MEET THE DEVIL
Article by Burton H. Wolfe
FLING [May 1978 C.E.]
[From The Collection of Butch & Sara Rung]

Anton Szandor LaVey, known as the leading Satanist of our times, has a dream to save the world. Not from plague, drought, earthquakes, melting of the polar ice caps, or even the earth freezing over like Dante's dream of Hell. His plan is to save it from sexual frustration and the millions of psychotics, neurotics, rapists, homicidal drivers, and other explosive lunatic types who are ticked off by unfulfilled sex needs. In the process, he believes, there may be a mass easing of overpopulation and resulting pressures that cause war.

LaVey's idea might not seem new or revolutionary. After all, there are inflatable dolls on the market. And there have been suggestions for legalized whorehouses or sex therapy institutes at prices most people can afford instead of the going rate of around $50 a trick or $2,000 for the minimum number of sessions at the sex clinics. But LaVey has a far less expensive, much more readily available solution, of a quality that is infinitely superior to the cheap, gaudy, lifeless blowup dolls now being advertised. The proper term for the solution is "sex surrogate."

In LaVey's design, a sex surrogate is an object that looks and feels exactly like anyone's dream woman. It has a completely realistic, flexible cunt that feels like real flesh and hair, and provides equivalent satisfaction. You can score with it whenever you are in the mood, no matter how weird the hour or occasion. You don't have to turn it on, take it to dinner, buy it a new dress, cook for it, dress in any special way for it. The sex surrogate is yours to feel, fondle, and fuck on demand, at no cost other than the original purchase price.

LaVey is confident that sex surrogates, widely distributed, would bring about a drastic reduction in crime and mental illness, or alleged physical ailments that are actually just neurotic expressions of sexual frustration. The savings to a given individual, he believes, would amount to thousands of dollars in doctor bills, while to society as a whole there would be a giant-sized slash from the billions that crime and public health care are now costing us collectively. If the surrogate were used widely enough, fewer children would be produced, the overpopulation crisis would no longer be a problem, and the causes of war would be greatly eased. For all that, LaVey quietly pursues his humanitarian goal while the world thinks of him as the embodiment of evil.

You know LaVey, whether you realize it or not. Nine out of ten times when some newspaper or magazine publishes an article on black magic, the Devil or Satanism, it is illustrated at least partly by a photo or drawing of a shaven-headed character with a Mephistophelian beard and mustache. You have seen the photo or drawing in Time, Newsweek, Life, Look, Argosy, Oui, dozens of other magazines, and hundreds of newspapers. That is Anton Szandor LaVey, former circus lion trainer, carnival magician, burlesque house and nightclub organist, lover of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, and High Priest of the Church of Satan, the organization he founded in 1966 to make an open religion of Satanism, a philosophy and practice once considered dead or confined to small underground cults. Now, more than a decade after LaVey founded it, the Church of Satan is a worldwide body with headquarters in Amsterdam. Over a million copies of LaVey's books, such as The Satanic Bible, have been sold in America and Europe. And when Pope Paul announces that the Devil is not just a symbol but a living presence who walks among us mortals, you know whom he is talking about.

"The ironic part about the Pope's pronouncement," LaVey remarked to me in a post-midnight skull session, "is that most of his subjects are really undeclared disciples of the Devil six days a week, and churchgoers on Sunday for show. One reason the Pope never has to admit that is because Satanism is presented in such simple, moronic terms; Devil-worship, the Black Mass; defilement of the church; accidents, disasters, tragedies, ailments caused by the horned character in the red suit with tail and pitchfork, or by demons he has visited on the earth that have to be exorcised.

