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Satanism and Demonology
Satanism has been known around the world by many names over the centuries and has involved the shadowy deities of ancient pagan religions. During Christian times, Satanist sorcerers frequently tried to invoke the Devil to make their black magic work. In Satanism and Demonology, the great central questions behind the legends are explored: does Satan, or Lucifer, really exist, and if he does, what dark, anomalous powers does he wield?
Authors Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe begin with an examination of what Satanism is, then explore its earliest, prehistoric history. They track Satanism from the Middle East and ancient Egypt to the European witches and sorcerers of medieval times, and then on through the Renaissance to our present day. The bizarre, uninhibited, satanic rituals, liturgies, and sexual practices are all examined in detail.
Authors Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe begin with an examination of what Satanism is, then explore its earliest, prehistoric history. They track Satanism from the Middle East and ancient Egypt to the European witches and sorcerers of medieval times, and then on through the Renaissance to our present day. The bizarre, uninhibited, satanic rituals, liturgies, and sexual practices are all examined in detail.
- GenresOccultParanormal
232 pages, Paperback
First published March 8, 2011
10 people are currently reading
126 people want to read
About the author
Lionel Fanthorpe
178 books20 followersRobert Lionel Fanthorpe cowrote with his wife Patricia Fanthorpe. Pseudonyms: Erle Barton, Lee Barton, Thornton Bell, Leo Brett, Bron Fane, R.L. Fanthorpe, R. Lionel Fanthorpe, L.P. Kenton, Victor La Salle, Robert Lionel, John E. Muller, Phil Nobel, Lionel Roberts, Deutero Spartacus, Neil Thanet, Trebor Thorpe, Pel Torro, Olaf Trent, Karl Zeigfreid
The Reverend Robert Lionel Fanthorpe is a priest and entertainer, and has at various times worked as a journalist, teacher, television presenter, author and lecturer.
Born in Dereham, Norfolk (UK), his parents were shopkeeper and teacher, Greta Christine, née Garbutt. In 1957 he married Patricia Alice Tooke, with whom he has two daughters (born 1964 and 1966). From 1958 to 1962 he was a teacher at Dereham Secondary Modern School, then from 1961 to 1963 he studied Education and Theology at Keswick College, Norwich, and was then again a teacher at Dereham until 1967, after which he served in the British Army and was a tutor at the Gamlingay Village College in Gamlingay, Cambridgeshire, and course leader with the Phoenix Timber Company in Rainham from 1969 to 1972 . From 1972 to 1979 he was Headmaster at Hellesdon High School in Norfolk. In 1974 he acquired a bachelor's degree at the Open University. The marriage currently live in Roath, Cardiff, South Wales.
In the early 1950s, Fanthorpe began writing short stories that appeared in various magazines published by John Spencer & Co., such as Futuristic Science Stories and Worlds of Fantasy. From 1954, Fanthorpe's novels appeared primarily in the Badger Books series of the same publisher. In the good decade between 1954 and 1967, Fanthorpe was astonishingly productive. Under various pseudonyms, some personal and some publisher pseudonyms such as Victor La Salle, John E. Muller and Karl Zeigfreid, Fanthorpe wrote much of the supernatural tales and science fiction published in the Badger Books, a total of well over 100 novels and countless short stories. At times a 45,000-word novel was published every 12 days at a flat rate of £22.50, with Fanthorpe dictating his lyrics on tape and then having friends and family transcribe them, after a quick proofreading of the text then going to the publishers. The production method caused frequent careless mistakes, inconsistencies and plot gaps, and the story often came to an abrupt end because he did not have an exact overview of the extent of the text produced while dictating it. Despite such shortcomings, it is conceded that his products often need not fear comparison with the works of other prolific writers. In particular, some stories from the series about Val Stearman, an adventurer in the style of Bulldog Drummond and the mysterious immortal La Noire are considered highlights of Fanthorpe's work. A contributing factor to the large number of pseudonyms used was that the Badger Books series often included so-called magazine volumes, i.e. collections of stories allegedly by different authors. In fact, the stories in such a volume came all or mostly from Fanthorpe under various pseudonyms.
