The Satanism we know today, with its pentagrams, inverted crosses and odd devotion to faded black clothing, dates all the way back to the year 1966 when it was wholly invented by a musician from Chicago named Anton LaVey. This makes it younger than Wicca, the Cthulhu mythos, the Rolling Stones and Mr. Potato Head.
Of course, you can find descriptions galore of Satanist activity for centuries before that. Look closer, though, and you see that this “Satanism” inevitably involved a misinterpretation of a nonmainstream religious practice or was a handy accusation to use against your neighbors when they stayed up all night ringing their cowbells or whatever bad neighbors did back then.
Cases where accused Satanists admitted to devil worship usually involved a good deal of horrible torture, under which most of us would probably confess to worshiping Vice President Joe Biden. Most probably innocent people confessed under torture to secretly worshiping the demon Baphomet, a name that is most likely a corruption of “Mohammed.” In other words, what we now think of as accusations of Satanism were the old school equivalent of neocons accusing Obama of being a secret Muslim.
7 ‘Ancient’ Forms of Mysticism That Are Recent Inventions
