Satanic Feminism Part Four
“A woman shall not wear a man's
garment, nor shall a man put on a woman's cloak, for whoever does these things
is an abomination to the Lord your God.”
Deuteronomy 22:5
There is an
interesting insanity that is happening in the feminist movement at the moment.
A battle for supremacy. Who are the combatants? Women stand in one corner, and who
stands in the other corner? Men dressed like women. A remarkable situation, and
one that is confusing to many people.
Gender
politics has for some time now focused on those who were perceived to be the
most marginalized, and that is no longer women, or even women of colour, it is
men who want to identify as women. This has caused a chasm in the feminist
identity politics movement, because now men are claiming women’s rights, but
doing it as “women”. Should women recognize these men’s claims to the rights of
being protected women? Or should they balk at the idea of having to share
women’s spaces and women’s issues with people born with penises? Where should
feminism draw the line here?
This issue
has been made famous by the recent approval of Kentanji Brown Jackson to the
supreme court of the United States, who gave a remarkable answer to what should
be a simple question. She claimed that she could not define what a woman was,
because she was “not a biologist.”[1]
This is clearly absurd, even my 4 year old daughter could answer this in a
moment. But this is the quandary that intersectional feminism and large
portions of the left, now finds themselves in.
This same
circus was repeated in an Australian Senate Estimates hearing. One Australian
Senator asked, “Can someone please provide me with a definition of what a woman
is?”[2]
To which was responded,
“‘I think there are a variety of definitions and I think
perhaps to give a more fulsome answer we should take that on notice,’ the
Secretary said. The Liberal Senator interrupted to explain he was after a ‘simple’
definition, to which Dr Murphy said, ‘there are a variety’. ‘It’s a very
contested space at the moment,’ Dr Murphy said.”[3]
A very
contested space? Again, this is absurd. But people are confused why progressives
who have pushed women’s issues for so long are now buckling under transgender activism,
and are giving up on being able to define the women they always said they were
advocating for. Was feminism not about lifting women up from the beginning? How
did it become about denying or erasing their existence? Well, you might be
surprised to hear the answer to this question.
You will
often hear certain evangelicals claim that feminism was a biblically inspired movement.
I debunk that claim here in some detail. The early
“evangelical” feminists had no time for the Bible’s teachings on gender. But
what I want to show in this piece is something many people are just not aware
of at all. That transgenderism was an integral part of the feminist movement
from the beginning. I will conclusively prove this historically in a moment,
but first observe what the word transgenderism itself means: “a state or
condition in which a person's identity does not conform unambiguously to
conventional ideas of male or female gender.”[4]
In other words it means to transgress all gender boundaries.
Trans
activists generally acknowledge that sex differences exist in biological
realities, but they assert that gender is a state of identity, or how you feel
about your gender representation. You may be biologically male, but
psychologically female or vice versa. In essence the trans activist wants to
smash gender boundaries, which is precisely what the feminist claims as well.
Feminists generally refer to this as the “glass ceiling” and it is the concept
that wherever men have gone women can, should and will go there as well – if
about 150 years after the men…
So, if
feminists also want to transgress gender boundaries, is there a more explicit connection
between the origins of the feminist movement and transgender ideas? Yes, there
most certainly is, and Per Faxneld has documented this in his important work, Satanic
Feminism: Lucifer as Liberator of Woman in Nineteenth-Century Literature.[5]
I have
documented in earlier pieces (such as here) the inherent connections between
Luciferian ideas and early feminism, so we do not need to re-prosecute that whole
argument here. It is enough to note that proto-feminists and early feminists
reinterpreted the actions of the Devil in Genesis 3. Rather than viewing the Serpent
as deceiving the woman who then gave the fruit to her husband, they
reinterpreted this event as liberating the woman from her “bondage” to man and
God, i.e. the “patriarchy”. This is where the concept of overturning the
patriarchy comes from. But what is important for our current piece is that this
means the early feminists presented Lucifer, or the Devil, as their liberator rather
than as their enemy. Now it is a truism of Christian theology that people will
be conformed to the image of the gods they worship and adhere to. So, what is
the image of the Devil?
