Episode 666: Anton LaVey Part I - Hail Satan

There's no place to escape to. This is the last podcast. On the left. Right on your glade. That's when the cannibalism started. Who's that? Oh, yeah! Yes! Yes! It is the most evil, domed-shaped, molten lava cake in the world! Oh, they are. Remember, only the people watching on Netflix can see it. We have a cake here in front of us. I'm too elated to care about you audio slaves! And it's celebrating the episode 666. 666! 666! It's the number of the fucking beast. Is that what that means? Yes. See, I never learned 666. We never talked about 666. You never got to that level of elementary school. No, no, no. Very, very difficult for you. Oh, blow the candles out. I get one satanic wish. Yeah, okay. Yeah, Henry, you should do it. Yeah, you should do it. Oh, you don't get nothing. This is terrible radio. God, this couldn't be. You can't. Are these trick candles? Or is he just that horrible? They were not trick candles. Welcome to the last podcast on the left, everybody. They were not trick candles, and it took Henry a full 15 seconds to do it, which is an eternity on radio. I had to reach across my laptop. It's episode 666. I'm excited. What the hell am I supposed to do here? We can't follow every rule in the GD radio book. My name is Marcus Sparks. I'm here with resident Satanist Henry Zebrowski. Yes, I carry the burden. I carry the burden of being the most sovereign of us all. Just immediately want to start making fun of you. I know what it's like to be, to walk around being wiser and. More moral than everyone else. That's really the key. He has a pitchfork made out of forks. It's just three forks. And we have the man with no affiliation whatsoever, Ed Larson. I'm an atheist and proud. Good work. I am here as the devil's lawyer. Yeah. That is my, literally his advocate. That's nice. Yes, that is my goal. The devil's advocate. Honestly, that's why Anton LaVey started this whole fucking thing, Eddie. I saw the devil's advocate. I saw the devil's advocate at a birthday party for myself in freshman year of high school. And I was a hero because there were boobs in it. That sick fuck has got you jumping from one foot to the next. Look, but don't touch. Touch, but don't taste. Taste, but don't swallow. And that sick fucking asshole is laughing his ass off. Actually, for Henry's birthday this year, I got him a bumper sticker that said. She's got a huge. She's got a huge fucking ass and you got your head all the way up in it. Yeah, honestly, it's like. And that was an improv line. It was, yeah. And everyone on set reportedly had to keep themselves from laughing. Of course, it's incredible. He's an amazing actor, except when he does a British accent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You ever see Paterno? Jerry! Jerry, you fuck those kids, Jerry! Who are you? What's this chair doing in here? Whoa, you got a. You can't tell me. You made her tell me. You had that kid where? Inside of what? Jerry, you can't go around calling yourself the Tickle Monster! So for this, what we assume to be our 666th episode, we decided that we would fully explore the life of the father of Satanism and the creator of the Church of Satan itself, Mr. Anton Sandor Lavey. And I already got my defensiveness out in our production call. Nice. It was about an hour of it. But we did it! No, we did it good, because this is obviously very close to the chest. So you like him? Like is. There's no like here. Okay. It's not about like. It's about respect? No. He gave me the permission to not like or respect him. Oh! That's the best part. That's very nice of him. He freed me. Like Charles Bukowski did. Honestly, yes, for some people. You know, I'm going to go ahead and say up top that it is our aim to not get too bogged down in philosophy during this three-part series, because while Anton Lavey is certainly one of the most important occult figures of the 20th century, he's also one of the most important cultural figures as well. So, well, today, any of you can go to a Last Podcast live show and yell, Hail Satan! Hail Satan! Hail Satan! You can yell that in unison with 2,000 other weirdos of like minds just because it's fun. You don't have to be a Satanist or anything like that. You just want to join in. It's important to remember that the last witch trial in America was held less than 100 years before the war. It was held before Anton Lavey founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco. I think it was held in Salem in, I think, like, 1878. Pretty fucking late. Yeah. Wow. So there was already. Slavery was already done. Yeah. And they're still doing witch trials. Like, let's get one last witch trial in there. Hey, listen, we don't get to do anything fun anymore. All right? I don't get to have a man as property. I don't get to beat him to death. I mean, I gotta burn a woman. Witch trial? That trial. There, wolf. For almost the entirety of the first two millennia of Western Christian society, nobody in their right mind openly said that they were a Satanist. Being a Satanist was not something you claimed. It was something that was accused. And more often than not, an accusation was a direct precursor to a horrific and painful execution. But as the Western world began to rapidly evolve into a more secular society in the 20th century, especially in places like San Francisco, where Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan, enough of a balance existed between secular living and religious belief where something like the Church of Satan could both exist and serve a purpose in the culture at large. Therefore, the story of Anton LaVey is not just the story of the world's most successful circus carny, although that is certainly a massive part of it. Almost all of it. This is also the story of just how much culture began to speed up in the second half of the 20th century and how Anton LaVey matched and at times surpassed that acceleration. But because American culture did change so quickly, this is also the story of the reactions people had to those changes in the decades after the founding of the Church of Satan, both in the secular and religious worlds. Christians who took Anton LaVey seriously destroyed countless lives during the satanic panic that crept into American life in the decades after the founding of the Church of Satan. While Satanists like Richard Ramirez, who completely misunderstood Anton LaVey, they committed horrific murders in Satan's so-called name. Both, of course, completely missed the point of Satanism, or at least Satanism as I personally see it. For me, Satanism is like the carnival from whence Anton LaVey came. The whole thing is set up to be a little unsettling and a little scary, but it's also supposed to retain an element of goofiness, an element of play. If you don't believe me, contrast the sinister Church of Satan black masses in the 60s with the silly little red devil outfit that Anton LaVey sometimes wore while he was doing them. Point is, just like a night at the carnival, Satanism is supposed to be all in good fun. Important, but not serious. But that's just my opinion. And for the record, I'm not a Satanist. If you ask five Satanists what they think Satanism is, you'll get five different answers. And