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~~Lord Larehip~~ · 12-24-2013, 09:00 PM

The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey
(Avon Books, 1969)

The most accessible Black Book to date and owned by just about every goth and metalhead in junior highs across America. To give some background, San Francisco was a wild and crazy place in the 60s and undoubtedly the mecca of the counter-culture and the underground. It started off as a kind of social experiment by certain freethinkers in the late 50s. These were largely people with college degrees in chemistry and physics and other sciences looking for an escape from their dreary 9-to-5 jobs and academic existences. Many practiced Eastern religions, American Indian religions, various philosophies, some started their own religions and many did mind-altering drugs in an effort to expand the human consciousness and they believed in free love.

The problem was that all sorts of others heard about it and set up shop in San Francisco. These included the dreary Christians who relabeled themselves “Jesus Freaks” and who dressed in counter-culture clothing but were really just the same old boring, repressive Christians that the founders of the social experiment wanted to escape from. High school dropouts and runaways flocked to Haight-Ashbury only to be recruited into cults, turned into prostitutes, or ended carted to a hospital after overdosing on some drug or other. Free love turned into free venereal disease.

By ’62, most of the founders were disappointed with the experiment and began to leave. Most were gone by ’64 and by ’65, none were left. Haight-Ashbury was now nothing but runaways, junkies and the worst kinds of hucksters imaginable. The 1967 so-called Summer of Love was a joke. The “hippy” had already been declared dead and the founders of the movement were long gone.

Cultic groups at work recruiting members in the area were the Process Church of the Final Judgment, the OTO, Scientology, Hare Krishna, Soka Gakkai, and the aforementioned “Jesus Freaks.” Many of these groups had no affinity for the values that kicked off the hippy movement. In fact, most were steadfastly opposed to it and highly contemptuous of it. Many Christian cultists looked and talked like hippies but had no trouble explaining to the media that they regarded the Haight as the devil’s world and were willingly wearing the devil’s uniform (i.e. long hair, love beads, tie-dyed shirts, peace signs, sandals, etc.) in order to save the souls of those so obviously in his clutches. But other cults were far more rightwing than this. Some were downright and even openly fascistic—some to the point of being neo-Nazi. Many were dangerous.

Satanism, according to some a product of this hucksterism, started in San Francisco with the founding of the Church of Satan in 1966. The prime mover behind this was Howard Stanton Levey. Levey claimed to have been everything from a lion-tamer to a police photographer to an organist before landing his gig as the premier Satanist and changing his name to Anton Szandor LaVey.

LaVey didn’t come from the Norman Rockwell apple pie scene of the 50s era. He wasn’t someone you would see on Leave It To Beaver but he might be sophomorically lampooned on a show like Dragnet (and likely get a big kick out of it). LaVey emerged into the 60s from the carnival/girlshow seedy underbelly of the 40s and 50s complete with his “Step right on up, folks, and peek behind the curtain at a real, honest-to-god Satanist” type sideshow campiness fully intact. He entered the 60s in the same way Burroughs’s Naked Lunch or Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn did but he drew no attention doing it. He snuck in stealthily like the black leopard he kept as a pet.

What shined through that era mostly for LaVey was the hypocrisy of the whole thing. All appearances had to be kept up despite what was seething down below. This was something America had inherited from its earliest days as a nation. The blackface minstrel era, for example, allowed white people to dress, walk, talk and sing in the carefree lifestyle that they perceived blacks to be living. All the societal pretensions of propriety and respectability could be dropped for a while and the Lord of Misrule could have full reign. The old Roman festival of Saturnalia where slaves became masters and masters became slaves was an even earlier version of this. When minstrelsy gave way to vaudeville and vaudeville gave way to carnivals and circuses and girly strip shows, it was carried on in new ways. LaVey stated, “On Saturday night I would see men lusting after half-naked girls dancing at the carnival, and on Sunday morning, when I was playing the organ for tent-show evangelists at the other end of the carnival lot, I would see these same men sitting in the pews with their wives and children, asking God to forgive them and purge them of carnal desires. And the next Saturday night they’d be back at the carnival or some other place of indulgence. I knew then that the Christian Church thrives on hypocrisy, and that man’s carnal nature will out!” Well “carnal” and “carnival” sound alike for a reason.

