7 - From Book to Bit: Enacting Satanism Online

Summary

Although overshadowed by pornography and file sharing, religion is a popular topic online, and increasingly so. As a consequence, the previously hard-to-get and difficult-to-see has blossomed as the virtual environment supports the easy transmission, archiving and recontextualization of texts and imagery. Even if the adoption of new technologies has not been even, all kinds of esotericism, occultism and alternative religiosity previously relegated to the margins as fringe pursuits are now exhibited and easily found alongside established offline religions through hyperlinks and search engines. With this propagation of information we lose a sense of relative comprehension, but we gain something else. In her research, Annette Markham has proposed two important ways in which the Internet and related computer-mediated communication technologies are viewed and used: as a tool for communication and as a virtual social space. Extending that notion and drawing on examples from contemporary religious Satanism, this chapter provides a discussion of new contexts for source material as well as new types of material on the Internet, both of which are highly relevant in the study of modern esotericism.

As a context, the new virtual space magnifies something that has been very difficult to see, let alone study, namely the fluid relations between free-floating material and the audiences and practitioners using it. The cacophony of online meaning-making actually supports established sociological models of occult affiliations and “rejected knowledge” as transmitted through a cultic milieu between seekers, originally formulated by Colin Campbell in the early 1970s.