Troll's blog

A friend of mine asked about Satanic self-worship. I wrote the following in response to his brief inquiries and reflections:

As a Satanist, self-worship means to me applying most if not all of the categories of treatment generally regarded to GODS by other religious to oneself, not just metaphorically or euphemistically, but honestly and fully. I've thought long and hard about this, in part because i sought such worship of my Goddess and in part because i think it is an egotistical challenge to worship myself actively, rather than merely as part of some interest in outrage or humour.

I'd list those categories as:

• exaltation -- supernalizing in a personal and emotional sense for the time being of the worship; regaling those present with the glories and virtues of the focus of worship; praising aloud and with sonic volume, singing or dramatically portraying these virtues; celebrating the being and character of that entity, and particularly their importance to the worshipper and to the wider world. (lifting up from above)

• obeisance -- subordinating oneself before that entity or intelligence, especially physically before objects of worship inclusive of statues, images (generally 'idols') conceived as in some way representing and/or participating in the presence or person of the entity being worshipped; recognizing and paying tribute overtly to the dependency we have upon that entity, how their existence is central, essential, or of extreme importance to the continuation of what we value. (lifting up from below)

• ardour -- expressing emotional devotion in whatever capacity and role is pertinent (guardian, grandparent or parent, uncle or aunt, spouse or sibling, lover, friend, or comrade, cousin or child, pet or mascot; reciting or reading poetry, singing rapturous love songs, recounting tales of sweet, deep, and abiding love, attesting to the heights and depths which this love did, could, would, or will inspire, (establishing intimacy out of love on variable footing)

• alliance - declaring with force and faith one's solid testament to the entity, portraying, describing, or artfully depicting the tests to which this loyalty and compact has been put, establishing by dint of accompanying testimony and proof in endeavour (as by rite, blood pact, etc.) one's thorough commitment to the cause of the other. (establishing strength out of trust of a comparable equal)

You ask if the things you mention count (to me) as self-worship ('with that end in mind'? not sure what this means), and i will take them each in turn below:

-- giving yourself adoration and devotion: too vague.

-- loving the person one has become: fairly weak, perhaps a start.

-- appreciating one's finer qualities, self-improvement, attention to integrity, intentionality, and health: weak but a good start.

-- admiring one's own image as part of ordinary affairs: merely vainglory, but headed in the right direction if pursued to purpose.

So i'd have to say no they do not count, and i think i have made the extremity and intensity of ACTIVE ENGAGEMENT OF PRAISE AND DEDICATION, particularly in a ritual and ceremonial sense, clear as a criterion.

For Satanists i have repeatedly made it plain that i think it will be helpful for them to study in some detail how other religious conduct their worship, catalogue this to an extent, as i have, and then exercise this with respect to oneself, as i have experimentally achieved with canonizing myself and paying tribute to myself as a saint while attempting a communion with the Saint of Occultism.

{interlude after which further questions seemed important to put forward}

So does worshipping oneself create a sense of other? Does worship of a god predispose or necessitate the division of that object of worship into an other?

Let me broaden this a bit for philosophic purpose: ALL images of oneself are different than oneself. An observation of a mirror will demonstrate to us that the image is reversed right-to-left. A video reflection or phone-camera reflection for a selfie are very close, but as soon as we snap the photo to capture that image, the person of whom it was an image (us in the past) is necessarily different than our present being.

Thus the worship of oneself might be likened to a god in that we are always, when issuing devotion or exaltation, turning our worshipful attention to the PAST of the god. Why a god would necessarily need be different than ourselves is nothing i can answer. Is canonization something new or different, and does the fact that this is popularly issued by large churches make it of a different character than (and thus a more authentic version of) what we are doing?

I had already identified with the Jesus character many times, with bodhisattvas, with spiritually advanced images, prior. Prophethood, identification of my birthplace as a holy city (on account of my having come from it), was both arch and genuinely felt.

When does ego outstrip the usefulness of our activities as regards ego expansion with interest toward self-development? I suppose that once one integrates disciplines of humility and non-self-destructive asceticism that this curtails some if not all of the negative effects of egotism exercises, with titles, self-re-envisioning, and dramatic rite, role-playing, or faking-it-until-making-it.

You ask what connection there is between the object of worship and the idol. I suggest to you that you could merge those magically and therefore prevent any distinction through a spell (comparable to making a doll-baby of yourself and unifying with it, but instead doing it with a candle or a statue or a photo, and then directing your obeisance and dedication to that object).

Yes, there is a common TEMPORARY distinction, just like with all idols and most states of consciousness. Very few bhakti yogis can engage in worship sufficient that the idol *becomes* the very deity during that worship. For most religious that is an unimportant and merely ephemeral distinction operating during the prayers or worship event.

Troll Towelhead, Grand Mufti of Satanism

For years and years now i have used Facebook. While chatting in IRC we would review the latest social media sites, receive visits from those who were making them, including a couple from the projects by Cult of Cthulhu folks, one or two from SIN as it was conceived and then came into being, a number familiar with the 600 Club, the Modern Church of Satan, a variety of boards which were temporary using some service which eventually changed their policies and charged money, driving out all users, etc.

Facebook seemed somehow different than the rest in a couple of ways in that they 1) appeared to require the use of legal names, and 2) were apparently implementing a diverse set of interaction applications interior to their network. I was satisfied watching the Satanists come and go, occasionally create a temporary account i rarely used once learning that such things wouldn't be immediately stomped, and unifiedly emphasizing my online projects in an overt fashion.

At some point a few of us who were using IRC in a very small, yet tight-knit, group decided that Facebook might offer an opportunity in that it accommodated chat there in groups, and this might get more traffic than we were seeing in Dalnet. We created a joint account none of us were concerned with losing and shared a login and password amongst us.

Through time this seemed to yield potential. Chat seemed possible and might attract 15-20 or more people simultaneously with only a few technical glitches. At times people were added without providing permission, and the technical idiocy of Facebook provided for absolutely zero (0) moderation or expulsion, making it extremely tentative and restricted to the mature. Gaining group members we soon found out that the only groups *capable* of sustaining the chat feature were those with less than 30 or 40 members maximum. This immediately killed the possibility of using the same group and chatting using it.

Once the chat feature became problematic, enthusiasm for the project began to wane amongst participants. As the weeks and months wore on internecine squabbles erupted and from what we could tell there were reports to Facebook and these compromised a series of accounts of those who became the targets. We could never tell, initially or eventually, from the outside whether someone was having problems with their account due to technical limitations and who was receiving a challenge to their account from Facebook admin, asking for identification or proof of being "Samael Deathbringer" or whatever pseudonym the person was using.

By slow and incremental portions almost everyone began to either resurface with a new, legal name, or simply reappear with a new account and a new, or the same, nickname they had been using before. The technical means of keeping people together as friends or group members or whatnot while all this was happening was somewhat tenuous, and people became more and more quiet within Facebook as a result. Fewer and fewer of our group continued to use the shared account, until pretty much i was left with it.

At that point i decided to see what i might do with it. I had my legal name account, and was exploring the ins and outs of that to good effect. I re-assigned the name of the group Satanist account and quickly learned that there were only so many *times* that this could be done (maybe once or twice more after exploring). Not only this, it wouldn't even ALLOW my Satanic initiated name (either "Troll" or "Towelhead"), so i was stuck with trying to get a variation on my title, winding up with 'Grand Mufti Satanist', all of which apparently passed their mechanical filters.

I then set about issuing friend requests to dozens and dozens of people: anyone with the name 'LaVey', anyone with 'Satan' in their name, etc., and it was only after about the first 40 or 50 that i began to get challenges via the Facebook system that i "might not be using the account as was intended". I discontinued and tried the same thing the next day or a few days later and had similar effect. I built it up to something like 1400 Friends and then it began giving me regular captchas, so i stopped that and instead began to explore its chat feature.

I began to add hundreds of people to chat without asking them and seeing what would happen. There were many who simply remove themselves from the "discussion", some who were very happy to be there and commenced to chatting away, and some who bitterly complained at being dumped there without asking. Some made noise, others began to converse in very interesting ways amongst us.

Eventually it became obvious that chats like this didn't last long and, while we could have a sustained engagement of this type, inevitably a bunch of us would be compromised and our accounts removed and so those who knew one another couldn't really sustain being members of it. The chat was truly a bust, and this after i had abandoned IRC and Dalnet to devote a bunch of time to analyzing and exploring Facebook.

Meanwhile SIN and other boards were going through upheavals and revolutions, and we would occasionally get word from Zach about it. In Aug of last year i heard from him and had to re-sign-up because he'd lost control or the whole thing had been hacked. I dutifully and loyally re-created the Troll account after all that history which had gone before, and posted the 'Triumphant Return' essay which had become my herald upon again returning (prior after having again received a booting from the board, now upon the board itself returning!).

After months i was pretty much the lone standing of us who hadn't been relegated to a legal name account or departed to realms elsewhere. I had joined numerous groups, wrestled with a batch of interested Satanists and quasi-Satanists, Dark Pagans, etc., creating numerous groups, taking over some after they'd been abandoned, seeing some of them set from Public to Closed and from Closed to Secret heavily restricting the likelihood of being found without advertizing.

After some 2-3 years at least of this kind of activity (almost entirely separate from my first account), Facebook finally caught up with me and challenged the Grand Mufti Satanist name, requesting it be changed, and i changed it to 'Satanist Grand Mufti' and wondered how they would possibly leave it untouched. For another 6 months or so i bolstered the groups and pages that i owned with that account by co-owning them with my original account, just in case, watching numerous of my friends lose accounts because of their pseudonyms (mostly Satanists and Neopagans) and sure that that account would be doomed but i'd make my best effort to retain it.

Sure enough some 3.5-4 years into its use i finally got the challenge i was expecting demanding an ID. I examined their rules, which stated that if you had a piece of correspondence and a business card with your name on them, then this would be acceptable proof of identity. I spent the $15 to have a minimal set of business cards with 'Satanist Grand Mufti' on them with my photo and email address, sent myself some mail which arrived without a very heavy cancellation, scanned them both and sent them in for proof.

Perhaps needless to say, despite their rules including this, they did NOT accept this as a name, and froze the account. I then set into the next phase of my plan (which i had only barely prepared to implement -- my efforts were somewhat half-hearted). I designed a means of recreating an account using a RTF file with links to all the friends that i cared to reproduce, plus links to all groups to which i wished to belong, and then used this with different email addresses successively to recreate the Satanist Grand Mufti named account. I got this down to a 15 minute process!

So then i proceeded to watch as the Facebook folks put my IP on a more and more brief watch and hand-refroze the account with less and less intervening time until the last couple were 2 days and about 4 hours. At that point (May of 2015) i gave the whole project up and re-set the pages of Troll Towelhead to operate as my Satanist outlet, noticing a huge decrease in my involvement amongst actual Satanists. I just got the repeat Christians wanting to sell their souls.

Since then i've been busy, and intended to once again set out into the internet to find out whether any of these boards were alive. I did find SIN immediately (someone posted a Facebook ad for the New Testament Satanic Bible with a foreward by Zach Black which drew my interest in looking him and SIN up). That gave me incentive.

So here i have returned, and just in the last few days have resumed IRC Dalnet #satanity involvement as well, letting Venus and other regular denizens of it that this was the intention.

So hello again! :)

Troll Towelhead, Grand Mufti of Satanism

https://www.facebook.com/Tr0llT0welhead

(even pages couldn't contain 'troll' or 'towelhead'! only with zeros!!)