The Secret Life of a Satanist By Blanche Barton Introduction What Manner of Man is This? One couldn't dream of a more diabolical-looking man. With his head shaven in the tradition of carnival strong men, and a black, Mephistophelean beard tracing up thinly around his lips, Anton LaVey's appearance is decidedly barbaric. His amber eyes look more leonine than human. The small gold ring in his left ear conjures childhood images of gypsies and pirates. Many would see him as their nightmarish vision of the Devil himself. My impression of Anton LaVey matured slowly, over a period of some 10 years before I ever met him. My father (a dyed- in-the-wool Satanist if ever there was one, though he emphatically denies any theistic label) raised me on generous portions of Kipling and London, with enough Robert Louis Stevenson thrown in to instill me with an early fascination with the hidden and the fantastic. By the age of 13, I was already a jaded occult connoisseur. I pored over all available magical texts ancient and modern, from Albertus Magnus to Diary of a Witch, and could feel only disdain at their flaccid meanderings. It's not surprising then that for a long time I resisted reading The Satanic Bible, saving myself from certain frustration. During my sexually and intellectually seething adolescence, I had my own ideas about Satan -- thoughts that surely no living soul could understand but me. I was wrong. When I finally cracked open LaVey's now-infamous book, I felt a thrill of satisfaction. There were others like me out there, and they called themselves Satanists. I read Burton Wolfe's The Devil's Avenger to find out whether this strange, bald-headed man wasn't just posturing -- mouthing-off from a cloistered tower, play-acting his cynicism. But knowing more about LaVey only made me more curious for answers to my questions. The High Priest of the Church of Satan doesn't look much different than he did in 1967, when he burst into international prominence by performing the world's first public wedding. With so few new photographs released during LaVey's ten-year media hiatus (roughly from 1976-1986), I can be forgiven for expecting to see a paunchy, balding, good-natured fellow by the time we finally met. LaVey is not paunchy, nor is he good-natured. The intervening years have served to accentuate the angles of his face, making him look more severe than ever. He is also more cynical, bitterly misanthropic, and violently determined in his role as founder of the Church of Satan. This book attempts to peek into the world of a heretic. Not a cardboard devil or the comfortably menacing fiction that religionists have, for centuries, earned their living denouncing from every pulpit. If LaVey were a cooperative scapegoat, he would be an inarticulate, posturing dilettante who could be trotted out on talk shows, righteously set upon and vanquished. He has not obliged. Nor is he a pretentious self-proclaimed evocateur who can be safely snickered at for spouting what he claims to be the Dark Prince's given word. Anton LaVey is a complex, and in many ways a frighteningly deceptive man. "No one in the world is more justified in being cynical and bitter than me," says LaVey. "Everyday I think less and less of what others are going to think." It's this "justifiable bitterness" that spurs expressions of biography, LaVey has become increasingly reclusive and fiercely protective of what he has achieved. He prefers to limit companionship to that of his daughters, a few close, Cerberean friends and professional associates. After finally being granted an initial interview with LaVey in 1984, it became clear to me that if I wanted to more thoroughly explore this Black Magician's heart and mind, I would have to become woven into the fabric of his everyday life. And so I did. He needed a Girl Friday and seemed satisfied with my enthusiastic determination. Over time, it became my role to arrange interviews with reporters, students and members; iron out travel itineraries; generate informational literature; handle correspondence; straw boss; and generally keep complications to as dull a roar as possible. Along the way, I watched, I listened. To Stories, jokes, long-neglected tunes, movies that contained the germs of LaVeyan Satanism. And, as unobtrusively as possible, I began to take notes. Upon first meeting Anton LaVey, many are disarmed by his good-natured wit, extraordinary talent and almost self- deprecating manner. Those who have the opportunity to be around him for any length of time eventually see a seething, brutal side to LaVey. There is, at times, an almost unbearable oppressiveness to his intolerance and anger. Here is a man who can spend hours delighting in playing forgotten