Satan :: personal Narrative Religious Essays

Satan On a winter’s evening in 1967, I drove crosstown in San Francisco to hear Anton Szandor LaVey lecture at an open meeting of the Sexual Freedom League. I was attracted by newspaper articles describing him as â€Å"the Black Pope† of a Satanic church in which baptism, wedding, and funeral ceremonies were dedicated to the Devil. I was a free-lance magazine writer, and I felt there might he a story in LaVey and his contemporary pagans; for the Devil has always made â€Å"good copy,† as they say on the city desk It was not the practice of the black arts itself that I considered to he the story, because that is nothing new in the world. There were Devil-worshiping sects and voodoo cults before there were Christians. In eighteenth-century England a Hell-Fire Club, with connections to the American colonies through Benjamin Franklin, gained some brief notoriety. During the early part of the twentieth century, the press publicized Aleister Crowley as the â€Å"wickedest man in the world.† And there were hints in the 1920s and ‘30s of a â€Å"black order† in Germany. To this seemingly old story LaVey and his organization of contemporary Faustians offered two strikingly new chapters. First, they blasphemously represented themselves as a â€Å"church,† a term previously confined to branches of Christianity, instead of the traditional coven of Satanism and witchcraft lore. Second. they practiced their black magic openly instead of underground. Rather than arrange a preliminary interview with LaVey for discussion of his heretical innovations, my usual first step in research, I decided to watch and listen to him as an unidentified member of an audience. He was described in some newspapers as a former circus and carnival lion tamer and trickster now representing himself as the Devil’s representative on earth, and I wanted to determine first whether he was a true Satanist, a prankster, or a quack. I had already met people in the limelight of the occult business; in fact, Jeane Dixon was my landlady and I had a chance to write about her before Ruth Montgomery did. But I considered all the occultists phonies, hypocrites, or quacks, and I would never spend five minutes writing about their various forms of hocus-pocus. All the occultists I had met or heard of were white-lighters: alleged seers, prophesiers, and witches wrapping their supposedly mystic powers around God-based, spiritual communication. LaVey, seeming to laugh at them if not spit on them in con-tempt, emerged from between the lines of newspaper stories as a black magician basing his work on the dark side of nature and the carnal side of humanity.