The Mammoth Book of The Supernatural
The Power of The Witch by Colin Wilson
{pp. 322, 323. Segment about Magus LaVey & The Church of Satan}

America's most notorious black witch is an ex-circus ring-master and police photographer, Anton Szandor LaVey. On April 30, 1966 LaVey initiated the 'First Church of Satan' on California Street in San Francisco (April 30 is Walpurgis Night, the great feast of the witches' year). LaVey and his followers openly practice black magic, putting evil curses on their opponents, performing weddings, funerals, and baptisms in the name of Lord Satan, and preaching 'indulgence instead of abstinence'. The Church of Satan is dedicated to the worship of The Devil and the glorification of carnal pleasures - a far cry from the assurances of Sybil Leek and the Wilsons.

LaVey, known variously as the 'High Priest of Hell' and the 'Black Pope of America', goes out of his way to look Satanic by wearing a pointed black beard, Fu Manchu mustache, and shaven head. He is the author of a work called The Satanic Bible, which contains invocations to Satan in a language called 'Enochian' and LaVey's own system of 'Satanic morality'. States LaVey, "Blessed are The Strong, for they shall possess the earth. Cursed are the feeble, for they shall be blotted out!"

LaVey's church is expanding, but there are many students of the Occult who claim that no one can handle Black Magic without risk. An event that took place in 1967 seems to support this view. On the evening of June 29 a middle-aged man suddenly collapsed on the floor of his San Francisco apartment. He and his family were all members of LaVey's church. As his son and wife knelt beside him, trying to revive him, they heard a woman's voice coming from his lips, saying, "I don't want to die."

The mother and son immediately recognized the voice as that of actress Jayne Mansfield, a fellow member of LaVey's congregation. Later they learned that the actress had died in a road accident earlier that very evening. She had been driving with her attorney n a narrow road near San Francisco when a truck hurtled from under a narrow bridge, and crashed into their car. Jayne Mansfield was decapitated, and her attorney, Sam Brody, was also killed.

Newspaper reporters soon unearthed a story of violent conflict between Brody, who was Jayne Mansfield's lover as well as her attorney, and LaVey. It arose because Jayne Manfield's film studio was grooming her as a successor to Marilyn Monroe, and rumors of her membership of The Church of Satan were bad publicity. Brody threatened to start a newspaper campaign that would drive LaVey out of San Francisco, and LaVey retaliated by pronouncing a solemn ritual curse on Brody. He told Brody that he would see him dead within a year, and shortly before Jayne Mansfield's death he warned her not to share Brody's car. "She was the victim of her own frivolity", said LaVey dispassionately after the crash; but there were members of California's Occult underground who declared openly that LaVey's curse had got out of hand, killing the disciple as well as the unbeliever.

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The facts are that she was warned to stay away from Brody because she would be on ground zero when the Curse materialized. LaVey cared enough for her to grant this warning, which she unfortunately did not heed, to her fault and detriment. Brody really had it coming to him, and this was an absolutely justified Curse, which is why it worked so well. He was a disrespectful, rude, antagonistic manipulative abuser who obviously sought to tangle with the wrong person. Read the elaboration on this story in The Secret Life of A Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton LaVey by Blanche Barton. ∞

TIME magazine: The Occult Revival
[Monday, June 19, 1972; section concerning Magus LaVey & The Church of Satan]

SATANISM.

“Blessed are the strong, for they shall possess the earth. If a man smite you on one cheek, SMASH him on the other!” This inverted gospel —from Anton Szandor La Vey’s The Satanic Bible—sets the tone for today’s leading brand of Satanism, the San Francisco-based Church of Satan. Founded in 1966 by La Vey, a former circus animal trainer, the Church of Satan offers a mirror image of most of the beliefs and ethics of traditional Christianity.

La Vey’s church and its branches might well be called the “unitarian” wing of the occult. The members invest themselves with some of the most flamboyant trappings of occultism, but magic for them is mostly psychodrama —or plain old carnival hokum. They invoke Satan not as a supernatural being, but as a symbol of man’s self-gratifying ego, which is what they really worship. They look down on those who actually believe in the supernatural, evil or otherwise.

La Vey’s church is organized, incorporated and protected under the laws of California. La Vey, 42, stopped giving out membership figures when his followers, who are grouped in local “grottoes,” reached a total of 10,000. The most striking thing about the members of the Church of Satan (one of whom is shown on TIME’S cover) is that instead of being exotic, they are almost banal in their normality. Their most insidious contribution to evil is their resolute commitment to man’s animal nature, stripped of any spiritual dimension or thought of self-sacrifice. There is no reach, in Browning’s famous terms —only grasp. Under the guise of eschewing hypocrisy, they actively pursue the materialistic values of the affluent society—without any twinge of conscience to suggest there might be something more.

They jockey for upward mobility in the five degrees of church membership, which closely resemble those in witchcraft covens: apprentice, warlock (or witch), wizard (or enchantress), sorcerer (or sorceress) and magus—the degree that La Vey holds. The ruling Council of Nine, which La Vey heads, makes appointments to various ranks on the basis not only of the candidate’s proficiency in Satanist doctrine but also his “dining preferences,” the “style of decor” in his home, and the “make, year and condition” of his automobile.

The Army officer who celebrated the recent ordination in Louisville is a fourth-degree Satanist priest, a member of the Council of Nine and editor of LaVey’s “confidential” newsletter, the Cloven Hoof. He is also the author of a widely used ROTC textbook. Other La Vey Satanists include a Marine Corps N.C.O. from North Carolina and, in New Jersey’s Lilith Grotto, a real estate broker and an insurance executive. Beyond such devotees, La Vey’s sinister teachings reaches hundreds of thousands more through the black gospel of The Satanic Bible and his second book, The Compleat Witch {correction: The Satanic Rituals was LaVey's 2nd book, with The Compleat Witch 3rd}, in which his advice reaches the downright sordid.

WITCHES ARE RISING
by Brian Vachon
Look Magazine, August 24, VI A.S. / 1971 c.e. [section concerning Anton LaVey & The Church of Satan]

The bank check was thumb-tacked to the door of the waiting room. "The Church of Satan, Louisville, Ky., sends to Central Church of Satan," the check declared in funeral script, this payment "for 15 souls."

The room was in front of the three-story, solid black, San Francisco headquarters of the First Church of Satan. A coffee table at an ornate black sofa was a tombstone with legs. On the mantel, a small stuffed animal - a rat - stared down with an eternally frozen grin. To its right was the severed head of a bald eagle, staring nowhere.

On one wall of bookcases was a small label suggesting that persons caught removing any books would have their hands amputated. On the other three walls hung paintings all depicting death and un-nice ways of reaching that state, all signed by Anton Szandor LaVey.

After what seemed an interminable marking of time, one of the wall bookcases slowly revealed itself to be a door, and the large, broad-shouldered, demoniac Anton LaVey glided into the room.

LaVey has been called - to his sheer delight - "America's black pope." As titular head of the First Church of Satan, he has also been called a lot of other things. But principally, LaVey is a witch. He practices his magic of the occult - in his case, black magic.

His church, which claims 10,000 carefully screened members, specializes in ceremonial psychodramas designed to eliminate all inhibition; rituals in which naked women are occasionally used as altars and phallic symbols are shaken toward each point of the compass for benediction.

"There is a demon inside man," LaVey said with his basso at its most profundo. "It must be exercised, not exorcised - channeled into ritualized hatred."

This is the black side of witchcraft - "hedonism with control" in LaVey's Satanic church, but grim forays into the occult and the unknown for a growing number of unorganized black witches.

LaVey says he does not worship Satan, or even believe in his existence. "But there is a Force - a Godhead or whatever you want to call it. It is a displacement of the energy of human beings that will become a malleable source of action for the magician - the witch."

OCCULT AMERICA
by John Godwin [Chapter 12, pp.241 - 249]

All you have to do is ring a certain San Francisco telephone number and wait until a chirpy secretarial voice at the other end says, "Good morning, Church of Satan." It is, let's face it, a wee bit anticlimactic.

The Church was founded in 1966 by Chicago-born Anton Szandor LaVey, whose exotic names derive from Romanian, Alsatian and Georgian ancestry. He got off to a rather creaky start when - in order to raise support for his movement --- he staged some embarrassingly naive nightclub rituals involving topless witches and a bikini-clad "inquisitioner"; allegedly a former councelor for Billy Graham. But two years later came the film release of Rosemary's Baby and with it a tremendous upsurge of popular interest in matters demoniacal. The Catholic Legion of Decency helped by bestowing a "C" {condemned} rating on the movie. This positively convinced vast segments of the public that they were getting inside dope on Witchcraft and/or Satanism, despite the fact that director Roman Polanski's knowledge of - and interest in - either subject amounted to zero. {There was, incidentally, more concentrated evil in one pallid smile of Cocteau's Infants Terrible than in Rosemary's entire pregnancy.}

Millions of moviegoers saw LaVey in action, although his name didn't appear on the credit list. He was the curiously reptilian Satan who raped Rosemary. The film's box office success resulted in a blaze of publicity for America's only registered Satanic Church and enabled its High Priest to drop his nightclub routine. At the moment you have to shoehorn your way into his presence through throngs of newspaper reporters, magazine interviewers, occultist researchers, and would-be adherents.

Before meeting LaVey, I was inclined to regard him as an American version of Aleister Crowley, the gentleman from Leamington, England, who called himself the Great Beast, imbibed ten grains of heroin per day and never got much beyond being a grubby little boy thinly disguised as a monster.

I once met a Reuters correspondant who had known Crowley well before his death in 1947. And I recalled his comment on the self-styled "Wickedest Man in the World": "Crowley was a fine mountaineer and a pretty good chess player, but as a Satanist he was a crashing bore. You see, everything about him was secondhand. Even his motto, 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.' He had lifted that from Reblais." The Church of Satan is a black-painted Victorian structure of memorable ugliness. The type of house rampant in London's Bayswater district, but rare in San Francisco. A plate on the door said, "Do Not Disturb Unless You Have An Appointment," but there was a very welcoming black Manx cat sitting underneath. Anyway, I had an appointment.

I was greeted by Mrs. LaVey, a smiling, outgoing, hospitable little blonde, with long hair and stylish spectacles. "Please sit down," she said. "Anton will be here in a few minutes." She kept me company, but refused to be interviewed. "That's Anton's department."

The front parlour smelled like the inside of an antique matress; either the walls were damp or the windows were never opened. I sat down beside a tombstone serving as coffee table and admired the fittings. There was a regulr dentist's chair, an operating table, a hanging skelaton, a lumpily stuffed possum, and a large bookcase with the warning: "Whoever removes books from this shelf will have their hands chopped off." The telephone, decorated with a Satanic seal, bore the notice: "Do not make outside calls with this phone." The Church, it appeared, was big on notices.

LaVey made a good entrance. He is a massive six-footer in his early forties, dressed completely in black, wearing a clerical collar and a silver pentagram medallion around his neck. His skull is clean-shaven, Tartar fashion, and he sports a black chin beard a la Ivan the Terrible. He has a forceful, calm voice, a surprisingly amiable laugh, and a patiently cautious way of answering questions he must have heard several hundred times before. "How do we visualize Satan? Purely symbolically, as the all-pervasive force. The only true God, in fact."

"Well, then whose adversary is he?" LaVey smiled. "The adversary of all man-made spiritual religions. To all that we consider the contemptible crutches man has had to invent. We totally reject the concept of there being an antithesis to God. He is God."

"In other words," I said, "you consider Satan the personification of life - good and evil. Do you think that evil outweighs the good?"

"Well, we consider that what the theologians regard as man's prediliction for evil will always outweigh the good. So - from the theological point of view --- we are evil individuals."

He did not, however, go along with the dramatization of evil as performed in the original Black Mass. "Those," he explained, "were psychodramas at a time when people needed them. They had to express their opposition, their rebellion against an established church. Our rituals are suitably modified to express the needs of our particular era."

The rituals are outlined in LaVey's Satanic Bible, a piquant mixture of liturgy, history, and magical recipes, such as how "to Cause the Destruction of an Enemy", or "to Summon One for Lustful Purpose or Establish a Sexually Gratifying Situation." It's an intriguing book, although chunks of it are written in a mysterious tongue called Enochian, rendering certain parts - literally - unspeakable.

For a time LaVey also played the role of a sulphurous Ann Landers by running a weekly tabloid column, "Letters from the Devil." Among the do-it-yourself tips he passed out were the correct specifications for a voodoo doll, and the brewing of love potions, using ginseng root as a substitute for the hard to get {in fact unobtainable} Mandrake.

"Our religion," he said gravely, "is the only one, I think, in complete accordance with human nature. It is based on indulgence. Instead of commanding our members to repress their natural urges, we taech that they should follow them. This includes physical lusts, the desire for revenge, the drive for material possessions." LaVey gives a low, rumbling laugh, that semed to come from his solar plexus. "That's how most of them live already, in any case. Only hitherto have they been following the devil's creed without giving the devil his due. And suffering from guilt complexes because their hypocritical faiths keep telling them they have to live differently. This religious dichotomy is a breeding ground for neurosis. We free them of such conflicts by making it clear that Satan - or God - meant them to live according to their inborn tendencies."

"Does that mean," I asked, "that you encourage drug habits or alcoholism?" He fielded that one easily. "We certainly don't. Both are self-destructive. Typical of losers. And we don't want losers. Satanism is a winner's creed. Now" - a sweep of his black sleeved arm --- "would you care to see the rest of the house?" The church is a veritable FuManchu castle, bristling with hidden doors and secret panels. Wildly sinister or high camp, depending on your attitude. The parlor fireplace and sections of the bookcase swing inward on silent hinges, revealing dark passages into the bowels of the place. The smell gets mustier the deeper you penetrate.

Downstairs is the Ritual Chamber, draped in black and scarlet. The centerpiece consists of the altar, next to it a large Hammond organ, which LaVey plays with magnificent fluorish. {He used to play a calliope in a circus.} "No, we don't have any special Satanic music." He ran a finger over the keys. "We use Wagner for some ceremonies, Berlioz, Liszt, even church tunes."

Everywhere you look, there are artfully gruesome masks, a titanic papier-mache' spider, an arms collector's dream of carbines, pistols, swords, daggers, maces, clubs, some ceremonial, others businesslike. Also skulls, phallic symbols, the inevitable black candles, a bell, and a very handsome chalice. The whole sanctum is rather like a cross between a chapel, an arsenal, and the clubhouse of a juvenile gang.

By opening a case containing a mummy you step into the Red Room next door. Most of it is occupied by a towering bed, hung with black drapes, contemplated from the ceiling by ceremonial masks that look as if they remembered everything that went on below.

Upstairs we were joined by seven-year-old Zeena LaVey, just back from school. Zeena was the cause of a minor scandal some years ago when her father baptized her into his church.

Although as a minister he was entitled to do so, he created considerable indignation by performing the ceremony before the live, nude, and female diabolical altar, sprinkling his daughter with earth and water while intoning, "Welcome, Zeena, new mistress, creature of magic light, child of joy....."

When we arrived back in the parlor, the child of joy was being hauled off the hinged fireplace by her mother. "How many times have we told you not to step on the fireplace! We've already had it fixed twice!"

She abandoned the fireplace and agreed to show me her art class work. Her drawings were lively, imaginative and mostly of ponies. I asked her if she intended to become an artist when she grew up.

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. "No, I'm going to be a ballet dancer."

LaVey said, "I'm sorry we can't show you our lion. He used to live in the back. We had to present him to the zoo, unfortunately. The neighbors complained about his roaring at night."

The Satanic Church has less trouble with hostile elements than might be expected. "Occasionally, some nut comes to the door, but I can handle that," grinned the Devil's High Priest. "And we have very good burglar alarms in the house." He grew rather laconic when I asked about membership figures.

"We stopped divulging them after we reached seven thousand. That was - er - some time ago. But I can tell you that the Church is nationwide. We have Grottoes - that's what we call them - all over the country. And then there are large numbers of crypto-Satanists. People who are not Church members, but like what we're doing. We get quite a lot of donations from them."

LaVey began his career by dropping out of high school and joining the Clyde Beatty Circus as a cage boy --- which meant feeding lions, tigers, and leopards. He also had a decided musical bent. Taught himself piano and organ and played the oboe in the San Francisco Ballet Symphony Orchestra.

From the circus he graduated to a carnival, learning hypnosis, stage magic, and the elements of carny spieling. Then - oddly enough - he enrolled in college as a criminology major, which - even odder - led to a job as forensic photographer with the San Francisco Police Department. He made - and maintained - some handy contacts during his three years with the force. In consequence the Church of Satan is one of the best protected establishments in town. "I went ghost hunting long before Hans Holzer thought of it," he told me. "But instead of taking along a medium --- the way he does it --- I went at it with electronic alarms and infrared cameras. Maybe that's the reason why I never came to believe in ghosts."

His church evolved from his quiet clientele who came to hear him lecture. "One night I had something like a breakthrough into the grey area between religion and psychiatry," he remembered. I found I could help people by bringing the Devil out into the open, so to speak. By proclaiming his creed as a legitimate, active faith." LaVey's main concern is to keep out the "losers" - his pet expletive for the varieties of kooks inevitably drawn to a cult that allegedly conducts weekly orgies. Candidates must fill in a lengthy questionnaire containing points like, "What do you expect to gain from Satanism?" and "If you are a woman, would you consider being an altar?" They also have to pass muster at a confrontation, which is frequently arranged by subterfuge. If accepted they pay a forty dollar registration fee, then an annual ten dollars, which is not expensive by cultist standards.

The Satanic congregation tends to be on the young side of thirty, and composed of very much the same types you would find in, say, scientology or Golden Circle meetings. Good-looking, rather tense, and slightly vague men and women who indicate that they know what everything is about, but can't quite express it. The High Priest --- or another appropriate guru - does it for them. Friday night is the big night for Satanists, the night of the High {not Black} Mass. It opens with a lengthy ceremony in the Ritual Chamber, conducted by LaVey in full regalia, complete with a silken horned cap. Organ music and chanting, which has Gregorian overtones, punctuated by the exclamations "Shemhamforash!" and "Hail Satan!" repeated by the entire congregation.

The naked altar girl lays fairly comfortably on a fur rug. After LaVey has emptied the chalice {contents optional} he places the vessel on her belly or pubic region, where it stays for the remainder of the ritual.

Then follows the business part of the evening, but it's a fair way moved from the orgiastic.

Members come forwards to lay their requests before Satan. Almost in the forms of almost classical maledictions directed at unseen enemies: "Let his rotting dungheap brain writhe in unending agony as hordes of phantom rats gnaw at his diseased spirit for the rest of his life..." Others, in a gentler vein, ask for love, sensual pleasures, business triumphs.