"Sure, you can stil scare and fool the masses with all that. But there are now at least a few million sophisticated people who know better, and their numbers are growing fast. Through my own writings and publicity about what we're doing, eyes are being opened to what Satanism really is: a modern philosophy, a total way of life that celebrates the carnal nature of humanity condemned by the traditional Church as sinful. Lust, pride, acquisitiveness, material pursuits. The Church is building up massive wealth, acquiring more and more property, running Bingo games. Its members are looking for more satisfying sex lives, pursuing greater profits, shopping for more luxurious homes, cars, and clothes. So long as all of that is blessed by the Church and all evil is attributed to the man in the red suit, they never have to face up to their hypocrisy. We are merely reversing the whole process, recognizing what humanity is all about, and making a positive thing of its carnal nature. We're celebrating it, indulging it, making it work better."

So it is that LaVey has openly conducted the dreaded Black Mass and revived other Satanic practices that once brought the deaths of thousands at the stake. In public, with the news media reporting it to the millions, he has married and buried people in Satanic rites, baptized his own child in the name of the Devil, illustrated Satanism and black magic via films and television productions which he has served as technical director, and even appeared as the scaly demon copulating with Rosemary in the movie Rosemary's Baby.

What sort of man is it who will publicly proclaim himself the Devil's agent on earth and openly conduct reverse religious ceremonies construed by the Christian Church as the most evil defilement of God ever concocted?

To people who have not read his books or listened to him lecture, he must be a showman, a hustler, another alleged practitioner of occult wizardry who is actually just a fake making money off the easily beguiled and bewitched. If that's what you believe, do yourself a health-preserving favor and keep it to yourself. Don't say so openly. Or you might wind up like Sam Brody, the late Hollywood actress Jayne Mansfield's lawyer and consort.

At the pinnacle of Jayne's career, when she had succeeded Marilyn Monroe as the American sex goddess, she fell in love with LaVey and became one of the leading witches in the Church of Satan. Contrary to what her "official biographers" say, this is not claptrap but fact documented by love letters and photos of her accompanying LaVey in Satanic rituals. When Jayne's lawyer-lover, Sam Brody, became enraged with jealousy over the affair, he threatened to call LaVey a "quack" in public. With that LaVey put a curse on Brody, pronouncing that he would be dead within a year, and warning Jayne to "stay away from him because he's now traveling under a dark cloud." Jayne tried to heed the warning, but Brody threatened to blackmail her with photos showing her balling various men in her heart-shaped bed in the bedroom of her "Pink Palace," on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Brody originally met Jayne by offering to be her lawyer in her child custody case against her ex-husband, Matt Cimber. Had Brody released the sex photos, as he threatened, Jayne could have lost custody of her kids. So, she stayed with him, and six months after LaVey put his curse on Brody's head, Brody was smashed up in a series of auto accidents, inexplicably occurring one after another: three of them within a two-week span. The last took his life and that of his beleaguered obsession, Jayne Mansfield.

Does that mean LaVey actually believes he can put a curse on someone and make it work? Someone, yes. But not just anybody.

"The principle is well established," he explained to me in one of many rap sessions we have shared during the nine years I have known him. "If you are dealing with an individual whose character makes him susceptible to the implantation of suggestion, and if you have sufficient willpower, you can set in motion a series of events that will cause him to bring about his own destruction. Brody's compulsion for Jayne made him an impulsive, reckless, rotten little man with no redeeming features. So, I could place a curse on him with great confidence it would succeed. I'm only sorry that Jayne was incapable of ridding herself of her blighted suitor before it was too late. Her death was one of the greatest tragedies of my life. I still feel the loss deeply."

As you can tell from just that much, he takes it all very seriously. You might not think so after learning of his background as circus and carney man, or if you know anything about the mass-scale pranks he pulled off in the early day so f the Church of Satan. But LaVey has always been the opposite of the expected.

