The Satanic Bible Read online

  The Satanic Bible

  50th Anniversary ReVision

  - by -

  Michael A. Aquino, Ph.D.

  Magister Templi IV°-II’

  Church of Satan <1975 CE

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  © 2018 by Michael A. Aquino

  Barony of Rachane

  Post Office Box #470307

  San Francisco, CA 94147

  U.S.A.

  http://www.rachane.org

  ISBN-13:

  978-1724693259

  ISBN-10:

  1724693255

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  Dedicated to my Devil-Father

  Anton Szandor LaVey

  Magus V° and High Priest

  The Church of Satan

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  Foreword

  - by Satan

  What is, or should be, a “bible”?

  A collection of fantasies to impress, entice,

  seduce, threaten, terrify? It would seem so from the

  many scattered about this world.

  Not so this one. My Bible is, one might say, a

  sacred gateway: to the discovery of oneself and one’s

  powers and prerogatives in both the physical and

  metaphysical realms of conscious existence. It is a

  tool, a key, the very Grail awaiting the awakened,

  purified, and consecrated in the Castle of the Seven

  Stars.

  And like the Grail it cannot be seen by those

  not so disposed and determined. They will pass it

  blithely by, as the very last and least tome in any

  library.

  But you have noticed, taken up, opened, and

  are now perusing it. Whether you yet suspect it or

  not, you have thus commenced a personal Rite of

  Passage, an adventure into a universe - indeed many

  universes - beyond the one you think you know. To

  discover also your own self, your “soul” if you will.

  And as with those universes, it is far greater than

  you assume when confined to the pedantic of

  physics, the seeming security of your animal senses.

  - 8 -

  And so who am I? The “Satan” of this book,

  certainly: a book and a name aligned to your culture,

  idiom, and associations. Were it otherwise. were you

  elsewhere or of another time. I might be known by

  any number of other names, from the Egyptian Set

  to the Northern Odin or the Aztec Quetzalcoatl.

  But for you, here, now, I am Satan. You may

  think you know who this is, but until you have read

  my Bible you really don’t. So welcome to my house:

  Enter freely and of your own will. As one of your

  poets so presciently reflected:

  We shall not cease from exploration,

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  Through the unknown, unremembered gate

  When the last of Earth left to discover

  Is that which was the beginning;

  At the source of the longest river

  The voice of the hidden waterfall

  And the children in the apple-tree. 1

  So let’s go climb some trees together, and

  perhaps meet God. No, not the old, grouchy one of

  the Hebrews, but a friendly, fascinating, occasionally

  funny one, who’s staring at you right now.

  Over there. In the mirror.

  Satan

  1 Eliot, T.S., Little Gidding (1942).

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  Michael A. Aquino

  Preface

  A. ReVision Golden Jubilee

  Before the ink was dry on Anton LaVey’s

  original Satanic Bible (1968), it was already obsolete

  within the rapidly-evolving Church of Satan, as no

  one knew better than the author.

  When three years later he asked me to write a

  new Introduction for the book’s 1972 hardcover &

  paperback editions, he was adamant that this was

  just preliminary to a complete revision.

  But, as recounted below, he never got to it, and

  twenty years ago in 1997 CE he set aside his material

  body, making his own revision possible only by

  séance, which neither conventional publishing nor

  the Internet has sufficiently advanced to

  accommodate. 2

  2 Not to mention terrifying stenographers.

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  And my own dalliance here will soon dissolve

  as well; so if Anton’s Devil-Son3 doesn’t do this now,

  no one will.

  If the Satanic Bible weren’t worth a damn any

  more except as an incidental cash-goat for its

  profiteers, the most merciful thing to do would be to

  let it continue to fade away into obscurity: a quaint

  relic of an equally-quaint aberration in 20th-

  Century American counterculture.

  But, you see, it does happen to be worth

  something: indeed rather “more than the sum of its

  parts”. Because it hallmarked a door into a

  previously inexplicit aspect of human existence. It

  was a statement, an affirmation not just that

  humanity is an intelligent phenomenon of nature,

  but that there is something beyond the “natural” in

  this attribute.

  Philosophers as dissimilar as H.P. Lovecraft4,

  Eric Hoffer 5, Paul Kantner6, and Arthur C. Clarke7

  have glimpsed this door; and it was no secret

  whatever to the ancient Egyptians8. But in the sterile

  3 “I have just had a talk with the Man downstairs, who informs

  me that I should take my Devil-Son aside for a few moments

  and discuss certain machinations of the human jungle ...” -

  Letter, Anton LaVey to M.A. Aquino, June 2, 1973.

