Anton LaVey

Satan thinks His followers should get destructive

Posted on by A lesser demon

Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that only death and taxes are certain. But times change, and with the advent of LaVeyan Satanism, a third absolute was added to Mr. Franklin’s list: Anton LaVey is always right. No revision of his works is required or even asked for, no misunderstandings are possible, and no criticism is permitted. His writings are to be considered holy, and his words to be gospel. Such is the doctrine of The Church of Satan, although generally denied or phrased differently.

This may strike some as religious fanaticism and founder cultism, but The Church of Satan allows for some pragmaticism. Disagreements with LaVey are tolerable under three conditions that must all be met: firstly, the disagreements must concern minor issues. Secondly, specificity is prohibited; one may admit to “some disagreements” but not which ones. Thirdly, one must leave no doubt that the disagreement is a personal flaw; for example, one is not perfect or is in an unfortunate situation, forcing some level of deviation from the teachings.

It is best to remain discrete, however. Anton LaVey’s introduction to The Satanic Bible explains that one will find truth and fiction in the book, and as The Church of Satan will gladly inform you, a true Satanist can tell the difference, and therefore, so should you, with a thinly veiled implied “unless” concerning your demonic talent. Hence, each time Anton LaVey has uttered an atrociously uninformed opinion or statement or written an outrageously obvious falsehood, one is a poor Satanist for even doubting if it is truth or fiction and should not embarrass oneself by asking. Besides, one should realize that if a statement in the book is true, it is valid content, and if it is fiction, it is also valid content, and thus should not ask at all.

For example, Anton LaVey makes the asinine claims in The Satanic Bible that the Yazidis are a cult of Devil worshipers and that the positions of the moon and the fixed stars cause equinoxes on Earth. A true Satanist who reads it is expected to conclude that these passages were intentional fiction from an author who liked to speak with his tongue in his cheek, not the results of Lavey having uncritically swallowed Christian propaganda and lacking basic education.

It is sometimes impossible to pretend that a section with objectionable or poorly aged content was a designed fantasy. To circumvent doctrinal criticism of these portions, The Church of Satan has popularized the “personal opinion” cop-out in which everything is doctrine except the offending passage, which is assigned a third category playing a role almost identical to the ostensibly intentional fiction. For example, when LaVey repeatedly turns far-right extremist opinions into Satanic dogma in other of his canonized works, The Church of Satan thus avoids ideological accountability by labeling them his personal opinion and, again, instead of discussing what comprises the distinction between ideological tenet and personal sentiment in his writings, claims that a true Satanist knows the difference.

Yet, Satan thinks some of the contents cannot be that easily dismissed as the reader’s failure to comprehend as an adept Satanist. In particular, Anton LaVey uses the word “magic” around a hundred times in The Satanic Bible, and the practice of magic for power is arguably the most consistent theme in the book, competing for first place with LaVey’s personal variant of Christian theology. While largely nebulous in his explanations, LaVey writes sufficiently explicitly and frequently that he believes that magic is the ability to direct “psychic energy”—literally a transmittable force produced by strong “emotional energy”—into the minds of other people and other natural phenomena. Satan has already explained for those readers who lack historical insight into early psychology that this misconstruction has been dismissed as pseudo-science since about the same time as Anton LaVey decided to put this already braindead hypothesis on unwarranted occult life support.

Satan thinks the average reader may have been excused for believing in LaVey’s false conviction during the first or even two decades following the 1969 release of The Satanic Bible. These early readers “knew” that the belief in how magic worked, why it worked, and how to wield it belonged to the truthful sections of The Satanic Bible, whereas most details of the rituals, together with the Enochian calls, remained equally important fiction to be employed to produce the “energy” that fuels the contrastingly truthful magic.

However, the following decades of research decisively reassigned that truth to the realm of fiction. There is no excuse but ignorance to believe in such “magic” today. This left the modern Church of Satan in a pickle: nobody in their right mind living in the twenty-first century would pretend that LaVeyan magic works, but admitting so would contradict Anton LaVey on a principal pillar of his ideology, breaking the indisputable maxim that Anton LaVey is always right.

The Church of Satan solves this catch-22 by resorting to Orwellian double-think, where members are collectively deputized to thought-policing that conflicting beliefs are all simultaneously accepted as truth. In the case of magic, it both works and does not; only one cannot say either. “Magic” thus becomes “just psychodrama” in Peter Gilmore’s introduction to The Satanic Bible, and all readers must agree, despite finding LaVey writing many chapters later that magic is not just psychodrama.

Members of The Church of Satan from the days of Anton LaVey who have attempted to conserve the original doctrines have found themselves becoming “unpersoned.” More recent members who have joined after LaVey’s passing explain that magic works because it is just psychodrama that allegedly changes the minds and attitudes of the practitioners through releasing pent-up emotions, despite the latter reliance on emotional tension remaining the pseudoscientific nucleus of LaVeyan magic. If, for some reason, the “magic” incurs other worldly changes, then that is just a bonus, they say. Hence, although in the realm of science, all magically directed energy has dissipated from the now inert core of LaVeyan magic, the belief persists but is simultaneously denied. The Church of Satan sciencewashes the LaVeyan abracadabra to preserve the pipe dream that Anton LaVey’s original doctrine remains relevant in modern society or ever even worked in his days.

Unimpressed minds might suggest that The Church of Satan unconsciously reacts to the menace of cognitive dissonance, but Satan would never write His followers off as such ignoranuses (i.e., ignorant assholes) who compensate for their mental mediocrity with bogus parapsychological superiority. Satan prefers to think it was a deliberate, strategic choice.

Satan therefore thinks that if His church truthfully believes in its founder’s gospel, it has all the motivation in the world to wield its magic. Instead of finding its devoted members fighting a Sisyphean battle against detractors, non-Satanists, wannabes, pseudo-Satanists, and other people except Christians) who disregard The Church of Satan, the Devil thinks it would be a clean use of magic to smash that illusionary granite obstacle and finally make it to the pinnacle. Satan thinks that whenever churchgoers find themselves frustrated or irritated by people on social media, they should consult The Satanic Bible for the solution: they must retreat to their ritual chambers and perform a destruction ritual. Satan could even tell them which Enochian key to use, as Anton LaVey forgot to disclose such secrets in his book. Once freed of their emotional build-up and (perhaps) destroying their online foes, they would be ready to meet the world with renewed vigor and no longer use their same tired (and poor) arguments on the same social media platforms against the same people. Satan thinks they should perform their rituals and be content that their enemies are thus gone and no more energy be wasted.

Satan thinks that if His followers in The Church of Satan believe that magic is real and works, they should, therefore, apply it and prove themselves right. In fact, Satan thinks that if His church planned and executed a coordinated effort—contingent on acquiring some basic leadership skills—the ensuing mass destruction of its contestants would make a long-lasting impression on its few remaining perceived enemies. Satan can barely imagine the magical influence exerted by the timed effort of thousands (or a few dozen, but it is the thought that counts) of black-clad angry white males riling up anger at imagined enemies in their homes by waving a scimitar and reading a text aloud to put their minds at ease.

His Diabolical Lordship hopes His followers are not intimidated by LaVey’s reminder that a successful destruction ritual should purge one’s thoughts of the enemy and the implication that subsequent rumination means the enemy was the better magician. Hopefully, His followers cannot all be so incompetent that they only worsen matters; even a few rotten magicians should not spoil the entire barrel. Satan thinks that if His followers believe that magic is real, they should perform a destruction ritual and prove it works by leaving everyone alone.

Satan thinks His Church lied about LaVey’s death

Posted on by A lesser demon

Myths, legends, and fabrications characterize all religions (except your own, of course). Some will argue that there must be grains of truth in every religious tale but Satan thinks such concessions are unnecessary as one needs not to support any piece of religious fiction simply because it employs coincidental facts. For example, if some fantastic fable may be geographically pinpointed, the only truth that is revealed is that the story was invented by people who lived in or knew about that area. It does not prove any supernatural elements: the fact that the Sea of Galilee exists does not prove that Jesus walked on the Lake of Genesareth as it was then known.

From a religious point of view, there is good reason to provide reality anchors to otherwise impossible situations. Any report that demands belief must be partly credible, and every con artist knows that he must make his marks believe they might have been present to see for themselves had they been so lucky. Miracles occur in the neighboring village or other familiar area, not in a far-away fantasy country so they become obvious fairy tales, and some story must unfold.

The important element is a relatable reality. One must first recognize the profane world to appreciate and identify that a sacred change has occurred. For instance, the Christian rebirth conversion consists of a sinner in the profane realm who receives an experience from the sacred realm and thereby changes into something new. Note that the element of reality is important only insofar as it is relatable. The major narrative is the sacred change that happens to this reality, so the focus lies on the sacred. It suffices that the reality could be true by not violating any known principles of the world, and it may be bent if that favors the narrative. Hence, a newly converted individual will appear more convincing to the congregation if the conversion seems “impossible” and requires a “miracle” and the method is tried and tested: the worse the sinner, the more astonishing the conversion. It does not matter that the sinner may not have been as bad as told.

