H. P. Blavatsky’s influential The Secret Doctrine (1888), one of the foundation texts of Theosophy, contains chapters propagating an unembarrassed Satanism. Theosophical sympathy for the Devil also extended to the name of their journal Lucifer, and discussions conducted in it. To Blavatsky, Satan is a cultural hero akin to Pro- metheus. According to her reinterpretation of the Christian myth of the Fall in Genesis 3, Satan in the shape of the serpent brings gnosis and liberates mankind. The present article situates these ideas in a wider nineteenth-century context, where some poets and socialist thinkers held similar ideas and a counter-hegemonic reading of the Fall had far-reaching feminist implications. Additionally, influences on Blavatsky from French occultism and research on Gnosticism are discussed, and the instrumental value of Satanist shock tactics is con- sidered. The article concludes that esoteric ideas cannot be viewed in isolation from politics and the world at large. Rather, they should be analyzed both as part of a religious cosmology and as having strategic polemical and didactic functions related to political debates, or, at the very least, carrying potential entailments for the latter.Keywords: Theosophy, Blavatsky, Satanism, Feminism, Socialism, Romanticism.
In diesem Aufsatz wird ein früher und ziemlich unbekannter Satanist namens Ben Kadosh behandelt (Carl William Hansen 1872–1936), der in Dänemark am Anfang des 20en Jahrhunderts tätig war. Kadosh hat in der Gründung mehreren Freimauerlogen teilgenommen und stand mit einer Reihe von wohlbekannten esoterischen und literarischen Persönlischkeiten in Verbindung. Als sein System eine eklektische Mischung darstellte, wo der griechische Gott Pan beispielsweise mit Gnostizismus, Freimauermystizismus und Lobpreisungen von Luzifer verbunden wird, können verschiedene möglische Influenzen auf seine Lehre angeführt werden. Es ist ganz unwahrscheinlich, daß Kadosch in seiner Zeit mehrere Anhänger gewonnen hat. Heutzutage sind aber seine Idéen von einer Gruppe rehabilitiert worden, die hauptsätzlich in Dänemark und Schweden aktiv ist. Wichtiger für die Anhänger dieser Gruppe erscheint die Verwendung von Kadosh als ein Werkzeug um ihre eigene Wirksamkeit Legitimität und historische Würzeln zu geben, als für die eigentliche Fortsetzung seiner Gedanken zu sorgen.
According to the Bible, Eve was the first to heed Satan’s advice to eat of the forbidden fruit. The notion of woman as the Devil’s accomplice is prominent throughout the history of Christianity and has been used to legitimate the subordination of wives and daughters. During the nineteenth century, rebellious females performed counter-readings of this misogynist tradition. Hereby, Lucifer was reconceptualized as a feminist liberator of womankind, and Eve became a heroine. In these reimaginings, Satan is an ally in the struggle against a patriarchy supported by God the Father and his male priests. The book delineates how such Satanic feminism is expressed in a number of nineteenth-century esoteric works, literary texts, autobiographies, pamphlets and journals, newspaper articles, paintings, sculptures, and even artefacts of consumer culture such as jewellery. The analysis focuses on interfaces between esotericism, literature, art, and the political realm. New light is thus shed on neglected aspects of the intellectual history of feminism, Satanism, and revisionary mythmaking. The scope of the study makes it valuable not only for historians of religion but also for those with a general interest in cultural history (or specific aspects of it like gender history, romanticism, or decadent-symbolist art and literature).
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