LaVey’s experiences as a carny and now as a prototype phone-in psychic on the SFPD hotline made him realize that people are driven by three basic needs: entertainment, hypocrisy, and self-deceit. He began wondering how he could combine all three into a single occupation. Oh, what fun he could have then! The realization that there was no difference between the carny barker, the guru, and the evangelist got him to thinking.

He started a “magic circle” of like-minded individuals in the Bay area. They held get-togethers at his home. Among this strange group of businesspeople, lawyers, cops, and real estate dealers, was the occultist filmmaker Kenneth Anger (whose films have included everyone from Mick Jagger to Jimmy Page and have large cult followings). At first, the meetings were simply to satisfy curiosity regarding taboo subjects as cannibalism but soon the circle began to take on quasi-religious overtones. The magic circle became known as The Order of the Trapezoid. The idea was to admit that indulgence is at the heart of human nature but that people need to be responsible for their own actions and stop groveling before God for forgiveness for their carnal weaknesses.

One thing this Order did that changed the occult culture of America and ultimately the world was promoting the writings of H. P. Lovecraft culled from the trashy and lurid pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales. Today you can go to any bookstore and buy entire Lovecraft anthologies but back then, he was almost unknown to the vast majority of Americans and completely unknown to the rest of the world. LaVey began crafting his own religion based on the modern American myth rather than the old esotericism gleaned from musty tomes and Lovecraft fit in perfectly. Many of Lovecraft’s friends were happy to see someone taking an interest in their mentor and were frequent guests at LaVey’s meetings. LaVey stated that Clark-Ashton Smith was a good friend and that August Derleth helped the Order to assemble a history of Weird Tales for their lectures. “The writings of H. P. Lovecraft are far more Satanic than those of most occultists.” LaVey said. “Lovecraft was the first writer I discovered who really scared me. Lovecraft was pretty heady stuff back then, and has proved a hard act to follow since.” In LaVey’s mind, Lovecraft’s fiction gives the reader something immediate, something undeniable—that sense of creeping horror—which Crowley’s writings were too oblique to convey. And, well, how do you know anything’s any good if it can’t evoke the proper emotions within you? LaVey’s The Satanic Rituals even contain “The Ceremony of the Nine Angles” and “The Call to Cthuhlu” during which various Lovecraftian deities are invoked including Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath and, of course, Cthulhu.

LaVey then announced the founding of the Church of Satan on April 30, 1966 (April 30th is sacred to Satanists and various pagan groups and is known as Walpurgisnacht or May-Eve and is also the day on which Hitler committed suicide) where mass was held at his own home, painted entirely black and called the Black House not only for its color scheme (or lack of) but also to perhaps provide a West Coast offset to its opposite across the country in D.C. His church and style of ritual combined the best of Halloween with a great cult classic B movie. Not only was his house entirely black on the outside but he made it dark and mysterious on the inside—like a carnival house of horrors—and used beautiful naked nubile women for his altar. When hippies and occultists began to populate the Haight, the Church of Satan was a prime hangout for many of them.

In 1969, LaVey penned perhaps the single most important document in Satanism, The Satanic Bible. In it, lay the entire creed of the Satanist movement. Such as not turning the other cheek or wasting love on ingrates. There was nothing difficult in understanding it. LaVey was no Hobbes or Kant by any means. Kenneth Anger summed up LaVey’s Satanic philosophy by stating, “LeVeyan Satanism is an amusing, if somewhat superficial, take on the concept of self-indulgence.” In short, the Church of Satanism is dedicated to hedonism more than anything else. But the hedonism was conscious with the participant fully aware of why he or she was doing it. It wasn’t just to be a church of mindless enjoyment.

To symbolize his church LaVey chose the image of the goat’s head within the two-points-up pentagram enclosed in a circle with the five Hebrew letters for “Leviathan” spread around it, one letter at each point of the pentagram. These were surrounded by yet another circle. It is referred to as a Baphomet although I am not clear how it acquired the title from the Templar Knights whose own Baphomet was said to be a black cat or a head with three faces.