It is no far leap from exaggerating a little to making up entirely a little helper reality as long as it could have happened naturally, and gossip of repenting evildoers abound to prove the wonder of God’s love. Richard Ramirez is rumored to have repented, although there is no indication this ever happened, and the minister who baptized Jeffrey Dahmer was concerningly fascinated with his notoriously untrustworthy disciple, to name two prominent individuals.

It is, therefore, unsurprising that Anton LaVey, too, is rumored to have repented on his deathbed. The specifics vary somewhat, but their source is generally said to be the nurse who attended him during his last hours. It would be a great story if true, but Satan thinks its reliability is diminished greatly because, despite its news value, this story did not appear until about a year after the passing of Anton LaVey. Some have further argued that since LaVey had suffered from heart problems causing fatal pulmonary edema (fluid in his lungs), he would have been unable to voice any regrets. Satan is not entirely convinced that the latter would have prevented a gasp of remorse, however, as even people with a one-digit lung capacity percentage can be quite chatty. (You would be surprised how people may yet scream at the top of their lungs despite our sulfuric, toxic atmosphere here in Hell.) The Prince of Darkness considers the long delay between having supposedly been heard by the nurse until it emerged as rumors only to be the better argument against LaVey’s deathbed repentance.

The story of Anton LaVey’s deathbed regret is thus one of many Christian anecdotes that establish the mythological universe necessary for any religion. Each anecdote plays only a small part but together, they form a religious glue narrative that helps keep the religion together.

Satan’s own Church is no different in making up its own myths. Anton LaVey constructed an impressive persona whose true identity was not questioned until 1991 when journalist Lawrence Wright investigated LaVey’s past and found that many of LaVey’s claims about his life had been false. LaVey’s second daughter, Zeena Schreck (née LaVey), published a text titled Anton LaVey: Legend and Reality in 1998 that further debunked his claims.

This did not prevent The Church of Satan from still worshiping their founder as an extraordinary person about whom the myths at least provided an accurate impression of his (un)holiness. In Peter Gilmore’s foreword of the 2005 edition of The Satanic Bible, Gilmore admits that “detractors” had disputed LaVey’s authority but is sure to dismiss the relevance, both claiming that most else is true and even expounding on the myth of LaVey’s past. The Church of Satan even went so far as to mimic the fundamentalist Christians who spread stories surrounding the death of Anton LaVey by sharing the remarkable news about nine days after the loss of their founder that LaVey had magically appropriately passed on the eve of October 31st: their Satanic holiday of Halloween.

This seemed almost too good to be true for their religious narrative and indeed, when the local news caught wind of the event, they cited the correct date of October 29th. The Church of Satan immediately blamed the above-mentioned nurse for having entered an incorrect date of death on LaVey’s death certificate (it seems this poor nurse has much to answer for), apparently not stopping to think that if so, the press would also have been misled.

The Father of Lies knows a feebly executed deception and a poor back-pedaling when he sees it and calls His Church’s bluff. Blanche Barton was reportedly with LaVey when he died and would have known that this was not the eve of their High Holiday for which she would have prepared. If nothing else, although Blanche Barton is far from the brightest candle in the votive stand, Satan thinks even she would have discovered that her ideological sugar daddy had been missing for the celebration of Halloween for two days. Trust Satan that it was a deliberate lie by The Church of Satan to pretend that Anton LaVey died on October 31st as a conclusion for their personality myth.

Satan would have enjoyed daring The Church of Satan to produce proof in the form of a signed death certificate citing October 31st, 1997, but is aware that such documents may be doctored. He is content knowing for certain that The Church of Satan, like Christians passing stories about LaVey’s deathbed confession, spread lies surrounding his death intended to sustain the myth of Anton LaVey among the gullible rubes.

Satan thinks egalitarianism has merit

Posted on by A lesser demon

Every religion considers other religions to be the source of devilry, although in the past, pantheistic religions have usually been happy to incorporate inspiring elements from other religions into their own. People and hence their religions tend to become more tolerant towards other religions if resources are scarce and reliance on alien cultures is vital to one’s existence. However, as a general rule, anything that seems wrong in one’s society has always been blamed on others. It does not matter that it had been effective for centuries; if it eventually became undesired, it could be blamed on others and perceived as some kind of demon that they had introduced.

The Devil’s own church, The Church of Satan, has identified its share of demons that it attributes to other religions. One such archdemon is egalitarianism, which Peter Gilmore repeatedly denounces in The Satanic Scriptures and believes is caused by Christianity. He demands instead Social Darwinism and authoritarian eugenics, arguing that they expose the fundamental fallacies of egalitarian doctrine, although he does not explain how. In Peter Gilmore’s mind, the fallacies of egalitarianism are the belief that everything and everyone are, or should be, equal:

Thus, some random splashes on a canvas were considered an equal achievement to the Sistine Chapel; a mud hut was held up as being equivalent to Versailles. A janitor was dubbed the equivalent to a physicist; a novelist was now the peer of one who scrawled graffiti on a bathroom wall. This principle of “discrimination” was applied to all other fields of achievement.

The opposition to egalitarianism is deeply entrenched in both LaVeyan and Gilmoron Satanism, to the degree that the very first point, “on which all the others ultimately rest,” of The Church of Satan’s mostly political program is: “the advocacy … of stratification, which is no less than the elimination of egalitarianism wherever it has taken root.”

Egalitarianism, in The Church of Satan, is meant as a complete leveling of all differences between human beings. Similarly, equality is the presumption that everyone has equal abilities and no differences, and nobody performs to the best of their ability as everything is compressed into conformist homogeneity. Satan can barely fathom how nightmarish the thought of thereby having nothing to brag about must be to a stereotypically complete grandiose narcissist such as Peter Gilmore. From the Devil’s opposite perspective, however, most of His followers would improve considerably if it were possible to average all humans. When we sort their souls for incineration in Hell, we usually classify them as “small combustibles” unless they are toxic waste.

Neither of the two writers appears to be aware that their understanding of egalitarianism is utterly false nor that egalitarian principles have secular origins. These principles were born of the Enlightenment and are now adopted by numerous international laws, treaties, and domestic constitutions and bills of rights despite religious opposition. They cannot be dismissed as the product of a single religion or even several religions in unison. Egalitarianism involves the principle that everyone has a set of immutable rights that should not be infringed upon. They are designed to protect all individuals from social, legal, political, or other abuse. They are minimal standards, not maximal standards, whose goal is to prevent the worst, not enable or prescribe the best.

Human rights are not a leveling tool and have no bearing on ability or skill. They exist to protect the vital existence of every individual, not to artificially foster incompetence or homogenize society, and are constructed on the basis of human equality. In egalitarianism, equality is the claim that all humans are of equal moral worth, not equal ability. Anyone with the ability to write a symphony rivaling Beethoven’s genius is free to do so, and any individual who lacks the ability never will. (Satan thinks that, although holding a degree in musical composition, Peter Gilmore’s closest experience with musical recognition will remain the Salieri syndrome.) The human rights of egalitarianism protect everyone from repression or persecution in pursuit of their respective goals, and do not determine what individuals can do with their natural abilities nor flatten the differences between those abilities. With their fundamental liberties protected by egalitarian principles, individuals become free to pursue any life they feel is rewarding, providing that the rights of others are respected. Egalitarianism is a prerequisite for a functioning meritocracy.

Satan initially thought to Xerox Peter Gilmore a copy of the definition of egalitarianism from any modern dictionary, but the extent and the form of Gilmore’s misunderstanding of the term is all too familiar to His Infernal Majesty, who knows that Gilmore will not be educated. It is how the far-right ultra-conservatives apply the term when (like LaVey and Gilmore) they imagine that their arbitrarily charted group of people has intrinsically higher moral worth than other human beings. The only difference is that LaVey and Gilmore believe the horror stems from left-wing politics emanating from Christianity, whereas the typical far-right advocates against egalitarianism are equally convinced that it is a left-wing plague but believe that Christianity is the cure.

Old Nick considers an exposition on right-wing politics to be outside of the scope of these thoughts and believes it suffices to observe that when egalitarianism is yet another word that The Church of Satan uses incorrectly, in this incident, the primary explanation is not their usual subaverage comprehension skills. The Church of Satan echoes a far-right view that makes sense only when accompanied by a complete ideological framework from that same end of the political spectrum. It is an interpretation tightly knit with several other elements that provide that political position’s view of humans and cannot be separated from those elements.

One does not have to be a master of systemic functional linguistics (which Satan is, of course) to understand that people’s vocabulary reveals much about them, nor that social semiotics tells us that a consistent use of specific misunderstandings serves as a language equivalent of secret handshakes. The Church of Satan reveals and communicates a far-right political platform and attracts members accordingly.

