Satanic Nostalgic
DOOM, Gloom, the Q-Anon Boom, and a New Satanic Panic
*This piece was written in 2023 for an anthology that never got published. I’ve decided to find a home for it here.*
Something was off about the DOOM reboot—something in the funko pop doll in-game collectibles, the chirpy AI sidekick, the steady creep of lore, and how good the gameplay was, unconscionably good for anything that came out in the 2010s. It was the kind of good that felt plotted and deliberate, like it was aware of the creative bankruptcy of the industry and wanted to make a statement, but still a statement, still too aware of the shit surrounding it to be totally sincere.
And sure enough, my suspicions were confirmed with the 2020 release of DOOM Eternal, which injected so much more nerd lore into the franchise that I could now appreciate the full flavor of that initial foretaste I had. That first hint of something soy now blossomed into a full-blown bouquet of tongue-in-cheek winks, nods, references, gestures, Soyjacks pointing, all reeking of Reddit and the sci-fi deep-fried brains of emasculated nerds doing world-building and story-telling, and I knew I was about to have to say goodbye to an old franchise and friend.
The DOOM series now belonged to the enemy.
Here's how I imagine the beginning of the end which was Eternal: at some point, some nerd in a conference room reinvented Gnosticism by blurting out, “hey, what if DoomGuy started fighting angels instead of demons?” And the rest is science. A hive of nerds gets to work, coming up with elaborate backstories, esoteric taxonomies, codex entries, world-building, to pay their tally of complexity which all nerds take to be the sign of merit. They probably pulled back a little, qualifying the angels as “aliens,” because then they'd have to reckon with God. Still, DOOM’s new baddies are called Maykr, a crappy play on “Maker,” and basically look like angels with wings.
Yet another 90s baby retconned. Yet another classic hero myth of 90s cultural consciousness—a lone badass blasting demons with a double-barreled shotgun—turned into a bloated fanfic promoting moral subversion and shades of grey.
Still think I’m stretching? Spoilers: the main baddy of the entire DOOM series turns out to be God Himself. That’s right, John Romero’s innocent game about shooting demons ends its saga after a twenty-eight-year stint (almost as old as I am) to reveal that, ackshually, the Dark Lord is the creator of the universe. It turns out—so say the keepers of lore—that the leader of the Maykr known as the Father (i.e., the Abrahamic God) was the original retcon job after all, rewriting poor innocent Satan to be the bad guy, and confirming in my mind that it all boils down to daddy issues with these nerds.
This is what lore does to you, my friends, and why nerds can’t let us have any fun. They simply must preach science, sex lib, and Satanism.
All said, we’re due for a new Satanic Panic.
Because one thing riding the retrowave of 80s and 90s nostalgia is good old fashioned demon worship. The demonic imagery is in the open, the Satanic lyrics aren’t reversed but played straight, and the religious right ought to be having a field day, if there was a right, or a religion.
But there won’t be a scare—we’re too sedated. And that is the difference between the Satanic Scare of the 80s and 90s and the current stirrings of one, the Q-anon one, which isn’t so much a scare as an anxiety disorder on Adderall. There’s an unaccounted-for mass of people on the internet, many of them post-menopause, who were genuinely traumatized by the discovery of pedophiles and child traffickers in positions of power. For some, the Epstein flightlogs and Wikileaks emails were only the tip of an iceberg that bottomed out at subterranean bunker tunnels, an underground network of child-sacrificing demon-worshippers, time-traveling through CERN, different colored ‘hats’—more lore.
We’re scatterbrained. Our Satanic panic is soteriological ennui. Christian Bale’s Golden Globes shoutout to Satan is appropriate, eccentric, Madonna’s tired old crotch had a pentagram on it during Superbowl halftime, I gave up tracking down Jay Z’s spirit cooking shenanigans, and all of this when a few decades ago it would have been … oh, what’s the use in comparing. It wouldn’t have been at all, which is the point. We’re here now, in the thick of hell. Welcome.
Here’s what you can expect.
A big red demon is packing some black guy’s fudge right in front of my face and I can’t even tell anyone I know about my feelings. I can’t object. There is no cultural currency for shame. No healthy response that has any purchase anymore. We have only one soundbite to repeat again and again without end: how new. How brave. No revulsion allowed, only revolution, only revisionism and reboots: only leather boots on your face, forever.
Watching Lil Nas X give a leather-strapped lap dance to the demon version of himself, in his music video to “Montero,” I’m brought back to the Satanic panic of the 80s and 90s. I was born in ’92, so I only grew up in the aftermath, when what remained was mostly a faint whiff of witchcraft attribution surrounding the Harry Potter books. (By the way, assholes: check out J. K. Rowling’s cool new tattoo sometime. Then read the history of Éliphas Lévi and occult magick. Then make it not so lonely to know all this crazy fringe crap.)
