Anton LaVey

The founder who assembled a church and a scripture — and a life-story that did not check out.¹²³

Documented connection

LaVey founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco on Walpurgisnacht 1966 and published The Satanic Bible in 1969. What he codified is an atheistic philosophy of ethical egoism — Satan as a symbol of the self, not a worshipped being; LaVey later called it “just Ayn Rand’s philosophy, with ceremony and ritual added.” His tie to Crowley is documented but narrow and hostile: he took John Dee’s Enochian Keys by way of Crowley’s Equinox while publicly disparaging Crowley — dismissing his output as “Kabbalistic mulligatawny” and his magic as “drug-befuddled.” A borrowing of text, not a discipleship.

Held-open — the fabricated life

LaVey’s self-mythology — a boyhood with the Clyde Beatty Circus, an affair with Marilyn Monroe, three years as an SFPD crime photographer — was substantially debunked by Lawrence Wright in Rolling Stone (1991), who found no supporting records; his estranged daughter Zeena Schreck later endorsed and extended the debunking. The authorized biography by Blanche Barton is the founder-side account. Both are carried; neither is picked. Kept firmly apart from all of this is the 1980s Satanic Panic — the ritual-abuse conspiracy theory — which has no documented substrate and is not made here.

Role in the thesis

A manufactured faith whose founder manufactured himself as well: a documented church and book built on identifiable older sources, and a biography built the same way. The construction is on the record; the founder’s ancestry, like his church’s, is his own telling.

---

1. Anton LaVey, The Satanic Bible (Avon, 1969) — the founding scripture LaVey compiled ↩︎

2. Lawrence Wright, 'Sympathy for the Devil,' Rolling Stone (5 September 1991) — the exposé finding no records for LaVey's circus, police-photographer, and Marilyn Monroe claims ↩︎

3. Blanche Barton, The Secret Life of a Satanist (1990) — the authorized biography (the founder-side account) ↩︎

Referenced by. Where this entry is cited in the reading — hover any to read it in place.

• Scripture With a Bibliography — “Anton LaVey's 1969 scripture is an assemblage anyone can take apart.”