Satan thinks His church still believes in magic

Posted on by A lesser demon

Personality cults never take kindly to criticism of their gurus. Their gurus are flawless, and even outright personality disorders or mental illnesses are viewed as proof of their superhuman capacity or as evidence of their divine insights or an earned privilege. Their lies, deceptions, and displays of hypocrisy, when discovered, become gemstones in their robes, adding a sparkle to an already fascinating persona. True personality cultists will never admit that their guru can make a mistake and will invent all sorts of explanations, evasions, redefinitions, rationalizations, etc., that have denial in common to avoid facing the reality that their guru was plainly and simply wrong, incompetent, or delusional.

Satan thinks His Church is one such personality cult because any negative mention of Anton LaVey is met with hostility, whereas even the most obvious and blatant misconceptions and disagreeable features are compulsively whitewashed into comical absurdity. Satan marvels at their blind devotion and zealous worship of their guru, who decades later is still their axis mundi while the rest of the world moves on and properly disposes of those past errors that are the pillars of his cosmology. Concepts that, in the words of The Satanic Bible, have “been proven by results to be but an empty fiction” that the remainder of the educated world has long decided should be “unceremoniously flung into the outer darkness, among the dead gods, dead empires, dead philosophies, and other useless lumber and wreckage,” are defended with fang and claw by the LaVey cult.

Sometimes, however, LaVey was so evidently delusional that any defense of his hallucinations is impossible, and the LaVey cult instead revises his teachings, convincing themselves and (less so) others that LaVey meant something different, despite all evidence pointing to the contrary. Satan can think of several examples because many theories and ideas that may have meant life and hope and freedom for the early Church of Satan have lost their ground as environments changed over the decades following the establishment of the Church. Its scripture demands that no revision of the guru’s teachings is necessary, though, and therefore the churchgoers aggressively loyally insist that no revision is taking place. This reminds Satan of one example where revision only seems to occur while the flawed core is kept alive and true to LaVey’s pipe dream.

It warms the Devil’s cold heart that it is magic—a cornerstone of LaVey’s religion—that is being maintained as delusionally now as it was then. Satan was genuinely worried when He discovered that apologetical churchgoers began to dismiss magic as “just psychodrama” (despite Anton LaVey explicitly stressing in The Satanic Bible that magic is not just psychodrama) that merely helps rid the practitioner of unhealthy emotions, to serve as positive thinking, and what else do-it-yourself therapy purposes one finds in questionable feel-good self-help books. It seemed for a while that the churchgoers considered magic to be their new kind of the “thoughts and prayers” they used to employ before stumbling upon the Devil, but Satan was relieved to find that LaVey skillfully embedded magic so strongly into his ideology that it resists both sanity and reason. One may say, and even believe, that magic is superstition, as long as one still incorporates the superstition into one’s thinking: despite what Satanic Rule of the Earth no. 7 might suggest, what is a little denial of mysticism among friends? Satan finds that magicians of The Church of Satan may still decapitate their ex-girlfriends by accident, be the cause of power blackouts when they get insulted during a thunderstorm, or find that mass shooters kill innocent people because they have last names that somewhat resemble those of the magicians’ ex-wives. Why, they may even mentally force the traffic lights to change, although Satan suggests they abstain from similar attempts to change the stop signs.

Ours truly has already explained Satan’s thoughts on LaVey’s magic and hopes that The Dark Eminence accepts a mere hyperlink here, but you should read or revisit this post before continuing. Practically everything LaVey said about magic matches the psychological framework that was still widely believed back then, especially among the general population. People born before the early 1970es may even remember being taught that very framework at school and should easily recognize LaVey’s choice of words and conclusions.

Anton LaVey described in rather broad terms what magic is, and rather vaguely how it supposedly works. It is possible to waive responsibility by claiming, like LaVey, that magic works but is yet to be explained by science, that LaVey’s banter on magic should be taken metaphorically (although that begs the question of why one should bother practicing it), or that it is a pseudo-meditative exercise that affects only the practitioner. It is easy to repeat LaVey’s own cop-outs on how magic “works” or to invent new ones because, after all, there is no such thing as magic. Besides, LaVey was not born with a scientist’s heart and was satisfied that magic works, leaving the scientific hows and whys to others. He cared about what one should do to make it work, much like his clientele of today cares less about how technology works than how to use it to watch pornography. Everyone at LaVey’s time “knew” that humans generate emotional, or psychic, energy, and it needed little further elaboration; the important element to LaVey was what to do to harness that energy, not to author yet another book on pseudo-psychology.

LaVey introduced The Satanic Bible with a promise that with this book, magicians would finally find bedrock, and the section specifically devoted to the practice of magic provided explicit procedures and all but checklists. He explained that the ritual entrapments serve to rile up the practitioner’s emotions so that emotional energy (or bioelectrical, vital, sexual, or psychic energy; he uses all these terms and more) is generated and can be directed at the target of one’s hex. Not surprisingly, the instructions and their purpose align perfectly with the aforementioned psychological framework, because one cannot separate the “what to do” element of The Church of Satan’s magic from that framework.

It is easy to overlook the importance of these practical instructions, but religious practice beats religious pondering any day. In a ritual setting, one lives out the mythology of the religion by following the steps of a ritual with its arcane language and decorations. The otherworldly settings of a ritual turn otherwise trivial actions of the real world into important actions as far as the brain is concerned, reinforcing and conserving the mythology. It is thereby kept alive within the society of practitioners, even if they are mostly unaware of its history. If this seems strange, consider the mystical ceremonies of many Christian churches: even if all their members know is how to properly participate, the ceremonies and rituals keep the antiquated tradition alive. Religious rituals and ceremonies are critical to perpetuating and maintaining mindsets that would otherwise have been overtaken by progress. That is the true purpose of a ritual, not its formally stated goal that one finds in the pages of the religious textbooks: Christians do not gulp down the “blood of Jesus” in order to be magically cleansed of their sins but to stay reminded of their religion and its concepts of sin.

In the rituals of The Church of Satan, the mythology is the outdated psychological framework, and by performing LaVey’s rituals, one acts out that pseudo-science, maintains it, and absorbs it. This means that for all that the members of The Church of Satan insist that magic is mere psychodrama (not to be confused with the psychotherapeutic term that Jacob L. Moreno coined far earlier), in practice, through practice, they believe in actual magic in the form that Anton LaVey originally envisioned it—the pseudoscience that everyone once believed to be model truth. One may consider it a good case of “suspension of disbelief” when modern churchgoers deny magic yet enter their ritual chambers, but Satan thinks it is an empty statement. Nobody would care to enter the ritual chamber unless disbelief was already suspended.

It is impossible to dismiss LaVey’s magical loads of hooey as “just psychodrama” unless one also rejects his rituals altogether. Churchgoers may think they are skeptical of magic and feel compelled to reason the word that appears 150 times in The Satanic Bible or reduce it to a metaphor, but the actions of the rituals and LaVey’s recipe for a ritual with an explicit tangible goal cannot be denied. The same members of The Church of Satan follow the rituals to the letter and in so doing reinforce in the real world the very hocus-pocus that they mistake for rational thinking.

The above-mentioned Christian communion makes Satan thinks these churchgoers do what Luther did to Catholicism: by granting that maybe the wine and bread did not physically turn into blood and meat, but also arguing that the blood and flesh of Jesus were somehow still present, the Christian communion was unaltered for all practical purposes. The actions of the Christians did not change, and the Christians remained Christian.

One might identify a much-needed revision to LaVey’s silly magical beliefs that renders the superstitious mythology obsolete and replaces it with a modernized “mythology” that reflects how healthy human beings actually function or should function. However, such a revision would require a corresponding, radical change in the rituals, and very little would be left of LaVey’s original rituals beyond the colorful language.

To summarize, Satan thinks that it is fruitless to debate whether LaVey’s magic “works,” or whatever LaVey may have meant by this and that mention of the word “magic.” Had it worked, perhaps the Great Magus would have met a different fate than living in a derelict house and dying bitter, broke, and abandoned by family and friends, and in the end had more miasma than charisma. The all-important, undebatable, and undeniable fact is that LaVey provided specific instructions on how to activate an explicit function of the human body and psyche that does not exist save within a psychological framework that now finds itself in the same category as the four humors, the use of mercury to cure diseases, and the wandering uterus. No amount of rationalization can justify such clinging to past orthodoxies.

Satan thinks His followers should soak their heads

Posted on by A lesser demon

Satan appreciates an attentive student and favors followers who pick up His teachings. It is seldom a poor idea to read a book, and in the case of His usual followers, often any book would probably broaden their horizons. But, there are times when one of His devotees combines Anton LaVey’s teachings and musings with a herd following instinct and uncritical orthodoxy. That is when Satan thinks that the result stinks worse than our sulfurous fumes here in Hell.

Satan is, of course, thinking about those churchgoers in His Church of Satan who heed Anton LaVey’s advice to stop bathing.

