I'm a Satanic Pagan
Satanism saved my life. It answered my call for help when I felt alone.
Content warning; mention of religious trauma, child abuse, domestic abuse, self-harm, and rape, but nothing is described.
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It may have been obvious by now because of the content in my art and stories, as well as the spiritual company I keep, but after seeing others out and proud of their own left-hand paths, I didn’t want to be silent about mine any longer. We shouldn’t have to be silent.
I’m a Satanic Pagan. I hope my experience will show that it's not evil or anything like what horror movies portray. For me, it's changed my life for the better.
When I was a child, I went to Sunday school. I was baptized and sang loudly, embarrassingly, in the Christmas choir. I liked the Bible stories in the books my grandmother often got me. The writing in them was easier to digest for a kid and far more interesting with their watercolor illustrations.
Yet, deep down, I didn’t connect with any of it. A surface interest was as deep as it went, but I did have fear. I feared angering God would bring a horrible punishment down on me — as the church teaches — and that included openly straying away from what the Christian adults around me wanted me to be.
In the 90s when Marilyn Manson rose to fame on MTV, I was entranced. There was something about the darkness in his music that drew me to it, and it was comforting. It felt like home in a way I didn’t understand until I grew older. All I knew was that I didn’t care for the light. The light didn’t vibe with my depression or anxiety disorder, but the dark did. Listening to Christian music just felt like a brainwashing ritual because of its repetitive nature. ‘Love God,’ ‘God is good,’ ‘Jesus loves you,’ ‘He died for your sins’ can only be sung so many times in so many ways before it feels like a droning of indoctrination.
I craved depth. I wanted to understand and know the whole of humanity, not just a pretty, neatly organized picture that was created when wool was pulled over my eyes. I needed to know why people did the things they did, and that may have been because I needed to understand my own situation at home. I won’t get into too much detail with that, but my father wasn’t the kindest man and alcoholism drove him to do some unethical things.
I was always independent in thought and inquisitive of everything, which is a sin, isn’t it? To question God and see his faults is to bring down his wrath. Despite feeling disconnected, as a teenager, I tried one last time to ask for help from that side.
I’d found a home in Goth culture by then and had read an innumerable amount of horror stories. Horror movies were the only thing I wanted to watch, and I discovered music on VampireFreaks by London After Midnight, Gothminister, and Velvet Acid Christ. I came to love 80s Goth music like Christian Death. All of this made me happy and I felt like I belonged somewhere, and it led me to explore other dark subjects that my mother considered morbid.
I gained extensive knowledge on death and the science of it. I studied what it would take to be a mortician or a pathologist. I obsessed over medieval and ancient diseases, as well as the history of mortuaries and cemeteries. I wanted to go to school to work with the dead, and admittedly, when I had to make the unfortunate visit to a funeral home for a friend or family member, I found myself wishing I could spend more time there alone. I wanted to live in a funeral home or work there because there was something comforting and familiar about the Victorian décor. The somber quiet was serene and peaceful and so far away from the chaos that life was.
Despite being in love with the dark and exploring things taboo in Christian culture, I was still afraid of God. I was also going through one of the most traumatic events of my life that would result in my current diagnosis of PTSD. From the age of fourteen to seventeen, I dated a boy who hit me, raped me, cheated on me, and laughed at me when I self-harmed after he taught it to me. During that time, my father was also acting strangely in a way I won’t mention in detail, but it led to him taking me to speak with a family friend, the pastor of the local Baptist church.
At the time, I was not out yet as a trans masculine person, nor did I know I was trans. I was at the mercy of the sexism preached in the Bible as I walked into church in a black dress. I was told I would go to Hell for simply holding my boyfriend’s hand. I was the one who was wrong. My father was told he could be saved, and he received sympathy despite what he did — despite the mental and verbal abuse he subjected me to in the coming years, after being inappropriate, to put it mildly.
Although my father called upon the pastor to talk about where he went wrong, I felt like I'd been damned and my father had been saved.
