We’re collaborating with some folk at Ave Satanas Podcast (ASP) and Free Society Satanists to bring you a miniseries looking at Might Is Right — ur-text of Satanism and an infamous work of proto-fascism first published in 1896 by Arthur Desmond a.k.a. “Ragnar Redbeard”.

To be clear: Might Is Right sucks, both as a book and ideology. It’s full of doggerel, bigotry, and contradictions. But we’re gonna talk about it, chapter-by-chapter, from the perspective of modern, anarchist Satanists who feel that racism, misogyny, antisemitism, and tyranny are “bad, actually”.

Livestreams (mostly) take place alternating weeks 9 p.m Eastern / 6 p.m. Pacific, including Friday, Oct. 31 (0100 UTC Nov. 1), with podcasts released the following Saturday (Sep. 13), and new recordings taking place every two weeks:

RSS feed: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/2383108.rss

(copy and paste the URL into the podcast app of your choice)

Folk who have thoughts on MIR and want to weigh in are welcome to join us on Twitch.

Assuming we can make the technical stuff work, the idea is for us to talk this week about the background of Arthur Desmond and Might Is Right, and why a piece of shit book like that is even worth investigating almost 130 years later.

(Spoiler: Anton LaVey plagiarized it for The Satanic Bible.)

Since we’re springing this on you suddenly, the chapter-by-chapter stuff won’t start until Friday Aug. 22, giving people time to do their reading and weigh-in. The first one will prolly be messy, but also to do some open table-setting about why we are bothering with this project now.

We’re using the mechanically impressive “Authoritative Edition” that Trevor Blake put together and published in 2019, harmonizing and annotating various versions, but nobody else ought to feel obligated to use that one rather than any of the free versions you can find floating around on the Web.

Frankly, if you follow along reading the 1910 edition published by “14 Words Press”, you are in some ways getting the more genuine and relevant version of this rancid fucking text, what it is all about, and it’s cultural significance than Blake’s version which falls all over itself in apologism.

This is not really a fun book to read, and if you haven’t read it before, maybe it’s not worth your while.

However, the fact that is bad actually helps to explain a lot of the stuff you see around you today, and the continuity of shit like incels and “anti-theist” antisemitism is also useful.

* * *

Book editions

• 1896: [Link]
• 1910 (by 14 words Press): [Link]
• 1927: [Link] 
• This chapter: [Highlighted]

Ep. 6: Chapter 6 “Love and War and Women” (pages 243-303)

Love and Women and War. Female animals love the best fighting males. Sexual selection and the necessity of unmerciful conflict.

In what has been a very competitive category, the final chapter seems like the very worst one of all. 

It mostly treads no new ground, but I (David) know why I misremembered the “woman is two-thirds womb” section in the previous chapter as being in this one. Namely, the whole chapter is just an expansion of that misogynistic rant, just continued in a vein that never really gets anywhere fun (“Christians ruined the sexual chastity of our ancestors”), and it continues to be antisemitic and racist, obsessed with miscegenation, and contradictory page-to-page when you don’t keep in mind “he hates Jewish, “bad whites’, and non-white people, and he hates women, so everything is consistent when you work backward from that.”

Having read all of it, the book badly needed a real editor of any kind, although the best sort of editor would have brained Arthur Desmond with a pipe and left him to bleed out in an alley before burning the manuscript.

There may be a more thorough and academic study done of Desmond’s writing process to settle this, but the feeling you get reading the finished product is that he just kind of emptied his head out in fits and starts, occasionally going back to insert something else written years before and tangentially related to the subject in the middle of what he was working on then. But by this point, Desmond’s political transformation had left him without any real class critiques or even the veneer of progressivism, and it’s just the hatefulness spewing out of him. Which is also quite boring by now. It’s not blasphemy. It’s everything we’ve heard a hundred times in this book and all around us.

So we have a few examples we’ll look at, then we’re going to recontextualize the whole thing and its relationship to Satanism, and finally, we’re going to offer up some better ur-texts that Anton LaVey either feasibly could have plagiarized instead or we think Satanists today ought to treat as our philosophical core.