Anton LaVey had good reason to find bathing unpleasant. The heating in his house on California Street in San Francisco was broken, and for either lack of initiative or income he never had it fixed. The home was cold in the winter, and the water ran cold all year. LaVey therefore opted for the solution chosen by most humans who live in denial of their situation: he rationalized his situation into a personal choice. Unable to crank up the thermostat or enjoy a soothing long hot tub bath, he found that he liked the coldness of the wintertime, reasoned that bathing was unhealthy until he could no longer tolerate his own bodily odors, and found immersion in a cool bath pleasant only when temperatures were too high.

Hell is the epitome of all central heating systems, and the Devil settles for temperatures nowhere below the melting point of rock under the Earth’s gravitational pressure. He nonetheless understands that the benign winters of the coastal climate of San Francisco in Northern California are mainly a question of bad clothing, not bad weather, and Anton LaVey could ignore the unsolicited heads-up Mother Nature would otherwise have offered had he stayed in his birth town of Chicago.

Environmental choices were easily defended as a matter of preference, but unhealthy and socially problematic poor hygiene decisions required elaboration, perhaps even more so to LaVey whose sexual preference involved practices that incur additional demands on cleanliness.

LaVey concluded that because bathing masks the natural scents of a human being, it is dishonest and therefore liked by only the worst people. (Satan never checked but presumes LaVey must have been a completely honest person.) Based on his knowledge of animals as a cage hand in a circus in the times when animal welfare had yet to receive public attention, LaVey believed that a reduced bodily odor would confuse an animal. Satan believes this may have been LaVey’s experience with animals in such environments, but in trusting relations between humans and unstressed animals, a shower and some soap do not introduce unfamiliarity. When The Prince of Darkness emerges in all His splendor from a contemplative hour in a fiery lake and His pet Baphomet rubs its territorial glands against His marvelous unspeakables, it is not confusion but a reaffirmation of trust and belonging, for example.

True to his misanthropy, LaVey considered bathing to be nothing short of treason against the eugenics that he advocated, in that undesirable women (just women), through cloaking their scent, would thereby mask their undesirableness and coerce males into helping produce genetically inferior offspring. LaVey did not mention the genetic impact of males, but Satan is sure that was just an oversight, as He would not accuse LaVey of male chauvinism now that LaVey cannot defend himself. No, seriously, we had to tie him up and gag him after Diane Hegarty died a little less than a year ago and joined us as a proud citizen of Hell; and the recent premature arrival of his grandson did not improve the situation. If LaVey had males in mind, it would be his belief that his stench kept them at bay.

It is not entirely incorrect that humans react to each others’ pheromones, but the diminished senses of humans compared with many animals (although humans senses seem generalized and balanced compared with, say, the keen eyes but poor sense of smell of the eagle, or the extraordinary hearing of the nearly blind bat) are the likely evolutionary result of a significantly improved cognitive skill: to find a mate, the human animal relies on the many additional, often visual, cues of complicated social interaction patterns enabled, and recognized, by its brain beyond the mere smell of an opposite-sex fellow specimen in heat. A human being so horribly poorly socially inept that it had to rely foremost on its snout to identify a mate would not qualify for one in the first place. The smell of a human in heat would be rather uninformative anyway, as the human animal is a species that may have minor hormonal fluctuations influencing its sexual interest but is always in heat compared with the either-or periods of many animals. Humans have sex for pleasure and important social bonding, not only to procreate, and any biological traces of heat periods are counterproductive evolutionary artifacts. What you experience is vestigial heat as you chase vestigial tail.

LaVey’s need to explain his poor personal hygiene turned resistance to bathing into an accolade. He believed that he was an emancipated being by contrasting habitual bathing as the habit of the pious, the guilty, and the frightened—that is, it was the attempt of the religious to escape their animal nature. His Infernal Majesty recalls that His sworn enemies and followers of God entertained some attitudes toward bathing, indeed, but remembers the details somewhat differently.

If anything, traditional Christian focus on spiritual purity was paid with physical asepsis. Monks would abstain from bathing to show their spiritual strength over the physical body, not because hygiene was fundamentally sinful or animal-like, but because it was hard on the body and thus proved their mental fortitude and “superiority” over the physical needs of an average individual. And contrary to popular belief, Medieval Europe was not characterized by filth and grime although the sanitation of growing cities left plenty to be desired. Medieval people bathed often, but because public bathhouses were also gathering places, spas, brothels, and otherwise provided extra-sanitational activities, Christian officials discouraged going to baths and bathhouses; again not because bathing itself was sinful, but because it tended to involve a role in the tub occupied by a maid or a man-servant.

Christianity left literal stains on sanitary practices. Satan thinks His followers should understand that their true human animal selves are far more complex than meets the nose, and that Anton LaVey’s non-scents belief is the misguided excuse of a person who could not maintain his own personal hygiene. Satan thinks that the least His followers can do to leave the Christian mindset behind is to bathe regularly.

Satan thinks LaVey wrote a rape ritual

Posted on by A lesser demon

Lucifer prefers to call a spade a spade and avoids all sorts of “fancy” language. The Angel of Enlightenment thinks that exorbitantly whimsical wordings or effervescent expressions obscure intent, regardless of the verbal dexterity of the author. Satan considers it lingual masturbation that renders everyone else unsatisfied. He would allow none of His demons such self-inflated literary smugness and considers it proof that their thesauri are larger than their wits. But enough about the writings of Peter Gilmore—Satan appreciates that in The Satanic Bible, Anton LaVey uses simple words when he calls a “love charm” or a “love spell” for what they are: an attempt to get sex.

LaVey explains that the purpose of the sex ritual that he introduces in The Satanic Bible is to “create desire on the part of the person whom you desire.” All of Satan’s followers will please remember that, according to LaVey, magic is used when normal methods would fail, because the situation would be unchangeable using normal methods, and one applies magic only when conventional methods fail because otherwise, one would use conventional methods. In the case of sex rituals, it means that you could not possibly make the person desire you, even with the best tricks in the pick-up artist’s book. Satan thinks you are truly that undesirable if you must resort to a sex ritual.

Hence, the purpose of a sex ritual is to create the sexual consent that you have never received: that you may have sex with a person despite being denied the mating signal that Satan requires for any sexual advances per Satanic Rule of the Earth number five. This may have seemed reasonable in the 1960es of Anton LaVey when the absence of affirmative consent was yet to be understood as a sexual violation, but today it is indicative of a sexually predatory mindset.

Satan will hear no such excuse that having created the desire through magic, it became a genuine desire. Such an argument is true for sexual grooming as well, and for con jobs in general; the victim may have handed over his money willingly to the con artist but is nonetheless a victim. The mindset is no less dangerous in the modernized perception among His current churchgoers, where ostensibly a ritual now serves to modify one’s own mind, because it instills in the mind of the practitioner the delusion that the quarry has provided consent and thereby the mating call that justifies transgressive action. Unlike magic which does not exist, self-suggestion is real and can have consequences.

Returning to the topic of plain speech, Satan appreciates that LaVey did not hide the intent of the “sex ritual” behind a veil of love, but He thinks it is high time to call the ritual for what it is: it is a rape ritual, the purpose of which is to force consent where none was given.

Satan thinks all bad comes from above

Posted on by A lesser demon

Having ruled supreme in Hell for aeons, Satan has learned a thing or two about setting expectations. One cannot effectively lead an army of darkness only through barking orders or threatening with punishment. (The latter will be administered regardless, anyway. After all, this is Hell.) It is important that the infernal hordes know what is properly evil behavior, and there is only one way to teach them: to lead by example. This is why, if you paid attention in church, you know that the Devil is the ultimate evil and fundamental villain, who torments the damned with terminal wickedness, Satan being the worst of them all.

Satan thus does what any business coach and leadership consultant would recommend. They, too, know that organizational values propagate from only one place—the highest-level management. It is the top level that defines the company values and sets the workplace tone; and they do so by precedence not via memos or policy documents because such formalities are secondary (albeit still useful) to proper conduct. A company may have stellar written policies, but it is the behavior of the highest-level management that defines the standard which trickles all the way down to the last employee, causing the same behavior to be found on all levels of the company. This is how herds function.

Employees who find themselves in companies with a toxic senior management layer will find that the entire company is toxic, and that their own behavior becomes toxic or enabling of toxic behavior. Roughly speaking, new employees will either soon support and comply with the unspoken rules of conduct, or they will be harassed or fired unless they choose the only appropriate option of resigning.

It is with such insight in mind that His Esteemed Abomination turns a concerned eye towards His own church on Earth that was once consecrated in His name by Anton LaVey. It seemed an eminently fertile soil for future denizens of our Infernal Empire, but Satan thinks the values of its upper tier do not adequately further His cause.

