September 5, 2023

Anton LaVey was worse than you think

A cursory look at some of the Church of Satan founder’s politics and views

We often criticize The Satanic Temple, and for obvious reasons. They have been suing us for more than three years, and are at present the largest, most prominent, and most popular Satanic organization in the world. When a news org wants to get a quote from “Satanists” on a subject, TST is usually who they turn to.

When we’ve detailed the many ways in which the Temple’s owners are reactionary ghouls, this often prompts people with a cursory interest to say, “Wait, which Satanists are the good ones again? The Church of Satan?”

Black and white photo of Anton LaVey and Peter Gilmore standing, posing with a revolver and a rifle, respectively
Anton Szandor LaVey, left, and Peter H. Gilmore, early 1990s.

To the Church of Satan’s credit, to our knowledge they’ve never sued ex-members for criticizing them and don’t falsely promise pregnant people being a Satanist can help someone get an abortion with an religious liberty loophole. When folks buy a lifetime membership card or purchase a book associated with LaVey’s organization, they generally do understand accurately that they aren’t getting anything special in return.

But does that make them the “good ones”? Not exactly, and when it comes to the things Anton LaVey, Peter Gilmore, and other key figures have said and done when forming and representing CoS, the history with open neo-Nazis and fascists is quite awful, before even getting into the dogwhistles that your average “hail Satan!” atheist isn’t attuned to.

Indeed, even some more knowledgeable people have the general impression that the Church of Satan has always been mostly harmless and its founder just a bit of “goon” but otherwise unproblematic or even progressive.

In this article, we’re going to argue Anton LaVey’s lifelong flirtations with fascism and white nationalists in particular are actually quite bad and move him beyond the “wasn’t all that problematic” territory.

That doesn’t mean all LaVeyan Satanists are bad, or that they are even expected to agree with LaVey in matters politic. Over the past 20 years, being a LaVeyan has come to mean something different than it did in the 1980s and 1990s.

But the Church of Satan does not take the stance that their founder can be discarded easily with only his good ideas retained, so if you are being told that One True Satanism™ is restricted to the words and deeds of “The Doktor” himself, you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with his words, his deeds, and what he considered acceptable (neo-Nazis) versus beyond the pale (smoking weed).

Warning: This LaVey video and the caption will have all the slurs.

Brother Satan, I call forth this night all of your forces. Attain me and the elevation of the superior human animal, and the destruction of all those niggers, kikes, fags, wops, greasers, degenerates that are inferior and not as we are. We are superior.

Anton LaVey for “Speak of the Devil” (1993)

When this clip started making the rounds again in 2019, it was very disheartening to many a LaVeyan Satanist.

An apologist for LaVey would point out that this got left on the cutting room floor of Speak of the Devil: The Canon of Anton LaVey. The version with the slurs wasn’t the standard invocation; maybe it was even done as joke never intended to make it into the final cut.

The Church of Satan’s administrator Peggy Nadramia gave this explanation:

Which as far as literal victim-blaming isn’t all that great, but, uh, speaking of context, you know that director that’s referenced as doing the goading, Nick Bougas? You know what name he also went by?

“A. Wyatt Mann.”

If you don’t know him by name, the image should make it clear you’re familiar with his work.

The Surprisingly Mainstream History Of The Internet’s Favorite Anti-Semitic Image

“Thomas Metzger” would be former California Grand Dragon of the Knights of the KKK and founder of the violent white national group “White Aryan Resistance” Tom Metzger, by the way (rest in shit).

LaVey’s literal friendliness with literal neo-Nazis certainly didn’t start in the 1990s, either.

In this 2001 paper by Jeffrey Kaplan titled, The post-war paths of occult national socialism: From Rockwell and Madole to Manson, Kaplan talks about American neo-Nazi occultist James Madole and Anton LaVey’s warm, personal relationship with him in the 1970s, as made quite clear in letters between LaVey and one-time top Church of Satan lieutenant Michael Aquino.

This is a long excerpt from that paper with the underlying citations included to avoid any argument that something is being unfairly taken out of context. (Again, unredacted slurs presented below.)

There is no shortage of these sort of connections. Heresy Labs’ (now-deleted) Twitter thread and the Trident Antifascism articles were quite extensive on other leading figures in the Church of Satan.

But none of this is a secret. LaVey’s closeness with Boyd Rice in particular is well known, and Rice likes to fancy himself a musician and artiste, but back in the 1980s and ’90s when he was working with LaVey and the Church of Satan, Rice was a lot less coy about all of this Nazi shit.

Rice’s longtime ties to other fascist and neo-Nazi figures and groups that occasionally resurface get him into trouble, but if it’s a surprise to people now, it sure wasn’t to LaVey when Rice was putting together the 8-8-88 neo-Nazi fest worshiping Charles Manson.

