The complete text of the Black Temple

“No one was ever given fire as a gift.
Every fire was stolen somewhere, and every one is carried on by hand.”Prometheus's debt

To the Balkans the gods always came from elsewhere. From Rome, from Constantinople, from Istanbul, from Vienna, from Moscow. Each arrived with its own army, its own tax and its own hell, and not one of them asked what had already been growing here. And every one of them, before laying the first stone, performed the same operation: it took what had grown out of this soil for a thousand years and declared it the Devil.

So this is not a page about the Devil. This is a page about who invented him, what he is for, and why someone, now with cameras and microphones, is still trying to sell him to you in instalments.

How a devil is made

The procedure is simple, as old as power itself, and worth learning by heart, because in these parts it repeats every fifty years. You do not destroy another people's god. That is expensive, it breeds resistance and it makes martyrs. Another people's god you re-dress if he is useful to you, and denounce if he is not.

Perun fared well. The thunderer is a god of the army, of the court and of punishment, and every power needs a god like that, whichever power it happens to be. Nobody erased him, they re-dressed him: he was given a prophet's beard, the fiery chariot of Saint Elijah, and he stayed up there in the sky, only under a new name and with a new day marked in the calendar. The peasant went on watching the cloud gather over the hill and knew exactly who was rumbling up there. The inscription changed, not the god.

Veles fared differently. He was the god of roots and cattle, of wealth and wool, of song, of trade, of contracts and of the oath. The god of everything an ordinary man has and everything he is afraid to lose. A god of the people, not a god of power. That kind of god could not be re-dressed, because he did not guard the order of things but the person, so he was pushed under the ground: his feast days were covered over with other people's, his festivals painted over with new names, and his name was moved into the dictionary of curses, where the words we say when things are hardest still live. Our oldest god became our first devil. This is not theology. This is politics, a thousand years old, and it still works.

The Devil, you see, is the oldest administrative category in the world. He is not a being but a drawer. Into that drawer every power files whatever is in its way at the time: the old woman who knows herbs better than the paid physician, the woman who will not consent, the man who asks what the tax is for, the book that does not fit, the song sung too loudly, the young man who loves the wrong way, the neighbour who prays a little differently, the scholar who measured the sky and came back with the wrong number. The names in the drawer change every century. The mechanism never changes.

That is why we do not believe in the Devil. Nor do we believe in Veles as some horned old man sitting under the roots of the world counting cattle. We believe in what that figure remembers: that nothing forbidden to you is evil for being forbidden, and nothing commanded of you is good for being commanded. That behind every sermon on obedience lies somebody's very concrete interest, usually land, money or a vote at the next election. And that a man who thinks with his own head is, in every century, in every language and in all three scripts, given the same name: demon.

Here the oldest god has no name from any holy book. It is called: šta će selo reć (what will the village say).The First Truth of Crni Hram

The god actually worshipped here

You do not pray to him out loud. You pray to him by lowering your eyes. He has no temple because he needs none: his temple is every kitchen where somebody else's life is decided, every tavern table where the absent are judged, every corridor where things are whispered, and every wedding where it is counted who gave how much. His priests are not evil people. That is the worst part of the whole business. They are your aunt, your godfather and your next door neighbour, people who genuinely wish you well, but only the kind of well that can be recounted to others without shame.

To that god the greatest sacrifices on this peninsula are offered: marriages entered into because it was time, jobs hated from the first day, degrees taken for somebody else's pride, guitars and books locked in the cellar, loves concealed until death, whole generations packed into a van for Germany, and the silence across the table that only the third rakija thaws, so that by morning it is all wisely forgotten. No god here has ever received so many human sacrifices, and none has promised so little in return: no paradise, no absolution, no peace, only that for a while nobody will talk about you.

We renounce our obedience to that god, openly and without negotiation. The village may say what it likes. The village always talks anyway, including about those who obeyed it to the very end, except that they can no longer hear it.

The only sin this temple recognizes

We touch no one's grandmother and no one's candle. Her candle is her freedom, and she lit it in times when that took courage, so we bow before her. A faith that gives a person the strength to get through the night is not our enemy and never will be. Millions believe in it honestly, live by it decently and take nothing from anyone. To them we say nothing but peace.

We touch the others. The ones with the holy thing at the throat and the theft in the hand. Who fast in front of the cameras and rob behind them. Who preach modesty from a car worth three houses in the village they left. For whom faith is a jersey and God a terrace chant sung only when the match is against somebody. Hypocrisy is the only sin this temple recognizes.

And that is not the same thing as lying. A lie at least knows that it is lying, and there is a kind of honest cowardice in that. Hypocrisy demands that on top of everything you admire it, thank it and hand it the keys. So we measure people by one single question, which has never once been wrong: does he speak the same way in front of the man who can hurt him as in front of the man who can do nothing to him? The answer to that question tells you more about a person than everything he has ever said about God.

Inat and merak

Of everything the centuries have left us, two words we keep like fire. They are not our most beautiful, but they are our most useful, and neither one translates tidily into any world language.

Inat (defiant spite) is the strength to stand when you are ordered to kneel, without calculation, often at your own cost. Inat is the reason houses here stayed standing even after the third burning. Merak (deep, savoured pleasure) is the courage to enjoy a life you were told all through childhood was a vale of tears to be crossed with your head down. Merak is not indulgence. Merak is attention: coffee drunk slowly, a song sung to the end, a lunch you sit over for three hours although everybody has somewhere to be.

On their own, both go bad. Inat without merak turns to poison, a man who defies everything and loves nothing, who tears down and then sits in the rubble pleased with himself. Merak without inat turns to sloth, a man enjoying himself while the house, the land and the language are carried off from under his feet. Together they are the one thing no power on this peninsula has ever managed to tax or to ban. So we do not keep them as folklore. We keep them as tools.

No nation, no blood

This order has no nation and never will have one. Veles is older than Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and all the other names we quarrel over across the river today. The same god, the same name, the same stories from the Alps to the Vardar, before any of us got the name we are so proud of now. He is older than the schism, older than every empire that rolled through here, and older than borders that changed owners like a tavern table. Power kept moving. The root never did.

Whoever makes blood a flag has no place here. Not because we are delicate, but because on this peninsula we all know where that leads, and we know it not from books but from our own family albums and from the silence that stands in them between two photographs. Our blood is red like everyone's, and that is the whole of our theology of blood.