Conceptually,
people think of the Devil as masculine. He is the ultimate “bad guy”, double emphasis
on the “bad” and the “guy”. Traditionally theologians have largely
conceptualized the Devil as a man, or manlike figure, and denoted him with the
masculine pronoun, ‘he’.[6]
However, as Faxneld notes, not all have agreed with this summation. As the Devil
is an angel, this means he does not conform to the gender norms that men and
women are formed in. Christian theological tradition does not require that the
Devil conforms to a particular sex, indeed it was recognized that demons could
take the forms of any gender as they chose.[7]
Anyone who
has read the ancient Greek tales will be familiar with the way that the Greek
deities could change gender at will, often using this to trick their victims
and even at times the heroes of the tale. Minerva in Homer’s Odyssey is one
example, but Odin was known to do the same thing, and many others. In fact, it
was a consistent theme throughout the pagan pantheons to have gods transgressing
all boundaries, including gender boundaries.
From a
Christian perspective these beings were neither fake, nor gods. They were a
combination of legends and people’s encounters with demonic beings. It is easy
to understand why the early Church, and many in the Medieval Church, viewed
Satan neither as male nor female, but as a boundary transgressing being, who
took on the form that was useful in the moment.
In many
medieval and early modern representations of the Devil he is shown to be an “hermaphrodite
monster”. Demons were viewed as ontologically unstable creatures that crossed
gender and species boundaries. “Gender-bending would then be another sign of the
liminal and blasphemously category-defying nature of Lucifer and his demons
(figures 2.2 and 2.3).”[8]
Faxneld shares with us some abominable examples of how the early modern artists
visualized the Devil in figures 1 and 2.
From Satanic Feminism, Per Faxneld (fig.
1 left, fig. 2 right)[9]
As you can
see, it was common for the Devil, and demons, to be visualized as inherently
unstable beings that conformed not only to no gender boundaries, but no natural
boundaries either. The devil is the ultimate boundary breaking entity, which is
really a good description of evil itself. Evil intent consists in the desire
and intention to transgress the boundaries laid out by God himself. Indeed, one
of the words for sin in the Bible is transgression, which literally means to
transgress the boundaries of what the Lord says is good. Evil inherently
transgresses all of God’s good boundaries.
But not only
was the Devil represented by such boundary transgressing beings, he was also conceptualized
or represented as a woman, or a serpent-woman. For instance, in one Christian
work “Livre pour l’enseignement de ses filles (‘Book for the Education
of his Daughters’, 1371–1372), the author,
“…Geoffrey attempts to instil in his daughters the lesson
that women should defer to fathers and husbands in anything but domestic
matters and makes his point by retelling how Eve broke this rule when she
conversed with the serpent, ‘whiche as the Hystorye sayth hadde a face ryght
fayre lyke the face of a woman’.”[10]
It may be
strange for us to conceptualize a feminine Satan, because it is more common to
view him as masculine, but this was a consistent image throughout Church
history.
“…A more straightforwardly female Satan can be seen in the
actually very common depictions of the snake in the Garden of Eden with a
woman’s head on its serpentine body and sometimes also the breasts of a woman…Exactly
when the notion of a female snake was established is difficult to say, but the
earliest translation of the Bible into Latin rendered the word as
serpens—feminine gender.”[11]
Indeed,
according to J. B. Trapp “it was the most frequent way of representing the
Edenic serpent from the late twelfth century until the late sixteenth century,
when the human features of the creature disappear and it becomes, once more,
only reptilian.”[12] This
is interesting that the devil would be represented by feminine imagery, but
again, note, the Devil is not a man nor a woman, Satan is a fallen spiritual
being. The Devil is inherently in a different category. Even if you want to
argue the Scriptures lean towards presenting him as male figure, note, the view
that he transgressed all boundaries is inherent in his rebellion against God’s
good boundaries and in his role as ‘The Evil One’.
The most
famous image representing the Devil’s transgender nature is the Baphomet (figure
3).
