Lucien Greaves

Douglas Mesner, better known as Lucien Greaves, is a social activist and the co-founder of, and spokesperson for, The Satanic Temple.

Biography

Greaves was born in Detroit, Michigan, United States. His mother was a Protestant who took him to Sunday School. He studied neuroscience at Harvard with a speciality in false-memory syndrome.

Greaves collaborated with Shane Bugbee in 2003 for a 24-hour internet radio broadcast. The broadcast promoted Bugbee's reprint of the 1891 book Might is Right, notorious for its ideology of White supremacy and social Darwinism, which influenced part of The Satanic Bible (1969).

Greaves has spoken on the topics of Satanism, secularism, and The Satanic Temple at universities throughout the United States, and he has been a featured speaker at national conferences hosted by American Atheists, the American Humanist Association, and the Secular Student Alliance.

Greaves has been instrumental in setting up the Protect Children Project, the After School Satan project, and several political demonstrations and legal actions designed to highlight social issues involving religious liberty and the separation of church and state.

Greaves has received many death threats, and deliberately does not use his legal name to avoid threats to his family.

Greaves and his colleagues envisioned The Satanic Temple as a "poison pill" in the Church/State debate: Satanists asserting their rights and privileges where religious agendas have imposed themselves upon public affairs, serving as a reminder that such privileges are for everybody, and can provide a religious agenda beyond the current narrow understanding. Neither Greaves nor members of The Satanic Temple worship Satan; instead contemporary rational Satanic beliefs focus on personal sovereignty, independence, and freedom of will.

Greaves appears throughout the 2019 documentary film Hail Satan? regarding religious freedoms and early days of The Satanic Temple. Greaves contributed the foreword to The Little Book of Satanism by La Carmina (2022) as well as artwork for multiple endeavors by Shiva Honey.

References

External links

• Lucien Greaves on X
• Lucien Greaves Archive
• The Process Is... (Archived 2020-11-12 at the Wayback Machine) group blog, primarily 2008–2013
• Letters to a Satanist, reader responses, 2014–2015