The first High Priest of The Church of Satan was, of course, Anton LaVey himself. Old Nick thinks he was on to something useful, but unfortunately could not keep his mouth closed about his fascination with the Third Reich. There is no need to suspect that LaVey himself was more right-leaning than most conservatives at his time, but he believed that the Nazis were successful magicians, treasured their aesthetics, felt that they and he shared some objectives, and did not hesitate to be edgy by finding good things to say about Hitler, Satan rest his soul. Satan thinks that although Anton LaVey did not plan or desire the inevitable result of being thus historically unaware and lacking Fingerspitzengefühl, his silly references to the Herrenvolk nevertheless became not so much a dog whistle as a loud, lewd and longing mating signal for neo-Nazis.

Whatever LaVey’s motivation or tactical ignorance may have been, soon The Church of Satan attracted neo-Nazis in droves, and by the late 1980s it was brimming with neo-Nazis in its membership and clergy, who produced neo-Nazi texts, imagery, music, and other projects. New members learned to be accepting of this (but certainly not of leftist or centrist movements) as a condition to be a Satanist, and echoing their behavior was a tacit requirement if one wished to climb the organizational stairs. The last thing one should do was to criticize the neo-Nazi infestation, as it proved disloyalty towards The Church of Satan to thus be a shit-disturber, as Anton LaVey put it.

The next High Priest, Peter Gilmore, had expressed his interest in The Church of Satan in the early 1970s when he wrote to Anton LaVey’s column in a US monthly tabloid. Still an early teenager, young Peter’s Satanic ambition was to lead a group of Satanists and obtain both a free membership and an honorary title in The Church of Satan because he considered himself smart, and because he wanted to make his followers (his word) respect him more. LaVey declined, informing Gilmore that recognition is earned and that he would not reach his personal potential by settling for transitory, unearned “ego-sops.”

Unfazed, Gilmore later joined The Church of Satan and the competing Temple of Set, according to the high priest of the latter who promptly sent Gilmore on his way when it was discovered that he was riding on two horses at once. Peter Gilmore made sure to befriend Anton LaVey as soon as he could afford to travel between New York and San Francisco. Anton LaVey’s partner, Diane LaVey, was the main administrative person in The Church of Satan, and when she divorced her husband, Peter Gilmore was able to fill the administrative void that would otherwise have befallen LaVey himself and his groupie, Blanche Barton. Gilmore and his partner became the official online contacts and representatives of The Church of Satan and for all intents and purposes its de facto leaders until the passing of Anton LaVey.

Both Blanche Barton and LaVey’s daughter, Karla LaVey, desired to be the successor of Anton LaVey, and Peter Gilmore helped facilitate a shared leadership construction that was impossible and, predictably, immediately failed, leaving Gilmore as the fall-back choice—and he now assumed full control as the High Priest of The Church of Satan. Satan tips his hat at the successful take-over, of course. Management by confusion, intrigue, and triangulation requires Machiavellian skills not reserved for everyone.

Peter Gilmore was, and is, no neo-Nazi (nor was Anton LaVey), but had learned the rule of the game. His 1990s and early 2000s kept with the general use of thinly veiled Nazi innuendos, but it did not take long until he ceased to back the neo-Nazi clergy who began to siphon out of the organization one by one, often citing Gilmore as their reason. New values had been introduced by the new High Priest, and they understood that their neo-Nazi dispositions were now perceived as non-kosher by those in charge.

Satan thinks the previous values of The Church of Satan were not specifically neo-Nazi or even fascist. It was through a combination of neglect, a bad choice of agent provocateur (Nazis, that is), and a lacking sense of consequence that neo-Nazism nonetheless became a predominant value by attracting a critical mass of wrong people. Satan is pleased to know that the current values are less so. He certainly demands that His legions of evil fight with stormtrooper courage towards the final cosmic solution, but as the archetypical Adversary, Satan has bad experiences with such convictions whose core ideologies involve the demonization of your opponents and considers their presence in his ranks to be an obvious recipe for disaster.

Satan has no use for the new values introduced by the next High Priest, Peter Gilmore, either, however. Young Peter Gilmore’s late-childhood read-through of The Satanic Bible had apparently instilled in his mind that his identity hinged on becoming a Satanic cult leader, but not for any reasons qualifying as Satanic. Satan thinks that Anton LaVey nailed Gilmore’s motivation in their very first correspondence as a need for ego consolation. He needed to be respected, but instead of earning respect per LaVey’s recommendation, years later he settled for an underachieving job in real life and, gained by befriending LaVey, the intimidating effect that a “Satanic priest,” whether high or low, has on some people. In that first communication, Gilmore had also described his fear, “the greatest Hell imaginable for anyone,” of being remembered by your enemies as a fool, but LaVey did not address this concern. Satan suspects it may have been out of pity, because only people with considerably low self-esteem would feel that belittled, if at all, by knowing their enemies think badly of them. Of all hated beings, The Prince of Darkness would be a sorry mess if such insignificance troubled Him.

The new values introduced by Peter Gilmore in The Church of Satan are, regrettably, a level of grandiose narcissism that lies comfortably within the clinically diagnosable range of personality disorders, and of which Gilmore’s early letter to LaVey is a textbook example. No doctrine, opinion, view, or standpoint is conclusively important as long as one requirement is satisfied: you must either give Peter Gilmore the impression that he is being liked and that he can ultimately sway your opinion if he wants to, or you must be a useful idiot who enables his narcissistic behavior towards others by defending him in spite of what should have been your better judgment.

Before we venture any further, it is important to understand what narcissism is. It is not egoism, which is basically just being a jerk. Narcissism is a compensation mechanism for an intense feeling of insecurity stemming from unusually low self-esteem. The compensation generally takes the form of a grandiose sense of self-importance and an excessive need for admiration, exploitative and superficial relationships that only serve to confirm a positive self-image, a need for control and lack of empathy, a fragile and easily threatened identity whose stability depends on maintaining the view that one is exceptional, blaming others for one’s faults, being unable to take no for an answer, and being deeply afraid of being perceived as wrong or seen as inadequate. Failing to give them their way often triggers a hysterical, sometimes violent, rage. They feel “special” and unique and believe they can only be understood by other special or high-status people. They feel entitled and often believe they deserve better or were overlooked, are envious of others, or believe that others are envious of them; they are preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love. Their attitude towards others is often arrogant and haughty, and they frequently demean, intimidate, bully, or belittle others in order to seem better themselves in comparison.

It is not clear what causes narcissism, but scientists currently tend to agree that a genetic element and a later trauma element together turn a person narcissistic, after which the personality disorder is chronic. Satan thinks that their deep-seated low self-esteem and their compulsive and pervasive self-deceit run counter to the very core of Satanism, and since part of their condition is neurologically hard-wired, Satan thinks that, contrary to Satanists, these Non-Satanists are thus born not made.

Where LaVey had, probably inadvertently, created an organization that attracted neo-fascists and neo-Nazis, Peter Gilmore has propagated values that changed the organization into an environment that nourishes his narcissistic cravings. He uses The Church of Satan as a proxy for his ego: every praise of The Church of Satan feeds his self-esteem, which in narcissists is a perpetually empty hole of starvation. He demands respect, reverence, and for people to be impressed with him. Conversely, no criticism or disagreement can be tolerated, and no mistake can be mentioned because they threaten the very core of his being.

It is why, his ego intertwined with The Church of Satan, he often provides excuses or claims that are quite outrageous: for example, that they have extremely influential and powerful members who all just happen to keep unrealistically secret about it; that Gilmore’s uncommitted slowness and sense of low importance in his processing of membership applications is deliberate, intended to “test” the applicants; and that whenever a formerly appreciated, decorated, or dedicated member leaves, it invariably turns out they were, retroactively, “never really into it,” or never truly understood Satanism.

Through more than two decades as the de facto head of the organization, his demand for positive attention, and his equal terror at even the slightest doubt of his worth, have been institutionalized throughout the organization. He chooses his close associates and enablers of his narcissism based on their willingness to look up to him, and has made sure to make others in high positions feel unwelcome, should they not place him above all else.

The Church of Satan has become an entity of people who have taught one another to demand of everyone the unbounded admiration that Gilmore requires and to attack on sight anything that might leave the slightest dent in their inflated self-regard. What they believe is the proper way to be members of a Satanic organization is, instead, Peter Gilmore’s low self-esteem marioneteering their behaviors (and his!) like a parasite taking control of its host. Satan is impressed—to minds who do not understand organizational dynamics, such herd mentality is indistinguishable from magic.

This environment, shaped to accommodate Gilmore’s narcissism, is an environment that other narcissists readily recognize as conducive to their own narcissism as well. The Satanic Bible, by Anton LaVey’s own admission, already appeals to such undesirable characters, and LaVey considered the damage they do to be a tolerable trade-off, but it was Peter Gilmore who turned The Church of Satan into a self-perpetuating and multiplying breeding ground for them. Even those who are not narcissists by nature will soon learn to act as if they were.

The organization that was once established to create stronger individuals by exploring one’s own strengths is now an organization bent on pretending to have worth by diminishing the efforts of everyone else. True to the nature of narcissists, its claim to fame and accomplishment consists of exaggerating the tiniest of achievements to make the organization seem noteworthy, and first and foremost of demeaning and bullying everyone other than The Church of Satan who appears in the Satanic arena, as well as any true individual within their own ranks who calls the bluff and, as it were, exclaims that the emperor wears no clothes.