LaVey touches them with his sword, rather as if dubbing them knights, while the congregation joins in a united "willing" of fulfillment, their voices rising in a tremendous "Hail Satan!" to drive their message home.

Occasionally, there is an elaborate psychodrama, in which one member impersonates someone he or she detests. It can be a boss, a rival in love or - frequently - a father or mother. The actor hams up the role gleefully; ranting, lecturing, or whining to bring out the ugliest, most ludicrous feature of the subject. LaVey plays judge, the congregation the jury, as they sit in trial over the hate object. If their verdict is "guilty" {depending on the virulence of the impersonation}, they can bring down any of a score of horrific punishments on the {absent} offender.

> At the end of the evening the participants are emotionally replete, warmed with a sense of accomplishment, and pleasantly relaxed. Their curses are cursed, their hatreds spilled, their enemies smitten hip and thigh. They are - temporarily - at peace. And their peace may quite possibly endure until the next High Mass, come Friday.

At the moment LaVey heads the only officially recognized Satanist movement in the United States; the only one, that is, entitled to baptize, marry and bury its members, and enjoying the tax-exempt status of a church {no longer applicable}.

RE/Search: Modern Primitives
An Investigation of Contemporary Adornment & Ritual, XXIII A.S.

A N T O N L A V E Y

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Anton Szandor LaVey, author of the noir classic The Satanic Bible, is a "Rennaisance man", whose conversation draws from a vast storehouse of occult (in the true sense of "hidden") knowledge and culture; forgotten books, magazines, film, music, artists, power figures and incredible characters. In 1966 he founded The Church of Satan in San Francisco; many of its rituals and exorcisms were essentially under-documented performance art pieces. Besides producing one classic LP, The Satanic Mass, he also authored The Compleat Witch and The Satanic Rituals, plus the forthcoming Satanic Papers - books overflowing with shrewd psychological insight, witty societal analysis, and much more.

The following was excerpted from a much broader conversation lasting until 4 in the morning, when LaVey played on organ and synthesizers his version of "Je' T' aime" which the Temple Ov Psychic Youth has previously recorded, splicing in a recording of LaVey's voice speaking. Present were A. LaVey, Blanche Barton (secretary and an administrator of The Church of Satan), Genesis and Paula P-Orridge (T.O.P.Y.), and V. Vale. (For further information on The Church of Satan send a self-addressed, stamped envelope or 4 IRC's to: P.O. Box 210082, San Francisco CA 94121.)

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VALE: Why do you think there's an upsurge in "modern primitive" activity - piecing, tattooing, scarification?

ANTON LAVEY: I would say the past motivation (in contemporary Western society as we know it) for adornment, embellishment, and tattooing, was much more experiential, or rite of passage. When a man joined the Navy, or got a girlfriend, or was out with his buddies and drunk for the first time... doing something that in a peer sense would establish this belonging, a sense of camaraderie.

But now it's much more of a solitary choice. The person who proclaims, "I have this symbol on me" is trying to say, "You should recognize it because it's important to me." Now it's not necessarily something that's universally understood; it can be much more esoteric.

Today most people just don't go into a tattoo parlor and get the stock tattoos that are displayed on the wall; they have something much more personal in mind. Nowadays there are so damned many people who have an occult or mystical interest (I call them occultniks - these magical idiots - they're not very magical, of course) who have this idea that their particular symbology or bodily adornment is much more important than it actually is!

I've known some heavily tattooed people. One couldn't help but wonder about how they were motivated, especially when a guy would go into a tattoo parlor and have this incredible Egyptian deity tattooed on his back, or one on each thigh, and across his chest have something like the double eagles of the Harpsburgs or a huge symbol of Baphomet across his back! Of course, things like that weren't being done at the turn of the century, or in the twenties or thirties. Now tattooing involves much more diverse symbology.

V: Sometimes there's a totemic relation, in that person believes he derives personal power from the symbol that's tattooed. If the tattoo constantly reminds him of certain goals he's striving toward, then perhaps it actually does give more power. And if a piercing gives someone more sexual pleasure, then that person probably gets more out of life! Besides whatever pleasure that derives from just the adornment itself...

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I think that if a person feels alienated, if the frequency they're on leads them to that Dark Side instead of the light side, if they didn't happen to be born looking freaky or strange, then activities like getting a tattoo are a way of stigmatizing oneself.

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LV: You can put the various forms of bodily adornment into classifications. Fakir Musafar has been at his activities for many, many years: infibulation, nipple piercing, constriction, etc. I saw a lot of that sort of thing when I was in carnival work [late forties]. At that time tattooed people had to live in almost a twilight world; a society set apart from ordinary society. They were really aliens. Now many supposedly "respectable" people are able to celebrate a secret or fetishistic life. That's a motivating factor that didn't exist so much in the past; the satisfaction that knowing that one is different underneath one's business suit...

In the carnival there's a pecking order: born freaks vs. made freaks. The people who are made freaks have special acts they've learned that enable them to work in the ten-in-one, the Side-show, as opposed to the people who don't have to do anything - they're born that way. If a person is freakish enough to start with, probably they will not get tattooed. Born freaks - for example, Frank Lentini who had an extra leg, or the Hilton Sisters, Violet & Daisy (Siamese twins) - I've known them, and Johnny Eck, who had no bottom half of his body. Prince Randian was another one - the human torso. It's not just accidental that these people didn't have any tattoos, because they really were alienated - so different they probably never felt the need to adorn themselves.

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I've known plenty of people who have had tattooing and all kinds of modifications to their bodies that I would say are really screwed up!

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I think that if a person feels alienated; if the frequency they're on leads them to that Dark Side instead of the light side - if they didn't happen to be born looking freaky or strange, then activities like getting a tattoo is a way of stigmatizing one's self - I've done that. When I shaved my head, when I took on certain appearances to augment what I already had, I had reasons.

I'm sure that with people who get extensive tattooing, it's often a feeling that, "Well, maybe if I didn't look strange or of I didn't do something strange to my body, and I did or could blend in, lord knows what I might do that might be really dangerous!" So it's a safety valve, a way of keeping yourself - not on the straight and narrow, certainly, but from maybe being a mass murderer! I really feel that we who are not as others (to use Dan Manix's title) often (whether we know it or not) are inclined to sort of wave a sign and say, "Okay, here I am - keep a good eye on me, because as long as I am strange, bizarre, outrageous, and different, you people don't really have much to worry about! But when I start being devoid of anything bizarre, then lord help you!"

That's why I think a lot of people gravitate to modern primitives alterations in their bodies; it's like taking an antidote which enables them to co-exist with the workaday world. It's a way of linking themselves with the twilight world or the Dark Side. Some people do this in ways without physical change; doing, saying, or thinking things that would certainly alienate them from "normals". But that's just another variation.

In other words, people set up a certain stigma that says, "Watch out for me - I am dangerous!" - like the hourglass on the black widow spider's belly. Modern primitive activity serves as a self-alienation device to bring attention to the owner of that particular device, whatever it happens to be. Because a sailor doesn't look at it the way (one of the old-time sailors, that is), he wants to be one of the guys. He wants to be identified with a group rather than outside of a group.

BLANCHE BARTON: The outsiders are taking what used to be a method for identification inside a group and using it for "nefarious" inverted purposes! - sort of appropriating it.

V: Modern primitive activity facilitates stratification in society.

GENESIS P. ORRIDGE: People who dissociate from society by doing it can recognize other people who've dissociated. They don't have to agree on a philosophy, but they can see a kinship on a certain level. "There's another person whose chosen to step outside ... and there's another one." They get reinforcement of their decision, too. So it's strange you step outside to become part of a tribe that's fragmented, that doesn't have a common bonding except the mark of being outside of the other society.

LV: It's a reversal of it used to be.

BB: But that's what binds us together: that fact that we're outside the majority.

LV: Sometimes people that outwardly look the most weird or the most bizarre are, when you get to know them, the most tuned into the frequency that I'm on. Not always, of course, but often. There's got to be a stratification tell-tale signs that are little litmus tests by which you can know other people.

GPO: Almost like a developing initiation. You think, "That person may be an idiot, but they've still gone through this amount of pain, and this decision making; they've still done something irrevocable. Therefore a certain amount of attention can be spared on them, at least."

V: But the speech is always the dead giveaway.

LV: The dead giveaway. We are victims of our speech patterns. And when someone talks like a prole; opens their mouth and starts using pop expressions - certain terms, certain phrases - or displays common denominators like knowing all of what's going on on TV, then... I'd say the concordance of society is - well, the supermarket checkstand tabloids are the checklists of what the person is supposed to know about if they're going to be one of them as opposed to one of us!

Also, proficiency at sports, when anyone has a consuming awareness of or interest in spectator sports or in group sporting activities, and it really matters to them, you can;t help but wonder what frequency their brain is on that obviously yours is not. And certain articles of clothing; I call them uniforms.

There are certain uniforms that are just universal, almost like prison garb; they might as well be black and white stripes on the old chain gangs! When you see somebody in a jogging suit and running shoes - sweatpants and the whole thing; or a prole cap, T-shirt and stonewashed jeans, you know there's a mind-set there. I think, "Could I feel right wearing that?" I would actually feel impotent, I'd feel uncomfortable, I'd feel vulnerable, I'd feel weak. I would feel I was sapped of any vitality or resourcefulness if I were to look like that. Those clothes would place me in this amorphous mindless grouping that would be enervating; it would deplete my energy. I call them slave clothes; any kind of clothes that were worn by impersonal slaves or slaves to "the system."

So you think, "Well now, these people obviously feel warm and good dressed that way; they feel right." Obviously they're n a different frequency, a different level... just like the occultniks whose lifestyle and nitpicking, pedantic approach to magic is such that obviously they're not magical - it's all on a cerebral level.

BB: They have no conception of intuition ---

V: Or that sense of humor!

BB: That's what the litmus test for these occultniks is; if they don't have a sense of humor. If they can't laugh at themselves or get some perspective that way, then it's pointless to talk to them.

LV: Yes... pretentiousness and pomposity. And I've known plenty of people who've had tattooing and all kinds of modifications to their bodies that I would say are really screwed up! You can't just generalize and say that everyone who goes and gets their foreskin pierced or walks around with clothespins on their nipples all day is where it's at, you know. Because if we're going to be really objective, a lot of people are just plain and simple gluttons for punishment! They simply thrive on pain - which is great if they can get it! (I think self-aware masochism is wonderful, but full-time unself-aware masochism is terrible.) And if they get it by being squeezed in a box, or if they get it by getting their anus clamped together, it's all relative. Whatever it is, it's only effective if it's done with a real desire and need, ad isn't done to follow the lead of someone else.

GPO: Do you think this Modern Primitives book is just going to encourage people to emulate and mimic... like people becoming junkies to emulate William Burroughs, or people going to prison to emulate Jean Genet?

V: Tattooing and piercing are basically forbidden by the Bible in the book of Leviticus and most of the world is ruled by biblical religious beliefs - even Africa now. I want to encourage anything that's a statement against Christianity, because over the past 500 years becasue Christian missionaries systematically destroyed virtually all of the world's diverse cultures, making the world a much less interesting place.

No other religion - Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Paganism - did anywhere near the damage Christianity did. Bishop Landa burned almost all of the one-of-a-kind Mayan codices - an incalculable historical loss. There have been so many atrocities (like the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials) in the name of Christianity that - it can't be too soon to be rid of that alien belief plague. In fact, aliens from Outer Space could hardly have devised a more cripplng weapon against the people of planet earth than the Christian religion.

The Christian religion, especially Catholicism with its unscientific, suicidally reckless birth control views, is responsible for the major unstated problem in the world today: overpopulation. In less than 25 years the world population has doubled, from 2.5 to over 5 billion. The populations that are breeding the fastest, yet have the fewest resources - Latin America and Africa - are mostly Christian, and usually Catholic.

LV: No one addresses that problem anymore; overpopulation. Nobody addresses a lot of problems anymore. And you can feel the overpopulation - it's oppressive - very oppressive.

BB: They want to just keep feeding Africa, keep feeding Third World countries, loaning South America billions, keep feeding all the poor. How about inundating all those countries with birth control pills? No, we can;t do that! People say, "I have the right to keep having children as long as God tells me to keep having children."

---

That's why I think a lot of people gravitate to modern primitive alterations in their bodies; it's like taking an antidote which enables them to co-exist with the workaday world.

---

V: The modern primitive trend is a reaction against overpopulation, fueled by so many uninteresting-looking, conforming clones and drones.

LV: There is going to be stratification; there has to be. There's no choice. There will be cell systems, small groups or clans; there will be - not communes, but certainly communities or environments; insular options for people to move within. I've mapped it out as a series of total environments conducive to the particular lifestyle of the individual who would enter that total environment, very much like an Epcot Center or a Westworld or a Disneyworld, but on a much less commercial level, certainly, where they develop their own necessity - much like Solvang, the Danish community in Southern California.

Let's just say we have a film noir city - wouldn't that be great? And when people go in, they have to wear the right clothes, the cars even have to be the right vintage, and the music is the right kind of music. Just like Frontierland - if someone wants to be like Cowboys and Indians but on the banks of the Rhine with the Germans and the Russians having their cowboy camps and teepee villages, then that's what it'd be. And that'd be great - that's what I'm looking forward to. And them that don't like it can [waves hand] because at least there will be guidelines. And for the people who can have fun or at least can feel comfortable in that kind of environment, then even the weather can hopefully be controlled.

I think that'd be wonderful: total environments. If a person wants a Gay Nineties environment - fine! They can live in that as long as they wish. A Victorian environment with gaslights - fine, but with modern conveniences, and only those which will augment the reality of what appears to be authentic. In other words, instead of having to go through striking a flint, the street lamp will be lit automatically, bit it'll still look like a real gaslamp, and for intents and purposes be one.

V: If you set the stage right, somehow you can regenerate the spark of the actual original spirit that might have been present---

LV: You have just touched on the essence of my principle; you set the stage. The approximation; if it's there, even if it's not authentic - if it just looks authentic, it's close enough to evoke that feeling. I've been working on the concept of creating a total environment since 1965, and I know it works. Because you know it may not be actually turning the clock back in time, but if it's aesthetically pleasing and does something to make you feel good, to make you feel better than you would in this Land of the Dead, then it serves a very worthwhile purpose, I think. And you would certainly want to opt for that!

Meanwhile, to survive, I feel the vampire concept is a valid one, in terms of being awake at night and sleeping during that day - having the best, most creative time available; the time when other people are sleeping and not cluttering up the atmosphere - not jamming the frequencies, not dehydrating the ozone layer, so to speak.

V: It's also much quieter at night.

LV: Especially in urban areas where there's a great deal of concentrated activity. That's why I always gravitated to the opposite - whatever the opposite may be! Almost as if it's the most natural direction for me to go, shunning the average or usual or the predictable, very much like I would shun a poison. Because I know that no matter what it is that is immediately grasped upon as the norm or the thing that is the positive ionization factor, it's immediately going to be the wrong thing for me. So it's almost a cybernetic reflex - I have to almost not analyze it, but simply go with it. If I run towards it or run away from it, that's what makes it right or wrong! That's a rule of thumb - a mean average, a calculated risk that I'm going in the right direction.

I inherently believe man is a foolish, self-defeating, self-destructive creature who can't stand too much success, too much pleasure - he dies of satisfaction, because his life has outlived the potential for his boredom to override it. So he just can't go on any longer. But with all my "humanitarianism" I still feel there's a chance for improvement - at least a slight chance! Although Satan knows we sure need a good thinning out process. Every time there's a disaster or something goes wrong, I start tallying things up and start wondering not that it was such a tragedy, but wondering only, "So few? Is that all?"

V: As people stratify themselves into small groups or clans, what other standards apply? Certainly not race.

LV: My most elitist, Satanic society dream is on something that's not based on racism, but based on intelligence vs. stupidity - THAT'S IT! There are the stupid and there are the intelligent. There are the people who are alive and vital and sensitive and thinking, and there are the people who are the dead, the pods that are just things. They're the ones that I feel should be put to the flamethrower, regardless of race.

I have to keep an overview of all these things. Fundamentally, everything translates down to stupidity. That's the great Satanic sin: stupidity. That's the cardinal sin.

V: Whether or not you have tattoos or piercings, the bottom line is that purposeful, self-evolved intelligence... whether or not you've done the most you can with what you have - that's always the goal. If the tattoos or piercings help you evolve, then they've more than justified themselves.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
by Lawrence Wright for Rolling Stone magazine, September 5th, 1991 c.e.

"It’s not easy being evil in a world that’s gone to hell"

Is the Devil real? This certainly looks like the Evil One himself getting out of a black Jaguar and coming through the glass doors of a restaurant with a blonde on his arm. It's an interesting proposition and one that, after all, millions of Americans believe: Satan lives, and his real-life incarnation is the person of Anton Szandor LaVey.

His devilish appearance is cultivated, of course: the shaved head; the black slacks, black shirt and ascot, black leather jacket and black fisherman's cap; the Leninesque goatee, still shimmeringly black, although LaVey is now sixty-one years old; and the tiny gold ear loop in his left lobe. That much, however, would describe most of the leftover beatniks still wandering around San Francisco. No, there's definitely some-thing more, something innately sinister about this man.

His ears, you notice, are slightly pointed, and when he doffs his cap, you see his head is as well. He has a peculiar walk -- a splayfoot shuffle he says he picked up during his days in the circus and the carnival. Pale skin, which you would expect in a man who never sees the sun, but unnaturally youthful and lightly flecked with freckles. A gaptoothed smile that is missing an upper-left incisor. Amber eyes that scarcely look human -- more like the eyes of a big cat, with a cat's sleepy intensity and implacable in-difference. It is a wicked face, which is to say that it is charming, defiant, jaded, beguiling, humorous, bitter, knowing and even a bit insouciant. How else would the Devil appear?

LaVey's reputation as the Devil incarnate began with his establishment of the Church of Satan, in San Francisco in 1966, and was enlarged through his writings most notably The Satanic Bible, which was published in 1969 and has sold more than 600,000 copies through thirty printings. It was this book — a romantic celebration of indulgence, vengeance and existential doubt — that earned him the reputation among many religious believers as the ``evilest man in the world.'' It also made him a dark hero to the disaffected, the alienated, the marginal personalities, for whom his philosophy rang chords of recognition and identity.

