Chapter 121. The Black Pope: Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan

Faxneld and Petersen write that “an enduring and public tradition of Satanism was first instated in 1966, with the founding of the Church of Satan”; earlier “Satanists” had mostly been figures of accusation, and the precursors of Chapter 119 founded no lasting tradition [Faxneld & Petersen, The Devil’s Party, #87532, Introduction, pp. 5-6]. Its founder, Anton Szandor LaVey (1930-1997), turned the Romantic Satan of liberty and the flesh into an atheist and elitist philosophy wrapped in theatrical ritual. This chapter reconstructs his life and contested legend, mainly through Doug Brod’s 2024 biography Born with a Tail. It then sets out the doctrine of The Satanic Bible and the movement’s political and philosophical genealogy, and closes with the scholarly and hostile readings of LaVey.

The Black House and the first Satanic wedding

Brod’s “Invocation” opens on a staged rite in “a black Victorian house on an otherwise ordinary residential street in San Francisco”. On the fireplace mantel “a red-tressed woman lies face-up, barely covering her nakedness”, lit by candles in human skulls. Above hangs “a goat’s head inside an inverted pentagram whose five points hit on the Hebraic letters lamed, vav, yod, tav, and nun, spelling out ‘Leviathan’… It’s the sigil of Baphomet… whose two upward points symbolize the duality that sustains natural processes… and three downward points represent the rejection of Christendom’s Holy Trinity”. In the yard “a real, live five-hundred-pound lion named Togare” roars. The minister rings to “the four cardinal points of the compass: Satan meaning fire, Belial meaning earth, Lucifer meaning air, and Leviathan meaning sea and water” [Brod, Born with a Tail, #62663, “Invocation”]. The goat sigil goes back to Levi’s Baphomet of Chapter 119.

The event was the “first Satanic wedding”, of journalist John Raymond and Judith Case, held on 31 January 1967 at 6114 California Street before “more than fifty journalists and photographers”. LaVey performed the fifteen-minute ceremony “no fewer than five consecutive times that night” for the cameras. He explained that the naked woman was not on the altar: “She is the altar”, because the altar should be “a symbol of enthusiastic lust and indulgence” [ibid.]. In 1998, Brod reports, Raymond confessed that the wedding “was a sham, a put-on, a stunt” devised to publicise “the nascent church” [ibid.]. Brod dates the founding to Walpurgisnacht, 30 April 1966, which LaVey proclaimed “Anno Satanas, Year One on the Satanic calendar”, at first for the “First Church of Satan” [ibid., ch. III “6114: House Number of the Beast”].

A self-made legend: what Brod documents

Faxneld and Petersen summarise the problem: “LaVey claimed a colourful background as a former police photographer, carny, and lover of the young Marilyn Monroe. Most of this was challenged later, and some of it disproven. Regardless, LaVey had a highly charismatic personality” [Faxneld & Petersen, The Devil’s Party, #87532, Introduction, p. 6]. Brod checks the claims one by one in chapters I-II. LaVey “claimed to have spent some time playing the midways” of West Coast carnivals and told of an affair with the young Monroe. By 1949 the census listed him “as unemployed” in his parents’ house. His story of attending criminology classes is contradicted by a 1991 profile: “the college had no evidence of his enrollment”. On the police job, Brod writes that LaVey “claimed to have parlayed his talent for picture-taking… into a job as a photographer for the San Francisco Police Department”. He supposedly concluded from the crime scenes that “There is no God.… Man must be taught to answer to himself”, but “the SFPD later said no one with his name ever worked for the department”, and LaVey “reckoned that documentation of his employment was likely expunged” [Brod, #62663, ch. I “A Dark Star Is Born”]. The record shows a working organist (musicians’ union, 1 November 1955). In 1956 his parents bought the house at 6114 California Street for $9,500, which LaVey then painted black [ibid., chs. I-II]. Asbjørn Dyrendal’s chapter in The Devil’s Party, drawing on Petersen (2011), frames the invented autobiography as method and warns against reading LaVey too literally: LaVey’s “‘materialist magic’ included inventing an autobiography” and using his texts as tools “to ‘challenge the self-evident and decondition the self'” [The Devil’s Party, #87532, Dyrendal chapter “Hidden Persuaders and Invisible Wars”].