if you think your way is the only way, then again, to the best of my understanding, you've missed the fucking point. Honestly, thank you, Marcus. Because that's the big issue here that we're going to be covering in this whole series, is what is the point of Anton LaVey? Sure. Like, what is the point of covering him? Because even Aleister Crowley, his, like, direct predecessor, is like, he was way more of a poet, scholar, writer. Mountain climber. All of that, right? He was way more of a serious student. Anton LaVey picked up the golden path and said, this shit's dumb. I know a way to do that's better. And there's just something about this that it holds true for every Satanist. And that's why what I love is that we're going to do this topic and we're going to get angry emails no matter what. Because it's him. It's him. It's on episode and it's also, it's him. And other Satanists argue. And that's the kind of whole idea is that he's trying to tell you, here's the stuff, now go. Even me as the Pope of the Church of Satan, it's not that serious of a fucking role. Exactly. I always saw Satanism as, like, a form of atheism. Well, he actually then, I re-clarified, because I've always kind of said this as a shorthand, and that's a way to say it as a shorthand. But I know that within, if you re-read the Satanic Bible, you see that. Re-read? Yeah. Takes a couple times. It's a really bold assumption you just made there with Edward. If you re-read it. He specifically says, this is separate from God and all this shit. This is specifically, as we'll get all into it, the Church of Satan and the Church of Satan Levian Satanism is all about making fun of the bastards. Yeah, it's a lifestyle more than a religion. Yes. Yeah, a philosophy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an asshole lifestyle. Now, you called him success. Was he successful? Like, did he have money? Oh, yeah. Yeah, no. He had money. He lived a pretty good life throughout. And when I say successful, I mean more notorious. Okay. You know, like, successful as in he had the goal of bringing the Church of Satan to the world. He wanted to. Like, he is. I would call Anton on LeVay the most successful local character in the history of the world. - Yeah. - Okay. That was his really, because we're going to get into that far more in the second episode. But really, his main goal was he wanted to be the weirdest guy in San Francisco. That's weird. Exactly. It's like Big Lebowski puts him in the running for weirdest guy in the world. And it just kind of grew from there. And it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. And it grew to the point where like Anton LaVey was a little bit lazy. To the point where he was like, I don't want to deal with this anymore. Well, it's never supposed to be all that fucking serious. And then it got serious. And then it got unserious. And it got serious again. And it got unserious. And now we're back in a serious point, which is why we're covering the fuck in the first place. Now, as is befitting a man sometimes known as the Dirty Pope, Anton LaVey was what you'd call a complicated character. He wasn't a shiny beacon of morality. He was the founder of the Church of Satan. Did Anton LaVey hobnob with neo-Nazis in the 70s? Absolutely. And we'll cover those incredible idiots in full on the next episode, along with. Along with the reason why Satanism was attractive to said neo-Nazis. And how that disease of thought will also go on to fuck up the whole thing to begin with. Additionally, was Anton LaVey a bad husband, partner, and father? Yes, yes, and yes. But again, he's the founder of the Church of Satan. He's not going to be Pedro Pascal. He should be though. No one's saying that we should be modeling ourselves after Anton LaVey. But shortcomings aside, Anton LaVey is still an incredible. He's an incredibly important figure in the cultural history of the 20th century. His is an important tale to know if you want to get closer to understanding the modern world. How did we get here? That's always the question. But even besides that, even after you factor in the many, many lies Anton LaVey told throughout his life, his story is still utterly fascinating. There's no reason to let facts get in the way of a good story. Yeah. Is that his quote? Oh, no, that's just truth. I think that's. Before we get into the full life story of Anton LaVey, I think it would be helpful. And also, you know, it's episode 666. Yeah. Let's do a short history of Satan. Satan! Satan! This is what I want. Satan! It's just so everyone has a full concept. Old Louie! Yeah, Old Louie. Old Scratch. I love Old Scratch. And, you know, but this is also to give everyone a full concept of just how transgressive the founding of the Church of Satan was when Anton LaVey hung up a shingle in San Francisco in 1966. It was a big fuck. It was a. I would call it a big leap. So the image of Satan as a red devil with horns and a pitchfork, it's a relatively recent invention. Prior to the 20th century, Satan could appear as green, yellow, blue, or black. He could take the form of a serpent, a beast, a goat, any manner of monster, depending on which artist was painting him during what time period. Yeah, just a guy going, I'm sick of painting goats. Now he's a bad. Well, while most images of the devil. Well, throughout the second millennium, often came from painters working on the behest of the church, the little red devil image of Satan is thought to have come from the street puppet shows of the late 18th century. Puppeteers gave Satan a flashy color that made it easier for children to pay attention to the story they were telling in their puppet show. I mean, you know how it is with kids, like, oh no, it's the devil! Ah! Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Now, when you combine that red coloring with the mustachioed Mephistopheles character, from the 18th century play Faust, you had an image that looked great in print once color printing became common in the 20th century. And so, the red, pitchfork-wielding Satan, with a little curly mustache, he became a popular character in advertising. He popped. That's where the red devil comes from. It comes from advertising. Yeah. And the red devil, therefore, took his place as simply the latest iteration of Satan, going back through a history that was about a thousand years old. But, it seems like Satan is the only one who can do that. The goat, this is just my personal opinion, seems like Satan is the goat, has made a big comeback, again, because of shifting mediums. The witch! Yeah, we went from static images to moving ones. And, you know, red devil Satan looks fucking stupid on screen, except for maybe Insidious, that red devil's cool. Yeah, it was fucking bad. It does look stupid, though, but it's still scary somehow. Yeah, it looks stupid and scary. But goat Satan looks fucking awesome on screen. Has anybody seen Hexen? Yeah. If you've seen Hexen, you know. Oh, like that devil. Yeah. That's the devil. That's incredible. And the return of the goat is also due to Anton LaVey. But, Baphomet will not appear in this series until later. You know, like, it's just funny, because as we'll get into it now, Satan was not even that big deal to Christianity in the very beginning. For about the first thousand years. Yeah, like, he kind of got retconned into the villain. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because he hated heaven. Well, there's many ways. He's, again, he's a great foil to God. Yeah. And we're, and actually, that thing about him hating heaven and all that, we'll get into that here in a second. Okay, cool. There's a whole, like, it's, that's, I find, personally, I find the history of Satan as a figure fucking endlessly fascinating. Because you know how I view it? Like, when you see it, like, you really see, because I was reading about Irving Berlin's writings about Satan. He wrote several songs about Satan. There's a couple of things. And every one of those songs are, like, these old pieces of material before the modern inclination of Satan, kind of position Satan as Satan. Yeah. Like, hoi polloi. Like, the people of the street. And there's something about that. He's always been connected back to us versus, like, the ruling class. Well, not always. Really, since the late 18th, early 19th century. We'll get to that here in a bit. I always looked at Satan as a figure that existed to make sure that Christians were scared into morality. Well, you know. We'll also get into that. Because this whole thing is an evolution. It took, seriously, it took thousands of years for it to get to this point. Yeah. It took me. Yeah. And now I'm the very end of the process. Now, if you look at Satan as he is actually portrayed in Christian history, he has no set form, even in the Bible. He's a shape changer. He's positioned to oppose God as a serpent, a dragon. Sometimes he's an everything creature with bird feet, lizard hands, short, sharp claws. Sells apples. Yeah. Love that shit. Fucking love that fucking shit. One of my favorite late medieval depictions, Satan showed up as a hand. He's a hideous green monster with unusable bat wings and a face on his butt. You know, he's trying to tempt St. Augustine. He's got a book of vices and he's showing it to St. Augustine going like, you like that one? Yeah. You like that one? Yeah. You want that one? I'm going to blow you with my ass. Hey, I kiss my mother with that ass. And St. Augustine is holding up his hand like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I will not give into your vices, devil. As cool as you are. And the face, of course, represented the belief that witches had to kiss the devil's anus in a sort of heretic homage. In the earlier days of Christianity, Satan was actually portrayed as somewhat of a bumbling buffoon. He was the Washington generals to God's Harlem globetrotters. Satan would try time and again to tempt man. But because he was such a buffoon, he would fail in the face of God's great power and man's unbreakable faith. He was a trickster at best. Yeah. Oh, he also, you got to get tricked into a contract. Like, that's the thing, too. Mark Twain would use him as a kind of funny character. Even way before Twain. Way before Twain. Because then you could probably connect them to the same other mischievous characters of all those kind of folklore, like Anansi and these other types of things that were like Loki, like this idea of chaos, of something coming that's like, because the chaos is tempting. Yeah, of course. And, you know, he's also linked to, you know, the satyrs of Greek mythology, you know, the horny goat man and all that shit. Like, there's a lot of different characters came together to kind of, and Loki, of course, is a good one, too. Just makes me think of 100 days of, 120 days. 120 days of Sodom. Let's read it together. When did he learn the fiddle? 1973, I believe. Yeah, but honestly, it was after his period playing the clarinet. As we all know, the most evil woodwind. You know the difference between a fiddle and a violin? Fiddle's played by a racist. Yes, I've heard that. I have heard that. I thought it was just because I was too fat to play the violin. Now, eventually, the church recognized that Satan was being wasted as a simple foil, as someone who was just like, yeah, God's great, Satan sucks, whatever. It took about a thousand years, but the church realized that Satan was far more useful as an adversary, because if Christianity had a villain, someone actively working against God on earth, then the church could attribute man's actions to Satan himself. Because I believe, didn't Judaism at the time, before all of these things that kind of came out of it, they didn't have a sin. They didn't have a set devil. From what I see, from what I know from my cursory research, they never. The golem was what I was always told. Well, the golem is like an anti-reality. It's like someone's making, someone's being God in the face of God by creating a man out of dirt. That is what a golem is. A homunculus. A homunculus. Oh, okay. I know in Islam, like their devil is like Shaitan. Yeah, Shaitan. Which is more of a genie, like a djinn. A white man. A white devil. A white devil. Let me guess. Well, if the church could make people believe that Satan was meddling in earthly matters, then it made criticism of the church or its members far easier to dismiss as the work of the devil. It seriously took them a thousand years to come up with this idea. And that evil fuck who came up with that idea got the bonus of the year. The pope was like, oh, fucking shit, Francisco. here's a bunch of boys. Thank you. It also made Christianity a more active religion because Satan gave people something to do. It's something to fight against, which is the same principle, of course, that led to the rise of QAnon, which also is centered around Satan. But from identifying people as Satan's agents on earth, it wasn't too much of a stretch to convince people that anything allied with the devil was too dangerous to live and must therefore be executed. What that meant was that before the 20th century, hell, before the mid-20th century, fucking nobody willingly identified as a Satanist. If people did confess to Satan worship, they were either insane or they'd been coerced into confessing through torture or the threat of execution. And often, they'd be fucking executed anyway, even if they did confess, because punishments kind of varied from panic to panic judge to judge. It's kind of up to the guy. Yeah, you can burn, you can hang, you can get squished. Yeah, even in Salem, there were some people who confessed that lived and some people who confessed that still died. Interesting. Yeah, it's really up to the whims of whoever. It's almost like none of it's real. It's almost like it's all made up. It's almost like they just did it to kill people they didn't like. Yeah, yeah. And in Salem, you know, a lot of times it was, and it also became very useful for people. In Salem, for example, like, I want that guy's land. He's not going to sell it to me. Call him a witch. Call his wife a witch. Yeah, so I'm consorting with the devil at night. Yeah, so I'm consorting with the devil. And then that guy's dead. You buy the plot of land from the town. All good. See, I would just be like, you saw the devil? Wow! Now, that's all to say that Satanism didn't really exist until Anton LaVey created it, at least as a religion. But what's extremely interesting about all this is that