``Anton LaVey is the pivotal figure in the growth and dissemination of satanic theology in America — he is the Saint Paul of Satanism,'' says Dr. Carl Raschke, author of Painted Black, which surveys the spread of satanic activity amid the young and the phenomenal rise in reported cases of ritual abuse. And yet, as LaVey points out, ``I've never presented myself as having spoken directly to Satan or God or being in touch with any sort of divinity or having any sort of spiritual mandate. I just feel that what I'm doing is part of my nature.''

Reviled as a despoiler of youth, dismissed as a con man and a carny trickster, pursued by thrill seekers and Bible-thumpers and occult weirdos, LaVey has become increasingly reclusive over the years. Indeed, he is often rumored to have died long ago. His church, which once boasted ``grottoes'' in many major cities in the country, is now largely disbanded. During the Sixties, LaVey fashioned himself into an archetype of our depraved unconscious; he hobnobbed with movie stars and boasted of affairs with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield; he was our libido let out of its cage; he was the Black Pope, raging and blaspheming and flaunting our taboos. Back then Satanism was new and shocking, and LaVey was its most conspicuous practitioner. The post office would deliver mail to him addressed only to Satan.

Now, in the Nineties, satanic cults are springing up, it seems, in every little township and crossroads in America. Rock groups openly worship the Devil. Police departments all over the country are coping with rumors of human sacrifice and hospitals with survivors of ritual abuse. The signs of satanic activity can be found not only in the graffiti on subway trains but in the growing number of teenage suicides and actual cases of ritual murder. Meanwhile, the spiritual father of this movement has retired to his gloomy house in the Richmond district of San Francisco, where he lives a self-consciously ascetic life, surrounded by his books, weapons and keyboards, by his pets and magical artifacts, and by Blanche Barton, his Boswell and omnipresent blonde companion.

I had read increasingly sketchy reports about LaVey's existence and wondered whether he was sick, or in hiding, or even if, in some secret fashion, he was reformed. I suppose I hoped for that. He has made a career out of exploring the shadows of the human psyche. ``I am all that is vile, reprehensible and evil in the world,'' he has boasted. ``I am people's worst nightmares.'' Despite the absurdity of the claim, I felt more than a little anxiety about our meeting. After all, the danger that LaVey represents to society is not who he is but who we are.

``WHAT DRESSING WOULD YOU LIKE ON YOUR SALAD?'' the waiter inquired.

``Blue cheese,'' I said.

LaVey and Barton exchanged a look, then returned to their menus. Unknowingly, I had just failed the LaVey Salad-Dressing Test. According to The Satanic Witch, his guide for lovelorn sorceresses, ``dominant, masculine archetypes [like LaVey] prefer sweet dressings, such as French, Russian, Thousand Island,'' because the smell resembles the odor of a woman's sexual organs. Blue cheese, on the other hand, is ``reminiscent of a locker full of well-worn jockstraps.'' It is suitable, really, only for wimps and submissive females. LaVey ordered the twenty-two-ounce porterhouse steak, rare.

We were talking about violence and the corruption of art, which LaVey blames on television. ``But a lot of what has been unleashed is because of the Church of Satan,'' said Barton, a plump and intensely pale young woman with little spit curls poking out from under her blue pillbox hat - - a sort of blond Betty Boop but with a Phi Beta Kappa pin on her dress.

LaVey agreed: ``I promoted the idea where everybody is a god. That's the Pandora's box I'm partly responsible for opening. I helped create this big-shotism in everybody.''

``And are you glad you opened Pandora's box?'' I asked, innocently enjoying my salad.

``Yeah, because things have to get worse before they can get better,'' said LaVey. ``But I think we've already reached the lowest level of artistic expression as a result of this new-found sovereignty in every man.'' Although he spoke quietly, a terrible cloud had come over his face. ``Here we're really dealing with the `dignity' of the human animal. I find more dignity in the movement of a fish, the shape of a horse. . . .''

He was off on one of his misanthropic rants. I would hear that theme played again and again over the two weeks we would spend dining together and hanging around the parlor of his famous black house. During those sessions, which lasted until I staggered away in exhaustion, usually around four in the morning, I often wondered what it was that had caused him to become so alienated from the human race. I thought if I could get to the bottom of LaVey's rage, then I would find some great truth about the human need to pursue evil. Later I would realize that the notion that one could find truth and perhaps even salvation through the exploration of repressed human needs was itself a satanic idea — perhaps the ultimate satanic idea.

``I actually have more respect for vegetables than I do for people — I hate to even leave a pea on my plate,'' LaVey said as he pronged one with his fork. ``This little pea died for me. I know I'm beginning to sound like Albert Schweitzer, but for this pea to be able to grow and fulfill its purpose on the planet, that's more than most humans ever accomplish.''

``Do you believe peas have souls?'' I asked.

``Well, I wouldn't use the word soul, but I do believe there are living entities beyond what we normally understand. Anything can have life bestowed upon it == a car, a good faithful car; a typewriter; a house, certainly, becomes a living entity. Who can say these objects are not alive?'' With that, the pea moved on to its final reward.

``I've always been fascinated by the underbelly of humanity,'' LaVey told me in one of our early-morning discourses in his purple parlor. He was sitting in his armchair, beside a bookcase predictably filled with obscure occult literature, but there were also a number of coffee-table books on Hollywood, biographies of Marilyn Monroe, books on circus and carnival lore. I noticed Yeats's Memoirs, as well as several rare books by one of my favorite authors, Ben Hecht. Also The Complete Jack the Ripper, Eros and Evil and My Father, by Maria Rasputina, which was inscribed ``Happy winter solstice, To my father, Love, Karla.''

On the mantel above the fake fireplace (it was actually a secret entrance to a ritual chamber) were pictures of his daughters, Karla and Zeena. Karla is like her father, with black hair and humorous black eyes. ``I've always been conspicuous,'' she confessed when we met. ``Like my teachers would tell us to write a story about our pets, and I would write about my pet tarantula and the leopard who slept in my bed. We were really like the Addams family.'' Karla is now a realtor in Marin County and an occasional lecturer on witchcraft.

Zeena, LaVey's younger daughter, is an exotic pale blonde who has become a notorious spokesperson for Satanism in her own right. She has appeared on a number of talk shows, usually with her boyfriend, Nikolas Schreck, a member of the band Radio Werewolf. ``Zeena is trying to gain recognition,'' LaVey told me with obvious mixed feelings. ``She feels she has a legacy to gain. I think she's got a father fixation.''

There were no windows in this parlor. The only light came from what I supposed to be a twenty-five-watt bulb in the lamp behind LaVey's chair. He claims to be photophobic, one of his many vampiric qualities, which include an allergy to garlic. When he reads, even in this light, he wears a pair of bifocal sunglasses. Beside him, on one side of his chair, were his crystal ball and bullwhip; on the other, a stuffed armadillo and a machine gun. ``I guess,'' LaVey said, ``I've lived a sort of noir existence since I was a kid.''

He was born, he said, Anton Szandor LaVey, on April 11th, 1930, in Chicago, to Joe and Augusta LaVey -- although even these initial details have been the subject of some dispute.

He had what he called a ``subjective childhood.'' His parents were ``very normal,'' with no interest in the dark side: ``The story of my father's life was to blend into the woodwork. My mother was the same way. They were very paranoid about the neighbors and what people thought of them. In a way it was good. I was allowed to take my own lead. In that sense, I couldn't have chosen better parents.''

His religious background was ``very iconoclastic and extremely permissive,'' he said. ``My own family were nonparticipants. I was never pushed into a religious formula. The only thing I ever heard about religion was `Another name for God is nature.' We did have relatives who were Christian and Jewish. I had an aunt who was a Christian Scientist and an atheist uncle. You could say I grew up a second-generation nonbeliever or cynic.''

According to LaVey, most Satanists are stigmatized as youths. When I asked him about the stigmas of his own childhood, he spoke vaguely about his unpopularity with other kids and his inability to dance. ``My life wasn't awful -- my only stigma was up here,'' he said, pointing at his face. ``I was odd looking. By today's standards I would have looked fine, but in 1939 I was not cute. I was certainly not a Van Johnson or a John Wayne.'' He did talk about his horror of going to gym with the other boys, which was so great that he managed to get a doctor's excuse to avoid it. He said he spent his gym periods in the clinic eyeing the sexy school nurse.

Frankly, these did not seem like such traumatic experiences that they would catapult a person into Satanism. I was still groping for some telling incident in LaVey's childhood as I read the manuscript of Barton's authorized biography of him, The Secret Life of a Satanist (since published by Feral House). There I ran across this passage: ``Had tail removed. Extra vertebra removed near the end of Tony's spine which formed a prehensile tail, a caudal appendage, which seems to occur about 1 in every 100,000 births.''

``You had a tail?''

``Yeah. I had it removed when I was thirteen or fourteen, under very painful circumstances.''

``Don't you think that might have been stigmatizing?''

``I never thought about it,'' said LaVey, ``although it really was profoundly disruptive to everything I did. I couldn't sit straight in a chair because it would get inflamed. Several times it had to be lanced and drained. The last time it happened we were camping on rocky terrain. I rolled around and must have banged it. Next day it started itching. Two days later it really flared up.'' It was wartime, and there was a shortage of hospital rooms and anesthesia. He said he was operated on, on a gurney in the hospital hallway, with a local anesthetic that was not very effective. He recalled biting through the rubber cover of his pillow.

World War II was in many ways a thrilling period in LaVey's life. He would wear military outfits to school, and occasionally he got to go on submarine patrols in a boat owned by his uncle, who had been recruited by the Coast Guard Reserve. ``The Second World War and its permissiveness were not lost on me,'' LaVey said. ``Prurience was the order of the day.''

He had already experienced what he would later term an E.C.I. (for Erotic Crystallization Inertia) when he was five years old. A girl at a birthday party invited him into her room. When her mother suddenly came to find them, the little girl was so upset she peed in her pants. ``The E.C.I. is the split second of sexual awakening,'' LaVey explained. ``A switch goes off inside.'' After that, the sight of women urinating became a particular fetish for LaVey. He associated it especially with carnivals, because that was a place where girls became giddy and excited on rides; it felt like a lustful environment.

When he was eleven, he was earning money picking up bottles around an outdoor dance pavilion, and he discovered a hole under the ladies' restroom. ``Tony made sure he was front and center whenever he spied an interesting woman going to relieve herself,'' Barton notes.

When he was sixteen he experienced another E.C.I. He was at a party; some of the kids were wrestling, and a girl's dress was hiked up so that LaVey could see her plump thighs and pale skin. She was a blonde. ``She was just another schoolgirl,'' LaVey said. ``I wasn't even interested in her.'' But forever after, blondes were it for him -- an unending source of love and trouble.

We had moved into the kitchen, where LaVey kept his eight keyboards, his two house cats and his pet boa constrictor, Boaz. Music has always been at the center of LaVey's life and of his magic as well. ``I play kitsch music -- bombastic, schmaltzy, corny -- the kind of music you hear in the background of cartoons,'' he said unapologetically as he took a seat inside his nest of synthesizers and samplers.

``Satanic music is not heavy-metal rock & roll,'' he said. In his opinion, the music of supposed satanic groups such as AC/DC and Slayer is not really occult, because millions of people hear their songs on records and in concerts. What is really occult is what no one ever listens to anymore, songs that were popular but now are long forgotten, such as ``Telstar'' and ``Yes, We Have No Bananas.'' LaVey keeps a list of such lost songs. He believes that by playing them, he releases their power.

``Music is a magical tool, a universal language,'' he said. ``If you wanted it to rain, for instance, you could play every song with rain in the title. If no one else is playing those songs, there is still a certain charge in them. It might just rain.''

That sounded pretty tame to me, although LaVey has claimed in the past that he went cuckoo on the keyboards one night and caused the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City.

His musical career began, LaVey said, at the age of five, when he went into a music store with his mother and spontaneously picked out a tune on a harp. Soon he was studying violin, then drums and oboe. By the time he was fifteen, he said, he was sufficiently accomplished to play second oboe with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra.

The kitchen was painted black, with fiendish murals on the walls. There was a small hum of electricity when LaVey turned on his synthesizers, which aroused Boaz in his lighted box on the kitchen table. LaVey himself became visibly energized. His life story resumed, this time set to music.

He began with ``The Gladiator's Entry,'' the traditional opening song of the circus, played with a wheezing calliope sound. LaVey's legend, as he has told it many times, is that in the spring of 1947 he ran away and joined the Clyde Beatty Circus. ``I got in trouble with the law and had to take off,'' he said without further explanation. He signed on as a roustabout and cage boy. ``After a short time, 17-year-old LaVey was handling eight Nubian lions and four Bengal tigers in the cage at once, '' says Barton's book. LaVey said that he learned some elemental lessons in magic upon being knocked to the ground and finding himself on his back with the hot breath of a lion in his face: ``You have just one defense left: willpower. Any good cat trainer has to learn how to use it, how to charge himself full of adrenalin, to send out gamma rays to penetrate the brain of the cat. That's when you really learn power and magic, even how to play God.''

One day the calliope player, Fred Mullen, got drunk, and LaVey was pressed into service. He played the William Tell Overture -- to such enthusiastic reviews that Mullen spent the rest of the season on the sidelines. ``Anton would subsequently perform mood-setting, emotionally charged music to accompany some of the world's most famous circus acts: the Hannefords' riding team, the Concellos, Harold Alzana, the Flying Wallendas, the Cristianis and others,'' says the Barton biography.

Now the music changed. It was the snaky sound of ``The Billboard March'' — the melody of the midway, the freak shows, the hoochie-coochie girls. The next stop of the LaVey legend was the carnival, where in the late Forties and early Fifties he said he played the Hammond organ and learned to tell fortunes: ``I got to rub elbows with human oddities — freaks, dancers, showgirls who wanted to be stars -- it was a chance to meet people who were really marginal.''

LaVey claimed to have gotten a critical insight into the nature of religion during this period because he was often recruited by traveling evangelists to play gospel tunes. ``My exposure to grass-roots Christianity was on a real dirt-lot, tent-show level,'' LaVey recalled. While he was playing ``Bringing in the Sheaves,'' he would look out at the audience clamoring to be saved. ``I'd see the same goddamned faces that had been ogling the half-naked girls at the carnival the night before.'' It was, he has said many times before, a revelation: ``I knew then that the Christian church thrives on hypocrisy and that man's carnal nature will out no matter how much it is purged or scourged by any white-light religion.''

When winter came in 1948 and the carnival closed for the season, LaVey started playing burlesque houses in Southern California — in particular, a theater called the Mayan, in Los Angeles. ``That's where I met Marilyn Monroe, at the Mayan,'' said LaVey. ``The guy who ran it was Paul Valentine.'' Monroe was down on her luck and had taken up stripping to get by.

LaVey began playing ``Slow Boat to China,'' which he said was one of Monroe's numbers, followed by ``Harlem Nocturne,'' a classic stripper's tune. He played it in the organ mode, with a bawdy snare drum in the background outlining the bumps and grinds and a lonely trumpet crying out for love and attention. ``She was what the girls would call a chain dragger, which meant she was slow to take her clothes off,'' LaVey explained. He had not been particularly interested in her until he noticed her white, marshmallow thighs, with a trail of bruises, which he thought added an air of vulnerability. His old fetish for pale blondes made a sudden entrance, and within a few days he and Marilyn were lovers. The affair lasted about two weeks.

``I think she was attracted to your darker elements,'' Barton observed as she fed a mouse to Boaz.

``She did have a strange fascination with the dark side,'' LaVey agreed. ``I've tried to retrace all the places we stayed, like the fleabag motel on Washington Boulevard where we lived together, the whole West Adams section of L.A., where we drove around in Marilyn's Pontiac. . . .''

As a souvenir of those days, LaVey produced a copy of Monroe's famous nude Golden Dreams calendar, which he said she sent him. There she was, lusciously recumbent against a red satin drop, her legs curled under and her left arm raised invitingly, her body so white but her open lips so red; even her nipples looked red against that pale, pale skin. ``Dear Tony,'' the inscription read in a large and handsome script, ``How many times have you seen this! Love, Marilyn.''

``Her big break came right after we broke up,'' LaVey recalled. ``She did a walk-on in a Groucho Marx movie. Then John Huston gave her a great part in Asphalt Jungle.'' (As it happens, the romantic lead in the Marx Brothers' movie, Love Happy, was the same man who ran the Mayan Theater).

While Monroe moved quickly on to stardom, LaVey drifted to San Francisco, and it was here, in 1950, that he met a tiny teenage blonde named Carole Lansing. They married a year later, even though Carole was only fifteen. The Korean War was going on at the time, and in order to evade the draft, LaVey signed up to study criminology at San Francisco's City College. His first daughter, Karla, was born in 1952. To support his young family, LaVey got a job as a police-department photographer. He saw children splattered by hit-and-run drivers, women cut to pieces by jealous husbands, the bloated bodies of suicides fished out of San Francisco Bay. He came to the conclusion that if this brutal carnage was God's will, then he wanted nothing more to do with God. ``There is no God,'' he said he decided. ``There is no supreme, all-powerful deity in the heavens that cares about the lives of human beings. There is nobody up there who gives a shit. Man must be taught to answer to himself and other men for his actions.”

A switch here, a switch there, and the sound deepened into a throaty theater organ. It was ``Deep in the Heart of Texas,'' which LaVey slyly played in my honor. He said he was the official organist of the city of San Francisco until 1966, playing ``the largest pipe organ west of Chicago'' in the Civic Auditorium, where so many conventions were held. ``I played official banquets, political functions, basketball games.''

Blanche Barton had a cold. She stuck a package of tissues in her purse and glanced outside. ``It's nice out,'' she said, looking at the fog and the light, chilly rain.

It was sundown, and LaVey was just rising. He sleeps, he said, in four-hour stretches. While we waited for him to emerge, I roamed around the small parlor, where — with the exception of the kitchen and the bathroom -- I had been restricted. It was a great frustration for me because I knew from old newspaper accounts and from speaking to former associates of LaVey's that there really were secret passages and amazing artifacts buried in this thirteen-room house. A trapdoor to the basement, for instance, led to his famous Den of Iniquity, with his Hammond organ, a Rock-Ola jukebox and his mannequins -- Steve the Sailor, Bonita the Whore, Fritz the Cabbie and Gwen the Drunk, the last passed out on a bar stool with a puddle of urine on the floor beneath her. It was LaVey's latest in a series of attempts to create a ``total environment,'' one in which time stands still. Downstairs, it was 1944.

``Anton literally has created an underground world in his basement,'' says his old friend Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker and author of Hollywood Babylon, one of the bitchiest books ever composed. ``We share a fondness for mannequins,'' Anger says sweetly. When he and LaVey met, ``it was just like a friend I should have known forever -- we've never had a quarrel.''

