The Devil’s Prophet - The Untold Story of Anton LaVey

In a black house hidden in San Francisco, beneath candlelight and guttural chants, a man in a horned robe raised his blade and declared, This is year one. Anno Satanus. His name was Anton LaVey, and he didn't just worship the devil, he made Satan an entire religion. He baptized his child upon the altar of evil. He walked a panther through the streets. He cursed a man to die, and that man died exactly as foretold. Some say it was theater, others believed it was real. This video will cover the life of one Anton LaVey. These are the documented rituals, curses, and terrifying truths behind the most infamous Satanist of the 20th century. Let us now enter the black house and crawl into the belly of the beast within its ritual chamber. As we delve into EVIL HAS A NAME THE STORY OF ANTON LAVEY AND SATANISM Please remember to check out my official links. Like, share, and subscribe. Thank you. When you're training consistently, the right gear makes all the difference. I've been using Raycon's Essential Open Earbuds, and they've completely changed how I work out. They don't block out everything around you, so you can stay aware while running, lifting, or walking outside, without sacrificing clear, motivating sound. Your music or podcasts will stay crisp, and you stay focused and safe. Right now is the perfect time to grab them, because they're 15% off. Regular earbuds block out everything. You can't hear someone calling your name, or a car honking, or anything. These Raycon ones just sit outside your ear canal, so you get really clear sound, and you can actually hear what's happening around you. They're really light, and the earhook part rotates, so they actually stay in. I've worn them at the gym, on walks, and doing stuff around the house, and they don't fall out, and they don't get uncomfortable. Raycon has over 3 million customers, and the sound quality is just as good as the more expensive brands. They're half the price, because they're not paying for celebrity endorsements, and all that retail markup stuff. And if you don't like them, you have a 30-day money-back guarantee. Besides that, they're lightweight, and they have 36 hours of battery life. So that's 8 hours of playtime, and 36 hours of battery with the charging case. I've been using them pretty much every day since I got them, whether it's been running errands, or at the gym, or just working around the house. And they're my go-to's now, which has been fantastic. The Essential Open Earbuds are here to help you go for gold, so go ahead and visit buyraycon.com slash mysteryarchivesopen to get 15% off. Definitely don't sleep on this deal, guys, and help support the channel. Now, let's get back to the content. This man's life, and the topic of modern-day Satanism as a whole, is incredibly vast. I've done my best to deep-dive, but I'm sure I'll inevitably miss some details as we go on. After all, I'm only human, and have done my best. Now, let us begin. Howard Stanton Levy was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a family of mixed Jewish-European ancestry. As a child, he felt like an outsider, harboring a fascination with the macabre. Family members encouraged his musical talent. He excelled at keyboards like the piano and accordion, yet he preferred haunting melodies to hymns. One often-repeated, though fanciful, anecdote claimed that baby Howard was born with a tail, a tiny appendage that supposedly marked him as a devil touched from birth. Though this sensational detail was likely a myth Levy himself propagated in later years, but it set the tone for the self-created legend to come. Growing up in California, young Levy was repelled by what he saw as the pious pretenses of society. He later recounted a formative teenage experience, sneaking into a traveling carnival's burlesque show, only to spot a local churchgoer among the lute dancers. I knew then that the Christian church thrived on hypocrisy, he said. Man's carnal nature could not be suppressed by Sunday prayers. In the late 1940s, he played the organ for further burlesque shows, and in seedy bars and lounges, and chanting patrons with eerie-like melodies. During this period, he crossed paths with the then-unknown Marilyn Monroe, or so he later boasted. Levy eagerly told interviewers that he had had a brief affair with Monroe when she was a nude dancer at an L.A. burlesque club in 1948. Such tales further illustrate how Levy would embellish his life story and fabricate his own mythos when it suited him. In truth, by age 20, Levy had settled in San Francisco, married a local girl named Carol Lansing in 1951, and had become a father after Carol gave birth to their daughter Carla in 1952. To dodge the Korean War draft, Levy enrolled in criminology classes and even claimed to work as a crime scene photographer for the San Francisco Police Department. Levy's first wife later recalled that his true income came from continuing to play nightclub gigs and not policing. By the mid-1950s, the restless young husband had grown distant, drawn more to San Francisco's underground scene rather than his domestic life. Levy's marriage to Carol fell apart by 1960 after he began an affair with a striking blonde named Diane Hegarty. Diane shared Levy's fascination with the occult and would become his most important partner in the coming decade. Around this time, Levy also cultivated an interest in paranormal investigation. He presented himself as a psychic investigator, willing to chase down ghostly phenomena, claiming even that the police referred 800 calls about supernatural occurrences to him. But in the patterns we'll see to come, like everything in Levy's early resume, this was impossible