David Vance
Aug 02, 2026
What if I told you that Marxism has deep roots in Satanism? Would you be surprised? Is it possible that an ideology which has captured the minds of millions of people around the world has an origin story rooted in deep evil?
I recently read Richard Wurmbrand's fascinating book, Karl Marx and the Satanic Roots of Communism. It isn't an easy read and nor was it intended to be. Wurmbrand wrote it after spending fourteen years in Romanian Communist prisons. Unlike many modern academics who analyse Communism from their ivory towers, Wurmbrand experienced it at its most brutal - in a prison cell.
One of the first things Wurmbrand talks about is something that may surprise many people. Karl Marx did not begin life as an atheist. He was raised in a Christian home and his early school essays reveal someone who understood Christian teaching well. He explicitly wrote about finding comfort in Christ, about serving others selflessly, and about the believer’s relationship with God.
Then, according to Wurmbrand, everything changed.
Marx’s later poems strike an entirely different note. They are filled with a bitterness, a darkness and open defiance of God. In one, Marx declares,
“I wish to avenge myself against the One who rules above.”
In another, he describes a soul once devoted to God but now “chosen for hell.”
Whose soul was that, I wonder?
Wurmbrand argues that these are not isolated literary flourishes but rather clear evidence of a profound spiritual rebellion. Marx no longer appeared merely indifferent to Christianity; he was openly hostile towards it.
Marx also wrote a student play entitled Oulanem.
Wurmbrand points out that the title is an anagram of Emmanuel, one of the Bible's names for Jesus, written backwards. In occult traditions, reversing sacred names carries symbolic significance. Marx was only nineteen at this point.
The play itself is bleak. Its central figure longs to drag humanity into destruction before following them into the abyss himself. Elsewhere, Marx wrote of receiving a sword from “the prince of darkness.” Wurmbrand stops short of suggesting Marx literally entered into some formal pact with Satan but something had changed. Instead, he argues that the recurring imagery, together with Marx’s increasingly hostile language towards God, reveals a deliberate rejection of Christianity.