What we offer, and what we do not

We offer no salvation, because we do not sell fear, and salvation can only be sold to someone you have frightened first. We offer no paradise, because we charge no admission. We offer neither the comfort that puts you to sleep nor the explanation that has a ready answer for every question. Such explanations exist, they are cheap, and they are always paid for in the same currency: your own head.

We offer what Veles always guarded: wealth earned by work and not by seizure. A word that is kept even when keeping it costs. A song sung at full voice. Knowledge seized like fire, because it was never handed out free. And peace with death, with no blackmail of eternity.

We speak about death openly, because that is the only honest thing to do. We promise you no continuation. We tell you what we think ourselves: that this is probably all there is, and that this is exactly why one ordinary Tuesday of yours weighs as much as the whole eternity others sell you on credit. Whoever promises you a second life has taken the right to charge you for this one at his own price. We do not send you that bill.

The oath

In the old Slavic treaties the warriors swore by Perun, by their weapons and by the thunder, and the merchants and the common folk by Veles. To swear by Veles did not mean calling down punishment from the sky. It meant: I swear by my wealth, by my labour, by my obraz (my honour, my face before others) and by everything I can truly lose. A man who promised that way was not afraid of lightning, but of having to walk out tomorrow into the same market, among the same people, with the same face.

That is why it is the only oath we recognize here. Not before heaven, but before yourself and before those who are watching you:

• that you will not kneel where you can stand,
• that you will not stay silent where you can speak,
• that you will not spit on another's freedom to make your own look larger,
• that you will pay for what you do, with your own name and without hunting for someone else to blame.

There is no one to punish you if you break it. There is no hell, no penalty, no book in which it is written down. All that remains is a person who knows what he promised and knows he did not keep it. Anyone who has felt that once knows there is no harsher court.

We do not ask you to believe us. We ask you to stop believing anyone at their word, us exactly as much as everybody else.The Second Truth of Crni Hram

Two wings

The temple has two wings and it needs both. One looks at the sky before dawn, at Danica, whom the world calls Lucifer: at light, at knowledge, at walking upright and at the price paid for it. The other looks at the earth, at Veles: at the root, at wealth, at cattle, at song and at the oath. We are Balkan by our roots and of the world by the light we follow. Whoever thinks the two exclude each other has never looked at a tree. A tree is both at once, and that is exactly why it stands when the wind comes.

Why black, why temple

This is Crni Hram, the Black Temple. Black not because it celebrates the dark and not because we enjoy the fear in other people's eyes. Black because it is built out of everything that was thrown into the dark: out of the old god, out of the body, out of knowledge, out of the disobedient thought, out of women who knew too much, out of people who loved the wrong way, out of books that were in the way and songs that were not allowed to be sung. Here the dark is not the enemy. The dark is an archive, and we are opening it.

A temple because this is a place of gathering and of rite, not a building. There is no address, no bell, no plate going round and nobody at the door asking where you are from. To the world we speak the language of Satanism, because that is the language the world understands. To the Balkans we speak the language of its own roots, because that is the language that both hurts and heals here.

Welcome home, if you have ever, anywhere, been one too many. Here, being one too many is the measure of a person.

If you came to this page expecting blood, you will be disappointed within two minutes. If you came to see what is left of a person once you take away both heaven and hell, stay. What is left is actually quite demanding, and a great deal harder than obedience.

A word that was an accusation

Start with the language, because language always knows more than the sermon. The Hebrew ha satan means simply: adversary, accuser, the one who stands opposite. That is a function in a court, not a name on a baptismal certificate. In the oldest texts it is not a figure with horns but a role in the chamber: someone who tests a claim, questions the witness and asks the uncomfortable thing. The horns, the hooves, the biography and the whole theatre came only centuries later, when somebody needed an enemy with a face.

And for centuries nobody used that name for himself. The authorities used it for others: heretics, witches, old women with their herbs, midwives, astronomers who measured the sky and came back with the wrong number, dancers, actors, poets, printers, people who spoke the wrong language in the wrong village. The word did not describe what that person believed. It described what was about to be done to him. It was a label pasted on just before the stake, roughly the way other words get pasted on today just before somebody's life is destroyed.

So in that word we do not see horns. We see a case file.

And modern Satanism makes the one move that strips such a label of its power for good: it takes the label into its own hands. An insult only has force while you are running from it. The moment you say it first, calmly and without a tremor in your voice, it is out of a job. If the adversary is everyone who will not kneel, then fine. Here is your adversary, in public, with a first and last name. Claiming an insult and wearing it as a coat of arms is not our invention, plenty of people did it before us when someone wanted their heads bowed. It is the old school of dignity, and it is how we recognize our own.

Nobody here believes in the Devil

This is not the fine print in a contract. This is the first sentence. Every serious Satanic movement in the world says the same thing about itself: Satan is not a being but a symbol. There is no horned one, no hell, no contract signed in blood, no soul to be sold because there is neither a buyer nor a commodity. This is not our local exception or a joke for the audience, it is the rule of the entire modern tradition, from the first public Church of Satan to today's activist temples, which fight their cases in courtrooms and not in graveyards.

So why keep the figure at all? Because in the whole of Western culture there is no cleaner symbol for one single gesture: for the one who said no, knew in advance what it would cost, and said it anyway. Every other symbol of revolt has already been turned into a T shirt by somebody. This one they spent two thousand years trying to erase and failed, and that alone says something about its strength.

We believe in neither God nor the Devil. We have outgrown belief in God and the Devil, the world has quickened its pace, and superstition is baggage nobody is left to carry. It is easier and more honest to live this way, and much harder too, because there is nobody left to blame.Word of Crni Hram

So called devil worshippers exist mainly in two places: in horror films and in police panics that later fall apart in court. The great Satanic panic of the nineteen eighties shook half the world: years of investigations, newspaper front pages, experts on television, confessions drawn out of frightened children by suggestive questioning, dozens of ruined families and people who spent years in prison. At the end of it all: not one proven cult. Not one. We remember that episode twice over. As proof that the Devil does not exist, and as proof that the hunt for the Devil most certainly does, and that it always, without exception, catches ordinary people.

And the number they frighten you with? The old manuscripts give it differently, and the most serious readings say it is a cipher for a Roman emperor who has been dead a long time and can do nobody any harm. We do not wear it, we do not draw it and we do not sell it on pendants. Whoever trades in three sixes is selling you fear at a discount, and fear is the one commodity this temple does not stock.