LaVey referred to his Sigil of Baphomet as “ex calibur.” The lower point is the sword thrust in the stone (which, according to Arthurian lore, was not ex calibur which was actually the sword given to Arthur by the Lady of the Lake) and “represents the opening of the gates of Hell.” This is by far the most salient symbol of Satanism known to the public today.

The Trapezoid Order did not dissolve upon the founding of the Church of Satan, however. According to LaVey, it is “the exclusive governing body of the Church of Satan.” The Trapezoidal Order’s symbol became the very epitomy of evil and Satanism in the modern age.

Smack dab in the middle of that hippiedom, LaVey detested them. Whatever the hippies did, LaVey did the opposite. They liked psychedelic music, he liked classical and even circus organ pieces which he had once played for a living. They wore their hair long, LaVey shaved his head. They wore long, shaggy beards and mustaches, LaVey sported a black, well-trimmed mustache and goatee for that Satanic touch. They wore faded denim and buckskin with peace signs and tie-dyed t-shirts and love beads, LaVey wore black robes and black biker jackets and caps with a silver Baphomet medallion. The hippies reveled in drugs, LaVey eschewed them. He was on another wavelength entirely. But that was cool with the hippies. To them, LaVey was a guy doing his own thing and more power to him, man, even if he does hate hippies! Parents knew not what to make of him. He was a frigging Satanist, for Christ’s sake! But then again he hates hippies and claimed to have put a curse on the entire movement so he couldn’t be all bad. LaVey made both sides scratch their heads in bewilderment and that was exactly how he wanted it.

Another of LaVey’s cohorts in the founding of the Church of Satan was Arthur Lyons who functioned as a sort of “High Priest.” Among those who joined the Church of Satan in those early days of its formation was actress Jayne Mansfield and entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. Some modern fairly well known entertainers include avant-garde artist Boyd Rice (a.k.a. Non, who was the inspiration of Marilyn Manson and Depeche Mode) and Marc Almond of the band Soft Cell. Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” would become a big hit for the band Coil, one member being Peter Christopherson who was formerly with industrial music pioneers, Throbbing Gristle, along with another LaVey cohort, Genesis P-Orridge.

A lesser known member who would become quite famous or infamous was a runaway named Susan Atkins. She became involved with “High Priest” Arthur Lyons’s Witches’ Sabbath—a topless show basically cooked up by LaVey and his carny-style Satanism—where she played a vampire. Lyons wrote a book called Satan Wants You in which Atkins also appears. Another follower of Lyons was a young woman named Leslie Van Houten.

LaVey claims to have written The Satanic Bible because all other systems of magic nothing but fraud going all the way back to the Middle Ages and not just in the West but over the entire globe (yet the book contains the 19 Enochian Keys of the magic system invented or revealed—depending on how you look at it—by the Elizabethan English astrologer and alchemist Dr. John Dee and his assistant, Edward Kelley). This bible contains a “Book of Lucifer” but is not meant for the Tuckerian Luciferian. The sixth statement of the Nine Satanic Statements reads: “Satan represents responsibility to the responsible, instead of concern for psychic vampires!” But a Luciferian is a psychic vampire—that is exactly what a Luciferian is—although LaVey refers to a certain type of unsavory but otherwise ordinary person (i.e. a jerk-off).

The book contains some rituals which can be easily performed. It is clear that LaVey wanted to write something easily accessible to just about anybody and that is why the book has so much appeal to kids looking for new kicks. There is nothing particularly evil being expressed in the bible. Much of the tenets expressed in its pages most people who call themselves Christian already agree with whether they think so or not. How often do you meet a Christian who truly believes in forgiveness or turning the other cheek? They only do it if you remind them to do it, their natural inclination is as reactionary as it gets—eye-for-an-eye. So LaVey asks why don’t we just cut out all the sanctimonious phoney baloney and say that eye-for-an-eye is just and I’ll forgive you only if I feel like forgiving you? At least then we’re not being hypocrites.

LaVey’s system also requires no initiation or a period of being an adept. One need not know what a tarot card looks like or how to calculate the position of a star. Hence, the teachings are immediate and therefore a big draw for young people looking to rebel against the norms and the mainstream and don’t want to have to wait much less study.

