Charlatan. Clown. Carnival barker. Post-modern philosopher. Extreme individualist. Anton Szandor LaVey, the “Black Pope” of the Church of Satan, was all that and more, and there isn’t much you can call him that he wouldn’t have proudly called himself. 

LaVey remains an icon for spelunkers of the dark caverns of their own psyches and the collective unconscious at large. Although he’s been repeatedly and thoroughly canceled and the movement he created has fragmented into mutually hostile splinter sects, there remains much of value in that ol’ time Satanic religion that will likely not be replaced.

LaVey’s deep cynicism about human nature came form his experiences in mid-century San Francisco as a crime-scene photographer and an organ grinder for carnivals and burlesque shows. He recognized the hazards and limitations of the hippie counterculture and created an alternative that did not pine for a better world, but rather celebrated the inflamed instincts, moon-howling lust, and animalistic debauchery inherit to the human experience. It also presented a unique and highly specific ethical system that empowered his followers to honor their darkness without becoming enslaved to it through addictions and other such unmanageable hypocrisies.

When I was ten, I didn’t want to go to swimming lessons, so I prayed for rain – and wouldn’t you know it, there it was. Because my world was rather small at the time, I credited the Christian God for this intervention and became a hardcore Christian right up until I realized He had no intention of helping me get laid. 

Really, way before that – as soon as I had the courage and resources to actually think for myself – the damage had been done. When I discovered that Santa Claus was bullshit, the rest of the dominoes came down in quick succession, and I was left with a sense that I would drown in America’s grimy ideological soup if I didn’t learn to swim.

America was founded on the idea of freedom of thought, after which it immediately went to work curtailing any sort of though that might pose a threat to its ruling class. Satanism arose in opposition to Christianity because there’s no way for any new belief system to gain traction in America if it is not in some way in dialogue with Christianity, because Christianity – not the mystical bullshit, but the core set of assumptions and ideas about the human experience – is fucking everywhere.

Cultural Christianity remains thoroughly baked into nearly every major aspect of American life, which is a problem for me because I think Christianity sucks wet ass. If you asked me for advice on how to deal with any problem, the last thing I’d say was, “Why don’t you declare moral bankruptcy, turn it over to your imaginary friend, and hope for the best?” 

In the LaVeyan conception, Satan is not a real force in the universe, but rather a cheerleader and hypeman for the forces in our hearts that Christianity demands we forsake or deny. Enjoy what you will is the whole of the law, so long as you’re willing to accept responsibility for that enjoyment and its attendant actions. No one’s going to save you, but no one’s going to stop you, either.

There is no Platonic perfection in nature or anywhere else except in our sacred texts and the poor, fevered self-torture devices in our heads. The freedom to indulge the senses brings with it the responsibility to examine their attendant darker motives with unflinching realism – and my hunch is that, if you are ridden with guilt and shame, that will do you a hell of a lot more good than being forgiven.

For an unflinching realist, LaVey did a lot of questionable shit. He lied about many aspects of his biography that didn’t jibe with the public persona he’d created. His most famous book, The Satanic Bible, is a dizzying, defiantly messy bricolage that, among other “sins,” lifts heavily from the social Darwinist author Ragnar Redbeard.

When accused of anti-semitism, LaVey wrote a later piece explaining why Jews were, in a sense, the original Satanists. He also thought he could tell which partner in a couple held the most power based on which sides of the bed they slept on, and that blowing your nose is a more dominant behavior than inhaling and swallowing the snot. He was probably right about the last thing. And he was onto something when he suggested that much of modern life is thinly veiled sexual sublimation.

In short, LaVey torched America’s standard-issue hypocrites and then substituted his own, which he found far more practical. To his credit, he never asked for forgiveness.

As for his admittedly ridiculous public presentation. LaVey always insisted that ceremonial rituals and eye-catching aesthetics were hardwired necessities of the human psyche, and he didn’t expect to win converts by putting them to sleep. And, although he didn’t always use it to achieve ends you or I might find palatable, he understood a whole hell of a lot about power that remains taboo – which, as any self-aware practitioner knows, is one way to give an idea a hell of a lot more power.

Power – like sex, food, and amusement – is a perfectly normal thing to want. It’s the ability to make your beliefs manifest in the world. If you have no power, it doesn’t really matter what you believe – you have no way of putting it into action, which means you can claim any old beliefs you want without ever having to put your money where your mouth is. To make good things happen, you need power, which means that, in a sense, power itself is good – or rather, to crib from Nietzsche, “beyond good and evil” – and your lust for power is nothing to be ashamed of.

Once established, power generally hates competition and loves monopolies, but no one has a monopoly on truth, not even Anton LaVey. That’s why I founded The First Chuch of the Satanic Buddha, a hybrid faith that encourages sensory indulgence while accepting that it’s all ultimately a crushing disappointment, at least until you can untangle experience and ego, which, good fucking luck.

I also recommend Venkatesh Rao’s Be Slightly Evil, a Machiavellian strategy guide for those of us who want to become just sociopathic enough to keep the true sociopaths from establishing a permanent monopoly on what is commonly regarded as truth.

Whatever. You are not broken, or even especially flawed – the perfection you’ve been trained to compare yourself to does not, and cannot, exist in nature. This, right here, is all you get, and you have the right, if not the responsibility, to indulge your desires… in a way that also helps create the sort of world you can see yourself living in. You may be a piece of shit in the eyes of your make-believe God, but the make-believe devil loves you all the more for it. When you hail Satan, you hail yourself.

If you are beastmaster-curious but old-timey LaVeyan Satanism is too rich for your blood, you could try the Temple of Set (Michael Aquino’s breakaway sect that has a much stronger stomach for woo-woo mystical bullshit) or the Satanic Temple, which advocates through elaborate trolling for its left-wing positions on various social justice issues, including clever flexing of its FIrst Amendment rights and material aid to women seeking abortions. But for god’s sake, make sure you get your Satanism somewhere.

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