A recovered collection of tabloid columns from the founder of the Church of Satan
A Column Recovered from The National Insider
Letters from the Devil: The Lost Writing of Anton Szandor LaVey is a volume of more than sixty tabloid newspaper articles written by Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. The pieces originally appeared in LaVey’s column of the same name in The National Insider. The book presents this periodical writing as material that had been thought lost and forgotten, gathering it under the subtitle The Lost Writing of Anton Szandor LaVey. It is an English-language collection of short newspaper pieces rather than a single continuous treatise.
Reader Questions and an Occult Miscellany
The column’s format gives the book its distinctive shape. In the articles, LaVey responds to letters from readers and ranges across a wide variety of subjects. The topics extend from practical instruction in preparing magical potions to speculation or commentary on life after death. This reader-correspondence framework makes the volume a miscellany of occult and Satanic concerns rather than a tightly argued book on one theme. Its interest lies in the breadth of questions addressed and in the way LaVey uses the column to speak directly to his readers.
Beyond the Column: Periodical Ephemera
The volume is not limited to the text of the columns alone. It also includes advertisements, articles, and various caricatures that appeared in the original magazines. These added materials give the collection something of the character of the periodical pages in which LaVey’s column appeared, preserving not only the writing but also surrounding ephemera from the original publications.
A Lost Slice of LaVey’s Periodical Writing
The work’s significance is tied to its recovery of this body of tabloid writing. By assembling more than sixty columns from The National Insider, the book makes available a strand of LaVey’s writing that had been treated as lost and forgotten. It stands as a documentary record of his newspaper correspondence with readers and of the miscellaneous occult subjects he addressed in that format.
The catalog metadata supplied for the volume gives its first publication as 2008 and lists its subject as “Antichrist.” A bookseller listing records a release date of August 15, 2008, a publisher of lulu.com, a paperback format, 72 pages, ISBN-10 0557431735, and ISBN-13 9780557431731. Other encyclopedia entries instead give a publication date of 2010, publisher Underworld Amusements, 72 pages, ISBN 9780557431731, genre “News article,” subject “Various,” and series “United States.” These records therefore do not agree on the first publication date or the publisher.
Biographical Background
The source biography identifies LaVey, originally Howard Stanton Levey, as having been born on April 11, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois, and as having died on October 29, 1997, in San Francisco, California. It records that he was high priest of the Church of Satan, that he claimed to have been the first to define and organize modern Satanism, and that he wrote The Satanic Bible, published in 1969.
According to the biography, he was born to Gertrude Augusta Coulton and Michael Joseph Levey in a secular Jewish family. It states that much of what is known about his life derives from his own statements to biographer Blanche Barton and that those statements have been doubted; his daughter Zeena later characterized large parts of his biography as a catalogue of lies and as nonsense produced for his own advantage.
The biographical material further states that his family moved to California and that he spent his early years in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Globe, Arizona. There he showed an early interest in instruments, especially keyboards such as the pipe organ and steam organ, and taught himself to play piano. He attended high school in Globe but dropped out after some time and left his parents’ home. He claimed to have joined the Clyde Beatty Circus first as a handyman and later to have taken on other duties, including wild-animal taming and organ playing; journalist Lawrence Wright found no evidence that LaVey worked there. The biography also reports LaVey’s claim that he left Los Angeles and returned to San Francisco, where he worked for three years as a police photographer for the San Francisco Police Department, a claim later doubted by biographers because no records supported it.
LaVey married Carole Lansing in 1951, and their first daughter, Karla, was born in 1952. He separated from Lansing in 1960 after meeting Diane Hegarty, with whom he never married but who gave birth to his second daughter, Zeena Schreck (born Zeena Galatea LaVey), in 1963. In 1967 he employed a topless dancer named “Sharon King” in one of his nightclub shows; her real name was Susan Atkins, who became one of the main perpetrators in the murder of Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate by the Manson Family a year later.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the source lists Ayn Rand, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Dee, and Ragnar Redbeard among LaVey’s influences and credits him with essays and books including The Satanic Bible (1969), The Compleat Witch (1971), and The Satanic Rituals (1972). It notes that Ayn Rand is one of the most important authors quoted in The Satanic Bible and reports LaVey’s statement that his religion was “only the philosophy of Ayn Rand, with ceremonies and rituals added” and that Satanism had more in common with her Objectivism than with any other religion or philosophy.
In the 1970s financial problems led LaVey to announce that higher priestly degrees in the Church of Satan could henceforth be obtained only for financial consideration. This led to outraged reactions among his followers and ultimately to a split in the Church of Satan: in June 1975 some members led by Michael Aquino founded the Temple of Set. LaVey married his third and last wife, Blanche Barton, in 1987, and in 1993 they had a son named Satan Xerxes. He died in San Francisco on October 29, 1997, of a lung edema resulting from a heart defect, and his date of death was subsequently changed.
Church and Public Role
According to the source, LaVey founded the Church of Satan on Walpurgis Night, April 30, 1966, and proclaimed “Year one, Anno Satanis.” In a devil costume with horns on the cap, he celebrated Black Masses in the basement of his San Francisco townhouse. He became a controversial focus of media attention, appeared on talk shows, and was featured on the covers of many magazines. Whether he was actually consulted as an adviser for horror films such as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, as he claimed, is disputed.
After his community gained followers worldwide, LaVey devoted himself to writing, teaching, and instructing. His stated aim was to free “true,” modern Satanism from its medieval doctrines and thus make it comprehensible to all people. At its core, the source says, his teachings concern a radical materialism and hedonistic individualism that celebrates the human body, the ego, and sensual pleasure. With these values LaVey was compatible with the hippie movement flourishing in California in the late 1960s, yet he despised it as “psychedelic vermin” because he opposed its practice of equality of all people. He described himself as misogynist. The religious scholar Hugh Urban sees elements of satire and religious parody in both the rituals of the Church of Satan and the teachings of The Satanic Bible.
In 1994 LaVey named the rock musician Marilyn Manson a priest of the Church of Satan. Manson subsequently dedicated his 1998 autobiography, The Long Hard Road out of Hell, published a year after LaVey’s death, to LaVey.
