culture is essential.
Because from the perspective of the anything-
goes amorality of post-Millennialism, the
information-overload of Internetrality, and a blasé
impatience with anything but hyperstimulation,
these diatribes can seem pretty tame and simplistic.
But even in Haight/Ashbury San Francisco
morphing from the Beats to the Hippies, this was
omigosh experimentality with “occult” tidbits not
only unknown but unavailable to the general public.
While the “occult revival” of the 1960s
produced a scattering of New-Age touchyfeely and
fluffybunny Wiccawitchery, classic works of magic
and metaphysics were both rare and expensive.
Bookstores like Fields’ in San Francisco, Gilbert’s &
Cherokee in Hollywood, and Weiser’s in New York
kept their Necronomica in locked glass cases, which
one needed to be “known” to access.
Although in the years prior to 1966 Anton &
Diane LaVey had conducted an exclusive “Magic
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Circle” at their San Francisco home, the Church of
Satan was intended to be accessible to the general
public, whose ideas of things like “Satanism” and
“Black Magic” came from horror movies and E.C.
Comics.
So Anton gave weekly lectures on these
“Lucifer” subjects, along with additional funzies like
haunted houses, phrenology, and cannibalism. 37
The mimeographed “rainbow sheet” handouts
at these lectures began as expansions of paragraphs
in the Church’s informational Monograph, and
twelve of the most popular ones were selected for
the Satanic Bible. 38
The intent of the original “Lucifer” was
dramatic and polemical: to shock readers out of
their Sunday-school-complacency. It was a literary
water-balloon.
But there’s no need for that now. In keeping
with Satan’s Foreword, the purpose of this “Lucifer”
is to “explain reality”. If that sounds presumptuous,
just consider how little, and carelessly, most people
tend to think about these chapter-topics. One would
suppose that they would be seriously important to
humanity, but just try asking such questions [of
those who’ve not yet read this book]!
As you peruse the new “Lucifer”, something
else may occur to you: that you know these answers
already, intuitively. This, as Plato realized, is a
characteristic of “universal truths”, as well as a
signal that there is considerably more to human
intelligence than incarnate education through the
37 Diane wasn’t beyond serving audiences some exotic finger-
food scandalously represented as actually that.
38 “The Book of Lucifer” has rather more cachet than “Church
of Satan Frequently Asked Questions”.
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physical senses. He called this “recollective wisdom”
anamnesis, and devoted one of his Dialogues, the
Meno, to its illustration. So you are about to enjoy a
Meno experience.
But let’s start with a look-back at Anton’s
original essays:
A. “Wanted: God - Dead or Alive!”
Assuming that most people who sought out a
Satanic religion had a chip on their shoulder about
conventional Judæo/Christianity, this cornerstone
essay flings the requisite gauntlet down, establishing
pro forma that the Church of Satan was not afraid to
“provoke divine wrath”.
Scant attention is paid to identifying “God”
save as the Deistic model of a non-conscious
“balancing force in nature” with no interest in
human affairs.
Therefore prayer to God is pointless, and “sins”
are merely dictates of conventional churches for
their own agendæ.
Satanism thus regards “injustice” as a purely
inter-human matter, with practical hurts being
corrected by corresponding helps.
Interestingly over the Church of Satan’s decade
of experience, relatively few Satanists nursed an
obsessive hatred of God, or even thought much
about him/her/it. If there were hatred, it was
usually the result of bad personal experiences in
conventional religious affiliations.
Accordingly there was not much interest in epic
ceremonials to cast God down from his celestial
throne, as in Anatole France’s Revolt of the Angels
or Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Job: A Masque for
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Dancing. Most Satanists were content just to put a
tack or whoopie cushion on it.
B. “The God You Save May Be Yourself”
Following from the first essay’s Deism,
Satanists assume the role of “God” in deciding and
judging “good/evil” in human behavior.
Avoiding a conceptual discussion of ethics, this
essay just relaxes blissfully into individual
hedonism.
In the pre-rainbow-sheet Monograph, Anton
called for the Church’s eventual construction of
sybaritic “pleasure domes”, somewhere between
Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Clubs and the elites’ gardens
in Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis. In the early days
of the Church, Anton enjoyed several artistic
collaborations with Hollywood decadent Kenneth
Anger, whose Magic Lantern Cycle of films includes
an “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” to give you
the general idea.