Anger met LaVey in the early Sixties, when Anger was in San Francisco working on Invocation of My Demon Brother, a film version of a black mass. Anger fell in with an informal group of friends who met each Friday evening in LaVey's house to discuss the occult. They called themselves the Magic Circle. It was this group that eventually became the nucleus of the Church of Satan. It included novelist Stephen Schneck; a Danish baroness named Carin de Plessen; Donald Werby, who is one of the wealthiest investors in the city (he owns interests in the Clift, the Grosvenor and the Holiday Inn hotels in San Francisco); and Werby's wife, Willy. Along with this group was a selection of science- fiction writers, a tattoo artist, a dildo manufacturer and a handful of San Francisco police officers.

These meetings became famous in the city, and eventually LaVey opened them to the public, charging $2.50 a head to hear his lectures ``Fortunetelling and Character Analysis'' or ``Love Potions and Monkey Glands.'' Vampires, werewolves, freaks, homunculi, bondage and torture, moon madness — it was a survey course of the weird, the forbidden and the occult. People would spill over to the stairway outside and listen through the windows. One memorable evening LaVey spoke on the subject of cannibalism, and his wife — his second wife, a slender blonde named Diane — served a small portion of a human thigh, which a doctor friend had salvaged from an autopsy.

By 1964, LaVey was cutting a conspicuous public figure in San Francisco as a ``psychic investigator'' who drove a coroner's van and could be seen strolling a black leopard named Zoltan. Zoltan used to sleep in the crib with Karla. When the leopard was run over by a car, he was quickly replaced by a ten-week-old Nubian lion named Togare.

Whatever LaVey's actual connections were to the circus, people who visited him were impressed with his ability to handle the lion in his own house. Togare could be rambunctious -- he left a scar on Karla's back — but LaVey had him trained so that he would not eat until his master had taken a bite of his own dinner.

``I used to call him to his meal by playing `Onward, Christian Soldiers,' '' LaVey said. Unfortunately, Togare had the habit of roaring at night, which kept the neighbors awake. Eventually a city ordinance was passed forbidding lions in private homes, and Togare was taken to the zoo.

His successor was a German shepherd named Bathory, who was confined to the pitch-black narrow entranceway between the front door and the door to the parlor. I could hear the creature breathing; she had her nose stuck under the door as if she were craving even the minimal light in the parlor. Her odor, and what seemed like generations of leftover animal smells, suffused the room. But the overarching essence in this clammy parlor was that of snake -- although as far as I knew, Boaz was seldom let out of his box.

Beside the couch was an antique examination table with stirrups on the side, which seemed to me the most sinister object in the room. Next to it was a chair stacked full with LaVey's various black hats. Above that, in a light so dim I could scarcely make it out, was a framed sign: ``My worst enemies are those who presume me to be harmless. They cannot imagine how much I resent and disdain them, or just how great a threat they would face if I could get at them. . . . Some day, with the help of time, space and circumstance, I will be able to humiliate them properly - - not in a manner they would enjoy, but in a style calculated to make them wish they had never been born.''

Just then, LaVey entered and greeted me. The missing teeth, he had already admitted, he had extracted himself: ``I don't get them fixed, I just pull them out when it's time.'' I supposed it would be difficult to get a dental appointment in any case, given his schedule.

LaVey stuck his Smith & Wesson .38 in his holster in the small of his back and a nifty five-shot derringer in the pocket of his leather jacket. ``I never go out without armament,'' he said. He claims to be a champion marksman and trick shot.

``Do you have a permit for those?'' I asked.

He laughed and flipped open his wallet. Inside was a San Francisco Police Department badge. ``Look at the serial number,'' he said. It was number 666.

We were going over the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin County for dinner tonight. Barton was driving, despite her wretched cold.

On the way LaVey talked about androids, his favorite hobbyhorse. He has spent years working on his own android prototypes -- his mannequins -- preparing for the day when the science of robotics will enable industry to begin the production of artificial human companions. ``The forbidden industry,'' he called it. ``Polite, sophisticated, technologically feasible slavery.'' Most of his dolls are store mannequins with their faces sawn off, replaced by latex impressions taken from his friends.

``I sculpted one entirely out of polyurethane foam,'' LaVey said as we edged across the bridge through the fog. ``I inhaled all those fumes trying to create a realistic woman with actual sexual parts. I put so much of my personal fetishistic desire into it that I became like Pygmalion. I kept expecting her to show up on my doorstep.''

``Do you have sex with your dolls?'' I asked.

Pause.

``I tried to,'' he said. ``It was going to be my great test run. Just as I was entering her, the damn room started shaking. An earthquake hit. I figured it was God's way of trying to tell me something. So I ceased'' — he laughed — ``my activities of the moment.''

LaVey turned suddenly solemn. ``When I say `God,' you know, it's just a figure of speech.''

His theology is a puzzle. He has often tried to break off Satanism from any belief system. ``Satanism is not just an occultnik-type thing,'' he told me. ``It is a way of life, an aesthetic ideal, a code of behavior.'' Perhaps what he stands for is best understood this way: More than anything else, LaVey's life is spent evoking a mood, an era and a way of looking at the world through his art. He sees it as a satanic exercise, a way of replacing God with his own vision of creation. He is still in mourning for the lost moment of the Forties.

``I like dark, wet environments with street lights reflecting in the wet pavement, little towns with farmhouses in the distance, all-night gas stations in the middle of nowhere, bars with glass-brick fronts that are dark inside even at two in the afternoon, back alleys in the lost parts of town, streets that wander off into the fields, general stores that double as Greyhound depots, the sound of a siren in the night, automobiles with long hoods and short rear ends, women with moll-like qualities who are real sidekicks, the clicking of high heels on the pavement. . . .''

In LaVey's world, women still wear bright red lipstick and the music swings softly and sex is there but not there, in the teasing, exaggerated fashion of the DC Comic books that he used to read and save and still has inside plastic envelopes, and men have undreamed-of powers just like the film noir anti-heroes he grew up on -- the Green Hornet, the Shadow, the Whistler. ``Batman,'' he told me, ``is the perfect manifestation of the satanic ethic. These are the heroes who work in the shadows, doing what officials cannot do or will not do.''

His music, his mannequins, his writings, the ``total environments'' he attempts to create, his taste in just about everything, are reflections of this satanic pursuit of making his own world. Later, as I began to take apart the literary creation he had made of his life, I would realize that ``Anton LaVey'' was itself his supreme creation, his ultimate satanic object, a sort of android composed of all the elements his mysterious creator had chosen from the universe of dark possibilities.

And yet there was still a question in my mind about what he actually believed. He had told me that he believed in a ``balance of nature, a natural order.''

``That's God,'' he said. ``And that's Satan. Satan is God. He is the representation of the state of flux; he is the action-reaction; he is the cause and the effect; he is all the elements interwoven in what we call evolution.'' That statement seemed to me little more than an elaboration of his parents' single religious dictum: Another word for God is nature. Another word for God is Satan. Another word for nature is evolution.

I recalled a queer passage in a book by Susan Atkins, who was a topless dancer in LaVey's short-lived North Beach nightclub act, the Witches' Workshop, before she became a killer in Charles Manson's family. At that time, Atkins was dancing under the name Sharon King. While LaVey was trying to recruit her for the vampire role, he invited her to attend one of his satanic services. She told him she preferred not to, since she didn't believe in the Devil. ``But, Sharon,'' he said, ``we don't believe in God, either, but that doesn't mean he isn't real.''

``I am a skeptic,'' he admitted when I pressed him on the subject, ``although I want to believe in something. And whenever we want to believe in something so strongly we do speculate on its existence. But I need something more than pap or cliches, something more personalized. Maybe I'm practicing solipsism.''

``YEAH, I KNEW LAVEY BACK IN THE late Forties or early Fifties,'' says a retired San Francisco police inspector with the improbable name of Jack Webb. ``He was an outstanding pianist locally.'' Webb used to hear LaVey play at the Lost Weekend, and during breaks the two would chat about magic and the occult. Webb was impressed: ``One night I said off the cuff, `Tony, with all your ideas you ought to start your own church.' ''

The seed of that idea fruited in 1966 when LaVey ceremonially shaved his head and ordained the beginning of the Age of Satan. It was April 30th — Walpurgisnacht, the highest holiday of the satanic calendar. Now it was Walpurgisnacht more than two decades later, and LaVey was in a reflective mood. ``I try to minimize it, but deep down inside I can't — it's still a meaningful anniversary,'' he said as we sat in his favorite neighborhood French restaurant. The chef noticed LaVey as he entered and sent out a tray with a glass of Dubonnet on the rocks for each of us — LaVey's only alcoholic indulgence. ``Life everlasting, world without end,'' LaVey said in a sardonic toast.

He had thought, he said, that his little church would be a covert activity: ``I had no idea it would snowball in a year's time. I was stunned when everything happened so fast.''

The publicity explosion began with a satanic wedding that LaVey performed for John Raymond, a former writer for the Christian Science Monitor, and Judith Case, the daughter of a Republican stalwart in New York. A photograph of the couple, with LaVey standing beside them in his black cape and horned cowl and a naked redhead, who'd served as the altar, behind them, was carried in newspapers and magazines all across the world.

Barbara McNair, the black actress and singer, attended the ceremony. That began a correspondence between LaVey and Hollywood that would add luster and credibility to LaVey's organization. Among the stars LaVey has claimed as friends over the years are Kim Novak, Christopher Lee. Laurence Harvey and Keenan Wynn.

LaVey has served as a consultant on many different films — notably, the stylishly kitsch Abominable Dr. Phibes, in which Vincent Price played a character based on LaVey, and Rosemary's Baby, in which LaVey himself played the serpentine devil who impregnates Mia Farrow. LaVey called that movie ``the best paid commercial for Satanism since the Inquisition.''

LaVey's most notable conquest in Hollywood, however, was Jayne Mansfield. ``I remember Jayne, all right,'' says Jack Webb. In the early days of the church, Webb used to drop by for some of the rituals, along with several other San Francisco cops. ``One night she was lying naked on Tony's grand piano. I'll never forget that sight.''

Mansfield had already made a reputation in Hollywood for her vigorous sexual appetites. ``She liked to be humiliated,'' LaVey said. ``She longed for a stern master.'' He claimed Mansfield sought him out after reading a newspaper article about him. She wanted LaVey to put a curse on her Italian husband, with whom she was involved in a custody dispute. Soon after that, she became a priestess in the Church of Satan. She even posed for publicity photographs with LaVey, showing herself kneeling at his feet as he administered a chalice of some magical liquid. Satanism seemed to strike some deep chord inside her. She called it ``Khalil Gibran with balls.''

For his part, LaVey responded to what he saw as a kindred spirit. ``She never let the image down, not even in private — I could see a lot of myself in that,'' he once admitted. ``Perhaps she feared people wouldn't love her without the image.''

Her death would become a major element in the LaVey legend. Sam Brody, Mansfield's lawyer, agent and frustrated suitor, was jealous of LaVey's relationship with his client. LaVey despised Brody from the first moment he saw him. ``I don't know why attorneys have that effect on me — to the point that I have no choice but to say, `Look, you don't know who you're dealing with. . . .' ''

One night Brody mischievously lit a pair of black candles on LaVey's altar. ``Mr. LaVey was furious with Sam,'' Mansfield told her biographer. ``He proclaimed, `You are cursed by the Devil. You will be killed within a year!' ''

A few months later, on June 29th, 1967, Mansfield and Brody were riding on U.S. 90 near New Orleans when their driver rear-ended a tank truck that was spraying for mosquitoes. Brody and Mansfield were both killed instantly — the actress was actually decapitated in the accident.

LaVey claims he had been looking through his scrapbook when he noticed that in clipping an article about his placing flowers on Marilyn Monroe's grave, he inadvertently had cut into a picture of Mansfield on the next page. He had lopped off her head. Then the phone rang. It was an AP reporter with the news.

He puts a lot of weight on such coincidences. Walpurgisnacht, for instance, is the birth date of television at the New York World's Fair in 1939. (``What a satanic bomb that proved to be!'') It is the day Hitler committed suicide in 1945. The day LaVey's lion, Togare, died in 1981. Just this very afternoon, Barton was reading through a Mansfield biography and observed the date of Mansfield's first studio tryout: April 30th, 1954.

``Things are always turning up like that,'' LaVey said, unsurprised. ``It's the little things that are the big things.''

He was beginning to turn melancholy. ``Deep down, I still have an urge to put on the paraphernalia and go through a ritual,'' he admitted. But that is all behind him. He hasn't performed a black mass in twenty years.

He was talking now with his eyes closed. It was a peculiar affectation, one that hinted of his great need to live in his own world, to shut out the intrusions of reality and stay locked inside his head with his dark imagination. He said he expected society to stratify itself naturally, with Satanists rising to the top to inherit the earth -- a process he said was happening faster than he could have predicted. But until that day comes, he has chosen the strategy of abdication. ``I have decided to withdraw, to give up my citizenship in the human race.''

Later I learned that, earlier in the evening, LaVey's younger daughter had chosen this special day to renounce her father. ``I officially and ritually ended my positions as Church of Satan representative-defender and daughter of Anton LaVey,'' Zeena declared in a letter to LaVey's archenemy, Michael Aquino. She complained that her father ``was filled, and still is, with petty jealous criticism of my efforts -- this was easy for him to do from the safe vantage point of the comfortable and risk-free easy chair we know he has lived in for decades.''

LaVey's duck arrived, baked in a currant sauce. This seemed to revive him. He started railing against the predominant notion that Satanists are child murderers or that they sacrifice animals. He himself has always preached against such practices, he said. He despised the assault on public order: ``The police force has to take care of people without conscience; in fact there's very little conscience left. I'm not advocating a benign police state exactly, but there's a need for certain elements of control. There has to be tyranny. If you don't want to call it tyranny, call it rational stratification. The alternative is chaos and anarchy, savage and bestial. If this sounds fascistic, so be it.''

``He loves Disneyland,'' Barton added. ``That's been a real trial balloon for a lot of this — the incorporation of androids, a private enclave with a self-contained justice system, its own private police force. It's a good example of capitalism at its peak.''

Where was all the sin? Where was the ribaldry? Where was the dangerous action? From my two weeks of observation, Anton LaVey lived a life more circumscribed and reflective than a Benedictine monk's.

This observation put him on the defensive. ``I'm just as ribald as I used to be,'' he said, ``but I have to be more careful now. Security isn't what it used to be.''

But what were his indulgences? So far all I had noticed were his single glass of Dubonnet in the evening and an occasional Excedrin, which he took instead of coffee for ``a little lift.''

``I would like to indulge more,'' he admitted. ``If I were unencumbered,I would. My vice now is to wake up in the morning feeling halfway decent.''

``What about sex?''

``I've been around women all my life. It takes more than a lot of nude female bodies to move me now. I'd rather be reading an old book.

``I don't want to say I'm too old to cut the mustard,'' he continued elliptically. ``But if the battle's raging and shells are coming through the window, the stress level rises, and it does tend to dampen one's ardor. These guys that go around saying their pilot light's out — maybe they're concerned about their health — they're going to get pretty limp. The demoralization factor has to be considered rather . . .'' He groped in the air for a word.

``Inhibiting?'' Barton suggested.

``Inhibiting,'' LaVey agreed.

No liquor, no tobacco, no drugs, no sex, no black masses, no baby sacrifices -- what vice or indulgence was left for a Satanist to set himself apart from the common herd?

``What if they kill people?'' LaVey said.

``Do you kill people?''

He looked up and smiled. The waiter had just arrived with a healthy slice of mud pie.

``I don't want the legend to disappear,'' LaVey told me anxiously in our last conversation, after I confronted him with some of the inconsistencies in his story. ``There is a danger you will disenchant a lot of young people who use me as a role model.'' He was especially offended that I had tracked down his eighty-seven-year-old father in an effort to verify some of the details of LaVey's early life. ``I'd rather have my background shrouded in mystery. Eventually you want to be recognized for what you are now.''

It was a theme he had sounded many times before. ``I don't want to give anyone the satisfaction that they have me all figured out,'' he says in Barton's biography. ``If people only knew. I've always loved that ubiquitous Johnson-Smith Company ad copy, `Imagine the expression on their faces . . . !' That's a kind of leitmotif that has tempted me into most of the heinous, evil or disreputable things I've ever done. Just imagine people's reaction if they ever found out. But they won't. It began in mystery. I want it to end that way.''

Anton LaVey - "The Satanist Who Wants to Rule the World"
IX A.S. Argosy Magazine, June 1975; By Dick Russell.

The black house is set back 25 feet from the road. Broken glass weaving around it's courtyard is a 10-foot high cyclone fence whose long coils of barbed wire thrust menacingly toward the heavens. There is a small booth that hides a closed-circuit TV monitor with a wide-angle lens which patrols the fence. Inside the night's rhythms, waits a Doberman Pinscher. It's name is Loki, an ancient word that means "Devil."

Near midnight a man begins his journey through the old house. At the touch of concealed switches a fireplace and then a bookcase revolve to open a hidden passageway for him. The darkened ritual-chamber waits beyond.

Now he sits near the center of the chamber, one foot poised above a floor-switch that controls a rectangular black box near the far wall. He waits quietly, his other leg cradled underneath a slate rocking chair that once belonged to Rasputin, the mysterious figure whose powers dominated the life of the last Czar of Russia.

The man's body blends into the darkness because he is dressed in black from head to toe: black shirt, black levis, black socks, black shoes. All that is missing is the black robe that he dons for official Satanic ceremonies, and the black motorcycle cap that he wears outdoors to protect his shaven head.

Now, as his foot brushes the floor switch for the first time, his face suddenly glows luminous in a surge of light. It's a long, oval face. Below the head he shaved in 1966 in proclaiming Year One of the Satanic Age, his ears are set back and distinctly pointed. In the left ear is a small gold earring and a goatee and a mustache that stops growing at the middle of his upper lip surround his mouth like a clump of thistle.

The flash fades as rapidly as it came. Again enveloped by darkness, the man rises and moves his powerful six-foot frame toward the black box. He checks the two huge porcelain insulators that cling to each side, then the pair of protruding two-foot-long rods. He advances once more to the slate chair, with a strange graceless gait. It is a jerky, detached rhythm, as if despite his 45 years on earth, living here is still alien to him.

In the chair he begins to rock gently back and forth, back and forth, his foot hovering over the floor switch. From somewhere beyond the chamber come the faint chords of an organ. Then, without warning, the bolt of light flashes again. This time it doesn't subside.

