Back in the 1980s, there were two books my friends had that they would leave out for people to see. One was The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell. The other was The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey. Nobody took these books seriously. They were just for show and as far as I know, no one from back then ever used the former book to build any bombs although I do know a couple people who took the book’s advice and tried smoking banana peels. Don’t bother. The bombs don’t work and neither do the banana peels. Regarding the latter book, I also don’t know anybody who read it who became a Satanist, although I do know some who got into Wicca but that had nothing to do with The Satanic Bible. In fact, I’d say The Satanic Bible amounted to little more than bathroom reading. If you dug into the pile of dirty magazines stashed under some guys’ sinks you might find a copy and having a good read while doing what all humans do at the end point of their digestive systems.
Believe it or not, some people really do care about the biography of the Church of Satan’s founding father. The Secret Life Of a Satanist by Blanche Barton theoretically fulfills that need. There are better sources for legitimate information though.
This authorized biography starts out with lies and half truths about Anton LaVey’s ancestry and childhood. He was born in the 1930s to parents he claimed to be of Romani and Jewish heritage, having grandparents who emigrated from Transylvania, Romania. They were actually exclusively Ukrainian Jews according to immigration records. There isn’t a whole lot said about his upbringing except that he got bullied by his classmates and, according to him, it was because he was hung like a horse and they were jealous. Reading between the lines, I get more of a sense that they beat him up for acting like he was better than everybody else. Guys who carry the biggest baseball bats don’t ordinarily talk about it and those that do are usually just insecure. In any case, this pobrecito had a lonely childhood. In his teenage years, he had a striking appearance, not exactly handsome, but striking and photogenic. He liked wearing zoot suits and I can imagine people used to tell him he looked like the Devil which is something he probably took a little too close to heart.
The story gets interesting as he learns to play the organ, lives the life of a carny, and works for the Clyde Beatty circus as a lion tamer. I’m a real sucker for stories about carnies and circuses, but then I was sad to learn from other sources that the Clyde Beatty circus has no records of LaVey ever having been employed by them. The same can be said for other jobs he claimed to have had like being a crime scene photographer for the San Francisco police department, a psychic detective, and an organ player for the San Francisco ballet. Regardless of his dishonesty, LaVey says one significant thing about being a psychic investigator: people willingly want to be deceived. People sincerely want to believe their house is haunted when in reality the eerie moaning sound they hear is nothing but wind blowing through a small crack in an attic window. This insight is all you need to know to understand where Anton LaVey was coming from.
The book continues on with more lies. LaVey tells stories about a love affair with Marilyn Monroe, something which has been denied by people who knew both LaVey and Monroe. He claims to have had an affair with Jayne Mansfield which is a half truth. LaVey says she was in love with him but others say she thought he was a dork and she liked to tease him so she could laugh behind his back. Oh the cruelty of women. The interesting part of this story is that LaVey claims to have accidentally killed her. He says he put a curse on her jealous husband and then while cutting a clipping out of a newspaper, he accidentally cut through a photograph of her on the other side. The slice went through her neck and then she died in a car crash. You can believe that if you want, but beliefs aren’t facts. Besides, autopsy reports show that Jayne Mansfield’s head was not severed from her body in the car crash as many people believe. That was simply a rumor that spread after she died.
In Barton’s version of the founding of the Church of Satan in San Francisco in the 1960s. LaVey was making a living by giving lectures about dark subjects in the living room of his house which he painted black and kept a pet lion in. Since this attracted all kinds of eccentrics he came up with the idea of starting the world’s first Satanic church and began performing rituals involving pentagrams and nude women on altars for audiences. The media got excited about all this and drew the attention of hippies and other counter culturalists who LaVey despised. He also attracted a few people who were more sincere and possibly more clever than he was; when they challenged his leadership, he was unable to maintain control over the church and excommunicated them. Many went on to form their own cults and LaVey wrote them off as fakes. In reality, this exposed his weakness as a leader so he became a recluse and had minimal contact with other Satanists throughout the rest of his life. His daughter Zeena Schreck says he did little else at this time in his life besides lying around in his living room and barking out orders to his wife who kept the Church of Satan running mostly on her own. She divorced him in the 1980s which drove LaVey into bankruptcy. I guess his curses and spells couldn’t prevent that from happening.
