“The Satanic Scriptures” is a phrase that can refer both to a specific modern book and to a much wider, imagined body of writings about Satan. This ambiguity is important. Unlike Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or many other religions, Satanism does not possess a single ancient canon accepted across all its forms. There is no universally recognised “Satanic Bible” in the same sense that there is a Christian Bible or a Qur’an.
Yet Satan has generated a vast library. Biblical passages, rabbinic commentary, apocrypha, medieval legends, poetry, magical manuals, anti-clerical philosophy, occult manifestos, and modern Satanist writings have all contributed to the figure’s changing meaning. Taken together, these texts do not offer one stable Satan. They reveal many: adversary, accuser, tempter, fallen angel, rebel, liberator, symbol of the natural self, and—in some theistic traditions—a real spiritual being.
Peter H. Gilmore’s The Satanic Scriptures is one of the most prominent modern books to bear this title. Published in 2007 by Scapegoat Publishing and written by the High Priest of the Church of Satan, it presents essays articulating the philosophy of LaVeyan Satanism. It is not scripture in the traditional sense of divinely revealed law. Its title is deliberately provocative, using the language of sacred authority while advancing a fiercely secular, individualist worldview.
Understanding The Satanic Scriptures therefore requires two kinds of reading: attention to Gilmore’s particular text, and awareness of the much older scriptural and literary traditions from which the name “Satan” emerged.
Satan Before “Satanism”
The English word Satan comes from the Hebrew [Hebrew text not rendered in source], meaning an adversary, opponent, or accuser. In the oldest Hebrew biblical uses, it was often a role rather than a personal name. A satan could simply be an opponent in an earthly dispute. In the Book of Numbers, for example, an angel of God stands in Balaam’s path “as an adversary” (satan) to him.
The figure becomes more distinctive in the Book of Job. There, “the satan” appears among the heavenly beings before God. He is not presented as God’s equal or as the ruler of an opposing kingdom. He functions more like a prosecuting attorney in a divine court, challenging Job’s integrity and asking whether Job’s faithfulness survives suffering. The story is morally difficult, but its Satan is still subordinate to God.
Later Jewish and Christian writings increasingly developed Satan into a cosmic opponent. The Book of Zechariah depicts Satan accusing the high priest Joshua before God. The First Book of Chronicles attributes David’s census to Satan, where the parallel account in 2 Samuel attributes it to God. Such shifts suggest a growing tendency to distinguish the source of temptation or calamity from God’s direct will.
By the first centuries of the Common Era, Jewish apocalyptic literature had greatly expanded the landscape of evil spirits, rebellious angels, and heavenly conflict. Texts such as 1 Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and writings associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls describe spiritual adversaries in more elaborate terms. Not all of these texts identify their antagonists with Satan, but they provided imagery later Christian tradition would gather around the Devil.
The Christian New Testament intensifies this development. Satan becomes the tempter of Jesus, the enemy who sows weeds among wheat, the ruler of demons, and the “god of this world” in some Pauline language. The Book of Revelation presents the “great dragon” or “ancient serpent” as “the Devil and Satan,” linking several older hostile figures into one grand adversary. Christianity then fused these passages with Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28—texts originally addressing earthly rulers—to form the influential story of Lucifer, a proud angel cast from heaven.
This later tradition is familiar, but it should not be mistaken for a simple biblical narrative. The fully formed image of Satan as Lucifer, commander of hell and enemy of God, is a composite created over centuries through interpretation, preaching, art, and literature.
Scripture, Interpretation, and the Problem of Authority
The phrase “Satanic scriptures” invites a central question: scripture for whom?
For Jews and Christians, Satan appears within their own sacred and interpretive traditions. He is not the recipient of a separate ancient Satanic canon. Biblical passages about Satan belong to Jewish and Christian scripture, and their meaning is shaped by Jewish and Christian theology.
For Muslims, the related figure is Iblis, also called al-Shay[Hebrew text not rendered in source], “the Satan.” In the Qur’an, Iblis refuses God’s command to bow before Adam. His disobedience is rooted in pride: he claims superiority because he was created from fire while Adam was created from clay. Iblis is granted a reprieve until the Day of Judgment and vows to mislead humanity, though he has no coercive power over those who remain faithful. The Qur’anic Satan is a tempter and deceiver, but never a rival god. God’s sovereignty remains absolute.
