The founding of the Church of Satan on Walpurgisnacht, April 30, 1966, turned Anton LaVey’s accumulated interests in occultism and public performance into an organized religious institution. Its early visibility helped make Satanism a widely recognized subject, while its principles distinguished it from the simple inversion of Christianity that the name might suggest.

LaVey and the Founding

Before establishing the Church, LaVey had spent years in a variety of occupations: carnival work, police photography, accompanying burlesque performers on the organ, and occultism. The book presents this background as part of the context for his public emergence. He founded the first official Church of Satan on Walpurgisnacht, a date that gave the institution an unmistakably theatrical point of entry into public life.

Principles and Public Presence

The Church’s foundations, as described in the book, lay not in shallow blasphemy but in opposition to herd mentality and in a Nietzschean ethic of anti-egalitarian human development. Its ideal was a person freed from Christian morality and elevated toward godhood on earth. This combination of religious identity and declared opposition to prevailing moral conventions made the Church well suited to sustained media attention; it soon became a household name around the globe.

That public profile should not be conflated with every later group or individual identified with Satanism. The book contrasts the Church’s archetypal or symbolic understanding of Satan with the early Norwegian Black Metal youths’ belief in Satan as a literal being. Those youths imagined the world as a continuing struggle between good and evil, differing from fundamentalist Christians chiefly in the side they chose. The contrast shows that the Church’s founding established one influential form of Satanism, not a single doctrine shared by all who later adopted the label.

The Satanic Mass and Its Afterlife

In 1968, LaVey released a Satanic Mass LP that included a Black Mass recording. The book distinguishes the recorded Satanic Mass from a Black Mass understood as an inversion of Christian rite: the album instead presented a rejection of Christian doctrine. LaVey later described the record as a documentary of a performed event and recognized it as an early example of the kind of visual presentation that would become familiar much later. He also recalled that the recording was made live, with different tracks, and that publisher Lyle Stuart subsequently distributed it with some funding from Howard Hughes.

The album’s other side carried LaVey’s Satanic declarations over Wagner and other bombastic music. Drawn from essays, these texts became the framework for The Satanic Bible, published in 1969. The book describes that work as the only openly Satanic manual of thought to achieve wide distribution, while acknowledging that its social impact cannot be measured precisely.

Influence and Distinction

The book traces a cultural legacy from the Church’s publicity and LaVey’s writings to musicians who explored demonic and occult themes in their public identities, songs, and stage shows. By the late 1970s, some major metal acts still invoked sinister forces, though often superficially or with irony. The wider circulation of The Satanic Bible, however, helped keep the Devil in popular culture beyond any one musical moment. In this account, the founding’s decisive consequence was not that it dictated a single later practice, but that it gave Satanism an enduring institutional and media presence from which varied, sometimes sharply different, expressions could emerge.