The voltage in the electrostatic generator by the far wall begins to climb, shooting in violent spasms between the two rods, twenty thousand volts...thirty thousand...forty...

The chamber is ablaze with the cascading light. The crimson and black walls reveal themselves inside incredible gyrating spiraling streaks, as if any second the room will lift from it's roof, onward into the night sky.

The man lurches up on his feet. One foot Still on he switch, every ounce of his energy pulsing as he stands in the center of a vibrating capsule with one hand thrust toward the sky, alone and lost in the cauldron of his own creation, he chants the same word louder and louder: "Rise......RISE......RIIIIIISE!"

Anton Szandor LaVey has a master plan, and he doesn't think he will need force to achieve it. He expects it might come to him as naturally as the 25,000 followers who already carry his red card declaring themselves Citizens of The Infernal Empire. Before he dies, Anton LaVey believes that he and an elite force of Satanists will rule the world.

Since founding his Church of Satan in San Francisco on the annual witches' holiday of Walpurgisnacht on April 30, 1966, LaVey has become the central force behind the growth of Satanism in America. His "Satanic Bible" has sold over one million copies, and he claims as many as two and a half million students. For years rumors have swirled about his intimate relationships with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield-and the bizarre rituals in the black house.

Yet for some time LaVey has been all but inaccessible to the public. Moving between three California homes and retreats in the eastern U.S. and Europe, he has become an almost mythical recluse.

Now, Suddenly in 1975, he has come out in public-to the dusty Mexican provincial capital of Durango. For nearly a month he's been serving as technical adviser on the location of a new film, "The Devil's Rain," not far from the Sierra Madre pass where Pancho Villa traded his soul to Satan for unlimited power.

When I glimpse him for the first time he is standing on the porch of his hotel room on Durango's outskirts. His image looms up-broad-shouldered and brooding upon the horizon between the shadows of dusk and the dim light from behind his room's closed drapes.

Coming toward him along a gravel path, I pause a few doors away. Is he really so sinister, or is it all in my mind? Then, as if somehow he's already sensed my apprehension, LaVey turns. His gaze rivets upon me, and I have no choice but to go on.

As I introduce myself, his faces shows a curious, almost child-like smile. It dissolves my dark imaginings, and I find that I'm extending my hand.

"In Durango" he says, "I suppose I'm a captive audience."

He is wearing the familiar black garb, with a silver amulet of a goat's head inside an inverted pentagram hanging from his neck. His words come slowly, punching out phrases in choppy stops and starts. He agrees to meet me for dinner in half an hour.

In the restaurant. eyes rise and then rapidly fall to stare at tablecloths, and Mexican waiters whisper among themselves. LaVey strides briskly, jerkily, to a corner table, where almost immediately a waiter is upon him with a menu.

A bewitchingly feline girl named Terrazina has come to join us. She is 22, an employee of the local governor's office. Having met LaVey at a party a couple of weeks ago, she has sine become a Satanist: the "agent" for his newest "grotto." Tonight, after dinner, she wants to draw his portrait.

"Terrazina lives in what used to be an convent," LaVey is saying. "it's a wonderful place, lots of legends about the ghosts of headless nuns making lonely walks by night. All of the rooms were nuns' cells or old planked floor classrooms, and there's an old upright piano in one of them. I sat looking out on the courtyard and played for hours."

"In California, I have my organ in my inner sanctum. It's set up like a bar and one of my other prize possessions is there, a 1947 Rockola jukebox with the little spinning globe that makes flickering lights on the ceiling. And I also have... my people."

LaVey pauses drastically. His dark eyes glaze and half-innocent, half-barbaric smile crosses his lips once more.

"Yes, I make people," he continues. Out of polyurethane and fiberglass. they're partially automated. I move them with solenoids. I suppose most of them are actually disgusting human beings. Drunk floozies, sailors trying to pick up women, and one of them even passed out under the bar!"

He chuckles loudly, but not a single head in the restaurant turns to witness it.

"But I created them. So they become not reprehensible, but people you would meet at any neighborhood bar. Friends that you sit and have a drink with. Sometimes I have one of them get behind the drums and I sit at the organ. We play together for a few hours, real ricky-tick style, like in the '50's. And I've created another room, the perfect replica of a cheap hotel, even the smells. Cheap booze and urine and stale smoke permeating the wallpaper, the neon sign..."

LaVey pauses again and gazes wistfully into space. A chill passes rapidly down my spine. "I collect things," he shrugs. "I've always collected things.

"For example," he goes on, beginning to chuckle again, "there's a guy at MGM who calls me from time to time. A while ago they'd had a tremendous auction-the entire prop and wardrobe department-and afterward he called and said, 'Give me ten dollars and you can haul off whatever's left.' And there, inside the auction room, stood this huge box bursting at the seems with the underwear of MGM's most famous stars- from Greer Garson to Liz Taylor - with the labels still on them! What a haul, what a fetishist's field day! It must have weighed 150 pounds, but somehow I carried it upstairs and a full block uphill to my car. Talk about a madman! I keep this collection in plastic bags inside a footlocker!"

Uncontrollably, I begin to laugh. Soon Terrazina is laughing, and LaVey is laughing, and it seems the whole restaurant-the whole world-must be laughing.

There are tears in my eyes and when I glance up at him. He is bringing a glass of wine to his lips, grinning like a large whiskered cat. The grin brings me back to reality. In my mind I try to construct my next question. What of the group ceremonies he is said to conduct behind his chamber doors? The legendary images of nude females with long blonde hair flowing down their backs, reclining on a coffin alter while LaVey, in his black robe, shakes phallic symbols at his assembled flock...

As if reading my thoughts, LaVey says: "I don't conduct large ceremonies anymore. I've written two books that lay the groundwork for them, and my own presence is no longer necessary. But we do have grottoes in every major city, and my agents assist those members who wish more guidance. Most of my people prefer to remain anonymous."

A deep silence begins to hum at my ears. For an instant the restaurant seems to no longer exist, and I don't know where we are, yet a strange calm possesses me.

But afterwards, as we walk to LaVey's room in pitch darkness, the gravel path feels like teeth gnashing at my feet.

The quiet Terrazina takes a seat on his bed and brings out her sketchpad. LaVey opens a large suitcase stuffed with bric-a-brac, reaching for a fifth of Early Times bourbon and half-a-dozen cassette tapes. Then, moving into his closet area, he returns wearing a custom-made white hat of the French Foreign Legion. From a tape recorder the soft refrains of "Deep Night" become his background. Nodding to the music, he lifts the bottle to his lips, and sits down on a chair directly across from me.

Carefully I study his face. A blend of Gypsies and Mongolians and Huns, as timeless and inscrutable as the merger of so many strains in his blood. He closes his eyes, losing himself in the music of Ramon Navarro, Hank Williams, The Beatles and Puccini.

"When the outside world speaks of you," I say finally, "people seem to believe that you have certain powers. A way that you can exert influence over others and...can you...have actually ever put a curse on someone?"

For a long moment LaVey doesn't reply, bobbing and waving to the music. Then: "Yes, there are certain tricks that can be learned. It is possible to curse a person by working up enough adrenal energy so that you create a change in the atmosphere and it breaks through as a sort of gamma radiation. Like a force field."

His eyes open wide. And there is the disquieting feeling that someone of something is pulling his phrases along on strings.

"I hate to have to be cruel," he goes on, his voice rising. "I resent it when people place me in that position, nothing angers me more than that, and when I retaliate it's not because I want to. I've just been pressed too far, that's all. Like on the movies set the other day."

"The movie set?" I ask, and there is a no disguising the quake in my voice.

"You may simply say that a situation arose where I felt I was being minimized. I was able to crystallize and direct the energy of some people who felt the way I did. The results were rapid. Extremely rapid. I found I was soon blamed for all kinds of things. They were glad to get rid of me. And I was delighted."

Now something else flashes in my memory. Something about LaVey and another Hollywood curse. The year that Jayne Mansfield died in that accident...

As to the question, a new sensation sweeps over LaVey's face. A profound sadness even a glimmer of fear. Then, instantly, these give way to black scowl and a look of hatred so intense that a prickly energy digs claws up my arm and advances toward my neck. I stir uneasily at the edge of the bed.

"Yes, there was Sam Broady," LaVey is saying. "He worked overtime at being detestable, kept her doped and liquored up and had guys fooling around with her in the bedroom while he took pictures. If she ever left him, he promised to ruin her career and see that she lost custody of her kids. He was despicable, utterly despicable!"

Jayne Mansfield had been one of the charter members of LaVey's church. He had been her confidante, perhaps her lover, and Sam Brody had done everything he could to curtail the relationship.

"Once he drove out to North Beach and told about 20 tough young blacks that Jayne Mansfield was inviting them to a party. He brought them all to my house, and they broke through the front door. I'd really had it with Brody. I went into the backyard and pushedd the first bolt on the quarters where I kept Togare, my 500-pound Ethiopian lion. I gave them five minutes before I'd turn him loose."

"The police came just in time. They cleared my place. I was willing to consider the matter at an end. Then Brody telephoned, calling me a crook, a charlatan, a con man. I was pulled too far. I told him that I had more power than he could possibly imagine. I told him that he would be dead within a year. he slammed the phone down."

Now LaVey rises slowly to his feet, his face contorted with anger and grief. The last opera of Puccini writhes its wild strains through the hotel room, and somewhere clocks tick on toward midnight.

"All I could do was warn her. I couldn't be with her 24 hours a day! The tragedy was that she knew. She knew being with him was antagonistic to her own well-being!"

In the early hours of June 29th, 1967, precisely six months after LaVey had worked his curse, Jayne and Body were driving on a Louisiana highway when their car slammed into the rear of a spraying mosquito truck.

"I was in my den, clipping a picture out of the newspaper of myself placing flowers on the grave of Marilyn Monroe. And when I turned the page over, I saw there had been a picture of Jayne on the other side and I... I 'd cut straight across her neckline. Fifteen minutes later a friend called with the news. Brody had been killed instantly and she'd been almost decapitated."

From the cassette player a gong strikes three times. Barbaric powerful harmonies blend with a priest's maniacal laughter in the background. Suddenly, catapulting between myself and the standing LaVey, I am sure I see a bolt of lightning, a burst of yellow light summoned from nowhere, and my senses careen before it as I follow it's vanishing path down a long endless chasm.

Abruptly, the music stops. Just as abruptly, so does the shaking inside me.

"Did you see that?" I manage. LaVey nods, and goes on keeping time to the music that is no longer there.

Terrazina has finished her drawing. So intent has she been on capturing LaVey's image that she'd become almost invisible. Now she extends her sketchpad to him, and he gathers it gently in his hands.

"Oh, I like this one!" he exclaims. "A combination of Mephistopheles and Fagin!"

The hour is late, I say to myself. Very late. Willing myself to my feet, I leave the two of them laughing together over the countenance of Anton LaVey.

There is no rational explanation for the events of the night. They toss and turn in my mind, defying logic. The only thing I can think to do is rise early, drive out to the set of "The Devil's Rain," talk to the cast, and later try to catch up with the LaVey in Mexico City.

Now, as my car approaches a backdrop of old wooden building along a dusty winding path, dark clouds suddenly cover the sky and raindrops begin to pelt the windshield. The wrath of heaven seems to be unleashing it upon Durango.

The storm lasts about a minute, then subsides, and I begin to ask around about LaVey. It is like peeling away layers of masks only to find more disguises.

"A bent Billy Graham"... "Reverend Ike with an inverted collar"..."Well, he didn't snort brimstone, if that's what you mean"..."Just say that his brand of Satanism began to clash with the director"..."A stimulating conversationalist"..."A man of many talents"..."A true connoisseur of the arts..."

No opinion the same, and no one willing to be pinned down about the events that led to LaVey's early dismissal. But something is definitely seething below the surface. Ida Lupino, who plays the devil's victim in the film, is wearing a crucifix, not only on the set, but everywhere she goes in Durango. Ernest Borgnine, cast as the devil, admits he has accepted an honorary priesthood extended by LaVey. Among the local Mexican villagers, who before had always welcomed the arrival of gringo filmmakers, even more portentous feelings had arisen.

"I took a hunting trip last weekend with a couple of them," says actor William Shatner, onetime "Star Trek" hero. "Things went wrong that apparently had never happened before. People cut their hands, the oars of our canoe broke, the pattern of the birds was impossible to follow. Finally, the canoe tipped over and these people were sure it was the presence of the devil in Durango."

I pore over all my notes. Had it always been that way? Had he always been so many guises to so many different people?

Years ago, he first "cased the mark" of human nature in circuses and carnivals. At 17 he had joined Clyde Beatty's circus as a wild animal trainer. He merged himself totally with the existence of the big cats. Sharing their hamburger on the ground, imitating their growling sounds, crawling through the sawdust after putting them through their paces, often sleeping in the huge roaring cage below the bigtop. Sometimes a lion had turned on him, thrown him to the ground and planted itself above his helpless body, and Clyde Beatty had marveled at LaVey's miraculous escapes. This was how he mastered willpower, LaVey had said.

He had gone on to play the calliope, arranging music for the high-wire Wallendas and Human Cannonball, and sending eerie organ chords through the tents of the swamis. He moved on, playing the organ in a burlesque house in Los Angeles, and had a brief affair with a stripper named Marilyn Monroe. When he joined the San Francisco police department as a criminologist, he specialized in "nut cases"- oddballs who believed in demons and haunted houses-and by the mid-1950's, this son of a traveling liquor salesman could be glimpsed on foggy nights walking along the bay in a dark overcoat with a leopard at this side. Soon he became the city's official convention organist, and he bought the old 13-room house of the most famous madam of the Barbary Coast heyday. he painted it black, and began to conduct a "Magic Circle" at midnight each Friday. His mysterious reputation began to grow.

Aging practitioners of the same Black Arts that he'd studied at 12 began coming to him with their legacy of secrets. People looking to advance careers or private pleasures took strength from his private consultations, and paid him with cars or even homes. At least, the year before his portrayal of the devil in "Rosemary's Baby," he founded his church as a blasphemy of Christianity that invited man to accept and even revel in his selfish, carnal nature. Indulge to the fullest, he proclaimed, and look forward to nothing but your material existence.

His first wife had left him, but their daughter and a second wife remained his staunch supporters. And so his followers had begun to gather. Some, like Charles Manson, came to one ceremony and never returned. Others, like Jayne Mansfield, did not survive. Kim Novak, Sammy Davis Jr., and a number of politicians and business men quietly affiliated. It was a select membership. Long before he acquired the converted convent in Italy, the mansion in Bavaria, the three ocean going salvage ships at his disposal in Belfast, and a devoted Sicilian driver who chauffeured him in his black Buick and guarded his 1937 Cord, LaVey had let it be known that he was building "an elite of the future."

As I drive away from the set of "The Devil's Rain," a Biblical image of a grinning Lucifer enters my mind and won't go away.

Forty-five minutes from Mexico City there is a little Indian town called Tepotzlan. It lies in a valley below the fabled volcanic mountain Popocatepetl, and is said to be the magical center of all Mexico. Witches covens flourish along it's narrow rutted streets, and foreign settlers stay primarily on it's outskirts.

It is afternoon when LaVey arrives at the spacious weekend home of a short, stocky, bald-headed writer who made his acquaintance in Durango. From his backyard you may watch the nearby cliffs stab their sires into the heavens and glimpse the opening to a cave where the rebel leader Zapata once hid.

"On certain nights," Says our host, "always at the same hour, a black riderless horse will pass on the street outside. And the candelabra in the house will begin to sway. I don't know any explanation for it."

Hearing this, LaVey begins to pass slowly through all the rooms, studying the white walls and steel framed windows, the ancient artifacts and placement of furniture. Then he returns and stands meditatively beside a swimming pool.

"Yes, there is a trapezoidal shape to this house," he explains. "Walls that are slightly out of square can exert a certain influence on a room, a disturbing influence..."

The writer's face turns ashen. "We built this house ourselves," he says nervously "And there wasn't one square wall in it!"

LaVey reassures him with a smile. "To me, that's wonderful," he says. "But you know, it's very strange," the writer continues. "Because sometimes I feel as if this house owns us."

LaVey nods. "The Mayans and Aztecs and the Germans knew damn well what they were doing in their architecture. There are certain cuts of stones, bunkers in war, offshore oil rigs and even a variety of jinxed cars with all one thing in common: Angles that break tranquility.

"The is the kind of house Marilyn Monroe would have had," LaVey says, "The house where she died was the same style."

He sits down beside the pool, positioning himself to view both the house and the mountains.

"My relationship with her was so short physically," he says abstractly, as if talking to the house. "But I was young, and a lot could be crammed into a few weeks. We were both floundering when we met, it may have been the lowest point of my life. It was a much more romantic era then. The style was to make love in the back seat of a car, in a secluded place. We used to go up by that Frank Lloyd Wright building on the promontory in the Los Feliz hills. His Mayan house. Wright had been putting the finishing touches on it when his houseboy went berserk at Taliesen and killed seven people. It was said that the house was cursed. He built it for a shoe magnate, and the man lost everything in the Depression. The next owner's wife jumped off the parapet. Marilyn loved strange things. We would stay there for hours.

"I left her for someone else. All through the fifties, I couldn't bear to talk about her, or see any of her films. She sent me that famous 'Golden Dreams' calendar, inscribed. I kept it locked up."

After Marilyn Monroe died, he continues, a wealthy doctor and his family had moved into her mansion. The doctor refused to change a room of it. Even the same linens remained on her bed. A year to the day after her death, the doctor's mother died there. One evening the doctor left and never returned.

"I never went up to the house until 1973. It was the night of the 11th anniversary of her death. I was drawn there, to conduct an experiment, I didn't have any choice, and she..."

LaVey does not finish the sentence. The writer and I stare at him as he hovers by the swimming pool, his glassy reflection looming long over the water and his shadow cast beyond the protective wooden wall and toward the nearby foothills.

"I'm sorry," says LaVey. "I really can't say anymore. There are some things I can't speak about. Even telling you this much, I can't explain why, just something about the ethers of this valley, this house..."

"That's one reason why I wanted you to come, Anton," says the writer. "I wanted to see if you would feel it."

"Oh, yes," says LaVey quickly. "There is definitely a vibration here." He glances over at him. "Would anyone like to take a walk?"

"The two of you go ahead," the writer says, "I've some things to finish up here."

A moon is already coming into view as we begin to trace a path leading out of Tepotzlan, in the direction of Zapata's cave.

"Do you believe that you will leave your mark on history?" The question leaps from me so quickly that it takes LaVey by surprise.