Section 1

If the females behave badly, the male chastises them: they crouch at his feet, seem to beg his pardon, and shed copious tears. At times the male and female weep together.” (Monist.)

Sai: It really goes to show how incels and some men view women, even today, as babies who just “have to be put in their place”. It goes hand in hand with how an alarming number of me prey after much younger women which only leads me to think… is he telling on himself? It’s very interesting that this quote was handpicked by Redbeard/Desmond.

Section 2

Even to be carried-off by force, is not repugnant to her feelings, if the “bold bad man” is in other respects acceptable.

Sai: Sir, I know you haven’t had a crumb of pussy, but have you ever talked to a woman?

She pines to be ‘wooed and wow,’ (or as it were) she likes to feel that she has been mastered, conquered, taken possession of —that the man who has stormed her heart, is in all respects, a maw among men. This suggestive female idiosnocracy is rythmically set forth by an anonymous writer, thus: ‘ ‘Down a winding path way in a garden old, tripped a beautous maiden, but her heart was cold. Came a prince to woo her, said he loved her true; maiden said he didn’t, so he ceased to woo. Came a perfumed noble—dropping on one knee; said his love was deeper, than the deepest sea. But the winsome maiden, said his love was dead, and the perfumed noble, accepted what she said. Came a dashing Stranger, took her off by force: said he’d make her love him, and she did—of course.”

…

Superior males take racially superior women, and inferior males are permitted to duplicate themselves, per media of inferior feminines. Each class reproduces its kind (on the average) and if the ordained struggle for earths Good-Tkings is not artificially interfered with, the leading classes are periodically called upon to maintain their pre-eminence, at every turn, by Might or be swept away; enslaved, supplanted, expropriated by the braver and bolder Animals.

Sai, re: “superior males” – Modern scientists would like to have a word… It’s interesting that he thinks this considering the massive cases of inbreeding in just his time and before that resulted in some “not so healthy” looking people. Genetic diversity is stronger.

…

The brave man is ever generous, frank, outspoken, dauntless. His brow is open—his step fearless and firm—his bearing self-poised, leonine. He looks at you without a tremor—sums you up at a glance, and in business affairs, his ‘ ‘word of honor’ ’ is more binding than a Shylocks sealed bond. He may not be an erudite philosopher—a profound scholar—nor an eminent elocutionist— (nor be troubled over much with the “saving” of his soul); but he is more than all that—HE IS A MAN. Hence, everywhere he is first favorite, especially with the feminine gender—whose sexual instincts are as true to Nature, as the needle is to the pole.

Sai: Is this a yaoi fanfic?

Section 3

Women take supreme delight in the roll of warlike drums—in the marching of the military; in reading the poems and romances of ‘battle, murder, and sudden death.’ (Police Gazettes are mostly supported by women, because of the sensational homicidal reports.)

Section 4

In many respects women have proved themselves more cruel, avaricious, bloodthirsty and revengeful than men. Women are also remarkably good liars. Deception is an essential and necessary part of their mental equipment. They are inherently deceitful. Man however reckon upon that and discount it well in advance. Without deception of some sort, a woman would have no defence whatever, against rivals, lovers, or husbands. We must not forget that women really hate each other—intensely.

Sai: For a man who hates Christ, he sure does talk like a lot of Christian men. This is one of the main talking points “alpha” podcasters & Incels have when talking about women. From claiming a lot of women lie about rape to generalizing women as snakes who just wait to “catch a man up”. It’s alarming how this almost exact phrasing is used today and only shows that this book indeed needs to be taken more seriously as a threat.

…

Women are made sexually attractive to equilibirate their lesser masculinity. It is man—the warrior’s—business to supply their wants; and select the best of them, for his own enjoyment and the propogation of his seed. They will not object—except in a giggling, semi-sentimental sort of a way, because they comprehend their own incapacity for self-mastership, and logical business methods. They are never touched with any sense of personal responsibility; are mere babies in worldly concerns—hysterical, well supplied with tear glands, verbal mechanism—but lovable always. Slaves and women are notoriously incompetant of self-control—of holding their own in ‘business’—when not inspired and assisted by male friends. They are intended by nature to be loved and defended but not to be “equalized.”

