The Devotional Current

Most accounts of the left-hand path, this site's included, give the greatest attention to its organized currents: the carnal, the esoteric, the Draconian. One current has received less attention than its size deserves. Its practitioners hold that Satan is real, that he can be known, and that the right response to him is devotion: prayer, offering, gratitude, and a life lived in relationship with him. Observers call it theistic Satanism. Many of its practitioners call it simply Satanism, and some call it devil worship, without embarrassment.

This page describes the current as fairly as the Order can, in the terms its own practitioners use, and then says where the Order agrees and where it differs. Like the rest of this site it names no one. The Currents page explains why.

Two Theisms

The phrase theistic Satanism is applied to two different things, and much confusion comes from treating them as one.

The first is the esoteric current described on the Currents page. It holds that the Prince of Darkness is a real intelligence, but it honors him as a teacher and an example, and it does not worship him. Its aim is the practitioner's own becoming. The second is the devotional current. It also holds that the adversary is real, and it does worship him, or at least holds him in a regard that its practitioners are willing to call worship. Where the esoteric current asks what the Prince of Darkness gave, the devotional current asks what he asks.

The three currents quarrel. Devotional practitioners say that the carnal current has kept the name and left out the being who bears it, and that its rites are theater with nothing on the other side of the stage. Carnal practitioners say that the devotional current has kept the shape of the religion it rejected and changed only the name at the top. Each charge has some force. The Order, which takes no position on whether the adversary is real, notes only that the quarrel is old and that neither side has settled it.

What Its Practitioners Hold

The current has no creed, and its practitioners disagree about nearly everything except its center. The following beliefs are the ones most often stated.

• The adversary is real. He is a conscious being, often described as primordial, older than the religions that named and condemned him. Some call him the ruler of this world, in a reversal of the phrase used against him.
• He has many names and many faces. Practitioners speak of him as legion. Many open their rites by naming Satan, Lucifer, Belial, Leviathan, and Samael together, and many prefer the Latin form Satanas. Some hold Lucifer to be a separate being; others take him as the brighter face of the same one, and keep an altar divided between the two.
• He is known through relationship. Practitioners describe him in very different terms: as a loving father, a stern master who tests, a friend, a liberator from guilt. Practitioners in the current say plainly that he is different for different people.
• Experience is the authority. There is no scripture. What a practitioner has encountered, in prayer, in a working, or in a dream, counts for more than any book.
• Faith should be informed. Many of the current's own teachers insist that devotion is not blind, that study comes first, and that a devotee who has not read widely does not know what they are devoted to.
• Magic is optional. For many devotees the center is honor, not operation. Some practice no magic at all, and regard those who use the adversary's name only to get results as having missed the point.

What Its Practitioners Do

Devotional practice is for the most part private and domestic. A typical devotee keeps an altar, permanent or temporary, with candles, incense, and an image or sigil of the adversary. They pray, often morning and evening, sometimes in set words and more often in their own. They give thanks. They make offerings: incense, food, drink, written words, hair, objects of personal value, and time. Many keep a book of their practice, and some write in a state they describe as dictated.

Some mark their commitment with a rite of dedication, renewed at intervals. Some keep a calendar of festivals, described on the page Festivals of the Left-Hand Path. Some seek guidance by divination or in a dark mirror, and some speak of a personal guardian spirit, a figure described on the page Demons and Spirits. A minority belong to small covens with mentors and initiations. Most do not, and many say that their god has never asked them to.

Demonolatry

Closely related to the devotional current, and often confused with it, is demonolatry: the honoring of demons as divine intelligences in their own right. Its practitioners work with a pantheon, choose patrons from among it, and maintain a liturgy for its members. Many regard the demons of the grimoires as the gods of older peoples, renamed by those who conquered them, and there is some truth in this for a few of the names. The page Demons and Spirits gives the history.

