I Get Asked THAT Question…

“Are you a Satanist?”

In 2020, I joined Greg Salyer, then president of the Philosophical Research Society (PRS), to participate in an online forum to celebrate the life and work of esoteric scholar Manly P. Hall and the launch of my book The Seeker’s Guide to the Secret Teachings of All Ages. In the question-and-answer period that followed, a viewer asked, and Greg faithfully (and rightly) repeated, a direct question. Here is my reply along with one reader’s response; I hope you will find the juxataposition elucidating.

Greg: All right Mitch, let’s get this over with. You’ve been you’ve been waiting for this question: Are you a Satanist?

Mitch: I believe in giving direct responses to direct questions. So, I’m going to give you a very direct response. And that is: yes. However, I also want to give you a very clear response. And the clear response is that I have my own individualized conception of what that means. And it’s very important to understand that it’s impossible to interpret another person’s ethical, religious, and spiritual journey through the lens of decisions that other people have made about what a classification is, what a thought system is, what a school is, or, as often happens, through entertainment.

We must be able to define our terms or we wind up defining one another into very narrow…