From Faxneld (fig. 3)[13]
Baphomet is
a hermaphrodite figure, and one of the most recognized symbols of Satan in the
last century or so. Baphomet was first visually conceptualized by French
occultist Éliphas Lévi “in his book Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (‘Dogma
and Ritual of the High Magic’, 1855) and elsewhere.”[14]
Note, we are
not seeking here to establish precisely how Scripture describes the gender of
the Devil. The point is to establish that a lot of historical Christian
theology viewed the Devil as a being that transgresses all boundaries, and
early feminists were inspired by this and took this idea and ran with it. They
turned this transgender being into a liberator of women:
“Nineteenth-century feminists often felt they somehow had to
deal with male chauvinists’ use of the story in Genesis 3. One way of doing so,
which seems to have been quite widespread, was to turn the tale on its head,
making Eve a heroine and the serpent benevolent.”[15]
The founding
emphasis of feminism was rebellion against the long-established gender
boundaries taught by the Scriptures and applied to Western society. No one
really denies this, either, but most people are not aware of the full
implications of these Biblical ideas. They do not understand how rejecting them
unleashes Satanic forces on society.
From very
early on proto-feminists and early feminists sought to break the gender
boundaries of how women should be viewed in fiction or in public. An example of
this is the son-in-law of the first feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft,
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). In his Revolt of Islam, which was
dedicated to his wife Mary Shelley,[16]
the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Shelley incorporates
both Wollstonecraft’s feminist and Godwin’s Satanic ideas, to present to the
world a gender boundary breaking hero, Cyntha.[17]
The poem is
filled with obvious Satanic imagery. The first part of the poem relates the
tale of a woman giving aid to a fallen serpent referred to as the Morning Star,
which was cast to the ground after being defeated by an eagle that represents
what the people see as the ‘good God’. In Shelley’s story the ‘good God’ is the
true arch enemy,
“This Fiend is the creator of death, earthquake, blight, and
so on. His enemy the serpent is the benefactor of mankind and the enemy of all
oppressors. When he once again resumes his combat with “God”, thrones will
shake and ‘earth’s immense and trampled multitude’ will begin to realize its
own power.”[18]
The serpent
is the liberator in Shelley’s account. The women allies herself closely with
this serpent, this “friend of the oppressed”. The next part of the poem
recounts the tale of Cyntha and her brother. Cyntha’s story in some ways
parallels the serpent’s. She
“…is the earthly messenger of Satan the liberator. This messenger
propagates feminist ideas and defies gender roles. Cythna leads the final
insurrection against the tyrant Sultan who is the villain of the tale, which is
a quite remarkable role for a woman to be allowed to play.”[19]
Shelley
presents Cyntha in the dominant role as leader in the rebellion against the
patriarchal society. She, along with her brother, are both defeated and burned
at the stake.[20]
Yet her hope is that she will inspire other women to take up the call and take
on the patriarchy themselves. Faxneld notes that Islam in this passage is
symbolic of Christian society, which was a common technique in this era. John
Locke does something similar in his Letter Concerning Toleration.
Shelley’s
intentions are clear. In The Revolt of Isalm Shelley was attempting to
create a feminist counter-narrative myth to demonstrate ideological opposition
to the dominant Christian view of gender roles.”[21]
Shelley’s goal, as an advocate of feminism, like his parents-in-law, is to frame
God and the patriarchy ordained by God, as the force of oppression, and encourage
women to ‘realize’ that they can smash all gender boundaries.
“Shelley’s revolutionary Satanism is combined with what can,
without much hesitation, be described as a feminist ideal. This is further
reflected, for example, in how Cythna takes on a role coded as masculine, when
she comes charging on a black steed, sword in hand, to rescue her brother.
Shelley held a utopian vision that gender differences, ‘detestable
distinctions’, as he called them in a letter, would ‘surely be abolished in a
future state of being’.”[22]
‘Detestable
distinctions’? Shelley’s open and explicit goal is of a future feminist society
where gender distinctions are seen as evil and are abolished completely. Sound
familiar? It’s not an accident that this was inspired out of Luciferian ideas,
because as we saw both Christian theologians and early feminists saw Satan as a
gender bending being.
