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Satanism has traditionally been the inverse of Christianity. If Christianity condemns sexual promiscuity, Satanism is for it. If Christianity condemns buggery, Satanism is for it. If Christianity recites the Our Father forwards, Satanism recites it backwards. If in the Christian Mass the Eucharistic bread is white and circular, in the Black Mass it's black and triangular.
There is an element here of the playful rituals of many societies, such as the Roman Saturnalia or the medieval Lord of Misrule, in which for a short period the normal hierarchy of society is stood on its head. The initial attraction of Satanism is probably the intoxicating release of the repressed it appears to represent. Valerie Sinason suggests interestingly that many of today's Satanists are from fundamentalist religious backgrounds and, of course, Satanism is itself a fundamentalism: it does what in analytic language is called concrete thinking.
Once the first excitement is passed, Satanism turns into a relentless litany of compulsions, often of extraordinary viciousness. The need to avoid remorse (highly valued by Christians as by Kleinians) leads to extravagantly disgusting and cruel acts: one survivor, quoted here, describes how as a little girl she was hung up naked for two days ina sack full of creepie-crawlies; cult-members would periodically walk past and hit the sack, or poke things into it. ‘Typically,’ writes Mary Sue Moore,
children have hands and feet tied, may be gagged, are forced to watch dismemberment and beheadings of live animals, forced to eat or drink faeces or urine, often drugged and told they have had instruments ‘inserted into their body’ by surgery while drugged, are forced to watch or take part in the sexual and physical abuse of other children; often they are told by the robed or costumed adult perpetrators that they can be heard and observed by ‘Satan’ or the perpetrators anytime, anywhere, and that any attempt to tell outsiders will result in the torture and death of