When you’re a member of The Satanic Temple trying to explain what it is to someone, your job is pretty simple. You quote any number of media-guide-approved explainer articles written by a safe, TST booster.
Members of The Satanic Temple do not believe in God or the devil. Its beliefs are articulated in “the seven tenets.” These tenets emphasize reason and science as well as values such as compassion and justice.
—Joseph P. Laycock, “What Is The Satanic Temple”
However, when you’re not a member of TST and you want to accurately describe what “The Satanic Temple” is to someone, the job is considerably more difficult. So much so, it’s hard not to sound like you’ve gone a bit peculiar soon after you get started.
“Well you see, the for-profit United Federation of Churches LLC does business as ‘The Satanic Temple’, but the old name of the non-profit church ‘The Satanic Temple Inc’ was also just ‘The Satanic Temple’, so you have to go by federal EIN and secretary of state ID number for corporations to keep them separate, especially since they share a website and physical address…”
Just very normal, very cool, very on-the-level religion things, obviously.
Those are all real companies, and some have interesting intersections with TST, but seven in particular come up regularly: five for-profit corporations, one nonprofit, and another nonprofit church.
- 64 Bridge LLC, d/b/a “Salem Art Gallery”
- Spectacle Films Inc
- United Federation of Churches, LLC, d/b/a “The Satanic Temple”
- Reason Alliance, Ltd (nonprofit)
- The Satanic Temple Inc, formerly “The Satanic Temple” (nonprofit church)
- Cinephobia LLC, owner of TheSatanicTemple.TV
- Winstonian Enterprises Ltd, owner and operator of “The Satanic Estate” and its TST Virtual Headquarters
So, let’s see if we can make our way through all of these various, overlapping and interlocking legal entities one-by-one, and then see if we can make sense of what’s going on.
Because “that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared its demise.”
64 Bridge LLC d/b/a “Salem Art Gallery”
For more information, see The.Satanic.Wiki
This is not necessarily the most prominent or most important of all entities connected to The Satanic Temple and its owners, but it has a good case for being the most revelatory of what’s going on and how they really operate.
This is because Sixty Four Bridge LLC is a for-profit corporation owned by one person that seemingly owns just one property:
That property is the “Salem Art Gallery”, which is co-extensive if not identical to “The Satanic Temple — Salem”.
It’s also the official and seeming HQ for at least four of the other companies in the above image: the self-described “international headquarters for The Satanic Temple” (both for-profit United Federation of Churches LLC d/b/a “The Satanic Temple” and The Satanic Temple Inc, the nonprofit church); Reason Alliance, Ltd., the public nonprofit; Cinephobia LLC, owner of TheSatanicTemple.TV; and finally, it is the mailing address for Colorado-registered company Winstonian Enterprises Ltd., owner and operator of “The Satanic Estate” and its TST Virtual Headquarters.
As the situation in Colorado shows, an unknown number of other corporations, particularly ones registered in states with tighter disclosure laws, might also do business out of the address in some way, but without being announced—like in a newsletter—these legal entities wouldn’t just be impossible to find; they’d be impossible to even know of to look for.
That said, public records for the United States’ federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic indicated that only one company at that address — indeed, only one in that above image — applied for loans. That company was Sixty Four Bridge LLC, which received $52,000 for four jobs. The loan was entirely forgiven, meaning the company met its requirements.
So something about this is special.
The entire theory of change that The Satanic Temple pitches to members is that it uses the courts to fight and achieve “meaningful, constructive changes”; supposedly, it achieves practical victories by using the courts to take advantage of existing local, state, and federal religious liberty laws but for the benefit of religious minorities.
But after endless rebellions against the national’s attempts at authoritarian control, TST’s top leaders don’t trust local orgs at all and have become even more centralized.
Therefore, 64 Bridge LLC is absolutely essential to TST’s capacity to argue in court that it’s a legitimate religion (e.g. “does this org have standing in a local invocation matter?”); it is the owner of the physical structure that houses most TST-related entities’ physical headquarters but also houses TST’s Instagram props née failed public monuments like titless Baphomet, and their various gift shop kitsch.
Somehow, TST national leaders and local managers ignore and obfuscate from the lay membership the very existence of this legal entity as well as its relationship to TST, likely because the sole owner wants it that way.
That’s the second, subtler thing that makes Sixty Four Bridge LLC so important to everything else TST does: per its legal incorporation documents, the entity is owned by only one person— Cevin Soling.
Even for people who are quite familiar with TST, this may come as a shock. Neither Lucien Greaves nor any of his pseudonyms (or his legal name) have any right to the building that TST is based out of.
In other words, the guy that is treated like a semi-divine philosopher-king by his most loyal adherents can only continue to come into the office at the pleasure of a guy they’ve never heard of.
Now, some of them may have heard of “Malcolm Jarry” before, but other than being a “co-founder” and popping up to shit on public schools now and again, what does that guy even do?
The fact that Soling is actually “Jarry” (and the single most important person within TST from a financial perspective) is not something he likes to have known about him, for whatever reason.
Since a 2014 Village Voice article about The Satanic Temple, Soling has been identified as using the pseudonym “Malcolm Jarry”, and there’s plenty of suggestive and direct photographic evidence as well.
Recently, Soling even began an exhibit(?) at The Salem Art Gallery under his own name called (with absolute self-awareness or none — you decide), “We’ve Become What We Parody.”
For “Cevin Soling — Live!”, the one day, hour-and-a-half event (only $15, tickets non-refundable), this is how Soling describes himself:
In conjunction with We’ve Become What We Parody, join renowned writer, filmmaker, musician, academic, and artist Cevin Soling for a conversation about his process and practice, including a special musical performance featuring works from his band, The Love Kills Theory. Soling’s artistic and academic work is ultimately about transcendence. His debut film, A Hole in the Head, documented a sub-culture who drilled holes in their heads to expand their state of consciousness. The troubling aspect was not so much these people’s willingness to violate their own body in a dramatic manner. Rather, the procedure might work and the subsequent questions this raises about potentially improving brain function and how far one should go.
The bio then goes on to list a bunch of other projects.
Remarkably, none of those projects include The Satanic Temple or the fact that he owns the building everyone else will be sitting inside of.
Which probably is more relevant in terms of transparency (“Wow, Cev! How’d you manage to get an exhibit of your art in here?”) than letting people know you produced a film about urine therapy back in the late ’90s, don’t you think?
For all the importance that Lucien Greaves has as a recognizable figurehead, trotted out to talk about how great TST is and how it isn’t your grandpa’s bigoted ol’ Church of Satan, it’s important to remember that, while Cevin Soling trusts Lucien to handle soliciting nudes on Twitter for TST holidays, Cevin still doesn’t trust him enough to give him the legal keys to their professional home, which is a property assessed to be worth more than half a million dollars on its own.
So when we ask, “What is The Satanic Temple?”, keep in mind that “Lucien Greaves” is a trademark shared by Soling and Doug Misicko through the next entity on our list: United Federation of Churches, LLC. But the address “64 Bridge St, Salem, MA 01970–4131” is owned by Soling solely, and almost no one who supports TST knows it.
(Which may be part of why they haven’t left The Satanic Temple.)
Editor’s Note: Added list of TST corporations Nov. 3, 2021