LaVeyan Satanism isn't really based on the Bible. Because, relatively speaking, there's not a lot of Satan in the Bible. In fact, the word Satan is used less than 60 times in the King James Version of the Bible, which is insane for someone who is, according to the church, supposed to be one of the main characters of the story. This is when, like, they lied to us about, like, Drew Barrymore and Scream. Or, like, when they do that thing where they show the guy, like, in the trailer, and they're all like, oh, man, Benicio del Toro's gonna be amazing as Magneto's brother. And then he's fucking dead. And then he's fucking shot in the head in the first scene. And you're like, what the fuck? Yeah, they barely even used him in the sequel of the Bible. Yeah, very little. Yeah, it was just, actually, I think it was one scene, you know, when Jesus is out in the desert, the 40 days and 40 nights. And even that was a hangout. That was like a hangout. That was a loose, long discussion where they were just chilling out. Oh, yeah, and then he sucked his thorny cock. And even in the Old Testament, it's just, you know, him, you know, tempting Eve with the apple, and then the bet that, like, him and God gambling over Job, you know. And also, God was scary enough. Yeah, God was fine. So, instead of using the Bible, Anton LaVey drew far more inspiration from Satan as he was depicted in arguably the best piece of fan fiction ever written, Paradise Lost by John Milton. Basically, LaVey taking from Paradise Lost, it's no different from someone who, like, say, if this week started a religion based around Neil Gaiman's depiction of Lucifer and Sandman. It's the exact same fucking thing. You don't think that fucking happened? You don't really don't think that somewhere deep within the folds of Tumblr that there is not an entire society devoted to that? Yeah. So, this is the Milton that Donald Sutherland's talking about in Animal House. Yes. Okay, cool. Yeah. I'm with you guys. Yeah, you got it, man. You got it. Yeah, you got it. It's coming along, man. Fly from your grave. So, in Paradise Lost, Satan wages a war against God, and loses. But Milton expanded the story of Satan far beyond what's mentioned in the Bible. In Milton's version, Satan makes the best of his punishment after being sent to hell. Instead of suffering for eternity, Satan transforms hell into a place where it is, quote, better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. Fuck yeah, dude. He's like fucking John Taffer from Bar Rescue. You can't reign in hell because then they'll put out all the fires. Yeah. Well, that sort of comes into the, you know, the movie The Devil's Reign, which is personally one of my favorite, like, satanic exploitation movies. Anton LaVey was actually a, I believe he was a consultant in that movie. It's the only movie he's ever consulted on for Satanism. Yeah, it's incredible. Ernest Borgnine plays a satanic cult leader. He's fucking awesome. And Ernest Borgnine then disavowed the movie. Yeah. From then on, because he was such a, like, it was this thing. He was scared. He got scared by what he was doing. He did in the movie and by hanging out with Anton LaVey, because just the idea of Ernest Borgnine and Anton LaVey hanging out. I want to smoke cigars and I want to hang out with him and drink bourbon with him all night. Well, Milton's version of Satan is so influential that lines like the reign in hell one, they're often thought to be from the Bible. A lot of people think that this shit that was written about in Paradise Lost or like fucking Dante's Divine Comedy, the idea of like the circles of hell. People think that that's from the Bible. It's not. It's all fiction. It's all fiction. Like the Bible. Yeah. The circles of hell that's from the Divine Comedy that was written in the 14th century. This is really helpful, actually, because I really didn't want to read the Bible. This is all you got to know. It starts wet, ends hot. Yeah. This stuff isn't from the Bible. I mean, all this stuff about, you know, reigning in hell, it comes from a blind Puritan dictating verses to his daughters in the 1600s. Now, even though John Milton was indeed a Puritan, his reworking of Satan in Paradise Lost was a great inspiration to writers in the Romantic Age like Byron and Shelley, who wrote poems in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, reimagining Satan as a Romantic figure who is opposed to God, but not opposed to humanity. They used Satan as a way to criticize the power of churches and governments while championing the values of reason and liberty, which is very much in line with modern Satanism. This is what you'd call Satanism, where it's all about myths and symbols rather than it being a religion where God and Satan are actual supernatural beings who meddle in our affairs. In Levain's Satanism, Satan is not real. He's not some guy, which is something that I cannot fucking stress enough. No, it is the spirit of human potential. That is kind of how he puts it all together. What Satan stands for is humanity and our freedom and our ability to be free from all of what we assume are built-in hierarchies to reality. Like, that's kind of what this is all about. The story of the Garden of Eden, it's about releasing two pets to the street. That's what it's about. It's about the snake saying, you understand that your pet's here, right? Yeah. And it's like, and yeah, life's better as a pet and it really sucks being out there in the fucking world, but you have freedom. You have the freedom of choice. You have the freedom to do whatever you want. You have the freedom to do what you want to do. You get to fuck. Yeah. Like, literally, you get to fuck, you get to eat, you get to play music, you get to do all of the things you want to do. You don't just sit. But then you also got to go to work. Yes. Yeah. Tell me fucking about it. Yeah, there's a lot of bad shit that goes with it. It's very difficult, but the point is, and Satanism also kind of gives a bit of a framework of like, well, and here's how we all do this together. Can I ask a dumb existential question that obviously doesn't have a real answer? Okay. Is hell on earth? Heaven's a place on earth. You know what that's worth. Like, like, all right. So if hell exists and it's like a part of like humanity does like, if there's like a, another like planet with a bunch of aliens, do they have the same Satan or do they have a different Satan? I don't know. We're fully, and I don't know. And I've read all the science stuff. I've read all the books. I've read the Peter Hill books. Wasn't that the plot of an episode of Pretty Face? Doesn't an alien go to hell? That is literally, yes. Cause it gets abducted. We take the alien, it comes down to hell. Then the alien gods come and pull it out. Yeah. Yeah. Cause he, he dies on earth and he doesn't know what it is. Just anyone who dies on earth, it doesn't. Yeah. It's great. According to the early, early Christians, they apparently there was a place that there, that this could happen. There was like this, apparently some valley that they would kind of like, they pinpointed it for a while saying hell's over there. And, but no, it does not technically, according to all of this, you would leave