For modern Satanists, scripture has a different status. Some theistic Satanists may treat personal revelations, ritual texts, or works of esoteric philosophy as spiritually meaningful. Others, especially within the Church of Satan, reject supernatural revelation entirely. In that context, a “scripture” is not an infallible message from beyond. It is a work of philosophy, rhetoric, mythmaking, and cultural self-definition.
This distinction matters because the label “Satanic” has often been applied by outsiders as an accusation. Medieval heresy trials, early modern witchcraft prosecutions, nineteenth-century anti-occult polemics, and twentieth-century moral panics all imagined secret Satanic books and inverted rituals. Much of this alleged literature never existed. It was produced by fear, sensationalism, or the desire to identify an enemy.
A responsible reading separates historical Satanist texts from fantasies projected onto supposedly hidden cults.
The Satanic Scriptures by Peter H. Gilmore
Peter H. Gilmore’s The Satanic Scriptures belongs to the tradition established by Anton Szandor LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan in 1966. LaVey’s The Satanic Bible (1969) remains the best-known text of this movement. Gilmore’s book, published decades later, develops and defends the same broad philosophy while responding to social and political questions that had become more prominent by the early twenty-first century.
The volume is a collection of essays rather than a continuous theological treatise. Its subjects include Satanism’s public identity, religious freedom, censorship, artistic expression, ritual, family life, sexuality, death, animal nature, and the relationship between Satanism and other forms of occultism. The prose is polemical by design: it seeks to draw boundaries, correct misconceptions, and articulate a worldview that regards compromise with prevailing moral fashions as a form of weakness.
Gilmore’s Satan is not a literal horned being who demands worship. He is a symbol of independence, pride, carnal existence, skepticism, and resistance to unearned authority. In the Church of Satan’s terminology, Satan represents “the adversary”: the force that questions piety, challenges conformity, and affirms the individual’s right to pursue a self-directed life.
This symbolic use does not make Satanism merely a joke or costume. For LaVeyan Satanists, symbolism is valuable precisely because human beings are responsive to image, ceremony, drama, and myth. They argue that ritual can serve psychological and emotional purposes without requiring belief in supernatural intervention. A ritual chamber, a black robe, a sigil, or the name Satan can become tools for focus and self-transformation rather than objects of worship.
A Materialist and Individualist Philosophy
At the centre of Gilmore’s The Satanic Scriptures is a materialist understanding of human life. The book rejects the idea that the body is a prison for an immortal soul, that suffering is inherently ennobling, or that self-denial is the highest moral achievement. It insists that human beings are animals: complex, social, imaginative, and capable of both generosity and cruelty.
This naturalistic view leads to several recurring themes.
Self-Interest and Personal Responsibility
LaVeyan Satanism is often summarised as selfishness, but this can be misleading if “selfishness” is understood as casual cruelty or indifference to consequences. Gilmore’s emphasis is on rational self-interest: knowing one’s values, protecting one’s time and energy, pursuing excellence, and accepting responsibility for one’s choices.
The individual is not asked to love all people equally. Friendship, loyalty, affection, and generosity are regarded as meaningful when they are freely earned and sincerely felt. The book is sharply critical of compulsory altruism—the demand that everyone sacrifice themselves indiscriminately for abstract humanity.
This position can sound severe, and it is intended to challenge moral habits rooted in guilt. At the same time, it raises enduring questions. How should a society protect those who are vulnerable? What obligations arise from interdependence, family, disability, or unequal opportunity? A critical reader may find that Gilmore’s rhetoric of merit and personal sovereignty does not always resolve these questions. Its importance lies partly in forcing them into view.
Opposition to Supernaturalism
Gilmore’s Satanism is atheistic. It does not affirm devils, angels, gods, ghosts, or an afterlife as literal entities. Satan is treated as a poetic and philosophical emblem, not an external intelligence.
This places the Church of Satan in a category distinct from theistic Satanism, Luciferian devotional practice, demonolatry, and many forms of contemporary occultism. These communities may honour Satan, Lucifer, Set, Lilith, or related figures as real beings, archetypal powers, or spiritual presences. Their beliefs are diverse and should not be collapsed into LaVeyan Satanism.
Gilmore’s rejection of supernaturalism also informs his criticism of magical claims. While the Church of Satan has retained ritual language and speaks of “greater magic” in a theatrical, psychodramatic sense, its official position does not require belief in paranormal forces. Ritual is understood as a controlled setting in which emotion may be expressed, examined, and released.
