CHURCH OF SATAN
Among the most colourful organizations in late twentieth-century popular occultism, the Church of Satan was founded in 1966 by San Francisco eccentric Howard Stanton Levey (1930–77), better known by his assumed name Anton Szandor LaVey. Beginning in the late 1950s, LaVey parlayed an interest in the occult and a willingness to shock into an impressive public presence, abetted by local and national media who reported even his most outrageous claims at face value without bothering to check the facts.
As much a work of performance art as anything else, LaVey’s Church of Satan became famous for public ceremonies that used all the trappings of traditional Satanism, including inverted pentagrams and female nudity. The church also taught LaVey’s Satanist philosophy, a system of “rational selfishness” derived from the writings of Russian-American Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand. Belief in the existence of Satan as an actual being was never one of the church’s articles of faith; this detail completely escaped the notice of fundamentalists across the United States, who boosted LaVey’s publicity campaign markedly by denouncing him at every turn. See fundamentalism; Satanism.
The late 1960s and early 1970s were the glory days of the Church of Satan, as LaVey attracted celebrities such as Jayne Mansfield and Sammy Davis Jr. to his organization, and performed Satanic weddings, baptisms, and funerals in a glare of media publicity; 1969 saw the publication of his bestselling The Satanic Bible and an appearance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. LaVey organized a network of local Grottoes across the United States in the following years as would-be Satanists flocked to the Church of Satan’s banner. Many of these new recruits took Satanism far more seriously than LaVey did, however, and found his passion for publicity difficult to handle. In 1975 one of the Satanic priests he had ordained, Michael Aquino, broke with the Church of Satan to found a rival organization, the Temple of Set, and not long thereafter LaVey closed the Grottoes and abandoned the limelight. See Temple of Set.
The Church of Satan remained in existence, however, and surfaced again in the early 1990s as members of the alternative music scene adopted LaVey’s kitsch Satanism as a symbol of their disaffection from society. A new book by LaVey, The Devil’s Notebook, helped draw a new generation into the Church. The organization survived LaVey’s death and remains active at the present time.
SOURCE:
The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies : the ultimate a-z of ancient mysteries, lost civilizations and forgotten wisdom written by John Michael Greer – © John Michael Greer 2006