To begin with, he was a high school fudkup and dropout. When the other kids took gym, LaVey invented ailments and spent the period screwing around with the school nurse. He did not like ball games or the boisterous ways of most teenagers. He preferred music, judo, billiards, reading, and fucking. He wore a French Foreign Legion kepi to school, studied oboe, hung around pool halls, read everything he could find on the subject of magic, and consorted with sleazy bitches dressed in short skirts and spiked heels, his constant favorite type over the years. At 16 he was already second oboist in the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra. At 17 he was a school dropout and assistant wild animal trainer in the Clyde Beatty Circus.

As an assistant to Beatty, LaVey's methods included sleeping in the lions' and tigers' cages occasionally, and crawling around on all fours and gnawing at hunks of beef in the sawdust while making growling noises so the big cats would be comfortable with him. Why would a man want to carry on this way? Was he crazy or was there a justifiable purpose?

"I felt safer and more comfortable among my cats than I did on city streets." LaVey explained to me early in our friendship. "And the reason behind what I did was that I learned so much from it. When you're in that cage and you get knocked down on occasion, as all trainers do, and a lion or tiger is hovering over you breathing in your face, that's when you really learn power and magic, and even how to play God. Lying there without your stick, which you lost when you were knocked down, you have just one defense left: willpower. Any good animal trainer has to learn how to use it, how to charge himself full of adrenalin, to send out gamma rays that penetrate the brain of the big cat so that it will hold off chewing or clawing you while you grope around for your stick. Then, when you've got your hands on it, you've got about one second to whip it across the lion's or tiger's nose and jump to your feet while it's distracted. And if you can't reach your stick, then you have to do it by giving the cat a punch on the nose."

Once he had learned enough from all that, LaVey taught himself how to play organ, calliope, and other circus keyboard instruments; and he became official accompanist for the Wallendas' high wire troupe, Human Cannonball Hugo Zacchini, dancing horses and elephants, and other acts. After awhile he quit the circus and joined various carnivals, where he learned magic tricks and accompanied hootchy-kootchy dancers. From there, it was on to burlesque houses as accompanist for strippers such as Tempest Storm and Lily St. Cyr.

In the fall of 1948, at the Mayan Theater on South Hill Street in downtown Los Angeles, LaVey played for an unheralded actress who was performing there surreptitiously: Marilyn Monroe. She had entered films as a bit player and had just finished portraying a stripper in the Columbia Pictures "B" film called "Ladies of the Chorus." But she was finding it difficult to get more work in films, so she was stripping for the time being while trying to hide it from her film world contacts.

It's not uncommon for a stripper to take her accompanist as a lover, if he is young enough and attractive enough: and LaVey has always looked handsome in a sinister and powerful way. So, the affair between them was not unusual. It was the way it ended that would now be considered unusual. LaVey threw over Marilyn Monroe, the woman who was to become America's sex goddess, for a wealthy businessman's daughter. Incredible? Well, though she was voluptuous, Marilyn was still just a bit movie player with greater hopes than resources. And LaVey was an opportunist.

Eventually LaVey married a banker's daughter, manipulated his way around the lack of a high school diploma to gain entrance to college, studied criminology, and became a crime photographer in the San Francisco Police Department. In his spare time he would take on the "800's" or "nut cases" that cops wanted no part of: hooting sounds in the attic, objects dropping mysteriously from ceilings, people being hit by rays of radiation, dead dogs howling, weird sounds in "haunted houses," and ghosts and more ghosts.

While cops on the beat avoided the 800's, LaVey agree with delight to spend the night by himself in the attic of a "haunted house" trying to detect the source of a howling sound that was terrifying the occupants. To his amusement he discovered they were aggravated and disappointed when he came across something like an old tin can lodged in a corner of the roof and producing an eerie noise when struck by winds. The occupants protested about some character that once inhabited the attic, leading them to be convinced it must be a "spirit" hanging around. So, LaVey would give them what they wanted, a sort of exorcism of the "spirit," and since he had removed the old tin can, why of course the terrifying noises were gone and the owners of the house were convinced the "exorcism" had worked and LaVey was a powerful magician.