planet earth. Yeah. Okay. And you'd go to another realm. Yeah. Now, ideally, you know, concerning morality, concerning the rules about what you do when you're out and about out of the, out of the garden at Eden, Satanists like Anton LaVey in the symbolic vein are supposed to do as little harm to others as they can possibly manage in their pursuits of pleasure, knowledge, and pleasure. Knowledge and power. One of the central tenants is that you're not supposed to hurt anyone else unless they hurt you first. Never cross into another man's territory. But when Anton LaVey brought the worship of Satan into modern society, even if it was just as a symbol, he also introduced the possibility that one might interpret worshiping Satan as worshiping the concept of evil itself as Christians see it. LaVey, therefore, accidentally also gave birth to a whole crop, a theistic Satanists who believe in Satan just as fervently as a Christian fundamentalist believes in Satan. in God. These are people like serial killer Richard Ramirez, who did harm in Satan's name because he believed that's what Satan wanted. It must be said, however, that theistic Satanists are incredibly rare. Evil Satanists committing ritualistic murder, that happens in novels, TV, movies. They're portrayed by Christopher Lee or Ernest Borgnine. But Christians committing murder in the name of Jesus? Well, that's just the history of the Western world. Whoa, Marcus, come on! That's just called how they won. Whether it be the Crusades, Manifest Destiny, the Spanish conquest of South America, the Spanish Inquisition, the Iraq War, the murder of gay people in Africa, or millions of smaller atrocities throughout the last 2,000 years, far more people have stained humanity with blood spilled in Jesus's name than Satan's. This, of course, is partly why today's fundamentalist Christians are working so fucking hard to prevent your kids from learning our actual history. Satan is still an incredibly useful scapegoat for the world. And he's still an extremely effective boogeyman to use when people are questioning why they're being told to kill other humans. For a worryingly recent example, we can go to our latest war in Iran. Earlier this year, over 200 American soldiers across all branches of the military reported that they were being told by their superiors in the United States military that the Iran war was a precursor to Armageddon. That they were there to trigger the final battle between God and Satan. What this tells me is that Satan, as a real enemy, is primed to make a big fucking comeback. And whether you're Christian, Jewish, atheist, agnostic, or whatever, you really aren't going to like the world that's made when these people start using the battle against Satan as an excuse for their actions. Never forget that most of the people executed as witches at Salem were themselves committed Christians who pled their innocence to the God of the world. And that's why we're right up to the moment the rope wrapped around their necks by their good Christian neighbors ended their fucking life. It has happened before and it can happen again. And that's why I, as the resident troll fucking shithead of this show, still call myself a Satanist because we are at the precipice of another religious war within the United States of America. It is happening right now just like we see it in the United States of America. And that's why we're right up to the mark. And we have to really think about this because, yes, there is evil, theodistic Satanists. We're not going to go into right now, order nine angles or seven, six, four, or these other things that still that's kind of modern. But the real shit is the fact that several hundred million people believe in another fake character called God that is killing the rest of us. And so that's what I kind of think the scales are not even here. Yeah. Satan never killed everyone on Earth. Never. Not once. Not once. Yeah. Again, we are. In the middle of history right now. Like, that's why we're talking about this is because, you know, Satan has always been a very powerful figure, at least has been for the last thousand years. Satan has been extraordinarily powerful figure. And we're about to see how powerful that figure really is again. So if the war against Satan and God in Iran is supposed to bring on Armageddon, does that mean we're going to lose to Satan or do we God? No, we trigger Armageddon and God kills everybody except for the super religious and he turns them into ghosts. So we should, in that theory, be on Satan's side. Yeah, we have to kill God. We need to get the Lance of Longinus. We need to dig up Lilith. I know how to do it. I've been watching Evangelion again. I know how to do it. It's in the rebuild. All right, cool. All right. Call my friends. I'm going to stab God in the heart. Now, part of what Anton LaVey was trying to do with the creation of the Church of Satan was to banish the superstition around God and the devil. and making our lives better in any meaningful way. I don't know about you, but the church never did jack shit for me besides give me nightmares and make me feel guilty about masturbation. Didn't stop me from masturbating. Fuck, my brother Thomas still calls me little M in my goddamn 40s because I masturbated so much in my youth. But because of the church, I would beg Jesus for forgiveness so I wouldn't go to hell every time I did it, which was a lot. And that was a lot of wasted energy. And the church gave me the bonus fear of being terrified about just the possibility of being gay. Because I knew being gay wasn't a choice, but if it wasn't a choice, then that meant that being gay was a guaranteed ticket to hell. So even having a fluid thought was absolutely fucking terrifying. In other words, the modern Christian church can really fuck up a kid with even half a brain who has an interest in things outside of their immediate sphere of experience. The modern world does not fit with the modern church. So I absolutely get what LeVay meant. When he said an evolution was needed. The church actively hurt my family. It actually forced my mother out of it. And they shamed her for the divorce after her first husband beat the shit out of her. They shamed her for it. And then I'll always remember when I went to the priest and I was trying to ask him what his purpose was. And that was the first time anybody ever called me a little devil. And you wonder why I'm fucking like this. Yeah, the bishop at my church that I was an altar boy for, he ended up banging a bunch of boys. Sucky, fucky, sucky, fucky. And they fucked. They fired him or moved him up to Michigan. And then I found out recently, because I looked up the story, and the guy they replaced him with, he fucked a bunch of kids. Hey, if it's not broke. Now, are you sure the M wasn't for Marcus? It was both. He was very good. It was what you'd call a double entendre. It was a pretty funny brother joke. It was a very funny brother joke. It was both little Marcus and little masturbator. Don't worry. Yeah. He clarified. Oh, we know. Oh, yeah, sure. I can't wait to hear it again, because I know we'll hear it the next time I see him. You will. Now, what's interesting is that Satanism is a self-declared religion defined by