Periodically, claims that Marx was a satanist occur across media platforms, provoking a mixture of disbelief, laughter, and knee-jerk alarm – but is it true?

Allegations that Karl Marx embraced satanic ideas are not supported by any substantial evidence from his adult life, according to leading biographers, despite a letter in which Marx's father warned that his teenage son showed signs of "demonic" influence and a "Faustian" tendency towards self-destruction.

The accusation, which continues to circulate, particularly in the sphere of far-right social media, centres on several poems and dramatic fragments Marx wrote as a student in the mid-1830s. The texts include a monologue in which a fictional character declares he has "forfeited Heaven" and is "chosen for Hell", and a fragment titled Oulanem (claimed to be a corruption of the blessed name Emmanuel) whose narrator curses humanity and threatens to drive the world "to its wreck". A third poem contains the line "I am born to rule the world".

Either the poetic works or Marx's attitude did prompt a worried response from his father Heinrich. In a letter sent in November 1837, he accused Marx of falling under the "spirit that denies" – Goethe's description of Mephistopheles – and described his son's tone as "gloomy, arrogant and demonic". Heinrich urged his son to abandon what he saw as his dangerous intellectual impulses.

At first glance, this might seem like compelling evidence for demonic inclination. However, contemporary context suggests otherwise.

Why Marx was most likely not a satanist

Using a range of voices to express our realities (yes, even satanic ones) are older than Marx, and continue to this day, without accusations of satanism.

Indeed, all of Marx's most notable biographers, including Jonathan Sperber, Gareth Stedman Jones, and Terrell Carver, place the father's warnings in a generational and literary context rather than evidence of his son's satanic belief.

In a modern context, just because your child listens to Marilyn Manson, wears black eyeliner, and writes huffy, dark, juvenilia (immature poems), does not make your child a bat-head munching follower of the lord of darkness. The same was true in the 1800s.

The age in which Marx was writing in Germany could be labelled the Goethe-inspired 19th-century-equivalent of Emo. As my old school English teacher used to say "context, context, context!"

Dark German Romanticism feeding on its earlier Sturm and Drang cousin embraced intensely emotional ideas – such as spiritual damnation, and an individual's place in what might seem like a hellish world. And this was nothing new – even in the mid 1800s.

Fifty years before Marx was born, the Schauerroman (shudder novel) thrived on its offerings of demonic pacts and pyschological torment.

Around the same time the spiritually celebrated William Blake wrote of London's "Dark satanic mills", and over a hundred years earlier the world of literature celebrated the blasphemy of the charismatic Lucifer in Milton's Paradise Lost.

Arguably, Marx's juvenilia simply align with the darker Romantic idioms common in German student culture of the time. Furthermore, they were written in dramatic voices rather than as confessional statements.

As biographers point out, Marx throughout his life made no reference to occult, supernatural, or esoteric belief in the countless volumes of his expansive written work and his correspondence, which is extensive and includes thousands of letters.

So why does the rumour persist?

Certain media outlets and infuencers have vested interests in click-baitable material and in promoting alternative versions of history that simplify debates. By investing in fallacies, Marx’s private life can be used as a weapon against modern proponents of socialism.

This is sometimes called a genetic fallacy, when the origin of an ideology is attacked rather than its context.

Ultimately, the rumour of Marx being a satanist has no bearing on his philosophy – for which there is plenty of mature debate that has nothing to do with demons.