songs, or playing with an animal, yet will become monstrously callous when he feels the need. LaVey is idealistically against hunting and would be the first person to stop to help an injured animal along the road, yet put a nickel in him and he will enthusiastically advocate putting a bounty on selected humans. He speaks with such fervor one doesn't need to question his sincerity. LaVey can appear infirm one minute and possessed of a madman's supernatural strength the next. Well-trained in firearms and judo, I've seen him deal swiftly and savagely with rowdies who have dared to approach him. On the pistol range, I once made the mistake of bringing up a subject I knew produced a violent reaction in LaVey. Answering my question with barely controlled rage, he hit a perfect bull's eye 200 feet away. He prefers to work his 14-foot bullwhip to siphon off pent-up aggressions, snapping the end off a cigarette just as skillfully as he did when he learned fancy whip cracking from Col. Tim McCoy 40 years ago. With all the elements of daring, mystery and intrigue, Anton LaVey seems less like the neurotic, cramped contemporary than an imposing, complex fictional character out of the pages of Jack London or Somerset Maugham. The idea behind starting the Church of Satan was not to gain millions of dependant souls who needed activities and organized weekly meetings to keep them involved. LaVey started an organization for non-joiners, the alienated few who felt disenfranchised because of their independence, and who pridefully adopted Satan, the original rebel, as their patron. LaVey wanted to make Christianity, which he sees as fostering stupidity and dull complacency, obsolete. The gulf between our social evolution and our scientific and technological advances was getting dangerously vast. LaVey wanted to give us tools for a revolution against artificial "morality" before the intellectual cramping became fatal for us all. In Satanism, Anton LaVey provided Christianity's coup de grace. Yet despite his influence, LaVey, for the most part, has been ignored by the avatars of our media-centric culture. Visit the "New Age" section of you nearest bookstore. You'll see the entrepreneurs who have taken up LaVeyan ideas, slapping a more palatable name on them to their critical and literally "Satanic" influences in the modern world, plainly drawing from LaVey's philosophy, routinely give not so much credit as a notation in their in their bibliography. And then there are Johnny-come- lately pseudo-Satanic groups, some claiming to have taken over where the Church of Satan left off," but most, as LaVey says, still afraid of the dreaded "S" word. You can't avoid seeing, on book racks or on talk show panels, an impressive range of Satanic "experts" (usually claiming affiliations with law enforcement, academia, or counseling centers) who adroitly spin their heads around avoiding confrontations with real Satanism. Christian alarmists tremblingly hold aloft tattered copies of The Satanic Bible into the eyes of television cameras while muttering inane and unsupported balderdash about bloody sacrifices and unspeakable crimes against children. Knowing Anton LaVey as long as I have, my mind whispers a question: is ate a pro-Satanic backlash? At these times I get the idea Anton LaVey must be the most dangerous man in the world. The outsider, the alien, will always receive a meager amount of credit. LaVey knows that's an inevitable consequence of being an accuser -- people don't like to hear what you have to say. Still, maybe we're due for a renaissance of the brutal, principled film noir anti-hero. In this new Satanic world of his own making -- expect that the Devil will get his due. Chapter One Satanists Are Born, Not Made If the Gods have any sense of the dramatic, it should have been a dark and stormy night on April 11th, 1930—the night Anton LaVey was born. Somewhat prophetically assigned by birth the sign of Aries (symbolized by the horned ram), Anton LaVey is a mixture of French, Alsatian, German, Russian and Rumanian stock. Even at birth, his overabundance of silky black hair and strange amber eyes hinted at his Mongolian heritage and his Gypsy blood. Throughout his life he has been mistaken for a Latino, Prussian, even an Oriental, because of this unusual blending. Though born in Chicago in the shadow of where the black, trapezoidal-shaped John Hancock Building now stands, his parents relocated to the San Francisco Bay area soon after his birth. Tony, as he would be known in his younger years, spent much of his boyhood in adjacent towns, where he had the freedom to explore the ranging, undeveloped swamplands that have since been developed into tract homes and shopping malls.