The old Satanic Scare, being pre-Internet, was a slow-boil type of hype, hype with staying power. Somehow the idea had spread in the moral conscience of Americans that kids everywhere were getting ritually abused in satanic ceremonies. Repressed memories were being brought to the surface, by psychiatrists like Lawrence Pazder in his book Michelle Remembers, and the journo-nerds caught on to their next big break in worldbuilding. The Evangelical news cycle with its Diet Coke conservatism helped spread the sensation of Satanic Ritual Abuse to TV sets across the country. Experts referred to SRA as “ritual abuse” or “multi-victim, multi-offender abuse,” so there was enough of a nod to the secular, enough ‘serious clinical science’ to cover for the fact that America was pinging for another witch hunt.
Imagine the media taking a firm stance on child abuse in 2023. It almost makes you want to go back. But you’ll find that feeling doesn’t go away after backpedaling two decades—you’ll keep wanting to riff on an original, and who knows how far back you’ll “retvrn.”
Funny: back in the 80s and 90s, all that televised Satanic outrage must have been seen by some conservatives as way too liberal for public broadcast, too exploitative, a sign of the decline. The rabid news coverage probably seemed to the more sensible fundies as part of the problem, not the solution—demonic in is own right.
If my half-baked hunch is true, the SRA scandal is one litmus test for how far the Overton window has shifted. I won’t press the point, but showing an excess concern about child trafficking today, too systemic a concern, risks putting you somewhere in the ballpark of January 6 in the cultural consciousness. Salva et coagula, indeed.
Back to the devil, or Lil Nas. Everyone’s heard about Lil Nas’s shoes. He released (from its chains? Summoned from its pits?) 666 pairs of red-black Nikes complete with pentagrams, inverted crosses, and one drop of actual human blood in its ‘soles,’ priced at $1018, a reference to Luke 10:18 (“I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”). This is in addition to the buttfucking demon video, in which Nas, I best mention, descends from heaven to hell on a stripper pole.
But don’t worry: anyone anxious about Lil Nas’s spiritual state can rest easy knowing he was an atheist “at one point” but now considers himself “a very spiritual person in terms of the Universe, how everything works,” according to an interview with XXL Mag. Phew. That’s good. Spiritual is good, right? So how does the Universe work, Lil Nas? Let’s start with life: how do you make babies? Right. You don’t. You do as thou wilt, with butts. But I’m beginning to lose the thread of it all, Nas. What is the Universe and its workings without life? Could it be, simply, universal death?
Speaking of cosmic death, let’s turn to Astroworld, a topsy turvy world, a world much like our own. Last year, rapper Travis Scott gave us the Astroworld Fest, with an inverted cross for a stage leading straight into the mouth of a Hieronymus Bosch rendition of Travis’s head, complete with spinning hell portal. On top of all that, we got a sneak peak into how our favorite autotuned celebrities feel about their most die-hard fans when they’re actually convulsing in death throes around them.
CNN says that eight people died and hundreds were wounded from the mumble rap equivalent of a mosh pit, I guess. But my favorite Astroworld lore is that the mass causality incident was all a test run for the weaponization of 5G, emitted from the speakers on ever-unsuspecting, ever-drugged millennials. Anyways, it was spooky. Someone caught Travis on video while another catatonic concert-goer was being rolled out on a stretcher, and Travis went on singing, more autotune than man, staring straight through his dying fan in a stupor that was either Xanax or the practiced affectation of a ritual abuser farming loosh.
But back to the 90s—always back to the 90s. You want more 90s nostalgia with a 2020 conspiracy twist? How about everyone’s favorite sitcom Friends, one of the last things celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain tweeted about before he got (allegedly, allegedly!) Epsteined? “During the commercial breaks for ‘FRIENDS,’” Bourdain tweeted in 2019, “the entire cast would chant ‘Hail Satan...Hail Satan..’ little known fact. I saw it the internets.” I believe him. I believe him incredibly. Because he had little reason to lie on the internet(s) and I have every reason to believe in it, to believe in anything, because Friends is hell: it is about nerdy bumbling men who can’t get any and it even has lore.
The Google Play icon is the sigil of Lucifer. Gmail’s logo is a Masonic apron. I’ve got the papers. And every time you clean out your junk mail, you’re being flashed by the Novus Ordo Seclorum because the big Masonic secret about that apron is that it’s meant to hide your cock: your solar shaft of cosmic sperm or some such Hermetic bullshit. I can’t keep it all together. I’m somewhere between “I want to believe,” They Live!, T2: Judgment Day, and “Run, Forrest, run.”
Don’t get me started on Tom Hanks.
Okay, maybe you’ll bite: what’s with all the sock, shoe, and glove pictures on Twitter, Hanks?
What the hell?
All stories are fundamentally religious. There is no escaping lore.
All heroes are fundamentally Christlike: visiting us in the grit and grime from somewhere on high, descending down into Hades to drag us dirty sinners back up to the light. Stories are told and retold because the core truths keep being true—especially when we tell ourselves we’re above them.
