ABSTRACT
From among the many religious identities available today, there are a few people who chose to name themselves Satanists. In this paper, discussion of the activities and interests of such people is generated by the related facts that (a) their Satanism is a performance of alterity and (b) discourses about Satanism are generally revelatory of society’s obsessions. That is, both “insiders” and “outsiders” similarly construct “Satanic” identities even when their understandings are (or can be) quite different. Satan continues to be the archetypal “other” and “transgressor”. The precise form of transgression encouraged by such archetypes is, in turn, generative of passionate discourses from both self-identified Satanists and those claiming to know what Satanism “really is”.
