Scripture With a Bibliography
Most of the first book of The Satanic Bible is a lightly edited reprint of a social-Darwinist book from 1896.
Anton LaVey’s 1969 scripture is an assemblage anyone can take apart. Its “Book of Satan” is largely Ragnar Redbeard’s Might Is Right (1896), re-edited to strip out the racism; its closing Enochian Keys are the sixteenth-century invented language of John Dee, lifted from Crowley’s Equinox and inverted; its Nine Satanic Statements paraphrase Ayn Rand. Early printings even carried a dedication naming the sources. A revealed book conceals where it came from; this one prints a list. LaVey himself later called it “just Ayn Rand’s philosophy, with ceremony and ritual added.”
A faith you can watch being built. The Church of Satan LaVey founded on Walpurgisnacht 1966 is, on its own account, an atheist philosophy — Satan a symbol of the self — and its scripture is a compilation with its seams showing. Nothing here is ancient and nothing here is hidden. It is a modern construction that says so.
Which is more than the older, gentler version managed. Gerald Gardner built modern witchcraft the same way in the 1950s — Witchcraft Today in 1954, rituals worked at a Hertfordshire coven, a liturgy traceable on the page to Crowley (whom Gardner had met in 1947, and from whom he took an OTO charter), to Freemasonry, to Victorian folklorists. His priestess Doreen Valiente, disliking the Crowley passages, rewrote most of them out. But where LaVey printed his sources, Gardner claimed an inheritance: that he had been initiated into a surviving New Forest coven, an unbroken remnant of a pre-Christian witch-religion. The coven cannot be found, and the ancient cult it was said to descend from — the thesis of the folklorist Margaret Murray — is one academia has abandoned. What is documented is a 1950s man assembling a religion from modern books. What is claimed is the Stone Age.
The Crowley thread runs through both, and at two very different depths. Gardner met the man, took his charter, and carried his words into the ritual. LaVey studied under no one; he took a single borrowed text, the Enochian Keys, and even as he took it he called Crowley’s magic “drug-befuddled” and his writing “Kabbalistic mulligatawny.” One is a borrowing with a handshake behind it; the other a borrowing with a sneer. Neither is the discipleship the word “influence” quietly implies.
The built exemplar sits beside them, already on the record elsewhere in this study: Scientology, the religion L. Ron Hubbard incorporated in 1953 out of the same occult milieu — Hubbard had called Crowley “my very good friend” on tape — a manufactured faith that grew from a scene. Three faiths, three founders, three founding dates in the 1950s and ’60s, three compilations with named authors and older parts.
The Satanic Panic of the 1980s imagined a coordinated program of ritual abuse behind every pentagram; it ran on no evidence, and none has arrived since. Crowley’s words sit in the Book of Shadows, borrowed passages in a religion that is Gardner’s and Valiente’s. What the record holds is smaller and stranger: some modern people, with names and dates, made these religions out of older books.
A faith that prints its sources has told you the most honest thing a faith can tell you about itself. The others said the opposite — that they were old, or revealed, or received — and the record keeps catching them in the act of composition: a charter dated 1947, a book dated 1896, an incorporation dated 1953. What the record shows is the ordinary business of people building new religions out of Crowley and whatever else was on the shelf, and then, more often than not, claiming they had found them rather than made them.
Grounded in. The reference nodes underneath — hover to read each.