"Greater Magic" and "Lesser Magic" are the terms used within LaVeyan Satanism, the philosophy of the Church of Satan founded by Anton LaVey in 1966, to distinguish two categories of magical practice, understood within a broadly naturalistic and self-oriented worldview rather than a supernatural one. Lesser Magic is the everyday manipulation of people and situations to one's advantage through the applied understanding of human psychology, the use of charm, manipulation, body language, and the deliberate management of the impression one makes, especially through the exploitation of sex, sentiment and awe, which LaVey named the principal levers of influence. It is, in effect, a codified art of persuasion and self-presentation, magical in name and framing but understood as the skilled application of natural human dynamics.
Greater Magic is the ritual and ceremonial dimension: formal rites performed, in LaVey's system, to focus and discharge the practitioner's emotional energy and will toward a desired end, classified into rituals of desire, of compassion, and of destruction. LaVeyan Satanism understands even these ceremonies in essentially psychological terms, as a means of directing the practitioner's own emotions and adjusting their state of mind, a kind of self-administered catharsis and concentration of will, rather than as the invocation of external supernatural powers, since the philosophy is atheistic and treats Satan as a symbol of the self and of the natural rather than a literal being. The distinction reflects the movement's characteristic fusion of ritual form with a materialist, self-interested and psychologically framed understanding of what that ritual actually accomplishes.