an intentional, religiously motivated veneration of Satan. That did not exist in any meaningful form until Anton LaVey created it in 1966. That's part of what makes. It sounds like it's not true, but it is. And it's what makes Anton LaVey such a fascinating character. I mean, yeah, he could be a little douchey. He was certainly abusive. And he was definitely too comfortable with fascism for my personal taste. Yeah, he started a religion. Yeah. Yeah. But he also pushed culture into exploring its darkest corners by shining lights into areas not normally seen. In other words, he was a Lucifer, a lightbringer. And for that, his story certainly deserves to be told. And honestly, I also know people. I'm already hearing my history people scream about the Cathars and other. And it's like, listen, we're talking about actual Church of. Satan put together. The Cathars were a weird branch of Gnostics. The Gnostics also believed in a devil god that created this physical realm. But that's taking this back to a context level in which we will all starve to death. If we continue to go. If we start from the beginning of thought, we could talk about it. Yeah, I chose. I looked at it and I said, no, we don't need it. So Satanism is younger than Scientology. Satanism is older than. Or younger, yes. Because Scientology is the 50s, Satanism is 66. You probably learned a lot from Scientology, to be frank. I know that he did go. We'll get on to a lot of different stuff. I don't know about him and Elrond. He got hubby-dubby? I actually don't think he. To be honest, I don't think he ever met with Elrond. I don't see any of that in him. They would have been buddies. No, honestly, I don't think they would have. They would. I think it would have been two opposing forces. They would have hated each other. I think they literally would have gotten into a physical fight. Yeah, a pretty good. Bitch-slap fight, yeah. Oh, hey, hey, ow, ow, hey, hey. Now, before we get into the full story, let's acknowledge our sources today. Our main two were The Secret Life of a Satanist by Blanche Barton and Born with a Tail by Doug Broad. Out of the two, go with Born with a Tail. It does a fantastic job of sifting through Anton LaVey's many exaggerations and lies. And in fact, we'll probably talk to Doug Broad in an interview here soon. Oh, yeah, also, read Nightmare Alley. Yeah, oh, yeah. We'll get to Nightmare Alley later on. So without further ado, let's get into the life of the Dirty Pope, the Black Pope, the Devil's Pope himself, Anton Sandor LaVey. I just want to say, Reggie Satanus, welcome to today's Black Mass. It's truly one of the most evil, diabolical things that one can do. Anton LaVey is so funny. Yeah, his accent is story. Hey, Reggie Satanus, hey, you want to listen to the clappy a little bit? Yeah, I know, this is called Clown's Lament. Yeah, this is called Clown's Lunch Order. You know, I'm just sitting here, and there's, you know, I got a lion, and I love my lion, and all of my, all of my neighbors are saying, oh, the lion's too loud. I'm saying there's a lion. Why are you fucking mad? Okay, let me just guess. Hey, hey, hey, nice to meet you. Let me guess. 195 pounds, right? Yeah. Yeah, I'm good. That's amazing. Yeah, I'm really good. I'm really fucking good. Now, like almost every occultist in modern history, Anton LaVey's life prior to his fame is difficult to parse, because almost every popular 20th century occultist, occultist was, at some level, a showman who knew that a bit of self-mythology is important. I would put it on a scale, right? Because then I'd put him, because Aleister Crowley was sort of like, Aleister Crowley HPB a little bit more on the serious side. He's way on the other showbiz side. He's on the circus side. Oh, very much so. We're going to get into that. Like, he is a fucking carny. Yeah, I know that Mr. LaVey does, not sound as good in the song no well a bit of self mythology it gives these guys it gives their ideas a bit of a bit of a hook because humans for one reason or another they're far more likely to listen to someone if they believe that person has led a special and unique life they americans love the chosen one and so anton levay was born howard stanton levy on april 11th 1930 now you never call me howie never call me howie i damn you now like i put 19 curses on you he had a full head of black hair strange amber eyes and an actual tail which sounds like we're starting with the lie but in this case the wild claim is actually true some people are born with an extra vertebrae at the end of their spine something called a caudal appendage it appears to be a tail and while most people today just remove it anton levay kept his tail throughout his formative years in those early days anton was called tony by friends and family tony levy which is a very normal name likewise anton levay's parents were fairly normal middle class people from chicago named gertrude and michael levay however claimed that his maternal grandmother luba corton would regale him with tales concerning the mysteries of her eastern family and his family's life and his family's life and his family's life and his eastern european homeland levay described his grandmother in the satanic bible as a so-called gypsy who told him tales of the vampires and witches who populated her homeland of transylvania i love transylvania although we now know that she was from ukraine yeah she's not from transylvania if you're gonna write a bible you can't put your grandma in it it's not really a problem that's the other thing we'll get all into it eddie i'll explain it all well luba colton's brother was known as anton sandor and it was this name that little tony levy would take years later after also tweaking his last name just a little bit he had to sound a little more evil a little less nerdy because no one is following howard levy into a black mass honestly the balls i i would have loved to have her obviously you need a magical transformation that's a part of what this is too he knows you need a magical transformation in order to appear to people like you are and you're not a magical transformation you've had a magical transformation so you have to change your name and look that's kind of like it's just boilerplate yeah but howard levy the pope of evil howard levy such it's like almost more powerful yeah hey hello everybody it's enough egg salad for everyone but no one bowl of it is poison i love that great comedic actor eugene levay oh if his name was eugene levay he would have been eating too much pussy in order to be an actor oh yeah gene levay gene levay sounds like a man who invents a pussy eating machine here we go it's diesel same brain since anton levay was indeed the founder of the church of satan one of his earliest childhood experiences that he wrote about years later had everything to do with the church of satan with the development of his sexual fetishes namely anton levay was a committed urophiliac meaning his fetish was urination he liked it a peepy man he loved it a peepy we are part of a urination hi i'm peepy abdul it's janet well anton claimed that when he was five years old a little girl coaxed him into her bedroom at a birthday party but when the girl's mother caught them and scolded the