The word 'Satanist' was invented as an insult between rival Christians
For centuries almost nobody called themselves a Satanist. The label first surfaced in the 1500s as a smear that Catholics and Protestants hurled at each other. Self-declared Satanism is largely a modern creation, usually dated to 1966, when Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan in the United States, a group that does not believe Satan exists.
Accusations of devil worship run deep in Christian history. The medieval Inquisition charged groups such as the Knights Templar and the Cathars with secret rites. In the early modern era, fear of an organised conspiracy of witches led to the trials and deaths of tens of thousands of people in Europe and colonial North America, with the worst decades falling between 1560 and 1630.
The vocabulary grew out of the Reformation quarrels of 1517 to 1700. A Catholic tract of 1565 condemned the 'sathanismes' of Protestants, while an Anglican work of 1559 dismissed Anabaptists as swarms of 'Satanistes'. Neither meant literal worship; the charge was straying so far from true faith that one served the Devil's purposes. By the 19th century the word could mean simply living immorally, and only late in that century did English apply it to people thought to revere Satan deliberately. Swedish got there earlier, when the Lutheran bishop Laurentius Paulinus Gothus described devil-worshipping sorcerers as Sathanister in a work written between 1615 and 1630.
The name Satan itself began as a common noun for an opponent. Before the New Testament was written, Jewish communities developed the story of a rebel angel cast out of heaven with his followers, preserved in texts such as the Book of Enoch. Folklore, art and theology then gave the Devil a vast repertoire, until he stood as evil's chief representative and the imagined Satanist as a dark reflection of the faithful Christian.
Small groups using Satanic imagery have appeared since the 19th century. After the 1960s they split roughly into two camps. Theistic Satanists revere Satan as a real being, though usually as a father figure rather than an all-powerful god. Nontheistic Satanists treat him as a metaphor for certain human qualities. The movement remains mostly American, though the internet has carried it abroad, and it shares family resemblances with Left Hand Path figures such as Lilith, Prometheus and Set.
Source: Satanism