to verify since SFPD had no such records. But these tales of midnight hauntings and psychic adventures burnished his emerging persona as a man unafraid to walk on the dark side. In truth, the most consequential development of Levy's young adulthood was not any literal brush with the supernatural, but rather the circle of acquaintances he had gathered in San Francisco's bohemian circles. By 1965, Anton Levy had wholly embraced the role of San Francisco's resident village occultists. He and Diane, now his de facto wife, purchased a two-story Victorian house at 6114 California Street in San Francisco's Richmond District. Painted jet black with gothic trim, the home quickly became known as the Black House. Inside, Levy indulged his flair for the dramatic. Trap doors, trick bookcases, a full-sized coffin, a real human skeleton, and antique weapons on the walls. The collection was a monument to one man's obsessive aesthetic. Taxidermy and occult imagery adorned the parlor. Levy even kept a menagerie of exotic pets, most famously a black leopard named Zoltan that he would walk on a leash through the neighborhood. Neighbors gawked at the bald, Mephistophelian-looking man strolling a panther down the street or driving a former coroner's van as his personal car. But Levy relished his local notoriety. The Black House's most important feature was its ritual chamber, a dimly lit room with a grand fireplace mantle that served as an altar centerpiece. Here, Levy's magic circle gatherings reached their full flourish. On Friday nights, inquirers and devotees crowded into the house for lectures on arcane subjects and demonstrations of magic. Topics ranged from the history of werewolf legends to techniques of hypnosis and the use of sexual energy in rituals. Levy, typically clad in all black, would pontificate from his fireplace altar, delighting in shocking conventional sensibilities. Everything weird and wonderful was up for discussion, from vampires and cannibalism to the secrets of psychic power. By early 1966, the informal magic circle had coalesced into a more defined group of radical thinkers and misfits who were urging Levy to take his ideas further. Many felt that Levy's blend of rational self-interest, anti-establishment blasphemy, and theatrical ritual could form the basis of a new philosophy, even a new religion. Levy himself was coming to believe it. He had studied works of iconoclasts like Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand and found inspiration in their celebration of the individual will and rejection of Christian morality. He was also influenced by older occult texts, ranging from Aleister Crowley's Ceremonials to the Enochian Keys of Sorcerer John Dee. Levy's genius was synthesizing these desperate influences. philosophy, occult lore, and satire into something accessible to the curious 1960s public. He wanted to create a religion that explicitly celebrated the carnal self and marked the pieties of established faiths. All he needed was a catalytic event to declare his new movement to the world. On the night of April 30, 1966, the traditional Witches' Sabbath and European folklore, Levy gathered his closest associates in the Black House ritual chamber for a midnight ceremony that would make headlines. In dramatic fashion, Levy ritualistically shaved his head as the group looked on, explaining that he did it in the tradition of ancient executioners and other dark magicians. Then, standing before a makeshift altar, Levy raised a sword and solemnly declared the founding of the Church of Satan. He proclaimed that night to be the start of Year One, Anno Satanus, the first year of the Age of Satan. Those gathered became the inaugural congregation of the world's first organized satanic church in modern times. Levy's theatrical pronouncement might have ended as a mere odd footnote or a nod for his shrewd instinct for publicity. Immediately after the vulpers knocked right, Levy began courting the press. He alerted local newspapers that a new satanic church was open for business in San Francisco and invited reporters to come witness the blasphemous goings-on at the Black House. Before long, sensational articles appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times, dubbing Levy the Black Pope of a devil-worshiping cult. Rather than deny such labels, Levy embraced them. He appeared for interviews wearing a flowing black cape and a clerical collar, a Baphomet pentagram medallion gleaming on his chest. Levy loved to play the villain for the media, sporting a pointed Van Dyke beard and arching his brows in diabolical poses for photographers. Historian Gareth Medway later noted that Levy was a born showman who knew how to captivate an audience. And indeed, in 1966, he succeeded in grabbing worldwide attention by proclaiming the dawn of the Church of Satan for those who would reject the guilt-inducing god of Christianity. With the Church of Satan formally launched, Levy wasted no time in orchestrating dramatic rituals to put his new faith on the map. The Black House became the scene of frequent nocturnal ceremonies, equal parts occult ritual and performance art. Levy's early services were highly theatrical affairs. As one witness described, the witness chamber would be illuminated only by flickering candlelight and a red chandelier, while moody strains of Levy's organ music, often the eerie theme from Rosemary's Baby or Bach's Toccata, droned in the background. The air hung heavy with incense. Levy cut an imposing figure in his hooded black robe and horned cap, a gleaming sword in hand. He would intone a litany of infernal names, Satan, Lucifer, Belial, Leviathan, his voice resounding against the pentagram-painted walls. Often, a nude