Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible is doctrine, not narrative: a compact scripture for a religion he founded, assembled from essays, aphorisms, ritual instructions, and invented liturgy. It appeared in the late 1960s, in the middle of the San Francisco counterculture that produced the Church of Satan itself, and it has stayed in print ever since. Its four internal “books” are keyed to the elements—Fire, Air, Earth, and Water—and the whole is framed by introductions from later figures in the Church and by LaVey’s own prefatory material.
Man invented God, the book argues, and the time has come to take the projection back. Every religion is a human fabrication, LaVey writes; the Christian church in particular thrives on hypocrisy, and its prohibitions—especially against the flesh—exist to produce guilt and revenue. His alternative is not worship of a horned deity but a symbolic Satan: a dark force in nature, the spirit of progress and revolt, and above all an externalized image of the Satanist’s own highest potential. From this follows the ethic that runs through the whole book: indulgence rather than abstinence, love and hate directed only where they are deserved, and ritual practiced as a deliberate, self-aware psychodrama rather than as supplication.
From the Carnival Tent to the Church of Satan
The Making of a Satanist
Anton Szandor LaVey, whom followers called the Black Pope, traced his road to the High Priesthood of the Church of Satan to a teenage job playing organ in a carnival. There he watched men lust after half-naked dancers on Saturday night and then appear in pews on Sunday morning with wives and children, begging God to purge them of the very desires they would indulge again the following weekend. The lesson he drew was blunt: the Christian Church thrives on hypocrisy, and man’s carnal nature will out. On the last night of April 1966, Walpurgisnacht, he shaved his head in the tradition of ancient executioners and announced a church meant to recapture the body and its desires as objects of celebration—a temple of glorious indulgence. The book is dedicated “For Diane,” and its dedication list runs from Rasputin, Cagliostro, and Nietzsche to Barnum, Mark Twain, H.P. Lovecraft, Marilyn Monroe, and the Nine Unknown Men. The contents lay out four introductions, a preface and prologue, the Nine Satanic Statements, and four books keyed to the elements: Fire, Air, Earth, and Water.
A Church Above Ground
When Bay Area newspapers noticed the Devil-worshippers in summer 1966, Burton Wolfe saw precedents in voodoo cults, an eighteenth-century English Hell-Fire Club, Crowley’s circle, and the Black Order of Germany—but two things set LaVey apart. He organized blasphemy into a church rather than a coven, and he practiced openly, inviting the press to Devil-dedicated weddings, baptisms, and funerals. Midnight rituals in his dark Victorian house near the Golden Gate cliffs were punctuated by the roar of a full-grown lion that startled the neighbors. By 1967 reporters arrived from Tokyo and Paris, wire services carried stories of a naked woman serving as altar to Satan, and affiliated groups formed across America, England, France, Germany, Africa, and Australia—proof, Wolfe writes, that the Devil was alive and popular.
The Carnival and the Police Photographer
LaVey’s grandparents were Georgian, Roumanian, and Alsatian, including a gypsy grandmother from Transylvania who passed on vampire and witch legends. At five he was reading Weird Tales, Frankenstein, and Dracula; other children made him their ringleader in mock military marches. At twelve, gripped by the world war, he studied military manuals and concluded that the earth would be inherited not by the meek but by the strong. He studied music, metaphysics, and the occult in high school, became second oboist in the San Francisco Ballet Symphony Orchestra at fifteen or sixteen, then dropped out, left home, and joined the Clyde Beatty Circus as a cage boy, rising to assistant trainer. Self-taught on piano by ear, he replaced a drunk calliope player and kept the job, accompanying Hugo Zachinni the Human Cannonball and the Wallendas. At eighteen he moved to a carnival, assisted a magician, learned hypnosis, and studied the occult. Married at twenty-one in 1951, he studied criminology at City College and photographed for the San Francisco Police Department, where he saw the bloodiest, grimiest side of human nature—people shot by nuts, knifed by friends, children splattered by hit-and-run drivers—and asked where God was, coming to detest the sanctimony that called violence God’s will. He quit after three years and returned to nightclub organ playing, holding weekly classes on hauntings, E.S.P., dreams, vampires, werewolves, divination, and ceremonial magic. A Magic Circle formed around him to perform rituals he discovered or devised, and he built a library on the Black Mass, the Knights Templar, the Hell-Fire Club, and the Golden Dawn.