What a Satanist truly values

Strip away everything above and what remains is a list of values that, honestly, any decent person in the world would sign. That is the point. Six items, and every one of them asks something of you.

A brief history in ten cuts

• 1487A witch hunting manual goes to press and becomes one of the first European bestsellers. Persecution now has a methodology, forms and deadlines. The Devil finally has an administration, and an administration always needs work.
• 1667Milton publishes Paradise Lost. For the first time Satan speaks as a tragic hero and, entirely by accident, gets the best monologues in the epic. The poets notice at once, the theologians only when it is too late.
• 1790sBlake and the Romantics read Milton backwards and thereby correctly: hell becomes a cipher for energy, the body and the imagination, and Lucifer a cipher for freedom against tyrants. For the first time somebody defends the figure, and does it in verse.
• 1863Carducci writes a hymn in which that same figure is in fact reason, the steam engine, the printing press and progress. The scandal was enormous and the point was simple: whatever speeds a person up, somebody will call it the Devil.
• 1871Bakunin writes lines in which Satan is the eternal rebel and the world's first free thinker. Political movements thereby acquire a metaphor they will use for the next hundred and fifty years.
• 1891In the novel Là-bas, Huysmans invents the aesthetic of the Black Mass for a bored, decadent Paris. Cinema will later sell it as documentary, and the police will spend half a century looking for it in cellars.
• 1966San Francisco: the first public Church of Satan is founded, atheistic from day one. Satan as a symbol of pride, the body and individualism, ritual as psychodrama and not as summoning.
• 1980sThe Satanic panic: a global moral hysteria without a single proven cult. A textbook example of how an enemy is manufactured, who manufactures him and who builds a career on it.
• 2013The activist wave: non-theistic temples begin using legal means and public humour to defend the separation of church and state, bodily autonomy and minority rights. Not one candle in a cellar, all of it in the courtroom.
• 2026Crni Hram: the Balkan cut of the same story, with Veles in place of an imported devil, because ours is older, ours was at home from the beginning, and nobody had to carry him in across a border.

Good? Yes. And here is the measure.

Goodness is not proven by declaration but by the balance sheet. Measure every system that offers you something, this one included, against four questions, and give way on none of them:

• Does it ask of you fear or courage? Anything that begins with the sentence "if you do not, here is what will happen to you" is being sold to you through fear.
• Does it ask ignorance or knowledge? If they forbid you to read their opponents, it means they have read them and did not like what they found.
• Does it ask submission or responsibility? An obedient person is easy to lead. A responsible person will not be led, but he can be relied upon.
• Are you allowed to leave? This is the most important one. A community you can freely walk out of is one you can love. One you cannot leave, you can only survive.

A system that lives off your fear, your ignorance, your submission and your inability to leave, call it whatever it calls itself and however handsome its building, is bad by its fruit. A philosophy that tells you: think with your own head, govern yourself, defend the weaker, enjoy without doing harm, pay for what you do and kneel to nobody, call it the worst name you have. By its fruit it is good.

We call it Satanism, because others gave us that name, and we have washed it, polished it and put it back into circulation brighter than it arrived.

“Worth is not glued on from the outside.
It is cut in, and shows only when the light falls at the right angle.”Gold poured into the cut

A star, not a criminal

Before it became an accusation, Lucifer was astronomy. It is Venus when it rises before dawn, the last and brightest light before the sun wipes the sky clean. The old peoples thought there were two different stars, a morning one and an evening one, because it appeared at both ends of the day. The Romans called the morning one lucifer, the lightbringer. The Greeks called it heosphoros, the bringer of dawn. Our own people called it Danica and the evening one Večernjača, and by them they measured the time to set out on a journey, to let the cattle out and to come back from the field.

Not one of those names was a curse. Every one of them was a compliment. Danica in our songs is not a threat but a female figure, a sister and companion, a star that goes ahead of the light and announces it. The name is still given to daughters and nobody crosses themselves over it. It is one of those small things that expose the whole swindle: the same object in the sky stayed beautiful here, and in translation it became the Devil.

How a star got a case file

The indictment was written later and, like most indictments in history, it was written in an office. In one of the prophetic books there is a taunt aimed at the king of Babylon, an entirely earthly man of flesh and blood: "how you have fallen from heaven, shining son of the dawn". The sentence was political mockery of a powerful man who had climbed too high. In the translation into Latin that "son of the dawn" was rendered with the word lucifer, because that was simply the name of the morning star. Later writers tied the sentence to the story of the fallen angel, and the job was done.

That is how the morning star acquired a court file for someone else's deed, and it has been carrying it for two thousand years. One word in one translation, and the most beautiful name in the sky became a synonym for the fall. Remember that procedure well, because we have already seen it on this page, with Veles: first they take your name, then they try you under it. The method is the same, only the languages differ.

The fall as the price of light

In every myth worth anything, light is not handed out free from above. Somebody brings it, and somebody pays for it. Prometheus steals fire and gets the rock, the chains and an eagle that comes back to the same spot every day. The serpent in the garden speaks the one verifiable sentence in the whole story, "you will know", and banishment follows. Lucifer says "I will not serve" and falls. Always the same contract, and always the same fine print: knowledge is paid for with comfort.

Note the punishment too. It is never death. It is permanent exile from the warm. Because a system does not need to kill the one who asks, that is clumsy and it makes martyrs. It is enough to leave him outside, in the cold, long enough for everyone else to see him through the window. The punishment is not meant for him. It is meant for those who are watching.

Satanism, in one single sentence, is the decision that this price is fair.

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.John Milton · Paradise Lost · 1667

And let us be clear, here the fall does not look epic. There is no rock, no eagle and no angelic army. Here the fall looks like this: they stop inviting you to weddings and funerals. Your father does not call for two years. You lose your job because you said out loud what everyone in that company knows. Your mother begs you to keep quiet at least in front of people. The village turns you into a story retold over coffee. That is our hell, it is entirely earthly and very well organized, and that is exactly why we speak about it openly: so that whoever is sitting in it knows he is not the first and not alone.

The Enlightenment under another name

When Kant boiled the Enlightenment down to two words, sapere aude, dare to know, he wrote a Luciferian programme in white gloves. Dare to know. Not dare to believe, not dare to obey, but dare to know, and to do it at your own risk.