Sai: This is very reminiscent of Andrew Tate and how he views and espouses his views on women in general but also the women he’s trafficked.

Section 5

None

Section 6

None

Section 7

None

Section 8

None

Section 9

None

THE HIGHER LAW

None

Stuff plagiarized for The Satanic Bible

None

Continuing influence on Satanism

Q: What is Might Is Right? Why did you write the forward to the new printing of Might Is Right ?

A: Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard is probably one of the most inflammatory books ever written, so who better to write an introduction? It was only natural that I excerpted a few pages of it for The Satanic Bible. The book has been so indelibly linked with me, it was felt that any new edition should have my name on it. I am pleased with the new printing. The afterward is befitting the impact the book had upon George Hawthorne, a reader already predisposed to that kind of presentation. The editor’s notes made my Ms. Lane astutely reveal aspects I had not considered. The possibility of two distinct authors, in light of my own observations, makes perfect sense, though I am not qualified to hazard a guess as to who the other might be.

Q: What is your opinion of the militia groups today? Of the government, the president or politics in general?

….The extreme right-wing, like the extreme left, I find to be a rather humorless lot given to blaming everyone but their own kind for the plight they crusade against. The same applies to racism. There would be no problem if the gentile white man had done something when he was the majority. Now, he’s trying to close the barn door after the horse runs away. That’s why I believe in stratification by allowing water to seek its own level. It’s something that can, and is, being done. I’m all for a police state; no messing around. There should be an armed guard on every street corner. The Israelis have the right idea: school bus drivers and MacDonalds managers carrying Uzis.

—Anton LaVey fax interview with Shane Bugbee, Summer 1997: https://churchofsatan.com/interview-mf-magazine/

“Might is Right” illustrations for 2003 re-print by TST co-owner Doug Misicko (“Lucien Greaves”) under the pseudonym “Doug Mesner”.

[Source]

What The Satanic Bible should have plagiarized

Jack

• Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667)
  • Bonus: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake (1790) [illustrations]

David

• Félix Pignal: The Philosophy of Defiance or, A Pardon for Cain (1854)
  •  … Give me any epithets you wish; I accept them all in advance. I have only one thought, and envision only one glory: it is to strike everywhere and always, as much as I can, at the principle of domination. Satan, in his revolt, is my father, and, in his courage, Cain is my brother!
    
    … We do not take a single step in society without hearing that human beings must believe in a God, in a sovereign being, master of all things, according to whose absolute will everything occurs, whether for good or ill.
  •  … Some mistreat others,—that is beyond doubt,—and in order to safeguard ourselves against rebellion, we have invented the belief in God.
    
    I will go further, and say that in order to believe in a supreme being, the mistreated have no need of teaching; from that side, the movement of the soul is inevitable. 
  •  … A tooth for a tooth! The law of the jungle. Such is the combat that we must still make against the divinity… First, why do we tremble at this audacity? Isn’t humanity, under the weight of its sorrows, at bay, at the last extremities? So it no longer has anything to lose… Courage in the attack! Courage! Our servility offers us a glorious pretext which would, by itself, justify our rebellion. And since we honor a people when they know how to overthrow a tyrant, what would be the grandeur of our triumph, if we succeeded in destroying the principle of tyranny!
    
    There is a fact, and it is that tyranny is an evil more violent than all the evils which could result from our independence. That is why each of us should seek to belong to ourselves, in order that human tribulations (if we must still have them) might not be the result of a shameful mistake, and that the vicious should always be disgraceful in our eyes, for God is an imaginary torch, so fatal to humanity that he guides it in paths contrary to its happiness and renders society guilty before the criminal that it punishes! 
  • Labor, which should be for individuals only a subject for leisure has become mind-numbing under this insufferable and bloodthirsty empire, because many are required to give of themselves beyond their strength to feed their own executioners!… 
  •  Now, in order to enjoy that liberty, it is necessary to prevent tyranny, and as we have already said: The king is certainly not the only tyrant in a kingdom.
    
    A king is only the summit of a governmental pyramid, the base of which is calculated to maintain it.
    
