p75.
[11] Ibid, p76.
[12] Ibid, pp75-76.
[13] Ibid, p76.
[14] Ibid, p77.
[15] Ibid, p77.
[16] Ibid, p77.
[17] Ibid, p19.
[18] Ibid, p19.
[19] Genesis 3:16.
[20] It is important for the reader to note, that I am aware that there were currents arguing for different versions of society wide equality predating, and also concurrent with Milton. I have written about that in other works and am continuing to write about that in other works. At this stage, I have traced the idea of “Equality” in the sense that we think of it: “All men being created equal” to Nicholar of Susa, it is transmitted through Hobbes, and is exposited by Locke, who had great influence on the American founders who nearly exactly quote Locke in the Declaration of Independence. So, I am in no way arguing that Milton invented the idea of equality, I am showing that he put it, in its right context: as a Luciferian ideal, not an actual righteous ideal. For further discussions about the idea of equality, refer to my article (here, or here), read Martin Van Creveld’s, Equality the Impossible Quest, or you can continue with this series, and another I am writing on where equality comes from. It is fundamental for this piece to recognize this: the great socialist and feminist movement, which has wrought great change in our society were not inspired by Christianity, but were deliberate attacks on Christianity, which is patriarchal and hierarchical, not egalitarian.
[21] Faxneld, P.2017, Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Culture, Oxford University Press: P79.
[22] Ibid, pp80-81.
[23] Ibid, p81.
[24] Ibid, p81.
[25] Ibid p81.
[26] Ibid, p82.
[27] Ibid 82.
[28] Ibid, pp82-83.
[29] Ibid, p83
[30] Ibid, p83.
[31] Ibid, p84.
[32] Ibid, p84
[33] Ibid, p84.
All scripture references are from the ESV translation.
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