Christians
often try to argue that the move for equality in society was the result of biblical
influence. However, one thing is certain, the Scriptures do not teach equality
(cf. read more here). Critics of the Bible see this
clearly, including Faxneld, and feminists,
“The topic of women’s status within the early church has been
debated for a long time. Looking at scripture itself, it is easy to find
several passages that give strong support to the subordination of women, such
as the aforementioned 1 Timothy (2:11–15) but also Titus 2:3–5, Ephesians
5:22–33, Colossians 3:18, and 1 Corinthians 14:34–36. Phrasings like ‘Wives,
submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord’ (Eph. 5:22), and
the ways in which they have been used to serve patriarchal ends, make it easy
to see why some feminists would later view God as the protector of patriarchy
(and, occasionally, Satan as an ally in the fight against it).”[23]
The Bible is
clearly patriarchal, that is, supporting of leadership by men and it rejects
the pretentions of equality. Because of this, feminist approaches to Scripture
have flicked between rejecting it outright, rejecting it as modified, and in
modern “evangelical” circles, explaining it away as culturally outdated, irrelevant
or superseded. Shelley, and other Satanic Feminists, sought to subvert it, and
reclaim passages like Genesis 3 to align the Devil with woman as her liberator.
The poem Revolt
of Islam was not successful at first, but it eventually had a wide impact,
when sold in collections of Shelley’s works,
“Brown labels The Revolt of Islam ‘the most powerful feminist
poem in the language’ and the second ‘most thoroughly grounded in the realities
of the woman question’, being ‘focused … squarely on the efforts of the subject
sex to cast off the chains of male supremacy’. The Victorian poet and feminist
Mathilde Blind (1841–1896) agreed, excitedly describing Cythna as ‘a new female
type’ with no previous parallels in literature.”[24]
When
feminists tell you where their real inspiration came from, take note. A
fighting woman was not completely unknown to Westerners, of course, but
Shelley’s use of this imagery, was novel. To deliberately stir up woman to turn
against the patriarchy.
Illustration from the 1904 edition of Shelly’s work, from
Faxneld’s work (fig. 4)
[25]
Cyntha is not radical in our modern world, but she was in Shelley’s,
and really, she was not that long ago as well. The idea of a female soldier
charging the enemy lines, back then, was laughable. It still should be today. But
the goal of feminism from the beginning was to subvert gender norms and
boundaries, and so this is what feminists did. This is the core of feminism,
that all gender boundaries are shackles to be cast off. Feminism IS transgenderism.
Another
early feminist icon that also exhibited this gender bending characteristic and
had significant influence on the feminist movement was Sarah Bernhardt. She was
a French actress in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, and while you have likely not heard of her, at the time she was
incredibly well known and influential. She was unparalleled in her ability and
genius for publicity in her era (1844-1923).[26]
Bernhardt is therefore the most well-known of all the individuals discussed in
Faxneld’s studies on Satanic Feminism.[27]
Among the many in this era that made an artform of flirting with the demonic,
she was the most significant and influential.[28]
Bernhardt
was financially independent in her own right, and therefore did not need to
submit to traditional gender roles, or what Faxneld calls “oppressive
patriarchal structures.”[29]
Bernhardt would flick between whatever representation of gender was deemed
useful to her in the moment. “…it is crucial to stress that she always
projected multiple personae, appearing not only as a self-governing
transgressive bohemian but at times also as a soft womanly woman who retained
various traditionally feminine virtues.”[30]
However, her overarching personage was that of a woman who made her own gender
rules. She was a gender transgressor.
She never
actually expressed vocal support of the women’s rights movement, but rather set
herself up as a model of their agenda.
“…much of her behaviour was clearly disruptive of gender
roles: wearing men’s clothes on and off the stage (though it was far from
unheard of for actresses to play male parts, Bernhardt did so more often than
most) and participating in activities considered somewhat controversial for women,
all associated with la nouvelle femme, such as tennis, bicycling, and hot air
ballooning.”[31]
She lived an
incredibly rebellious lifestyle that was deliberately immoral and
transgressive, openly being a single mum, open adultery, flaunting her nudity
in her youth. In other words, “her credentials as a subversive rule-breaker
were…impeccable.”[32]
While some
of her activities would be seen as rather benign today, they were utterly scandalous
in her time. In fact, the difference between how she would be viewed today and
how she was viewed back then, is the point of this article, and this series on
Satanic Feminism. Femininity today looks more like Sarah Bernhardt than Mary
the mother of Jesus. One of these women is the height of impurity, the other
the model of modesty and purity. If your response is: Matt, none of what she
did is that big of a deal. I respond, yep, as I have said we live in a culture
more influenced by Satanism than Christianity. Christendom was stolen and we now
live in Satandom.
