Our Lady of Endor Coven
Our Lady of Endor Coven
Our Lady of Endor Coven was an early semipublic Satanic group, which grew out of the appearance of "Satanas, the Horned God," to Herbert Arthur Sloane of Toledo, Ohio. Sloane was a child at the time. He later saw the same entity pictured on the dust jacket of a study of witchcraft, The God of the Witches. When Sloane was 25 years old, Satanas appeared again.
In structuring Our Lady of Endor Coven, Sloane was heavily influenced by his reading of The Gnostic Religion, a scholarly treatise on gnosticism by Hans Jonas. In gnosticism, the creator God (of the Christians), is considered a lesser deity than another God. Satan is that God's messenger. Satan brought knowledge of God to Eve in the Garden of Eden. That God takes no direct interest in this world, except for his concern that the sparks of deity trapped in this world return to their origin. This return occurs through gnosis, occult wisdom.
Sloane taught that this gnostic form of Satanism was the oldest religion, dating to the worship of the horned god pictured in the ancient cave paintings of Europe. As developed by Sloane, the religion emerged in the context of the neo-pagan revival of the late 1960s. It differed from Wicca by refusing to turn the Horned God into a fertility god.
The coven dissolved following Sloane's death in the early 1980s.