The Reluctant Interview and the Lion’s Roar
One introducer came to observe LaVey as an anonymous audience member rather than arrange an interview, expecting a trickster or a quack. He had known occultists—Jeane Dixon was once his landlady—and found them all phony white-lighters. LaVey struck him differently: a black magician working from nature’s dark side and humanity’s carnal side, with nothing metaphysical in his talk. What he heard was pragmatic, relativistic, rational—a blast at established worship, repression, and phony piety, full of sardonic satire yet logical common sense. Convinced of his sincerity, the narrator attended midnight rituals in the Victorian manse and produced a serious article, but respectable magazines wanted only freak-show pieces; Knight, a men’s magazine, published the first definitive piece in September 1968, and the biography The Devil’s Avenger followed in 1974, after which the narrator became a card-carrying priest of the Church.
The Devil’s Many Names
The book opens this stretch with a catalogue of devils drawn from across the world’s religions—Sabazios the Phrygian snake-god, the Hebrew Sammael whose name means “venom of God,” the Egyptian Set and Sekhmet, the Hindu Shiva the destroyer, the Inca Supay, the Chinese T’an-mo and Yen-lo-Wang, the Aztec Tezcatlipoca and Yaotzin, the Russian Tchort, the Arabic Shaitan. LaVey reads this list as evidence of a pattern: the devils of past faiths invariably carry animal characteristics, because man needs to deny his own animal nature, which would wound his “impoverished ego.” The pig, despised by Jews and Egyptians, once symbolized Frey, Osiris, Adonis, Persephone, Attis, and Demeter, and was sacrificed to Osiris and the Moon before being degraded into a devil. The Phoenician fly-god Baal became Beelzebub, identical to the Egyptian dung beetle that seemed to resurrect itself like the phoenix. Through Persian contact the ancient Jews came to see the two great forces as Ahura-Mazda, god of fire and light and life, and Ahriman, the serpent of darkness and destruction. Each example shows the same habit: original animal gods sacrificed and demoted to devils.
Faustus and the Myth of the Soul-Pact
At the Reformation, the alchemist Dr. Johann Faustus supposedly found a way to summon the demon Mephistopheles and signed a pact in blood, trading his soul for the feeling of youth—becoming young at once. When his time came, he retired to his room and was blown to bits as though his laboratory had exploded. LaVey calls the story a protest of its age against science, chemistry, and magic. Satanists, he insists, need not sell their souls or make pacts; the threat was devised by Christianity to terrorize people away from straying, teaching that yielding to temptation meant paying with one’s soul and suffering eternally, while a pure soul was a passport to everlasting life. He turns the logic over: if God is merciful, why fear him—and if one must fear God, why not be “Satan fearing” and at least have the fun? Without wholesale fear, religionists would have nothing to wield power with.
How Hell Was Built
Hel, the Teutonic goddess of the dead and daughter of Loki, was a Pagan deity of torture and punishment; another “L” was added when the Old Testament books were formulated. The prophets never knew “Hell”—they used the Hebrew Sheol and Greek Hades for the grave, Tartaros for the abode of fallen angels, and Gehenna for the valley near Jerusalem where Moloch reigned and garbage burned, from which the Church evolved fire and brimstone. Catholic Hell adds Purgatory and Limbo; Buddhist Hell has eight sections, the first seven expiable. Dante imagined ice, and northern climes thought of Hell as “a giant refrigerator”—missionaries in Alaska warning Eskimos of a blazing lake were eagerly asked how to get there.
