It’s Friday night in Downtown Santiago, the capital of Chile, and a group of 15 people gather around a table. They share a bottle of wine as the smell of tobacco and incense fill the air. Black candles burn atop an altar decorated with chalices and knives. The members of the Temple of Satan are about to start a ritual.
Five years after the Satanic Temple of the United States made headlines — and unleashed a wave of panic — when it was designated a church, a similar organization in Chile , a conservative country where half of its population of 18 million identifies as Catholic, is asking the government to recognize them legally as a religious association. Siuling, center, a member of The Temple of Satan: Satanists and Luciferians of Chile , takes part in a Celtic pagan celebration, in Santiago, Thursday, Oct.
“These types of organizations now feel that they have greater support to challenge what was virtually impossible before,” said Luis Bahamondes, a professor at the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Chile. And that’s because, “until very recently, the Catholic Church enjoyed an unprecedented power. It had an opinion on everything: politics, economics, geopolitics, sexuality and education.
Once they are accepted, members can choose a new name — normally that of a demon or fallen angel — with which they will be identified inside the Temple and among other associates. “The history of Satanism is well known it has often been the cause of tragedies,” the leaders of several churches in Chile, including the Catholic, Anglican, Jewish and Evangelical, said in a joint statement.
His words resonate in the darkness of the chamber and are interspersed with chants, clapping, mantras and readings of passages from the Satanic Bible and the Bible of the Adversary, the main guidelines of the group. Néstor da Costa, an expert in secularism and religion at the Catholic University of Uruguay, said the influx of people seeking answers through different perspectives might be linked to the search for less dogmatic approaches.
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