The Invention of Satanism

Asbjorn Dyrendal, James R. Lewis and Jesper Aa. Petersen are scholars of new and minority religions, none affiliated with any Satanist or Luciferian organization, and this book was published by an academic press. It is a standard scholarly account of how modern religious Satanism was assembled from folklore, prior occultism and Anton LaVey's own writing, and it treats Luciferianism as a related but distinct current, one that reads Lucifer as a figure of enlightenment and self liberation rather than adopting Satan as an adversarial identity the way LaVeyan and theistic Satanism do. The authors draw on published primary material from the movements they describe rather than from participant observation alone. This record has not independently traced a documented history of scholarly rebuttal to the book's specific claims. Use it for the scholarly basis of distinguishing Luciferianism from Satanism; it is not a source for what any individual self-described Luciferian personally believes, which varies considerably and is documented nowhere in a single authoritative canon.