Anton LaVey

Anton Szandor LaVey (1930–1997), born Howard Stanton Levey in Chicago, was an American writer, musician and occultist. He founded the Church of Satan and gave his name to LaVeyan Satanism, a philosophy that is central to modern Satanism. His work belongs to the counterculture of the mid-twentieth century, and its importance lies in turning Satan into a public, systematic symbol of a worldview with no supernatural or theistic core, grounded in materialism and individualism.

The son of a Protestant minister and a mother of European descent, LaVey showed an early gift for music. He played piano in a Baptist church as a boy and oboe at high school, and later worked as an organist in bars, lounges and nightclubs in California. Many of his accounts of his youth, including a supposed stint with a circus and a claimed job as a photographer for the San Francisco police, have been questioned by biographers and journalists, who found no records to support them. In San Francisco he became a local celebrity through his performances and the parties he hosted, which drew well-known guests, and through his habit of walking a pet black leopard named Zoltan.

According to his own account, on April 30, 1966, he shaved his head, declared the founding of the Church of Satan and proclaimed 1966 the "Year One." The group had grown out of a circle called the Order of the Trapezoid, and it became the first open, visible and long-lasting organisation to promote a coherent Satanic outlook. Its doctrine starts from a view of human beings as carnal animals driven by natural impulses in a cosmos without divine intervention. Satan serves as a symbol of self-assertion and of the forces of nature, set against a religious morality that LaVey believed suppressed those impulses.

In the 1960s and 1970s he blended these ideas with influences from Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, H. L. Mencken and social Darwinism. His books include The Satanic Bible, The Satanic Witch, The Satanic Rituals and The Devil's Notebook, and he also released albums with satanic themes. He worked on screen too, as a technical adviser on the 1975 film The Devil's Rain. The press called him "the Black Pope," and his personal life, shaped by his relationships and his children, was often disputed. He died in San Francisco in 1997.

His influence has been considerable. The Church of Satan lost momentum over time, but his writings shaped contemporary Satanism and popular culture, and he remains the most recognisable figure of modern Satanism in the English-speaking world.