    As long as that base is not broken up, it would be useless to sacrifice ourselves to knock down its peak in order to acquire liberty…
  • Down with governments, down with tyranny, and long live independence! Long live love and friendship. 
  • Oh, independence! Protector of humanity, inexhaustible source of happiness and satisfaction, seep into the hearts of the people, disabuse their minds of the artifices which delude and incite them, unblind their eyes, oh goddess! so that they can see your radiant halo, whose pure light weakens the monsters like the daylight wearies the owl! Mother of all pure liberties, let your name be sung, and let your name be blessed! Long live independence! War to authority!
• Max Stirner: The Ego and Its Own or The Unique and Its Property [German: Der Einzige und sein Eigentum] (1844)
  • The state practices “violence,” the individual must not do so. The state’s behaviour is violence, and it calls its violence “law”; that of the individual, “crime [Verbrechen].” Crime, then – so the individual’s violence is called; and only by crime does he overcome [brechen] the state’s violence when he thinks that the state is not above him, but he is above the state.
  • Therefore we two, the state and I, are enemies. I, the egoist, have not at heart the welfare of this “human society,” I sacrifice nothing to it, I only utilize it; but to be able to utilize it completely I transform it rather into my property and my creature; that is, I annihilate it, and form in its place the Union of Egoists [Verein von Egoisten].
  • Man is the last evil spirit or spook, the most deceptive or most intimate, the craftiest liar with honest mien, the father of lies.
  • But, because Man represents only another Supreme Being, nothing in fact has taken place but a metamorphosis in the Supreme Being, and the fear of Man is merely an altered form of the fear of God. / Our atheists are pious people.
  • Whether I am in the right or not there is no judge but myself. Others can judge only whether they endorse my right, and whether it exists as right for them too.
  • I derive all right and all warrant from me; I am entitled to everything that I have in my power. I am entitled to overthrow Zeus, Jehovah, God, if I can; if I cannot, then these gods will always remain in the right and in power as against me, and what I do will be to fear their right 
  • I decide whether it is the right thing in me; there is no right outside me. If it is right for me, it is right. Possibly this may not suffice to make it right for the rest; that is their care, not mine: let them defend themselves. And if for the whole world something were not right, but it were right for me, that is, I wanted it, then I would ask nothing about the whole world.
  • The tiger that assails me is in the right, and I who strike him down am also in the right. I defend against him not my right, but myself.
  • What sort of right, then, is there that was born with me? The right to receive an entailed estate, to inherit a throne, to enjoy a princely or noble education; or, again, because poor parents begot me, to – get free schooling, be clothed out of contributions of alms, and at last earn my bread and my herring in the coal-mines or at the loom?
  • It is said that punishment is the criminal’s right. But impunity is just as much his right. If his undertaking succeeds, it serves him right, and, if it does not succeed, it likewise serves him right. You make your bed and lie in it.
  • Only against a sacred thing are there criminals; you against me can never be a criminal, but only an opponent. 
  • Liberty of the people is not my liberty!
  • A people cannot be free otherwise than at the individual’s expense; for it is not the individual that is the main point in this liberty, but the people.
  • Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter.
  • Which of the two lies nearer my heart, the good of the family or my good? In innumerable cases both go peacefully together; the advantage of the family is at the same time mine, and vice versa. Then it is hard to decide whether I am thinking selfishly [eigennützig] or for the common benefit [gemeinnützig], and perhaps I complacently flatter myself with my unselfishness. But there comes the day when a necessity of choice makes me tremble, when I have it in mind to dishonour my family tree, to affront parents, brothers, and kindred. What then?
  • Are the own or unique perchance a party? How could they be own if they were such as belonged to a party? / Or is one to hold with no party? In the very act of joining them and entering their circle one forms a union with them that lasts as long as party and I pursue one and the same goal. But today I still share the party’s tendency, as by tomorrow I can do so no longer and I become “untrue” to it. The party has nothing binding (obligatory) for me, and I do not have respect for it; if it no longer pleases me, I become its foe.
  • A revolution never returns, but a mighty, reckless, shameless, conscienceless. proud – crime, does it not rumble in distant thunders, and do you not see how the sky grows presciently silent and gloomy?
