I
Satanism is one of the words that most of us simple people have heard others use; we guiltily feel that we ought to know what it means, but do not quite like to ask, lest we expose the nakedness of the land. Then comes Professor Gilbert Murray, one of the few learned men who are able to make a thing clear to people not quite like themselves, and tells us all about it in a cheap, small book, easy to read. It seems that the Satanists, or the pick of the sect, were Bohemian Protestants at the start, and quite plain, poor men from the country.
“Every person in authority met them with rack and sword, cursed their religious leaders as emissaries of the Devil, and punished them for all the things which they considered holy. The earth was the Lord’s, and the Pope and Emperor were the vicegerents of God upon the earth. So they were told; and in time they accepted the statement. That was the division of the world. On the one side God, Pope and Emperor, and the army of persecutors; on the other themselves, downtrodden and poor. …”
How easy to understand! In crude works of non-imagination the wicked, repente turpissimus, suddenly says, some fine morning, “Evil, be thou my good.” In life the conversion is slower. It is a gradual process of coming to feel that what has passed officially as true, right, and worshipful is so implicated in work manifestly dirty, and so easily made to serve the ends of the greedy, lazy, and cruel, that faith in its authenticity has to be given up as not to be squared with the facts of the world. From feeling this it is not a long step to the further surmise that the grand traditional foe of that old moral order of the world, now so severely discredited, may be less black than so lying an artist has painted him. Does he not, anyhow, stand at the opposite pole to that which has just proved itself base? He, too, perhaps, is some helpless butt of the slings and arrows of an enthroned barbarity tormenting the world. The legend about his condign fall from heaven may only be some propagandist lie—all we are suffered to hear about some early crime in the long, beastly annals of governmental misdoing. So thought trips, fairly lightly, along till your worthy Bohemian peasant, literal, serious, and straight, like the plain workingman of all countrysides, turns, with a desperate logical integrity and courage, right away from a world order which has called itself divine and shown itself diabolic. He will embrace, in its stead, the only other world order supposed to be extant: the one which the former order called diabolic; at any rate, he has not wittingly suffered any such wrong at its hand as the scourges of Popes and of Emperors. So the plain man emerges a Satanist.