Satanic Temple threatens legal action over statue in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

"The issue isn't the appropriation of Satanic religious symbols to portray beliefs and activities that bear no relation to what the practitioners of Satanism believe," Greaves tells SYFY WIRE in an email. "We don't own Satanism and we can only try to educate people as to what Satanism means to those who identify with it when we're countering irresponsible fictions that feed real-world moral panics.

"It's one thing that there's another ignorant television portrayal of a Satanic Panic-style Satanic cult that engages in cannibalism, but it is another thing that they've used our unique and copyrighted Baphomet monument as the central icon of that cult," he continued. "We spent a year and a half designing and financing our monument, which has become a central image of our own organization. To see it appropriated as 'the Sabrina monument' while associated with cannibalistic rites is unacceptable. We owe it to everybody who identifies with us to rectify this situation." [...]

Both the real-life and TV statue are clearly the offspring of illustrations and wood carvings that date back hundreds of years, but the resemblance between the two is remarkable. [...]

The Temple's statue was first commissioned in 2014 to protest the installation of a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Oklahoma state capitol, with the reasoning being that if one religious icon could be displayed there, others could as well.

When the Commandments monument was removed, the nine-foot-tall, 2,000-pound, bronze Baphomet statue was completed and debuted at the Detroit chapter of the Satanic Temple a year later. It was parked outside the Arkansas state capitol earlier this year to protest another Ten Commandments monument.

It's a great show, though!

Update: Church of Satan notes, "That's not us, leave us out of it."

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