girl she peed her pants which levay claimed set him down the quote fetishistic sexual path towards water sports levay further wrote that he believed that men born in different eras would have different fixations levay's type for example came from the beauty standards of the 1940s he wrote that if he had a type if i had a type it was a fleshy heavily made up mall with pale translucent skin who pissed the panties when he wrote he purposefully put a period after translucent skin with pale translucent skin who pissed her panties he he would talk about it a lot like if you look at him too there are so many other romantic ways to write it he's like i know i just like it too much pale translucent skin the only time either he's like and then when i was 11 i was collecting bottles and i saw a lady's bathroom and there was a hole in the wall and i watched the women urinate he did he did now well anton levay was born in chicago and spent a lot of time moving around the american west during the first 10 years of his life and we all know chicago women piss the thicket i know that for a fact yeah that's actually what malort is yeah it is natty light piss despite all this anton levay was more or less a san francisco native in 1940 when anton was 10 his family moved into 18 redwood avenue where his father sold car parts and his mother worked as a typist which is hardly a recipe for evil in fact levay would later describe his parents as people who were completely devoid of religion people who held no strong opinions about anything he called his mother a flibbertine jibbit oh yeah flibbertine jibbit yeah i love that word she was always rearranging furniture making her family move house constantly even though his father hated moving levay meanwhile was a bookish child who hated sports which comes as a surprise to no one what do you mean what are you saying the coolest guy in the world he had to stay away from places where he could beat up piss that panty unfortunately his head was shaped like a football yeah so if you got anywhere near a football you're not going to be able to play football he was a strange-looking boy who grew into a strange-looking adult has big ears narrow eyes that football-shaped oval head but instead of being ashamed levay said that he took pride as a young boy in being an outcast strangely he said that the one place where he found community in his youth was the boy scouts of america specifically the cub scouts love the cub scouts he earned his bear badge always had fantastic things to do with his life and he was a big fan of the cub scouts you know what i'll say about satanists and levay and satanists in particular that is a it is considered to be a like a positive attribute is being very handy yeah being very self-sufficient being independent yeah so the idea of being able to like tie knots and do something that i feel like that's kind of like a every single test of anton levay's life is like every scene way he learned it instead of like learning to be a part of society it's like he saw it all and he saw like the bits and parts of society he kind of wanted to adhere to like he very much immediately understood as a little boy like i'm gonna guide myself and i'm gonna do whatever the hell it is i want to do he was a brilliant person i mean and that's that is one of the things that you see uh throughout history like especially in like cult leaders i mean anton levay wasn't a cult leader uh but you see like people who understand systems like especially like people who understand systems especially humanity those humanities like just societal systems those are the people who change things you know or those are the people they either change them or they use those systems to get laid like keith rennery yeah you know he understood systems perfectly anton levay also understood systems and how society worked but he used it to figure out how to be independent and then to tell other people how to do the same let's see peepee and panties he did like the peepee and the panties and he did get to touch jane mansfield's boobies he did he did that's a huge debt really pretty massive oh yeah we're gonna get into the whole jane fact yeah he he took credit not credit but he uh he felt that he accidentally killed her really long story long story we'll get into it later all right all right all right now since anton levay was comfortable being himself he had no trouble making friends his house was always full of kids whom levay would organize into secret societies with mock military orders and he would become enraged when other kids broke character or lost interest i don't want to like obviously say that i have a lot of similarities yeah but this is literally the shit i did yeah this is all the shit that we did we only got together and made little clubs like me and my boys we'd get together and like when a couple girls we make these like monster clubs and we have like all these like mystery clubs and it was always that now it's always the evil president yeah this is so it's better than you know being similar to the toy box killer you know yeah i accept i wish i had a boat yeah well basically throughout his childhood anton levay did whatever he wanted he didn't like school but he loved studying so he ditched class to study his own interests by focusing particularly on biographies history adventure novels and crime that's more that i would say that's what i um relate to more this is like yeah school fuck school i'm gonna go do my own shit i was just better at it yeah i was better at the stuff i read that wasn't math and science yeah i was real bad at that i was bad at those yeah i actually did what's not i was like fine at math in the beginning and then it was like i once we got to like abstract concepts like calculus and stuff i was like oh this is not gonna i'm not gonna this is not gonna be a part of my future yeah yeah i was so bad at it that i i like i suspect I suspect my father may have bribed one of my teachers. Oh, yeah. I gotta say, your mother certainly cares about your school, young man. I get to see your father fucking your teacher. You know, like, giving your teacher sexual favors. It was either that or everyone in my class was so fucking stupid that she just passed all of us. I think that was far more likely. I fucking, I did real bad at school, and I understand this completely. And now you write term papers for a fucking half your living. I feel like I've learned more in the past two and a half years than I did in high school. Yeah. I'm not a bad teacher. He's cool. Well, by the end of it, LeVay had made heroes from wildly disparate corners of human history. People that LeVay would later call de facto Satanists. These people are extremely important to the development of Satanism as a religion. They included Al Capone, Rasputin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Louisiana politician Huey Long, adventure novelist Jack London, and a fairly obscure character from the Ottoman Empire named Basil Zaharoff. Known to his friends as Zed-Zed, Zacharias Basilius Zakharoff was a Turkish arms dealer who first showed up in history as a pimp at a Turkish brothel in the 1860s. Are you like her hairy or too hairy? Are you like, are you like you want to see