  4 Cf. Correspondence with Emil Petaja in Selected Letters of

  H.P. Lovecraft, Volume V. Sauk City: Arkham House, 1976.

  5 Cf. “The Unnaturalness of Human Nature” in The Ordeal of

  Change, 1968.

  6 Kantner, Paul, Planet Earth Rock & Roll Orchestra. San

  Francisco: Little Dragon, 2003.

  7 Cf. Childhood’s End (1953) and [with Stanley Kubrick] 2001:

  A Space Odyssey (1968).

  8 Cf. M.A. Aquino, MindStar (2016, 2018).

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  timidity of modern intellectualism, Anton LaVey

  was the first to step through it, and the Satanic Bible

  was his footprint. Indeed, had it contained nothing

  but blank pages, its title on the cover alone would

  have sufficed to pull down the Samson’s temple of

  sanctimony epitomized not only by the Hebrew

  Torah (“Old Testament”) but its cluster of clones:

  Koran, Book of Mormon, “New Testament”, ad

  tedium. A “bible” is supposed to define, and thus

  imprison the reader in “reality”: in all these cases

  “nature”. But a “bible” for Something Else?

  As I daresay my DevilDad would approve, this

  ReVision retains only the “conceptual flow” of its

  predecessor: its first four “books” named in honor of

  that 19th-Century occult classic Abra=Melin’s9 “four
r />   crown princes of Hell”: Satan, Lucifer, Belial,

  Leviathan. 10

  “Satan” is a dramatic introduction to that

  personage. In the original, at which time no

  satisfactory epic was available, Anton chose to do

  this indirectly, through an intensely anti-Judæo/

  Christian diatribe that could be dramatically, if not

  strictly attributed to the Devil.

  “Lucifer” consists of essays outlining the

  cosmology and philosophy of the Age & Church of

  Satan. In the original these collected and reprinted

  the pre- Bible “rainbow sheets” (handouts so-called

  9 Mathers, Samuel L. MacGregor (Trans.), The Book of the

  Sacred Magic of Abra=Melin, the Mage. New York: de

  Lawrence, 1932.

  10 Yes, both Anton & I are well-aware that in certain traditions

  “Satan” & “Lucifer” are post/pre-”Fall” identical, that Belial &

  Leviathan were Hebraic corruptions of the rival [to their god

  El] Canaanite gods Baal & Lotan. Neither was inherently

  “Satanic”; Job’s nemefish’s name just decorates the Bessy-

  Baphomet because “Satan” in Hebrew has only four letters.

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  because they were mimeographed on brightly-

  colored paper) of the fledgling Church). Anton wrote

  these in the vernacular of Haight/Ashbury San

  Francisco as his lecture-audiences of the day could

  understand without taxing their brains. Their

  present replacements unflinchingly address the

  more complex issues raised by the same sequence of

  topics; unfortunately readers’ brains can now expect

  some taxation.

  Humans come to a religious institution because

  they want to get in touch with the god(s) in

  question: at least to find out what they want so as

  not to anger them, but perhaps also to get on their

  good side and get blessed rather than beaten. The

  Church of Satan was different in that it introduced

  adherents to the tools of its god - something called

  Black Magic - enabling them to bless themselves

  [and perhaps beat on others].

  So the third book, “Belial” is a primer on what

  Black Magic is, and how to begin using it. For this

  the original offered three basic/simple examples -

  lust, curse, and compassion - assuming that at the

  most elementary level of each the practitioner would

  learn enough to get his/her feet wet, after which

  more detailed instruction within the Church’s

  activities and publications might be appropriate.

  There is of course no such Church anymore, so

  this “Belial” examines the methodology & machinery

  of Black Magic more comprehensively, but still short

  of “providing matches for children to play with fire”.

  Practical proficiency in Black Magic requires not just

  expertise in operations, but even more importantly

  the most rigorous and conscientious ethics

  governing them.

  Finally from the original edition, “Leviathan”

  discusses one of the most elegant and elaborate

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  vehicles of self-explorative, or “Greater” Black

  Magic: the “Enochian Keys” or “- Calls” of the

  Elizabethan mystic and magician Dr. John Dee.

  What until now no one outside the original

  Church, and even very few within it knew is that

  Anton LaVey, realizing the power of this instrument,

  simply did not trust the mere purchaser of a mass-

  market paperback to use it responsibly. Thus he

  presented the Keys, already substantially corrupted

  by a succession of miscopyings and arbitrary

  syllables, as stand-alone invocations of various LBM

  ritual working themes. Thus the Satanic Bible Keys

  served little more purpose than to lend a dash of

  mysterious mumbo-jumbo to otherwise prosaic

  proceedings - much the same as surrounding the

  Bessy-Baphomet with five Hebrew letters gave it an

  ominous glamor that “S-A-T-A-N” would not have.