Every school, every library, every printing press, every vaccine and every device you are reading this on: all of it is stolen fire. All of it is knowledge wrested from those who kept it under lock and key with the explanation that it is not for you, that it is too dangerous, that you will burn yourself and that you had better trust the man who has already read it on your behalf. When the lightning rod was invented, some declared that an insolence against heaven too, because lightning was held to be punishment from above. Today that same lightning rod stands on every steeple, calmly and without apology, protecting precisely those who once cursed it.

Blake wrote that famous thing about Milton: that the true poet is, without knowing it, on the Devil's side. It was not an insult. In that division the Devil's side was always the side of the question, of the body, of the imagination and of the light, while the heavenly side was the side of order, obedience and silence. The poet simply could not have done otherwise.

So we say it calmly, without smoke and without apology: Lucifer is good. Not as a being, because there is no being and never was. As a direction: toward the light, upright, at the full price and with no bill left for somebody else to pay. Whoever carries the light is ours. Whether it signs itself Danica, Prometheus, enlightenment or an ordinary schoolteacher in a village with no asphalt is a matter of handwriting.

What the light must never become

Here comes a sentence usually missing from texts like this, and without it everything else is worth nothing. Light turned against a human being is not light but arson.

There are people who take Lucifer's name to justify cruelty, contempt for the weaker and plain hunger for power. To them the figure is not a signpost but an excuse, and a cheaper excuse than any religion, because it demands neither fasting nor prayer. It is the very mechanism this whole page has stood against since its first sentence, only dressed in black so it is harder to recognize. Knowledge without regard for the human being wrote the worst pages of modern history, and it wrote them with knowledge, not with ignorance.

So every light in this temple comes with the same condition: carry it so that it lights the way for others, not so that it burns their house down. Whoever does not understand that has understood nothing, however well he knows the symbols.

Danica, our Lucifer

And here the two wings of this temple finally meet. Danica up in the sky, before dawn. Veles down in the root, under the earth. The West sang its lightbringer in epics, then burned him in the town squares, then spent three centuries apologizing in poetry. We kept ours in lullabies, in the round dance, in the names for stars and in the names of daughters, and so it never even occurred to us to fear him.

The same story at both ends of Europe, with the same outcome: the brightest thing and the deepest thing were both declared dangerous, and both survived anyway. They survived because they were useful, and because people did not stop using them even when they were no longer allowed to name them.

When you get up before dawn tomorrow and see it low in the east, while everything is still cold and quiet, know that you are looking at the oldest symbol of freedom this civilization has. Your ancestors did not call it the Devil. They called it Danica, and by it they knew it was time for work. On that alliance of the sky before dawn and the earth below the roots stands everything we build here.

We know how this looks from outside. We know what comes to mind first in these parts when the word Satanism is heard, and we are not offended by it, because that picture was built over decades, by films, by newspaper front pages and by very profitable fear. So there is no poetry here. This is a list, and we keep to it literally.

How a sect is recognized, and why we are not one

This is not a defence but a tool, and it is meant for you, not for us. Learn these six signs and test every community that life offers you against them, this one included. A community becomes a sect the moment any one of these applies:

• There is a person or a body that may not be questioned.
• Entry is paid for, and the payment grows over time.
• There are secret levels, and knowledge you receive only once you have earned enough.
• You are asked to move away from family and old friends, usually in gentle words.
• Leaving is punished, shamed or shadowed by a threat, even if only a spiritual one.
• Salvation, happiness or health is for sale, with a deadline that always slips a little.

Not one of those six things exists here, and that is not a matter of our good will but the foundation everything is set on. If you ever notice that this temple is beginning to slide on any of those items, do not write us a letter. Be the first one out, and take whoever you can with you. A community that tells you this in advance has given you the only guarantee that is worth anything at all.

“Gods are not killed.
They are rebuilt into devils and left in the forest to wait.”The horned serpent, cut into living rock

First, an honest disclaimer

Slavic mythology did not reach us as a tidy book. There is no Homer of ours, no catalogued pantheon, no sacred scripture that somebody copied out for centuries and thereby saved. What remained are pieces: a few sentences in state treaties, a few names in sermons against paganism, the names of hills and waters, rites the village kept repeating long after forgetting why, and songs the grandmothers sang until the collectors of the nineteenth century arrived in time to write them down. Everything else is reconstruction, and reconstruction is honest work only as long as it is called by that name.

So you will not read a single sentence here beginning with "the old Slavs believed", spoken in the tone of a man who sat there taking the minutes. You will read what the sources actually say, what the field assumes, and where the line between the two runs. Anyone who speaks about Veles with more certainty than that is selling you something. And this is a temple that sells nothing.

The god by whom words were sworn

In the oldest East Slavic sources Veles, in that spelling Volos, carries the title skotji bog, god of cattle. Today it sounds modest, almost rustic, until you remember what cattle meant to an ordinary man for thousands of years: food, wool, hide, manure for the field, strength for the plough, dowry, inheritance, pension and insurance against hunger, all in the same animal. Cattle were a bank that walked. That is why in our language blago still means both cattle and wealth, and that is not a poetic image but a trace of bookkeeping. In old Rus the treasury was called skotnica, literally the place where the cattle are kept. To the Romans money was pecunia, from pecus, cattle. To the English a charge is a fee, from feoh, cattle. Three languages, three empires, the same arithmetic: the first wealth a person ever counted had four legs and breathed.

A god who stands over that is not a god of folklore but a god of the economy. And here comes the most important part. In the tenth century treaties between Kievan Rus and Byzantium the whole delegation swears, but not all of them by the same name: the prince and his armed retinue by Perun, the thunderer, and the common folk and the merchants by Veles. Perun was the god of those who command. Veles was the god of those who work and who answer with what is theirs. Perun's oath sounded like a threat from above, Veles's like a guarantee out of your own pocket: if I am lying, let my blago drop dead. A man who swears by his cattle swears by what he can actually lose, and that is why that oath is stronger than any thunderous one.

Along with cattle and wealth, Veles holds the treasure that can neither be killed nor stolen: song, memory and skill. In The Tale of Igor's Campaign the legendary singer Boyan is called the grandson of Veles. Poets, then, are his offspring. God of the underworld, god of the herd, god of the word that is kept and the song that is remembered, everything a village actually stands on, while the thunder above mostly collects awe and knocks down what somebody else has built.

Everything that is genuinely written about him

This is not mythology from memory. These are hard points, with dates, as they read in the sources and in serious scholarship. Where something is an assumption, it says so.

