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40 Facts about the Church of Satan

Tim Flight August 29, 2019 27 min

37. The Church measures time in anno Satanas, not anno Domini

Gustave Doré’s engraving of Satan from Dante Alighieri, Inferno, France, 1857. Alpha Coders

The Church of Satan measures time from this fateful night in 1966, which they call Year One AS, or anno Satanas. This seems needlessly confusing on first glance, but there was good reason for re-jigging the common system of calculating the year. AD or anno Domini, means ‘year of the Lord’, and is calculated from the date of the birth of Jesus Christ. AD was invented by the monk Dionysius Exiguus in 525, and so whilst it’s a pain in the ass, it makes sense for the Church of Satan to avoid a dating system that commemorates its greatest enemy.

Written by

Tim Flight

I am a freelance historical and literary writer based in West Yorkshire, UK. I read for a funded PhD in English at the University of Oxford (Magdalen College) and graduated in 2016. I am a former lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. My publications include peer-reviewed articles in academic publications, and pieces in mainstream magazines such as History Today and Fortean Times. For more information, please see www.drflight.co.uk