Celebrity, cinema and the media Devil

Greer calls the late 1960s and early 1970s “the glory days of the Church of Satan, as LaVey attracted celebrities such as Jayne Mansfield and Sammy Davis Jr…. and performed Satanic weddings, baptisms, and funerals in a glare of media publicity”. He adds that 1969 brought The Satanic Bible and a Tonight Show appearance, and that membership “peaked in the 1970s and began an inexorable decline” [Greer, The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies, #64911, “Church of Satan”]. Faxneld and Petersen say that these celebrities were only “briefly attracted to the Devil’s congregation” [The Devil’s Party, #87532, p. 6]. LaVey traded on Rosemary’s Baby (1968) with buttons reading “Pray for Anton LaVey”. Brod rejects LaVey’s boast of having played the Devil in the film (“No way LaVey was the Devil”) and names the actor Clay Tanner in connection with the role [ibid.]. Greer gives the outsider’s verdict: “Satanist-showman Anton Szandor LaVey’s Church of Satan titillated audiences in the 1970s with a version of the old ritual designed to play down the religious elements” [Greer, #64911].

The doctrine: carnal self, elitism and ritual as psychodrama

Faxneld and Petersen summarise The Satanic Bible (1969): “Satan, to him, was a symbol of man’s carnal nature, and LaVey’s Satanism was a blend of Epicureanism, elitism, and streetwise cynicism. He once himself described it as ‘Ayn Rand with trappings’ (Klein 1970: 20). In LaVey’s more or less atheist and materialist system, ritual and magic mostly function as theatre, psychodrama, and self-therapy”. They also note “an unresolved tension… between ideas based strictly on the natural sciences and notions inspired by fringe science and ‘rejected knowledge’, such as the theories of Wilhelm Reich and the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft”. The Compleat Witch (1971) and The Satanic Rituals (1972) followed [The Devil’s Party, #87532, pp. 6-7]. Brod calls The Satanic Bible “a startling concoction, blending the rational self-interest of Ayn Rand with the godless self-realization of Nietzsche” [Brod, #62663, ch. V “The Cold Testament”]. LaVey wrote in Playboy (1969): “Man does need religion… but he needs a religion based on what he is, not on what he can never hope to be” [ibid.]. On sex he was explicit: “Sexual freedom… is something we feel is very important, as a necessary requisite of the Satanic Church” [ibid.].

In Faxneld and Petersen’s reading, the church’s black masses resembled the mythic ones “in form and content but not in function”, because the ceremonies praised the self-realisation of the Satanist [The Devil’s Party, #87532, Part Two].

Political genealogy: Rand, Redbeard, Nietzsche and the “honor game”

The library’s sources place LaVey on the elitist, social-Darwinist wing of modern thought. A work on veganism and animal rights in the library calls Ragnar Redbeard’s “POWER IS REASON” [Might Is Right] “an example of Social Darwinism… on which Anton Szandor LaVey based his writing on ‘The Satanic Bible'” [Veganism, Animal Rights and the Environment, #60177]. Dyrendal’s chapter in The Devil’s Party documents “LaVey’s connections with individuals and groups on the Far Right”, which make “the lines of convergence social, as well as ideological and textual”. He also cites a letter to Michael Aquino in which LaVey intended that neo-Nazis flirting with Satanism should “become stooges for the Church of Satan”. LaVey nonetheless “continued to criticize the simplistic racism, the naïve romanticism, and the conspiracism of extremists he dallied with”, becoming “more isolationist and individualist, rather than activist” [The Devil’s Party, #87532, Dyrendal, “Hidden Persuaders and Invisible Wars”]. Faxneld and Petersen describe the 1980s as “the age of satanic avant-garde artistic and (ambiguous) political provocation, courtesy of Church of Satan members like noise musician Boyd Rice” [ibid., Introduction, p. 7].

Heisman offers a contrasting frame. Judaeo-Christian ethics arose as an inversion of master values: the Exodus revalued slaves whom Egypt held “worthless in themselves and valuable only as means”. On this view, “when liberals and traditional Jews give charity to help the poor, they are working against the natural justice of natural selection” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, Part II]. Read through Heisman’s terms, LaVeyan Satanism inverts the inversion: it returns to the “natural” valuation of strength that Heisman attributes to the master morality, and to Hitler’s charge that Christianity was “a rebellion against natural law” [ibid.]. This is an analytical comparison drawn from Heisman, not a claim that LaVey drew on him.

Sexual revolution and its limits (Urban)

Hugh Urban, in “The Age of Satan”, argues that “the Church of Satan needs to be understood in the context of 1960s American culture amid the social trends variously called the countercultural revolution, the sexual revolution”. LaVey “reflects both the larger preoccupation with sexual liberation during this period and the tendency of sexual liberation to be co-opted by the forces of consumerism” [Urban, Magia Sexualis, #43699, ch. 7]. Urban quotes the lust ritual of The Satanic Bible (“In the name of the great god Pan, may my secret thoughts be marshaled into the movements of the flesh of that which I desire!”) as an example of sexual magic aimed at the practitioner’s own desire [ibid.].

