Danger of inviting evil into your life
October 27, 2004
**Devil worship and Satanism should not be considered harmless, ** writes Sophie Masson.
Have you heard? Britain’s Royal Navy has its first official registered Satanist. Leading hand Christopher Cranmer, 24, has had his application to be recognised as a practising Satanist - complete with the right to perform rituals on board - approved.
He’s also revealed that he’ll be lobbying to have Old Nick’s worship recognised as a religion by the state. Now that he’s given over his life to the worship of the principle of evil, which, as the Church of Satan’s official website proclaims, is an “acceptance of man’s true state - that of a carnal beast living in a cosmos permeated and motivated by the Dark Force we call Satan” - his mother Catherine, supposedly a practising Christian, seems unmoved. “He’s not evil … in our home, we have angels on the mantelpiece,” she says.
It sounds like something out of a dodgy parody. In the words of French poet Charles Baudelaire, “The best trick the Devil ever pulled is to persuade us he didn’t exist.” That would seem to be the case, since basic disbelief in the idea that there could be such an entity is surely behind the navy’s acceptance of Cranmer’s beliefs as harmless.
Well, are they? Trawling through the Church of Satan’s website and its related links, one comes across such statements as “Let our governments be toppled! Let the strong become Masters and the weak be swept away, as they should!” and “Kill all the deluded and weak”.
The Church of Satan breezily informs us that though supposedly it venerates the “Dark Force”, in fact, “we are our own gods”. All traditional sins are henceforth virtues. Altruism is a myth; the Christian virtues are just hypocrisy; all restraints are simply attempts to force the really strong into a humiliating capitulation to the weak.
That this sub-Nietzschean, quasi-Nazi rubbish should be tolerated, much less encouraged, by the Royal Navy simply beggars belief.
The most frightening thing is that our society has seemingly become so disconnected from meaning that it no longer takes seriously the very building blocks of its culture.
Traditionally, we understood that symbols have an underlying meaning: the human world is not a parade of meaningless gestures, but a mysterious, strange place which we only partly understand, where metaphysical battles are played out every day in people’s hearts.
The figure of the devil is a very profound, living metaphor, expressed in a concrete way; to worship the principle of evil itself is to invite it into your life and the lives of those around you, sometimes in unpredictable and horrifying ways.
A year after Church of Satan founder Anton la Vey appeared in Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate and several friends were gruesomely murdered by the followers of mad anti-prophet Charles Manson - who laid great stress on the fact that his name, reversed, was “son of Man”.
The devil likes grim jokes, you see. Now somewhere in one of the navy’s warships, a young Satanist with an emblematic name - Christopher means “the bearer of Christ”, “Cranmer” was also the surname of a martyr of the Protestant Reformation - may well be earnestly expounding the scripture of the “Satanic Bible”, with its love of the strong and contempt for the vulnerable. It’s not a comforting thought.
Sophie Masson’s latest book is Snow, Fire, Sword (Random House Australia).
