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Satanism, any of various religious or countercultural practices and movements centred on the figure of Satan, the Devil, regarded in Christianity and Judaism as the embodiment of absolute evil. Historical Satanism, also called devil worship, consists of belief in and worship of the Judeo-Christian Devil and the explicit rejection of his antithesis, God, and (in Christianity) God’s Incarnation, Jesus Christ. It was traditionally based on the “black mass,” a corrupted rendition of the Christian Eucharist, and ritual , magic evocations of Satan. Some more-recent forms of spiritual or theistic Satanism recognize Satan as an independent non-Judeo-Christian deity. Other modern Satanic movements, including the U.S.-based Church of Satan (founded 1966), celebrate Satan not as a god but as a symbol of supposedly anti-Christian moral values or as a pre-Christian life principle. Such movements may be atheistic, agnostic, or deistic. They do not promote or practice evil in any literal sense but may profess extreme forms of individualism and ethical egoism and may reject traditional Abrahamic religions, particularly Christianity, as hypocritical and repressive.

Historical Satanic cults have been documented in Europe and North America as far back as the 17th century, but their earlier roots are difficult to trace, just as the number of such Satanists in any period is frequently overestimated. Roman Catholic churchmen readily attributed Satanism to “witches” and to such heretics as the gnostics, Cathari, and Bogomils, but that charge does not correspond to the heretics’ own understanding of their beliefs, and the alleged Satanism of those persecuted in the heyday of witch burning may rest on no better foundation than the overheated imagination of witch finders and confessions obtained by torture (see Salem witch trials). Modern witchcraft and Neo-Paganism are not to be confused with historical Satanism, since those groups worship non-Judeo-Christian deities. Historical Satanism, as devotion to the Judeo-Christian source of evil, can exist only in symbiosis with that tradition, for it shares but inverts its worldview.

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