The Satanic Bible

Anton LaVey published The Satanic Bible in 1969, three years after founding the Church of Satan in San Francisco, and structured it as four named sections, styled after the classical elements, that mix philosophical essay with ritual instruction rather than separating the two. Its essays lay out LaVey's avowedly atheistic philosophy, rejecting belief in a literal supernatural Satan or any other deity in favor of a self-described rational self-interest that treats Satan as a symbol of pride, individualism and undisguised carnal nature rather than as an object of worship.

The book also sets out a numbered list of guiding statements and a further numbered list of rules of conduct, both widely reproduced in secondary discussion of the Church of Satan's public teaching, alongside ritual material for ceremonies LaVey framed explicitly as psychodrama and stage-managed performance rather than as invocation of supernatural forces, drawing openly on his own background in carnival showmanship and stage magic. The book has remained continuously available since 1969 across multiple publishers and editions, making it one of the longest continuously reprinted texts associated with any twentieth century new religious movement.

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.