Reaction to Mitch Horowitz’s “Good, Clean Satanism,” a review of Anton LaVey’s “The Devil’s Notebook”

Church of Satan News: Occult writer and lecturer Mitch Horowitz reflects on his early impressions of Satanism and rediscovering the writings and philosophy of Anton LaVey.

I had once written off Anton as a showman and gifted musician with a instinct for the (virtual) kill. I saw his theology as little more than a secularized bastardization of British occultist Aleister Crowley, with a side of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist ethics and will-to-self thrown in. I was wrong.

As I recently discovered in cultural critic and occult explorer Carl Abrahamsson’s stunningly insightful forthcoming study Occulture, Anton had a more fully developed philosophy than I had realized, and he wrote with a depth and wit that has gone under-appreciated.

Read the full article at his Real Magic Medium blog.

It’s interesting that Mitch Horowitz found The Devil’s Notebook to be inspiring when it, along with Satan Speaks show Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey at his most obvious crankiness.

A short version of late-stage LaVey can be be summed up as “old man yells at cloud”.

There are substantive criticisms to be made as well about the kinds of things LaVey ends up whining about, but mainly it just sounds like an aging edgelord complaining about TV, how gun-laws affect “law-abiding citizens” versus criminals, why people who care about the environment are losers, etc. Also there’s some eugenics stuff thrown in, naturally.

It seems to me that the people who holler the most about ecology are the least capable of actually contributing to the planet’s development. Quite obviously, the first place to start is to eliminate the source of the problem. The problem of course is people. Get rid of the people and you will be rid of the problems they so desire to eliminate. 

The armchair liberals who speak reverently of ecological duty would be horrified to implement the totalitarian requirements of compulsory birth control. They shout, “Power to the people!” Power to do what? Make a bigger mess?

If he were alive today, he’d be complaining about “woke” on the Joe Rogan Show, hawking yet another poorly-edited book that read like your standard crypto-fascist blog. Or wearing sunglasses and making videos in a pickup about how the real problem “how easily young people are offended by things today.”

At 14 years old, LaVey has a lot exciting ideas for you. But the more you read him, especially as you get older and more familiar with other writers and thinkers, it’s difficult to arrive at where the author of that article did. For example, Horowitz specifically loved the “Duck Billed Platitudes.”

Here’s one of them:

“The best things in life are free.” They may be free for you, but somebody else is paying for them.

Like no one has ever had a conversation with a smug contrarian libertarian dude who says “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” and thinks himself a genius?

Now, specifically to the power of ritual, sure, rituals can be powerful for their ability to externalize and make one’s subjective feelings real in a way that resolves them. It makes sense to engage in physical actions, including words, that get stuff out of your head and into the world for you to experience with your senses and bring it back into your head in a different way or leave out there. It makes sense that focusing too much on what you want makes it more difficult to get that, although the comparison to masturbating so you don’t seek out a “lousy lay” is typical.

Even this collection isn’t free from the “gross old man” quality LaVey brings to essentially everything, his pretentiousness married to a tone of undeserved confidence, and, of course, his casual misogyny.  From his essay, “Clothes Make the Slave”:

Consider the development of trousers for women. It came with “emancipation.” Even though sexual mores were becoming looser, women started wearing trousers for their “freedom of movement.” Through the 1940s to the present time women have worn slacks, capris, pedal pushers, and whatever else was in style, so long as they could spread their limbs in comfort. In so doing they have established a standard of prudery that would make Victoria look bawdy by comparison.

Amidst carefully programmed porn, slick and abundant, exists today a primness unrivaled in Western culture. In their freedom people have become accustomed to depictions once only accessible to gynecologists and proctologists. One can purchase all manner of material depicting human genitalia in its most aseptic glory. Yet try to catch a glimpse of bare leg on a woman walking down the street. Turn-of-the-century petticoats couldn’t do a better job of concealing a nasty ankle or calf so much as a shapeless pair of pre-washed denim. Photo essays abound portraying the labia of emancipated women, but where in public dares a lady display an inch of bare thigh when not swimming, playing tennis or sunbathing? Saint Pantihoes doth protect her upper limbs from the gaze of the heathen.
…
The growing acceptance of homosexuality (which was needed to decrease the birthrate) manifested its influence on standards of dress and physical desirability. Soon men appeared more feminine and women more masculine, and a monster called “sex differentiation” began to creep forth. By the 60s, classic archetypes of comeliness were reversed. Most likely, the man would make a better woman, feature for feature, and the woman could easily pass for a man if she added a little fake stubble or beard.

It goes on from there and ends with the line, “Who says 1984 hasn’t come home to roost?”

Before you call this “progressive for its time”, this collection of essays was published in 1992 when LaVey was 62.

Admittedly, because we find LaVey objectionable as a person and object to the basis of his philosophy (Might Is Right) that he builds everything on top of, we’re never inclined to interpret borderline passages charitably, from his views on sex to women to magic.

But even with that in mind, LaVey is not a gifted writer, not an enjoyable read, and not apparently capable of the sort of humility and self-reflection necessary to grow as a person and find more interesting things to talk about with time. Instead, he used Satanism as a way to pretend he had come up with a philosophy of rebellion, and sank ever-deeper into his ever-more-boring, reactionary grievances.