Satan as a Force, Not a Fiend
Most Satanists reject the anthropomorphic Satan of cloven hooves and barbed tail. He represents a force in nature—powers of darkness so named because no religion has taken them out of the darkness and no science has named them. It is an untapped reservoir few can use, because most people cannot wield a tool without first breaking it down and labeling every part. Satan as god or personal saviour was invented by every religion’s formulators for one purpose: to preside over man’s so-called wicked activities, defining anything that brings physical or mental gratification as “evil” and assuring a lifetime of unwarranted guilt. “So, if ‘evil’ they have named us, evil we are—and so what! The Satanic Age is upon us!”
Love and Hate
Satanism means kindness to those who deserve it, not love wasted on ingrates; you cannot love everyone. Loving all things indiscriminately destroys one’s natural powers of selection and makes one a poor judge of character, and anything used too freely loses its meaning. Satanists should love strongly and completely those who deserve it, but never turn the other cheek to an enemy. Hate is as intense an emotion as love; forcing indiscriminate love is unnatural and cheapens feeling for those who merit it. Repressed hatred breeds physical and emotional ailments, while releasing it toward those who deserve it cleanses malignant emotion and keeps it from being taken out on loved ones. No great “love” movement in history, he notes, has failed to wind up killing countless people—presumably to prove how much they loved them.
The Ritual Implements and Their Meanings
The working tools of the Satanic ritual carry precise functions. Black candles serve the participants’ power and success, consuming parchments that bear requested blessings, while the white candle exists for destruction—curse-parchments burn in its flame. The bell marks the ritual’s beginning and end: the priest rings it nine times, turning counterclockwise and directing the tolling toward the four cardinal points, once at the start to clear and purify the air of external sounds, once at the end to intensify the working and signal finality. Its tone should be loud and penetrating, never soft or tinkling. The chalice represents the Chalice of Ecstasy; silver is ideal, but another metal, glass, or crockery suffices—anything but gold, which is associated with white-light religions and the Heavenly Realm. The priest drinks first, then one assistant; in private rituals the celebrant drains it.
The elixir is a Pagan stimulating fluid that Christianity corrupted into sacramental wine. Originally drunk to relax and intensify emotions, it is restored by Satanism to its original stimulative purpose; no god is sacrificed and no symbolic cannibalism practiced. Any pleasing, stimulating drink is acceptable, taken from the chalice immediately following the Invocation to Satan. The Sword of Power symbolizes aggressive force and extends the priest’s gesturing arm, much as a pointing stick or blasting wand might. He points it at the symbol of Baphomet during the Invocation to Satan and uses it when calling the four Princes of Hell; after the request is read aloud, he thrusts its point through the parchment, holds the parchment into the candle flame, and places the sword atop participants’ heads in knighting fashion while hearing or repeating requests. A long knife, cane, or staff may substitute. The phallus, a Pagan fertility symbol of generation, virility, and aggression blasphemously converted by Christianity, functions as a non-hypocritical version of the Catholic aspergillum; an assistant holds it in both hands and shakes it twice toward each cardinal point for the house’s benediction. Any phallic symbol of plaster, wood, clay, or wax works, and it is required only in organized group rituals. The gong calls upon the forces of Darkness, struck once after participants repeat “Hail Satan!”—again required only in group rituals, with a concert gong preferred.
Parchment is used for its organic compatibility with nature. Consistent with Satanic views on sacrifice, it would come from a sheep killed by necessity for food; animals are never slaughtered for ritual use, and plain paper may substitute. The request is written, read aloud by the priest, and burned in the black or white candle as appropriate; before ritual, curses are placed to the priest’s right, blessings to his left. The Book of Leviathan holds the invocations, since verbal communication can attain emotional ecstasy or anguish and proper sounds must be invoked. Past conjurations lacked emotion—an old wizard known to the author, running out of words near culmination, adlibbed stanzas of a Rudyard Kipling poem and finalized an effective working. These invocations are proclamations of certainty, devoid of shallow offerings and hollow charity; Leviathan, the great Dragon from the Watery Abyss, roars as the surging sea, and the invocations are his tribunals.
The Invocation to Satan and the Infernal Names
The Invocation to Satan opens “In nomine Dei nostri Satanas Luciferi excelsi!” It commands the forces of Darkness to bestow Infernal power, asks Hell’s gates to open and the abyss to greet the speaker as brother or sister and friend, takes Satan’s name as part of oneself, lives as the beasts of the field rejoicing in fleshly life, favors the just and curses the rotten, and commands by all the Gods of the Pit that the spoken things come to pass.
The Case Against Loving One’s Enemies
The book’s polemical voice turns first on the Christian command to love one’s enemies, and it treats the injunction as both irrational and unlivable. Can a victim love the jaws that tear him? Humans are predatory by instinct, the argument runs, and could not survive without preying on one another; “lust and carnal desire” is the truer name for what the preachers call love, since it is what continues the race. To turn the other cheek is the philosophy of a spaniel rolling on its back when kicked, and obeying it condemns the reader and his descendants to be hewers of wood and carriers of water. Hate your enemies with a whole heart instead: struck on one cheek, smash the striker down, because self-preservation is the highest law. Give blow for blow, scorn for scorn, doom for doom with compound interest—eye for eye, tooth for tooth, fourfold and a hundredfold—and make yourself a terror to your adversary so that he gains wisdom. The reward is not paradise but an immortal spirit living on in the brains and sinews of aggressive, unconquerable sons; a splendid progeny is the true proof of manhood, and timid animals, by a scientific axiom, transmit timidity to their descendants. Strip the world of war, rivalry, kingship, slavery, and the survival of the toughest, and the globe becomes a festering hell fenced in.
This Day, This Hour, No Redeemer
Why not enter the struggle with kindly courage and dauntless delight, preferring to perish rather than serve? Liberty or death matters tremendously to those who comprehend it, and there are worse things than death—a life of dishonor among them. All who serve a master with hand or brain lead dishonorable lives. Life is a spark in the gloom that flashes out and disappears, so make the most of it here and now. There is no Heaven, no Hell, no Right, no Wrong, nor God, nor Son, nor Ghost; death ends all for every man. No Elysian Fields, no garden of the Hesperides—those are waking dreams. Here and now is the day of torment and of joy, the hour of opportunity; choose this day, this hour, for no Redeemer liveth. Every attempt to organize the future must collapse; the present is our domain, to be taken on strict business principles. Strive against those who strive against you, be a terrible one in your own defense, and say: I, even I, am my own redeemer. Hurl adversaries back to confusion, scatter them as chaff before the cyclone, let them fall into the pit they dug—then sound the loud timbrel and rejoice in your own salvation, bones asking, who is like unto me? Have I not delivered myself by mine own brain?
The Blessings and Curses
A litany of beatitudes inverts the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are the strong, for they shall possess the earth; the powerful, the bold, the victorious—victory is the basis of right—the battle-blooded, the audacious, the iron-handed, the death-defiant. Blessed are the destroyers of false hope, for they are the true Messiahs; the valiant; those who believe in Nothing; the man with powerful enemies; the man whose foot is swift to serve a friend; the wise and brave; the sires of noble maidens; the mighty-minded; the unmerciful; and the man with a sprinkling of enemies. Cursed are the weak, for they shall inherit the yoke; the feeble, the righteously humble, the vanquished, the poor in spirit, the obedient, the haters of battle, the feeble-brained, the God-adorers, believers in Good and Evil, the lambs of God. Cursed is he who does good unto others; cursed are organizers of charities, propagators of plagues; the unfit; mothers of strumous tenderlings; those who teach lies for truth; the famous wiselings; the vile. Footnotes gloss life as the great indulgence and death as the great abstinence, curse those who gaze toward a life beyond the grave, and bless the man who believes in what is best for him. The angel of self-deceit, a bracketed line warns, is camped in the souls of the righteous.