  • Through the “Nationals” of today the conflict has again been stirred up between those who think themselves to have merely human blood and human ties of blood, and the others who brag of their special blood and the special ties of blood.
  • I am owner of humanity, am humanity, and do nothing for the good of another humanity. Fool, you who are a unique humanity, that you make a merit of wanting to live for another than you are.
  • The Revolution directed its weapons against everything which came “from the grace of God,” against divine right, in whose place the human was confirmed. To that which is granted by the grace of God, there is opposed that which is derived “from the essence of man.”
  • Property is what is mine!
  • Private property lives by grace of the law. Only in the law has it its warrant – for possession is not yet property, it becomes “mine” only by assent of the law; it is not a fact, not un fait as Proudhon thinks, but a fiction, a thought. This is legal property, legitimate property, guarantied property. It is mine not through me but through the – law.
  • What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing; if it gets away from me again, no matter by what power, as through my recognition of a title of others to the thing – then the property is extinct. Thus property and possession coincide. It is not a right lying outside my might that legitimizes me, but solely my might: if I no longer have this, the thing vanishes away from me.
  • If men reach the point of losing respect for property, every one will have property, as all slaves become free men as soon as they no longer respect the master as master. Unions will then, in this matter too, multiply the individual’s means and secure his assailed property.
  • We are all in the midst of abundance; now shall I not help myself as well as I can, but only wait and see how much is left me in an equal division?
  • They raise a mighty uproar over the “wrong of a thousand years” which is being committed by the rich against the poor. As if the rich were to blame for poverty, and the poor were not in like manner responsible for riches!
  • What equivalent do you give for our chewing potatoes and looking calmly on while you swallow oysters?  … You will make an outcry over violence if we reach out our hands and help consume them, and you are right. Without violence we do not get them, as you no less have them by doing violence to us.
  • There is not one among you who does not commit a crime at every moment; your speeches are crimes, and every hindrance to your freedom of speech is no less a crime. You are criminals altogether!
  • it is precisely as an individual that every one has open to him the liberty to utter his mind. But he has not the “right”: that liberty is assuredly not his “sacred right.” He has only the might; but the might alone makes him owner.
  • God torments himself with the devil, and the philosopher does it with unreason and the accidental.
  • I love men too – not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no “commandment of love.” I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not torture them.
  • You love man, therefore you torture the individual man, the egoist; your philanthropy (love of men) is the tormenting of men.
  • Selfish love is far distant from unselfish, mystical, or romantic love. One can love everything possible, not merely men, but an “object” in general (wine, one’s fatherland, etc.). Love becomes blind and crazy by a must taking it out of my power (infatuation), romantic by a should entering into it, by the “objects” becoming sacred for me, or my becoming bound to it by duty, conscience, oath. Now the object no longer exists for me, but I for it.
  • I sing because – I am a singer. But I use [gebrauchen] you for it because I – need [brauche] ears. / Where the world comes in my way – and it comes in my way everywhere – I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but – my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use. We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself.
  • Now, let one imagine a French revolutionary in the year 1788, who among friends let fall the now well-known phrase, “the world will have no rest until the last king is hanged with the guts of the last priest.” The king then still had all power, and, when the utterance is betrayed by an accident, yet without its being possible to produce witnesses, confession is demanded from the accused. Is he to confess or not?
  • Have all one and the same welfare, are all equally well off with one and the same thing? If that be so, the question is of the “true welfare.” Do we not with this come right to the point where
  • No one is my equal, but I regard him, equally with all other beings, as my property.
  • Only in the union can you assert yourself as unique, because the union does not possess you, but you possess it or make it of use to you.
  • Liberalism wants to give me what is mine, but it thinks to procure it for me not under the title of mine, but under that of the “human.” As if it were attainable under this mask!