While
Bernhardt was focused on expressing her individual gender expressions as she
saw fit, and not engaging in explicit political activism, “…we need to bear in
mind that the extremely public performance of this project naturally also had
political implications and effects.”[33]
And what sort of political message was she sending with her persona? According
to Mary Louise Roberts she was instrumental in “causing a shift in gender roles
by setting a transgressive example…” The whole characteristic of her public
persona was that of a transgender activist. This was not just implicit either.
“Bernhardt and her peers played with gender norms by shifting
back and forth between conventional and unconventional roles and behaviour.
This, it has been claimed, made other women seek inspiration in her persona for
their own struggle for freedom. It is notable, for instance, that feminists
frequently idolized Bernhardt, with feminist newspaper La Fronde glowingly
describing her in 1897 as a ‘queen’ and ‘priestess outside the temple’.
Parisian lesbians also used her as a role model when forging subversive sexual
identities. In particular, they mimicked her cross-dressing roles.”[34]
Presenting
transgressive women representing themselves as men in the public sphere was a
common tactic of the early feminist movement. Because their goal was always to
break all gender boundaries. This is what feminism means, in its truest,
historical definition: gender boundaries are arbitrary and all of them must go.
And is anything really different today? Are there any gender boundaries which
modern feminist movements hold sacred?
So, we can
see conclusively that the stoush between feminists and transgender activists
today is not a corruption of the feminist movement, or really something alien
to the feminist movement. It is simply the unavoidable logical extension of the
original goals of feminism, and it’s really not even new, it was there at the
beginning. As we saw “…Shelley held a utopian vision that gender differences,
‘detestable distinctions’, as he called them in a letter, would ‘surely be abolished
in a future state of being’.”
“The choice of diabolical imagery for these identity
games—which at times engulfed the everyday life led by the individuals in
question—reveals what the taboos and limits the women consciously transgressed
and mocked were tied up with: conservative Christian values. Embracing demons,
Satanic serpent motifs, and the horrific could hence function as a way of
criticizing such values and rejecting them on a symbolic level. In other words,
demonism was one of the registers of symbolic resistance available for
rebellious women to draw on.”[35]
A
philosopher might say that underneath the claims of feminists lies the
ideological foundations for the destruction of all gender boundaries and ideas.
They would be correct. But as I am a Pastor and I mainly write from the
perspective of God’s word, I would argue something else: there is a spirit
underneath the claims of feminists that rears its head again and again. The
same Spirit that led Eve to overcome her husband, Jezebel to dominate Ahab, and
that wreaks gender havoc on society whenever it is unleased by our foolish
pretentions for equality and our rejection of God’s good and preserving
boundaries. But perhaps I will, uncharacteristically, leave the last words to
journalists who observed Sarah Bernhardt in her day:
“In 1890, one of the writers for the newspaper L’Éclair
stated that ‘she descends in a curvy line from the serpent who corrupted Eve’.
The critic Jules Lemaître saw her as ‘a distant chimerical creature, sacred and
serpentine with a fascination both mystic and sensual’…A 1908 article—fittingly
enough for a Satanic female figure of titanic stature—made her out to be a
female counterpart to Nietzsche’s Übermensch.”[36]
‘She
descends in a curvy line from the serpent who corrupted Eve.’ Wow. That is
incredible. But what is even more incredible is that today this woman doesn’t
even stand out that much to both believers and unbelievers. Women today, in
general are more like Sarah than Mary, we need far more Mary’s and far less
Sarah’s.
List of
References -
[6] Faxneld,
Per. Satanic Feminism (Oxford Studies in Western Esotericism) (pp. 45). Oxford
University Press. Kindle Edition.
[16]
Yes, that Mary Shelley, the one who wrote Frankenstein.