In 1972, the Church of Satan was large enough that LaVey stopped holding meetings at the Black House. Instead, chapters were set up in various cities and were called “grottoes.” Detroit’s chapter was the Babylon Grotto while New York had the Lilith Grotto and so forth. A degree system was also put in place and a certain amount of study was necessary to advance and each advancement required a fee. Not that advancement fees were anything new to degree systems. They are standard in Freemasonry, for example. LaVey said it was time to stop performing Satanism and start practicing it.

In no way can we underestimate the importance of LaVey in the formation and direction of modern occultism. Satanism in its various forms descended almost without exception from him. Former-members of the Church of Satan formed many different offshoots with varying degrees of success such as the Temple of Set, the First Church of Satan, the Werewolf Order, the Church of the Satanic Brotherhood, the Church of Lucifer, Ordo Templi Satanas and others. Many of LaVey’s writings are considered required reading on the subject of Satan even by LaVey’s rivals. These books include The Satanic Bible (first and foremost), The Satanic Rituals, The Devil’s Notebook, The Satanic Witch, and Satan Speaks. He was also largely responsible for thrusting Lovecraft into the modern occult. Thanks to LaVey, there are now approximately 20,000 Satanic orders, cults and lodges worldwide. Not bad for being in business little more than thirty years before his death on October 29, 1997.

Coincidentally, LaVey portrayed Satan in Roman Polanski’s now legendary 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby and, of course, Polanski was the husband of Sharon Tate, who would be murdered a year later by Susan Atkins on the orders of her new master, Charles Manson. True to her vampiric fantasy, Atkins freely admitted to tasting Tate’s blood, which she described as “warm and sticky and nice.”

In fact, LaVey stated that the curse he put on the hippie movement resulted in the Manson murders which was the beginning of the end of the hippies. If we combine LaVey’s philosophy with that found in The Psychopath’s Bible, we can conclude that indulgence is good because it feels good and because with “normal” people it is the rope by which they hang themselves. So give them as much as they want.

Finally, on the last page, the two final words of the bible are "YANKEE ROSE." No one is sure why.

