Interview With a Satanist

For the third installment of the Interview series, I sat down and had a nice chat with a Satanist friend of mine: 

When did you first become involved with the CoS?

My first exposure to it was actually when I was 12. I was at a bookstore and I opened Anton LaVey’s autobiography and I saw him cavorting with a naked woman. I thought that was really cool. I always had an interest in it, but being very young I didn’t have the opportunity to learn more about it until about a year later, after I read in Time Magazine that he died in 1997. I got my hands on the Satanic Bible and read it, then I became involved in an online message board called Letters to the Devil. That was the official/unofficial CoS message board, and a number of prominent members including the High Priestess used to post on there regularly. When I was 19, I officially joined the church and I am technically still a member, although I am no longer deeply involved.

Does the church worship the literal depiction of Satan as he appears in the christian bible?

They don’t literally believe in Satan; they’re atheists, although there is some overlap with belief in the occult and the paranormal. LaVey talks about rituals a lot in his book, but Satan is intended to be a representation of rebellion, indulgence, and free thought rather than an actual entity.

What can you tell me about Anton LaVey?

He was born in 1930 and died in 1997. He was a well-known figure in the counterculture in San Francisco in the late sixties. He embellished a lot of details about his life, such as a claim that he dated Marilyn Monroe, but he did have an interesting life. He worked as a crime scene photographer, allegedly worked as a lion tamer (records are spotty on this), and was a professional organist. He started the CoS in the late sixties and wrote the Satanic Bible and several other books, which became this cultural phenomenon. In the late seventies, he became something of a recluse in his San Francisco home, but he still had visitors, famously including including King Diamond and Marilyn Manson. Kurt Cobain was interested in him, but they never met. Some have said that LaVey renounced Satanism on his deathbed, but that is not true; nobody who was there when he died reported any such thing.

A man named Michael Aquino, who left the CoS in 1975 and formed his own rival Satanic group called the Temple of Set, wrote a detailed book about his time around LaVey that debunked a lot of LaVey’s proclamations about himself. Aquino himself was/is a bit of a kook and his obsession with LaVey was quite odd, but he did a valuable work showing who LaVey was behind the image he created for his followers, even digging into his childhood. You can read it here:

https://zalbarath666.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/michael-a-aquino-church-of-satan.pdf

I would also recommend a 1991 Rolling Stone article by Lawrence Wright, who spent time around LaVey:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/anton-levey-interview-1235074429/

 

 

In 2020 some FBI declassified documents revealed that two FBI agents visited LaVey in 1980 after receiving a bogus tip that he was involved in an assassination plot against Ted Kennedy. The agents recorded that in the interview, LaVey said that he viewed his followers as “fanatics, cultists and weirdos,” and that his interest in the Church of Satan was “strictly monetary.” So in the end, it seemed even he didn’t believe his own grift:

https://www.cultnews101.com/2020/01/satan-fbi-mob-and-forgotten-plot-to.html

Have you ever participated in a Satanic ritual?

Yes. I used to do them myself occasionally and I was in attendance at the CoS official Satanic Mass on June 6, 2006 in L.A. I had a friend in the church who passed away a year later and I was involved in his Satanic funeral.

What is the difference between the Church of Satan and The Satanic Temple?

The Satanic Temple was founded later, in 2013. They have a different set of tenets about how justice and consent are important; in my opinion their beliefs are intentionally written to be so anodyne so that most anyone can agree with them.

They don’t use the image of Satan as much of a figurehead, it seems more that they adapted it purely for shock value.

They also seem to have more in the way of resources; I’ve been to their headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts, and it is a beautiful old Victorian home with a museum and everything. They are also very involved in political organizing and public demonstrations, unlike the CoS.

The two belief systems are definitely rivals and they don’t have anything good to say about each other; TST mocks some of LaVey’s more unusual proclamations (like a man’s preference of salad dressing being indicative of his masculinity level), while the CoS accuses TST of being a cynical grift operation that has nothing to do with Satanism, and of deliberately creating confusion about the two organizations.

You can find the CoS statement about TST on the CoS website:

https://churchofsatan.com/the-satanic-temple-fact-sheet/

 

Is there anything else about the church you believe people should know?

Nowadays there is a moral panic that has roots in the Satanic Panic of the eighties, in this Qanon baloney that there is  a whole ring of Satanic child abusers led by Hillary Clinton. But actual Satanists aren’t some elite cadre of monolithic group of monsters who hurt innocent children, they’re humans like anyone else; I’ve met satanists who are successful professionals as well as basement-dwelling incels. So if you’re going to publicly call yourself a Satanist, you have to be okay with that kind of baggage.

 I don’t consider myself an active, practicing Satanist as such anymore, but I met friends through the church and we remain friends to this day.You meet cool Satanists and asshole Satanists, just as with any other tribe.

Along with the CoS and TST websites and the articles I’ve linked, here are some documentaries I would point people to:

An American Satan (2019 documentary on the CoS:

https://link.tubi.tv/OADb5YrOuXb

Hail Satan? (2019 documentary on TST):

https://link.tubi.tv/z4PEAFfSuXb

Speak of the Devil (1993 documentary on Anton LaVey):

https://youtu.be/NxFgOavCJ54?si=rbLIuh2Fv3ZN8dsN