Organisation, schism and sanitisation

After only a few years, Faxneld and Petersen write, LaVey “grew tired of being in the spotlight and stopped hosting public rituals”. The “grotto” system “was also disbanded after administrative troubles started growing”. In 1975 Michael Aquino and other high-ranking members left to form the theistic Temple of Set. LaVey returned to the public in the 1990s with two books and several interviews, died in 1997, and was succeeded by Peter H. Gilmore, “who has further emphasized the rationalist and atheist elements” [The Devil’s Party, #87532, p. 7]. Brod quotes LaVey’s own reframing as he dismantled the grottos: “The new type of Satanist is not the ostentatious or garish type, but a substantial, responsible citizen” [Brod, #62663]. Brod also cites an FBI file in which LaVey allegedly said most church members were “fanatics, cultists, and weirdos”, and that his interest was “strictly from a monetary point of view” [ibid.].

Petersen calls this strategy “sanitization”, which effectively cleanses “the satanic of any unwanted connotations, practices, or aspects”. Rivals within the milieu turn the charge around: they see “the sanitizing strategies of the organized rationalist and esoteric groups as weak attempts at explaining the true force of the satanic away, namely the satanic itself: evil, transgressive, and grotesque”. LaVey’s “law-and-order” line is one of their targets [The Devil’s Party, #87532, Petersen, “Sanitization and ‘satanization'”].

On numbers, the 2001 UK census “indicated about 1,600 Satanists” and the 2006 Australian census 2,247. Chris Mathews makes “a very tentative estimate at 30,000-100,000 Satanists worldwide”, which the editors find “quite reasonable (but see also Evans 2009 for some cautionary remarks)” [ibid., Introduction, p. 5].

Hostile and conspiracy readings

Outside the academy, LaVey appears as a figure of menace. The evangelical author Russ Dizdar files him under “Popular Satanism”: “The man [sic] figure was Anton LaVey who was the founder of the Church of satan and author of the satanic bible”, with “thousands of web sites dedicated to Anton” [Dizdar, The Black Awakening, #71487, ch. 8]. David Shurter, who presents himself as a survivor of satanic ritual abuse, calls LaVey “a notorious cult figure” who “started the social experiment known as the Church of Satan” to “mock Christianity and the Bible” [Shurter, Rabbit Hole, #73043, ch. 15]. Leo Lyon Zagami claims that “despite the conception of Church of Satan devotees as modern atheists with no real belief system”, the church was created by “a bunch of Crowleyan Theosophists preparing for the advent of the dark side” [Zagami, Confessions of an Illuminati, #367409]. These authors present their accounts as testimony and disclosure. The academic editors place such accounts within the “SRA scare, a rumour panic fired by fundamentalist Christians and dubious psychotherapists” of the 1980s, during which Aquino was briefly suspected and then “soon acquitted” [The Devil’s Party, #87532, p. 7].

Key points

• The Church of Satan (San Francisco, 30 April 1966, “Year One”) was, per Faxneld and Petersen, the first “enduring and public” Satanist tradition; its 1967 wedding was, per Raymond’s later confession, “a stunt”.
• Brod documents the theatre at 6114 California Street: the naked woman as altar, the Baphomet sigil spelling “Leviathan” (two points up for duality, three down rejecting the Trinity), the four crown princes and the lion Togare.
• LaVey’s legends (carny, police photographer, Monroe’s lover, the Devil in Rosemary’s Baby) were “challenged later, and some of it disproven”; the SFPD said no one by his name had worked there.
• The Satanic Bible makes Satan “a symbol of man’s carnal nature” in “a blend of Epicureanism, elitism, and streetwise cynicism” (“Ayn Rand with trappings”), with ritual as “theatre, psychodrama, and self-therapy”.
• Sources connect LaVey to Redbeard’s social Darwinism and to Far Right contacts, while Dyrendal records LaVey’s criticism of their racism. Heisman’s master/slave analysis offers a philosophical frame.
• Urban sees the church as mirroring the sexual revolution and its co-option by consumerism.
• The grottos were disbanded and Aquino founded the Temple of Set in 1975; LaVey died in 1997 and Gilmore stresses rationalism. Petersen’s “sanitization” names the respectability strategy that rivals call diluting.
• Census figures (UK 2001 ~1,600; Australia 2006: 2,247) and Mathews’ estimate of 30,000-100,000 worldwide contrast with the large role hostile authors (Dizdar, Shurter, Zagami) give LaVey.