Introduction

Encountering Satanism

It was the summer of 1973, when I took my first trip to the United States. I rented a car together with a friend from high school, which we had just fin- ished, and explored legendary California. We had an “alternative” map of San Francisco, which marked, among other places to see, a house at number 6114 of California Street, identified as the home of the “Black Pope”, “the world leader of Satanism”, Anton Szandor LaVey (1930–1997). I came from Turin, Italy, where newspapers frequently discussed Satanists. I had never met one, and I was not destined to meet the “Black Pope” either. Perhaps, I naively thought that, in the laid-back environment of California, it would be sufficient to knock on the door of 6114 to be welcomed inside immediately. Naturally, it was not so: the door was opened by somebody who told me there was nobody home. By insist- ing, I managed to obtain some measly Church of Satan brochures. Those were the oldest pieces of a collection which grew progressively, and now includes hundreds of books, pamphlets, brochures, kept in Turin, Italy, in the library of cesnur (Center for Studies on New Religions), an institution I founded in 1988. Starting in 1980, I developed an interest in religious and esoteric minorities, including Satanism. Over the course of many years of research, I collected most of the material that was possible to obtain on Satanism, not only in Italy but also all over the world. A good deal of bizarre stories emerged from old and often forgotten books and from documents, found painstakingly in many different archives and countries. A 17th-century French haberdasher invented the Black Mass. An 18th-century English Cabinet Minister administered the Eucharist to a baboon. High-ranking Catholic authorities in the 19th century believed that Satan appeared in Masonic lodges in the shape of a crocodile and played the piano there. A well-known scientist from the 20th century estab- lished a cult of the Antichrist and exploded in a laboratory experiment. Three Italian girls in 2000 sacrificed a nun to the Devil. A Black Metal band honored Satan in Krakow, Poland, in 2004 by exhibiting on stage 120 decapitated sheep heads. Some of these stories, as absurd as they might sound, were real. Oth- ers, which might appear to be equally well reported, were false. But even false stories generated real societal reactions. I began writing about Satanism towards the end of the 1980s, and immediately encountered two kinds of obstacles. The first came from my colleagues in the field of the study of minority religions. Some of them believed that it

2 INTRODUCTION was unwise to waste the limited resources for researching new religious move- ments on minuscule bands of Satanists, while studies on groups that counted millions of adherents such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses or the new religions of Japan were still scarce. It was even claimed that there were more scholars studying Satanism than Satanists.1 This was explained with the pressures of publishers, who knew that books on Satanists, dressed as devils, or better still naked in their Black Mass ceremonies, especially if pretty girls were involved, sold more than accounts of Jehovah’s Witnesses in their jackets and ties. The second problem is that I am an active Roman Catholic, and I never felt I needed to apologize for it. Curiously, this was rarely a problem for the Satanists who accepted to be interviewed by me, while it was one for some Catholic reviewers, who were surprised that I discussed Satanism in value-free sociological terms rather than expressing my outrage at its unholy practices. Sometimes, those who complained about my methods of research raided my writings, and did not feel the need to quote them in their footnotes. The first objection, that Satanism is irrelevant, has now largely disappeared. A new generation of scholars has acknowledged that Satanism was not a passing 1960s fashion but something unpredictably capable of resisting the passing of time. These scholars include, to name just a few, James R. Lewis, Jesper Aagaard Petersen, Per Faxneld, Kennet Granholm, Cimminnee Holt, and Asbjørn Dyrendal,2 who have built upon the foundations provided by scholars of a previous generation, such as J. Gordon Melton and David Bromley. Admittedly, Satanism is small. The proto-Satanist or early Satanist groups that existed before World War ii were all tiny, and probably no one of them reached the figure of 50 members. The largest modern group, the Church of Satan, counted in its heydays between one and two thousand members, and most of them were in contact with the headquarters by mail only. The other two comparatively large organizations, the Temple of Set and the Order of Nine Angles, had a few hundred members each. When it reached a total membership of around 100, the Italian group of the Luciferian Children of Satan was among the largest Satanist groups in the world, and perhaps the largest in a non-English speaking country. However, numbers are only part of

1 Dave Evans, “Speculating on the Point 003 Percent? Some Remarks on the Chaotic Satanic Minorities in the uk”, in Jesper Aagaard Petersen (ed.), Contemporary Religious Satanism: A Critical Anthology, Farnham (Surrey), Burlington (Vermont): Ashgate, 2009, pp. 211–228 (p. 226). 2 A good summary of recent academic research on Satanism is Asbjørn Dyrendal, James R. Lewis and J.Aa. Petersen, The Invention of Satanism, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.