woman was draped across the altar as a living mockery of Christian modesty, serving as what Levy called the Satanic Altar. In some rites, Levy brought out a live snake or his pet lion cub to enhance the atmosphere of primal chaos. The participants, dressed in black hooded robes with inverted pentagrams, would chant responses in a guttural language, sometimes Enochian invocations borrowed from John Dee, and everyone would shout Hail Satan at climactic moments. It was strange, campy, and subversive all at once. While much of the ritualizing was akin to performance art, Levy was sincere in his philosophy behind it. The goal was not to summon literal demons, but to release the participants and their inhibitions through dark pageantry, a kind of psychodrama, to unchristianize them and exalt the carnal self. One of the earliest public satanic ceremonies Levy staged was a satanic wedding, a blatantly blasphemous mockery of a Christian marriage. On February 1, 1967, just nine months after the church's founding, Levy presided over the wedding of journalist John Raymond to New York socialite Judith Case in the Black House. This bizarre midnight service was deliberately open to the press, and it generated international headlines. Under the glare of cameras, Levy appeared in full demonic regalia, a black hood, cape, and goat head medallion. While the bride and groom donned black robes trimmed in scarlet, a naked woman lay sprawled across the altar, scantily covered by a leopard-print cloth, serving as the profane altar of Satan. As Levy intoned phrases in Pseudo-Latin, at one point chanting In nomine Satani, Lucifer Excelsius in a strangely accented growl, he traced an inverted cross on the couple's foreheads. He then rang a gong and declared them bound in Lucifer's name instead of God's. The ceremony was entirely for shock value indeed. The pair had not even bothered to obtain a legal marriage license, but it achieved Levy's aim of courting controversy. Reporters scribbled furiously as Levy concluded by raising a sword and pronouncing that So be it in the name of Satan, our Lord. The next day, headlines around the world blared news of the witch's wedding in San Francisco and the devil priest who officiated it. Levy was pleased. We really pulled it off, he told the groom afterward, and you can bet that the rubes are going to come back for more. The Life Magazine spread on the event dubbed Levy the Black Pope of his odd flock, a moniker he would carry for years. Levy continued to feed the media's appetite for satanic spectacle. A few months later, he staged an event more brazen than ritual, the first recorded satanic baptism in history. On May 23, 1967, Levy baptized his own three-year-old daughter, Zina, into the Church of Satan in a ceremony deliberately inverting the Christian baptism rites. Little Zina, dressed in a tiny hooded robe, was seated on the edge of the black house altar while a nude woman lay beneath it. As flashbulbs popped, Levy tapped his giggling toddler on the forehead with his sword and intoned, In the name of Satan, we dedicate you, Zina, to the left-handed path. The imagery was so outrageous that it hit front pages worldwide. Religious leaders were scandalized, but Levy gleefully welcomed their outrage. It only amplified the mystique of his church. He pressed vinyl recordings of the ceremony on an LP titled The Satanic Mass so that curious listeners could experience the blasphemy secondhand. Between the satanic wedding and baptism, 1967 saw Levy's fame or infamy explode. He appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson that year, clad in his devilish costume, confidently sparring with Carson's quips. Other talk shows and magazines lined up to feature the intriguing new religious figure, who preached indulgence instead of piety. Even a Jesuit college invited Levy to lecture, a publicity stunt he undertook with relish and a wicked grin. Behind the theatrical shock tactics, Levy was developing the philosophical foundation for Levyan Satanism, which he would soon be codifying into writing. Stripped of the spooky trappings, Levy's message appealed to many disaffected, rational-minded people in the late 1960s. He argued that Satan was not a literal demon with horns, but a symbol of rebellion, individuality, and the material reality of human nature. To Levy, God and the Devil were metaphors, one for the life-denying moralism of Christianity and the other for the life-affirming instincts that Christianity tried to suppress. I am my own God, Levy liked to say, and Satan is the symbol of man's carnal nature and prideful spirit. His creed exalted indulgence, not abstinence, vengeance, not turning the other cheek, and unapologetic selfishness as a virtue. Levy plagiarized freely to build his doctrine. For instance, he drew on Ayn Rand's philosophy of rational egoism, but he also tempered these harsh ideas with a streak of carnival humor and theatrical absurdity, which may have kept his church from tipping into something genuinely dangerous. Many who attended early Church of Satan rituals were struck by the wry irony in Levy's tone. He often delivered his diatribes with a sly wink, as if acknowledging the cosmic joke of it all. As one lecture attendee recalled, Levy spoke as if to say, we are hypocrites to condemn this act while we in society mutilate each other every day through war, rotten marriages, and the rest of modern life. This mix of frank social commentary, dark humor, and outrageous blasphemy attracted a variety of followers to Levy's growing movement. By late 1967, Levy was the center of a small satanic scene in San Francisco and a figure of fascination far beyond. The Church of Satan's central grotto, as local chapters