Satanic Feminism sheds a new light on the early feminist movement. It discusses neglected or unknown aspects of the intellectual connections of early feminism with Satanism in a way that nobody before Faxneld has dared to do. In doing so, he richly illustrates how leading figures of the early feminist movement, such as the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the actress Sarah Bernhardt and the poet Renée Vivien, viewed God as the precursor of patriarchy and Satan as an ally in the fight against it.
Satan becomes a powerful ally in the struggle against a tyrannical patriarchy supported by God the Father and his Son.
The Women ’ s Bible amounts to a satanic inversion of the biblical account of the Fall. Stanton and her colleagues felt they had to deal with the patriarchal use of the story in Genesis 3. One way of doing so, which seems to have been rather widespread, was to turn the biblical narrative on its head, thus making Eve a heroine and the serpent benevolent. So Eve is eulogised in her consumption of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, and depicted in collusion with Satan as a liberator from her male counterpart. With a benevolent Satan, Eve’s actions in the Garden become laudable, and women are thus superior to men “for being the first to heed Satan’s advice”.
It’s quite astonishing how repetitive this pattern is throughout history. It’s all minor variations on the original theme of the serpent in the Garden telling women that God is holding them back.
Even the trilogy His Dark Materials repeats this trope. It might have seemed original to Philip Pullman, but he’s just another fable-teller in a long line of fable-tellers with the same deceptive story.
This merges with something I seem to keep encountering but haven’t quite had time to really sit and parse through it.
The idea of a wicked ideology always resulting in the aligning or identifying oneself with the enemy or the monster.
Last week I ran across an academic article discussing the subject of race in Beowulf, a ludicrous piece of work if ever there was one, essentially a hit piece on Tolkien and white men in general, but the conclusion was quite interesting. In her efforts to destroy ‘whitness’, to break free and liberate Beowulf studies from the clutches of old white men, she winds up concluding that Toni Morrison’s interpretation is the bees-knees. Of course that interpretation is sympathetic to Grendel and is read in such a way as to actually identify oneself with the monster.
This reminded me of the story that popped up not to long ago about an author who claimed The Lord of the Rings was racist because of Tolkien’s depiction of the orcs.
In all of these you find they want to, (need to?), identify with the evil characters/monsters, or even evil itself. (Dare I say we saw even a glimpse of this type of thing, maybe in reverse, from some of the social justice warriors on Twitter screeching about the forgiveness displayed by the man whose brother was shot and killed?)
This is the shape of Satan’s temptation of the Green Lady in Lewis’s Paralandra. She will become the Heroine, the Noble, Free Woman if she disobeys her Creator. She, of course, resists the temptation.
As Elisabeth Elliot said, “God put these two in a perfect place and—you know the rest of the story. Eve, in her refusal to accept the will of God, refused her femininity. Adam, in his capitulation to her suggestion, abdicated his masculine responsibility for her. It was the first instance of what we would recognize now as ‘role reversal.’ This defiant disobedience ruined the original pattern and things have been in an awful mess ever since.”