Sai:

• Assata: An Autobiography By Assata Shakur (1999)

Felo’s (they/them) notes:

Chapter 6:

This chapter really hammers home the point I heard persuasively made by Craig A. Johnson on some podcast (possibly Straight White American Jesus?) while promoting his book, How to Talk to Your Son about Fascism. Which is that while fascisms have many recurring themes, such as racism, xenophobia, rugged individualism, nationalism, etc., it is the misogyny and strict gender roles that is at the very core. 

• Incidentally, that book (which I’ve not read yet) is in the Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right series, same as Spencer Sunshine’s Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege.

MiR as a whole:

As painful as it was to read, I’m glad I now have this under my belt. I knew going in it would be bad, but I definitely didn’t expect it to be as bad as it is. 

The way I often heard it talked about, even unfavorably, within Satanism, gave the impression that its racism was incidental, even if overt (or that it was, say, “ambiguous about Jews”). 

So my main takeaway is that this text fundamentally cannot be understood outside of a (proto?) white supremacist worldview. So much so that it makes for an interesting peek into full throated white supremacy early on in the invention of whiteness as we know it today. 

What Tony should have cribbed instead:

So many books have inspired and informed my Satanism that it’s difficult to narrow down. Any one of which would be far superior to Might is Right:

• Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (the 2014 documentary based on the book’s first essay, “Concerning Violence“, was one of Capital Area Satanists’ earliest Film Club screenings)
• Mikhail Bakunin’s God and the State
• Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (published 2 years too late but amusingly does open with an acknowledgment to Lucifer)
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X
• I, Phoolan Devi: The Autobiography of India’s Bandit Queen (published much later)
• The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, a (very) short story by Ursula K. Le Guin. Also published a few years too late but the foundational text to my personal Satanism.

Restricting my scope to something published before 1969, and was obscure enough that LaVey might have thought he could get away with pretending to have written himself, I’ve landed on French author, artist, and reluctant philosopher, Georges Bataille (george buh-tie). His work explored eroticism, transgression, and a kind of materialist mysticism, as well as anti-fascism. A difficult figure to sum up in brief, but someone worth keeping an eye out for.

Georges Bataille: The Sacred Conjuration (1936):

• The thing that we have undertaken must not be confused with anything else. 
• It cannot be limited to the expression of an idea, and still less to what is properly considered art.
• We are ferociously religious, and in so far as our existence amounts to a condemnation of everything that is known today, an inner necessity demands that we be equally unyielding. What we are starting is a war.
• It is time to abandon the world of civilized people and its light.The time has passed for being reasonable and cultured. This has only led to a life lacking in any attraction. Whether secretly or not, it is necessary to become completely different, or else we cease to be.
• The world of which we have been a part offers nothing that deserves our love outside each of our individual shortcomings. Its existence is limited to its convenience. A world that cannot be loved to the point where it is worth dying for, in the same way that a man loves a woman, represents only financial interest and the obligation to work.
• The advantages of civilization are offset by the ways in which men profit from them. The men of today profit so as to become the most degrading of all beings that have ever existed. Life has always proceeded in a tumult with no apparent sense of cohesion but finds its splendor and its reality only in ecstasy and an ecstatic love. Whoever tries to ignore or disregard ecstasy is an incomplete individual whose thinking is thereby reduced to mere analytical processing. Existence is not only a restless void, it is a dance that compels us to dance like fanatics. Thought that does not revolve around dead fragments may have an inner existence in the same way as flames do.
• What is required is for us to become sufficiently firm and unmovable, that the existence of a world of civilization will at last be called into question. It is useless to respond to those who are still capable of believing in the existence of this world and who managed to derive their authority from it.

Parting thoughts:

It was an unfortunate choice of source material to have cleaned up and passed off as his own. But at least LaVey did clean it up and pass it off as his own.

It just gets worse when found out to defend, praise, and write a foreword to it.

But worse still, by a significant margin, to volunteer to illustrate new editions and advocate for a new, “more evil” volume.

As David recently said in the FSS Discord, and probably again during this recording: “the fact that Might Is Right is so directly related to the two biggest Satanic organizations that have ever existed (Church of Satan and The Satanic Temple) do make it necessary for any Satanic organization that wants to exist outside of their wake to exorcise this influence by opposing it head-on.”

To paraphrase Angela Davis, given the legacy we’ve been handed, it is not nearly enough for our Satanism to be non-racist, our Satanism must be anti-racist. 

Let us become completely different, or else cease to be.

Hail Satan.