And so, when I see yet another story, another film, another beloved franchise, make its messaging about ‘overturning the traditional order,’ I know exactly what sort of sacrament I’m partaking in. The rejection of religion is religious. There is no place to stand that does not take its own grounds for granted, on faith. In fact, that’s what taking a stand means.
Satanism is a religion, but in a way that goes beyond Anton LaVey’s little horror-house religion in San Francisco (unholy Jerusalem of the Church of Satan). Satanism is a state of mind. It goes back to Byron and Blake, to the Romantic poets, flouts itself in Nietzsche and de Sade, crackles through the core of the metal scene, ripples under the surface of mild-mannered Silicon Valley.
People who can’t comprehend the religious zeal of the anti-religious believe in all their naivety that there is a neutral place to stand, a place beyond good and evil. Science, you see. But the problem of pursuing a neutral truth above all else, separating it from the good and the beautiful, is it stops discriminating against the evil and the ugly, so that ‘objective truth’ becomes the pretext for being permissive to a whole lot of nasty shit.
And how do you tell who is using the truth to be true or to be nasty?
But if you’re going to hear me out, when I say that Satan worship is at an all time high, you’ll first have to know what I mean by worship and by religion. I do not mean an organized set of rituals or beliefs. I mean Robert Bellah’s definition of religion—a set of symbols and actions that relate us to the ultimate conditions of existence. No contract in blood needed, no Black Mass necessary, no codified system of which the believer need be aware; that’s only the endgame, the final boss. Religion at its most basic is what you believe to be the bedrock: the most foundational reality, the building blocks of being, the source code of all things.
All this means you could be a Satanist without being a card-carrying Satanist (good for you, since cards are currently sold out on the Satanic Temple website), so long as we understand Satan as the avatar of all evil. Yes, that means you could worship evil without your explicit consent. Does that give you bad vibes? Does it remind you of rape? And what’s the test for knowing whether you’re Satanic-positive?
Simply ask yourself this: do you believe that evil, absence, the void—something fundamentally wrong, something ‘off’—is built into the very structure of the universe? Remember, religion is your relation to the ultimate conditions of existence: relating to them badly spells daddy issues on a cosmic scale. If you believe the universe is an illusion, a simulation, a lie (hello again, Gnosticism), if you believe it is a mistake or an accident, if you believe it is meaningless and disjointed and fucked, if you believe this reality is broken at its core, congratulations. The Dark Lord has you.
In fact, I don’t think you could worship the Devil if you really knew it, because knowing it, truly, would horrify you back to the bosom of love and light. And if that sounds too preachy for all you denizens of hell, I say it because my brushes with evil have convinced me that facing evil truly, not aslant, is impossible. To do evil, to be evil, even to be around evil, is always by necessity to lie to yourself in some way.
So yes, you could never pay homage to the Devil, master of all evils, in any way in which you could be consciously aware. Yet my bid is that you do it anyway, all the time. Call it dissociative identity disorder. It’s the one worldwide ritual abuse we’re all victims of, the one memory we all repress: our lost innocence. Our secret worship of evil is the only truly internalized, intersectional original sin, from which the social justice lore can only crib. And that explains why mythologies have always depicted the Devil as the deceiver, the trickster, the liar, the conman—because knowing you’re in the cult is the only way out. Hence, repentance. Hence the eye of the needle.
But try to explain to someone that we all worship the Evil One in our private ways, especially in those ways we don’t want to fess up to, and you sound crazy. You sound Q-anon. It’s the biggest, most original conspiracy theory of them all, before the original turned into a never-ending series of sequels, prequels, and lore. Backpedaling in time to your own 90s nostalgia turns out to be a search for that time before time, the pre-prequels: 90s innocence is the promise of a deeper innocence. And the true Deep State is a state of depth that has no bottom, except your own, getting porked by the big red demon version of yourself forever in an autoerotic, solipsistic hell of your own make.
Welcome to Satanism, folks. The Pentagon is a pentagram. Jesuits control the Vatican. The Club of Rome wants us all dumbed down for a mass extermination event and the Georgia Guidestones were commissioned by CNN founder, UN sponsor, and creator of Captain Planet, Ted Turner. I saw it, the internets. I saw it all before it ever began, in my 90s-era womb, hearing my Mom’s prog rock through the amniotic fluid and knowing, believing, that the show must go on. I only hope that the show is not Satan’s Superbowl halftime—that something that isn’t fake and ghey, something still original, remains for us to remember. And perhaps stand for. And perhaps more than stand: perhaps fight.
And so, while the lore nerds get busy world-building, Babel-style, I say we practice what we preach. We point out the decline first of all with the beam in our eye. We draw out the conspiracy, first and foremost, of our own souls against ourselves. And while we let our world-building run wild, let’s run even wilder, braces on our legs, slightly retarded, but sincere.
Because we need individuals, not copies, to survive this psychosis. We need originals: not story builders but story livers. Weak nerds may lead to end times, but end times lead to Chad times: demon-hunting with a double-barreled shotgun.
And while my ass may be the devil’s, I’m also all out of bubble gum.
