APPENDIX 11: THE HIDDEN SOURCE OF THE SATANIC PHILOSOPHY
- by George C. Smith II°
The Scroll of Set #XIII-3, June XXII/1987
... Let us examine the
Nine Satanic Statements in view of the Rand work
Atlas Shrugged. In Galt’s speech (pages #936-993) is the written source of most of the philosophical ideas expressed in the
Satanic Bible. Here are the first clear, contemporary statements which led to the glorification of man’s pride and the denouncing of the life-killing concept called altruism. Here also is a vindication of rationality and the inevitable cause of the failure of the
Church of Satan to encompass the needs of intelligent and curious minds.
Note that the sequential order of these
Atlas Shrugged quotations parallels the order of the
Nine Satanic Statements.
1. LaVey: Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence.
Rand: A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man - every man - is an end in himself. He exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose. (page 940)
2. LaVey: Satan represents vital existence instead of spiritual pipe dreams.
Rand: My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists - and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these. (page 944)
3. LaVey: Satan represents undefiled wisdom instead of hypocritical self-deceit.
Rand: Honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others. (page 945)
4. LaVey: Satan represents kindness to those who deserve it instead of love wasted on ingrates.
Rand: To withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement. (page 946)
5. LaVey: Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek.
Rand: When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him by force. (page 950)
6. LaVey: Satan represents responsibility to the responsible instead of concern for psychic vampires.
Rand: You have been using fear as your weapon, and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours. (page 950)
7. LaVey: Satan represents man as just another animal - sometimes better, more often worse than those that walk on all-fours - who, because of his “divine spiritual and intellectual development”, has become the most vicious animal of all.
Rand: Damnation is the start of your morality; destruction is its purpose, means, and end.Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start not with a standard of value but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good; the good is that which he is not. (page 951)
8. LaVey: Satan represents all of the so-called sins, as they all lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification.
Rand: What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge - he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil; he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor; he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire; he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy - all the cardinal values of his existence. (page 951)
9. LaVey: Satan has been the best friend the church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years.
Rand: And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, your teachers offer him the help of a morality that proclaims that he’ll find no solution and must seek no fulfillment on Earth. Real existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty of perceiving the non-existent - and if he is unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and his consciousness impotent. (page 952)
