Satanism: Aleister Crowley In Mainstream Media

The Temple of Satan is Following Through on Threats and Suing Netflix and Warner Bros. for $150 MillionShow more

Event The Satanic Temple, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Netflix, Lucien Greaves, Lawsuit 5 years ago by Tommy Williams

I never thought that writing for Geek Tyrant would lead me to ever talk about the Satanic Temple, yet here I am. Roughly a week ago, co-founder of the Satanic Temple, Lucien Greaves, made it clear that he was looking into suing Netflix over the use of a statue of Baphomet in The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina which TST holds copyrights to.

It now appears that he is following through on his threats as he has officially filed a suit for $150 million. Here are the claims:

“Defendants misappropriated the TST Baphomet Children in ways implying that the monument stands for evil. Among other morally repugnant actions, the Sabrina Series’ evil antagonists engage in cannibalism and forced-worship of a patriarchal deity.”

Overall, there are three grounds for which Greaves is suing: “copyright infringement, trademark violation, and injury to business reputation.” Each claim is worth $50 million which gives us the $150 mil total.

This a really big deal. Trademark and copyright infringements are no small matter. The question is, what’s Netflix’s move?

https://twitter.com/LucienGreaves/status/1057418640243466242?s=20

Some Christians recently protested against a giant Satanic Temple statue unveiled at the Arkansas State Capitol, holding Bible verse messages against a Satanic rally.

CBS News reported that in total 150 people, both Satanists and Christians, were present at the unveiling of the Satanic statue of a goat-headed, winged creature called Baphomet at the state capitol last Thursday.

The Satanic Temple organized what it called a First Amendment rally, insisting that since the capitol allows a monument of the Ten Commandments to stand on its grounds, so should their symbol be allowed as well.

"If you're going to have one religious monument up then it should be open to others, and if you don't agree with that then let's just not have any at all," argued Satanic Arkansas co-founder Ivy Forrester.

The nearly 8-foot tall statue of Baphomet stood in its place for less than a day, however, with the Satanic group removing it later on Thursday

The Satanic Temple has held numerous state campaigns against Ten Commandment monuments, recently getting Oklahoma's Supreme Court to rule that its own monument was unconstitutional and had to be taken down.

Republican Senator Jason Rapert, who sponsored Arkansas' Ten Commandments monument, said that legislators will never allow a permanent statue of Baphomet to be erected at the capitol.

Rapert insisted that he respects the Satanic Temple's First Amendment rights, but at the same time said that the group members are "extremists" and "it will be a very cold day in Hell before an offensive statue will be forced upon us to be permanently erected on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol."

The Arkansas Ten Commandments monument previously suffered vandalism attacks, with a man smashing it to pieces in 2017, less than 24 hours after it was installed.

Several public space incidents where the Satanic Temple has demanded equal representation and where Christians have counter-protested have led to all religious monuments being taken down.

Satanic statue unveiled in Detroit

DETROIT – A controversial Baphomet monument was unveiled Saturday night in Detroit.

The Satanic Temple unveiled the bronze goat-headed statue at a location on Joseph Campau Avenue.

Hundreds of people turned up for the event, supporters and protestors, at the first location on Grand River Avenue.

The statue cost more than $100,000, weighs one ton and is nearly 9 feet tall.

The location of the unveiling was kept secret and given via email to ticket holders hours before the event. Tickets were pre-sale only.

The monument was intended to be located next to a Ten Commandments monument in Oklahoma City until Oklahoma's Supreme Court banned religious displays on Capitol grounds, including the Ten Commandments monument.

The statue may stand outside Arkansas' Statehouse in Little Rock where a Ten Commandments monument is planned to be built.

The Satanic Temple said the statue is symbol for what they advocate, the separation of church and state.

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2015/07/26/satanic-statue-unveiled-in-detroit/

Satanic Temple Threatens to Sue Twitter Over Religious Discrimination

The Satanic Temple, an activist group based in Salem, Massachusetts, is threatening to sue Twitter for religious discrimination after one of its co-founders had his Twitter account permanently suspended.

Lucien Greaves, the Satanic Temple's co-founder and spokesman, said his Twitter account was permanently suspended without any notice after he asked his followers to report a tweet that called for the Satanic Temple to be burned down.

"We're talking to lawyers today," Greaves said Friday about whether he planned to take legal action.

On Wednesday, a woman with the Twitter handle @LaurieGAtta1 posted a tweet saying that the Satanic Temple is evil and should be burned to the ground.

"I doubt nothing anymore. I have em. In Salem MA. Opened a Satanic Church last year!!! The Witches are evil. And Satanists and Cults are VERY real! W a church like this Should not exist! Burn it! Blame Hillary I don't care! It's gutta go. If anyone likes this idea they r FKEd," @LaurieGatta1 posted.

The post was later shared by former child actor Corey Feldman, who complained about "Satanic Nutbags."

In response, Greaves shared the social media posts and asked his followers to report the tweet calling for arson. His tweet was liked and shared hundreds of times on Twitter.

But on Thursday evening, Greaves saw that his Twitter account had been suspended.

[Twitter] permanently suspended my account outright, [at first] they didn't give me a reason, and they put the main Satanic Temple's account on a 7-day suspension because it was associated with an account that had been permanently suspended

Greaves said that there was nothing unusual on his Twitter account that would have caused Twitter to close it.

He filed an appeal with Twitter but was not given a time frame for when the case would be resolved, he said.

