Posts Tagged ‘church of satan’

Who owns the Satanic Bible?

Mar
10

David Shankbone: Do Dr. LaVey’s children have anything to do with the church at all?

Peter Gilmore: His son Xerxes is a member because he asked to be. We generally don’t let people under 18 join. We used to let people whose parents allowed them to join, but because people are so litigious we changed that. We just don’t want to take the chance that some parents say, “Yes, it’s okay if my kid joins the Church of Satan,” and then decides that’s the reason they can’t control their kid. We’re just not willing to go there. But if our members have children who are interested, they can participate and become members, but that’s the only way you can if you’re not legally an adult. So Xerxes could become a member because his mother was High Priestess at one point, and still remains a member.

David Shankbone: But not Zeena?

Peter Gilmore: No, she left years ago. She’s not very bright and is very jealous. She and her paramour, Nikolas Shreck, got married I think. They wanted to take the Church of Satan over at one point and wanted Anton LaVey to retire, but he was a feisty guy and said “Hell no!” So they quit in high dudgeon and ran off to Europe and said, “America is corrupt and horrible and we’re going to Fortress Europa!” They played with being Nazi occultists, which is kind of funny because both of them have Jewish blood. They’re just like clowns. They then joined the Temple of Set, which was an organization that split off from the Church of Satan years ago, in 1975, when Michael Aquino—

David Shankbone: Based on the Egyptian god?

Peter Gilmore: Yeah, and they’re theists. They believe that Set exists and that their priests can commune with him and that their founder is the voice of Set. So, it’s like, good that they left for housecleaning. But Zeena went and joined them and became High Priestess because Michael Aquino has this Anton LaVey obsession, which is obvious since he wrote a book about him that’s about a thousand pages, so he made her the High Priestess of their organization. Then she left to form an even more orthodox Setian group called “The Storm”, which to us is just funny. Such theatrics. His oldest daughter Karla isn’t a very bright girl. She kind of hung around the background and once in a while she would come out to speak in public and support her father. When Xerxes was born she kind of got miffed because she wasn’t the center of attention. Karla is also jealous type. She withdrew from her father, which hurt him a lot.

David Shankbone: How did the legal wrangling surrounding his estate pan out?

Peter Gilmore: They finally settled. What ended up happening is he had written a will. Anton LaVey’s idea was that if he acknowledged he is going to die, then he’d be giving in to death, so he didn’t want to go to an attorney and make out a will. He was very feisty and had his own perspective on that. So he finally wrote a will out and signed it, but it wasn’t notarized and there were no witnesses. So when it came to court they said it wasn’t good enough. They basically split everything up between the three children, so Karla and Zeena and Xerxes all got part of the estate.

David Shankbone: Who received the copyright to The Satanic Bible?

Peter Gilmore: The estate. The money that comes in from that gets split up and goes to the three kids. Also there is a small percentage that goes to LaVey’s companion, Diane Hegarty; she says LaVey. But they were never married and had a falling out in the early 1980’s. She went off and left Satanism and sued him for palimony and he had to sell his house because of all of that, and he sold it to an old friend and member. Diane got a pile of money and she got a tiny percentage of the books that had been written up to that point. Every once in a while she comes creeping in off the periphery to say, “Ah! I’m Diane LaVey!” and it’s like, you were Diane Hegarty and you were kind of involved in it, but before the Satanic Panic happened you left and had nothing to do with it. She was never someone who wrote or said anything of interest. She was just the pretty blonde wife of Anton LaVey. She was a nice figurehead, but wasn’t of much use beyond that.

Who is the First Family of Satanism?

Feb
10

Anton Szandor LaVey (1930-1997)
– High Priest and Founder of CoS (the Church of Satan)

Carole Lansing
– Anton’s First Wife and Mother of Karla Maritza LaVey

Karla Maritza LaVey (born 1952)
– Daughter of Anton and Carole.
– High Priestess of the Church of Satan (1990 to 1997)
– High Priestess of the First Satanic Church (1999 to Present)

Diane Hegarty-LaVey (born 1942)
– Anton’s live-in companion
– Mother of Zeena Galatea LaVey
– Hostess, Model-Enchantress, Mother, Magician’s Wife, and High Priestess of the Church of Satan (1966 to 1984)

Zeena Galatea LaVey-Schreck (born 1963)
– Daughter of Anton and Diane
– Wife of Barry Dubin a.k.a. Nikolas Schreck (1988 to Present)
– Mother of Stanton Zaharoff LaVey
– Alpha Female and Co-director of the Werewolf Order and Radio Werewolf (1988 to 1993)
– Priestess of the Temple of Set (1995 to 2002)
– Co-Founding member and High Priestess of the Storm International Vanguard of the Sethian Movement (2002 – Now Defunct)

