Cultural and ontological foundations of the teachings of the Church of Satan

Abstract

This article is devoted to the problem of highlighting the cultural and ontological foundations of the teaching of the Church of Satan (whose founder is A.S. LaVey), which originates in the sixties of the last century in the United States. Currently, Satanism acts not only as a religious organization registered in most Western European countries, but also as one of the specific trends of modern mass culture, which is also relevant for the domestic media and information space. As the basis of the methodological apparatus of the study the author takes a synthetic concept of culture a prominent Russian philosopher D.V. Pivovarov, according to whom a solid core of Satanism its antecedent sacred text – the so-called Satanic Bible, which openly articulates the principles of self-deification (the fundamental individualism), absolute self-centeredness (managed egoism) and denial of orientation to post-mortem existence of the human soul as the only adequate modern social order and worldview. The result of the research is the author’s statement that left-wing Satanism, which is a purely ethical (and not a belief-based) concept, is in its essence no more than a private representative of a number of counter-cultural phe¬nomena of our time. In conclusion, the author suggests paying attention to a number of potential scientific direc¬tions that contribute to further philosophical understanding of this topic, among which they highlight the relevance of historical and philosophical analysis of the Genesis, formation and institutionalization of left-wing Satanism as a global socio-cultural phenomenon, the study of its value-semantic orientation through the prism of the synthetic concept of culture of Pivovarov, as well as consideration of the functioning of the Church of Satan on the territory of the Russian Federation from the point of view of domestic socio-historical experience of interaction between traditional religiosity (orthodox christianity) and counter-cultural organizations (cults) of a syncretic nature.

Keywords

• religion
• culture
• counterculture
• ontological foundations
• satanism
• church of satan