12-24-2013, 09:00 PM	#4 (permalink)
~~Lord Larehip~~ Account Disabled Join Date: Jun 2013 Posts: 899	The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey (Avon Books, 1969) The most accessible Black Book to date and owned by just about every goth and metalhead in junior highs across America. To give some background, San Francisco was a wild and crazy place in the 60s and undoubtedly the mecca of the counter-culture and the underground. It started off as a kind of social experiment by certain freethinkers in the late 50s. These were largely people with college degrees in chemistry and physics and other sciences looking for an escape from their dreary 9-to-5 jobs and academic existences. Many practiced Eastern religions, American Indian religions, various philosophies, some started their own religions and many did mind-altering drugs in an effort to expand the human consciousness and they believed in free love. The problem was that all sorts of others heard about it and set up shop in San Francisco. These included the dreary Christians who relabeled themselves “Jesus Freaks” and who dressed in counter-culture clothing but were really just the same old boring, repressive Christians that the founders of the social experiment wanted to escape from. High school dropouts and runaways flocked to Haight-Ashbury only to be recruited into cults, turned into prostitutes, or ended carted to a hospital after overdosing on some drug or other. Free love turned into free venereal disease. By ’62, most of the founders were disappointed with the experiment and began to leave. Most were gone by ’64 and by ’65, none were left. Haight-Ashbury was now nothing but runaways, junkies and the worst kinds of hucksters imaginable. The 1967 so-called Summer of Love was a joke. The “hippy” had already been declared dead and the founders of the movement were long gone. Cultic groups at work recruiting members in the area were the Process Church of the Final Judgment, the OTO, Scientology, Hare Krishna, Soka Gakkai, and the aforementioned “Jesus Freaks.” Many of these groups had no affinity for the values that kicked off the hippy movement. In fact, most were steadfastly opposed to it and highly contemptuous of it. Many Christian cultists looked and talked like hippies but had no trouble explaining to the media that they regarded the Haight as the devil’s world and were willingly wearing the devil’s uniform (i.e. long hair, love beads, tie-dyed shirts, peace signs, sandals, etc.) in order to save the souls of those so obviously in his clutches. But other cults were far more rightwing than this. Some were downright and even openly fascistic—some to the point of being neo-Nazi. Many were dangerous. Satanism, according to some a product of this hucksterism, started in San Francisco with the founding of the Church of Satan in 1966. The prime mover behind this was Howard Stanton Levey. Levey claimed to have been everything from a lion-tamer to a police photographer to an organist before landing his gig as the premier Satanist and changing his name to Anton Szandor LaVey. LaVey didn’t come from the Norman Rockwell apple pie scene of the 50s era. He wasn’t someone you would see on Leave It To Beaver but he might be sophomorically lampooned on a show like Dragnet (and likely get a big kick out of it). LaVey emerged into the 60s from the carnival/girlshow seedy underbelly of the 40s and 50s complete with his “Step right on up, folks, and peek behind the curtain at a real, honest-to-god Satanist” type sideshow campiness fully intact. He entered the 60s in the same way Burroughs’s Naked Lunch or Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn did but he drew no attention doing it. He snuck in stealthily like the black leopard he kept as a pet. What shined through that era mostly for LaVey was the hypocrisy of the whole thing. All appearances had to be kept up despite what was seething down below. This was something America had inherited from its earliest days as a nation. The blackface minstrel era, for example, allowed white people to dress, walk, talk and sing in the carefree lifestyle that they perceived blacks to be living. All the societal pretensions of propriety and respectability could be dropped for a while and the Lord of Misrule could have full reign. The old Roman festival of Saturnalia where slaves became masters and masters became slaves was an even earlier version of this. When minstrelsy gave way to vaudeville and vaudeville gave way to carnivals and circuses and girly strip shows, it was carried on in new ways. LaVey stated, “On Saturday night I would see men lusting after half-naked girls dancing at the carnival, and on Sunday morning, when I was playing the organ for tent-show evangelists at the other end of the carnival lot, I would see these same men sitting in the pews with their wives and children, asking God to forgive them and purge them of carnal desires. And the next Saturday night they’d be back at the carnival or some other place of indulgence. I knew then that the Christian Church thrives on hypocrisy, and that man’s carnal nature will out!” Well “carnal” and “carnival” sound alike for a reason. LaVey’s experiences as a carny and now as a prototype phone-in psychic on the SFPD hotline made him realize that people are driven by three basic needs: entertainment, hypocrisy, and self-deceit. He began wondering how he could combine all three into a single occupation. Oh, what fun he could have then! The realization that there was no difference between the carny barker, the guru, and the evangelist got him to thinking. He started a “magic circle” of like-minded individuals in the Bay area. They held get-togethers at his home. Among this strange group of businesspeople, lawyers, cops, and real estate