He contemplates a moment, then replies: "I'd be maudlin to say I didn't. I honestly feel that a hundred years from now, when most of these Watergate figures are long forgotten, people will know who Anton LaVey was. Selfish as it might appear on the surface, I also sincerely believe I'm doing something that will elevate man's self-awareness. Even if it's a tiny, tiny little step."

"But what about the future?" I ask him. "What do you foresee?"

LaVey close his eyes, but continues walking blind down the shadowed path. " 'The ghost kings are marching, the midnight knows their tread. From the distant stealthy planets of the dim unstable dead, there are whisperings on the night winds and the shuddering stars have fled... The Satanists are marching, where the vague moon vapor creeps, while the night wind to their coming like a thunder's herald sweeps. They are clad in ancient grandeur, while the world unheeding sleeps.' "

The poem comes in a torrent, until the end. Then his words tumble slowly, softly into the wind, and his eyes open once more.

"Think of a cat on the limb of a tree in the jungle," he muses, "Waiting for something to pass underneath at just the right time. He can leap any time he wants, but if he's not hungry he just lies there and lets antelope, deer and other small game go by. It's just the knowledge that he can spring, that he has that power vested in him...

"Someday then," I say, "you envision an elite group, perhaps your own, taking control of the world?"

"The truth about Satanism is far more frightening than anything people might expect to see. Yes, eventually it has to be, if humanity is to survive. But it will be far more sophisticated and subtle than someone like Orwell ever dreamed. It's happening already. Like stage magic, you see? The conjurer says: 'You'll observe this perfectly empty box in my hand.' But he's he's really doing the trick with the other."

In that moment the many masks of Anton LaVey seem to melt before my eyes. Mad scientist, carnival barker, intellectual broker: All of these melt, then form again, one sinking into the quicksand of the next. And when he turns to face me, it is the most terrifying Prince in my life, yet I'm unable to tremble for I am gazing only at sleight-of-hand, at a face with a definable shape, a face both as charming and as monstrous as any I could possible imagine. The face of the anti-Christ.

SECONDS Magazine #46, XXVIII A.S., 1994 c.e.

"Only a fool is going to believe in absolute good or absolute evil"

In the Sixties, Anton LaVey was everywhere: on television, in the movies, and on the newsstand, glowering down from the covers of major magazines. He was more than a household name; he was everyone's favorite brand name for evil. But as his fame grew, so did his misanthropy. As his ideas became increasingly high profile, he himself grew increasingly less so, withdrawing into the self-imposed exile of the recluse. For nearly a decade he maintained an icy silence, turning down large sums of money for television appearances and turning down all interviews. Rumors that he was dead circulated. Though his Satanic Bible continued to outsell the Christian Bible on college campuses, he had, by all appearances, vanished from the face of the Earth.

Then, in the Eighties, a funny thing happened. LaVey, touched by the obvious sincerity and enthusiasm of a young admirer named Eugene Robinson, broke his silence to grant an interview for Robinson's underground paper, The Birth of Tragedy. That interview was literally like the shout heard 'round the world. Not only was it a hard- hitting, funny, blasphemous and intelligent, it served notice that LaVey was still very much alive and kicking and was still a force to be reckoned with. Moreover, the article served as a call to arms of sorts. People who had grown up on LaVey's material began to come out of the woodwork, anxious to pay homage to the man and acknowledge their gratitude for his early influence. An entire generation of people who had established successful careers as artists, musicians, publishers, filmmakers, et cetera began to rally around LaVey and his Church of Satan.

Today there is a wealth of information dealing with LaVey, his life and his philosophy. One can easily obtain his biography, his books, newsletters, and any number of magazines devoted to his Satanic Creed. There is so much information about Anton LaVey (and as much, if not more, disinformation!) that one might as well ask the question whether or not there is still more that we don't know about him. The answer to that question is an emphatic "yes." There is probably far more about Anton LaVey that is not known, perhaps never will be known, than all the words about him on the printed page betray. Only now are the ideas he espoused some thirty years ago starting to be embraced by a new generation - ideas once thought extreme, harsh, unthinkable. And despite their growing acceptance by certain sectors of the public, these ideas still remain far too bitter a pill for most of today's self-proclaimed purveyors of extremism.

Ironically but appropriately, LaVey remains an outsider even in an era where outsider culture has been widely embraced and marketed to a society where "rebellion" has become the status quo. In an age where faggot junkie William Burroughs did Nike commercials and Henry Rollins endorses laptop computers, it's somehow reassuring that Anton LaVey is still a pariah after all these years.

To the religious Right, LaVey is still a very dangerous figure - a libertine Antichrist, whose philosophy of sex, violence, and power will surely usher in The End Of The World. To the liberal Left, LaVey represents an equal but opposite threat: for them he's the modern face of Fascism, a man whose anti- democratic principles will set the stage for the reemergence of totalitarianism and erase the triumphs of egalitarianism. Though both scenarios are undoubtedly the result of fear and loathing carried to their logical extreme, both nonetheless bear a kernel of truth. LaVey is both tyrant and libertarian at one and the same time; a tireless champion of humanity's Promethean nature who nevertheless acknowledges our more fundamental status as a beast. To most people, such a view would seem a contradiction. Some would consider it a paradox. To Anton LaVey, it's simply Satanism.

Seconds: Is Satanism a power philosophy or a religion?

LaVey: Both. It's unlike any other religion that's ever existed. And it's more than just a power philosophy because, even though there's a charismatic leader in most of the power philosophies, there still isn't the outspoken element of the unknown, of magic or sorcery. Whereas I think this is a blend of the two and that's what makes it work.

Seconds: Most religions lack a primary understanding of power and its application to one's life, most power philosophies lack that extra element that satisfies the soul.

LaVey: Exactly. This possesses the structure of the power philosophy and the religious element and that's why it works out. Especially because the separation of Church and State has always encouraged that people's conscience be their guide, and their conscience is usually going to be the guy in the sky or Jesus or something like that. And these supernatural forces are what decide whether their behavior is going to be accepted or frowned upon. Whereas the secular element of control has been the police, armies, various militia...and the two don't really meet except in wartime when you have chaplains in uniforms.

It's like that song in World War Two, "Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition" - the image of a chaplain with a gun is a very hypocritical one, but of course we're talking about people who've been practicing hypocrisy for two thousand years. "Onward Christian soldiers, swords against the foe" - The Prince of Peace could not possibly condone such an idea. It used to be a man of substance could be a clergyman or a military man, but there was never a chance to be both. And in its broadest sense Satanism is a philosophy that embraces both. A person can be very religious and not have pangs of conscience when it comes to exercising feelings of hate and destructiveness in a very productive manner.

Seconds: Satanism seems to be the fastest-growing religion on Earth. What is the reason for the frenzied interest?

LaVey: Cults and sects - and we aren't a cult or sect - depend on a belief system that may not be completely reasonable or logical.

Seconds: The more unreasonable or illogical, the more successful they are.

LaVey: [laughs] That's right! And the feedback we get is unanimous: the reason that Satanism will prevail is that for every one person who joins a cult or sect there are ninety-nine other people who wouldn't ever join. And they're the people who, after two thousand years of religious dogma, are going to sit up and take notice when something really makes sense. And from the feedback we get, that's the answer. You don't need to have read all the great philosophers to be able to recognize it when something comes along that finally makes sense, and Satanism just makes sense.

Seconds: Some members of your organization say they believe in Satan as an anthropomorphic deity.

LaVey: The people who believe in an anthropomorphic Satan are possible people that would be "ideal", or born, Satanists. But their need for imagery is so strong they just can't shake it off. For example, people raised in a very strict Catholic upbringing, where they've had plaster saints and paintings of the Last Supper and that sort of thing - they're so oriented toward imagery that it's almost impossible to divorce themselves from having an icon that's a very visual representation of their beliefs.

The entire concept of Satanism is not dependent on image, although we can and do use it. We use it in a very symbolic sense, where Satan becomes more than just a super-villain with nothing much to say. We've taken that symbol, and even if it's only symbolic, we've incorporated and attributed some really grand qualities into it - Promethean qualities. And we've brought out and emphasized the legacy of that which would be Satanic for the first time! It's never been codified before. Now here's a guy who's been pictured maybe on a can of deviled ham or a beer bottle of something like that, and it's the Devil. But he's more than that, and that's what we want to emphasize. Because there hasn't been enough emphasis on the writings of Milton or Mark Twain. Or the activities and lives of Da Vinci, Galileo, Paganini, Franz Liszt, Camille Saint-Saens - many of these people who've been so productive have been very Satanic people. But there's been no stress put on that, the reason being that there's never been any codification or guidelines for what constitutes a Satanic personality. Yet there's always been a depiction of the devil that the Church uses to represent the bad guy. The enemy. That's because man needs evil - and good. He needs to be against something.

The scapegoat has always been the Devil, except in times of war when there's a universal enemy. And even today, with the massive spread of Satanism, Satanists are the only minority, the only religious group, the only special interest group that can be maligned and slandered with-

Seconds: - with impunity.

LaVey: With impunity and without compunction! There's no other group you could do that to. No ethnic group. No religious group. No special interest group - not any other group. But they can with the Devil, with Satanists. Well, we're here to smash that. We're here to create a forum and give a valuable voice to all those people who are natural- born outsiders. And if using the image of the Devil helps do that, so much the better. And if this guy with horns and cloven hoofs scared the people who don't like him, so much the better. They can have the old man with the white robes and the long white beard and we'll keep the guy with the horns. Compare these two archetypes and you'll see the difference between the two very distinct approaches to life.

Seconds: Those archetypes conjure up diametrically opposed world views; if you showed them to someone who had no conception of their meaning, they would intuitively know that the Devil represented action and vitality because his aesthetic is much more powerful. He has more fun, has more sex, knows how to live -

LaVey: Yes. There's definitely a Satanic aesthetic. There are objects, there are everyday implements, there are artifacts, architectures, automobile designs, things like firearms, that look Satanic. You wouldn't say something looks very Christian: "That's a very Christian-looking car." Or that something like a Luger or .45 looks very Christian. But you might say it's a very Satanic-looking thing because of its configuration.

Seconds: Some things look innately evil.

LaVey: That's right. They have that appeal.

Seconds: Some in your organization say there's no such thing as evil, while others claim to worship evil. What's your slant?

LaVey: My slant is that I'm afraid I just have to parrot Nietzsche and go beyond good and evil. I mean, only a fool is going to believe in absolute good or absolute evil. There are intrinsically evil things - I don't even like to call them "evil." There are intrinsically rotten things people can do that violate the Darwinian law of survival, where they're just crying out to be destroyed; but that doesn't mean it's good and evil. To do something harmful or destructive or disruptive to others purely on the grounds that it's evil might qualify.

Historically, great wars have been fought on the grounds of subduing an evil adversary and even that is specious. There's never been a side that has said, "We're the bad guys and they're the good guys." Everyone has always thought their side was the right side, the good guys. And I'm sure that from Attila the Hun to the American Revolutionaries to the Nazis to the Stalinists, they all thought that they were trying to build a better world. So nobody has ever gone and said we need good and we need evil and we're the evil ones. So what we're doing is saying what Nietzsche said and that is: "There is nothing good. There is nothing evil. One man's meat is another man's poison." Good things are bad things to some people and vice versa. It's as simple as that.

Now as far as transgressing the codes that human communities agree upon to govern conduct - however transitory they may be - some people do things that even in the animal kingdom would be grounds for their own destruction or for being beaten out of the pack. Because you need a strong code, a moral code, of loyalty. I would say that within a given society, loyalty is probably the most important thing regardless of whether that society is considered good or evil. Loyalty to that society is far more important, Satanically, than whether that society is considered good or evil.

Seconds: The Church of Satan has taken flak recently for making Marilyn Manson a priest. He's taken a lot of flak for being affiliated with you. Yet you seem very supportive of one another.

LaVey: Because he's performing in a manner like a pied piper, through outrage. His entire presentation is beneficial, and certainly not as harmful as some of the saccharine sugar-coated pop scene as being nice. And because of the climate of the times, he's doing the right thing. He's doing what has to be done. He's a very intelligent, well- spoken, sensitive, and certainly dramatic individual. He's priesthood material. Our criteria for clergy or priest is based upon what influence a person has on the outside world. And you'd have to be under a rock not to understand that he has had an influence on the outside world.

Seconds: Jayne Mansfield and Sammy Davis Jr. were members, and no one considered that the least bit outrageous.

LaVey: That's right. We have people who are very high-profile on today's scene in terms of music, art, publishing and so on who are doing exactly what I would do if I could split myself up into a lot of different people and go out there and do it all myself. And they are in today's marketplace, using today's idioms and today's tools and blending them with something that may be a little more serious. And that's what Marilyn Manson has done so eloquently - something a lot of these performers can't do: blend outrageousness and blasphemy with articulation. Few people can do this. King Diamond does it. Thomas Thorn of The Electric Hellfire Club does it. But even the ones who can't do it are serving a purpose. They're like lesser elementals; their mere presence serves to -

Seconds: Stir the pot?

LaVey: Stir the pot! What Marilyn Manson is doing today on a large scale is not all that different than what I was doing in 1966, '67, '68, or '69 - drawing people into a Satanic ritual. He's just making use of another means. And people who'd say that Rock is an inappropriate means have misinterpreted me.

Seconds: You pronounced Christianity a spent force, which was discounted as empty rhetoric; in the Sixties it seemed to be the most powerful force on the planet.

LaVey: I've always felt that man created God in his own image, not the other way around. When I see accidents on the highway where someone's drunk or stoned out of their mind and plows into a car full of people, they're always the ones who seem to survive where the innocent victims are the ones who get killed. And when I see a baby die from crib death or a child die from some horrible disease, it saddens me. Then to think that people imagine that some god is protecting them - I get angry. He always seems to protect the assholes. I don't want any part of such a god. If I could shoot my gun into the air and somehow blow this god away, I would do it. But you see, it's an invention, a construct of assholes who needed a god like that.

Seconds: Isn't it a superstition that's kept them in line, through fear of punishment?

LaVey: Let's put it this way: you do need a god created in man's own image, as it has always been, to keep those people in line. That will make them god-fearing - and again the stress is on fear and punishment - but he's just sort of dismissing them with a wave of his hand, knowing they'll keep. But the one he really smiles on, the one that concerns me, is the asshole. He doesn't really smile on the ones who petition him or get down on their knees wearing out their nylons. They aren't his problem.

Seconds: The fact that you've been so widely ripped off is a testament to the power of your ideas, yet people still have a problem with the "s- word." If the s-word had not been involved, would the ideas have become even more widespread?

LaVey: If the s-word hadn't been attached, the ideas would have never seen print, so they wouldn't have been around to be ripped off. Nobody would have given a shit whether I had something to say or not. But because of the s-word - it's like hitting the mule with the two- by-four; you've got to get its attention first. And the Devil is always good copy - it represents the dark side of man's nature, the rebellious side, the side that's always been repressed and the side that is not really evil, just unpopular, unfashionable.

Seconds: Through promoting the primacy of the individual, have you helped give certain conceits to classes of people who never before had them?

LaVey: Janitors who had always been content cleaning toilets were suddenly malcontents demanding more rights, more respect. Hobos who had always liked being hobos suddenly felt society owed them something more. Everyone wants to be a big shot, even if they can't deliver the goods.

I do think there's been a trend or movement towards that. Of course these people haven't digested the whole equation. They perk up when they hear the part about each man being his own god, but simply ignore the aspects that deal with personal responsibility - which of course is the key element. I've probably talked about this more than anyone else; I griped and complained about how everyone's a big shot. But I figure "Well, let them be big shots," but at least let the people who can see through all this say "No!" They can strut foppishly around and they can pretend they're big shots, but there should be enough people around who will say "no" to them; that's being Satanic.

Seconds: Was the world a better place when you were young?

LaVey: In some ways it was, yeah. Because of exactly what you just asked me. It wasn't so full of big shots. If somebody wanted to elevate themselves from a blue collar job, working in a mill or a coal mine or something like that, there was an opportunity for them to set themselves above that. You had what they called the dignity of labor and so they could take pride in being an employee of an automobile plant or something like that. Which was great in a way, because the few who could strike out on their own really did make something of themselves. By today's standards, you look back on that and you see what these people turned out to be and how productive they were and you realize that maybe they were just a little shrewder and - not necessarily - brighter than the guy who was working at the drill press. Maybe he was just as bright, but maybe they had a drive to go out and do something on their own, which is so important to a Satanist. They had individuality and wanted to remove themselves from the herd.

Seconds: Or they're self-starters. A lot of people who are smart or talented don't act upon it.

LaVey: That's right. People who were big shots back then were self- starters, usually. Now there are fewer self-starters because it's been made too easy to take the path of least resistance.

Seconds: The more you take the path of least resistance the more programs there are for you. If you're an alcoholic there's a program. If you're poor...what is it you used to say, "The rich get richer, and the poor get richer"? If you have nothing there's always a program to give you whatever you lack.

LaVey: That's right. And they get paid for having kids. There's a lot to be said, though, for the welfare system. On the surface I might be assumed to be against it, but it's like finding a worm in an apple - it's better than finding half a worm. The welfare program is very supportive of the weakest, least productive members of society. And yet, what about all those stupid people who are going to and from jobs? They're self-righteous, they've got their important positions, their titles and things. Please spare me! On any floor of offices there are usually two or three people who do all the work. And the rest are on occupational welfare. They show up, put in their time, collect their check and go spend their money at the company store. Their real job is to keep the money in circulation. They shouldn't have their self- righteous attitude because when all is said and done most of them are on welfare, just another sort. Who's to say that the bum collecting welfare isn't smarter maybe that the white collar worker who shows up to work every day then brags about how important he is, how he's going places? In my experience, the people who talk the loudest about how hard they work are usually the ones who work the least.

Seconds: People try to dismiss you by calling you a huckster.

LaVey: I've been accused of being a charlatan, an exploiter, the worst sort of phony-baloney huckster - I can only answer to that that I am no more, and no less, than what my position dictates. I heard a similar answer to a similar type of question in an interview with Charlie Manson. And he said "I'll be whatever you want me to be." Well, I'll take it a step further and say "Okay, I'll be whatever it takes, whatever I need to be to fulfill those requirements necessary to present what I have to present."

Seconds: What brings you joy?

