7 Paths Foward: The Satan Seller pp. 19-22

 Note for new readers: page numbers are based on the PDF of the book found at the internet archive.

“One might see in these events a quickening of the conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, God and Satan.”

The events he lists are the civil rights movement, the Watts Riot, a massive power blackout in the Northeast US and Southeast Canada (it only lasted 13 hours), and the Pope visited the US for the first time. He phrases the Watts Riots as a white guy in the 1960s, so I’m actually prepared to let that one go—as he’s probably only getting the official story and not the LAPD doing LAPD things. Aside from that, there’s no good versus evil battles here.

He calls 1965 the downward pivot in world history and he’s not talking about music. He sees a blossoming world of drug use which to him says, “Evil seemed to be afoot on Planet Earth.”

This book is charting a clear path: alcoholàmarijuanaà “drugs” àSatanism. The point of the book is to illustrate that if little Johnny or Susie turns away from Jesus, they’ll be running drugs for a kingpin like Dean Anderson which is what Warnke is doing right now. He’s high all the time, and Anderson is going to introduce him to the new scene.

What’s very interesting to me is how Warnke describes the first meeting with the Satanists. He drives out to a very fancy house in Redlands California. Redlands was/is a wealthy suburb East of San Bernadino. Warnke is taken to a fancy house full of various signs of wealth: plushy carpet, oil paintings, the best furniture, etc. He meets the group who welcomes him in and they smoke pot and engage in “hip talk.”

Then there are the women, “cool-looking, sexy girls too. And every one was liberal. I mean liberal! These chicks were free-lovers.” Everyone pairs off and they begin having sex…in the same room! It’s an orgy or a shared exhibitionism thing, either way Warnke is getting laid.

There are two interesting parts to this story. The first is that we have more evidence that Warnke is lying, “It was great because there was a girl for every guy, not like most places I had been where there is a chronic chick shortage.”

Warnke is lying now or he was lying in the previous chapters. There has been no point in the story so far where Mike has expressed a lack of women. Quite the opposite in fact: Warnke, at every step of his story, has told us about how much the chicks hang around him. In highschool he was sneaking off with one girl, there was the café bar he was pulling all kinds of women, and then at college. These women might be different in some fashion, but there has never been a shortage women around him.

The second interesting aspect is that this is exactly how Alex Jones describes the time that Satanists tried to recruit him with two important differences. The first is that his story takes place either in a suburb of Dallas or Austin (he’s said it both ways) and that he was in high school when it happened. Well, not ‘happened’ because they’re both lying. The important part of the story isn’t that it was happening, it’s that it was happening because both individuals were so awesome that the Satanists needed them to join. It’s just a sad ego boost story.

He begins having sex, and it reads just like his drug use in the previous chapters: he never gets specific, so it doesn’t read like a personal experience. Instead it reads like someone who knows that they can’t fake the details so they’re just being vague.

Warnke begins working for this group. In the terminology of HBO’s “The Wire” he’s a hopper, an errand boy. He delivers packages, money, and messages. I think I could like this part of the story if he was better at telling it. Warnke is attempting to make it seem like he was an integral part of the group, but he glosses over all of the details. We read that one message was an order to “rough someone up” and it was scrawled on the back of a “ripped-open package of cigarettes.” So we are left to wonder if it was carried out, why it was so hastily written, why Warnke had to be the one that delivered it. If this group is as evil as he’s going to suggest later on, then these little things matter. There should be a slow escalation that sucks him in. First he’s just the message boy, but he’s given more important tasks with more serious consequences.

Instead he just tells us that he was so smart that he was able to piece together the entire Witchcraft thing on his own. But, what witchcraft? He’s not told us about witchcraft the only thing that we know about is a sex and drug party in Redland California. Then the story winds down. Instead of telling us about the magic powers of the witches or with details of how big it was (we’re only told that it was bigger than anyone thought); we’re told a story about the fellowship classes. This isn’t a bunch of people playing pretend, he says, but then everything he says afterwards is just church meetings and discussion groups.

It just sounds so boring. There are people who specialize in certain things, Warnke rightly compares them to college majors, “There were students of Satanism (utilizing the power of the devil through worship); demonology (summoning different demons-the devil’s helpers); necromancy (communication with the dead by the conjuring up of spirits); vampirism (belief in vampires, blood-sucking ghosts); lycanthropy (assumption of the form and traits of a wolf via witchcraft)”

[my edition doesn’t have a period at the end of that section and I’m super angry about it]

These majors don’t make sense. Why would you study demonology if you can study Satanism? One of those is the minor league version of the other. Vampirism’s definition is so bad that even Stephanie Meyer would roll her eyes. “Necromancy” is the only one that actually makes sense, but also is the lamest. Your classmate (covenmate?) can make demons do her bidding but you can just talk to the spirits. Lame.

Warnke shows good judgment, so Dean Anderson is going to bring him into the “third stage.” This is described as the “real thing” which means that the rest of it was just fake. I get what he’s trying to do which is tell us that the kids spray painting pentagrams are amateurs. It’s just repetitive because we’ve already been told that this drug orgy group was the real deal, then it was the “church group” with their majors, but now we’re going to get to the really real part.