On the Subject of Child Sacrifice

A short story about demons

I want to get this out of the way right at the start: it’s not the demon worship I have a problem with. We all know we live in a nightmare world created by the false god Ialdabaoth who was unnaturally born from the Aeon Sophia when She impregnated Herself with seed from Her own rib bone, that angels, devils, and grigori alike are all equally wicked because they were born of Ialdaboath’s will, that true Goodness is impossible in the False God’s World and therefore any attempt to impose moral standards on others is both nonsensical and an infringement on their right to self-determination and Holy Rebellion, and that there’s no such thing as ethical behavior under demiurgic rule. I’m not disputing any of that.

But folks: could we maybe cut down on the child sacrifice?

You won’t want to hear this, but we have an image problem. I know, I know: respectability politics. By attempting to make our behavior conform to the demands of a wicked society, we both demean ourselves and implicitly reify the legitimacy of that society and its faulty moral standards. I’m not proposing anything crazy here like less self-mutilation or fewer bacchanalian orgies. Our souls may belong to incomprehensible entities from the dark corners of consciousness which language can’t reach, but until we die and receive our final reward, we all have the right to exercise bodily autonomy. I just think that performing so much child sacrifice, so openly, is likely to draw a serious backlash, and I’m not sure we’ve amassed the power to deal with that yet.

I mean, folks, there’s a reason we did our best to hide our worship from the rest of society for most of history. It’s not the dawn of agriculture anymore; we can’t just put altars to Moloch in public squares. American society is made up mostly of cultural Christians, materialists, and normie religionists. There are a lot more of them than there are of us, and wishful thinking won’t change that. We can’t even organize ourselves into a unified front! It’s all competing cults and splinter groups, every one taking the public position that at least half the others are irredeemably wrong and bad people besides. How many different sects are there worshipping one aspect or another of Satan, and how many of those get along? And we think we can take on the secular humanist establishment? Give me a break.

Take the news stories coming out of Arizona. I know the media will jump on any chance to smear us as bloodthirsty perverts, but you have to admit it doesn’t look good. A man was cutting off the body parts of other people’s children and hurling them onto a burning pyre in a public park where anyone could see. Folks, I understand how this might feel like a victory. For so long, demon worshippers couldn’t even amputate their own children’s body parts in the privacy of their own homes without the Demiurge’s footsoldiers throwing us in jail for our beliefs. But we don’t live in those dark times anymore, and we should take that for the victory it is instead of trying to push our luck. Real positive change is incremental.

Ten years from now, I don’t want us regretting the decisions we made. I want it to be a little better than it is today, and in twenty years a little better still. And maybe, a hundred years from now, this world will be a burning irradiated husk where warlocks kept alive beyond the will of nature by eldritch magicks can sacrifice as many children as they please.

But the only way that’ll ever happen is if we’re smart about this.

From John Ashton’s The Devil in Britain and America, 1896