dealers, was the occultist filmmaker Kenneth Anger (whose films have included everyone from Mick Jagger to Jimmy Page and have large cult followings). At first, the meetings were simply to satisfy curiosity regarding taboo subjects as cannibalism but soon the circle began to take on quasi-religious overtones. The magic circle became known as The Order of the Trapezoid. The idea was to admit that indulgence is at the heart of human nature but that people need to be responsible for their own actions and stop groveling before God for forgiveness for their carnal weaknesses. One thing this Order did that changed the occult culture of America and ultimately the world was promoting the writings of H. P. Lovecraft culled from the trashy and lurid pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales. Today you can go to any bookstore and buy entire Lovecraft anthologies but back then, he was almost unknown to the vast majority of Americans and completely unknown to the rest of the world. LaVey began crafting his own religion based on the modern American myth rather than the old esotericism gleaned from musty tomes and Lovecraft fit in perfectly. Many of Lovecraft’s friends were happy to see someone taking an interest in their mentor and were frequent guests at LaVey’s meetings. LaVey stated that Clark-Ashton Smith was a good friend and that August Derleth helped the Order to assemble a history of Weird Tales for their lectures. “The writings of H. P. Lovecraft are far more Satanic than those of most occultists.” LaVey said. “Lovecraft was the first writer I discovered who really scared me. Lovecraft was pretty heady stuff back then, and has proved a hard act to follow since.” In LaVey’s mind, Lovecraft’s fiction gives the reader something immediate, something undeniable—that sense of creeping horror—which Crowley’s writings were too oblique to convey. And, well, how do you know anything’s any good if it can’t evoke the proper emotions within you? LaVey’s The Satanic Rituals even contain “The Ceremony of the Nine Angles” and “The Call to Cthuhlu” during which various Lovecraftian deities are invoked including Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath and, of course, Cthulhu. LaVey then announced the founding of the Church of Satan on April 30, 1966 (April 30th is sacred to Satanists and various pagan groups and is known as Walpurgisnacht or May-Eve and is also the day on which Hitler committed suicide) where mass was held at his own home, painted entirely black and called the Black House not only for its color scheme (or lack of) but also to perhaps provide a West Coast offset to its opposite across the country in D.C. His church and style of ritual combined the best of Halloween with a great cult classic B movie. Not only was his house entirely black on the outside but he made it dark and mysterious on the inside—like a carnival house of horrors—and used beautiful naked nubile women for his altar. When hippies and occultists began to populate the Haight, the Church of Satan was a prime hangout for many of them. In 1969, LaVey penned perhaps the single most important document in Satanism, The Satanic Bible. In it, lay the entire creed of the Satanist movement. Such as not turning the other cheek or wasting love on ingrates. There was nothing difficult in understanding it. LaVey was no Hobbes or Kant by any means. Kenneth Anger summed up LaVey’s Satanic philosophy by stating, “LeVeyan Satanism is an amusing, if somewhat superficial, take on the concept of self-indulgence.” In short, the Church of Satanism is dedicated to hedonism more than anything else. But the hedonism was conscious with the participant fully aware of why he or she was doing it. It wasn’t just to be a church of mindless enjoyment. To symbolize his church LaVey chose the image of the goat’s head within the two-points-up pentagram enclosed in a circle with the five Hebrew letters for “Leviathan” spread around it, one letter at each point of the pentagram. These were surrounded by yet another circle. It is referred to as a Baphomet although I am not clear how it acquired the title from the Templar Knights whose own Baphomet was said to be a black cat or a head with three faces. LaVey referred to his Sigil of Baphomet as “ex calibur.” The lower point is the sword thrust in the stone (which, according to Arthurian lore, was not ex calibur which was actually the sword given to Arthur by the Lady of the Lake) and “represents the opening of the gates of Hell.” This is by far the most salient symbol of Satanism known to the public today. The Trapezoid Order did not dissolve upon the founding of the Church of Satan, however. According to LaVey, it is “the exclusive governing body of the Church of Satan.” The Trapezoidal Order’s symbol became the very epitomy of evil and Satanism in the modern age. Smack dab in the middle of that hippiedom, LaVey detested them. Whatever the hippies did, LaVey did the opposite. They liked psychedelic music, he liked classical and even circus organ pieces which he had once played for a living. They wore their hair long, LaVey shaved his head. They wore long, shaggy beards and mustaches, LaVey sported a black, well-trimmed mustache and goatee for that Satanic touch. They wore faded denim and buckskin with peace signs and tie-dyed t-shirts and love beads, LaVey wore black robes and black biker jackets and caps with a silver Baphomet medallion. The hippies reveled in drugs, LaVey eschewed them. He was on another wavelength entirely. But that was cool with the hippies. To them, LaVey was a guy doing his own thing and more power to him, man, even if he does hate hippies! Parents knew not what to make of him. He was a frigging Satanist, for Christ’s sake! But then again he hates hippies and claimed to have put a curse on the entire movement so he couldn’t be all bad. LaVey made both sides scratch their heads in bewilderment and that was exactly how he wanted it. Another of LaVey’s cohorts in the founding of the Church of Satan was Arthur Lyons who functioned as a sort of “High Priest.” Among those who joined the Church of Satan in those early days of its formation was actress Jayne Mansfield and entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr. Some modern fairly well known entertainers include avant-garde artist Boyd Rice (a.k.a. Non, who was the inspiration of Marilyn Manson and Depeche Mode) and Marc Almond of the band Soft Cell. Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” would become a big hit for the band Coil, one member being Peter Christopherson who was formerly with industrial music pioneers, Throbbing Gristle, along with another LaVey cohort, Genesis P-Orridge. A lesser known member who would become quite famous or infamous was a runaway named Susan Atkins. She became involved with “High Priest” Arthur Lyons’s Witches’ Sabbath—a topless show basically cooked up by LaVey and his carny-style Satanism—where she played a vampire. Lyons wrote a book called Satan Wants You in which Atkins also appears. Another follower of Lyons was a young woman named Leslie Van Houten. LaVey claims to have written The Satanic Bible because all other systems of magic nothing but fraud going all the way back to the Middle Ages and not just in the West but over the entire globe (yet the book contains the 19 Enochian Keys of the magic system invented or revealed—depending on how you look at it—by the Elizabethan English astrologer and alchemist Dr. John Dee and his assistant, Edward Kelley). This bible contains a “Book of Lucifer” but is not meant for the Tuckerian Luciferian. The sixth statement of the Nine Satanic Statements reads: “Satan represents responsibility to the responsible, instead of concern for psychic vampires!” But a Luciferian is a psychic vampire—that is exactly what a Luciferian is—although LaVey refers to a certain type of unsavory but otherwise ordinary person (i.e. a jerk-off). The book contains some rituals which can be easily performed. It is clear that LaVey wanted to write something easily accessible to just about anybody and that is why the book has so much appeal to kids looking for new kicks. There is nothing particularly evil being expressed in the bible. Much of the tenets expressed in its pages most people who call themselves Christian already agree with whether they think so or not. How often do you meet a Christian who truly believes in forgiveness or turning the other cheek? They only do it if you remind them to do it, their natural inclination is as reactionary as it gets—eye-for-an-eye. So LaVey asks why don’t we just cut out all the sanctimonious phoney baloney and say that eye-for-an-eye is just and I’ll forgive you only if I feel like forgiving you? At least then we’re not being hypocrites. LaVey’s system also requires no initiation or a period of being an adept. One need not know what a tarot card looks like or how to calculate the position of a star. Hence, the teachings are immediate and therefore a big draw for young people looking to rebel against the norms and the mainstream and don’t want to have to wait much less study. In 1972, the Church of Satan was large enough that LaVey stopped holding meetings at the Black House. Instead, chapters were set up in various cities and were called “grottoes.” Detroit’s chapter was the Babylon Grotto while New York had the Lilith Grotto and so forth. A degree system was also put in place and a certain amount of study was necessary to advance and each advancement required a fee. Not that advancement fees were anything new to degree systems. They are standard in Freemasonry, for example. LaVey said it was time to stop performing Satanism and start practicing it. In no way can we underestimate the importance of LaVey in the formation and direction of modern occultism. Satanism in its various forms descended almost without exception from him. Former-members of the Church of Satan formed many different offshoots with varying degrees of success such as the Temple of Set, the First Church of Satan, the Werewolf Order, the Church of the Satanic Brotherhood, the Church of Lucifer, Ordo Templi Satanas and others. Many of LaVey’s writings are considered required reading on the subject of Satan even by LaVey’s rivals. These books include The Satanic Bible (first and foremost), The Satanic Rituals, The Devil’s Notebook, The Satanic Witch, and Satan Speaks. He was also largely responsible for thrusting Lovecraft into the modern occult. Thanks to LaVey, there are now approximately 20,000 Satanic orders, cults and lodges worldwide. Not bad for being in business little more than thirty years before his death on October 29, 1997. Coincidentally, LaVey portrayed Satan in Roman Polanski’s now legendary 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby and, of course, Polanski was the husband of Sharon Tate, who would be murdered a year later by Susan Atkins on the orders of her new master, Charles Manson. True to her vampiric fantasy, Atkins freely admitted to tasting Tate’s blood, which she described as “warm and sticky and nice.” In fact, LaVey stated that the curse he put on the hippie movement resulted in the Manson murders which was the beginning of the end of the hippies. If we combine LaVey’s philosophy with that found in The Psychopath’s Bible, we can conclude that indulgence is good because it feels good and because with “normal” people it is the rope by which they hang themselves. So give them as much as they want. Finally, on the last page, the two final words of the bible are "YANKEE ROSE." No one is sure why.