From the early 1980s, together with his wife, he signed a series of non-fiction books on historical mysteries, for example on the legend of the Templars and on Rennes-le-Château, as well as on themes of anomalistics and cryptozoology. Adept at such subjects, he has appeared on television on a number of occasions, notably as presenter and writer on the British television series Fortean TV (1997) and Forbidden History (2013–2016).
The Reverend Robert Lionel Fanthorpe is a priest and entertainer, and has at various times worked as a journalist, teacher, television presenter, author and lecturer.
Born in Dereham, Norfolk (UK), his parents were shopkeeper and teacher, Greta Christine, née Garbutt. In 1957 he married Patricia Alice Tooke, with whom he has two daughters (born 1964 and 1966). From 1958 to 1962 he was a teacher at Dereham Secondary Modern School, then from 1961 to 1963 he studied Education and Theology at Keswick College, Norwich, and was then again a teacher at Dereham until 1967, after which he served in the British Army and was a tutor at the Gamlingay Village College in Gamlingay, Cambridgeshire, and course leader with the Phoenix Timber Company in Rainham from 1969 to 1972 . From 1972 to 1979 he was Headmaster at Hellesdon High School in Norfolk. In 1974 he acquired a bachelor's degree at the Open University. The marriage currently live in Roath, Cardiff, South Wales.
In the early 1950s, Fanthorpe began writing short stories that appeared in various magazines published by John Spencer & Co., such as Futuristic Science Stories and Worlds of Fantasy. From 1954, Fanthorpe's novels appeared primarily in the Badger Books series of the same publisher. In the good decade between 1954 and 1967, Fanthorpe was astonishingly productive. Under various pseudonyms, some personal and some publisher pseudonyms such as Victor La Salle, John E. Muller and Karl Zeigfreid, Fanthorpe wrote much of the supernatural tales and science fiction published in the Badger Books, a total of well over 100 novels and countless short stories. At times a 45,000-word novel was published every 12 days at a flat rate of £22.50, with Fanthorpe dictating his lyrics on tape and then having friends and family transcribe them, after a quick proofreading of the text then going to the publishers. The production method caused frequent careless mistakes, inconsistencies and plot gaps, and the story often came to an abrupt end because he did not have an exact overview of the extent of the text produced while dictating it. Despite such shortcomings, it is conceded that his products often need not fear comparison with the works of other prolific writers. In particular, some stories from the series about Val Stearman, an adventurer in the style of Bulldog Drummond and the mysterious immortal La Noire are considered highlights of Fanthorpe's work. A contributing factor to the large number of pseudonyms used was that the Badger Books series often included so-called magazine volumes, i.e. collections of stories allegedly by different authors. In fact, the stories in such a volume came all or mostly from Fanthorpe under various pseudonyms.
From the early 1980s, together with his wife, he signed a series of non-fiction books on historical mysteries, for example on the legend of the Templars and on Rennes-le-Château, as well as on themes of anomalistics and cryptozoology. Adept at such subjects, he has appeared on television on a number of occasions, notably as presenter and writer on the British television series Fortean TV (1997) and Forbidden History (2013–2016).
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December 16, 2025
“Satanism and Demonology” is the kind of book that walks into the room with its cape already swirling. Lionel and Patricia Fanthorpe have written a brisk, curiosity-driven survey that understands what draws readers to the subject in the first place: the old itch to name what terrifies us, to give a silhouette to evil, to map the dark like a coastline. Yet for all its flirtations with the sensational – curses, black masses, infernal catalogues, whispered entities at the edge of sleep – the book’s governing impulse is not to howl but to arrange. It wants to be useful. It wants to take a subject that is, by nature, slippery and contested and to build a set of drawers you can pull open: definitions, origins, cultural migrations, rituals, case studies, modern movements, and the final question that refuses to die.
The Fanthorpes begin with a practical problem: what, exactly, does “Satanism” mean? The word is thrown like a net over wildly different fish. Sometimes it is a label hurled by enemies, sometimes a posture assumed by rebels, sometimes a genuine metaphysical claim, and sometimes a theatrical costume stitched from borrowed symbols. From the start, the book encourages the reader to separate three things that are often tangled together: the fear of Satan; the study of demons (often undertaken by those who oppose them); and any actual practice, whether devotional, magical, or merely rhetorical. That sorting matters. A great deal of what the public “knows” about Satanism comes from anti-satanic writing – demonologies, witch-hunting manuals, scandalous pamphlets – whose purpose is not neutral description but warning, persuasion, control. The book’s early chapters make the case that even before one reaches the modern Church of Satan, one must first understand the long history of projection: how societies, in periods of anxiety, fasten onto an imagined adversary and load it with everything they fear or desire to punish.