• 907 and 971The treaties of Kievan Rus with Byzantium. Oaths sworn by Perun and Volos, and beside the name of Volos it stands explicitly: skotji bog. The first appearance of the name in a legal document, not in a story.
• 988The christening of Kiev. The chronicles describe the toppling of Perun's idol, and later compositions about Vladimir also mention the removal of Volos's idol. Where the sources are younger, we say so out loud.
• 11th and 12th centurySermons against paganism. Priests list the gods to whom the people still secretly make offerings, and Volos is on that list. A ban is the most reliable proof that something is still alive.
• around 1185The Tale of Igor's Campaign. The singer Boyan is called the grandson of Veles. The god of cattle is at the same time the god of song, and that is one of the most important traces of his breadth.
• over the centuriesNames in the landscape. Chains of place names carrying Perun's name on the heights and Veles's name in the water and the wet ground below them, from our coast to the interior. The map reads like a sentence: the thunderer above, and below him the one who waits.
• 1885 to 1890Natko Nodilo publishes a sweeping attempt to draw the old faith out of our folk songs. Many hits, many misses, but the first serious cut into that forest.
• 1974Ivanov and Toporov publish a reconstruction of the so called basic myth: the thunderer above, the adversary in the root, a duel that keeps repeating. A reconstruction, not a manuscript that was found, and it should be taken that way.
• 1980s to todayRadoslav Katičić and Vitomir Belaj patiently assemble verses from folk songs, rites and place names into what looks like the remains of one single great text about the duel between above and below. This is where we come closest to the original, in songs the grandmothers sang without knowing what they were keeping.

Where it says "reconstruction", reconstruction is what is meant. Not one of these points asks you to believe anything, only to know where each thing comes from.

How a god becomes a devil

When the new faith arrived with armies and charters, the old pantheon was handled like a defeated army: the officers were offered new ranks, and the inconvenient ones were shot in the myth. Perun, the thunderer at the top of the world, was re-dressed as Saint Elijah, who to this day thunders across our villages, drives a fiery chariot and scorches whoever fails to get out of his way. Veles, as god of cattle and guardian of the throat, was given in one layer of popular piety the role of Saint Blaise, known here as Vlaho or Blaž, protector of herds and keeper of the throat; some researchers hold it is no accident that this particular cult took root so deeply on our coast. The useful part of Veles, then, got a new uniform and stayed on the job.

But his other, deeper layer, the underworld, magic, wild knowledge, everything that cannot be supervised or catalogued, that layer could not be given a rank. It was pushed downward and handed a pair of horns. In the folk Christianity of these parts the Devil inherited Veles's place, Veles's work and Veles's underworld, along with his inventory: the cattle, the treasure buried in the ground, the contracts that get signed, and the places you do not go at night.

And here something lovely happened, something that shows the people never quite believed in that reassignment. The Devil in our stories is not a magnificent lord of evil but a slightly dim neighbour with paperwork. The peasant cheats him over the crop, the blacksmith locks him in a sack, the bride drives him off with a broom, and the old godfather takes him at cards. Nobody who truly believes he is ruled by someone makes fun of him. All those stories in which the Devil comes off as a fool are in fact confirmation that the people took him in as a stranger and not as a master.

Demonization is an administrative procedure

Remember the mechanism, because it is the point of this entire page. You do not become a devil because you do evil. You become a devil because the new power needs you as the villain, since what people want from you, wealth, the body, knowledge, song, freedom, is exactly what it can neither charge for nor supervise. The procedure is always the same and it has its steps:

That happened to one god. It happens every day to people: to those who live differently, love differently, think differently, ask too much or agree too little. That is why Crni Hram does not stand on Veles as a deity, but on Veles as the oldest surviving case file on how an enemy is manufactured. Whoever reads that file to the end is harder to convince that the next one in line is dangerous.

The serpent in the roots of the world

The reconstruction, and we repeat, reconstruction, puts a duel at the very heart of Slavic mythology. Perun the thunderer at the top of the world tree, the serpentine Veles down in its roots. Veles climbs and carries off cattle, water or people; Perun strikes him with lightning; Veles hides under a stone, under a tree, under a person, under an animal; when the lightning finally finds him, he releases what he took, the rain falls, the world is renewed, and it all begins again. That is not a story about victory. It is a description of the year: drought and rain, winter and summer, an empty stable and a full one. A duel with no final verdict, because a world with a final verdict would stop working.

Note who stands where. Above stand power, law, lightning and punishment. Below stand moisture, root, seed, herd, the dead and memory. Those are not good and evil. They are two poles without which nothing grows. Lightning without earth is only a fire. Earth without lightning is a swamp. Anyone who offers you a world with only the upper pole is offering you a world without roots, and a world like that comes down in the first serious wind.

Later the duel was retold as an archangel treading on a serpent, as a saint slaying a dragon, as Saint Elijah chasing the Devil across the sky. We read it closer to the original: every power calls itself heaven and calls everything it does not control a serpent. And so, thank you for asking, we are calmly and with no drama whatsoever on the side of the roots. Everything grows out of the root. From the summit there is only thunder.

Why we take him as a sign and do not worship him

We light no candles to Veles, we do not pray to him, we ask him for neither rain nor health. We do not believe he exists, just as we do not believe in any other god, and that is not a shortcoming but our starting point. Veles is something more useful to us than a deity. Veles is a map of our own values, drawn a thousand years ago by a hand that did not even know it was writing us a message:

• Blago, property earned by work and trade and not by seizure. From there our root of obraz (honour, the face you keep before others) and of labour, and from there the contempt for anyone who confuses wealth with plunder.
• Wool and the herd, care for what and for whom has been entrusted to you. From there a community without a pack, and the rule that strength is measured by who you lifted up, not by who you ran over.
• Song and memory, Boyan's inheritance. From there sevdah (the deep, aching song of longing), the kolo round dance and the book in the same temple, and the conviction that a people who forget their songs are the first to run out of arguments.
• The oath, the word sworn by merchants and common folk because they have something to lose. From there obraz is our law, and a signature is a matter of the body, not of paper.
• The underworld, death as part of the circle and not as a stick for obedience. From there the root in the earth and peace with our own ending.
• Horns and the serpent, everything power declared the Devil and the people never stopped needing. Everything pushed into the black so that ruling would come easier. From there the name as well: Crni Hram, the Black Temple.