Stanton Zaharoff LaVey (born 1978)
– Son of Zeena Galatea Lavey
– Stanton carries on the family tradition as a “lifestyle Satanist.” He is supportive of his grandparents’ character and philosophy
– Married Szandora LaVey on 06/06/06 (marriage lasted only one year)

Szandora LaVey (born 1981)
– Former daughter-in-law of Zeena LaVey-Schreck
– Worked as a go-go dancer and hula-hoop artist for a 1950s surf band, The Swank Bastards
– Satanic Model who appears in around 100 Blue Blood Szandora photo sets
– Satanic Witch
– Married Stanton LaVey on 06/06/06 (divorced the following year)

Blanche Barton (real name Sharon Densley; born 1959)
– Last Companion of Anton
– Mother of Xerxes
– High Priestess of the Church of Satan (1997 to 2002)
– Now Magistra Tempi Rex and Chair-mistress of the Council of Nine (the governing body of the Church of Satan)

Satan Xerxes Carnacki LaVey (born 1993)
– Son of Anton and Blanche. A standing member of the Church of Satan
– Goes by Xerxes

Religious and Satanic symbols

Dec
2

David Shankbone: Could you explain your logo?

Peter Gilmore: The Sigil of Baphomet. Heavy metal people say “Bapho-MAY!” Because they want to take it from the French Templars, where it originally came from the trials of them. But we explain it as there is a goat face in the center of a five-pointed star. The goat face represents carnality. In ancient Egypt goats were considered representations as god symbols of lust, and we think lust is an important factor of biology that keeps humanity going so we value that. The five-pointed star really comes from the Pythagoreans. That is the one figure in which every element is within the golden mean of each other. It’s this wonderful mathematical symbol of perfection, organic perfection specifically. Since we are organic life and enjoy the idea of perfecting ourselves, that star is right for us in there and it perfectly fits the goat head inside. Now around it are two circles, one at the tip of the points of the star and one outside. In that are Hebrew characters starting at the bottom and going counter-clockwise spelling Leviathan. In Hebrew mythology, Leviathan was the great dragon of the abyss, this powerful Earth figure that even Yahweh was afraid of. So all these things taken together creates a symbol that Anton LaVey identified with Satanism specifically. When he started the Church of Satan, usually upside down crosses were considered Satanic, and he saw that these different elements and felt this was a positive symbol you could tie to the Satanism he was creating.

David Shankbone: So much of the symbology references a lot of myths and superstitions, yet you’re antithetical to that. How do you explain how those two notions comport?

Peter Gilmore: We have this approach that we take the dualities and find a third side to it, a way of integrating. You might find that even in Marxist theory, a way of finding opposites and coming with a new synthesis of the different thesis and antithesis. So ritual is natural to people, because humans have a conceptual consciousness. Symbols let us hold much more information in conscious focus, more so than just keeping them separately. So symbols are something we function with. It’s part of our nature. So using ritual activities that are symbolic and have deep meaning to us is common to our species if you look at our history from cave paintings up to every civilization currently existing.

David Shankbone: It’s almost difficult to come up with a symbol that doesn’t reference a superstition in some way.

Peter Gilmore: Absolutely! So we feel that since they are often used to support a fiction, why not let it be used to explore the inner part of our nature. For us, when we do ritual—which we call greater magic—we call it an intellectual decompression chamber. It’s a place where we release our emotions, any emotions that are hindering us, and we use the symbolism we find most stimulating. We leave it in the ritual chamber. You enjoy the self-transformational psychodrama in the ritual where you release any emotions that are hindering yourself and then you go outside and basically pursue your life, being rational and doing what you need to do to make your life as rich as it can be.

Who is Peter H. Gilmore?

Nov
30

Peter Howard Gilmore is an American author and administrator of the Church of Satan. He was appointed High Priest of the Church in 2001 by Magistra Blanche Barton. Within the church, he is known as Magus Peter H. Gilmore, High Priest of the Church of Satan. Gilmore read The Satanic Bible at age thirteen and has described The Church of Satan as “the motivating philosophical force in my life” ever since.

In 1989, he and his wife Peggy Nadramia began publishing a Satanic journal, The Black Flame, and continues to publish issues sporadically. In 2005, Gilmore wrote the new introduction to LaVey’s The Satanic Bible, and his essay on Satanism was published in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature.