Date: Sunday, September 26
Time: 2 pm EDT

Part of the Psychoanalysis, Art & the Occult series of events, curated by Dr. Vanessa Sinclair and Carl Abrahamsson

This lecture will take place virtually, via Zoom. Ticket sales will end at 12 pm EDT the day of the lecture. Attendees may request a video recording AFTER the lecture takes place by emailing proof of purchase to info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com. Video recordings are valid for 30 days after the date of the lecture.

Ticketholders: a link to the conference is sent out at 12:30 pm EDT on the day of the event to the email used at checkout. Please add info.morbidanatomy@gmail.com to your contacts to ensure that the event link will not go to spam.

Dancing in the Graveyard: Death Imagery in Satanism by Blanche Barton

“Life is the great indulgence—death, the great abstinence. Therefore, make the most of life—HERE AND NOW!”

So reads a phrase from the opening chapter of The Satanic Bible. But if Satanism, true Satanism as defined by Anton LaVey in 1966, is a profoundly life-loving religion, why all the black candles, skulls, and funerary trappings? The use of a coffin in the ceremony known as “L’air Epais—the Ceremony of the Stifling Air”, for example, goes well beyond a simple memento mori to remind ourselves how fleeting is our time here on Earth. The coffin becomes, like the Hanged Man in the tarot, a symbol of both death and transformation.

The Western esoteric tradition indulges in metaphors of magical mastery as a path to explore death, even defeat death, through unholy compacts and infernal congress, with sinister sorcerers and witches tempted by wisdom at the very borders of our understanding. Satanists challenge the boundaries between reality and fantasy with images of dark defiance and heresy, concentrating their power through ritual, challenging the strength of their own creative force, then manifesting that productive drive in the real world.

Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death, recognized that when a child reaches adolescence and fully confronts the inevitability of his or her own eventual demise, the youth begins casting about for a philosophy that provides a satisfying context in which to place this knowledge. One might successfully argue that all religions are invented to resolve this one issue:  How do we process the inexorable truth of our own mortality? Satanism offers an engraved invitation to the courageous and the curious, to those fatally attracted to the darkest, most dangerous corners of forbidden arcana and scandalous lore, who are driven to dance with the Devil in the moonlight. Let’s glimpse beyond the veil together, shall we?

Memento Mori Forever by Carl Abrahamsson

For the human individual, there is no greater arbiter than death itself. Anxiety and fear are the very shadow-side fundaments of human religiosity, and nowhere is magical thinking as present as in thoughts and emotions touching upon (the fear of) death. One reason why human neurosis reaches ever new heights in contemporary culture is our distancing from death itself, and our painting ourselves into a corner of abstracted and compensatory imagination. How to cope? How to improve this highly detrimental neurosis and its dangerous side effects, such as monotheism?

Carl Abrahamsson is a Swedish author, specialising in Occulture and Magico-anthropology. His books include Resonances (2014), Occulture (2018), The Devil’s Footprint (2020), Sacred Intent (2020), Different People (2021), and Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan (forthcoming). He is also the editor and publisher of the highly renowned anthologies in The Fenris Wolf series.

Blanche Barton is the present Magistra Templi Rex of the Church of Satan, having been a member for 45 years. She is the author of The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton Szandor LaVey (2014), as well as her most recent book, We Are Satanists: The History and Future of the Church of Satan (2021). She likes long walks on the beach and summoning chthonic forces to unleash their unholy terrors upon an unsuspecting world.  

The Psychoanalysis, Art & the Occult series of events, curated by Dr. Vanessa Sinclair and Carl Abrahamsson, is dedicated to exploring the intersections and integration of psychoanalytic theory, the creative arts, occult practices, and folk magic traditions. By inviting psychoanalysts, philosophers, artists, writers, and occult practitioners from a variety of theoretical orientations and worldviews to discuss their work, personal experiences, and areas of research interest with one another, dialogue is opened up between practitioners in fields of study that traditionally rarely engage with one another though often operate in similar and complementary ways.

Photo by Carl Abrahamsson