Anton LaVey and Black Metal

Anton LaVey’s relationship with Black Metal was neither a simple line of influence nor a shared doctrine. His Church of Satan and The Satanic Bible gave some musicians a recognizable intellectual and symbolic reference point, but much of the scene defined itself against the humane, codified Satanism associated with LaVey. The result was a persistent distinction between Satan as an extreme, transgressive identity and Satanism as a system of individualist philosophy—a distinction often blurred by headlines that presented them as one menace.

Competing Ideas of Satanism

The account distinguishes a crude, theatrical form of Satanism from a more developed outlook associated with musicians such as Ihsahn of Emperor and members of Ulver. The former drew on familiar images of Devil worship, black magic, and occultism, and was represented by bands including Venom and Bathory. Some musicians who began within that current later moved beyond it. Their expressed ideas, the book argues, could come closer to the doctrines associated with LaVey than to the caricature of Satanism as ritualized evil.

That difference did not mean the scene generally welcomed LaVey’s ideas. The earlier Black Metal bands could express primitive and hateful views, and the music’s anti-LaVey posture reflected a preference for something more extreme than a humane philosophy. Some participants wanted not merely to adopt Satan as a symbol, but to approach the image of Satan himself. In that setting, LaVey’s presentation of Satanism as something accessible to ordinary people could seem to threaten the specialness that young adherents claimed for themselves. Rejection of LaVey therefore served both an ideological purpose and a subcultural one: it marked distance from a system perceived as too widely available and insufficiently transgressive.

Ihsahn and a Changing Relationship to LaVey

Ihsahn provides a specific example of how the relationship could change over time. He described buying and reading The Satanic Bible and finding it easy to agree with, while also being strongly drawn to its Satanic imagery. The book was an early influence, not a final authority. Black Metal and more extreme material then shaped his thinking; as he matured, he described moving among influences and forming views of his own rather than adopting any one person’s position.

His account also separates the appeal of a philosophy from the appeal of its imagery. LaVey’s writing offered ideas with which many people could identify, while its Satanic symbols gave Ihsahn a distinct aesthetic point of departure. He credited LaVey with helping make the word Satanism publicly recognizable through the Church of Satan, and observed that Black Metal had also made the term familiar in Norway. That shared visibility did not make the scene doctrinally uniform: Ihsahn said his later views no longer matched those of others in the scene. The relation was therefore one of contact and development, not simple conversion or allegiance.

The Church of Satan’s Response

LaVey and Blanche Barton rejected the assumption that Black Metal musicians necessarily represented a different legitimate branch of Satanism. LaVey maintained that his book set out a codified contemporary philosophy, and argued that many self-described Black Metal Satanists still defined Satanism according to Christian assumptions. In his view, treating Satanism as the opposite of Christianity could leave its adherents dependent on the religious framework they claimed to oppose.

Barton emphasized the importance of codification: in her account, there had been no legitimate, codified form of Satanism before the Church of Satan. LaVey was less concerned with denying individuals their opinions than with their claims to possess the uniquely correct version. He suggested that some young people were attracted to the name Satan and to striking symbols, but lacked access to accurate information about the Church’s philosophy. For him, communication and access to The Satanic Bible were key to clarifying the difference between the doctrine he had written and the identity being performed in parts of the Black Metal scene.

Media, Crime, and Public Conflation

The distinction was difficult to maintain once Black Metal entered mainstream coverage. A January 1993 front-page story in Bergens Tidende presented Varg Vikernes as a striking public figure and helped establish the scene’s interaction with the press. The later Kerrang! cover feature paired church-burning imagery and band photographs with a sensational account of Satanism. Its presentation brought Norwegian Black Metal to an international readership, but helped make the crimes associated with the scene inseparable, in public memory, from its music.

Asbjørn Dyrendal’s account of Norwegian media coverage traces an earlier history of Satan-related stories, followed by the arrival of Black Metal as a headline subject in 1993. The press often described young people adopting shifting identities—sometimes Satanist, sometimes Nazi or Odinist, and sometimes simply invested in being seen as evil. Some also committed crimes against people and property. Dyrendal notes that coverage could create the impression of a broad Satanic assault on Christians, provoking fear among police and church congregations. This public frame joined together distinct things: professed identities, criminal conduct, and religious doctrine.

The book also considers how publicity could feed back into the scene. Dyrendal came to see mass-media attention as valuable to Vikernes’s street reputation and as one factor that intensified internal competition for dominance. This does not establish that LaVey’s philosophy caused the crimes or the coverage; rather, it shows how the broad public category of Satanism could absorb very different beliefs and actions. In June 2003, the desecration of a chapel again triggered days of intense coverage and speculation about Satanic ritual, along with calls to outlaw Black Metal. Yet the arrested former band member had been dismissed for musical reasons and was largely ostracized from the scene. The book presents psychological and pharmacological factors as more plausible contributors to his conduct than music or Satanism.

Across these accounts, LaVey’s connection to Black Metal remains a contested influence rather than an explanation for the scene as a whole. The Satanic Bible mattered to some musicians, and LaVey helped give Satanism a widely recognized name; many Black Metal participants, however, resisted his humane approach or used Satanic identity chiefly as a mark of extremity. Media narratives repeatedly collapsed those differences, while the evidence in the book keeps them in view.