LaVey: Strength...through joy! [laughs] No, I think what gives joy, and I'm going to sound like a real devil now...Rimsky-Korsakov wrote a rather obscure musical composition called Antar. It's a symphonic suite in four movements, each representing a different delight, and the one I like most is called "The Delights Of Vengeance." That's ironic because Tod Brownin in Freaks chose to use that as a leitmotif. The film opens with the barker and in the background you hear "The Delights Of Vengeance." It sort of sets the stage for what happens in the end. I think that's the most elusive of joys, the one you sit and wait for and you never hear about. And you wish - you wish- you could sit back and celebrate and savor the moment - like the very moment that the curse works. But it is probably the most elusive joy. My son gives me joy. Untold joy. Because of my age now and because I can devote the time and give him the input, I really appreciate him. Of course I like to think of him as the once and future king. And my animals...that's a form of joy I get that goes beyond the bounds of human relationships. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche said pretty much the same thing - that they Overman, or Superman, learns from the children and the animals. That's where the great lessons are to be learned. When in doubt, don't ask another person; go to the zoo. Or a circus. Or ask your cat.

Seconds: What really pisses you off?

LaVey: [long pause] What pisses me off is injustice. I guess as a kid I listened to The Lone Ranger too much on the radio. Or The Green Hornet, or The Shadow, or The Whistler. What pisses me off is what pissed them off - Injustice! I want to get out there and do something about it. To me, joy is somebody getting their comeuppance. I don't think there have been enough films, enough plays, enough books written where this sort of thing happens. I want to see some real Satanic literature written, some real Satanic screenplays, where it takes Death Wish to its highest power. Where there is no redemption at the end.

Seconds: I like to ask people, if you could travel in time and have sex with any famous woman at her prime, who would it be? But maybe it's pointless to ask this of a man who's been involved with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield -

LaVey: I'll admit I have a penchant for flashy blondes that are rather chubby and predisposed to cellulite. But there's a blonde type that has dark hair or black hair and does the hula hula dance or the belly dance. But she's still that type that is the opposite of myself! That is, cherubic and innocent - but still very naughty with a sort of lwed innocence. So I admit that my choice in women that I enjoy the most, up to and including Blanche, are basically cast in that mold. There are very few depictions of that type of woman these days, but I should give a plug where it's due and say that the artist who today seems most dedicated to rendering that ideal is Coop. I like the kind of women artists like Roy Crane and Matt Baker drew, but right now I think that Coop is the greatest exponent of that sort of thing.

Seconds: You've championed forgotten music for as long as I can remember. Now a lot of this stuff is experiencing a huge resurgence in popularity. Are you happy that more people can enjoy this music, or are you sad because something which was once your private obsession has become the flavor of the month?

LaVey: There are mixed emotions. I feel that it would be wonderful if everyone were exposed to this kind of music, but on the other hand, I feel it's too good for them. And it might make them think or feel something. I know that you've been singing the praises of Martin Denny for the last twenty-five years - how do you feel? To be into something so alien to mainstream contemporary music that no one takes any notice of, then suddenly it's sold to people and they act like they've discovered something brand new. I'm waiting to see if this music really has come back, or if it's going to be diluted and destroyed by modern practitioners who have no understanding of it. If it has come back, then it's a very dangerous phenomenon because, as I said, it will make people really feel something for a change. They'll become addicted to it like a maniac. Or like glazed donuts or apple pie with cinnamon sauce.

Seconds: You worked in the carnival, then as a crime scene photographer, then as a musician; what would you have pursued if you hadn't founded The Church of Satan?

LaVey: I wish I had eight or ten lifetimes to live. I can think of a lot of things I'd like to do if I had another thirty of forty years. This life flies as it says in the Rubayiat of Omar Khayyam. One thing is certain, this life flies. When I think about it, I would have liked to pursue painting. When I was painting, I thought I could very easily been satisfied with that life. To sit down and be absolved by something like a painting or drawing for endless hours, I know what that's like and that's why I'm so appreciative of great artists. I've loved animals so much I could have been satisfied working with animals, especially big cats. I have an affinity with big cats. Criminology always interested me. Working with law enforcement and dealing with the mysteries of life and death on a daily, gut level. Solve a few crimes, maybe. Or commit a few crimes, even. I would have liked the chance to pursue an occupation in that field.

And music has always been my first love. I started playing when I was five years old and I guess I wouldn't be able to exist without music in my life. If I had my life to live over and then another live and another still, I could pursue these things on a more in-depth level and my life wouldn't be so fragmented. But then people have told me, "Don't forget that fragmentation is what led to your philosophy and to the cohesion of The Church Of Satan."

It's not an epiphany, not some great horned god speaking to me in puff of smoke and flame. It's a result of dabbling and dabbling and dabbling in all these things. In a Darwinian sense, perhaps it was necessary to have gone through all those careers, jumping from one thing to the other. That eclecticism prepared me. I meet people who, egotistically speaking, are like my children. I don't meet a lot of them; the supply never quite fulfills the demand. But these people are out there, doing the sort of things that I'd be doing in their place. And they're just terrific, they're producing some great stuff. They can take the ball, I can pass the torch. Easily. I take great pride in these people and what they're doing. And probably in 1997 I would be doing things in much the same way they are, with minor variations. Nothing is ever permanent when it comes to fads and fallacies and the changes that reflect the mercurial nature of the world. But there are certain things that are ageless, like mountains and oceans...

Seconds: And human nature.

LaVey: Human nature. That doesn't change. You're right. Human nature doesn't change. But there will always be those people who stand out from these...humans. [LaVey says the word contemptuously] And those are the people that I pride myself on. They're people who don't so much search and seek you out, but seem to be magnetically drawn. They come through my portals eventually. It's like sending a flare up, giving the signal. Getting it out into the ether, the atmosphere. And sure enough, they appear.

Straight From The Witch's Mouth
An Interview with Anton Szandor LaVey, High Priest and Founder of The Church of Satan by John Fritscher, Ph.D. (Jack Fritscher)

"As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect." --Emerson Self-Reliance

WITCH-HUNTING THESE DAYS IS A SNAP. In fact, new inquisitors have it easy since witches advertise. Where advertisement is lacking, ask the manager of the local occult bookstore. If he is not awitch, he'll know who is. Check out the backwater boutiques and the slightly off-campus shops with window signs reading "Occult Records." Catch up on occult symbolism and casually confront anyone wearing mystic insignia during a rock concert. (The median age of witches has lowered drastically. Crones are out.) Read the classifieds of the local college newspaper or the advertising in the local TV guides (free for the taking at supermarkets). Clip addresses from the Wanton Ads of the Underground Press or from overground tabloids like The National Enquirer.

Let your fingers do the walking through the Bell System's Yellow Pages (pop culture's surest and handiest index): check listings for astrologers, astrology schools, and palmists. In every instance, ask the persons listed what they think about witchcraft. (What they're advertising is often not what they're selling. Witches advertise as palmists because of Dis(ney)-crimination against witches. After all, in the popular mind what does a witch do? Witch is too indirect a come-on. Palmist, astrologer, numerologist are titles specific of what the consumer expects and will get.) In any group of seven or more people, interrupt the conversation to ask, "Has anyone here any American Indian blood?" Always there will be someone. Try the same with: "Does anyone here know a witch?" Once a witch is found, ask for a referral to his or her friends in the Craft.

If all else fails, join a psychic encounter group or better yet the Psychic Club of Dayton, Ohio. For ten dollars this club, which advertises itself as the place "where witches and warlocks abound," will give. you--besides what you deserve--an astro-twin pen pal, a Free Location Service for correspondence with others with the same interests, and a one year subscription to the Psychic Club Bulletin.

In the last analysis, witches, like beauty and smut, are in the eye of the beholder. What they say about themselves, though at times repetitious is often more revealing than what we say...

Anton Szandor LaVey, High Priest and Founder of The Church of Satan; San Francisco, California

"I don't feel that raising the devil in an anthropomorphic sense is quite as feasible as theologians or metaphysicians would like to think. I have felt His presence but only as an exteriorized extension of my own potential, as an alter-ego or evolved concept that I have been able to exteriorize. With a full awareness, I can communicate with this semblance, this creature, this demon, this personification that I see in the eyes of the symbol of Satan--the goat of Mendes--as I commune with it before the altar. None of these is anything more than a mirror image of that potential I perceive in myself.

"I have this awareness that the objectification is in accord with my own ego. I'm not deluding myself that I'm calling something that is disassociated or exteriorized from myself the godhead. This Force is not a controlling factor that I have no control over. The Satanic principle is that man willfully controls his destiny; if he doesn't, some other man--a lot smarter than he is--will. Satan is, therefore, an extension of one's psyche or volitional essence, so that that extension can sometimes converse and give directives through the self in a way that mere thinking of the self as a single unit cannot. In this way it does help to depict in an externalized way the Devil per se. The purpose is to have something of an idolatrous, objective nature to commune with. However, man has connection, contact, control. This notion of an exteriorized God-Satan is not new.

"My opinion of succubi and incubi is that these are dream manifestations of man's coping with guilt as in the case of nocturnal emissions with a succubus visiting a man or of erotic dreams with an incubus visiting a woman. This whole idea of casting the blame off one's own sexual feelings onto convenient demons to satisfy the Church has certainly proved useful in millions of cases. When the priest is confronted one morning by a parishioner holding a stiffened nightshirt, a semen encrusted nightgown, the priest can tell him about this 'terrible' succubus who visited him in the night. They proceed to exorcise the demon, getting the parishioner off the sexual hook and giving the priest a little prurient fun as he plays with the details of its predication on some pretty girl in the village. This, on top of it all, leaves the girl suspect of being a witch. "Naturally the priest can keep his eyes open as to who fits the succubi descriptions that he's heard in the confessional. Of course, the concept of incubi and succubi has also been used by people who have engaged in what they would consider illicit sexual relations. More than one lady's window has been left open purposely for the incubus to enter--in the form of some desirable male. This can then be chalked up the next day to demonic possession. All these very convenient dodges have kept Christianity and its foibles alive for many hundreds of years.

"The birth of a satanic child is another manifestation of the need to extend the Christ-myth of the virgin birth to an antithetical concept of a demonic birth, a Devil-child. Rosemary's Baby wasn't the first to use this age-old plot. The Devil's own dear son or daughter is a rather popular literary excursion. Certainly the Devil walks in the sinews and marrow of a man because he is the representation of fleshly deity. Any animal heritage, any natural predilections, any real human attributes would be seen in the personification of the Devil. Consequently the Devil would have offspring and be proud of them, antithetic as they are to Christianity. Instead of being ashamed the child was conceived in sin and baptized out of sin, the Devil revels in the lust conception of his child. This child would be involved much more magically than one who was the by product of an environment that sought to negate at first opportunity the very motivating force--carnal desire--that produced him.

"Religious artists' desexualizing of the birth process (Christ coming out of the bowels of Mary) has caused women to suffer childbirth pains much more than they need to because of the age old collective unconsciousness that they must suffer this and the periodic suffering that comes every 28 days. Both these are attempts to stamp out or discredit what is in the animal world the most passionate feelings when the animal comes into heat at that time of the month. The "curse" of the menstrual cycle is a manufactured thing, manufactured by society that recognizes this period as one of great desire. Automatically, we have overemphasized its pains, tensions, turmoil, cramps. This taboo is not just Christian. Women have been placed in huts outside many villages. Every culture has thought she'd cause more jealousy and turmoil at this time because of this increase in her passions. Male animals fight more when the female is in heat. Having been a lion tamer, I know even the females are morecombative at this time.

"Christianity has put women at this time in more need of self-recrimination. This is the big difference between tribal customs and Christian: in the tribe, the woman is considered bleeding poison; in Christianity the woman is not only considered taboo, but she has to endure her pain as a 'moral' reminder of her mortality and guilt. The primitive woman can give birth relatively painlessly and return to the fields. She goes through the physical act, but not through the moral agonies of the Christian woman. Such is the compounding of guilt. This kind of hypocrisy is my enemy number one.

"I don't think young people can be blamed too much for their actions and antics. Although they coat their protests in ideological issues, I think what they resent most is not the actions of older adults, but the gross hypocrisy under which adults act. What is far worse than making war is making war an(l calling it peace and love and saying it's waged under the auspices of God or that it's the Christian thing to do. On. ward, Christian soldiers and all that. I think that the worst thing about Christianity is its gross hypocrisy which is the most repugnant thing in the world to me. Most Christians practice a basic Satanic way of life every hour of their waking day and yet they sneer at somebody who has built a religion that is no different from what they're practicing, but is simply calling it by its right name. I call it by the name that is antithetical to that which they hypocritically pay lip service to when they're in church.

"Take for example, the roster of people executed for witchcraft in the Middle Ages. They were unjustly maligned because they were free-thinkers, beautiful girls, heretics, Jews, or people who happened to be of a different faith than was ordained. They were mercilessly tortured and exterminated without any thought of Christian charity. The basic lies and propaganda of the Christian Fathers added to the torment of the people. Yet the crime in today's streets and the mollycoddling of heinous criminals is a by-product of latterday Christian charity. Christian 'understanding' has made our city streets unsafe. Yet helpless millions of people, simply because they were unbelievers or disbelievers, were not 'understood.' They were killed. It's not right that a mad dog who is really dangerous should be 'understood' and those who merely dissent from Christianity should have been killed. At the Church of Satan we receive lots of damning letters from people condemning us in the most atrocious language. They attest they are good Christians; but they are full of hate. They don't know if I'm a good guy or a bad guy. They only know me by the label they've been taught: that Satanism is evil. Therefore they judge me on the same basis those people did in the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries. These very same people hardly ever get worked up over a murderer.

"I think, in short, that Christ has failed in all his engagements as both savior and deity. If his doctrines were that easily misinterpreted, if his logic was that specious, let's throw it out. It has no place. It is worthless to a civilized society if it is subject to gross misinterpretation. (I'm not just protesting the 'human element' in Christianity the way Christians do when something goes wrong with their system. I void the whole of the system that lends itself to such misinterpretation) Why the hell didn't the writers mean what they said or say what they meant when they wrote that stupid book of fables, the Bible? This is the way I feel about it. "Anybody who takes up the sanctimonious cult of white light is just playing footsy with the Christian Fathers. This is why the bane of my existence are these white witches, white magicians, people who'd like to keep their foot in the safety zone of righteousness. They refuse to see the demonic in themselves, the motivations Satan's Majesty and Nature has placed inside them for their terrestrial goal. Materialism is part of Satanism, but a right kind of materialism. Everyone wants to acquire. The only thing wrong with money is it falls into the wrong hands. This makes it a curse, a disadvantage rather than an advantage. The marketplace is full of thieves. Easy wealth may be something would-be Faustian Satanists would like to get ahold of. In my experience people have come to me after I had opened doors for them. They come back wanting to know how to turn "it" off as they have more troubles than they had before. Once I offer to people what they think they want, given a week to think it over, they get cold feet. Success is a threat. Threatened by success, most people show their true colors. They show they need a god or an astrological forecast to really lay the blame on for their own inadequacy in the threatening face of imminent success.

"Man needs religion, dogma, ritual that keeps him exteriorized outside of himself to waylay his guilt and inadequacy. Men will always, therefore, search for a god. We should, however, be men in search of man. The man in search of God is the masochist: he is the world's masochist. There are more than we imagine. "In the beginning I may not have intended Satanism to evolve into an elitist movement. But experience has taught me that Satanism can be a mass movement insofar as its basic pleasure seeking premise is concerned. You build a better mousetrap, and people are going to flock to it. A pleasure principle is going to be more popular than a pleasure denying. I can't heir) attracting the masses. As for the people who practice a truly Satanic way of life, you can't expect the masses to transcend mere lip service to the pleasure seeking principle and get into the magical state of the Absolute Satanist. The Absolute Satanist is totally aware of his own abilities and limitations. On this self-knowledge he builds his character.

"The Absolute Satanist is far removed from the masses who look for Satanic pleasure in the psychedelics of the headshops. We Satanists are magically a part of all this surface. I realize what my magical lessons have done, the things I've stumbled upon. We necessarily spawn our neo-Christian masses seeking their sense of soma through pills and drugs. Certainly I don't oppose this for other people who get stoned out of their minds. When they do this, the more material things there will be for me and my followers since all those people who freaked themselves out on drugs will be satisfied with their pills and will move off to colonies based on drugs. The rest of us, the Materialists, will inherit the world.

"Actually, I'm very much opposed to drugs from a magical point of view, from a control point of view. I feel drugs are antithetical to magic. The pseudo-Satanist or pseudo witch or self-styled mystic who predicates his success on a drug revelation is only going to succeed within his drugged peer group. His miracles go no farther than his credibility. This type of witchery is limited. This, I say, despite the fact that the druggies are no longer just a marginal group, but are a very large subculture which threatens to be the New Spirituality or the New Mysticism or the New Non-Materialism. They don't realize the whole concept of witchery is manipulation of other human beings. Druggies are not manipulative witches. To manipulate someone you've got to be able to relate to that someone. Their idea of witchery is not witchcraft so much--in the sense of witchery being manipulative magic--as witchery equaling revelation of a spiritual nature. Their superego gets developed through the use of drugs. This superego can be the earmark of a new world of drones who, through so ma, would attain superegos which allow them while so controlled to think they have superiority over those really enjoying the fruits of the earth. This is why as the leader of the Satanic movement I have to examine these popular movements in the culture from a very pragmatic point of view.

"The point is there will always be, among the masses, substitutes for the real thing. A planned way of life--not drugs--gets the materialist what he wants. There's nothing wrong with color TV and cars in the garage as long as the system which provides them respects law and order--a terribly overworked term. But as long as people don't bother other people, then I think this is an ideal society. I'm in favor of a policeman on every corner as long as he doesn't arrest people for thinking their own way or for doing within the privacy of their own four walls what they like to do.

"We haven't been hassled too much by the law because we have so many policemen in our organization. I'm an ex-cop myself. I worked in the crime lab in San Francisco and I've maintained my contacts. They've provided for me a kind of security force. But all in all we have a very clean slate. We are very evil outlaws in theological circles, but not in civil.

"How could we murder? We--unlike Christians--have a real regard for human bodies. The Satanist is the ultimate humanist. The Satanist realizes that man can be his own worst enemy and must often be protected against himself. The average man sets up situations for himself so he can be a loser. We Satanists have ancient rituals which exorcise those needs for self-abasement before they happen. We wreck Christians' tidy little dreams. When you have somebody rolling orgasmically on the floor at a revival meeting claiming an ecstasy, you tell them they're having a 'forbidden' orgasm and they hate you for enlightening them. You've robbed them of their 'succubus,' of their freedom from guilt. They push their evilness on to us. In this sense, then, we are very evil.

