Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from “Satan’s Little Helper” a feature on the The Satanic Temple’s legal battles written by author Molly Langmuir. To read the rest, get your copy here.
One morning in late October, Lucien Greaves, the spokesperson for the Satanic Temple, stood with his guard dog, Luci, out- side the organization’s headquarters, a Victorian mansion in Salem, Massachusetts.
Luci, a canine mass of muscle with such enormous ears that Greaves would soon dress her as a bat for Halloween, eyed the surroundings warily. “She’s on alert for everybody,” Greaves said. Behind us, a family headed inside the mansion to visit its museum, which contains, among other occult artifacts, a sculpture of the goat-headed deity Baphomet large enough for people to sit in its lap for selfies. Visitors often ask to take photos with Greaves as well.
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“In this place, I’m fucking Mickey Mouse,” he said. Greaves, the most visible and influential Satanist in the country, is also frequently the subject of death threats. He has spent the past decade as the face of the Satanic Temple, a group he co-founded to promote religious pluralism and rational thought—and to mercilessly antagonize the religious right. One of TST’s first actions, in 2013, was a “pink mass” performed over the grave of the mother of Fred Phelps, founder of the virulently homophobic Westboro
Baptist Church. The mass included two men kissing while Greaves presided in a horned headdress, then draped his scrotum along the headstone. The next year, after a monument to the Ten Commandments was installed at the Oklahoma State Capitol, TST commissioned a nine-foot bronze sculpture of Baphomet. (Before it could be erected, state court ordered the Christian monument removed.)
This past December, after an Ohio school began offering periods of Bible study during lunch and recess, TST countered by offering its own “religious release program,” which involves taking students to a local
library to learn about subjects like zoology. The group also fervently supports abortion rights—one of its fundamental tenets is that a person’s body is subject to their will alone. In 2023, in New Mexico, it opened a telehealth service named Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic, after the ultraconservative Supreme Court justice. (Another central belief of TST is that engaging in serious missions shouldn’t require setting aside one’s sense of humor.)
In October 2024, they opened a second clinic, in Virginia, with the relatively staid name Right to Your Life Satanic Abortion Clinic. While these are small operations, they perform the same functions as any other
telehealth abortion clinic, providing virtual consultations and connecting patients with pharmacies that mail them abortion pills. A few things do set their services apart, however. Both clinics are fully funded by
donations—patients pay the pharmacy for their medication but send nothing to TST.
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As part of the service, patients are also told about an optional “religious abortion ritual” wherein they look at themselves in the mirror and recite, “By my body, my blood, by my will, it is done.”
TST, in other words, is a sort of right-wing fever dream. But it’s also the opposite of pop culture’s depiction of Satanists as murderous devil worshippers. TST members do not revere Satan or even believe he is real. Instead, their view of Satan is that of the character reimagined in Romantic literature
as a complex figure who fought abusive power and served as a voice of reason. (This is in line with how Satan was initially presented in the Old Testament—the Hebrew term that was often originally used to refer to Satan simply means “the Adversary.”) TST’s website says the group’s mission includes “encouraging benevolence, rejecting tyranny and pursuing noble goals.” They see in Baphomet not the
devil but a representation of duality.
Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman argues that James Madison, known as the father of the Constitution, would have backed TST’s fight for religious pluralism because the framers wrote the First Amendment to apply to all groups, no matter how contestable. “We don’t have any examples of people in constitutional discourse saying, at the time, ‘Well, not them,’” he says. Meanwhile, detractors have deemed TST “troll lords” and “Satan personified,” and any number of people who legitimately believe the group is evil have been drawn to its headquarters. Some of these visits have been innocuous, as when a group of women tried to douse the building with holy oil. But there was also the time a man showed up in
a T-shirt that read “GOD” and tried to set the building on fire and an incident last May when a guy threw a pipe bomb at the porch (it failed to fully explode).
The cops suggested Greaves get a gun or a dog. He chose Luci, whose presence helped him feel more secure, but only slightly. “I don’t want to assume I’m not going to get got,” he said. Just a few nights earlier, a man had attempted to break in while ranting that he had “four tons of TNT up in this bitch” and was himself Baphomet. When I expressed bewilderment, Greaves suggested that trying to make sense of it was beside the point. “I think you haven’t dealt with the deluded long enough,” he said.
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