How to Actually Understand What Satanists Believe In
You show up at a community event or see a thread online asking about Satanism, and within minutes you've got three different people pulling the same information from wildly different sources. Some are reading 1960s anti-cult pamphlets. Others are scrolling through memes. The truth is messier than either camp wants you to believe. I spent years sorting through the noise after someone brought me a printed copy of the Satanic Bible and asked me to grade its theology like it was a textbook. That never happened again. Satanism isn't a single doctrine. It's at least three distinct movements that share a name and occasionally overlap at conventions. The biggest by membership is the Church of Satan, founded by Anton LaVey in 1966. They're atheists. Their "Satan" is a symbol of individualism, carnality, and defiance against authoritarian religion. They don't actually worship a literal devil. The temple they ran in San Francisco was basically a social club with theatrical rituals. The Nine Satanic Statements and the Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth are their core documents, and they read more like than anything supernatural. Then there's the Temple of Set, which split from the Church of Satan in the late 1970s when Michael Aquino disagreed with LaVey's direction. They actually do treat Satan as a conscious entity, but not in the Christian sense. Set is an Egyptian god they associate with enlightenment and self-devolution. This is where things get complicated for outsiders because the language starts looking theologically similar to traditional Satan worship even though the underlying framework is completely different.
And then you have Theistic Satanists, who are genuinely devout and believe in a literal Satan. These are scattered, smaller groups with no central authority. Some are legitimate religious organizations with registered status. Some are people posting on forums who've never met another member in person. There's no reliable census for this segment. I ran into this problem firsthand in 2019 when a local news reporter called me because a high school student had been expelled for wearing a pentacle necklace. The reporter wanted a soundbite about "Satanic worship." I had to explain to her on camera that the kid's family belonged to a Theistic Satanist congregation that met in a rented church space in Dayton, and that the family had been there for six years before the incident. The reporter cut my sentence in post. She used the word "cult" three times in a sixty-second package. That's the environment you're operating in when you try to give people an accurate picture of what Satanists actually believe. The common pitfall people make is assuming Satanism is primarily about evil or anti-Christian hostility. That's a Christian framing of the religion, not a Satanic one. For most Satanists, Christianity is background noise, not a daily concern. Their grievances, when they have them, are aimed at institutional control structures broadly, not specifically at the Christian God. LaVey himself was more interested in psychology and personal sovereignty than in theological opposition to any particular deity.
Another thing beginners consistently miss is the distinction between ritual and belief. Church of Satan rituals aren't prayers. They're psychological tools. A typical Black Mass at the Church of Satan involves theatrical elements designed to trigger an emotional state in the participant, not to summon anything or communicate with a deity. I attended one in 2014 as a researcher. The actual experience was underwhelming. A lot of props, a few minutes of dramatic reading, and then people went out for drinks. The value for members wasn't in supernatural outcomes. It was in the collective reinforcement of an identity that says I'm not subordinate to any religious authority. The practical limitation here is that Satanism doesn't have a centralized mechanism for defining orthodoxy. The Church of Satan publishes materials but can't speak for independent Satanists. The Temple of Set publishes its own literature but claims no authority over others. When someone asks "What do Satanists believe?", the most honest answer is "Which ones?" and most people asking that question don't realize that's even a meaningful question. It's like asking "What do Christians believe?" and getting the same generic response every time, even though Baptists, Copts, and Jehovah's Witnesses would answer very differently. If you need to understand Satanism for academic work, legal matters, or media reporting, the most reliable path is to go directly to primary sources. Read the Satanic Bible. Read the Book of the Law if you're looking at Thelemic-adjacent thought. Read the Temple of Set's publications. Don't rely on secondary summaries written by journalists who had thirty minutes to file a story. The gap between what those sources say and what most people think they say is wide enough to drive a truck through, and I've seen it cause real harm when institutions made decisions based on the version they'd heard secondhand.
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