The Satanic Temple’s other co-founder, “Malcolm Jarry,” appears to be a markedly more reclusive figure than “Lucien Greaves.” Although Jarry’s real identity has been reported in several sources to be Cevin Soling, a filmmaker and music producer, Soling does not seem to have yet publicly acknowledged or openly confirmed that he does indeed play the character of “Malcolm Jarry” inside The Satanic Temple (Merlan; Doyle; Bugbee, “religion” [sic]). Making it seem almost like some kind of a big secret, the somewhat lengthy Wikipedia entry on Cevin Soling makes no reference to reports of his role as behind-the-scenes leader of The Satanic Temple (Wikipedia editors, “Cevin Soling”).
There is nevertheless an array of facts which confirm the open secret of “Malcolm Jarry” and Cevin Soling being one in the same person. For one, the Village Voice has described Soling as the “mastermind” behind The Satanic Temple (Merlan, “Trolling Hell”). The same Village Voice article notes that Soling, a Harvard alumnus, was “president of the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club, the group that sponsored the infamous black mass [at Harvard University, where TST was also formed,]” (ibid.). Another source notes that Soling spoke “about the use of religion in the service of social activism and as a potential device to protect civil liberties” at a 2013 Harvard event about “The History of Satanic Worship” which also featured a lecture by “Lucien Greaves” or Douglas Misicko (PRWeb). TST’s headquarters are in the Boston suburb of Salem, Massachusetts (a symbolic choice considering the group’s interest in the propagating the “witch-hunt” narrative), and Soling has said in a recent interview that he “currently [lives] in the Boston area” (Zarkower). Soling is president of Spectacle Films, which has been called “the production company behind The Satanic Temple” (Bugbee, “religion” [sic]).
“Jarry” and Soling also bear an uncanny resemblance to one another:
Figure 3.4. Left: Detail from screenshot of Cevin Soling being interviewed on The Colbert Report about his documentary film The War on Kids (Comedy Central). Right: Detail from photograph which appeared in a New York Times article on The Satanic Temple shows Soling, as “Malcolm Jarry,” appearing to make a half-hearted attempt to conceal his identity with a hat, sunglasses, and his hand (Oppenheimer). The Times of Israel claims that “Jarry” (Soling) “refuses to be photographed,” (Lebovic).
Besides “Greaves”/“Mesner”/Misicko and “Jarry”/Soling both being co-founders and leaders of The Satanic Temple, another similarity between them is each one’s supposed connection to the US government. In Soling’s case, the source of the claim on this matter is not a third party, but the man himself. According to his personal website (“cevinsoling.com”), Soling “is awaiting an appointment for a diplomatic post with the U.S. Foreign Service where he received his security clearances and was given an employment offer pending an appropriate assignment,” (“Bio,” my emphasis in bold).
Another noteworthy fact is that Soling is a critic of public school desegregation. In 2009, Soling’s company Spectacle Films released a documentary which he directed titled The War on Kids. Speaking in a segment on the news network RT about the film, Soling argues that desegregation of public schools led to a decrease in their “social efficiency.” With racial overtones made abundantly clear by RT’s use of stock footage playing on repeat as Soling speaks (showing alternating clips of an orderly classroom filled with predominantly “white” students followed by footage of people, whose heritage is visibly African, wearing saggy pants and locs [or “dreadlocks”] and wrestling around, seemingly pointlessly, with a hose on a sidewalk, in what is a transparent attempt to draw a contrast between old tropes of “civilized” and “savage”), we hear this argument from Soling:
“What I think the transformation that took happened [sic] [i.e., the transformation that sapped public schools of their ‘social efficiency’], was that we went from a homogeneous population in these [public] schools to a heterogeneous one. And so where you have a common culture in a school, where everyone sort of comes from the same background, it’s easier to suppress and keep people in line, but when people have different cultures, greater efforts have to be made to basically keep people in line and enforce the conformity that is demanded and required in public schools. They’re not good places to learn and they’re not good places to be,” (RT, “US schools declare war on kids”).
Other reactionary aspects of Soling’s War on Kids film and the relation of the film’s message to the activity and goals of The Satanic Temple will be dealt with later in this chapter.
Soling claims to identify as a “secular Jew” (Lebovic); however, there are strong indicators that his Satanic pseudonym (Malcolm Jarry) is a direct reference to Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), an antisemitic French writer and absinthe enthusiast active at the end of the 19th century who made the “Antichrist” the protagonist of several of his literary works. This makes Soling appear to be cast from the same mold as Anton LaVey, who, despite having some Jewish ancestry (though not enough to be considered Jewish according to Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg race purity laws, which LaVey explicitly expressed admiration for), nevertheless built strong ties to leading figures in the US neo-Nazi movement and identified himself and his sect with Nazism, even arguing that Adolf Hitler himself was a Jew and equating Satanism with a would-be “Jewish Nazism.” These bizarre theories, the virulent antisemitism of Alfred Jarry, and the antisemitic aspects of modern Satanism in general will be dealt with in more detail in the last section of Chapter 6.
In addition to his film company, Soling is also the president of a record label company from which affinities between The Satanic Temple, the Church of Scientology, and a cultic “magickal order” known as “Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth” (sic) can be deduced. These affinities are outlined in what remains of this chapter.
CONTINUE READING… 3.2.1 “The Satanic Temple” and “Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth”
OR RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS (Anatomy of a Crypto-Fascist Sect: The Unauthorized Guide to “The Satanic Temple”)
Daniel K. Buntovnik 