Twitter later informed Greaves his account had been suspended due to targeted abuse

Greaves claims that he did not harass anyone, but he did send a Tweet to Feldman asking why he supported the call for arson.

"I don't know if they consider this targeted harassment?" Greaves asked Newsweek about the potential reasons Twitter closed down his account

Greaves says the incident has impacted the Satanic Temple's outreach and is a case of religious discrimination.

"The religious discrimination aspect is apparent because they would have reacted differently if it were any other religious organization," he told Newsweek. "[Getting suspended] is not something I can take lightly, because we've cultivated a certain audience over a certain amount of time."

Twitter declined to comment on the case.

https://louderthanwar.com/aleister-crowley-influence-on-popular-music/

Aleister Crowley's Influence On Popular Music

Nov 17, 2017 ... And so it was that David Bowie and Aleister Crowley shared some astral space. Aleister Crowley was a self-aggrandising occultist from a ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnc0_NdqF6E

The invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was initially met with skepticism

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Woodcut, circa 1400. A witch, a demon and a warlock fly toward a peasant woman

On a midsummer day in 1438, a young man from the north shore of Lake Geneva presented himself to the local church inquisitor.

He had a confession to make. Five years earlier, his father had forced him to join a satanic cult of witches. They had flown at night on a small black horse to join more than a hundred people gathered in a meadow.

The devil was there too, in the form of a black cat. The witches knelt before him, worshiped him and kissed his posterior.

The young man’s father had already been executed as a witch. It’s likely he was trying to secure a lighter punishment by voluntarily telling inquisitors what they wanted to hear.

The Middle Ages, A.D. 500-1500, have a reputation for both heartless cruelty and hopeless credulity.

People commonly believed in all kinds of magic, monsters and fairies. But it wasn’t until the 15th century that the idea of organized satanic witchcraft took hold.

Early medieval attitudes about witchcraft

Belief in witches, in the sense of wicked people performing harmful magic, had existed in Europe since before the Greeks and Romans.

In the early part of the Middle Ages, authorities were largely unconcerned about it

A church document from the early 10th century proclaimed that “sorcery and witchcraft” might be real, but the idea that groups of witches flew together with demons through the night was a delusion.

Things began to change in the 12th and 13th centuries, ironically because educated elites in Europe were becoming more sophisticated.

Henricus de Alemannia lecturing students at the University of Bologna in the second half of the 14th century – one of the earliest illustrations of a medieval university classroom.

Laurentius de Voltolina/Kupferstichkabinett Berlin

Universities were being founded, and scholars in Western Europe began to pore over ancient texts as well as learned writings from the Muslim world.

Some of these presented complex systems of magic that claimed to draw on astral forces or conjure powerful spirits. Gradually, these ideas began to gain intellectual clout.

Ordinary people – the kind who eventually got accused of being witches – didn’t perform elaborate rites from books.

They gathered herbs, brewed potions, maybe said a short spell, as they had for generations. And they did so for all sorts of reasons – perhaps to harm someone they disliked, but more often to heal or protect others.

Such practices were important in a world with only rudimentary forms of medical care.

Christian authorities had previously dismissed this kind of magic as empty superstition. Now they took all magic much more seriously.

They began to believe simple spells worked by summoning demons, which meant anyone who performed them secretly worshiped demons

In the 1430s, a small group of writers in Central Europe – church inquisitors, theologians, lay magistrates and even one historian – began to describe horrific assemblies where witches gathered and worshiped demons, had orgies, ate murdered babies and performed other abominable acts.

Whether any of these authors ever met each other is unclear, but they all described groups of witches supposedly active in a zone around the western Alps.

The reason for this development may have been purely practical. Church inquisitors, active against religious heretics since the 13th century, and some secular courts were looking to expand their jurisdictions.

Having a new and particularly horrible crime to prosecute might have struck them as useful

I just translated a number of these early texts for a forthcoming book and was struck by how worried the authors were about readers not believing them. One fretted that his accounts would be “disparaged” by those who “think themselves learned.” Another feared that “simple folk” would refuse to believe the “fragile sex” would engage in such terrible practices.

Trial records show it was a hard sell. Most people remained concerned with harmful magic – witches causing illness or withering crops. They didn’t much care about secret satanic gatherings.

The handbook for detecting and persecuting witches in the Middle Ages, ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ or ‘Hammer of Witches.’ Wellcome Images/Wikimedia

In 1486, clergyman Heinrich Kramer published the most widely circulated medieval text about organized witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches).

But many people didn’t believe him. When he tried to start a witch hunt in Innsbruck, Austria, he was kicked out by the local bishop, who accused him of being senile

The 15th century seems to have provided ideal soil for this new idea to take root

Europe was recovering from several crises:

plague, wars and a split in the church between two, and then three, competing popes. Beginning in the 1450s, the printing press made it easier for new ideas to spread.

Even prior to the Protestant Reformation, religious reform was in the air. As I explored in an earlier book, reformers used the idea of a diabolical conspiracy bent on corrupting Christianity as a boogeyman in their call for spiritual renewal.

Over time, more people came to accept this new idea. Church and state authorities kept telling them it was real. Still, many also kept relying on local “witches” for magical healing and protection.

The history of witchcraft can be quite grim. From the 1400s through the 1700s, authorities in Western Europe executed around 50,000 people for witchcraft.

Salem, in 1692, marked the end of witch hunts in New England. In Europe, too, skepticism would eventually prevail.

It’s worth remembering, though, that at the beginning, authorities had to work hard to convince others such malevolence was real.

https://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/693930217317842944