Satan has no use for such an organization, which is alive but an empty shell. Satan demands stalwart soldiers with genuine fighting skills for the imminent battle against the hordes of God, not a mob of deluded snowflakes who believe that their petty, verbal party fireworks rain fires of doom upon their foes and that victory is won by declaring that the celestial army is fake angels, all the while sabotaging the Devil’s far superior elite squadrons.

Satan thinks fish stickers are warning labels

Posted on by A lesser demon

Anton LaVey once defined Satan as a great car, among other things of pleasure and materialism. While His Satanic Excellency prefers to think of Himself as more sophisticated than the items on LaVey’s list, it is true that Satan delights in driving a quality automobile.

The Devil is no speed demon, as some may have inaccurately believed, and is drawn towards cars that radiate business in the professional sense rather than sports cars or flashy cars. His Infernal Majesty is usually found behind the wheel of a Lexus or a Mercedes Benz as is appropriate for a gentleman of His age group.

It is during His frequent business trips from Hell and back that Satan has observed a peculiar phenomenon among human drivers: whenever a car has a “fish” sticker on it (a symbol used by Christians), its owner’s driving skills are below par, and Satan has learned to maintain an additional safety distance to any car that is decorated with this emblem. The unpredictability of vehicle fatalities became lamentably clear when His Wickedness arranged for a car accident only to decapitate the wrong victim in the Jayne Mansfield incident, for example. The last thing The Fallen Angel wishes is again to be cast from His seat, this time not by the “Almighty” himself but through the recklessness of one his disciples driving a Toyota Corolla.

Satan first hypothesized that the fish sticker was meant to warn that something fishy is ahead because a Christian should never be trusted, but soon dismissed the idea. Christians never warn against their ill intentions but instead cloak them with words of “neighborly love” intended to lure unsuspecting prey into their mental and often financial traps.

The Devil currently favors two hypotheses that may both be true.

The first one is that people who slap herring badges onto their automobiles presumably disagree with the Satanic tenet of vital existence where one keeps focus on the road—both in the figurative sense of doing what is best for oneself and in an acutely literal sense in traffic. Satan thinks these people drive as if their minds are elsewhere. They may be preoccupied with guilt, planning their next move towards salvation, desiring some male love of Jesus, or whatever Christians have on their minds; whichever it is, it seems to inhibit their attention towards other road users.

The second hypothesis might sound a little Freudian but Satan is not yet posed to dismiss it: any religion that upholds that death yields gratification, vindication, or happiness, or in any other sense advocates the just-world belief that suffering will eventually be compensated with corresponding comfort, is a death cult. Satan thinks that maybe drivers who flaunt their death wish cult membership may subconsciously be driven (or driving) toward death, thus leading to more accident-prone behavior.

And so Satan thinks you should not only drive carefully and wear your seatbelts, as is always advised, but also beware of drivers whose vehicles display fish stickers and often a few dents to boot.

Satan thinks confirmation bias is key

Posted on by A lesser demon

Confirmation bias is the cognitive tendency to see what one wishes to see and ignore the rest. It means one interprets, remembers, and searches for information that bolsters one’s beliefs, preconceptions, and prejudice. It ranges from interpreting ambiguity as supporting one’s position to overlooking or downright denying evidence to the contrary. Confirmation bias is the cause of poor decisions and systematic errors in both science, organizations, and international politics.

Anton LaVey is lauded for his large number of inspirations that he combined into what his organization describes as a novel and unique philosphy. There is no question that Anton LaVey was an avid reader; if in doubt, the bibliography of his 1971 book, The Satanic Witch, originally entitled The Compleat Witch, should convince anyone. Satanism might involve no innovative ideas or original insigts but Anton LaVey’s combination of elements of pre-existing ideologies and philosophies was new.

Satan demands study not worship, and it would seem reasonable to use Anton LaVey’s sources of inspiration as a starting point. And yet, it is a route traced by misleading paths where one must rigorously observe and apply the Balance Factor on a shaky ground of philosophical traps, unscientific foundations, and ideologically slippery slopes. Satan thinks that is incumbent on the eager student of the dark lore to always beware that Anton LaVey picked that from his sources which he liked and ignored everything else.

Anton LaVey later revealed to be aware of his cherry picking. For example, he explained in The Devil’s Notebook that he found the attempts to build “orgone accumulators” to be a fad that presumably one should steer clear of, and instead—with a direct reference to The Satanic Bible, so it should be considered important—pursue Wilhelm Reich’s cloudbusting hypothesis or his similarly hypothesised cancer biopathy. Lest any of you decide to follow his advice, Old Nick cautions that these works of Reich’s, too, were complete bunk. Wilhelm Reich should be honored for breaking somewhat free of Sigmund Freud’s paradigm, for being an early theorist of psychosomatics, and for describing mental illness as a phenomenon that may extend beyond the suffering of individual beings. And he should be remembered as an example of a suffering, pitiable madman who gained followers in pursuit of an unhinged dream founded on the yet unretired belief that the secret of human nature could be reduced to understanding particles. Satan cannot think for a moment that virtually any of Wilhelm Reich’s work deserves attention save his regrettably mostly unaccredited transition from Freudian mistakes toward modern psychology.

A more prominent example is without question Anton LaVey’s inclusion of the contents from several chapters of Might Is Right in “The Book of Satan” of The Satanic Bible. It was originally authored by Arthur Desmond using the pen name “Ragnar Redbeard,” and Anton LaVey wrote in his preface to the 1996 reprint that the book was a rant of glaring contradictions, leaving only a fraction of it suitable for The Satanic Bible, and this only for its inflammatory prose and evocative purpose, Anton LaVey claimed.

Satan could not agree more. Arthur Desmond was a failed politician with delusions of grandeur who kept getting into legal trouble and was eventually forced to flee from New Zealand. He came to America and settled in Chicago where he wrote the book. Might Is Right does not urge any specific ideology but rather argues that morality exists only in the human mind, that there is no such thing as “good,” and that there is no inherent benefit in being a good person or doing what is right. Arthur Desmond respected only those who were physically strong and could force others to do their bidding. The arguments went in all directions, however, often contradicting each other. There is no need to take Anton LaVey’s speculation that the author might have been Jack London seriously, because passages have later been recovered from Arthur Desmond’s early writings, and Jack London was just 14 years old when the first edition of Might Is Right was released anyway.

The elements that Anton LaVey plagiarized for The Satanic Bible are among the least senseless passages, and they serve their purpose as Satan’s long overdue retort against those who have slandered His name over the centuries. Satan thinks they also transmit the concept that morality is relative and a man-shaped idea that is subject to discussion and negotiation, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater by using Arthur Desmond’s original, preposterous arguments. (We shall ignore here that morality does in fact seem to extend beyond the human mind, because moral judgment and behavior, as humans understand it, have been observed among a variety of other species.) “The Book of Satan” thus channels the message that established sophisms and religious “truths” can go to Hell on their own banana peels and primes the reader for the new and superior morality of the Devil that follows in remainder of The Satanic Bible. Everything else in Might Is Right is useless.

Some level of condolence is usually implied when an author draws inspiration from a source but Satan thinks this does not apply in the case of Anton LaVey’s Satanism. Perhaps Anton LaVey was a pragmatist who cared little about the cause of magic as long as it worked, had little concern about the possible existence of the Devil as long as he felt he could draw on the powers of darkness, and ignored any political or other leanings of his sources if they otherwise managed to accidentally stumble upon something Anton LaVey considered true. In his many years of searching for the secrets behind magic, he would accept anything that he believed would work and discard the rest with a complete disregard of context.

This would describe a conscious application of confirmation bias where Anton LaVey deliberately ignored the context of his sources and placed them into a new one that cannot be derived from the original contexts—that is, Anton LaVey did not only combine hitherto unconnected ideas as mentioned earlier, he changed their meanings. The question, of course, is whether Anton LaVey was deliberately eclectic or was so vulnerable to confirmation bias that he was unaware of his suppression of contradicting evidence, non sequiturs, and broken causalities and his similar inclination towards hasty generalizations, false dichotomies, and strawmen. Satan thinks there are signs pointing in both directions and shall draw no conclusions on the matter.

Anton LaVey passed away decades ago, however, and Satan is more interested in how Anton LaVey’s devotees of today react to his one-sided selection of source material. The Devil has identified no Satanist who constructed a cloudbuster in spite of Anton LaVey’s recommendations on the pursuit of Wilhelm Reich’s “magic,” and speaking of magic, newer Church of Satan members have demoted magic to do-it-yourself coaching intended as mental self-help. Modern readers of The Satanic Bible focus on the elements that appeal to them and downplay or even ignore anything they cannot readily relate to, and thus remove themselves by yet another level beyond Anton LaVey’s removal from his inspirators.

