In the Year of Our Lord 2004, in the Borders bookstore at the local mall, I picked up Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible. I was thirteen, and I bet the pentagram on the cover would upset my mom. Until that point, I had been steeped in the Christian account of the cosmos, and I wanted to know what other people thought was really out there. Did we have it right?
I put The Satanic Bible back on the shelf after a couple chapters. It didn’t have much to say about the cosmos; the LaVeyan Satanists didn’t even believe in a real devil, much to my disappointment. They seemed mostly to believe in themselves—their own powers and ambitions—as well as the imperative of self-preservation.
In Born with a Tail: The Devilish Life and Wicked Times of Anton Szandor LaVey, journalist Doug Brod catalogs exactly how much LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, believed in himself. “The Black Pope,” as he came to be known, was a born showman, a charismatic speaker, a talented organist, and a wildly creative thinker, a man with no inhibitions when it came to embellishing his life story and fabricating his own mythos. He applied the same inventiveness to Satanism—a belief system and set of rituals he patched together on the fly—and he sold it with flair. But LaVey became the public face of a movement that rejected Christianity and asserted something else in its place, a combination of epicureanism, Nietzschean nihilism, and social Darwinism, occasionally bordering on fascism. It wasn’t always clear, as one reporter put it, if he ever “crossed the line into believing his own bullshit.” Sporting a villainous beard, a priest’s robes, and the sigil of Baphomet, he looked spooky, and sometimes a little hokey. But once in a while, as he pronounced on the hypocrisies of Christians, he could make a halfway decent point.
Anton Szandor LaVey was born Howard Stanton Levey on April 11, 1930, to a Jewish family in Chicago. It is unlikely that he was born with a caudal appendage—a devil’s tail—as he consistently claimed throughout his life. Brod writes that he gave himself his “florid, abracadabran” name as a teenager. He loved to read horror classics like Dracula and Frankenstein as well as pulp magazines, including Weird Tales, which published the work of writers like H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. The picture that emerges is of a kid who was bored with and even disdainful of normal life from an early age, yearning instead for the macabre and forbidden.
LaVey claimed that his Satanic epiphany came about when he snuck into a burlesque show and a friend saw his Sunday-school teacher among the dancers. “I knew that the Christian Church thrives on hypocrisy,” he later said, “and that man’s carnal nature will out no matter how much is purged or scourged by any white-light religion.” He dropped out of high school during his junior year, playing the organ at tent revivals and eventually joining the circus, where he later claimed to have become a lion-tamer. He was purportedly a crime-scene photographer for San Francisco Police Department, for which there is no record.
LaVey and his partner Diane purchased a home at 6114 California Street in San Francisco, which would come to be known as the Black House, where the Church of Satan would have its first meetings. Trap doors, trick bookcases, a human skeleton, taxidermied animals, creepy art, guns, a pet lion—all things weird, dangerous, and macabre were welcome, the collection “a monument to one man’s obsessive aesthetic, leavened with his particular gallows humor.” Soon, a few local eccentrics were showing up for LaVey’s Magic Circle, a kind of “occult salon” he hosted at the house.
On Walpurgisnacht—the Germanic feast associated with witches—1966, LaVey declared the foundation of the Church of Satan, which “rejected the Holy Trinity and its proscriptions and instead allowed its congregants to indulge in their lust for life,” as Brod puts it. LaVey declared 1966 Anno Satanas, Year One on the Satanic calendar. He set up a loose collection of local churches throughout the country, what he called “grottoes,” to reach people beyond San Francisco.
LaVey was clear from the beginning that he and his church did not believe in a literal Satan, even though the red, pitchfork-wielding demon was painted on the wall of the Black House’s kitchen. “Rather, it was the idea of one—a metaphorical tempter wielding a more seductive and gratifying portfolio than the guilt-inducing Other Guy” that Satanists would channel.
What did this look like in practice? In the early days, LaVey held the church’s rituals in his dark living room, “illuminated by electric-candle sconces” and containing “a Yamaha organ, an upright coffin, a gong the size of a garbage can lid, and a wooden sleigh chair he claimed once belonged to Rasputin.” He would lead the church members, mostly white professionals in their late twenties to early forties, in over-the-top blasphemous rituals meant to “un-Christianize” them. Congregants wore pentagrams; in their telling, the two points at the top symbolized the “duality that sustains natural processes,” while the bottom three points were a rejection of the Trinity. Often, a nude woman would offer her body for use as the ritual altar. According to a former member’s account of a particular evening’s ritual, LaVey began with the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer backwards. The altar and several congregants engaged in a sacrilegious sex act (that I won’t describe here), whipped each other with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and pretended to defecate on a man dressed as the pope. The evening ended with a total rejection of Jesus, whom LaVey pronounces a “pallid monstrosity that hangs limpid upon the Cross still.” Rituals would often include readings from whatever struck LaVey’s fancy—Lovecraft, Smith, the Enochian Keys—with some “Hail Satan”s thrown in for good measure.
LaVey argued that these rituals were meant to celebrate human lusts and appetites, embracing vitality rather than suppressing it, as he said Christianity did. Sometimes he got more mystical, expounding on the gathering and channeling of dark energy that the rituals achieved. But one gets the sense that he was totally making it up as he went—doing and saying whatever he thought would be most titillating and outrageous. (Once, when a reporter pushed him on the nature of evil, LaVey replied, “Look, I’m just trying to make the rent. I’m an atheist.”) The rituals may have been offensive, but they were also a little sad. For all the raucous blasphemy, the group was still beholden to Christian imagery (which had a particularly Catholic flavor), grabbing up symbols to corrupt in one great big “nuh-uh” to God. It’s offensive in the way that a teenager might try to offend.
