So Veggie-Devil is Real?

Veggie-Devil was supposed to be a joke. An acquaintance of mine came up with it many years ago after dealing with one too many gothy kids in the Twin Cities occult community running around calling themselves Satanists, when really they were more like fashion victims. For whatever reason, one of the things that the members of this group seemed to all have in common was a deep-seated hatred of hippies. Thus a legend was born.

The basic idea is pretty simple. Satan is a hippie. He's vegan because he's part animal and doesn't want anyone hurting his friends. He wears tie-dye and special Birkenstocks that fit his cloven hooves. He smokes pot. He's environmentally conscious and wants world peace. And so forth. So whenever one of those black-clad, would-be Satanists would start going on about what a bad-ass Satan was, we would regale them with tales of Veggie-Devil.

Most of them laughed it off, but there were a few people who seemed generally bothered by the idea. The more parallels we could draw between hippies and Satan, the more upset they got. Needless to say, in true primate fashion, that prompted even more stories, and eventually an entire ethos that we dubbed "Eco-Satanism." It taught that the apocalypse was really an ecological catastrophe, so Satan opposed God by working to save the environment.

At one point on my old website I even created a satirical "Eco-Satanist Home Page." Sadly, a search through the Internet archive failed to turn up a cached version of it, but in my opinion it was pretty darn funny. Maybe I'll post it here someday if I can find a saved version of it on one of my home machines. At any rate, Veggie-Devil being a joke and all, imagine my surprise when I came upon the following on my Facebook feed.

Okay, that looks like some kind of an altar setup. The poster described it as an "altar of evil" and it's based around an inverted pentagram, so they're some sort of left-hand path practitioner - okay. Then I got to the description of what the altar was for:

First, a technical point. Enochian Kings are angels, so you don't summon them into the same working space with demons. Ever. It's not that they're going to burn down your house or anything, but the two energies are completely contradictory and will shut down almost any spell. So that's a big problem right there. And then there's the intent. I can only assume that a left-hand path practitioner who want to coerce the world into veganism must be an Eco-Satanist or something similar.

I didn't think any of those really existed! I thought we made it up!. But I guess the takeaway is that just about anything you can imagine is probably out there somewhere. It's not that it's necessarily incongruous for a Satanist to be an environmental activist, it's just that most of the ones I've met tend to be a lot closer philosophically to Ayn Rand-style objectivists and are more concerned with individual liberty.

To be clear, I have nothing against anyone who decides to eat a vegan diet or a vegetarian diet or a paleo diet or whatever. As a Thelemite I believe we all have the right to eat as we will, and I consider it pretty rude to criticize what may very well be a manifestation of another person's will. How someone else decides to eat doesn't affect me in the slightest, so it's none of my business. However, that consideration should go both ways, and if merely criticizing is rude, coercive magick is so much worse.

Maybe the whole thing is just a publicity stunt trying to go viral - one can at least hope. With the combination of entities there the spell's not going to work, so from a technical standpoint it's harmless. Still, I have a hard time imagining the mentality of someone who would do this for real, expecting it to have an actual effect.