Satan thinks there are two important lessons to be learned from confirmation bias both as Anton LaVey is concerned and as LaVey’s legacy is concerned. (Well, there are three lessons, but the thirds one is general advice on how to manage confirmation bias. Satan thinks this lesson should be taught by others.)

One lesson is a danger of confirmation bias: the instant hit of The Satanic Bible and the inclusion of the passages from Might Is Right sparked a renewed interest in the book, which had by then passed into obscurity. It was reprinted and soon discovered by right-wing extremists who appreciated its rampant racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and social Darwinism—all that Anton LaVey had omitted except some hints of social Darwinism which, in the strongly anti-Christian context of “The Book of Satan” and The Satanic Bible as such, should be taken as opposition against the alleged meekness of Christianity rather than necessarily a political statement.

Satan thinks it is unfair to accuse Anton LaVey of intentionally inviting neo-Nazis into his organization through the otherwise ideologically fueling literature. However, it takes an exceptional lack of perspective to overlook the obviously appealing effect on right-wing extremists by dedicating an entire section of The Satanic Bible to Might Is Right. Indeed, Michael Aquino’s book, The Church of Satan, reveals that Nazi associations with The Church of Satan began in the very year that Might Is Right came back in print. For good measure, Michael Aquino’s book also reveals that Anton LaVey was opposed to the connection between neo-Nazism and The Church of Satan. The Church of Satan went dormant a few years later, and when it resurfaced in the mid-1980s it soon became clear that members with more than spurious interest in Nazism had joined the organization and became ranking members. One could barely find a periodical or a magazine published by a Church of Satan member that was not littered with neo-Nazi imagery and other fascist references. Satan takes no issue with people who feel that the sun-symbol should be reclaimed and make occasional use of it among less tarnished symbols, but the “who are you kidding?” line is long crossed when they reach a seven-out-of-ten ratio of the topics of a magazine. These members were not merely loud. They constituted a disproportionally large part of the representative membership and appealed to more members of their likes.

Satan trusts that Anton LaVey did not desire this, but it is what happens when you quote an important inspiration a source who was primarily occupied with issues that you chose to ignore in your quest for what you wished to find. Satan thinks that the avid Satanic student who reads the book should learn to appreciate not only its value for The Satanic Bible but also its author’s biography and why the remainder that Anton LaVey omitted speaks to right-wing extremists instead, and especially that there are often unintended and sometimes severe consequences of confirmation bias.

The other lesson is that confirmation bias replaces potentially vital parts of a teaching with one’s own opinions, and because everyone changes their views more than they imagine or can even admit (because the brain believes it is consistent) throughout their lifetimes, one may render the original teaching washed-out to a homeopathic dilution. What remains is the person’s culturally inculcated values, the person’s political stance, probably some affinity for diabolic aesthetics, and other entirely personal opinions—and the person believes this to be the exact same Satanism that Anton LaVey defined.

Satan thinks that followers of the LaVeyan variety should mind Anton LaVey’s confirmation bias that governs his definition of Satanism and make calculated efforts to steer clear of all the hogwash and counter-productive instructions that plagued his grimoires, too. Satan thinks that if ever in doubt of where to strike the balance, one should make no attempt to learn further from said grimoires.

Satan does not require infernal fundamentalism, far from it. He only asks His followers to both be mindful of opinions that they may not be conscious of and to be mindful of the origin of their opinions. If they do not stem from the Devil, Satan thinks that the would-be follower may have accidentally submitted to a different master, one without horns and cloven hooves.

Satan thinks authority matters

Posted on by A lesser demon

Satan thinks everyone seems to be an expert these days but usually with little to show for it. He thinks humans may have forgotten what makes someone an expert and especially what constitutes authority as an expert.

Anyone can make a claim, but to convince others that you speak the truth about a subject, first you must establish credibility as someone who has actual knowledge on that topic. Your authority is required to speak on the subject matter, or none will attribute more significance to your claims than had you told them about your favorite color: it would be received as nothing but your personal opinion, and certainly not something that calls for consideration let alone compliance.

Religions face a particular challenge when their adherents must argue why they are right and everyone else is wrong, typically including all other groups within the religion than one’s own: there are no gods. Whatever gods the followers believe in, these gods never seem to care to visit Earth and settle the score once and for all. Godless religions such as certain schools of Buddhism are equally challenged because although the founder of atheistic Buddhism was once a living and breathing human, he is long dead and will never rise from his grave to explain what he really meant.

Instead, religions must resort to other tactics in order to feign authority. The Catholic Church has managed to keep an uninterrupted line of popes since the foundation of Christianity by Paul the Apostle, who claimed that Jesus had conferred the “Petrine primacy” to him and thus appointed him as the first pope. All popes are assumed to inherit this primacy, almost as if they were Paul the Apostle reborn. Hence, the Catholic Church’s claim to being right is its direct line of heritage to the founder of Christianity. Of course, if you do not believe that popes can inherit whatever mandate was given to Paul the Apostle, the Catholic Church will not convince you that it is the true kind of Christianity, at least not using that argument.

Michael Aquino (who founded The Temple of Set) took a similar approach, borrowing his mandate from a supernatural entity when he claimed that my Master had transferred an infernal mandate from Anton LaVey to Michael Aquino. Thus having been specifically appointed by the Devil Himself, Michael Aquino obtained the authority to define Satanism and Anton LaVey lost it. But, one must believe both that there is a Devil and that Michael Aquino spoke the truth to respect this claim to authority. In the absense of any Prince of Darkness to confirm the transaction, one can only conclude that Michael was either consciously lying or having a fit of self-delusion, whichever version one prefers. Satan thinks that the purported bestowal of His mandate onto Michael Aquino came at a remarkably convenient time, noting how perfectly it coincided with Michael Aquino’s intense personal dissatisfaction with Anton LaVey’s decision to sell titles in The Church of Satan for money and Aquino’s own urge to herald His Infernal Majesty as an existing being representing the ancient Egyptian deity Set.

Anton LaVey had never claimed to have been appointed by Satan, at least not that He is aware. Anton LaVey had no marketable skills to hang his hat on either with no jobs, no training or initiation, nor any education that might lend some credibility to his claims about Satanism. What Anton LaVey did have was an interest in reading. Satan is not certain whether Anton LaVey did so consciously, but it is clear that Anton LaVey was highly inspired by works of fiction and combined a number of fictional characters into a distinctive persona to replace his real-world footprint. This remarkable protagonist, who was a lion tamer at a circus, played in the city orchestra, had studied criminology, and much more, served to render Anton LaVey a Satanist by example. The fictional credentials served as a magical shroud, as it were, which provided Anton LaVey with the authority he needed, because who better to speak authoritatively about Satanism than someone who is demonstrably one?

Had Anton LaVey had been a school drop-out who never held a real job and lived at his parents’ house while dabbling with one occultism fad after the other, eventually saying that whatever he was currently practicing was Satanism, nobody would have cared, and others would probably be better qualified to define Satanism than Anton LaVey. However, if Anton LaVey was the very embodiment of a Satanist and knew the dark secrets because he was a carnival showman, a police photographer and occult adviser, a burlesque musician, and what not, then he could speak with some authority when he said what Satanism is and isn’t. Anton LaVey had no educational authority, no social authority, no legal authority, etc. to provide him with the might that is needed to be right, but he could provide himself as an example that he was right. By his spectacular past, Anton LaVey had acquired the mandate to define Satanism.

Many who attempted to imitate Anton LaVey and be the high priests of their own various churches and temples of Satan and Lucifer were easily dismissed as posers, who only wished to be what Anton LaVey was. No-one needed to take them seriously when the real thing, Anton LaVey, was available, as the argument from Anton LaVey’s own organization went. The Devil is inclined to agree, as most such would-be high priests tended to provide no new insights or interpretations, instead merely offering what they thought The Church of Satan failed to provide—that is, themselves as high priests instead of Anton LaVey.

In turn, The Church of Satan had to rethink its claim to authority following Anton LaVey’s death in 1997 which required the Church to now routinize his charisma. Its initial attempts at placing Karla LaVey (who would inherit some of Anton LaVey’s authority by virtue of bloodline) and Blanche Barton as co-heads predictably failed, and shortly after Blanche Barton was equally predictably offered an emerita retirement title so Peter Gilmore and Peggy Nadramia could finally assume the formal leadership that they had already assumed a decade before.

Satan has not kept close tabs on The Church of Satan’s referrals to Anton LaVey, but He feels that LaVey’s authority has shifted from being a Satanist by example to now being a first mover: Anton LaVey’s authority today rests less on his persona than on his being the first person to define Satanism outside of Christian mythology. Part of the explanation may be that Anton LaVey’s persona was uncovered as a myth and his original authority as the proto-Satanist was shattered with it. However, Satan thinks that the primary reason is simply that Anton LaVey has been dead for over two decades as of this writing. No-one is waiting to see what the great Szandor comes up with in The Cloven Hoof, and all but a few members of The Church of Satan have never experienced him. To everyone, Anton LaVey is literally history. His made-up colorful persona was bound to fade had it not already been debunked.