I tried to call out to the angels in one last try. I didn’t know what else to do since I was alone and scared and surrounded by horrible things. I read somewhere on a ghost hunter’s website that I could leave a note for angels to respond to, and I followed the advice. I asked for my parents to stop fighting all the time. I asked for my boyfriend to stop abusing me because I was dedicated to him and didn’t want to break the promise I’d made to stay with him. I grew up watching my parents fight, yet they remained loyal to each other, so it was something I'd taken to heart.
No answer ever came. Just silence. No matter how hard I tried. I made my first suicide attempt soon after.
I then discovered Satanism. My first spirit guide, Darokin, started coming around more often then — when I was sixteen, I think. I came across him when I accidentally stumbled into automatic drawing and writing when I was half asleep in study hall.
After I woke up I defined the image some more, which you can see above, although it was heavily influenced by my love of Gothic culture at the time. I was half asleep, so the name wasn’t clear when it came to me. For a lot of years I just called him Daro, and he doesn’t look exactly like the drawing above, but it was a general yet unclear idea of him. Within the past five years, I finally learned his true name when I delved deeper into Demonology and found the name Darokin. Its Chaldean origin fits with how he appears, his tribal nature, and his dark skin.
Above is a recent drawing I did of him as he appears to me. I believe he was the first to answer my cries for help back then. He is calm, collected, and has taught me meditation and to find inner peace through it.
At the time, when I was a teenager, I wasn’t sure who he was to me. My drawings began to focus more on Satanic imagery and demons, and as I delved more into Satanism, something inside me felt like I’d finally found an answer. It wasn’t angels or God who helped me out of my metaphorical darkness, they never answered when I begged them for help. Their religion had left me with nothing but perpetual self-guilt.
I continued to explore Satanism, although I made mistakes along the way. I delved headfirst into contacting entities I was not prepared for, and I dabbled with ritual magick and other things I was ignorant about. I was so desperate to immerse myself fully in a spiritual path that had reached out to me and given me a safe place.
I became frustrated despite Darokin being with me, as well as another guide, Zagan Lestan, who I didn’t know was a spirit guide at the time (I’d first met him as just 'Lestan' when I was thirteen while drawing). I delved into Wicca in an attempt to fit what I had into something that was widely known, and I strayed from Satanism for a little while. It never truly felt right, however, and the way many Wiccan circles spoke about Satanism rubbed me the wrong way. They were a little too high and mighty about it, and it reminded me of the Christianity I'd left. Satanism wasn’t evil. I sure as hell wasn’t evil. Satanism had saved me.
In 2014, which was one of the worst years of my adult life, I contemplated suicide while injuring myself badly, and I ended up in a psychiatric hospital for a week. Darokin became a constant in my life again. He warned me that my true path was calling to me, and the longer I denied it and tried to fit into society out of fear of being rejected, the worse things would become. I accepted his guidance, and I pulled out the first Baphomet pentagram necklace I’d bought a few years before. When I placed it around my neck, I never went back. My life started to change in big ways a year later.
After meeting my third spirit guide, the fallen angel Byleth, in 2016, I deepened my knowledge of spiritual Satanism and discovered a wonderful resource, Philosophy for Theistic Satanists, to keep me grounded. Darokin was ecstatic that I’d finally decided to become more of a student with careful practice, and my growing collection of tarot cards I’d been using since I started in 2008 became an important tool in our meditations and private rituals.
I have learned many things from my guides, Darokin being a great source, specifically, of knowledge:
Everything happens for a reason. The universe does not give me challenges I cannot overcome.
I am an old soul. My life has become more difficult because of this, but it will only make me a stronger person once I complete this life’s challenges.
The dark is my home despite my lifelong fear of it. Within its shadows lurks wisdom that can only bring me strength.
Satanism saved my life. It answered my call for help when I felt alone. It made me a stronger person and taught me to value and stick up for myself. It accepted me as a queer trans person. I felt valid and welcome for who I was as a person in love with Goth culture and ancient forms of spirituality, like old polytheism.
So, I am a Satanic Pagan. I strive to do good and act with kindness in all that I do. I keep my spiritual practices to myself, unless I decide to write about them occasionally. I don’t care to recruit anyone or turn anyone away from their own beliefs. I respect you if you respect me.
This is where life has led me, spiritually speaking, and I feel whole when I'm surrounded by these energies. I'm thankful I was able to find my true calling.