The next step for LaVey was to become a powerful magician: not for such pathetic entertainments, but to elcit the dark forces in nature-his definition of Satan-that he was convinced he could use for the benefit of himself and his friends. To that end he organized a "Magic Circle" that numbered among its first members: underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger, poet-playwright Michael McClure, bondage madame Monique Van Cleef, and a variety of business people, doctors, lawyers, writers, artists, entertainers, scientists, and police officers.

Among their first adventures in Friday midnight gatherings were samplings of voodoo, witchcraft, werewolf lore, vampirism, fortue telling, extra-sensory perception, telepathy, and cannibalism. All of the gatherings, at LaVey's insistence, were realistic. Hence, at the one on cannibalism, the dissected thigh of a dead human being was basted in a variety of sauces and served to the group. It was obtained by a doctor who practiced at a nearby hospital.

Finally the Magic Circle evolved into the Church of Satan. Why call it a "church"? LaVey explained: "Partly because it was to be our form of religion. Partly so we could get the same benefits and tax writeoffs for a black magic organization as an institution of white magic, which is all that the traditional churches really are. And also partly to prank people, to be outrageous. I operate by a magic formula: one part outrageousness to nine parts social respectability."

The formula worked with spectacular success. Within a year after the Church of Satan was formed in 1966 to make an open religion of black magic, its activities were being featured along with stories about LaVey on the front pages of newspapers and the covers of magazines in many parts of the world. Paid membership reached 25,000 within a few years. LaVey's books-The Satanic Bible, The Satanic Rituals, The Compleat Witch-were on the best-seller lists.

In those days LaVey reveled in pranking and publicity. He imported a Nubian lion and an African capybara, a rat that grows to four feet, to live with him, his stunning blonde wife Diane (his second wife), and his two daughters: Karla, now a raven-haired criminologist, and Zeena Galatea, a voluptuous teenager (it was she who popped up a decade ago on the front pages of newspapers as the three-year old LaVey daughter baptized in the name of the Devil).

In a house near the Sea Cliff district of San Francisco that was at that time Church of Satan headquarters, LaVey staged Black Masses and a variety of psychodramas: rituals he worked out to benefit his fellow Satanists, purge them of enemies, or fulfill their secret desires. Though there were naked acolytes and a naked woman serving as the church altar, to the disappointement of some there were never any orgies. Sex rituals were private affairs performed to alleviate some church member's deprivation or hangup or obsession.

That is LaVey's answer to the couch (psychoanalysis) and the Christian Church (exorcism or purges of sin). Instead of trying to exorcise an obsession out of somebody by psychotherapy or religious ritual, you work it out by gratification in a setting that will not get in the way of or harm other people. Conceivably, you could even handle somebody's desire to kill in such a fashion, by acting it out in mock ceremony, though LaVey has never done that. The closest he and the Satanic order come to killing is the curse, which is leveled in all seriousness.

"There is nothing wrong with wanting to slay your enemies," LaVey has preached, "and a curse is a clean, bloodless way to do it."

But the organized rituals for group power to make a curse more effective take place no longer in the Church of Satan as everyone remembers it from the late Sixties. The once infamous black house in San Francisco has been vacated, world headquarters shifted to Amsterdam, and the enactment of rituals left to various grottoes (Church of Satan equivalent to chapters or covens) in different cities and countries. The grottoes' rituals proceed in keeping with the formulas laid out by LaVey in The Satanic Bible and The Satanic Rituals. But he himself no longer leads them. (If you want membership information, you can write to: Church of Satan, P.O. Box 7633, San Francisco, Cal. 94120.)

These days LaVey concentrates on writing, lecturing, traveling, playing a variety of roles ranging from technical director to actor in television and movie productions (e.g., Rosemary's Baby, The Devil's Rain, The Omen), directing Church of Satan policies, and turning out essays for his organization's newsletter, The Cloven Hoof. He lives in a variety of mansions provided for him by wealthy Satanists, and he rides in a chauffeured, custom-equipped sedan (Buick's largest and most powerful) when not driving his Jaguar or 1937 Cord.