recalled, and the Black House had initiated dozens of members, issuing red membership cards emblazoned with the sigil of Baphomet to each new Satanist. Levy would later claim membership in the thousands, though such numbers were likely inflated at the time. What is certain, though, is that his notoriety brought some other notable persons to his door. Among the curious celebrities of the 1960s who orbited Levy were Hollywood actors, musicians, and underground artists. One of these was the legendary singer Sammy Davis Jr. Davis had an open-minded interest in the occult and was introduced to Levy by friends at a Hollywood witch's orgy party. The singer found Levy's philosophy intriguing and even attended Church of Satan rituals. By 1970, Sammy Davis Jr. had officially joined the Church of Satan, proudly accepting a membership card and occasionally defending Levy in interviews. Another unlikely dabbler was said to be Liberace, the flamboyant pianist, who was rumored to have attended one of Levy's rituals out of sheer curiosity. Levy welcomed famous seekers. Their presence only fed his legend, but of all celebrity encounters, none was more fateful or fatal than Levy's entanglement with blonde bombshell Jane Mansfield. Mansfield was a popular actress and sex symbol of the 1950s who, by 1966, saw her Hollywood career waning. Ever hungry for publicity, Mansfield was drawn to Levy's dark glamour like moth to a flame. The two met in the summer of 1966 during a San Francisco film festival and Mansfield, intrigued, accepted Levy's invitation to visit the Black House. The unlikely pair forged a peculiar friendship. Levy, clearly smitten with the voluptuous actress, named her a High Priestess of the Church of Satan in a gaudy ceremony and presented her with a membership certificate, which Mansfield hung on the wall of her pink Los Angeles mansion. They staged a series of publicity photos together, Mansfield posing playfully in Levy's arms or seated by her heart-shaped swimming pool, while Levy, in cape and horns, loomed behind with a leering grin. Mansfield told the press that she was simply interested in what this man had to say and remained a practicing Catholic, but she also called Levy an interesting person and a genius. Clearly, both understood the publicity value of their association with one another. Beauty and the Beast in Real Life In 1967, Mansfield's visits to Levy became more frequent and so did the tensions that they caused. Mansfield often brought along her attorney and boyfriend, Sam Brody, when seeing Levy, and Brody was openly hostile to the self-proclaimed Satanist. According to legend, during one visit to Levy's Black House, Brody made the foolish mistake of In one account, Brody flippantly lit a forbidden candle on the altar, an act of sacrilege in Levy's eyes. Levy was enraged by the insolence. He warned Mansfield that Brody had earned Satan's ire. With a dramatic flourish, Levy allegedly invoked a curse. Your lawyer will die in a car crash within a year, he proclaimed. Anyone with him will be killed. Get rid of him at once. Mansfield supposedly laughed off this dire warning at the time. After all, Levy was known to be theatrical, but the events that followed were chilling. Over the next year, Mansfield and Brody were plagued by freak misfortunes. Mansfield's young son was mauled by a lion in a horrific accident, an eerie coincidence given Levy's own lion habit. Brody and Mansfield themselves suffered a string of seven car crashes in 1966-67, each one more serious than the last. Mansfield began to wonder if the Levy curse was real. Then, on June 29th of 1967, just one year after her first meeting with Levy, the curse appeared to come to fruition in the most tragic way. In the early hours of that morning, Jane Mansfield, Sam Brody, and three of Mansfield's children were driving on a dark Louisiana highway headed toward New Orleans. They had just finished a nightclub performance in Biloxi, Mississippi, and despite the late hour, after 2am, the party was determined to press on to the next venue. As their driver sped along Route 90 through misty bayou roads, a truck spraying mosquito fogger pulled onto the highway ahead of them. In the thick insecticide fog, the driver never saw the semi-trailer's rear end looming until it was too late. The car slammed into the truck at a high speed, cheering the top off. In an instant, Mansfield, Brody, and the driver were killed. All three in the front seat died at the scene, while the children in the back miraculously survived with injuries. The crash was so violent that rumors swirled about Mansfield being decapitated, although in fact she wasn't, but her skull was crushed. The nation was shocked by the gruesome death of the 34-year-old starlet, and many couldn't help but recall LaVey's ominous prediction. Did the devil kill Jane Mansfield? blared tabloid headlines. By one interpretation, Mansfield had been collateral damage. She died because she was in the car with the cursed Brody, exactly as LaVey had warned. In the wake of Mansfield's death, LaVey found himself even more in demand for interviews and profiles. Throughout 1967-68, he continued cultivating his devilish image. He boasted to Look magazine that he had served as a technical advisor on the hit film Rosemary's Baby, even claiming that he had personally played the devil during the movie's impregnation scene. In a similar vein, LaVey encouraged rumors linking the Church of Satan to the burgeoning counterculture chaos. When the notorious Manson family murders occurred in August of 1969, for instance, journalists couldn't help but note that one of the Manson killers, Susan Sadie Atkins, had been a performer in LaVey's circle. Indeed, Atkins had worked