What are your thoughts about Anton Szandor LaVey, the First Magus of the "Age of Satan" who Uttered the Word "Indulgence" and who founded the original Church of Satan in the common year 1966? Here is a quite amusing interview with LaVey in the early years in which he seemed to enjoy the questioning and ridicule:
What can I say? Without Anton LaVey then I might still be stuck in a Pentecostal cult and probably would've killed myself by now. Anton LaVey saved my life by allowing me to become aware of this
other part of my Self - my True Self - instead of the false self that some abusive fanatics tried to brainwash me into thinking I was. He was one of only two people at the time who had an important message for the American people - the other being Ayn Rand. The problem with Rand is she wanted to throw the baby out with the bathwater - according to her: no Shakespeare, no Nabokov, no Poe, no Lovecraft, et al, and no classical architecture and blah blah. In a word: Rand had no aesthetics and was still trapped in a very Bolshevist dialectical intolerance (Lenin was gung-ho about turning Russia into a Capitalist nation not a Socialist one for that one would come later and the Bolshevists hated all forms of charity and wanted to do away with 'parasitic' individuals and adopt Soviet 'realism' as aesthetics). Ayn Rand novels read like old famous Soviet novels which are very romantic and almost entirely about productive working men and women and their wondrous inventions and their struggle against the exploiters.
I'm not digressing because this is important in understanding Anton LaVey. Without Ayn Rand there would be no Anton LaVey just as without Nietzsche there would be no Ayn Rand (and no Nietzsche without Max Stirner, etc.). I think LaVey was very Randian but he also recognized her for what she typified: counter-productive pride, forgetfulness of past orthodoxies, and lack of aesthetics among them. Like Rand and like the leaders of the Bolshevik party Anton was Jewish and had a very materialist and sensual worldview but also a very idealistic one. I think the lesson he learned from such people was not to fall into the error of extreme scientific reductionism - that things weren't so simplistic and black and white - that there are huge grey areas in the social sciences and in the human equation or the ultimate reality of the universe. Anton LaVey was a Satanic Lenin. He didn't just look like him. He was him - only better at it.
I'll move along now lest I start sounding like some sort of Satanic Reds ideologue who loves Anton LaVey.
Now . . .
It is unclear to me whether Anton LaVey believed in a literal Satan in one form or another or not. Was he an atheist? An agnostic? Was he engaged in some sort of Pascal's Wager? Was he more along the lines of Voltaire - was he a pantheist? Did he interpret the Satanic religion more along the lines of a Robespierre or a Rousseau - that is as some sort of civic religion along the lines of a Supreme Cult of the Human Being? Did he change his mind a lot? Was he confused about where he stood on the issue? Did he ever make up his mind? Nobody can quite be sure but I do think there's plenty of evidence that he was trying to some how "hedge his bets" in some direction or another. From some of the Barton letters that I have photocopies of such as the ones she sent to - or at least one of them - to Tani Jantsang then I would have to say that even among his later inner circle that these people too weren't so sure about where Anton stood on this issue.
I'm writing a book on Satanic history so I don't want to get too much into it here but I'll leave you all with this:
He deserves more respect, leeway, compassion, and celebration than any other religious (even if atheistic-religious) than any other figure in the history of the world with the exceptions of maybe the Buddha (who also founded an atheistic religion) and Aleister Crowley.
More later.
Eihwaz/Blake
