Where LaVey's Satanic Bible had presented Satan explicitly as a psychological symbol rather than an objectively existing being, Aquino's Temple of Set reversed that framing, holding Set, derived from the Egyptian deity of the same name, to be a real, separate intelligence that had guided human self awareness across history under various names, of which Satan was only the most recent and most misunderstood. The Temple describes its central goal as Xeper, an ancient Egyptian term it uses to mean the deliberate, isolate development of the individual's own separate consciousness, distinguishing its aims explicitly from any tradition oriented toward dissolving the self into a larger unity.
The 1975 split between LaVey's Church of Satan and Aquino's Temple of Set remains the founding schism of organized modern Satanism and its closely related Left-Hand Path successor movement, dividing the field along the same symbolic-versus-literal line the two men themselves drew at the time. The Temple of Set continues to operate as an initiatory order under later leadership, and the atlas describes its history and doctrine here without offering instruction in its closed initiatory material.
Aquino himself became the subject of a separate, unrelated 1987 criminal investigation into allegations of child abuse at a Presidio day care facility; no charges were ever filed against him and the case was closed without prosecution, but it remains a documented and contested part of the public record around him distinct from his religious work, and this entry notes it for completeness rather than treating it as settled fact in either direction.