The Satanic Bible

Anton LaVey spent the early 1960s running a private lecture circle in San Francisco out of a Victorian house painted black, drawing on a career that had already taken him through carnival work, organ playing and a stint photographing crime scenes for the police. On Walpurgisnacht, April 30, 1966, he shaved his head, announced the beginning of what he called the Age of Satan, and founded the Church of Satan. Three years later he wrote the book down.

The Satanic Bible is not a transcription of secret ritual. LaVey built it in four parts, mixing his own essays with borrowed material he was open about reusing, a section on ceremonial magic drawing on nineteenth century ritual magician Éliphas Lévi and a closing section lifting passages from Ragnar Redbeard's 1896 social Darwinist tract Might Is Right almost unchanged. What holds the parts together is the Nine Satanic Statements, LaVey's own compressed creed: indulgence over abstinence, vital existence over spiritual pipe dreams, and Satan as the best friend the church has ever had, because he has kept it in business for centuries.

Reviewers at the time mostly read it as showmanship, which LaVey never entirely denied. He had built a public persona around performance long before he built a religion, and the book reads that way in places, gleefully blasphemous, deliberately provocative. What it also did, whatever else it was, was give a new religious movement a text of its own on the day it needed one.

The most common assumption about the Church of Satan, then and now, is that its members worship a literal devil. The Satanic Bible exists largely to correct that assumption, and it does so in its own voice rather than through a critic's paraphrase.

LaVey states plainly that Satan is not a being to be prayed to. He is a symbol, standing for the carnal, the earthly and the self, set against what LaVey called the "spiritual pipe dreams" of religions built around denying the body and deferring reward to an afterlife. The book's ethics follow from that starting point: indulgence rather than abstinence, vengeance rather than turning the other cheek, responsibility to the responsible rather than love wasted on the ungrateful. It reads less like a manual for devil worship than like a deliberately inverted sermon, borrowing Christianity's own vocabulary of sin and virtue and running every value the opposite direction.

That inversion is also its clearest organizing idea. LaVey was raised in a culture soaked in Christian moral language and built his religion by keeping the vocabulary and rejecting the content, individualism instead of submission, this world instead of the next, the self instead of a god outside it. Whatever else The Satanic Bible is, in the founder's own stated terms it is not devil worship. It is atheism performed in Christianity's own costume, a distinction LaVey insisted on for the rest of his life.