From that conceptual foundation, the narrative reaches backward, almost greedily, into prehistory. Here the book adopts its characteristic method: a mixture of archaeology, comparative religion, folklore, and pointed questions posed as a kind of lantern-swinging inquiry. Cave paintings of half-animal, half-human figures; burial customs suggesting belief in an afterlife; stories of taboo-breaking and supernatural retaliation – these become early ingredients in the eventual stew. The argument is not that Paleolithic people were “Satanists” in any modern sense, but that the human imagination has long produced certain recurring shapes: horned beings, hybrid bodies, guardian spirits that can punish, darkness as a moral register. The Fanthorpes are attracted to continuity: Pan, with his animal features and unruly sexuality, becomes one of the book’s emblematic examples of how a nature deity can later be reinterpreted as diabolic. In the hands of later moral systems, horns do not remain merely horns; they acquire a charge.
As the book travels into the ancient Near East, it becomes most convincing when it is least eager to force an origin story. Zoroastrian dualism is treated as a major conceptual engine – a structured cosmology in which good and evil are not merely moods but competing principles with eschatological stakes. The chapter’s power comes from its clarity: in such a system, evil is not a stray error but an organized force, and the human being is a chooser. The book then moves through legends and rival cults, showing how competing gods become moralized across time: what is once simply “not our god” becomes “the enemy,” and then “the devil,” and then the presumed sponsor of every forbidden act. The mechanism of demonization becomes, in a sense, one of the book’s central characters.
Ancient Egypt supplies another of its dramatic galleries. Here the Fanthorpes offer a crowded pantheon in which the moral valence of a deity can shift with politics: Seth, once worshipped and later recast as an evil figure, becomes a case study in how conquest and backlash can transform religious meaning. The book is particularly interested in the way religions absorb one another, rename one another, and preserve older images under new interpretations. The jackal-headed Anubis and the serpent Apep appear as archetypes, and the book folds in the familiar “mummy’s curse” around Tutankhamen as an example of how modern culture continues to crave the idea that the sacred, violated, will strike back. It is a chapter that reveals the authors’ taste: history is rarely allowed to remain purely historical; it is constantly braided with story, with the long afterlife of rumor, with the way myth continues to perform labor for the living.
That taste comes to the fore in the medieval and Renaissance chapters, where the book’s tone becomes almost procedural. Grimoires are treated as manuals – recipes for influence, lists of tools, instructions for timing, circles, names, oils, talismans. The authors emphasize a crucial point: much medieval ceremonial magic is saturated with Christian language and symbols, not because the church approved it but because practitioners worked within a Christian cosmology even as they tried to exploit its margins. In this world, the sacred name is a tool; the prayer becomes a lever. If the earlier chapters show the birth of demon imagery, these chapters show its bureaucratization: evil as a hierarchy, an index, a set of offices. One of the book’s implicit arguments is that demonology is, among other things, an administrative fantasy – a way of making the terrifying legible by giving it ranks and job descriptions.
It is also in these chapters that the book’s moral seriousness, though sometimes understated, emerges. The authors are not shy about the brutality of inquisitions and witch hunts, and they are attentive to the ways confession can be manufactured by torture, by social pressure, by the financial incentives of witchfinders. The narrative’s darker implication is that institutions claiming to fight the devil can, in their cruelty, become indistinguishable from the evil they claim to oppose. The book does not linger in philosophical despair; it prefers to keep moving. Yet the accumulation of historical detail creates a harsh portrait of how fear authorizes violence – and how the category of “satanic” has been used to justify the removal of inconvenient people.
When the book arrives at Salem, it shifts into a case study that feels almost like a warning label affixed to the whole project. The authors catalogue the types of “evidence” that flourished in that courtroom: spectral testimony, bodily inspection for “marks,” the touch tests, the folk counter-magic that only deepened suspicion, the cascade of accusation as confession became a survival strategy. The chapter reminds the reader that Satanism, as a cultural obsession, is not only an occult topic but a civic one. It is about what happens when a community, under pressure, decides that invisible forces are more persuasive than due process. If earlier chapters explore how Satan was imagined, Salem shows how that imagination, once given legal power, kills.
