Our paths to modern Satanism are varied. Why Satan is our ongoing blog series where we tell about our individual journeys in our own voices. We are hoping that these stories provide inspiration and comfort to those taking this path less traveled. If you would like to participate and share your story, you may email your contribution to bastet@renosatanic.com or, if you prefer, fill out our form.
*Submissions may be slightly edited for length and clarity.
Damien Maze: Coming Out as a Satanist
I grew up in a Christian home. Mom was a Christian and Dad didn’t believe in a god.
From the age of 7, I have always loved science and how things worked to my best understanding. At the age of 10 I know I started to take interest in both males and females but stayed only dating girls. At the age of 12, my mother asked me if I would be interested in joining the local youth group at the little Nazarene church three doors down from the house I grew up in. She told me this would be a good way to try to make some new friends, at the time I only had one friend at the time. So I did. At first, I knew the stories that my mom told me about the Bible from one of those “My First Bible” books. But other than that I didn’t know much else from it.
I will say I enjoyed the youth group purely for the fact I wasn’t by myself as much as I once was. It was nice to have people around but there was something that never sat right with me. Like I couldn’t be myself. To skip ahead a little bit the whole youth group put a hold from the games and free pizza to actually read from the Bible and as a punishment we would have to read Numbers. We would screw around from time to time and some we did have to read number and thats where I found number 5 21-24 (which is basically an abortion). During all this time I hear the same lines that you would hear in any church, “God is love and loved the world gave his who gives a fuck.” So I was still reading the Bible and being horrified by all the violence in it in the name of a so-called God. When I was 14, the youth group fell apart due to the fact we lost our youth pastor got promoted and left us without a pastor. So still without a pastor I still went to Sunday School because I still didn’t finish the understanding of the religion.
At this time I was very angry as early teen always getting into school fights, pot, and sex was fun, and I loved heavy metal music. I always loved dark and spooky things: horror movies and dark themed books like Edgar Allen Poe, and Dante’s Inferno, Frankenstein etc. Now I’m 16 and I started dating this gal who was Wiccan. You can say we didn’t always see eye to eye on religious views but I always learned something new about a different religion. Well we didn’t last. At the same time the youth group got a new pastor so I thought I would check it out. Now this pastor was different and I really didn’t care for how he thought about the youth group like a backwood church pastor. This is where I start hearing the hate that most people hear from the bible like. Being gay was an abomination and that if you dont follow jesus you will burn in hell forever. Well, Hell is never clear in the Bible so I pictured it like Dante’s Inferno and was scared. Well at that point I got baptized to be on the safe side.
Now age 17 I was you can say a Christian and I started dating a young gal from the youth group. She had a few mental issues: bipolar and low schizophrenia and said dark spirits were trapped in her mind. Being stupid I believed it. When I was 18 I was turned away from the youth group and was put in the young adults group. At this time I stopped going for a while still dating the same girl from the youth group. I started to learn what I was told to be fighting against. I started learning about what an abortion was and what other religions where about and the crazy part was there was always a rumor that there was a Satanic church in the back of the valleys. I searched all over and never found it. I started to broaden my views and to be less hateful to these things I was told to hate and I strayed away from the church.
Then I read The Satanic Bible. And then I started listening to the Thinking Atheist a lot. I went back and read the Bible again but this time I was seeing it from a different point of view, growing up loving sex and metal music that even my own mother would call satanic. At this time I was still dating the same gal and her parents said if we were to continue dating I must start going to church again and seeing the Bible from a different point of view. So I started to rebel against their teachings and challenged their view. They didn’t like that too much.
Well now I was stuck with a choice: leave the girl I loved and shared 5 years of my life with and a religion I was now being forced to go to and dealing with issues. Age of 20-21 now I did just that, I put childish things away and left that all behind. This is where my Satanic path was built, now it was time to learn and do I wanted to do with my life. I went out to find myself and had sexual encounters with men, transpeople, and a wide range of women, indulging in what was sinful.
I heard about The Satanic Temple in 2015 – 2016 with their monument campaign in Oklahoma. That’s when I first heard about them and liked them on Facebook. The more I heard about them in the coming years I really started learning more about them, the occult and other things that people would call satanic. So I didn’t have a community to be a part of and it was lonely. The more I read, I liked Paradise lost and started to learn the religion part and was still popping in and learning about The Satanic Temple and their fundamental tenets and noticed that these were things I was coming to understand more since I left religion.
One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedom of another is to forgo your own.
Beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. We should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our own beliefs.
People are fallible. If we make a mistake, we should do our best to rectify it and resolve any harm that may have been caused.
Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
One of the best sayings is “No two people’s satanism will ever be the same and neither is the path taken to get there, but for the nobility of one’s action to speak louder than how others speak about one through ignorance.” – Unknown
In the year 2019 I not only did I become a card carrying member of The Satanic Temple, I started My own community in the Reno Nevada area under the banner Reno Satanic. We have built a grassroots community where we don’t have to hide anymore from what we practice and to be true to our own selves in the pursuit of what we want that fills our lives with joy. To end the stigma or what it means to be a satanist in the 21st century.
You can say that the situation I was in was very fortunate. My family understands why I chose the path that I did and are supportive in what I want from life. Though they might still not understand satanism they do not reject my views, and to still show me the same love that they have always had.
Would you like to read more stories about our personal journies to Modern Satanism? There’s more here…