We do not kneel to Veles. We straighten up with him, out of the same root.The Second Truth of Crni Hram

“Nine stones, none holier than the rest.
The one with the gold seam is only the one that cracked first.”The nine roots

The difference is not in the words but in the direction. A commandment arrives finished, signed and with a threat attached, and it asks you only whether you will obey. A root asks nothing. A root is what you have already done a hundred times, until it grew into your character. You do not choose it once, you choose it again every day, in small things nobody knows about, and then one morning somebody asks why you would not give way, and you have no answer except: I cannot, I am rooted there.

There are nine because nine is enough. Fewer would be a slogan, more would be a rulebook, and the moment something becomes a rulebook somebody starts interpreting it for you, and that somebody soon starts charging for the interpretation. Not one of these roots was invented for this page. All of them were dug up here, out of the language you argue, sing and forgive in, out of what this peninsula learned in the most expensive way possible and then mostly forgot to write down.

And one warning before you read, because without it this turns into self-praise. Every one of these roots has its disease, its spoiled underside, which looks almost identical and is only turned inward. Inat has its disease, merak has its own, justice has its own, and each of those diseases has killed more people here than any outside force. So every root comes with a test: one sentence you say to yourself when you are not sure whether you are standing on the root or have just slipped into its disease.

The Mark of the Black Temple

Our mark is not invented. It is the Seal of Lucifer, the seal of the light bearer from the grimoire Grimorium Verum (18th century), a sign the world has recognised for centuries. We took an old and genuine mark rather than drawing our own, because truth needs no new logo. Its exact meaning no scribe ever wrote down; the mages drew it as the seal of the one who carries the light. We read it like this:

• The chalice at the base, the vessel that catches the light: everything you are given, you must also know how to keep.
• The crossed paths in the centre, above and below meeting in a single point: Danica in the sky and Veles beneath the roots, joined by one hand.
• The point turned upward, the ascent: knowledge is not handed down from above as a gift, it is seized and climbed toward.
• The sign of the morning star, the last light before dawn, a name they turned into an accusation, and we into a banner.

Colours

Black, everything they cast into the dark, which then learned to see in the dark. Old gold, treasure, grain and wax: value that is earned, not inherited. Red we use sparingly, the way the old folk used red thread against the evil eye: for warnings, not for ornament.

Marks cut into stone

The same marks, but no longer a drawing on paper. This is how they look when someone cuts them into black slate and fills the cut with gold: no fog, no hedging, a single line that cannot be read two ways. Above stand the historical originals with their sources; here stands the same language in hard material.

A stone that turns

A mark is not a picture on paper. A mark is an object someone holds, carries with them and hands on. This one is cut in black stone, and the line inside it is gold poured into the cut. It turns slowly so you can see every face, because a mark is not read in a single glance.

The shared language of the dark

These are original signs, genuine, from the grimoires, alchemy and the old astronomy, not our inventions: the Seal of Lucifer, the Leviathan Cross, the inverted pentagram, the inverted cross, the star of Ištar. They have been redrawn by our own hand into a clean, hard line. Not one of them "summons" anything, each one remembers something. And beside each stands the thing that matters most: which reality of life it holds.

Every image in this set is an original historical source in the public domain, from grimoires, alchemy and the old astronomies, cast into our own gold. The stone plates above are our own renderings made after them. Take them, wear them, share them, only do not lie with them.

Sigils, the seals of the grimoires

A sigil is the oldest way to lock an intention into a drawing. Medieval sorcerers believed that every spirit had its own seal and could be summoned by it; we do not believe in summoning, but before the mastery of these lines we take off our hats. These are the original seals from The Key of Salomon (Ars Goetia) and the Grimorium Verum, just as hands copied them over the centuries. They summon nothing. They show everything: that a human being could turn even his greatest fear into geometry, catch it in a circle and so strip it of its power.

Seals from The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King (ed. 1904) and the Grimorium Verum, public domain. They stand here as heritage, not as instruction.

“A word is not an ornament.
A word is a drawer: until you open it, you do not know what someone put inside.”The wall of drawers

There is a way to learn the truth about a people that they would never admit about themselves: look at which words they polished to perfection, and which they never needed at all. Language is the oldest archive we have, older than every church and every state in this region, and unlike them, an archive nobody managed to rewrite to their own measure. Written into it is what we feared, what we enjoyed, and what happened to us so often that we had to invent a shorthand for it.

Look also at where these words come from. Some are Slavic and older than all our names, others arrived with empires, through Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin, Hungarian, German, and then stayed because without them we felt cramped. That mixture is the only honest identity card this peninsula has. A man who talks about purity here is speaking a language that is its own best counterargument, and it is so in every second word he says.

So this dictionary is not folklore but foundation. We do not translate these words because they cannot be translated, and they cannot be translated because they do not describe things but states that nobody elsewhere ever had to name.

Not one of these words is anybody's property. They all came with caravans, armies, merchants and songs, changed masters and stayed with us. Whoever counts them by origin instead of by meaning has missed both the dictionary and the peninsula.

“Not one face survived.
What survived is what people said to those faces.”A row of worn heads

Before you go down among them, understand how we read this, because whether the whole page makes sense depends on it. Myth is not a lie. Myth is the oldest database humanity has, assembled out of everything that happened often enough to have to be remembered, with no other way to write it down. An illiterate village could not produce a study of sleep paralysis, of an epidemic, of how a person behaves after losing a child, or of what a community looks like once it starts hunting for someone to blame. But it could carve a figure, give it a name and a habit, and pass it on by the fire. Every monster is a set of minutes.

So there is no summoning here, no protective rite, no instructions on what to do if something presses down on you at night. There are doctors for that, and this is not a joke but the only honest advice. Here there is something else: reading. Of every being we ask three things. What was actually said, whom that fear really kept in line, and what the being has to tell us today, now that monsters appear less often in the forest and more often in a contract, in a law and in somebody else's sentence about what you ought to be.

And remember the rule that holds for all of them without exception: look at who profits from that fear. That question separates mythology from superstition and belief from obedience, and it is the only tool you actually need in this cellar.

Why a rite at all, if there is nobody to receive it

The question is fair and it always comes first. If there is no god, no spirit, no power on the other side listening, then what is the candle for? The answer is simpler than it looks: the rite never actually worked upward. It worked inward. For thousands of years people lit, tied, spoke and broke things convinced they were negotiating with heaven, and the whole time they were changing the only thing that could actually be changed: themselves. That technology proved so good that it outlived every theology that served as its excuse.