From there the book makes one of its most distinctive moves: it offers a survey of “demon reports,” nearly a thousand accounts sorted into categories – incubus and succubus experiences, possession narratives, structural legends about bridges and churches, hell hounds, water demons, repulsive entities, major devils and minor imps, and the broad category of felt malevolence. This chapter reads like an atlas of dread. Its effect is not scholarly certainty but pattern recognition: the repeated shapes that appear across regions and decades. Even a skeptical reader may find the method oddly revealing. Whether demons exist is not, here, the immediate question; the question is what kinds of experiences people have, how they interpret them, and how those interpretations harden into local lore. It is a sociological portrait disguised as a supernatural inventory.
The book’s second half turns explicitly contemporary, and here the Fanthorpes are careful to draw a line that many readers will appreciate: modern Satanism is not one thing. The authors distinguish between atheistic Satanism, in which Satan functions as symbol – a banner for autonomy, indulgence, rebellion – and theistic Satanism, in which Satan is taken as an actual entity. This distinction is central to making sense of the modern landscape, where public perception often collapses symbolic posturing, occult experimentation, and serious religious conviction into one undifferentiated scare-word. The book, to its credit, refuses that collapse even as it continues to enjoy the luridness of the material.
The chapters on ritual and sex magic are, in some ways, the book’s most revealing. They show how rituals are built from choices: solitary or communal, improvised or scripted, devotional or instrumental, altar-centered or mind-centered. The Black Mass appears as a cultural specter – more famous than common – and the book details the historical narratives that have made it a fixture of the public imagination. The sex magic chapter, meanwhile, frames sexuality as both a source of power and a site of accusation: it has been central to demonological fantasies for centuries precisely because it is charged, intimate, and easy to moralize. The Fanthorpes present ritual sexuality not merely as licentiousness but as choreography, with circles, directions, anointings, symbolic roles. The reader may disagree with the premises; still, the book succeeds in showing how ritual practice makes meaning by structure. Even transgression has a liturgy.
Then comes the book’s most straightforwardly compendious chapter: the seventy-two Solomonic demons, each with its appearance and specialty. The effect is a kind of infernal “who’s who,” and it reveals a peculiar charm in demonological literature: its insistence that evil is not amorphous but staffed. Some of these entities are associated with knowledge, some with treasure, some with seduction, some with storms, some with harm. The chapter’s very repetitiveness becomes a point: the human mind can hardly resist turning metaphysical anxiety into a catalog. If one were forced to name the book’s pleasure principle, it might be precisely this – the pleasure of lists, of names, of giving shape to the ungraspable.
The most recognizably modern portion arrives with the Church of Satan and related groups. Anton LaVey’s flair for spectacle is treated as both strategy and theology: a deliberate rejection of Christian moral framing and a kind of performance art. The book is interested in the way modern Satanism thrives in the space between religion, psychology, and publicity – a zone where ritual can be interpreted as psychodrama, where symbols can be weapons against conventional guilt, where the shock itself is part of the message. The authors also widen the lens to include Luciferian and Set-oriented movements, as well as more obscure and controversial organizations, showing the variety of “left-hand path” identities that borrow from, diverge from, or contest LaVey’s version.
Finally, the book ends where it might have begun: does Satan exist? The concluding chapter is, appropriately, the most philosophically restless. It moves through the classic problem of evil, the role of free will, and the unsettling scale of harm if one grants the existence of a powerful non-human adversary. Yet it also entertains the possibility that Satan may be less a being than a name we give to the human capacity for cruelty, deception, and self-justification – the subordinate self that whispers permission. The authors do not claim to “solve” Satan; they prefer to leave the reader with a tension: between the metaphysical explanation and the psychological one, between the comfort of an external villain and the moral discomfort of admitting that much evil is homegrown.
As a work of cultural history and popular demonological survey, “Satanism and Demonology” has the virtues and vices of its genre. Its greatest strength is momentum. It is relentlessly readable, never content to sit still for long, always moving from one era, one legend, one mechanism to the next. The prose has an accessible confidence, a hospitable willingness to tell you what you need to know without making you feel you’ve wandered into a graduate seminar. The authors’ curiosity is genuine; they are not merely trading in cheap thrills. Even when they indulge the dramatic, they tend to anchor it in some form of source, tradition, or comparative frame.