C. “Some Evidence of a New Satanic Age”
Fun is poked at Christianity’s famous “Seven
Deadly Sins” - pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony,
wrath, sloth - blessing Satanists’ Indulgence in and
enjoyment of them all. As of course do Christians,
hypocritically whining “the Devil made me do it!”
Continuing on the theme of hypocrisy, Anton
denounces “safe” labels such as “humanist” and
“white witch” as sanctimonious posturing.
If one acts under illusions imposed by others,
then one can plead the excuse of ignorance or
innocence. But if one is free from such constraints
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and engages in self-delusion, one is simply a
hypocrite: clearly the “deadly sin” of Satanism.
D. “Hell, the Devil, and How to Sell Your
Soul”
In the fourth essay Anton traced the legend of
“the Devil” through some of its more prominent
manifestations in Eastern and Western cultural
tradition, punctuating the account with a list of
seventy-seven names under which the Archfiend or
his close approximations have been known. The
point to be taken being that “Satan” was to be
appreciated as something more significant than a
mere Judæo/Christian myth.
The following from one of the “rainbow”
handouts, later adapted for this essay, catches its
flavor:
Satan, as a god, demi-god, personal savior,
or whatever you wish to call him, was invented by
the f
ormulators of every religion on the face of the
Earth for only one purpose. That purpose is to
preside over carnal, mundane, and so-called
wicked activities and situations.
Of course anything indulgent or gratifying of
a physical or mental nature must be “evil”; how
else can people be assured of feeling guilty without
actually going out and hurting others?
“Selling one’s soul” was dismissed as a simple
fantasy of conventional religious paranoia. 39
39 In 1970 this didn’t prevent my new Nineveh Grotto in
Kentucky sending the Central Grotto in San Francisco a check
for its initial members payable in souls, not US$. We were
taking a chance that they’d be worth at least $13 apiece.
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E. “Love and Hate”
Conventional religions characteristically
advocate blanket love of humanity paradoxically
combined with a similar hatred of its sinfulness.
This elicits guilt, obligation, penitent obedience: the
nominal emotions being tokenexploited as rhetorical
platitudes.
Satanism emphasizes selectivity and clarity in
emotional judgment and expression, indeed to the
point of magical ritualization.
Emotions all too easily and habitually are
experienced so indistinctly that it has become the
norm to treat them as social attitudes and
relationships. This essay responds at this level of
discourse.
F. “Satanic Sex”
The 1960s were also famous as a time of
“sexual revolution”, but it was slow in starting, even
in sordid San Francisco.
Through the 1950s burlesque40 dives were
piously quarantined in a one-block “International
Settlement” on Pacific Avenue in North Beach. But
then fingercymbalist Allen Ginsberg published his
flagrantly fornicative poem Howl with Lawerence
Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Beats-bookstore, while a
half-block away on Broadway Carol Doda sent
shockwaves across the entire country by by doffing
her décolletage.
40 In those tasteful times, only as far as G-string & pasties.
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Anton LaVey enjoyed coining aphorisms,
among them “sex and religion will always sell”. 41 So
he was quick to publicize the Church of Satan with a
“Topless Witches Revue” 42 by Doda’s Condor Club.
But even more scandalous were the Church’s
altars, on which the brooding Baphomet was
udderly upstaged by a beauty in the buff. This
particularly peeved Christian competitors with a
2,000-years-desiccated deadguy on a torture-tree
above their altars.
No one had more fun than the press, as when
one local newspaper reviewed the 1969 Satanis film
about the Church:
This has been a hard piece to write because
the subject is so crazed …
It’s a documentary. One cat in a dark suit
and shoes with white socks says, “Yeah, before I
joined the Satanic Church I masturbated once a
day and was very unhappy about it. Now I
masturbate three or four times a day and really dig
it.” During one ritual a naked woman takes a large
snake and rubs it over her body, up and down in
her crotch, passing her hands over its length and
wrapping it around her. Then she gives it to Anton,
who’s dressed in an open-front hood with horns,
all in black. He takes the snake over to a plump
blonde, bound naked to a post, and proceeds to
41 Similar Satanic sagacitickles included:
• A bird in the hand is useless when you want to blow your
nose.
• Don’t ever sit on a stone bench with a glass bottle in your
back pocket.
• If you are a lady, do not wear patent leather shoes because
men will see your underpants reflected in them.
