A Text Built From Older Material

LaVey drew openly on earlier thinkers in composing the book, citing Ayn Rand's philosophy of rational self-interest and Friedrich Nietzsche's writing on master morality among his acknowledged influences. Less openly acknowledged at the time, later documented by biographers and scholars of new religious movements, was his extensive, largely unattributed use of Might Is Right, a nineteenth century social Darwinist tract published under the pen name Ragnar Redbeard, substantial passages of which LaVey reworked into his own text. The book became a commercial success on a scale unusual for a work of this kind, selling widely in paperback for decades and remaining continuously in print, and it is generally credited by scholars of new religious movements with defining and popularizing LaVeyan Satanism as a self-consciously irreligious, materialist philosophy that treats Satan as a literary and psychological symbol rather than a supernatural entity, explicitly distinguishing it from theistic Satanism, which the Church of Satan has consistently rejected as a different and unrelated phenomenon.

Scholars of new religious movements studying the Church of Satan generally treat the book's borrowing from Redbeard as a documented textual fact rather than a live controversy, useful for tracing LaVey's intellectual sources without diminishing the text's independent role in organizing and popularizing the movement that formed around it.