At the same time, the book’s eagerness for connective tissue sometimes leads it into speculative leaps that a more cautious historian would either bracket or refuse. Questions are often posed in a way that nudges the reader toward a particular inference: a skull separated from a body becomes a hint of fear of revenants; a hybrid figure becomes a prototype for the devil; a curse narrative becomes an almost self-evident proof that the sacred retaliates. The book’s tone frequently invites the reader to enjoy the suggestion. That is part of its appeal, but it can also blur the difference between evidence and narrative gravity. Readers seeking a strict academic demarcation between what is documented and what is conjectured may occasionally feel the ground shift beneath their feet.
Still, there is a deeper coherence to the book than its episodic structure might imply. Across centuries and cultures, the Fanthorpes keep returning to a handful of recurring human behaviors: we demonize rivals; we moralize the unknown; we build rituals to seize control when life feels unstable; we create stories that punish transgression; we need a figure to carry what we cannot bear to carry ourselves. In that sense, the book is not only about Satan. It is about the human appetite for explanation – and the human tendency to make explanation into a weapon.
An “85/100” feels right for what this book aims to be: a capacious, vivid, intelligently arranged tour through a subject that resists tidy boundaries, written with a storyteller’s eye and a compiler’s instinct. It is not the last word, and it does not pretend to be. But as a map of the terrain – the myths, the rituals, the institutions, the panics, the enduring shapes that keep returning in different masks – it offers the reader something valuable: not certainty, but orientation. And in a landscape this shadowed, orientation is no small gift.
The Fanthorpes begin with a practical problem: what, exactly, does “Satanism” mean? The word is thrown like a net over wildly different fish. Sometimes it is a label hurled by enemies, sometimes a posture assumed by rebels, sometimes a genuine metaphysical claim, and sometimes a theatrical costume stitched from borrowed symbols. From the start, the book encourages the reader to separate three things that are often tangled together: the fear of Satan; the study of demons (often undertaken by those who oppose them); and any actual practice, whether devotional, magical, or merely rhetorical. That sorting matters. A great deal of what the public “knows” about Satanism comes from anti-satanic writing – demonologies, witch-hunting manuals, scandalous pamphlets – whose purpose is not neutral description but warning, persuasion, control. The book’s early chapters make the case that even before one reaches the modern Church of Satan, one must first understand the long history of projection: how societies, in periods of anxiety, fasten onto an imagined adversary and load it with everything they fear or desire to punish.
From that conceptual foundation, the narrative reaches backward, almost greedily, into prehistory. Here the book adopts its characteristic method: a mixture of archaeology, comparative religion, folklore, and pointed questions posed as a kind of lantern-swinging inquiry. Cave paintings of half-animal, half-human figures; burial customs suggesting belief in an afterlife; stories of taboo-breaking and supernatural retaliation – these become early ingredients in the eventual stew. The argument is not that Paleolithic people were “Satanists” in any modern sense, but that the human imagination has long produced certain recurring shapes: horned beings, hybrid bodies, guardian spirits that can punish, darkness as a moral register. The Fanthorpes are attracted to continuity: Pan, with his animal features and unruly sexuality, becomes one of the book’s emblematic examples of how a nature deity can later be reinterpreted as diabolic. In the hands of later moral systems, horns do not remain merely horns; they acquire a charge.
As the book travels into the ancient Near East, it becomes most convincing when it is least eager to force an origin story. Zoroastrian dualism is treated as a major conceptual engine – a structured cosmology in which good and evil are not merely moods but competing principles with eschatological stakes. The chapter’s power comes from its clarity: in such a system, evil is not a stray error but an organized force, and the human being is a chooser. The book then moves through legends and rival cults, showing how competing gods become moralized across time: what is once simply “not our god” becomes “the enemy,” and then “the devil,” and then the presumed sponsor of every forbidden act. The mechanism of demonization becomes, in a sense, one of the book’s central characters.