  The Keys in this ReVision are directly from the

  British Museum microfilm of John Dee’s original

  manuscript, and the English translations the result

  of a succession of GBM workings drawing upon both

  Dee’s own writings on use of the Keys11 and Aleister

  Crowley’s original manuscripts of his Liber 418

  workings with them in Mexico and Algeria. 12

  Most readers will probably not want to subject

  themselves to the discipline required for activation

  of the Keys; but for those who do, judicious

  attention to the “Lucifer” and “Belial” guidance

  11 Cf. Deacon, Richard, John Dee. London: Frederick Muller

  Ltd., 1968.

  Casaubon, Meric., A True and Faithful Relation of What

  Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee and Some

  Spirits. London: Askin Publishers, 1974.

  12 Crowley’s original Liber 418 manuscripts, with extensive

  marginalia not included elsewhere, are in the Special

  Collections of the University of Texas Library, Austin.

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  herein will probably keep you safe from Choronzon’s

  clutches.

  This edition adds a fifth “book”: YANKEE

  ROSE. Browsers through the original were

  invariably caught up short when reaching its last

  page, finding thereupon nothing but this enigmatic

  inscription. While it is “decoded” herein, of greater

  importance is what it connotes concerning the

  geographical and emotional atmospheres in which

  something like the Satanic Bible could come to be

  written. One simply couldn’t concoct it in Miami

  Beach or the Rocky Mountains. Mary Shelley needed

  the gloom of Lord Byron’s manor on Lake Geneva to

  conceive Frankenstein, and Anton LaVey the

  dæmonic decadence of not just his Black House, but

  its city and surroundings as well: an Odyssey that

  began at a fog-shrouded nightclub and reached its

  zenith on the North Solstice nine years later.

  Is this ReVision intended to replace or

  overshadow Anton LaVey’s original? Of course not:

  With all its lacunæ it exudes the charismatic charm

  of its creator, who had a way with words as well as

  the Wurlitzer. But he and I both saw the book’s

  unrealized potential, and that is what this

  celebratory commemoration seeks to realize.

  B. Before the Bible: Monograph &

  “Rainbow Sheets”

  If you were curious, courageous, and foolhardy

  enough to make enquiry to the [shudder!] Church of

  Satan 1966-8, your mailbox soon smoldered with

  this cheerful response, accompanied by a 12-page

  mimeographed monograph of a pre-“Belial” tutorial

  in [gasp!] Black Magic, and a rainbow-colored

  assortment of Devilish diatribes destined for a less-

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  kaleidoscopic future as the “Lucifer” essays of the

  subsequent Bible:

  Enclosed is the information which you have

  requested. Thank you for your interest, and

  congratulations on having the courage to seek the

  truth ab
out Satanism.

  After reading the information on Satanism,

  you may feel that it is the religion for which you

  have been searching, or possibly the one you have

  been practicing in an “underground” way for years.

  If you wish to join the Church of Satan, please fill

  out the enclosed questionnaire and send it along

  with your initiation fee of $13, and you will

  become a part of the most exciting concept in

  religion in the world today.

  U p o n r e c e i p t o f y o u r c o m p l e t e d

  questionnaire and initiation fee, you will receive

  the following:

  1 - Lifetime membership in the Church of Satan.

  (There are no periodic dues; your initial fee is

  the only payment you make for lifetime

  membership.)

  2 - A suitably inscribed membership card of a

  striking appearance.

  3 - Complete instructions for performing

  authentic Satanic rituals (see enclosed paper

  for full description).

  4 - A list (revised bimonthly) of other members

  with whom you may communicate. This list

  includes not only names, addresses, and

  phone numbers, but also marital status, age,

  sex, and interests of each member listed.

  5 - Past newsletters containing pertinent

  information for all Satanists as well as

  announcements of scheduled press coverage.

  6 - A reading list of readily obtainable books and/

  or articles on Satanism and related subjects.

  (This list will have bimonthly additions.)

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  As a member of the Church of Satan, you

  will have the opportunity to:

  1 - Overcome any obstacle through the ability to

  control people and events.

  2 - Embark on a series of studies unlike any other

  correspondence course ever offered to

  students of Satanic science. (This course is

  offered only to members of the Church of

  Satan. The material it contains is not the

  hackneyed lore usually found in readily

  available books and journals on witchcraft and

  Satanism. The Satanic Study Course consists

  of twenty separate essays covering all aspects

  of the Satanic religion. A complete list of

  topics and a full description of the course will

  be sent to all new members.)

  3 - Study for the Satanic Priesthood. (Full details

  will be sent to new members.)