H. P. Blavatsky’s influential The Secret Doctrine (1888), one of the foundation texts of Theosophy, contains chapters propagating an unembarrassed Satanism. Theosophical sympathy for the Devil also extended to the name of their journal Lucifer, and discussions conducted in it. To Blavatsky, Satan is a cultural hero akin to Pro- metheus. According to her reinterpretation of the Christian myth of the Fall in Genesis 3, Satan in the shape of the serpent brings gnosis and liberates mankind. The present article situates these ideas in a wider nineteenth-century context, where some poets and socialist thinkers held similar ideas and a counter-hegemonic reading of the Fall had far-reaching feminist implications. Additionally, influences on Blavatsky from French occultism and research on Gnosticism are discussed, and the instrumental value of Satanist shock tactics is con- sidered. The article concludes that esoteric ideas cannot be viewed in isolation from politics and the world at large. Rather, they should be analyzed both as part of a religious cosmology and as having strategic polemical and didactic functions related to political debates, or, at the

very least, carrying potential entailments for the latter.

Keywords: Theosophy, Blavatsky, Satanism, Feminism, Socialism, Ro-

manticism.

1965: Abramović began her studies at the Academy of Visual Arts in Belgrade. She also read esoteric literature, in particular by H.P. Blavatsky, and books by Mircea Eliade.

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Satan the Freemason: The Mystification of Léo Taxil, 1891–1897Le Diable au 19e siècleBoth the Temple of Satan by Guaïta, where the rituals of Boullan were exposed, and Là-bas by Huysmans were published in 1891. The Parisian public was, how-ever, still not saturated with revelations on Satanism, because at the end of the following year, in December 1892, an extraordinary piece of work, which would grow to little less than two-thousand pages, started been published in monthly issues. The title, a program in itself, was The Devil in the 19th Century; or the mysteries of Spiritualism, the Luciferian Freemasonry, complete revelations on Palladism, Theurgy, Goetia, and all modern Satanism, occult magnetism, pseu-do-Spiritists, evocations, Luciferian mediums, fin-de-siècle Kabbalah, the magic of the Rosy-Cross, latent states of possession, the precursors of the Anti-Christ: Tales of a witness.1 The author presented himself as “Doctor Bataille”, a physi-cian on board the ships of the Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes.According to “Doctor Bataille”, his adventure began in 1880 on a ship that took him from Marseilles to Japan. While on the ship, the doctor received the confidences of an Italian businessman, one Gaetano Carbuccia, a native of Maddaloni, in the Southern province of Caserta. Carbuccia, in the hopes of improving the state of his business, became initiated into Freemasonry in the Memphis-Misraïm Rite organized in Naples by Giambattista Pessina (?-1900). The latter was a real person, although his last name was often misspelled in the Diable as “Peisina”,2 and the Memphis-Misraïm was one of the so-called “fringe” Masonic organizations where occult elements prevailed.1Dr. Bataille, Le Diable au 19e siècle, ou les mystères du spiritisme, la franc-maçonnerie luciféri-enne, révélations complètes sur le Palladisme, la théurgie, la goétie, et tout le Satanisme mod-erne, magnétisme occulte, pseudo-spirites et vocates procédants, les médiums lucifériens, la Cabale fin-de-siècle, magie de la Rose-Croix, les possessions à l’état latent, les précurseurs de l’Ante-Christ. Récit d’un témoin, 2 vols., Paris-Lyon: Delhomme et Briguet, 1892–1894.2On Pessina and his role in the story of the Masonic Rites of Memphis and Misraïm, born as separate organizations and later unified under the name of Memphis-Misraïm, see M. Introvigne, Il cappello del mago. I nuovi movimenti magici dallo spiritismo al satanismo, cit., p. 166.

>https://brill.com/view/book/9789004244962/B9789004244962-s010.xml

HAMMER, SICKLE, SQUARE & COMPASS

The first thing you should know is that Freemasonry is a big deal in Cuba.

>https://www.exutopia.com/fidel-castro-the-curious-case-of-freemasonry-in-cuba/

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