Ancient Egypt supplies another of its dramatic galleries. Here the Fanthorpes offer a crowded pantheon in which the moral valence of a deity can shift with politics: Seth, once worshipped and later recast as an evil figure, becomes a case study in how conquest and backlash can transform religious meaning. The book is particularly interested in the way religions absorb one another, rename one another, and preserve older images under new interpretations. The jackal-headed Anubis and the serpent Apep appear as archetypes, and the book folds in the familiar “mummy’s curse” around Tutankhamen as an example of how modern culture continues to crave the idea that the sacred, violated, will strike back. It is a chapter that reveals the authors’ taste: history is rarely allowed to remain purely historical; it is constantly braided with story, with the long afterlife of rumor, with the way myth continues to perform labor for the living.
That taste comes to the fore in the medieval and Renaissance chapters, where the book’s tone becomes almost procedural. Grimoires are treated as manuals – recipes for influence, lists of tools, instructions for timing, circles, names, oils, talismans. The authors emphasize a crucial point: much medieval ceremonial magic is saturated with Christian language and symbols, not because the church approved it but because practitioners worked within a Christian cosmology even as they tried to exploit its margins. In this world, the sacred name is a tool; the prayer becomes a lever. If the earlier chapters show the birth of demon imagery, these chapters show its bureaucratization: evil as a hierarchy, an index, a set of offices. One of the book’s implicit arguments is that demonology is, among other things, an administrative fantasy – a way of making the terrifying legible by giving it ranks and job descriptions.
It is also in these chapters that the book’s moral seriousness, though sometimes understated, emerges. The authors are not shy about the brutality of inquisitions and witch hunts, and they are attentive to the ways confession can be manufactured by torture, by social pressure, by the financial incentives of witchfinders. The narrative’s darker implication is that institutions claiming to fight the devil can, in their cruelty, become indistinguishable from the evil they claim to oppose. The book does not linger in philosophical despair; it prefers to keep moving. Yet the accumulation of historical detail creates a harsh portrait of how fear authorizes violence – and how the category of “satanic” has been used to justify the removal of inconvenient people.
When the book arrives at Salem, it shifts into a case study that feels almost like a warning label affixed to the whole project. The authors catalogue the types of “evidence” that flourished in that courtroom: spectral testimony, bodily inspection for “marks,” the touch tests, the folk counter-magic that only deepened suspicion, the cascade of accusation as confession became a survival strategy. The chapter reminds the reader that Satanism, as a cultural obsession, is not only an occult topic but a civic one. It is about what happens when a community, under pressure, decides that invisible forces are more persuasive than due process. If earlier chapters explore how Satan was imagined, Salem shows how that imagination, once given legal power, kills.
From there the book makes one of its most distinctive moves: it offers a survey of “demon reports,” nearly a thousand accounts sorted into categories – incubus and succubus experiences, possession narratives, structural legends about bridges and churches, hell hounds, water demons, repulsive entities, major devils and minor imps, and the broad category of felt malevolence. This chapter reads like an atlas of dread. Its effect is not scholarly certainty but pattern recognition: the repeated shapes that appear across regions and decades. Even a skeptical reader may find the method oddly revealing. Whether demons exist is not, here, the immediate question; the question is what kinds of experiences people have, how they interpret them, and how those interpretations harden into local lore. It is a sociological portrait disguised as a supernatural inventory.
The book’s second half turns explicitly contemporary, and here the Fanthorpes are careful to draw a line that many readers will appreciate: modern Satanism is not one thing. The authors distinguish between atheistic Satanism, in which Satan functions as symbol – a banner for autonomy, indulgence, rebellion – and theistic Satanism, in which Satan is taken as an actual entity. This distinction is central to making sense of the modern landscape, where public perception often collapses symbolic posturing, occult experimentation, and serious religious conviction into one undifferentiated scare-word. The book, to its credit, refuses that collapse even as it continues to enjoy the luridness of the material.
The chapters on ritual and sex magic are, in some ways, the book’s most revealing. They show how rituals are built from choices: solitary or communal, improvised or scripted, devotional or instrumental, altar-centered or mind-centered. The Black Mass appears as a cultural specter – more famous than common – and the book details the historical narratives that have made it a fixture of the public imagination. The sex magic chapter, meanwhile, frames sexuality as both a source of power and a site of accusation: it has been central to demonological fantasies for centuries precisely because it is charged, intimate, and easy to moralize. The Fanthorpes present ritual sexuality not merely as licentiousness but as choreography, with circles, directions, anointings, symbolic roles. The reader may disagree with the premises; still, the book succeeds in showing how ritual practice makes meaning by structure. Even transgression has a liturgy.