Demonolaters and Satanists overlap, but they are not the same people. Demonolaters tend to reject two older models with equal firmness: the grimoire magician who commands spirits by the authority of the divine names, which for a devotee of the adversary means borrowing the authority of the god he opposes, and the youthful blasphemer who performs what the opposing religion says devil worship looks like. Some demonolatrous groups ask for long study before any initiation, and put no pressure on anyone to take it.

Why People Come to It

The accounts that devotional practitioners give of their own arrival have much in common. Many were raised in strict religious households, and describe carrying the guilt of that upbringing for years. Many report an early sense of a presence that was not frightening. Many tried atheism and found that it left an emptiness that something else would come to fill. And a striking number came in a crisis: addiction, homelessness, the death of someone close, a moment of having nothing left, in which they called out and felt that something answered.

These accounts deserve respect, and the Order gives it. It also notes that a person in crisis is the person most exposed to anyone who claims to speak for a god. The page Sobriety and Recovery considers what practice can and cannot do for someone in that position, and the page Working With Others describes the signs of a group that has noticed the same thing and means to use it.

Questions the Current Raises

The Order does not share the devotional current's central belief, and does not deny it either. It does think that the current raises four questions, which its own practitioners have asked and answered in different ways.

Who Is Speaking?

Devotees report guidance: a voice, a nudge, a dream, or a silence that they read as an answer. Some teachers counsel that when a request for guidance meets no reply, the reply is to stay where one is. The distinction made in The Nightside Record applies here as everywhere. What was heard is an observation. Who said it is an interpretation. A practitioner who was told, in a moment of despair, to go home and get sober was given good counsel, whatever its source, and the decision to take it, and all the work that followed, was their own.

Who Decides?

Some devotees decide whom to trust by consulting their god, and confirm a calling by divination. This places the final judgment outside the practitioner. The fourth of the Order's tenets, Will Answers to Reason, asks that it stay inside.

What Is Owed?

Much devotional practice rests on exchange: nothing is free, one gives in order to receive. As an account of practice this is defensible, since every discipline costs something. As an account of what is owed to a teacher it is dangerous. When the offering is money and the one who receives it is a person, it is a payment, and if teaching depends on it, it is a toll. The page On Sacrifice takes up the question.

Can Worship Belong to the Left-Hand Path?

The site's introduction says that worship, in the sense of submission to a superior being, runs against the central aim of the path. Devotees answer in several ways. Some say that their god asks for no submission and wants a relationship of equals. Some redefine worship as holding in high regard. Some say that their god asks to be understood, not worshipped. Others accept the word in its full sense and speak of service. The answers are different, and it matters which one a practitioner gives.

What the Current Gets Right

An account of a current that differs from the Order would be unfair if it listed only the differences. Many of the devotional current's teachers counsel things the Order also counsels. They say that self-destruction, by drink, drugs, or recklessness, is not the path, and that the path is about preserving and strengthening the self. They say that a practitioner should study widely and think critically. They do not proselytize, and they regard the effort to convert others as a habit of the religions they left. They hold that a practitioner is responsible for what they do, and that a mess one has made is not the god's fault. Nearly all of them reject the sacrifice of animals. And they take seriously an experience of presence that the carnal current explains as psychology. The Order holds that such experiences should be recorded and examined before either explanation is accepted.

Where the Order Stands

The Order takes no position on whether the being that devotees address exists. Its Philosophy holds that no being, real or imagined, is owed obedience, and it worships nothing, the serpent included.

It declines several things found in parts of the devotional current: offerings of blood, the practitioner's own included; oaths described as eternal and unbreakable; liturgies that ask for wrath upon enemies or upon other religions, since its texts contain no curses; payment for teaching or advancement; and a fixed calendar. It notes that many of the current's own teachers decline most of these as well.

A devotee who reads the Library and finds it useful is as much a part of the Order as anyone else. The Order asks of them only what it asks of every practitioner: that they keep the record, keep observation and interpretation apart, and let no one, on earth or off it, hold authority over their practice.