The first half of this biography is a somewhat interesting story even if it buried under a half ton of bullshit. The second half isn’t so much of a biography as it is Anton LaVey making an awkward attempt at explaining his “philosophy”. I use the word “philosophy” loosely because there is no structure or well-thought out stances in it. It is more a rambling collection of thoughts and ideas that don’t add up to anything definite.
LaVey had some odd ideas. He believed trapezoids could be used to bring demons into our dimension from who knows where. These demons are like the monsters in H.P. Lovecraft stories. Never mind that Lovecraft wrote fiction and never tried to convince anybody otherwise. LaVey talked about what kinds of music and movies are sufficiently satanic for him. I’m not sure how Irving Berlin or Cole Porter were satanic; I guess he heard something there that the rest of us don’t. Although he believed in right wing politics, authoritarianism, and eugenics, he also didn’t like racism, censorship, or homophobia. Science fiction movies and TV shows are meant to program people to live in outer space and in the future, people will mostly have social and sexual relationships with androids. Isn’t this a somewhat accurate prediction of AI? Despite being a quasi-fascist ideologue, LaVey shared some views with counter-culturalists like a hatred of TV, a dislike of consumer culture and the soulless, mechanical lifestyles of mainstream Americans who do little more than work, sleep, and then go to work again. How any of this is a satanic philosophy, I don’t know. It’s just satanic because it’s what he thought and that’s all there is to it.
Speaking of androids and soullessness, Anton LaVey’s main hobby, aside from performing satanic rituals, was building androids which the rest of us would call “mannequins”. He talked about himself as if he was a modern incarnation of Michelangelo sculpting statues in his basement. But really he was just a guy making mannequins and dressing them up. He put all his androids on display in a speakeasy scene in his cellar. I admit it might be an interesting installment piece to see, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to find it. I guess these androids make a good substitute for the friends he didn’t have. At least they wouldn’t challenge his authority or talk back when he was being a dick the way real people would. Female mannequins never say no either so he could always get what he wanted from them. You’d think a guy who claimed to be the John Holmes of the San Francisco occult scene would have had a better sex life than that.
LaVey admits near the end of the book that he is nostalgic, particularly for the years prior to World War II. The way I see him now is that as a kid, he was fascinated by the world of adults and probably fantasized about what he would do when he came of age. Then he suffered an unremarkable adolescence in the blandly conformist restraint of the 1950s, invented a fabulist biography to cover it up, tried to get in on the counter-culture scene of the 1960s by starting a satanic cult but didn’t approve of the kinds of people he attracted. So he dropped out of society to be a solitary king in the castle of his house, a replica of the life he imagined adults having when he was a child, never growing up and ruling over a court of mannequins while peddling Church of Satan merchandise to pay the rent. Anton LaVey reminds me a lot of Jean des Esseintes, the eccentric aesthete in J.K. Huysmans’ novel Against Nature who can’t handle living among the nobodies of the real world and so retreats into the isolation of his chateau. I find a certain kind of appeal in living that way but it is undercut by a certain kind of cowardice and social incompetence too.
Anton LaVey always said that being satanic meant embracing the role of adversary. I’m not sure what he was adverse to or why he rejected it. It can’t simply be Christianity. Although he pointed out some of the hypocrisy in its followers, like the way Christians go to burlesque shows on Saturday night and then show up at church on Sunday, he didn’t display enough of an understanding of Christian theology to truly be against it. Was he an adversary to the entire world? That’s just too vague to be valid. His attitude was like a blind, knee jerk reaction to life without any depth of understanding behind it. LaVey tried to make himself look menacing and powerful, but he sounded more like a sloppy drunk sitting next to me in a bar, babbling about whatever came into his mind. Since I admit I like hearing from and reading about weird people, some of this is amusing but none of it is anything I can take seriously. The Secret Life Of a Satanist didn’t convince me to join the Church of Satan or any other cult. I’ve always thought Anton Szandor LaVey was a dork and this biography further confirmed that opinion. He’s like a strange guy at a party that takes his own oddity seriously when in reality, people just like having him around for the freaky kicks.
Anton LaVey claimed P.T. Barnum as an influence and so I will leave you with two paraphrases from that iconic American con man. People don’t mind being ripped off if they have fun in the process of being cheated. There’s a sucker born every minute. And that’s all you need to know to understand Anton LaVey.
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