Elitism and Human Difference
One of the most controversial elements of The Satanic Scriptures is its defence of elitism. Gilmore rejects the claim that all people are equal in ability, achievement, taste, or character. He argues that societies benefit when excellence is recognised rather than concealed beneath a demand for sameness.
There is an important distinction, however, between equality of dignity and equality of outcome or talent. Modern democratic ethics generally holds that every person deserves legal protection and basic respect, even though individuals differ enormously in their capacities and circumstances. Gilmore’s writing deliberately presses against egalitarian language, sometimes in ways that readers will find bracing and sometimes in ways they will find troubling.
The book is best read neither as a neutral social-scientific account nor as a programme for public policy. It is an ideological statement. Its central concern is the individual who refuses to apologise for ambition, competence, pleasure, or discernment.
Satan as Literary Ancestor
Although Gilmore’s book is modern, its Satan belongs to a long literary lineage. John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) was especially influential in transforming Satan into a figure of immense rhetorical power. Milton intended Satan as a warning against pride and rebellion, yet readers have repeatedly been drawn to his defiance, energy, and refusal to submit.
William Blake famously remarked that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Blake’s own visionary works reimagined biblical oppositions, treating conventional morality with suspicion and associating oppressive law with spiritual imprisonment. In the nineteenth century, Romantic writers such as Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley further cultivated the image of the proud outcast and rebellious genius.
These literary Satans are not always religious objects. They are imaginative figures through whom writers explored freedom, tyranny, desire, alienation, and the cost of defiance. Modern Satanism inherits this symbolic inheritance as much as it inherits theology.
The Satanist who invokes Satan as a liberating image is therefore often engaging not only with the Bible but also with Milton, Blake, Romanticism, Nietzschean critiques of morality, and modern secular individualism.
Reading Without Sensationalism
Satanic texts are frequently approached through alarm or fascination. Both responses can obscure what is actually on the page.
The Satanic Scriptures does not reveal a hidden conspiracy, prescribe criminal conduct, or offer evidence of supernatural power. It is a public philosophical work, written to define a particular form of atheistic Satanism. Its language can be confrontational, but confrontation is part of its rhetorical method. The reader is meant to feel the friction between conventional moral expectations and Satanism’s unapologetic valuation of self-possession.
It is equally important not to treat Gilmore’s work as representative of all Satanists. Contemporary Satanism includes organisations and individuals with radically different commitments. The Satanic
Temple, for example, uses Satan as a symbol of bodily autonomy, pluralism, and resistance to religious privilege, while explicitly grounding its ethical principles in compassion and justice. Theistic Satanists may approach Satan through devotion, ritual relationship, or esoteric cosmology. Independent practitioners may reject all institutions.
The plural in “scriptures” is therefore fitting. There are many Satanic voices, and they disagree about nearly everything except the enduring power of the adversary as a symbol.
The Continuing Meaning of the Adversary
The Satanic figure persists because it poses a question that cannot easily be settled: when is rebellion destructive, and when is it necessary?
Religious traditions often answer by warning that pride separates the creature from the good. Satan becomes the image of self-will turned against truth, love, and humility. Satanist traditions reverse the symbolism. They ask whether obedience can become servility, whether humility can disguise fear, and whether inherited morality sometimes protects power rather than justice.
Neither question can be dismissed lightly. The image of Satan endures not because it offers a simple licence for wrongdoing, but because it dramatises the tension between authority and conscience, restraint and desire, belonging and autonomy.
In The Satanic Scriptures, Peter H. Gilmore gives that tension a distinctly modern, secular form. His Satan is not the fallen angel of medieval imagination. He is the emblem of the self that refuses to kneel before gods, crowds, or moral abstractions. Whether one agrees with that vision or rejects it, the book deserves to be read as a serious contribution to the modern history of religion, dissent, and the enduring mythology of the adversary.
Selected Sources
• The Hebrew Bible: Job 1–2; Zechariah 3:1–2; 1 Chronicles 21:1; Isaiah 14:12–15; Ezekiel 28:11–19.
• The New Testament: Matthew 4:1–11; Luke 10:18; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Revelation 12:7–12.
• The Qur’an: 2:34; 7:11–18; 15:26–43; 17:61–65; 38:71–85.
• Gilmore, Peter H. The Satanic Scriptures. Scapegoat Publishing, 2007.
• LaVey, Anton Szandor. The Satanic Bible. Avon Books, 1969.
• Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1667.
• Medway, Gareth J. The Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism. New York University Press, 2001.