Anton LaVey

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all The Satanic Bible (1969), The Satanic Witch and The Satanic Rituals (1972).

Satan as a symbol

LaVey's Satanism has no God and no devil in it. Satan, in his teaching, is a symbol: of the carnal nature of man, of pride and appetite, of the adversary who stands against every creed of self-denial. The Satanist is his own god, and his church honours the self, the flesh and the life lived here, since there is no other. Man is an animal among animals, and for all his claims to a higher nature often the most vicious of them; the churches, he holds, made people sick by teaching them to hate what they are.

The nine statements

The Satanic Bible opens with nine statements of what Satan stands for, each set against its opposite: taking the pleasures of life instead of refusing them; this life, lived fully, instead of dreams of another; clear sight instead of comfortable self-deception; kindness to those who earn it instead of love squandered on the ungrateful; repaying a wrong instead of inviting another; duty to those who carry their own weight instead of to those who feed on others; man as an animal; all the so-called sins, as roads to the gratification of body, mind or feeling; and, last, the best friend the church ever had, since he kept it in business.

Indulgence, not compulsion

Indulgence, he teaches, is not compulsion. The Satanist chooses his pleasures and can stop; the compulsive is ruled by what he cannot refuse, and that, LaVey says, is often the fruit of long denial. Kindness is given where it is earned, and the one who drains others with guilt and need, whom he calls a psychic vampire, is refused. The Satanist answers for himself and asks others to answer for themselves.

The four books

The book is divided under the four elements and four names of the adversary. The Book of Satan, of fire, is a diatribe against the morals of meekness, much of it taken from an old tract that preached the rule of the strong. The Book of Lucifer, of air, is enlightenment: the creed argued in plain prose. The Book of Belial, of earth, is mastery: the method of ritual. The Book of Leviathan, of water, gives the angelic calls of John Dee in a version of his own, for use in the rites.

Greater magic

Ritual, which he calls greater magic, is done in a chamber he calls an intellectual decompression chamber: a room where the doubting, reasoning mind is set aside for an hour so that feeling can act at full strength. There are three kinds of working: for lust, for compassion, which is help for oneself or another, and for destruction. The celebrant wears black; the sigil of Baphomet hangs on the western wall; a bell is rung nine times to open and to close; and the wish is written on parchment and burned in the flame of a candle. When the rite is over the matter is put out of mind, for to keep fretting over it is to drain the force that was spent.

The sigil is taught on the symbols art's branch Baphomet. The house leaves the rite of destruction aside, as it leaves every working aimed at another person; LaVey himself held that the chamber is first a place where such a rage can be spent without harm. Fire is fire: a parchment burned in a rite is burned in a dish, and a candle is never left alone.

Lesser magic

Lesser magic is the everyday art of getting one's way, and he teaches it in his book for women, The Satanic Witch. Its rule is to command attention by sex, by sentiment or by wonder: to be looked at, to be felt for, or to astonish. Its law of the forbidden holds that what is half hidden draws the eye more than what is shown. His clock of types sets people round a dial by body and temperament and holds that each is drawn to the type across the dial from their own. He called it manipulation and meant it so; the house teaches it as his doctrine, and the power art's branch Recognising the moves teaches how to see such moves and refuse them.

The holidays and the sins

The highest holiday of the Satanist is his own birthday, the feast of the god he is; after it come Walpurgis Night and Hallowe'en. Late in his life he named nine Satanic sins: stupidity, pretentiousness, solipsism, self-deceit, herd conformity, lack of perspective, forgetfulness of past orthodoxies, counterproductive pride and lack of aesthetics. They are failures of intelligence and taste rather than of piety, and they show what his creed asks of its followers: to see clearly, to stand apart from the herd and to live well.

The Black Mass

His book of rituals gives the Black Mass, the parody of the Catholic mass, as a psychodrama whose worth is to free the one who performs it from the hold of a faith they were raised in, and he held that his own church seldom had need of it. The rites of his church for a wedding, a baptism and a funeral follow the same pattern as the others: the self and the life of the flesh honoured in black.