Written by three experts in the field, The Invention of Satanism examines contemporary religious Satanism as the product of historical, ideological, and social processes.

The Earth is poised to make a great disclosure. Its a hierophant. But whats a hierophant? A person who reveals the holy light. But it can also be a landscape or a planet. And whats the holy light? It is the structure of reality and consciousness, a map of the heavenly realms, the engineering blueprint of Creation. Some people call this imminent disclosure the Apocalypse and run for cover. But that is mistaken. Apocalypse means the revelation of the divine revelation. It means the end of our picture of the world as we know it. The world itself will be fine, even better than fine. Splendid. Illumined. The Architect of reality lays down His cards, face up, and you see the whole deck. Here is the truth of yourself and the Earth. How will this disclosure work? What we call sacred sites and holy landscapes will start revealing themselves in full to us in all their geomantic and visionary richness. Thats the inner patterning of their design, their arrays of Light temples and subtle palaces primed for our visionary adventures and edification. The Earth needs us to have these adventures and visions because thats how we keep the planet healthy. Hierophantic Landscapes visits five landscapes from Norway and England to California and Mexico, providing firsthand reports on the visions and adventures of a small band of geomancers as they seek to unravel the mysteries of the Earth. Maybe not such a small band, because along the way we encounter angels, landscape devas, Nature Spirits, and otherworldly mentors, and revel in vistas of the ancient past of the Earth when that revelation was as fresh as a sunrise, as it will soon be again.

This issue of The Ministry contains the last nine messages given during the 2004 spring term of the Full-time Training in Anaheim, California. The general subject of this series of messages is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In a simple, basic way the God of Abraham is the God of justification, the God of Isaac is the God of grace, and the God of Jacob is the God of transformation through divine discipline. Messages 2 through 7 of the October 2005 issue of The Ministry presented the God of Abraham. Messages 8 and 9 of that issue presented the God of Isaac. In this issue Message 10 concludes the fellowship concerning the God of Isaac. Isaac signifies our living a life of enjoying God; hence, we live a grace-enjoying life for God's good pleasure. Messages 11 through 17 present the God of Jacob. The God of Jacob, who is the God of transformation, issues in the God of Israel, who is the God of the transformed Jacob. Message 18 presents the Israel of God. All the experiences of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, represented by the lives and experiences of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are to produce this corporate person--the Israel of God. We do not have the experiences of the God of Abraham merely to be spiritual persons, we do not enter into the experiences represented by Isaac simply to be individuals enjoying God's grace in a personal way, and we do not go through all the experiences represented by Jacob's long life just to end up as spiritual individuals who have some spiritual stature. God desires a corporate person; He wants a people to express Him and represent Him. Last of all, we include a report concerning the Lord's move in the United Kingdom.

Satanism is a phenomenon that has existed as a prominent trope since very beginning of Christianity, when the Church Fathers entertained fantasies about people worshipping the Devil and indulging in macabre rituals. In the early modern period, similarly unfounded ideas led to the infamous witch trials which transpired primarily between 1400 and 1700. In the 1980s and 1990s, what has been labelled a "Satanic Panic" swept the United States and parts of Europe, with again, unfounded rumors about secret Satanist networks committing gruesome murders, kidnappings and ritualistic child abuse. Today, the so called Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracy theories in the United States again draw on these motifs, this time postulating that left-wing Satanists are secretly manipulating politics and doing nefarious deeds in the shadows. This book, however, is only indirectly concerned with the purely fictional Satanism of such paranoid fantasies. It does not deal directly with the literary tradition of Satanism either, where Satanists can appear as antagonists (or, more rarely, protagonists) in the plot of a story, or authors express Satanic sympathies in a poem or two. Rather, our selection of source texts focuses on actual, existing Satanic groups, and thinkers of importance to the emergence of a Satanic milieu that forms part of a broader landscape of alternative religion. Some of the texts do in a sense belong to the above-mentioned categories, e.g., Léo Taxil's spoof on conspiracy theories, or the quite literary pseudo-histories of Satanism - in fact Satanic tracts in disguise of Jules Michelet and Stanislaw Przybyszewski, but we have aimed to concentrate on 1. self-designated Satanic groups and ideologists, 2. groups and ideologists who prominently revere a figure they identify with Satan, even though they may not self-designate as Satanists, and 3. groups and ideologists mostly excluding, however, literary texts and conspiracy theories whose re-interpretations of Satan were crucial to the growth of such ideas--

If we are to believe sensationalist media coverage, Satanism is, at its most benign, the purview of people who dress in black, adorn themselves with skull and pentagram paraphernalia, and listen to heavy metal. At its most sinister, its adherents are worshippers of evil incarnate and engage in violent and perverse secret rituals, the details of which mainstream society imagines with a fascination verging on the obscene. Children of Lucifer debunks these facile characterizations by exploring the historical origins of modern Satanism. Ruben van Luijk traces the movement's development from a concept invented by a Christian church eager to demonize its internal and external competitors to a positive (anti-)religious identity embraced by various groups in the modern West. Van Luijk offers a comprehensive intellectual history of this long and unpredictable trajectory. This story involves Romantic poets, radical anarchists, eccentric esotericists, Decadent writers, and schismatic exorcists, among others, and culminates in the establishment of the Church of Satan by carnival entertainer Anton Szandor LaVey. Yet it is more than a collection of colorful characters and unlikely historical episodes. The emergence of new attitudes toward Satan proves to be intimately linked to the ideological struggle for emancipation that transformed the West and is epitomized by the American and French Revolutions. It is also closely connected to secularization, that other exceptional historical process which saw Western culture spontaneously renounce its traditional gods and enter into a self-imposed state of religious indecision. Children of Lucifer makes the case that the emergence of Satanism presents a shadow history of the evolution of modern civilization as we know it. Offering the most comprehensive account of this history yet written, van Luijk proves that, in the case of Satanism, the facts are much more interesting than the fiction.