Though LaVey is publicly quieter than he used to be, his character remains much the same. He still defies orthodox religion, "be it traditional Judeo-Christian or UFO trek-king" as he puts it, and he still delights in living contrary to the latest fashion or custom. He often sleeps by day and works or plays by night, but it's better to say his time awake or asleep is determined by his biological needs. ("I stay awake until I'm tired and sleep until I'm rested," he will explain to you.) His way of life is indulgence in the Seven Deadly Sins of Christianity. His companions are like-minded people and animals such as his ferocious pet bull terrier, Typhon, a descendant of General George S. Patton's dog, "William The Conqueror."

LaVey also looks much the same as a decade ago. He ages slowly. At 47 there are almost no lines in his face. He still keeps his head shaved, as he has since the day in 1966 when he celebrated formation of the Church of Satan by taking it all off in the manner of ancient executioners and strongmen. His beard and mustache are still Mephistophelian style as a decade ago. He likes to wear elegantly tailored, non-contemporary clothes: chalk-stripe 1940's suits with pegged trousers, white linen jackets, severely cut back tunics, leather trenchcoats. He constantly alternates styles, complementing them with his wild variety of ties: one day a $30 Countess Mara, the next a $5 clip-on. Same thing with his hats: fez, safari helmet, straw Panama, wide-brim Stetson, gangster-style black fedora, seaman's cap, Russian fur cap. He wears them all, one on each head.

Occasionally LaVey permits a journalist to interview him. The journalist expects to see him in a bizarre, black, sinister setting, and to be entertained. Instead LaVey directs the interviewer to a plain, common office minus any kind of Satanic trappings.

"I enter the room wearing unobtrusively casual clothing," LaVey explained to his members in a recent issue of The Cloven Hoof. "No robes, capes, or other Dracula drag. My visitor's ears pick up safe Muzak background. No Night on Bald Mountain or Bach fugue. I request a rum and Coke, [Servants are always on hand to serve the High Priest.] No Bloody Mary or other suggestive concoction. When the session ends, I accompany my subject [the journalist who is supposedly making LaVey the subject] out the door, bid him good day and enter my car, which is a strategically parked blue-gray fleet type sedan. No hearse. His parting comment is a nervous 'keep up the (heh heh) bad work.' I match his wit with 'Don't take any wooden nickles,' and speed off at 20 mph.

"The foregoing has left the subject frustrated and disillusioned, but ultimately very concerned. I did not meet his preconditioned standards. He must now completely re-evaluate what he needed so desperately to conclude. Instead of being entertained and leaving with his presupposition intact, it is I who was entertained.

"Of course I actually do ride in large black automobiles, live in fortress-fashioned homes, wear black and scarlet and chrome, play Night on Bald Mountain and Bach on the organ (complete with mad flailing of arms), drink exotic concoctions amidst soft carpets an vaulted ceilings. I have ritual chambers that would satisfy the eyes of the most Edwardian satanist, and I meet with strange and unholy characters."

So, why not offer this true face to the world through the eyes of a visiting journalist? "Because then," LaVey told me, "he would be able to write the same kind of article that's been done over the years-the gosh, gee whiz, look-at-the-black-house-and-skeletons-and-spooky-things kind of story done to titillate the rubes. I'm tired of it. I want them to see me in a plain setting with nothing at all unusual, so they have to listen to what I say."

Fair enough? In the next issue of FLING, we follow this brief sketch of the world's leading Satanist with his views on major topics of the times. We journalists are always asking holy clergical lights, politicians, athletes, and various celebrities of the good guy variety to pontificate on philosophies, styles, and tastes of the times. For once, let's hear what the Devil has to say about world affairs. After all, it is this world, and not Heaven, that is his realm.

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