The Scholar’s Frame: Scripture Without Revelation
The editorial essays that follow the main text belong to James R. Lewis of the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, writing in the Marburg Journal of Religion in 2002. His subject is authority: though Satanists do not revere The Satanic Bible as traditional religionists revere scripture, the book functions as an authoritative quasi-scripture among them.
The Totemic Book and Its Uncontrolled Image
The closing apparatus of the volume turns from doctrine to the book as an object, arguing that the errors and rumors surrounding The Satanic Bible are themselves evidence of its design. Its packaging performs a deliberate fetishization: the dark minimalist cover, LaVey’s devilish back-cover photograph, the bombastic prose, and the word “Satanic” in the title all connote evil, so that mystery is dispelled only by buying and reading the thing. During the late-1980s and early-1990s rumor panic, LaVey’s playful resignification of darkness as kitsch failed utterly; his church was dogged by accusations of ritual murder, child abuse, and occult crime. He built a successful Satanic spectacle but could not govern it once it entered popular media.
The commentary explains this through what it calls the mobility of the image: pictures detach easily from their original contexts and migrate into new ones that supply alternative codes. The less ambiguous the image, the less mobile—an elephant travels poorly, the Sigil of Baphomet travels everywhere. Rhetorically this mirrors the topos, the stock stuff of which arguments are made, and “stock footage” is its perfect television form. A 1969 documentary on the Church of Satan, recycled as stock footage, shows how rumor panics work: the image’s reality effect (“seeing is believing”) plus a drift toward sign-value lets LaVey’s intentionally humorous rituals be resignified as factual evidence of blood sacrifice.
Amulets, the Calendar, and Year Reckoning
A note signed by Michael A. Aquino discusses the Brimstone symbol above the Nine Satanic Statements, which appeared on original Church of Satan letterhead and on custom baked-enamel amulets—a subtler alternative to Baphomet. One “Knowledge” amulet bore a cross-shaped spiral LaVey said he adapted from television rabbit ears, reasoning that anyone foolish enough to buy an amulet for knowledge rather than study deserved mind-stuffing by television, “better reception.” Pirated copies later turned up in occult shops. The Satanic Calendar follows: the individual’s birthday, Walpurgisnacht on April 30, Midsummer’s Eve, the Satanic Revels, the equinoxes, Hallowe’en, and the winter solstice, with the cross-quarter days falling about five and a half weeks after each solstice or equinox, descended from Gaelic fire festivals. Church years are reckoned from the founding at Walpurgisnacht 1966 as Year One anno satanis; earlier dates use the common era, and conversion means subtracting 1965.
Mortensen and the Command to Look
Stephen E. Flowers recounts finding William Mortensen’s The Command to Look catalogued as a photography manual in the University of Texas humanities research center, alongside much of Crowley’s library, and discovering instead a treasure trove of practical magic. Mortensen’s premise is showmanship, built on a threefold formula: arrangement makes you look, subject interest makes you see, and participation makes you enjoy—all triggered rapidly and mostly unconsciously. Impact is a pictorial imperative, biologically coercive, resting on danger-signaling shapes held in racial memory: the diagonal like a lightning bolt, the S-curve of the snake and the female body, the triangle of blade and teeth, and the compact dominant mass of the trapezoid blocking one’s path. Subject interest must deliver on impact’s promise, and De Mille’s box-office formula of sex, sentiment, and religion reduces to sex, sentiment, and wonder.
The Order of the Trapezoid
LaVey drew Lovecraft’s strange angles into the ritual chamber, correlating them with the negative architecture of Houses That Kill and formulating the Greater and Lesser Laws of the Trapezoid: certain angles harm most people but benefit those initiated into their mysteries. Kant had already likened the sublime to a cliff that attracts us toward the ledge and repels us toward safety. On October 19, 1983, Aquino carried the experiment to Walhalla, the inner sanctum of Wewelsburg Castle, where German romanticism’s dynamism and life-worship had curdled into totalitarianism. The order’s mystery is a yantra of nine angles articulated as Reyntil Runa, its central source the Black Flame—the psyche as a developing deity, kindred to the Prince of Darkness, bound through the ninth angle to the Temple of Set.
