Satan is God
The High Satanic Church worships Satan as God. We mean that literally. Satan is a real acausal intelligence with His own existence, will, and presence.
He is not confined to a body or a fixed place in the physical world. In our theology Satan belongs to the acausal, and the rest of the Church's metaphysics begins there.
Read more about Satan and worship
Causal and acausal reality
Causal reality is the world you already know: bodies, clocks, weather, work, money, illness, distance, matter, and consequence. It has sequence. Things happen, and what happens leaves a mark.
Acausal is our word for another order of being. Satan, the Dark Gods, and other spiritual Entities are understood through it. The two words are useful because they let us speak about ordinary life and spiritual reality without pretending they are the same thing.
Read about the acausal and nexions
The human being as nexion
A nexion is where causal and acausal reality meet. The first nexion a practitioner has to work with is a living human being: a body with a history, habits, duties, limits, and a capacity to turn deliberately toward the acausal.
This is why the work never ends at the altar. Prayer, meditation, ritual, dream, symbol, place, and attention matter because of what they become when you carry them back into ordinary life.
The Dark Gods
The Dark Gods are acausal intelligences named throughout the deeper Church material. Atazoth, Shugara, Noctulius, Nythra, Kthunae, Davcina, Baphomet, and other names appear in the canon.
They are approached as beings. A new member will meet the names in reading long before there is any need to make them the centre of practice. There is plenty to learn before that point, and none of it is wasted time.
Wyrd and becoming
Wyrd is the shape a life takes through nature, circumstance, choice, habit, and consequence. It is not a script written in advance, and it is not unlimited freedom either. It is the pattern that becomes visible when you look at a life over time.
Physis is the inward nature of a thing. Aletheia is truth coming out of concealment. Gnosis is knowledge gained by participation and direct acquaintance. These words recur because some things are understood differently after they have been lived.
Pathei-mathos
Pathei-mathos is learning through what has been undergone. Life supplies enough material on its own: grief, failure, embarrassment, responsibility, love, loss, illness, endurance, and the discovery that you were wrong about something important.
The event itself is only the beginning. Pathei-mathos is the change in judgement that remains after the event has stopped being a story you keep repeating about yourself.
No borrowed conscience
Rank does not lend you a conscience. Neither does a priest, a book, or an intense religious experience. Your choices remain yours, and so do their consequences.
Honour begins with being answerable for what you do. The Church expects members to become harder to fool, especially by themselves. Titles and dramatic gestures are much easier.
Faith and honest judgment
We speak of Satan as real. That conviction does not make every impression a revelation. A dream, an unexpected coincidence or a strong feeling during prayer still needs to be described carefully. Belief in an acausal reality leaves room for an honest admission that a particular experience is not yet understood.
Study gives this honesty a language. Practice gives it a history. A dated record lets a member return to an experience after the first excitement has passed and ask whether the original explanation still fits. Religious seriousness includes the willingness to revise that explanation.
A shared religion, a responsible person
The congregation gives solitary work a shared vocabulary, books, conversation and continuity. Its ranks mark responsibilities and access within the Church. They do not make one person metaphysically superior to another, and they do not relieve anyone of responsibility for their own conduct.
Devotion should remain answerable to the life around it: the promise kept, the obligation met, the error admitted. A convincing account of spiritual progress is less useful than a practice whose consequences can be lived with.