"I needn't send my child to a private school. Why should I when children are, in fact, all Satanists. She has no trouble at school. Ironically enough, the majority of our members are that often-attacked silent middle class. At least fifty percent of our members have children; the other fifty percent are not rebels, but they're not losers. "I was very liberal in my younger years. I would have been thrown into prison during the McCarthy purge had I been of any prominence. I was ultra liberal, attending meetings of the Veterans of the Spanish Civil War, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the Revisionist Movements of Israel's founding. This was all very liberal at the time. I was always for civil rights. I had Negro friends when Negro friends weren't fashionable. A man should be judged on his accomplishments, his kindness and consideration for others. A certain planned form of bigotry may be a little healthy. I mean, if a person is the worst that his race has produced, he should be prevented from using his race unless he is a credit to his race, religion, whatever it is.

"Martin Luther King was killed because he was an articulate gentleman, concerned about his wife and family. He tried to do things in a mannerly way. A man like that belongs on a pedestal. But these loud baboons--and I choose the term--are nothing but rabble rousers, spewing venom. The more a person has at stake the more he watches his p's and q's. This is my test of a person's sincerity. The public is no judge. The public is not too particular in its choosing of heroes.

"I voted for Wallace to act out a magical ritual. I performed it--knowing he would not win, but wishing simply to cast my runes. Wallace's advantage was he would have been helpful in the inert area between action and reaction. The pendulum is swinging. I've been misinterpreted when I've said people like Reagan and Nixon are doing a lot to help Satanism because they are causing tremendous popular reaction whereby we're getting off the hook in Vietnam.

"Popular opinion is simply a reaction against the leaders who have made their stand so heinous that the protestors don't realize they're doing exactly what the masters want them to do: they're getting the masters off the hook. The masters arc using the old magical technique of allowing the people to think it's their idea. This explains the government's permissive attitude toward protest. The idealists of the early fifties during the McCarthy era were certainly just as against violence; but the Government posture did not lie in that direction so they had to be shut up fast. Currently the show of rebellion is, therefore, a very magical ritual.

"The new emphasis will be placed on staging. Life is a game and we'll realize it's a game. Life is not "God's Will." We have to go to the point of no return before we can return. We will get to the point where anybody who is establishment oriented is suspect as being the worst kind of individual. This will happen before we return to a rather safe normality, to a sane discrimination as to who are really the contributing members of society and who are the cancerous tissue.

"Satanically speaking, anarchy and chaos must ensue for awhile before a new Satanic morality can prevail. The new Satanic morality won't be very different from the old law of the jungle wherein right and wrong were judged in the truest natural sense of biting and being bitten back. Satanic morality will cause a return to intrigue, to glamour, to seductiveness, to a modicum of sexual lasciviousness; taboos will be invoked, but mostly it will be realized these things are fun. "The various Liberation Fronts are all part of the omelet from which the New Satanic Morality will emerge. Women's Liberation is really quite humorous. Supposedly women were liberated after the Industrial Revolution when they got out of the sweatshops. They're going to defeat themselves because they're not using the ammunition of their femininity to win as women. They're trying to reject their femininity which is their greatest magical weapon. "They're parodying themselves.

"Speaking of parody, the historical Black Mass is a parody of a parody. The Black Mass parodies the Christian service which parodies a pagan. Every time a man and woman go to church on Sunday they are practicing a Black Mass by parodying ancient earth rituals which were practiced by their ancestors before they were inverted by the Christian Fathers. Our Satanic mass captures the beauty of the self and ritualize that; the Satanic mass is no parody. It is catharsis. The Women's Libists should simply use their femininity by taking the Devil's name and using it and playing the Devil's game. They should take the stigma that cultural guilt has thrown at them and invert the values, making a virtue in their semantic reversal. This is what we have done in Satanism. What theologians have supplied in stigma, we use as virtue. We therefore have the attraction of the forbidden. This has greatly aided our success.

`"I know I have been rumored to have cursed Jayne Mansfield and caused her death. Jayne Mansfield was a member of the Church of Satan. I have enough material to blow sky high all those sanctimonious Hollywood journalists. She was a priestess in the Church of Satan. I have documentation of this fact from her. There are many things I'll not say for obvious reasons. Her lover, who was a decidedly unsavory character, was the one who brought the curse upon himself. There was decidedly a curse, marked in the presence of other people. Jayne was warned constantly and periodically in no uncertain terms that she must avoid his company because great harm would befall him. It was a very sad sequence of events in which she was the victim of her own--as we mentioned earlier?inability to cope With her own success. also the Demonic in her was crying out to be one thing and her Apparent self demanded that she be something else. She was beaten back and forth in this inner conflict between the Apparent Self and the Demonic Self. He was blackmailing her. I have definite proof of this. She couldn't get out of his clutches. She was a bit of a masochist herself. She brought about her own demise. But it wasn't through what I had done to curse her. The curse was directed at him. And it was a very magnificent curse. "The dedication of my Satanic Bible to Marilyn Monroe and Tuesday Weld was, in Marilyn's case, homage to a woman who was literally victimized by her own inherent witchery potential which was there in her looks. I think a great deal of the female mystique of beauty which was personified in Marilyn's image. In the case of Tuesday Weld it's part of the magical ritual. She is my candidate of a living approximation of these other two women. Unlike them Tuesday has the intelligence and emotional stability to withstand that which Marilyn Monroe could not. For this reason Tuesday is not in the public eye as much. Her own better judgment has cautioned her not to bite off more than she can chew.

"I'd like to point out that another popular American, Ben Franklin, was a rake without question. He was a sensual dilettante. He joined up with the British Hellfire Club Their rituals came to them from the Templars and other secret societies. We practice some of these same rituals secretly in the Church of Satan. Not only did Ben Franklin influence the activities of the Hellfire Club, his very association sheds some light on the quality of members of what would appear to be a blasphemous group of individuals. This proves the Devil is not only a gentleman but a cultured gentleman.

"Throughout history the witch most feared is the witch most antithetical to the physical standards. In Mediterranean cultures, anyone with blue eyes would have been the first to be named as a witch. The black woman Tituba in Salem was antithetical to New England physical standards. Anyone who is dark nag an edge because of all the connotations of black arts, black magic, the dark and sinister side of human nature. Tituba probably was not only more feared but also more sought after. She was set apart physically from the rest of the people. She was the magical outsider.

"The Church of Satan does not employ males as altars simply because the male is not considered to be the receptacle or passive carrier of human life. He possesses the other half of what is necessary to produce life. Woman is focal as receiver of the seed in her recumbent role as absorbing altar. A male would defeat the purpose of receptor unless he were fitted out with an artificial vagina and were physically and biologically capable of symbolizing the Earth Mother.

"We do, however, accept homosexuals. We have many in the Church of Satan. They have to be well-adjusted homosexuals--and there are many well-adjusted homosexuals who are not on the daily defensive about their sexual persuasion. Many have a great amount of self-realization. Of course, we get the cream of the crop. Since they cannot relate to the basic heterosexuality of the Church of Satan whatever they do must be modified. If the homophile were involved in defining the dogma of our Church it would be very imbalanced for the masses of people with whom we deal. The homophile would very easily like to substitute a male for the female altar. It's a fact that a heterosexual can accept homosexuality more readily than a homosexual can accept heterosexuality. Relating to the existence of the other sex is something that must be in evidence. Women cannot be denied their function in our Satanic Church. Needless to add, man-hating women cause us a great lack of sensual scintillation. "My book The Complete Witch; or What to Do When Virtue Fails is a guide for witches. It doesn't stress the drawing of pentacles on the floor. It smashes all the misconceptions that women have had, not only about witchery but about their own sexuality. I think of this book like de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Even if a woman is a man-hater, she can use her femininity to ruin that man. This book tells her how to do it. If she wants to enjoy men, this book will open her eyes to a few things. "Sexual fetishes we find natural. Everybody has one. These should be catered to. Sexual deviations are only negative factors when they present an obstacle to one's success. They present an obstacle when they are carried out of the ritual chamber, out of the fantasy room into the world where others will see them disapprovingly. "I must tell you something quite amusing. Rosemary's Baby did for us what The Birth of a Nation did for the Ku Klux Klan. I never realized what that film could do. I remember reading at the premiere of Griffith's Birth of a Nation recruiting posters for the KKK in southern cities. I Chuckled because at the premiere of Rosemary's Baby there were posters of the Church of Satan in the lobby. Here at the San Francisco premiere there was a great deal of consternation, but the film started an influx of very worthwhile new members. Since Rosemary the quality of membership has gone up. Immeasurably.

"Since that film with Polanski, I am constantly confronted with scripts by thick-skulled exploitation producers who want me either to be technical advisor or play the role of the Devil or the Satanic doctor in their new films. They think to one-up Rosemary. What they don't realize is that Rosemary's Baby was popularly successful because it exploded a lot of the preconceptions of Satanism: it didn't chop up the baby at the end. It threw all the crap down the drain and showed the public who was expecting the sensational the real image of the Satanist. It will remain a masterpiece.

"The allegory of the Christ child in reverse is simply the birth of the new Satanic Age, 1966. The year 1966 was used in Rosemary's Baby because it was our Satanic Year One. The birth of the baby was the birth of Satanism. Rosemary's Baby stands foursquare against the popular image of child sacrifice. The role that I played in the picture--the devil in the shaggy suit was not from my point of view anything other than it should have been: man, animal, bestial, carnal nature coming forth in a ritualized way. The impregnation of Rosemary in that dream sequence was to me the very essence of the immodest, the bestial in man, impregnating the virginal world-mind with the reawakening of the animalism within oneself. This impregnation was very meaningful because it spawned literally the Church of Satan. Among all the rituals in the film, this was the big ritual in Rosemary's Baby.

"These others who want my opinion on their scripts are simply producing more trash of the blood-sacrifice variety. In Rosemary's Baby, the girl who went out the window and landed on the pavement died in the pure Satanic tradition. She had made it clear--although the people who saw the film didn't realize it--that she was a loser. Everything she said pointed to it. She'd been kicked around. She'd been on the streets. She'd been on dope. She was obviously the wrong girl to be a carrier. Satan saw her lack of maternal instinct, of winning instinct, of spunk to carry this baby out into the world. She therefore, sort of fell "accidentally" out the window. The end of the film shows Rosemary throw away her Catholic heritage and cherish the devil-child. The natural instinct of Satanism wins out over man made programming.

"Even though I have done the consulting for Mephisto Waltz for Twentieth Century-Fox, that film still has the old elements of witchery. It's going to take a lot to come up with a film that's as much a blasphemy as Rosemary's Baby. Polanski's other film The Fearless Vampire Killers is like nothing else that's ever been done before in the film world. That film explodes all the puerile Christian myths about vampires. The old professor, sort of a Count Dracula, is shown to be not only the doddering old fool he really is but also the real victim at the end. The fact that all those unfortunate murders took place at Polanski's--his wife Sharon Tate and all the rest--was used by the press to highlight Polanski's interest in witchery and Satanism. The deaths had nothing to do with the films. The Polanski's were simply plagued with hippies and drug addicts. If I were to allow it, my house would be full of the sycophantic lounger. If I neglected them, they'd be paranoid. I would have been put in the same position as those people at Polanski's house had I allowed it. He attracted, as people in Hollywood do, all the creeps, kooks, and crackpots. He wasn't around to stop it or was too nice to put his foot down. He, in a sense, put himself in much the same position as Jayne Mansfield.

"Those people that were killed were all freak Ed out of their minds anyway. They were people who were only a little better than the killers. As far as their warped outlooks on life, their senses of values, it was a case of the blind destroying the blind. Sharon was probably the victim of her environment, but I can't find it in myself to whitewash these people. I know firsthand how the people at the Factory and the Daisy and these other nightclubs behave. They're quite indiscriminate as to the people they take up with.

"The devil in Rosemary's Baby was depicted as a combination of many anthropomorphic ideals of the bestial man: the reptilian scales, the fur, claws. A combination of the animal kingdom. It was not a red union suit with a pitchfork. Nor was it Pan transmogrified by Christians into a cloven hoofed devil. The Cloven Hoof title of our newsletter was chosen precisely for its eclectic image in the popular mind as one of the devil's more familiar and acceptable traits. Cloven hoofed animals in pre-Christian times had often been considered sacred in their association with carnal desire. The pig, goat, ram?all of these creatures--are consistently associated with the devil. Hence our title.

"The truest concept of Satan is not in any one animal but is in man, the evolutionary accomplishment from many animals.

"The historical note that Satan has an ice cold penis is a very pragmatic thing because when Satan had to service the Witches who would come to aim to draw from his power at the Sabbaths, he could actually remain erect either with those who stimulated him--that is the magician who portrayed Satan--or until he became expended of his sexual vigor. Naturally then, under his fur cloak or garb he had to strap on something of an artificial nature, a bull's pizzle, a dildo. In the night air. it would cool off. The witches all swore that it was cold. He would have to use something like this to maintain his position as the devil.

"It is of interest to me that hippies and Hell's Angels tattoo themselves with the markings of Satanism and other symbols of aggression. Tattooing is an ancient and obscure art. One of the few books on it is called Pierced Hearts and True Love by Ebensten. There's also George Burchett's Memoirs of the Tattooist. Certainly much needs to be said of the relation of Satanism and witchery to tattooing. We have members that were tattooed long before the Hell's Angels made it fashionable. One man has the Goat of Bathona, the Satanic Goat, tattooed across ills back. Beautifully done. The devil headed eagle is on his chest. Then on each thigh he has the figure of Seth. He's quite spectacular. He has a shaven head and the build of a professional wrestler. He is extremely formidable when tie is in ceremony wearing only a black pair of trunks with a very small mask across his eyes. His are very symmetrically contrived attempts at using tattoos for ritualistic purposes.

"Witchcraft has a lot of show business in it. Religious ritual after all was the first theater. For this reason, I think, Dark Shadows and Bewitched are fine. White witches think these TV shows are terrible because they play the witch as a pretty girl who can snap her fingers and get things done. They try to impress the world that a wicca is not up to that sort of thing. They try to play that they're an intellectually justified "Old Religion." The popular image of the witch is a gal who can get things done in apparently supernatural ways. Like I Dream of Jeannie. Why not take advantage of the glamorized witch? If this has been the very element that has brought witchcraft out of a stigmatized, persecuted stereotype, then why put it down? It is the glamorization of Witchcraft that gives the erstwhile white witches the free air in which to breathe. Why knock it?

"This gets me to Gerald Gardner, whom I judge a silly man who was probably very intent on what he was doing; he had to Open a restaurant and get it filled with customers. He took over a not too successful teashop and turned it into a museum. He had to say he was a research scholar. He got the term white witch from a coinage in Witchcraft's Power in the World Today. Gardner used the term because witchery was illegal in England at the time. To avoid persecution he opened his museum under the guise of research. He stated he wasn't a witch until the repeal of the laws in 1953. Then he made it very clear he was a white witch. That's like saying, "Well, I'm a good witch. The others are bad witches. So don't persecute me." Gardner did what he had to do, but I don't think he was anymore of an authority on the true meaning of witchcraft than Montague Summers. I think that he simply followed Summers' crappy rituals of circles and "Elohim" and "Adonai." They used the name of Jesus and crossed themselves.

"I have broken the barrier. I have made it a little bit fashionable to be a black magician. A lot of them, therefore, are trying to say now that their horned god is not a Devil. It is just a horned god. Well, let me tell you, until five or six years ago they wouldn't even admit to a horned god. Suddenly they like to intimate that perhaps they have made pacts with the Devil. For many years the Old Religionists used Albertus Magnus, the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, the Book of Ceremonial Magic, crossing themselves as they turned the pages, denying theirs was a Christian based faith. Why in the hell did they use all these accoutrements? White witches are no more than a by product of Christianity, or they wouldn't have to call themselves white witches in the first place. I don't think white witches have the courage of their convictions.

"I have said that Aleister Crowley had his tongue jammed firmly in his cheek. I think Crowley was a pragmatist. He was also a drug addict. The demons he conjured were the products of a be numbed mind. Basically he was a sweet, kind man who was trying to emancipate himself from the throes of a very strict upbringing. He can't be blamed for anything he did from a psychoanalytical point of view. He wasn't really that wicked of a man. He had to work overtime. All the arbitrary numbers, dogma, and so on of his magical curriculum were constructs he invented to answer the needs of his students. Crowley's greatest wisdom was in his Book of Lies. The particular page can be paraphrased: "My disciples came to me, and they asked, Oh Master, give us your secret." He put them off. They insisted. He said it would cost them ten thousand pounds. They paid, and he gave them his words: "A sucker is born every minute." This says more for Crowley than all his other work. His judgment of the popular follower was accurate; most of the public wants gibberish and nonsense. He alluded to this in his numbering of his Libers which are not immense volumes but just a few bound sheets of paper. He's saying the real wisdom is about ten lines long.

"Like Crowley, Gerald Gardner probably knew a good thing when he saw it and got something going that turned out to be more sanctimonious than it should be. Ray Buckland began the same way. Now he admits to once being part of the more mundane rather than the complete esoteric he was made out to be. Ray Buck land certainly knows a great deal about the occult. He has a good synthesis of the Arts. But sanctimony still comes through. His famous chapter on black magic threatens that if a curse is not performed properly it will return to the sender. He defines things like good and bad, white and black magic for those who--as I say in my Satanic Bible--are frightened by shadows. I maintain that good like evil is only in the eyes of the beholder. Ray Buck land has guts, though, to sit in his Long Island home conducting his rituals and not caring what the neighbors think.

"I don't know whether Sybil Leek is as big a fool as she sometimes seems, or whether she's laughing up her sleeve. Sybil is a good businesswoman. I don't want to judge her--if she is a good businesswoman she knows on which side her bread is buttered! My only complaint with Sybil--and I do know her personally--is she has done nothing to dispel all the crap about black and white witches. If she's after the little old ladies in tennis shoes, fine. But she is a dispenser of misinformation.

"Alex Sanders has become more public in proclaiming himself the King of the Witches. He is a dispenser of misinformation too. He's not too bad; in the stifling climate of England he's a forward man among a backward people. He's got a big load. For this I admire him. He's great enough to claim himself King. I don't put much credence in astrology --it's a case of the tail wagging the dog. A competent sorcerer, however, should know his astrology because it is a motivating factor for many people. Sydney Omarr, the popular syndicated astrologer, is basically a level-headed guy who sees through a lot of the fraud. "I'll be the first to give Sybil Leek and Louise Huebner and all these people their due. They don't say, 'We witches don't want publicity.' That takes moxie in a sanctimonious society. They're not like these damn cocktail party witches who can't defend their self-styled reputations when called to do it. These people give me a pain. It's part of being a witch, the ego gratification of being a witch, to want to talk about it in detail in public."

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