as a topless dancer in 1966 at a short-lived occult-themed nightclub show LaVey produced in San Francisco known as The Witch's Sabbath. In this grand burlesque, Atkins portrayed a vampire who drank blood on stage, a role chillingly apt given her later crimes. After Atkins fell in with Charles Manson and helped butcher actress Sharon Tate in 1969, riding pig in Tate's blood on the door, LaVey didn't miss the chance to mention that she was one of his former witches. LaVey simultaneously denied any connection to the Manson murders while slyly fanning the notion that the evil vibes of the 1960s swirled around him. Always, he walked the line between sincere occult philosopher and carnival huckster, keeping public intrigue alive. By the end of the 1960s, Anton LaVey had achieved global notoriety as the High Priest of the Church of Satan. To ensure his ideas were understood and to profit from the curiosity he had ignited, LaVey set out to publish a book laying out the tenets and rituals of his new religion. In 1968, sequestered in the Black House, he began compiling essays, aphorisms, and ritual scripts into a single volume. The result was the Satanic Bible, released by Avon Books in December of 1969. Part manifesto and part occult handbook, the Satanic Bible became the defining text of LaVeyan Satanism. In its pages, LaVey spelled out his nine satanic statements, a direct rebuke to the Christian Ten Commandments. These statements glorified indulgence, vital existence, and the undefiled wisdom over abstinence, spiritual pipe dreams, and self-deceit. For example, the first statement proclaims that Satan represents indulgence instead of abstinence. In another, Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek. The last, as LaVey loved to quote, was Satan has been the best friend the church has ever had. He has kept it in business all these years. LaVey pulled no punches in his contempt for conventional religion. He asserted that Christian ethic was anti-natural, demanding that people suppress their true desires and feel guilty for being human. Satanism, by contrast, would restore man's carnal pride. He framed it as a rational answer for those who couldn't swallow the hypocrisies of mainstream faith. There is a bit of Satan in us all, he wrote, meaning the urge to reject herd conformity and follow one's path. Crucially, the Satanic Bible also provided detailed instructions for LaVeyan rituals and magic. LaVey divided magic into two categories, lesser magic, everyday manipulation and charm, and greater magic, full-blown ritual spells. He firmly maintained that magic was mostly psychological, a means of focusing one's will, but he allowed for the possibility of unknown forces being tapped into. The book describes rituals for three main purposes, lust, to enchant a desired one, compassion, to help someone or oneself, and destruction, to curse an enemy. LaVey's destruction ritual in particular garnered attention. It involves crafting a doll or an image of the target, focusing hatred upon it, and declaiming the desired curse out loud. The book became an unexpected commercial success. Priced cheaply in mass-market paperback, the Satanic Bible sold through over a million copies in the years to follow. It spread LaVey's gospel of indulgence to curious youth and established the Church of Satan's canon. With his philosophy now codified, LaVey continued expanding his Satanic literature. In 1971, he published The Complete Witch, a, for witches only, guide to lesser magic and manipulating men's desires. Essentially, a Satanic take on seduction and self-help for women. In 1972 came The Satanic Rituals, which provided additional ceremonial scripts, some drawn from global mythos. During this period, LaVey's public activities gradually shifted. In the late 60s, he had thrown open the Black House to journalists regularly, relishing the limelight. But by 1972, he grew more selective. The Church of Satan's membership was spreading beyond San Francisco. Local chapters or grottos were established in other cities, led by deputy priests, and LaVey wanted to ensure the seriousness of his movement. He officially curtailed public access to rituals at the house in 1972, announcing that future ceremonies would be private or held by regional grottos. The core group in San Francisco continued meeting behind drawn curtains, but the new era of media-invited black masses was largely over. LaVey was also aging out of the flower power zeitgeist, and by the early 1970s, the hippie movement he despised was fading and a more cynical mood prevailed. On August 8th of 1969, the very night of the Manson murders, LaVey had conducted what he called a hippie funeral at the Black House, burning an effigy of a hippie in a ritual curse on the counterculture. Within 24 hours, the bloody Tate-LaBianca murders by ex-hippies seemed to signal the dark end of the Summer of Love, and a coincidence not lost on LaVey or others. One arena where LaVey remained active publicly was the entertainment world. Ever the showman, he enjoyed consulting on occult-themed projects. In 1970, a documentary film crew was allowed to film Church of Satan ceremonies, resulting in Satanus, The Devil's Mass, a 1970 film. This film, which played in grindhouse theaters, gave audiences a voyeuristic peek at LaVey's nude altars, bestial sigils, and campy blasphemies. Orgo, Mormo, Thousand-Faced Moon, look favorably on our sacrifices. Shem-hem-for-ash. Shem-hem-for-ash. Hail Satan. Hail Satan. Open wide the gates of hell, and come forth by these names. Adrenalek. Adrenalek. Astaroth. Astaroth. Viewers were equal parts shocked and amused. One of the best scenes features LaVey's bemused neighbors chuckling about the nude people dancing, and the pet lion they'd seen in his yard. In 1971, LaVey also made a brief cameo appearance in a low-budget horror film, Invocation of My Demon Brother, directed by avant-garde filmmaker and fellow occultist Kenneth Anger. And in 1975 came LaVey's highest-profile movie credit. He served as the technical advisor for The Devil's Reign, a Hollywood horror film about a satanic cult. The production crew flew LaVey to Mexico for the shoot, where he trained the actors in ritual gestures, and even played a small part on screen as a satanic priest. On set, journalists found LaVey in his element, striding about in a cape under the desert sun. He hinted to a reporter that his master plan was coming along. Before I die, he said, an elite force of satanists will rule the world. If nothing else, by the mid-1970s, Anton LaVey had cemented himself as the iconic face of satanism in the popular imagination. The bald-headed boogeyman lurking behind all that America found transgressive. Though LaVey outwardly projected confidence in the 1970s, the Church of Satan faced internal strains. As the initial flush of media curiosity waned, LaVey turned more to administration and monetization of his movement. In early 1975, LaVey announced a controversial policy. Higher degrees of satanic initiation could henceforth be obtained in exchange for financial contributions, rather than solely through merit or magical achievement. This did not sit well with some devoted members, who believed in satanism as a serious religion. They felt LaVey was reducing the left-hand path to a carnival show, or worse, a mail-order racket. The tension came to head in June of 1975, when Michael Aquino, a prominent member who edited the Church's newsletter, resigned dramatically. Aquino, an intellectual U.S. Army officer and ceremonial magician, had long been part of LaVey's inner circle, but had deeper theistic beliefs about Satan. He was disillusioned by LaVey's new pay-to-play policy, and what he perceived, as LaVey's atheistic stance, that Satan was merely a metaphor. After quitting, Aquino founded his own splinter group, the Temple of Set, which espoused the worship of an ancient Egyptian deity, known as Set, as a real supernatural entity. Aquino claimed that he took many dissenters with him from the Church of Satan, though LaVey downplayed the accidents. The Church of Satan later insisted that LaVey's fee-for-rank policy was intended to clean house of pretenders, who didn't fully grasp LaVey's self-reliant philosophy. Regardless, the schism marked the end of the Church of Satan's first era. Never again would LaVey's organization enjoy the momentum or unity of the late 1960s. From 1975 onward, the Church of Satan operated more as LaVey's private network, rather than a bustling public congregation. LaVey himself retreated from the limelight as the 1970s continued. He focused on writing essays, later compiled into books like The Devil's Notebook, and composing darkly whimsical organ music. He released an album, Satan Takes a Holiday, in 1973. He also indulged in personal eccentric hobbies. Yet, the outside world had not entirely forgotten LaVey. In the early 1980s, a new and unwelcome spotlight found him. The era of the Satanic Panic. As fundamentalist Christianity rose in political power, and the public developed an irrational fear of devil-worshiping cults, and supposedly ones that were abusing children, LaVey, the world's most visible Satanist, became a frequent target of suspicion. Fundamentalist preachers railed against him by name, and conspiracy theories flourished that the Church of Satan was behind a nationwide web of criminal ritual abuse. In truth, LaVey's organization was both theoretically opposed to harming children. One of his eleven satanic rules was to not hurt little ones, and far too small and disorganized to run any sort of criminal network. Nevertheless, he was associated with Satan in the public mind, and therefore, with whatever evil people cared to imagine. In 1980, after the release of the infamous and fraudulent memoir, Michelle Remembers, which popularized the notion of secret Satanic cults torturing children, law enforcement briefly took interest in LaVey. The FBI even interviewed him in 1980, regarding an alleged plot by others to murder Senator Ted Kennedy, a rumor tied into grandiose ideas of a Satanic conspiracy. According to the FBI files, LaVey was cooperative and dismissive of any such plot. He told agents that most of the Church's followers were fanatics, cultists, and weirdos, and that his interest in the Church of Satan is strictly from a monetary point of view. This candid assessment, essentially calling many of his fans kooks, was not something LaVey would have said publicly, but it revealed his pragmatic and even jaded view in private. The FBI closed their inquiry, finding no evidence tying LaVey to any crime. Nonetheless, during the 1980s, LaVey often felt under siege. As the New York Times later noted, the Satanic panic led to over 12,000 unsubstantiated accusations of Satanic ritual crimes across the United States. LaVey's Church of Satan, while not directly accused in most cases, became a boogeyman in the eyes of many Americans. LaVey received death threats. The Black House had rocks and bottles thrown at its windows by vigilante types, and in response, LaVey mounted barbed wire around the roof of the Black House and posted no trespassing signs with an image of a gun. He was growing older, in his 50s now, and had no appetite for brawling with angry Christians on his lawn, so he hunkered down. As one acquaintance put it, By the 80s, LaVey was holed up at home, playing the organ for whoever was willing to listen. The days of frequent public rituals were