Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism by Ruben van Luijk (Oxford University Press, 2016) Hardcover

Ruben van Luijk. Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism, Oxford Studies in Western Esotericism. Oxford University Press, 2016. Hardcover. 613 pages. 

Condition: Very Good in a Very Good dust jacket. Some wear on dust jacket. Minor edge wear and slightly bumped corners on book (see photos). Tight binding and strong spine. Clean copy with no underlining, highlighting, or notes.

Description from the publisher:

If we are to believe sensationalist media coverage, Satanism is, at its most benign, the purview of people who dress in black, adorn themselves with skull and pentagram paraphernalia, and listen to heavy metal. At its most sinister, its adherents are worshippers of evil incarnate and engage in violent and perverse secret rituals, the details of which mainstream society imagines with a fascination verging on the obscene. Children of Lucifer debunks these facile characterizations by exploring the historical origins of modern Satanism. Ruben van Luijk traces the movement's development from a concept invented by a Christian church eager to demonize its internal and external competitors to a positive (anti-)religious identity embraced by various groups in the modern West.

Van Luijk offers a comprehensive intellectual history of this long and unpredictable trajectory. This story involves Romantic poets, radical anarchists, eccentric esotericists, Decadent writers, and schismatic exorcists, among others, and culminates in the establishment of the Church of Satan by carnival entertainer Anton Szandor LaVey. Yet it is more than a collection of colorful characters and unlikely historical episodes. The emergence of new attitudes toward Satan proves to be intimately linked to the ideological struggle for emancipation that transformed the West and is epitomized by the American and French Revolutions. It is also closely connected to secularization, that other exceptional historical process which saw Western culture spontaneously renounce its traditional gods and enter into a self-imposed state of religious indecision.

Children of Lucifer makes the case that the emergence of Satanism presents a shadow history of the evolution of modern civilization as we know it. Offering the most comprehensive account of this history yet written, van Luijk proves that, in the case of Satanism, the facts are much more interesting than the fiction.

Table of Contents: 

Acknowledgments
Practical Indications for the Reader

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Christian Invention of Satanism

Intermezzo 1. The Eighteenth Century: Death of Satan?
Chapter 2. The Romantic Rehabilitation of Satan
Chapter 3. Satan in Nineteenth-Century Counterculture

Intermezzo 2. Charles Baudelaire: Litanies to Satan
Chapter 4. Huysmans & Consorts
Chapter 5. Unmasking the Synagogue of Satan
Chapter 6. Unmasking the Synagogue of Satan (continued and concluded)

Intermezzo 3. Nineteenth-Century Religious Satanism: Fact or Fiction?
Chapter 7. Paths into the Twentieth Century
Chapter 8. Tribulations of the Early Church

Intermezzo 4. Adolescent Satanism, Metal Satanism, Cyber-Satanism
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index