• A crowded elevator smells different to a midget.
• Never shove your mother while she’s shaving.
42 Starring T-witch Susan Atkins in her pre-Manson Family
days. Cf. my The Church of Satan for the lurid details.
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touch its head to various parts of her body, around
each breast and down to the cunt. 43
Actually outside its ritual chambers, the
Church of Satan was scrupulously staid. Individuals’
promiscuous proclivities were considered entirely
their own business. 44 The result was an adult
atmosphere in which sexual issues, should they
occur conversationally, were considered both calmly
and courteously.
G. “Not All Vampires Suck Blood”
Anton LaVey’s weekly lectures included one on
“classic” neck-nibblers like Count Dracula and
Barnabas Collins, but for this essay he was more
interested in something less sanguine: humans who
try to avoid confronting their own worthlessness by
firmly attaching themselves to one or more creative
personalities and seeking to control and exploit
them thereafter.
Such is what Anton called a “psychic vampire”,
the defining characteristic being that the PV has no
independent identity or accomplishments of any
significance, and is only influential through use of
the host.
A PV identification is not always easy to make.
An obvious exception would be a marriage in which
one, the other, or both spouses subordinate
personal, independent accomplishment to the family
as a whole beneficiary. PV questions might apply
43 Ogar, Richard in Berkeley Barb, March 1970. The snake was
a pet python named Julius Squeezer.
44 With absolute prohibition of anything involving minors or
nonhuman animals. Julius’ appearances were carefully gentle.
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only if one or both individuals should cease that
common-interest motivation for an exclusive one.
The same problem exists in business and
professional relationships as well. There is normally
some degree of benefit sharing or exchange, and
PVism enters the picture only if the relationship
becomes predatory.
Anton offers no easy remedy to PV victims. The
predation is possible only if the host is dependent
upon the vampire’s control, which may have
progressed to the stage of inescapable addiction.
And of course there is the question of
perspective: What appears to a third-party to be a
benign relationship may be PV behind-closed-doors,
or vice-versa.
H. “Indulgence, Not Compulsion”
As with psychic vampirism, the concept of
“indulgence” is not just a question of lifestyle, but of
its motivation and actual enjoyment or benefit.
Imitation of an admired figure is a common
human practice, and often may extend from
inconspicuous personal affectations to obsessive,
complete makeover.
There were any number of admirers who, after
seeing Anton LaVey in a magazine or on television,
promptly shav
ed their heads, grew goatees, and
dressed in black - certain that now they too were
Satanists.
When inviting my suggestions concerning
applications for the Satanic Priesthood, Anton listed
several attributes he thought preferential, then
insisted they be kept secret:
Naturally I wish “preference given to”
omitted from requirement questionnaires which
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are sent to aspirants. Otherwise we will have them
running out and buying dogs they can’t stand,
marrying spouses they can’t stand, and eating food
they can’t stand at restaurants they can’t afford. 45
Besides imitation, indulgence could also be
compromised by simple insincerity. In the “rainbow
sheet” addressing this, Anton commented:
The Eastern mystical beliefs, which have
been in great intellectual favor in recent years,
have taught people to contemplate their navels,
stand on their heads, avoid the use of labels in life,
and discipline themselves against any conscious
will for success so they might dissolve themselves
into “Universal Cosmic Awareness” - anything to
avoid good, healthy self-satisfaction or honest
pride in earthly accomplishments.
I am sure you have seen just as many so-
called disciplined yogis with the inability to control
a smoking habit as anyone else, or who become
just as excited as a “less aware” person when an
attractive member of the opposite sex [or in some
cases the same sex] walks by.
Yet when asked to explain their faith, these
people retreat to the ambiguity characterizing
their faith - being that no one can pin them down
if there are no straight answers that can be given.
Another problem with compulsion is that, if
there is no convenient, socially-acceptable release
for it, it can devolve into self-destructive obsession -
sometimes to the point that it transforms the
affectee into a maniacal [and tiresome] evangelist or
apologist for it: a martyrdom often encountered in
“aggrieved” religious, racial, and sexual circles.
In 1928 Abraham Merritt wrote a novel entitled
Seven Footprints to Satan, not about the Devil but
rather a freakish human mastermind who modeled
45 Letter, Anton LaVey to M.A. Aquino, January 6, 1972.
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his personality and pleasures after those of the
The Satanic Bible Page 8