Brod’s focus is more on the media history of LaVey’s life than the church’s practices or metaphysical claims, and he pieces together a fascinating story of the rise and fall of LaVey’s celebrity as well as the greater world of stars and scandals that he moved in.
LaVey brought the Church of Satan to the world’s attention with a publicity stunt: a hastily arranged staging of a “Satanic wedding,” produced entirely for the cameras. “We really pulled it off,” he told the groom, “and you can bet the rubes are gonna come back for more.” (The description of the events includes my favorite line from the book: “‘Nomine Satani Lucifer excelsis,’ [LaVey] chants in an accent of discordant origin, more Fargo twang than Hades bellow.”) The wedding made news all over the world, and LaVey alchemized the attention into a slot on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He was profiled by magazines and invited onto other talk shows, and even lectured at universities (including a Jesuit college—cue laughter).
LaVey ran with the era’s celebrities, some more notorious than others. He became close with film star Jayne Mansfield and capitalized on her untimely death by suggesting that he had accidentally put a curse on her. Sammy Davis Jr. joined the Church of Satan and became one of its earliest public supporters. In 1967, LaVey produced a ladies’ nude revue in San Francisco and cast as one of the show’s vampires a woman named Susan Atkins. Atkins went on to join the Manson family and kill Sharon Tate and her friends, writing “PIG” in Tate’s blood on the door of the house that she shared with her husband, Roman Polanski. LaVey was thrilled at the release of Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, a film that he praised for “presenting Satanism as something that existed among ordinary people.” He claimed to have been the actor behind the devil’s mask—one more item on his résumé that didn’t add up.
Brod’s narrative illustrates that, more than anything, LaVey seemed to love talking with people, famous or not, about whatever he was reading that week. He frequently gave talks and hosted conversations about all kinds of kooky things—ghosts and hauntings, funereal practices, human sacrifice, love potions, cryptozoology, sadomasochism, what shapes were the most accursed (the trapezoid, obviously). LaVey landed a couple book deals on these topics, including a lifestyle guide for women called The Compleat Witch (“I just took Cosmo and put a little Satanic flair to it,” his editor said). It was this genuine curiosity and openness—even when it was mixed with opportunism and a sprinkling of bullshit—that comes out in the interviews Brod conducted, and it seems to be what kept even the skeptics coming back to LaVey. One lecture attendee described LaVey’s style as “wry, as if to say we are hypocrites to condemn his act while we mutilate each other every day through war, rotten marriages, plots, and the rest of ‘modern life.’” This kind of appeal to disaffected Christians was a recurrent theme, especially in the Vietnam era.
LaVey and his Satanic brand sold well in the 1960s and ’70s, but by the 1980s, the act had run its course. As the Evangelical Right gained power, Satanism drew much more negative attention than it had before. Michelle Remembers, a book purporting to detail Satanic ritual abuse of children (later debunked), was released in 1980. Throughout the era of the Satanic Panic, secret messages from the devil were everywhere—in video games, Dungeons and Dragons, AC/DC lyrics—and the public started treating LaVey’s church less as an oddity and more as a threat. Bricks and bottles were thrown into the windows of the Black House, and LaVey put up barbed wire. He was soon holed up at home, playing the organ for whoever was willing to listen.
A few years later—the era of zines, grunge, and the skinhead culture that sometimes came with them—LaVey found a new crowd of admirers. LaVey had always been a social Darwinist, proudly declaring that it is right that the strong dominate the weak. He had played with the symbols of fascist or repressive regimes before—he kept a swastika and a Confederate flag in the Black House for their symbolic “power and aggression”—and, like any of today’s internet edgelords, couldn’t resist “wandering into you-gotta-hand-it-to-Hitler territory.” (On this, LaVey’s son Xerxes commented mildly, “I suppose the goal is to be as shocking as possible, but it is quite bizarre given my family’s heritage.”)
No one exemplified this nihilism better than Brian Hugh Warner, aka Marilyn Manson, who sent LaVey a demo tape and received an invitation to the Black House. Sharing a similar aesthetic as well as a deep allergy to American Christianity, the two became fast friends. As Manson put it, “We had both dedicated the better part of our lives to toppling Christianity with the weight of its own hypocrisy and as a result been used as scapegoats to justify Christianity’s existence.” He did not mince words about what he valued about Satanism: It’s “about finding your strengths and learning to use them. It’s about making money. It’s about the need to survive and succeed in a world full of idiots.”
LaVey died suddenly on October 29, 1997, of a pulmonary edema; through some infernal mixup, the date was originally listed on his death certificate as October 31. His estranged daughter, who founded a rival church, claimed to have put a curse on him. With no charismatic leader to shepherd the flock, church activity soon stalled.
Today, the Church of Satan mostly exists online, but it has inspired offshoots. The Satanic Temple in Salem, Massachusetts, for example, adopted much of LaVey’s beliefs while jettisoning the social Darwinism. It often gets attention for stunts like starting after-school “Satan clubs” in public schools to encourage the separation of church and state or declaring abortion the church’s sacred ritual to protect its legal status. But this all gets LaVey a little wrong—a man who at bottom wanted his friends to come over so they could fire up the organ and talk about weird shit.
“I will never die,” LaVey claimed on The Joe Pyne Show in 1967. “You won’t?” Pyne asks. “No, of course not. I’ve made arrangements.” The audience laughs, but LaVey keeps his composure. Maybe he’s joking, but maybe he isn’t. That’s the LaVey—totally ridiculous, totally confident—that keeps the rubes coming back for more.
Born with a Tail
The Devilish Life and Wicked Times of Anton Szandor LaVey, Founder of the Church of Satan
Doug Brod
Hachette Books
$31 | 368 pp.