Whitaker’s Comments and the Glossary
R. Whitaker’s comments describe cataloguing subjective and objective impressions in angular environments, where ratios of pi and phi surface as planes, frequencies, and fields. LaVey’s law holds that obtuse angles are magically harmful to the unaware and stimulating to the sensitive; entering such a space produces a polarity of attraction, with infinite imagery, or repulsion, with morbid visions of death. Haunted-house phenomena cluster in homes full of angular shapes.
The God You Save May Be Yourself
The theological argument at the heart of the book is a kind of inverted Feuerbach. Man, unable to accept his own ego, externalizes it into a “God” who may do what man is forbidden—kill, work miracles, control without responsibility. To worship such a being is to worship oneself by proxy, and a poor proxy at that. Better, LaVey says, to close the gap: when a person stops seeing himself as split into carnal and spiritual halves, the demon of pride—Lucifer—appears, and he discovers he was only ever the carnal part. From there he either hates himself into ever more elaborate spiritual quests, or accepts what he is and puts ritual to honest use. LaVey’s point about ceremony is that the forms invented religions used to sustain faith in a lie will just as well sustain faith in the truth. The same logic drives his treatment of the seven deadly sins, each of which he defends as a route to physical, mental, or emotional gratification, and his reading of Hell—a word, he notes, that the Hebrew prophets never used, and whose fire-and-brimstone imagery the Church built out of a garbage dump outside Jerusalem.
The Ethics of Indulgence and the Uses of Ritual
LaVey’s moral program is deliberately unsentimental. The Golden Rule is amended to “Do unto others as they do unto you”; kindness unreturned merits wrath; the indiscriminate love preached by other faiths is, in his phrase, sinning on the lay-away plan. He devotes real attention to the mechanics of resentment—the psychic vampire who gives gifts in order to collect, the repressed hatred that curdles into illness—and prescribes ritual as the safe outlet: a hate ritual performed on a deserving target cleanses the emotion rather than dumping it on one’s family. Indulgence, he insists, is not compulsion; the taboo is what creates the craving. The second half of the book turns this into technique. Magic, for LaVey, is not supernatural but a disciplined use of will and emotion, and his ritual chamber is explicitly an “intellectual decompression chamber”—a place where the rationalist consents to be temporarily irrational in order to expand his will. He is careful to distinguish his practice from that of the “white-lighters”: where they kill birds to release energy, he argues, a Satanist can release his own through orgasm or anger; where they stand in protective circles, he mocks their fear. The ingredients he lists—desire, timing, the target’s sleep, the woman’s cycle—read like a manual for applied psychology, and his warning is blunt: be certain you do not care whether the victim lives or dies before you throw the curse.
A Scripture That Has Never Gone Out of Print
The book’s afterlife is inseparable from its author’s talent for theater. LaVey distilled his Friday-night lectures into a “tenebrous conceptual tapestry,” named the Sigil of Baphomet, released The Satanic Mass on vinyl, and staged weddings and funerals for the press; by 1967 reporters were arriving from Tokyo and Paris. The Satanic Bible itself drew on Ayn Rand, Nietzsche, Mencken, P.T. Barnum, and the archfiend imagery of Twain, Milton, and Byron, and it prefaced Redbeard’s Might is Right alongside “Satanized” Enochian Keys. Its readership has always been narrower than its reputation: LaVey called it an integrated whole for a select few—epicurean, atheistic, fiercely individualistic—and conceded that fellow-travelers like humanists and freethinkers see only a partial reflection. What endures is the aesthetic and the argument: Satan as a symbol rather than a sovereign, ritual as a tool the skeptic may use without believing in it, and a church founded, in LaVey’s own arithmetic, on “one part outrage to nine parts social respectability.”
