Darkness Reborn: Satanism and the Problem of Hatred

‘Hatred’ is one of those words that makes people uncomfortable, though we’re quick to label it in others. Whether we’re on the left or the right, we accuse our political opponents of being ‘hatemongers’. In popular culture, we hear all the time that someone ‘hates himself’, ‘hates her parents’, or ‘hates their life.’ There’s a long tradition of theorizing hatred in depth psychology, starting with Freud’s ‘death drive’ and Jung’s ‘shadow’. Donald Winnicott warns that psychiatrists must be honest about feeling hatred toward their patients, just as parents must be honest about feeling hatred toward their babies. ‘You may have to let your client hate you’, supervisors tell their psychotherapy trainees.

In this event, we’ll attempt to shine just one small light into the abyssal darkness of hatred. The figure we’ll strive to see there is another one that makes people uncomfortable, namely the lord of darkness himself: Satan. Despite Satan’s continuing vitality in the western imagination, few have explored how the study of Satanism can illuminate the dynamics of hatred. Here we’ll experiment with an archetypal approach to the phenomenon of Satanism today, ranging from Satanic panics and Luciferian politics to black metal music and demonic dreams or visions. Approaching this in a creative spirit, our hope is to understand both the dangers and opportunities in our own hatred just a little bit differently.