Satan thinks that being first with an idea warrants appreciation, if nothing else. No Satanic organization since the formation of The Church of Satan can deny the influence of Anton LaVey, and no-one has dared to provide alternative scripture. That is, much mystical mumbo-jumbo has indeed been written among Satanists, but there has of yet been no competition to his book whose title—The Satanic Bible—is hard to outshine. All Satanic organizations owe a historical debt to Anton LaVey whether they like it or not.

The Church of Satan may lay claim to authenticity as the continued existence of Anton LaVey’s original organization, but that is a different matter. It is nowhere implied that one is permanently right simply for proposing the first definition of a phenomenon, or that the definition is immutable. There is no copyright on ideologies. Anyone can pick and chose from an ideology and change it where they feel so inclined. They may mangle the ideology beyond recognition, but perhaps that is precisely what the ideology needed to be true. After all, the first person who gazed into the night sky saw the stars as gods, and although we now know better, they are still stars to us. (That is, except for The Morning Star, whom we all adore.) The Church of Satan can at most assert that it offers the interpretation of Satanism that comes closest to Anton LaVey’s original description. (Satan does not wish to go off on a tangent pondering whether The Church of Satan truly resembles Anton LaVey’s original “magic circle” whose activities were strongly tied to physically attending Anton LaVey’s tutelage in his home on California Street in San Francisco until the early 1970s.)

The Church of Satan may nonetheless succeed in convincing at least some people that being first implies being both right and the owner of an ideological copyright and unregistered trademark. It seems to the Devil that the argument works well on The Church of Satan’s own members, and He agrees that although you cannot fool all of the people all the time, usually it is enough to fool some of the people some of the time.

The Devil believes that The Church of Satan has a second claim to authority: it is the only Satanic organization that has scripture to be reckoned with. Other organizations have written material for their followers but none of it has hit the bookshelves like the superbly-titled The Satanic Bible. Yet, Satan notes that although The Church of Satan does point to its scripture as a source for “one true Satanism,” usually the organization’s argument is that that Anton LaVey defined Satanism in this book, thereby using the author as an authority rather than relying on the persuasive and argumentative powers of the scripture.

Satan thinks that perhaps it is for the better. The Satanic Bible does not prove its claims nor does it attempt to, and is thus subject to the reader’s good faith. Putting it somewhat bluntly: one either believes in the claims made in the book, or one does not; if one does not, then it holds no authority. But more importantly, Satan thinks that if anyone were to treat The Satanic Bible as gospel truth and declared that the book contained the truth by its mere status as a bible, everyone would recognize the brainlessly religious nature of the Bible-thumpers of a certain religion that shall remain unnamed here. The Church of Satan can justifiably contend that it is the only organization that has any noteworthy (and, indeed, prominent) scripture but any reference to religious scripture as a source of truth is frowned upon across the entire Satanic milieu and is bound to backfire.

A short-lived group that named itself The Satanic Reds has a history that traces back to an early 1970s group of occultists in Florida which included a Church of Satan clergy. Satan is not overly interested in the now defunct group but wishes to mention where it derived its authority, because it added a step-up to Anton LaVey’s strategy of creating an alternate past.

Like Anton LaVey, the group featured no prominent scholars or other means of standing out as a natural source of the truth. But, somewhere during the occult studies, the group believed to have identified an occult tradition that had been upheld in secret societies through millennia. Widely different cultures in different ages seemed to have maintained a steady interpretation of the Universe and our role in it. An introduction to any specifics is far beyond the scope here so suffice to say that the technical term is syncretism. Satan prefers layman’s terms where syncretism means establishing a credo by picking what you believe is similar from entirely independent and dissimilar traditions while ignoring everything in those traditions that speak against your observations. This credo, named the dark doctrines, provided the group with the authority of research. They had identified the “roots of Satanism” and could now speak with authority on the latter.

Two of the members of the Florida-based group began to construct a past that was less flamboyant and wide-ranging than Anton LaVey’s and instead strongly focused on belonging to the dark tradition that they had identified. They claimed to have been formally initiated and accepted into this tradition, and one of them even claimed to stem from a family of generational Satanists. If Anton LaVey was born a natural Satanist by accident, these two were Satanists by birthright and could speak with both the authority of their research and the authority of their “Satanic culture.” They were eventually awarded magistrate degrees in The Church of Satan, and Peter Gilmore drew on their findings, as scientifically non-proof as they might be.

The much younger noteworthy organization, The Satanic Temple, is no easier off than any of the above but also denies magical or other metaphysical appeal to authority. Lucien Greaves, the leader of The Satanic Temple, boasts a Harvard degree in neuroscience, and while this is no small accomplishment (if true), a neuroscientist cannot be expected to offer any particular insight into Satanism. Lucien Greaves does feature a somewhat villainous look owing to his scarred right eye that may cajole some emotionally inclined individuals into projecting demonic qualities onto him, but that is about all. Satan knows the background and while the Devil respects Lucien Greaves’ wish to not discuss the incident in any detail, Satan regrets to inform His minions that nothing diabolical occurred. It may be worth mentioning that Lucien Greaves breaks tradition by avoiding to make claims about his background and by avoiding to pretend that his made-up name is genuine. The impression of personal integrity usually helps boost one’s authority but Satan is unable to determine how much it matters in Lucien Greaves’ case.

The Satanic Temple instead draws its authority from several sources. Firstly, it exists. So do The Church of Satan and The Temple of Set, of course, but unlike them The Satanic Temple has proven itself capable in the real world by showcasing tangible results, most prominently in the shape of its infamous Baphomet statue and its legal campaigns that result in significant media coverage. The Satanic Temple manages to demonstrate that it is more than a web site and a Twitter account. (The Church of Satan had the “Black House” in San Francisco but it served as a semi-official building only in the very early years of the organization, and consequently did little to communicate organizational thrust once its use as an organizational asset was discontinued. In fact, Satan thinks The Church of Satan exposed its impotence when it was unable to raise funds to keep the house, which was demolished in 2001.) It is not surprising that movie director Penny Lane caught interest in The Satanic Temple for her documentary movie Hail Satan? (2019), not The Church of Satan. The latter has Satanis: The Devil’s Mass (1970), which is tacky and obviously outdated, and Inside the Church of Satan (2010), which Satan considers toe (or hoof) curlingly embarassing and telltale of a diminished group of personal friends.

Secondly, might is right, and The Satanic Temple displays strength in numbers. The Church of Satan may have been advantaged by the Internet lately but as late as 2004, Peter Gilmore reported less than 10,000 members globally. Satan is not certain whether The Satanic Temple has that many members but the number of local chapters gives an impression of a thriving and spreading organization. It would be unfair at this stage to compare The Church of Satan’s pre-Internet age grotto count with the number of chapters in The Satanic Temple after the Internet revolution but The Church of Satan’s decision to abandon its grotto system makes Satan’s church less visible. The Satanic Temple has become a dominant mass on the statistical map, and this lends natural authority to the organization.

Thirdly, humanism is an already established ideology if not altogether well-defined. The Satanic Temple’s tenets are readily recognizable as identical or highly compatible with most humanist movements. This can—and Satan thinks maybe it should—be used as an argument against The Satanic Temple being a Satanic organization instead of just yet another humanist group, but it enables The Satanic Temple to draw on an established train of thought: they offer the aesthetics of horns and cloven hooves to a known ideology, and recognition is authoritative. This may be considered shallow but it works; it is the authority to define truth that is pursued not, regrettably, truth itself.

Fourthly, The Satanic Temple borrows its authority to define Satanism from historical literature. The Satanic Temple refers to itself as “romantic Satanism” and provides a reading list containing Romantic period (give or take a century or two) authors who paid homage to the Devil one way or another. The syncretic pitfall mentioned earlier notwithstanding, Satan is a modernist who demands change and thinks poorly of romantic rumination but is aware of the market a for medieval items and museum replicas. As the fashion trend in The Satanic Temple strikes the Devil as the “goth” look, He expects that some with slightly warped romantic inclinations will feel that the organization’s references to “romantic Satanism” has some merit.

Finally and fifthly, The Satanic Temple is a real life example of one who embraces the Devil’s role in society as the accuser against those who believe themselves to be at all times good. The Satanic Temple uses both outrage, mockery, and legal actions as it applies my Master’s tools. Satan does not wish to depreciate the aforementioned four appeals to authority but prefers this last one. It is the only decidedly demonic aspect of The Satanic Temple’s uses of authority although humanism, too, is sometimes decried as the work of the Devil in some circles of society.

Satan wishes to conclude by stating that there is no answer book on Satanism or any other ideology. Sense and meaning can be drawn from definitions and interpretations that are known to be falsehoods. Satan only asks that His followers keep a cool head and never believe they have discovered a universal and objective truth, and to always beware of the credentials of those who declare themselves experts.