face or not? Nothing! Hey, tricks on you. It is a bag of salt. All right. Yes, yes, do anything you like. But at the end, free apricots! Ay, ay, ay, help you bind, it bind your loose. Well, at the same time as Zed-Zed was working as a pimp, he was also making money in the Istanbul Fire Brigade as an arsonist who would set fires at mansions. The brigade would then extort money out of the wealthy owners, before the fire brigade would put out the fire that they had started themselves. It would be such a strange bad day for the fire to not be put out, huh? Kind of crazy how the fireman, he brought it in a fire basket. Don't know how he died, but so what? Yes, name's Zed-Zed. Yes, yes, I'm fake at everything. I'm bad at everything. By the 1880s, Zed-Zed was an arms salesman trying to unload second-rate multi-barreled machine guns. And steam-powered submarines. It actually doesn't make sense. Hey, they kind of worked. Yeah? Yeah, no, the earliest submarines. They have a hole in the top. The earliest submarines were used in the Civil War. The American Civil War. Oh, yeah, the Monitor and the Merrimack. Those were steam-powered? Yeah. There's a dude with coal, like, shoveling in the bottom of the. Most people on board would faint. Where did the steam go? The big pipe. Oh, so they still had, like, a snorkel. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not going that deep. It goes right underneath, yeah. Yeah, they aren't going against, like, the U-boats. You know what I mean? Like, this is very early submarine technology. Not Red October. No, no. These early submersibles would get so hot that the crew would faint. But Zed-Zed still managed to sell six steam-powered 19th century submarines to the Greeks, the Turks, and the Russians. Now, as an arms dealer, Zed-Zed truly was an evil individual, even if he didn't often hold the gun that did the killing. It's said that Zed-Zed. And, you know, every. Every idea has to. You've got to have someone who did it first. There's always got to be one guy who comes up with the evil idea first. And Zed-Zed was the guy who came up with the idea to sell arms to both sides of the conflict, conflicts that he himself would help provoke. You know, there's a lot of people that say, there's nothing innocent in war. But I tell you, there is. The gun. It has no mother, it has no father. The gun goes to the home in which the gun needs to go. There is no. Gun flag. You know, you see, you see, you see. He did indeed sell weapons for three decades to every side of every conflict in Europe, Asia, and South America from, like, 1890 up until, like, 1920. Like, Zed-Zed was there in all of them. And that's a violent time in human history. That's the best. You can just, like, wait for everyone to kill each other, and then go collect all the. Guns? Sell them again? Yeah! Yeah! You got it! Put it all together! In World War I alone, Zed-Zed sold millions of machine guns. He was a true merchant of death. His zeal for selling weapons, I would describe it as almost manic. His greatest ability was the instinctive understanding of when to offer bribes and who to offer them to. And his wheeling and dealing made him the modern equivalent of a billionaire by 1920. Now, to me, Zed-Zed is no different from the DuPonts. He just has a lot more fun with it. So, Henry, what is it about Zed-Zed that makes him a de facto Satanist? How does he influence the development of Satanism? I think that when he's reading it, the reason why it becomes attractive to Anton LaVey in the terms of Satanism is that that very central evil idea is actually also about freedom, right? So, yes, obviously, it is the opposite side of freedom. It's like, you know how we always say, like, the Internet's truly neutral. Yeah. You cannot call it good or bad because it just exists. It is the collection of our subconscious. I kind of view it as the same way when he sees somebody pluck an idea like that out of the air. What that is, it's a societal loophole. Like, he sees this thing that is a loophole that no one else is kind of considering, and he's making all of the money off of it. And in his mind, I am just a. I've arrived because war has given me a purpose. Sure. Like, I am not here. I wouldn't be here if there wasn't war. And if these guys aren't all willing to buy these guns for me, I wouldn't be here. So there's, like, for me, with Satanism, there's a lot of that. Satanism, there's a lot of. It's like breaking the system. And they don't evangelize. Yeah. It's about you choose it. You go make it. You go choose it. So there's a little bit of that. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. Yes. Yeah, and so Anton LaVey saw that this guy had taken advantage of a loophole in the system, and it's not necessarily that he admired all of the death, but it's not necessarily that he admired all of the death, that Zed Zed brought. I bet he did as a young man. I think he thought it was kind of cool and fun. Probably. Yeah, but he also kind of. But he viewed the idea of someone who was like, I don't have a country. Yeah. I'm a billionaire between all the lines. Yeah. Yeah, he was fond of saying, like, Hello, my name is Zed Zed, and I have 16 million dollars. Yeah, so all he wants to do is be Zed Zed. Yeah. Now, out of all the influences that led to the creation of the Church of Satan, the one thing that Anton LaVey credited for his success in creating the church was the showmanship he learned from the many worlds fairs and exhibitions that his parents took him to see in his early years. Fairs and exhibitions were massively popular throughout the first half of the 20th century. I mean, the ruins of world's fairs dot this entire country. The Wigsphere in Knoxville. Oh, yeah. You know, like the big globe in Queens. Yeah, or the two things from the Men in Black movie. Yeah, also in Queens. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The skeletons of these things are still everywhere. And Anton LaVey believed that basically he was in the right place at the right time to absorb all of this. Out of all the fairs he attended, it was the 1939 Golden Gate International Expo held on San Francisco's Treasure Island that had the most lasting influence. There, Anton LaVey had what he called his first satanic awakening while he was at an exhibition called Sally Rand's Nude Ranch. Yeah, baby! Is that the type of awakening you would think? I mean, yeah, sure, probably some kind of awakening. Yeah. You know, but it shows to me how serious we're supposed to take Satanism. It's always, remember, these are the influences. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, that's a very good point. A ranch in San Francisco? On Treasure Island, no less. Oh, yeah. Come on! Now, this awakening did not come solely from the topless cowgirls who spun lariats and pitched horseshoes for the crowd, although the Nude Ranch show itself was indeed one hell of an affair. In fact, it was led by one of the 20th century's greatest opponents of censorship, a woman named Sally Rand, who is another of LaVey's de facto Satanists. I mean, you know how a lot of times you look in the past at a person and you're like, oh, you know, like, you know, standards were different. Sally Rand was fucking hot. Fully modern person. