Consider the Devil. Though he (and it’s usually presumed that it’s a he) goes by different names in different religions and cultures. There’s one thing for sure, though: he’s the No. 1 The Big Bad.
The embodiment of pure evil who brings pestilence and plague to the world, inserts murderous intent in the hearts of humanity, and makes it rain on your wedding day (isn’t that ironic?). Oh, and he might eat a baby or two.
But some cultures see the Devil more as a trickster or prankster. A wily con man who creates his own backstory, gets people to do his bidding with some parlor tricks, sows chaos and, really, just brings out what is already within people. And always, always, always controls his image.
It’s that latter type of screamin’ demon who no doubt inspired one Anton Szandor LaVey (nee’ Howard Stanton Levey). The founder, face, and man PR machine for a little religious group he founded in 1966, the Church of Satan.
The wild life of Anton LaVey—and it is wild—it chronicled for the first time by an objective biography in Born with a Tail: The Devilish Life and Wicked Times of Anton Szandor LaVey, Founder of The Church of Satan by Doug Brod (368 pp., $31, Hachette Books).
The Church of Satan got its first prominent media coverage in 1967 when LaVey – in his San Francisco Victorian townhouse home (aka “The Black House”) that event the set decorators for The Addams Family and The Munsters might think was over-the-top – performed his first “Satanic Wedding” ceremony. Complete with a nude woman serving as the altar.
That LaVey invited the media and did the ceremony twice just so news cameras could catch it all, spoke volumes about the man. Though his look of squinty malevolent eyes, trimmed Van Dyke beard and shaven head brought to mind more the villain Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon than Lucifer’s representative on Earth.
Fortunately, he also ditched his early cape “costume” with a head covering and foamy sewn-on horns that decades later would be more associated with Jon Lovitz’s “Satan” on Saturday Night Live.
LaVey had already concocted a fantastical bio of his past complete with half-truths, exaggerations, unprovable proclamations and outright lies (including the medical condition he swears he had as a child that gives this book its name). Brod does a yeoman’s job of trying to sort out fact from fiction with his research and interviews, though even he is challenged at times.
What’s actually true is that Anton LaVey was a smart, insightful man and a talented organist and charmer who played his weird mixture of circus/stripper/groovy music at dive bars and floated from one get-rich-quick scene to another.
That is, until he landed on this most extreme of career paths and transformed himself into “The Black Pope.” And hey, it was the ‘60s and ‘70s when films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist and countless lurid paperbacks made Satan an unlikely pop culture figure. Even Sammy Davis, Jr. was interested. LaVey even recorded and released one of his rituals on record as The Satanic Mass for some easy listening at home.
Amazingly, the Church of Satan grew and grew and included chapters around the country and the world. Though by LaVey’s own admission, a core tenet (which he put out in The Satanic Bible, currently on its 101st printing) wasn’t really worshipping a physical demon.
No, this “Satanism” was more about exposing disdain and hypocrisy of Christianity and rejection of fear in religion, with a heavy dose of naughty free love and lots and lots of sexual imagery. Like when LaVey looking for early members produced a dance/ceremonial/burlesque revue of “topless witches.”
Among that nubile coterie was a teenage girl who called herself Sharon King. She’d later gain far more infamy as her real name—Susan Atkins—as she committed real evil under the guidance of another charismatic and charming older man. A guy named Charles Manson.
How much Anton LaVey truly believed the things he was spouting is up for debate. But like any good actor in the role of a lifetime, it was the performance that mattered most. And yes, that was a live lion named Togare he kept at home, until endless complaints from neighbors about it roaring at all hours the night—and a few dangerous incidents as he grew older—sent the beast away.
Still, the show could only go on for so long. The early 1980s “Satanic Panic” of demonic backward masking on Judas Priest records, the McMartin Pre School case, and Geraldo Rivera’s breathless TV special were all over the news. LaVey and his church faded away a bit.
It would take the alternative press, ‘zine culture, and early internet message boards in the mid-‘90s looking for offbeat people and features to help revitalize Anton LaVey. Though by now he was more playing a caricature of himself, like Hunter S. Thompson also was doing at the time.
Though many of a younger generation of writers and filmmakers who encountered him found him to be a surprisingly funny guy who told great stories while discussing the virtues of his and his female companion’s favorite restaurant, the Olive Garden.
Brod has conducted an impressive array of interviews, many of whom vividly recall things decades later. Ultimately, Brod quotes those who today see what LaVey and the Church of Satan were doing as “a social experiment” or “the gray area between psychiatry and religion.”
LaVey died in 1997 at the age of 67, somehow pulling off one final trick: all evidence points to him leaving this mortal coil on October 29, but his death certificate lists October 31: Halloween.
The women and children on his life would battle over control and direction of the Church of Satan and its holdings, down to the giant Baphomet symbol above the mantle, with accusations flying back and forth. It still exists today and maintains a robust website with policy papers, historical writings, essays, reading/viewing lists, and other ephemera.
But the lead photo? It’s “Doctor” LaVey himself, behind three members wearing what look like giant paper machine masks of animal faces from Back in the Day. In 2024, the picture is far less scary than what you’ll see in the aisles of Spirit Halloween this season, an “evil” more comedic than carnage. And it’s something that the Man in Black himself would probably have a chuckle about. Albeit an evil-sounding chuckle.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