over. Occasional private invitation-only ceremonies were held, but LaVey no longer performed for TV cameras or outsiders. When asked why, he said that he did not want the Church of Satan to be seen as just a sideshow curiosity. It was a philosophy for those who understood, not a spectacle for mass consumption. LaVey's personal life in this era was also tumultuous. His long-time partner and high priestess, Diane Haggerty, finally left him in the early 1980s after over two decades together. Their relationship had deteriorated, and Diane grew tired of LaVey's infidelities and controlling behavior. In 1984, she filed a palimony lawsuit against LaVey, seeking a share of assets from their years cohabitating as the First Lady of Satan. The court filings were tabloid gold. They squabbled over who would get the collection of medieval torture devices, the crystal ball, the coffin, and even the large bust of the devil that they owned. Ultimately, Diane won a modest settlement. But the break with Diane had another consequence. It alienated LaVey's second daughter, Zina, who had sided with her mother. In 1985, Zina Schreck, formerly LaVey, who as a child had been the poster girl of Satanism, publicly renounced her father and the Church of Satan. She accused LaVey of being a fraud and an abusive father, and eventually aligned herself, their father's rival, Michael Aquino, for a time. Zina later pursued her own spiritual path in occult and Eastern traditions, but wholly disavowing the Church of Satan. This familial betrayal hurt LaVey deeply. In response, he essentially disowned Zina and rarely spoke of her except to disparage her companions. On a happier note, LaVey did find love again with a new disciple, Blanche Barton. A fiercely loyal young Satanist who became his companion in 1984 after Diane's departure, Blanche revitalized the aging High Priest. She took over many administrative duties, and in 1985 officially assumed the title of High Priestess of the Church of Satan. To the outside world, Blanche defended LaVey's reputation ardently, especially against the swirl of Satanic panic lies. LaVey and Blanche lived a quiet life by night, entertaining occasional church members or friendly journalists. They delighted in watching old horror movies and playing music together, Blanche on vocals, and LaVey on keyboards. Despite the dark persona, friends noted that in private LaVey could be charming, funny, and even domestic, cooking steaks for guests and doting on his pets. Still, he never lost his edge. He wrote scathing essays in the church's newsletter, railing against everything from New Age white-light gurus to the mediocrity of pop culture, and he continued to issue curses now and then, at least in print. One notorious piece he penned was Bleeding Heart Liberals and the Nine Rings of Hell, in which he fantasized about elaborate tortures for those he considered society's true villains, animal abusers, rapists, and televangelists. It was half tongue-in-cheek and half deadly serious. Classic LaVey. By the 1990s, Anton LaVey had outlasted the Satanic panic and seen his teachings quietly influence a new generation. A rising wave of heavy metal and goth musicians lionized LaVey as an elder statesman of alternative culture. None was more famous than shock rocker Marilyn Manson. In the early 90s, Manson reached out to LaVey, sending him a demo tape and expressing admiration. LaVey, who despised rock music in general, but recognized Manson as a fellow provocateur, welcomed the young musician. He granted Manson an honorary priesthood in the Church of Satan and became something of mentor figure to him. Manson later recounted that he and LaVey bonded over their mutual goal of toppling Christianity with the weight of its own hypocrisy. Through figures like Manson, LaVey's philosophy seeped into 1990s pop culture in lyrics, imagery, and attitude, even as the man himself remained in semi-reclusion. In 1993, at age 63, LaVey experienced a late-life joy. Blanche Barton gave birth to his only son, whom they named Satan Xerxes Carnegie LaVey. Ever dramatic, LaVey insisted on Satan as the first name for the baby boy, a declaration that the line of the devil's advocate would continue. Fatherhood at that age mellowed LaVey out somewhat. Friends said he adored his toddler son and spent hours entertaining him with circus music and handcrafted toys. LaVey now had three children in total, Carla, Zena, and little Satan Xerxes, though only Carla and Satan Jr. remained in his life by the mid-90s. His eldest, Carla, had reconciled with him and became an active figure in the Church of Satan, often acting as a spokesperson. As the 20th century neared its end, LaVey's health quietly declined. Years of late-night living, a reported fondness for whiskey, and the stress of being a pariah had taken their toll. Fittingly, an air of mystery surrounded Anton LaVey's death. In October of 1997, LaVey suffered a pulmonary edema, or fluid in the lungs, and was rushed to St. Mary's Hospital in San Francisco. The irony was that this was a Catholic hospital, but the was treated by nuns in his final hours. LaVey lingered unconscious for a couple of days, and then, on October 29th of 1997, he passed away at age 67. Curiously, due to a paperwork error or delay, the death certificate recorded the date as October 31st of 1997, or Halloween. To his devotees, this seemed preordained, the ultimate trick-or-treat, that the Black Pope would officially die on All Hallows' Eve. In the immediate aftermath, LaVey's family kept his death a secret for several days. Only after LaVey's body was cremated in a secret satanic funeral in Colma, California, attended by invitation only under the cover of night, did his eldest daughter Carla make a public announcement. In a macabre press conference, Carla LaVey stood holding hands with a wax statue of her father, one he had made years prior for a wax museum, as she confirmed the news to cameras. It was as if Anton LaVey had become one of his own lifelike mannequins, hovering between reality and legend, even in death. Inevitably, rumors sprang up about LaVey's final moments. A particularly lurid tale spread that, on his deathbed, LaVey suddenly saw something with his final breath, and cried out, Oh my, what have I done? There is something very wrong. An implication of a deathbed repentance, or terror. This story made the rounds in Christian circles eager to believe that the devil's high priest had one last change of heart. However, investigation by the fact-checking site Snopes found that the rumor is entirely unfounded. LaVey apparently died unconscious, without any final pronouncement. This false tale of his last words is nonetheless telling. It shows that even in death, LaVey's life accrued myth, a fitting final trick by those who sought to diminish him. After LaVey's passing, a bitter dispute erupted over the final inheritance of his satanic legacy. In a coda worthy of a soap opera or a grim fairy tale, LaVey's estranged daughter Zina and her husband Nicholas Schreck released a scathing nine-page fact sheet in early 1998, attacking LaVey's life story. They confirmed many of journalist Lauren Wright's earlier exposés that LaVey had lied incessantly about his past. He never worked with the police, never had a fling with Monroe, never tamed lions in a circus. Contrary to his claims, they painted him as a narcissistic conman who had started to believe his own satanic bible hype. While some of their points had merit, LaVey was a liar about his biographical details. He openly admitted, I'm a hell of a liar. I lie constantly and incessantly in his last essay compilation. Many of Zina's barbs seemed fueled by personal resentment. The Church of Satan's leadership, which by mutual agreement passed to Blanche Barton after LaVey's death, fired back at Zina and a messy legal battle over LaVey's property ensued. In the end, LaVey's estate, including the famed Black House, was divided. The Black House, in poor repair, caught in legal limbo, was eventually demolished in 2001 to the dismay of Satanists who saw it as a piece of dark history. Condominiums now stand at 6114 California Street, but pilgrims still drive by to see where the unholy church once stood. The Church of Satan itself survived LaVey, though it splintered. Blanche Barton led it for a few years, but by 2001, she ceded leadership to Peter H. Gilmore, a longtime member whom LaVey had respected. Gilmore and the new administration moved the church's headquarters to New York and maintained LaVey's teachings via the internet and publications. Carla LaVey, feeling sidelined, formed a separate group in San Francisco called the First Satanic Church in 1999 to carry on her father's work in her own way. Meanwhile, entirely new Satanic-inspired movements sprang up, most notably the Satanic Temple, founded in 2013, which borrowed LaVey's Satan-as-a-Symbol approach but directed it into political activism for secularism. The Satanic Temple's founders openly acknowledged a debt to LaVey's philosophy while also rejecting his more reactionary social views. LaVey had flirted with social Darwinism and even kept fascist regalia as shock symbols in his home. In a sense, the torch of Satanic satire passed to a new generation, one focused on pranks like Baphomet statues and Satanic school clubs to challenge church-state entanglement, endeavors that LaVey might have smirked at even if he had disagreed with their political liberalism. Anton LaVey's legacy today is multifaceted. To religious scholars, he's recognized as the father of modern Satanism, the man who, for better or for worse, took the figure of Satan and made it the center of an actual organized religion. His ideas have influenced occult literature and new religious movements, ensuring that Satanism will forever be studied alongside other new religious phenomena of the 20th century. To pop culture, LaVey remains an enduring icon of the counterculture, immortalized in countless film characters, songs, and novels that riff on his persona. Whether it's a bald Satanic high priest in a horror movie or references in metal music, LaVey's archetype lives on as the image of a Satanist. He even made it into comic books and video games as a villainous caricature. Yet, those who knew him often described a more human side. Friends recall him cackling at episodes of The Munsters and performing amusing parlor tricks or doting on pet cats. He kept numerous cats, finding them suitably Satanic in their independence. He was a bundle of contradictions, a man who preached Nietzschean strength but loved cheesy monster movies, a liar and a dreamer who nonetheless gave confidence and identity to many alienated individuals. In his final interview, LaVey was asked how he thought he'd be remembered. With a sly grin, he answered that, I'll never die. I've made arrangements. In a way, he wasn't joking. Anton LaVey lives on as the idea of him endures. And endure it has. Each Halloween and whenever a sensational crime or story invokes Satanists, the specter of LaVey's shaven devilish face isn't far behind in the public imagination. He made sure of that by crafting his life into a lasting legend, a suspenseful paranormal thriller all its own. LaVey once wrote, I'm as much of a devil as I need to be. And though showmanship and substance alike, he ensured the world would always wonder just how much a devil he was. In between. And take care. I'll see you next time.