Then comes the book’s most straightforwardly compendious chapter: the seventy-two Solomonic demons, each with its appearance and specialty. The effect is a kind of infernal “who’s who,” and it reveals a peculiar charm in demonological literature: its insistence that evil is not amorphous but staffed. Some of these entities are associated with knowledge, some with treasure, some with seduction, some with storms, some with harm. The chapter’s very repetitiveness becomes a point: the human mind can hardly resist turning metaphysical anxiety into a catalog. If one were forced to name the book’s pleasure principle, it might be precisely this – the pleasure of lists, of names, of giving shape to the ungraspable.
The most recognizably modern portion arrives with the Church of Satan and related groups. Anton LaVey’s flair for spectacle is treated as both strategy and theology: a deliberate rejection of Christian moral framing and a kind of performance art. The book is interested in the way modern Satanism thrives in the space between religion, psychology, and publicity – a zone where ritual can be interpreted as psychodrama, where symbols can be weapons against conventional guilt, where the shock itself is part of the message. The authors also widen the lens to include Luciferian and Set-oriented movements, as well as more obscure and controversial organizations, showing the variety of “left-hand path” identities that borrow from, diverge from, or contest LaVey’s version.
Finally, the book ends where it might have begun: does Satan exist? The concluding chapter is, appropriately, the most philosophically restless. It moves through the classic problem of evil, the role of free will, and the unsettling scale of harm if one grants the existence of a powerful non-human adversary. Yet it also entertains the possibility that Satan may be less a being than a name we give to the human capacity for cruelty, deception, and self-justification – the subordinate self that whispers permission. The authors do not claim to “solve” Satan; they prefer to leave the reader with a tension: between the metaphysical explanation and the psychological one, between the comfort of an external villain and the moral discomfort of admitting that much evil is homegrown.
As a work of cultural history and popular demonological survey, “Satanism and Demonology” has the virtues and vices of its genre. Its greatest strength is momentum. It is relentlessly readable, never content to sit still for long, always moving from one era, one legend, one mechanism to the next. The prose has an accessible confidence, a hospitable willingness to tell you what you need to know without making you feel you’ve wandered into a graduate seminar. The authors’ curiosity is genuine; they are not merely trading in cheap thrills. Even when they indulge the dramatic, they tend to anchor it in some form of source, tradition, or comparative frame.
At the same time, the book’s eagerness for connective tissue sometimes leads it into speculative leaps that a more cautious historian would either bracket or refuse. Questions are often posed in a way that nudges the reader toward a particular inference: a skull separated from a body becomes a hint of fear of revenants; a hybrid figure becomes a prototype for the devil; a curse narrative becomes an almost self-evident proof that the sacred retaliates. The book’s tone frequently invites the reader to enjoy the suggestion. That is part of its appeal, but it can also blur the difference between evidence and narrative gravity. Readers seeking a strict academic demarcation between what is documented and what is conjectured may occasionally feel the ground shift beneath their feet.
Still, there is a deeper coherence to the book than its episodic structure might imply. Across centuries and cultures, the Fanthorpes keep returning to a handful of recurring human behaviors: we demonize rivals; we moralize the unknown; we build rituals to seize control when life feels unstable; we create stories that punish transgression; we need a figure to carry what we cannot bear to carry ourselves. In that sense, the book is not only about Satan. It is about the human appetite for explanation – and the human tendency to make explanation into a weapon.
An “85/100” feels right for what this book aims to be: a capacious, vivid, intelligently arranged tour through a subject that resists tidy boundaries, written with a storyteller’s eye and a compiler’s instinct. It is not the last word, and it does not pretend to be. But as a map of the terrain – the myths, the rituals, the institutions, the panics, the enduring shapes that keep returning in different masks – it offers the reader something valuable: not certainty, but orientation. And in a landscape this shadowed, orientation is no small gift.
September 9, 2024
3.5 stars.
It started slow, but I liked a lot about the second part of the book a lot (especially about the Witch Trials).
It started slow, but I liked a lot about the second part of the book a lot (especially about the Witch Trials).
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews