Anton LaVey

Anton LaVey was the founder and public interpreter of the Church of Satan, an organization that presented Satanism not as inverted Christian worship but as a rejection of herd morality and an ethic of self-development. Through a 1968 recording and The Satanic Bible, he gave that position a widely distributed cultural form. His later comments on Black Metal drew a sharp distinction between his doctrine and the scene’s theatrical fixation on evil, death, and destruction.

Formation and Doctrine

Before founding the Church of Satan, LaVey had worked as a carnival performer, police photographer, burlesque organ accompanist, and occultist. The book presents these experiences as part of his long observation of society’s disreputable margins, rather than as a conventional religious career. On Walpurgisnacht, April 30, 1966, he founded what the account describes as the first official Church of Satan.

The Church’s fundamentals were framed as opposition to herd mentality and a Nietzschean ethic of developing the individual as a god on earth, free from the restraints of Christian morality. This was not, in LaVey’s account, simply a celebration of blasphemy. Its challenge was directed at conventional moral authority and egalitarian assumptions, while its emphasis on earthly life set it apart from doctrines centered on self-denial or otherworldly reward. The combination of religious identity and deliberate provocation helped make the Church a continuing subject of media attention, until Satanism became familiar well beyond its adherents.

The Satanic Mass and Its Afterlife

In 1968, LaVey released a Satanic Mass LP. The recording included a Black Mass, but he distinguished his purpose from a simple inversion of Christian rites: he wanted to clarify what a Satanic Mass was and to reach an audience for whom there was, at the time, little comparable forum for performance art. The recording was made live, with separate tracks, and preserved the event as performed. It was not initially conceived as propaganda, he later explained, although it became propaganda in effect. Publisher Lyle Stuart distributed it, with some funding from Howard Hughes, who was sympathetic to the project.

LaVey later reassessed the recording as more than documentation. He saw its visual approach as anticipating, by roughly twenty years, imagery that would become commonplace. The album’s other side extended the project beyond the ceremony: LaVey recited Satanic declarations over Wagner and other bombastic scores. These texts came from essays that would help form The Satanic Bible, published in 1969.

The book became the most widely distributed openly Satanic manual of thought in the account’s history of the subject. Its influence cannot be measured precisely, but its ready availability gave musicians a source for exploring demonism and occult themes in their public personae, songs, and performances. By the end of the 1970s, some major metal acts still invoked sinister forces, often superficially or with tongue in cheek; the book’s reach, however, extended beyond any one band or musical fashion. A 1971 electronic-synthesizer LP, Black Mass Lucifer, is one further sign of the period’s musical fascination with Satanic imagery.

Black Metal and the Meaning of Satanism

LaVey’s ideas became a point of comparison as Black Metal gained notice. The book distinguishes the scene’s cruder forms of Devil worship, black magic, and occult display from more developed positions associated with musicians such as Ihsahn and members of Ulver. The latter were presented as having moved beyond an initial attraction to sensational Satanic imagery toward ideas closer to the doctrines LaVey had set out. LaVey himself died in October 1997, before the book’s retrospective assessment of his influence and the changing scene was published.

Ihsahn’s account makes that influence specific. He had bought and read The Satanic Bible, finding its arguments easy to identify with and its Satanic imagery compelling. He described it as an early influence, not a final authority: after encountering the Black Metal scene and more extreme material, he developed his own views through successive influences and reflection. By the time of the interview, he said he no longer shared the views of anyone in the scene. His trajectory illustrates the book’s broader claim that some musicians began with a readily accessible, media-shaped image of Satanism and later moved beyond it.

LaVey’s assessment of Black Metal was correspondingly qualified. He had limited information about the scene, but argued that many of its self-described Satanists remained Christian in their assumptions because they defined Satanism according to Christianity’s account of it. The Satanic Bible, in his view, was a primer that codified contemporary Satanism and remained available to anyone seeking to understand that alternative definition. Some Scandinavian Black Metal musicians had attacked his philosophy as humanist; the book treats this opposition as bound up with incomplete knowledge and a desire to appear more extreme than an established Satanic organization.

Ritual, Pragmatism, and Performance

LaVey did not deny the possibility of ritual magic. His objection was to treating occultism as an end in itself, detached from practical action. He argued that ritual and pragmatism could coexist, and that Satanism’s image of Satan called for skepticism and rational inquiry rather than worship. This position complicated the scene’s apparent division between religious orthodoxy and occult transgression: for LaVey, magical practice could be acknowledged without surrendering practical judgment.

He also extended the idea of ritual beyond formal religious settings. A performer could regard a stage performance as ritual, and LaVey endorsed the emotionally charged Rock concert as a contemporary gathering, rite, and call to action. In this formulation, music did not need to imitate a church service to acquire ritual force; performance itself could concentrate shared emotion and purpose. That claim connected his earlier use of the LP as performance art to his later interpretation of music’s social potential.

The book places these arguments against a recurring cycle of media alarm. In Norway, reports of Satanism had appeared before Black Metal became a major headline subject, but the press’s attention shifted toward young musicians who adopted identities of evil and sometimes attacked people or property. Coverage helped create an impression of a broad Satanic assault, provoking fearful responses from police and church communities. Researcher Asbjørn Dyrendal later argued that mass-media attention also helped Varg Vikernes build street credibility and intensified competition within the scene. LaVey’s distinction between Satanism as an articulated philosophy and Satanism as sensational public imagery therefore mattered beyond doctrinal disagreement: it exposed how easily a provocative identity could be converted into a media category, even when the people placed beneath that label held sharply different beliefs and aims.