LaVey, Anton (1930-1997)

Founder and high priest of the Church of Satan. Howard Anton Szandor LaVey was born in Chicago on April 11, 1930. As a youth he became interested in magic and the occult. Shortly after World War II, he dropped out of high school and joined the circus, where he trained the big cats and learned stage magic.

In the early 1960s he married his second wife, Diane Hegarty, and they organized late-evening occult meetings, from which the idea for the Church of Satan, and its original members, emerged. The church was formally founded on April 30, 1966. LaVey, with years of performing behind him, brought a flare for the dramatic to his leadership. He shaved his head and donned black ritual garb to announce the first year of "Satan's era." During the first year he conducted the first satanic wedding and funeral, each with a cadre of media representatives present, and played the part of the Devil in the movie version of Rosemary's Baby. In 1969 he completed The Satanic Bible, in which the beliefs and basic rituals of the church are presented. The book has remained in print and its ideas are expanded on in two subsequent volumes, The Compleat Witch (1970) and The Satanic Rituals (1972). LaVey had a most secularized image of Satan and Satanism. On the one hand he saw the power of the image of Satan to invoke fear in Christians and the hold the image retained even over those who had left their Christian beliefs behind. He saw the value that a focus on Satan could have in freeing people from their Christian pasts and turning them into autonomous, modern people. Thus rituals were designed not so much as a means of worshiping or invoking Satan, but as a way of affirming the self and unleashing what LaVey saw as natural human drives (such as for sex and pleasure) that had been suppressed by a culture that branded them as evil. At the same time, the church was particularly vocal about members being involved in anything that suggested they were breaking the law under the guise of following their religion.

LaVey's support was weakened by the defection of many members in the early 1970s who believed in a more literal existence of Satan and were attempting to find a more traditional Satanism. Since that time, LaVey assumed a much lower profile and the church tended to avoid publicity. Its high level of fame, including regular attacks from Christian ministers, supplied it with a steady stream of prospective members. LaVey died on October 29, 1997 of a heart attack in San Francisco, California. Since his death, Blanche Barton has taken over LaVey's Church of Satan.