We keep the technology and discard the excuse. That is the whole difference between us and magic. Magic claims the word changes the world outside your skin: that rain will fall, that a rival will fall ill, that money will come. We reject that claim for the same reason we reject hell, there is nothing to support it and it sells expensively. Our rite claims incomparably less and that is why we can defend it: an action properly performed changes the state of the person who performed it. Nothing more. But that "nothing more", added up over years, is the only lever you actually have.

Picture two people who made the same decision. The first thought: from Monday I am changing my life. The second sat down at a table in front of four people, stood up, said out loud what she was changing and by when, touched glasses and sat down. No law of nature moved for either of them. But the second one has something the next morning that the first does not: a moment with a sharp edge, witnesses, and shame working for her instead of against her. The Balkans have known this for centuries and call it a given word. Psychology later called it commitment before witnesses and wrote books about it. The same thing, two addresses.

The six levers of every rite

Strip everything supernatural off a rite and six parts remain. Each of them does something measurable, and every ritual of ours below is assembled out of them. Learn these levers and you will be able to build a rite for anything yourself, instead of looking for it in someone else's book.

• The boundary. An exact time and an exact place. A rite performed "whenever I get around to it, somewhere" is not a rite but an intention, and intentions die on a Tuesday. The boundary tells the body: it is different now than it was a minute ago.
• An act of the hands. Something has to physically happen: lighting, tying, pouring, writing, burying. A thought is slippery, a hand is not. What the hands did, memory holds differently from what the head merely thought.
• The word out loud. Spoken in the first person and the present tense. Not "I should", but "I am doing this, and by such and such a date". Your own voice is the only voice with authority in this temple, and the only one you cannot later pretend you did not hear.
• A witness. People at the table, a fire in front of you, an empty chair, a page in a notebook. The witness does not have to be alive, it has to be outside you. What has left you is harder to take back than what stayed inside.
• A trace. A thread on the wrist, ash in the ground, a dated line. The trace is a message you send yourself for three weeks from now, when the fervour has gone and the obligation has not. Every glance at the wrist repeats the decision for you, free and without a sermon.
• An ending. A clear close: put it out, stand up, shut the notebook, walk out. A rite with no ending spills into the day and is worth nothing. The brain releases badly what has no closing act, which is why funerals exist, and why here there is always a last move.

Rites for every day

These need no date. They need repetition, and that is their whole secret: a rite performed once is an event, a rite performed three hundred times is a character.

Rites of the wheel of the year

These have dates, and that is not an accident. A year without markers runs like water and in the end nothing is remembered; a year with rites has a spine. The dates below rest on the folk customs of this region, explained in the next section, and not one of them binds you if that day does not suit you. The calendar is a servant, not a master.

How to build your own rite

Nothing listed above is sacred and nothing is compulsory. If you need a rite for something that is not on the list, for a move, for a parting, for a first day in a new job, for a reconciliation, build it yourself. The procedure is always the same and takes five minutes:

1. Decide what exactly the rite does. One sentence, no fog. "I am letting this job go" is a rite. "May things get better for me" is nothing.
2. Set the boundary: when and where. Let the date have something to do with the matter itself rather than with your schedule, if at all possible.
3. Find an act of the hands that is a picture of that sentence. Letting go? Then something goes into fire, water or earth. Beginning? Then something is lit, tied or used for the first time.
4. Write the word you will say out loud. Ten to thirty words, first person, present tense, no conditions and no "if".
5. Choose a witness and a trace: who watches and what is left tomorrow.
6. Set the ending before you begin. A rite with no ending agreed in advance turns into a mood, and a mood is not a tool.

Run it past the three rules in the red box above. If the rite passes, it is yours, and it is worth exactly as much as any rite a thousand years older. Every one of those was once somebody's good idea on a Tuesday evening.

When a rite becomes a sickness

We write this because it costs us honestly, and so does everything else on this page. The same mechanism that makes a rite useful can turn it into a cage, and that line needs to be recognized in time. Your rite has gone wrong if any of the following appears:

• Fear of skipping it. If you believe something bad will happen because you did not light the candle, you no longer govern the rite, it governs you. Our rites have no power at all, so they have none when you skip them either.
• Counting and repeating. If the act has to be performed an exact number of times, and repeated because "it did not come out right", that is no longer a rite but a compulsion, and it is discussed with a professional, not with a temple.
• A substitute for treatment. No rite cures an illness, replaces a medicine, a therapy or a doctor, and whoever tells you otherwise is lying to your face. Fire is for paper. For everything else there are people who spent years learning it.
• Somebody is charging. The moment anybody asks you for money for a rite, a cleansing, the lifting of a curse or some special knowledge, you are looking at trade in fear, and the oldest kind at that. Everything written here is free and public, and that is not generosity but a condition of existing.
• Separation from people. A rite that moves you away from family and friends is working against itself. Our liturgy is a table, and a table does not set itself.
• Serious trouble. If something big is tormenting you, if everything has gone black in front of you, if you are thinking of harming yourself, a rite is not where you go. Go to a doctor, call emergency services, call a helpline, wake up someone close to you. We say this with no qualification and no mystification: in that situation no candle, no thread and no vow is your friend. People are.

And what if I feel nothing?

Then you have just received the most honest possible proof that we are selling you nothing. A rite is not a machine for feelings and it does not have to shake you in order to work. Most of them act like sandpaper, not like lightning: you notice nothing until one day you realize your hand no longer shakes in front of things it used to shake in front of. If it still does nothing, not even slowly, drop it without a twinge of conscience. There is no sin of omission here, no penance and nobody keeping records.

And remember the most important thing, the reason this section is on the page at all: a rite is not a substitute for the deed. A toast does not write the job application, a thread does not learn the trade, a fire does not repay the debt, and a candle has never washed anybody's obraz. All of that is still done by you, in the morning, tired, with no audience. The rite is only the moment in which you told yourself clearly what you are going to do. The rest is work, and it is the only part that actually counts.

“Before every calendar, someone counted at night.
The sky was the first law, and the only one that never lied.”The sky over the karst

Why a calendar at all

Because time is the only property we all receive in the same quantity and the only one we lose without an invoice. A year with no markers runs like water through the fingers: it passes, and at the end nothing is remembered except that it was exhausting. A year with rites has a spine. You know where you stopped, you know what you promised in February, and you know that in December comes the night when it is read out loud. No religion ever survived because it had better arguments than the others. The ones that survived gave people a rhythm.

So we take that tool, as we take the rite and the symbol, and we clean off the thing that makes us keep an eye on it in the first place. In our calendar there are no holy days of obligation, no sin of omission, no fast supervised by a neighbour and nobody keeping a record of your piety. There are only six to thirteen points in the year at which a person stops, looks back and says out loud where he is.

Two halves of the year

The old folk calendar of this region was not divided into four seasons but into two great halves, the summer one and the winter one, and their borders are two days every shepherd and every ploughman knows by heart. Jurjevo, Saint George's day, opens the summer half: the cattle go out to pasture, greenery is brought into the house, the contracts for day labourers and herdsmen start running. Mitrovdan, Saint Demetrius's day, or Martinje in the western layer, closes it: the cattle come back into the stable, the accounts are added up, the young men come home. Everything in between is worked; everything after it is counted.

That division is not our invention but one of the best documented layers of the local folk calendar, and we keep it as the frame of the whole year. In summer you build, in winter you settle accounts. That is why our rites of oath and inventory are packed into the winter half, and the rites of community and fire into the summer one. It is not mysticism but a work schedule, as old as the work itself.

What is recorded, and what we put together ourselves

This is the only list of its kind you will find on a page like this, and it stands here deliberately. Whoever does not distinguish a source from his own idea sooner or later starts selling the second as the first, and we built this whole page on keeping the seam visible.

• Well documented among the people: Jurjevo and Mitrovdan as the borders of the year, the midsummer bonfires, the badnjak and the solstice processions, the unbaptized nights and the karakondžule, the wolf days in November, the days of the dead, the white and red thread on the first of March, the beliefs about the night before the first of May.
• Documented, but outside our region or only in traces: the burning and drowning of Morana, best preserved among the northern Slavs, and here only glimpsed in spring processions and dolls.
• A layer that is reconstructed, not read: Veles's place beneath Saint Blaise and Perun's beneath Saint Elijah. Those are the conclusions of philologists and ethnologists drawn from comparing names, places and songs, not preserved documents. Very persuasive, but conclusions.
• Ours, assembled here and now: the schedule of this calendar itself, the date of 11 and 12 February as Veles's night in the form we use it, the autumn scales, and all the practices in the right hand column of the table. No shepherd ever did an inventory of the shadow in a notebook. That we added, out of what we know about how a person actually works.

How this calendar is used

As a schedule, not as a law. Five rules, and all of them short.

• A missed day is not a sin. If 21 March is a working day from hell, Morana burns on Saturday. Heaven will not notice, because there is nobody up there to notice.
• Better little and real. Three rites a year that you actually perform are worth more than thirteen you read about and nodded at. Start with Veles's night and the unbaptized nights, that is the skeleton, the rest is flesh.
• Nobody pushes into another person's house. If your people at the table celebrate Christmas, a slava or Bajram, you sit down with them like a decent person. Our calendar has not one point that asks you to insult anyone or spoil anyone's holiday; whoever draws that out of it drew it out of himself.
• The date serves the matter, not the reverse. If your life is breaking in August, you do not wait for February to say so. The calendar exists for the days when nothing is on fire, because those are exactly the days when the most gets missed.
• Nothing is counted out loud in front of others. No records, no reports, no questions like "did you light it this year". Whoever starts asking that has broken more rules of this temple at once than the person who lit nothing.

A note that applies to this whole section: whoever celebrates Christmas, a slava, Bajram, Hanukkah or none of the above is a free person, and our calendar takes nothing from him and disputes nothing. The wheel of the year turns for everyone, equally long and equally indifferent; we only choose where in it to stop and say out loud where we are.

“No question is rude.
What is rude is an answer that fears being checked.”The chair of the one who asks

Read this list as a cross-examination. That is how it was written: every question was put as harshly as we knew how, including the ones we are not comfortable answering. A system that answers its most uncomfortable questions with fog, smoke or wounded feelings has already answered you.

On what we believe, and what we do not

On organization, money and power

On rite and practice

On others: believers, family, society

On ourselves, and on doubt

This is not decoration. Everything we claim on this page about Veles, about Saint Elijah, about witches, about rite and about the history of Satanism is derived from the books below and can be traced back to a source. If we are wrong somewhere, the error is here, and here it can be checked. A teaching with no bibliography is not a teaching but a sermon.

How to read this list

• Tell a source from an interpretation. A folk song, a record of a custom and a medieval treaty are sources. A book that derives from them what the old faith looked like is an interpretation, however good. Both are needed, but they must not be mixed.
• Look at the year. A book from 1885 is precious as a monument and as material, and dangerous as a textbook. The field has changed its mind three times since then, and that is good news about the field.
• A reconstruction is not a document. Most of what we know today about Slavic mythology was inferred from language, place names, songs and customs, because no sacred texts survive. A convincing inference is still an inference, and whoever does not tell you so is selling you something.
• One author is not scholarship. If a claim appears only in one writer and nobody after him confirmed it, keep it in quarantine however much you like it. Especially if you like it.
• Read the ones who do not flatter you. Our list deliberately includes books that look at Satanism coldly and from outside, and one that warns that every revolt can become a new tyranny. A list that only pats you on the back is not a library but a mirror.
• If you have no money, you have a library. Serious academic books are expensive and that is the reality, but almost all of them can be ordered through interlibrary loan. On this peninsula ignorance has long since stopped being a matter of price and become a matter of habit.

The Slavic root, where Veles comes from

Folk customs, the calendar and the beings of the dark

Public domain, the myth of revolt, free and lawful

Satanism worldwide, the academic view

How an enemy is manufactured

This shelf is the heart of the whole page. If you read only this one, you will understand Veles, the witches, the nineteen eighties and every future panic still to come, because the procedure is always the same and it has its protocol.

Rite without the supernatural, the science of why it works

Conscience in literature, ours and close to home

What should not be read as a source

If you have time for three books

Most people will not read forty titles, and that is fine. Here is an honest minimum, in this order:

1. Radoslav Katičić, any of his books on the old faith. So you can see what it looks like when mythology is done scientifically, and so you never again fall for internet "ancient wisdom".
2. Ruben van Luijk, Children of Lucifer. So you know where every sentence the world says about Satanism comes from, including the ones we say.
3. Jeffrey S. Victor, Satanic Panic. So you can recognize the next panic while it is still running, and not twenty years later, when the apologies to the families begin.

After that, go back to the top of the list and work through it. Fire is not stolen once but every day, and that is the only form of piety this temple knows.