Credit: Dangerous Minds / Church of Satan

It’s a little overdone these days, but it bears repeating. Worshipping Satan really isn’t anything to be scared of.

It’s a pretty standard route that a lot of pretentious fuckwits like myself went through when they were young and desperate comes across as more radical than they actually are. First, you develop an aversion to organised religion, not for the actual reasons one should hate organised religion, but because “no one controls me, maaaaaan!” Then, you go through a humiliating in hindsight, Richard Dawkins assisted period of outspoken atheism. Some people never leave this part of the phase. Hi Ricky Gervais, how ya doin’?

Then, you get the black cherry on top of the insufferable gateaux. You discover the works of occultist and author Anton LaVey. A man who has made a pretty enviable living marketing his “Church of Satan” as, essentially, a faith-based version of your Slipknot phase. He took the most marketable aspects of the work of actual occultists like Aleister Crowley, mixed in some of the less dodgy parts of Friedrich Nietzsche and an ever regrettable pinch of Ayn Randian objectivism to make a form of (heavy inverted commas here) “Satanism” absolutely tailor-made for obnoxious teenagers trying to look cool.

Especially because one of the key fundamentals of LaVeyan Satanism is a belief that God isn’t real and thus, neither is Satan. To be a LaVeyan Satanist is to believe in the value of opposing things, more or less for the sake of opposing them. If you’re lucky enough never to have heard of this IQ-sapping nonsense, then you might be starting to see why this shit appeals to teenagers so much, but there was a period of time where the LaVey’s Church of Satan threatened to break into the mainstream. After all, a savvy mind like LaVey would absolutely look at the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and see only dollar signs for miles around.

How did Anton LaVey cash in on the Satanic Panic?

Honestly, there’s no one answer to the above question. If we went through each individual way LaVey has tried to use the moral panics that sweep the world to his own ends, we’d be here for years. Instead, we’ll just focus on one of the more crass examples of his sheer, white-knuckled devotion to being a professional irritant. One that took place on August 8th, 1988, in LaVey’s home turf of San Francisco, California. If the state of California and the date of August 8th rings a truly horrible little bell in the back of your mind, there’s a good reason for that.

19 years to the day prior to that day, the Manson Family murdered Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski and Steven Parent. That date was no coincidence. In fact, it was exactly what LaVey and his followers were commemorating and, in a truly horrible way, celebrating. Not directly, you understand. At least, not if you asked any of them. No, they were commemorating the day the 1960s died as a way of sticking it to older generations that were, at the time, leading hypocritical moral crusades against free speech. Or something. Look, it’s hard to focus on what they’re talking about with all those swastikas in the background.

Yep. This is where everything becomes a much less fun kind of stupid bollocks. Much like the Sex Pistols smirking on the Bill Grundy show clad in Nazi armbands, The Church of Satan’s desire to be everything the moralists accused them of being lead to them “ironically” doing a bunch of Nazi shit. We know this because the August 8th Rally was recorded and features segments where some truly heinous stuff is said about establishing a New World Order and the weak being marshalled by the strong. Y’know, Nazi shit.

Now, again, if you asked anyone involved in the movement, they would say that it was all ironic. That it was all a parody of what the media said they were. I wonder how they reacted when some of Lavey’s closest confidantes, like Boyd Rice, started openly flirting with fascism in real life. After all, as we know from the last 20 years of human existence, joking about horrible stuff often leads to believing it yourself. As the Church of Satan Mansonite Rally shows, LaVey’s church is, at its core, nothing more than an excuse to joke about horrible things.

Thus, Satanism itself is almost certainly a phase. However, fully fledged fealty to an institute like the Church of Satan? Worth being suspicious of. Just not for the reasons they’ll think.