But in interviews with Rivera’s team, posed in front of a statue of the deity Baphomet and a swastika, they seemed largely unrepentant and apathetic to the public response. Peddling plainspoken hatred, eugenicist ideas and talk of eradicating an entire population for the sake of the few, their message was clear-eyed and terrifying, even if it was a performance for the cameras.

Boyd Rice, aka the Bay Area experimental artist NON, interviewed in rare footage.
Boyd Rice, aka the Bay Area experimental artist NON, interviewed in rare footage.

Hephaestus @ Archive.org / CC BY-NC-ND
“The entire world is rotten and corrupt … to us they're dead people who refuse to lay down, they're cadavers,” said Rice on camera.

This went deeper than trolly aesthetics, and it consisted of far more than just LaVey. See, for example, current Church of Satan Grand Nagus Peter Gilmore being an unabashed fan of James Mason’s collected writings in Siege.

View on Twitter

That sounds pretty bad, but it gets worse. The following is in the middle of Peter Gilmore talking (no doubt “apolitically”) about a need for increased eugenics policy, greater social stratification, and the end of all social welfare as official Church of Satan goals.

The now edited essay was originally written in 1992, so around the same time as Gilmore is praising James Mason’s Siege collection:

Read that bolded section again, then sit and think for a moment why someone who wants an “American Schutzstaffel” to hunt down “vermin” in disproportionately non-white cities might be attracted to a neo-Nazi like James Mason. Then remember that Gilmore is who is running the Church of Satan now.

To get back to James Mason, he is also a man LaVey personally thought quite highly of, apparently.

Signed copy of The Satanic Bible: “To James Mason - a man of courage and reason, a rare combination”

Mason is a man called the the “Godfather of Fascist Terrorism” but also a pretty open child predator, eventually arrested on charges of possession of child pornography for nude photos of one of the 15-year-olds he was “dating”, although the plea deal ultimately didn’t include that in his conviction.

Mason was 40 years old in 1992.

Tweet by spencer sunshine @transform6789
Here's that picture of James Mason (Siege) with Peter Gilmore (Church of Satan) I've been looking for. Also included: Mason's underage girlfriend Eva and Gilmore's wife Nadramia
[Archive.org]

While LaVey personally may not have been aware of the child rape, he definitely knew about the white nationalist terrorism because, again, Peter Gilmore gave that positively glowing review of Mason’s Siege in The Black Flame.

Clearly LaVey — a man bothered by all sorts of things he never hesitated to complain about — wasn’t terribly bothered about that.

Or see Anton LaVey talking about ways in which fascism is good for keeping people in their proper gender roles.

As far back as The Satanic Bible (1969), LaVey’s idea of a blasphemous black mass may as well be the Republican Party platform under Nixon.

Before we keep multiplying examples, remember that Anton LaVey is also the same guy who looked at the viciously white supremacist, antisemitic, misogynistic Might Is Right by Arthur Desmond and said, “I could make a religion out of this”. LaVey did this while in the milieu of late 1960s San Francisco, so the exact opposite of “it was a different time” or “what do you expect from someone who didn’t know better?”

LaVey did know better, and he chose to go in this direction instead.

If you swim in the circles of white nationalism for a few decades, call your religion a “law and order philosophy“, seek the establishment of a police state to crush your genetic inferiors, oppose bodily autonomy for people who can become pregnant, and base what you’re doing on turn of the 20th century proto-fascism and Ayn Rand, you’re more than a little “problematic” and your ideas are likely poisoned at the deepest levels.

But if we need to multiply examples, then LaVey’s own actual ideology certainly gives you enough. Again, Might Is Right has plenty of absolutely explicit racism, antisemitism, and misogyny, and LaVey said, “What if we kept the underlying reasoning here but weren’t so explicit about it in these stolen passages or my worldview?” Not quite an aside: by the intellectual property standards of today, the plagiarism LaVey did with Might Is Right would probably literally have gotten him sued, but in the 1960s, copyright didn’t last as long (thanks Disney Corporation!). That’s how close and extensive the lifted passages are, though.

The pseudonymous Christian writer John Smith put together some short comparisons, but anyone who has read Might Is Right will recognize how LaVey padded out his “Book of Satan” section of The Satanic Bible with direct or sometimes only slightly modified quotes (“Open your eyes that you may hear, O! men of mildewed minds and listen to me, ye laborious millions!” becomes “Open your eyes that you may see, Oh men of mildewed minds, and listen to me ye bewildered millions!”).

The redefinition of explicit white supremacy to “mere” social stratification based on meritocracy seems to be a rather transparent version of the same thing. When Peter Gilmore has a low opinion of rap music and has a much higher opinion of orchestral music like Beethoven or chamber music, we can see what’s going on there even if he’s claiming it’s got nothing to do with skin color or ethnicity.

It seems impossible, but if anyone still reading is confused and thinks this is a defense of The Satanic Temple or generating sympathy for them, here’s where we point out that TST 2.0 brought in Shane Bugbee, Brian Werner, and Zach Black to help shore up their prank documentary’s credibility, and back in 2014, this is still how the split between Peter Gilmore and Boyd Rice was being talked about by the guy who founded the first Portland, Ore., chapter of TST:

Yes, of the two it is better that after LaVey’s death Gilmore led the Church of Satan rather than Boyd Rice, but why was the American Front guy in the running for leadership at all?

You may also want to consider the defense Peggy Nadramia (who is also Gilmore’s spouse) gave in 2023 of LaVey’s slurs as being about “collectives of people who care more about identifying with a victimized minority” and compare that to Rice in 2020 likewise still calling himself “apolitical” and talking about victims:

Rice wearing “Victimhood is Powerful” T-shirt

In terms of politics, how much daylight is there between the Church of Satan and Boyd Rice anyway?

Truth be told, being able to get along with and support open neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and their ilk is often all that those people want — especially if you’re willing to muddy the waters by using their symbols while disclaiming you “really” mean it.

Anton LaVey, of course, did both.

From Burton H. Wolfe’s unauthorized biography The Black Pope:

And from Blanche Barton’s authorized biography The Secret Life of a Satanist:

By the way, another long excerpt later from the same book makes it perhaps even clear that LaVey loved everything about white supremacy and Nazis down to believing there is a literal “genetic strain of Satanists” who ought to dominate a future police state against those considered their inferiors and wipe them out. LaVey just wanted this to be justified by something other than the standard racial categories the avowed white supremacists used.

When LaVey said, “Satanists are born, not made,” he meant this literally:

That’s a lot to take in!

It was also something coming from the end of his life with his final romantic partner Blanche Barton writing, so you might could say that he developed into something worse with time but that shouldn’t reflect negatively on The Satanic Bible and LaVey’s initial productive period.

Except that as that very passage itself indicates, this eugenics stuff, police state, and reactionary political ideology goes all the way back to the beginning, and it’s not just restricted to cribbed passages from Might Is Right left unchanged.

Neopagan (and posthumously revealed child sexual abuser) Isaac Bonewits first published an account in 1975 about Bonewits’ days in the early Church of Satan in 1967. So this shouldn’t be taken uncritically, but it does align with things LaVey himself wrote and other people have said, and it shows just how far back this tendency of “far-right aesthetics with actual far-right sympathies” goes.

It wasn’t a late development; rather it was there in the community practically from the start. Bonewits relates:

In Ruben van Luijk’s 2016 book, Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism, the eighth chapter “Tribulations of the Early Church” talks about this explicitly; while stressing that the ethnically Jewish man born “Howard Levey” was not a Nazi himself, the reason LaVey liked Nazis so much was because LaVey agreed with them about so much:

So The Church of Satan spent decades after the era Bonewits described spawning white nationalists and trying to court more white nationalists while never being that attractive to non-whites and being overwhelmingly male. The criticism is not just a grudge from a single person or one videotaped statement taken out of context; it is substantial and it seeps into everything.

It fits within this whole context where people keep saying, “Satanism is an apolitical religion of the individual!” and then official figures within the church will talk nicely about fascism with the only criticism being “it’s collectivist” — which if you’re one of the people fascists want to exterminate is not really the first or intermediate criticism any of us are that concerned with. We know to stay away from people who talk like that. Whether they want to eliminate us from the perspective of individualist egoists or as part of a mass movement is irrelevant.

In fact, when the issue is whether you should be eradicated or not, it turns out it actually doesn’t matter that much if the person wearing the symbols and talking about it “really” believes it, is just going along with their friend who does, or they think it’s a fun way to provoke and troll people.

LaVey earned criticism by doing some variation of this very schtick for many, many years.

Look, this isn’t even close to exhaustive because that would probably require its own book, but the point is that what Peggy Nadramia of all people has to say now about LaVey slinging racist slurs is not the most important or clarifying thing.

Yes, these things Anton LaVey, Peter Gilmore, and the Church of Satan’s official organs have said over the years are not necessarily reflective of every LaVeyan Satanist, certainly.

But they are reflective of something.

That clip of LaVey saying racist things at the direction of a white nationalist caricaturist is reflective and even representative of LaVey’s values, mores, and the company he kept for decades — and not just him personally but for numerous official Church of Satan projects that were presented as official works of him and the church.

From the outside, it seems rather baffling for LaVeyans to have it both ways.

Not every LaVeyan Satanist necessarily agrees with these sorts of reactionary political and cultural statements, and in fact most would probably claim the exact opposite. But when certain members of the Church of Satan tell others that to be a True Satanist™ is only to follow the religion set out by Anton LaVey and interpreted/represented by the Church of Satan, that includes stuff like all the examples above, below, and more not included.

At the very least, a LaVeyan Satanist should be able to acknowledge what is going on and suss out euphemisms and logical conclusions rather than acting like anything not spelled out isn’t there — even though plenty is quite explicit.

If you claim no other version of Satanism exists other than what Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan invented and have said about Satanism, it seems self-evident that what those key figures have said and are saying is of the utmost importance. Otherwise, how do we understand what Satanism is and stands for? This is the authority we’re supposed to be consulting and bowing to in our religion of the individual, right?

The alternative is that the Church of Satan doesn’t matter, Peter Gilmore doesn’t matter, nothing LaVey said or did after 1969 matters — only The Satanic Bible matters and we are each to interpret it anew for ourselves. But even for these types, it seems that if you interpret the book differently from the current Church of Satan, then you’re wrong and doing it wrong.

That’s very hard to square for most people.

Ultimately, some sort of “sola scriptura” view of The Satanic Bible feels awfully Protestant and we still have to ignore the plagiarized passages of Might Is Right in the “Book of Satan” section and pretend like they have no external context either. It just doesn’t seem worth putting that effort in to salvage in that way. Maybe only true elites of society are chromosomally different and therefore are willing to do that, but it’s not very compelling to the rest of us mere mortals.

As an alternative way of handling all of this, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon may have been the first person to declare himself an “anarchist” but no anarchists today (or really ever) have been terribly constrained by Proudhon’s writings or views. An anarchist can read Mikhail Bakunin, can like a lot of the stuff he wrote, acknowledge his enormous enduring influence, and still can understand that Bakunin’s works and life are no more than one person’s experiences and view of the world. Anarchists can, or at least should, freely admit Bakunin was an antisemite. “We follow ideas, not men. …We reject the habit of incarnating a principle in a man,” as Errico Malatesta wrote, expecting no one to feel constrained or beholden to him as an individual, either.

Anton LaVey can matter to you, and his writings that found you a crucial point in your development can still inform or inspire some aspects of your life today, but you ought to be able to admit that he had a ton of reactionary prejudices that formed his worldview. You ought to be able to admit these are represented in all of his writings and core beliefs in a way that was a problem for Satanism and is an ongoing one (e.g. you cannot say Satanism is “apolitical” but also a law-and-order philosophy and further perhaps we should have “an American Schutzstaffel” to stamp out vermin in cities who listen to low-class music like rap.).

When someone tries to “whatabout” LaVeyan Satanist critics of The Satanic Temple, clearly they are not concerned with anything real except keeping TST members in the fold and terminating deeper thoughts about their own founders’ long history of bigotry.

But the impression given, again from the outside looking in, is that LaVeyan Satanists believe “there are not multiple strains of Satanism, only this one thing because we — LaVeyan Satanists who agree with the Church of Satan’s party line — are the authority on and who define it… just do not look too closely at the history of this supposed authority or interrogate it too much because repeating the words of these key figures back is an attack.”

Criticism of LaVey and the Church of Satan as an official entity should not feel like an attack on any LaVeyan Satanists so long as they’re keeping that critical distance between their self and this external thing they partway support. But this distance collapses if what’s being said is, “There is only one Satanism, and we’re it. Just read LaVey and this official Church of Satan statement to understand.” That is the impression an outsider gets an awful lot.

Let us close by multiplying yet more examples of LaVey’s own statements since it’s notable how open he was about some of this stuff, and because Satan Speaks! in particular really is that awful, bearing in mind that we’re not even touching the piss-panty fetish, no-bathing, and smellz stuff:

A lukewarm defense of Anton LaVey is that most of what he wrote and said is inoffensive and actually just really boring.

This is not even a statement on his politics. The guy just was not that interesting or good of a writer outside of the one trick he figured out: pissing off Christians by claiming the devil’s side.

But his “apolitical” politics do sneak through all along, especially in his late works that began to scrape the bottom of the barrel, such as The Devil’s Notebook, published in 1992 which is a scattershot of grumpy old man opinions you could find any bar on a weekday:

Then it’s tough to pin down when the essays from this posthumous collection were actually composed, but the following is Anton LaVey as represented in Satan Speaks!

The same essay closes:

And you can look at that and say, “See! It’s proof that The Doktor didn’t hold antisemitic views!”

But it isn’t exactly biased to read that and think that a dude who hung around with Nick Bougas and worked on multiple projects with him, who surrounded himself with swastikas and people who wore them, who had an understanding of Nazism apparently that fucking surface-level, and thought rock music making white kids “too Black” which was the reason for the white power movement — it isn’t biased to assume that guy had a lot of really shit ideas about race and racism in a way that makes that initial video clip more representative of the man’s life and biases than the Church of Satan is comfortable with facing up to now.

A few more:

No gods, no magisters.

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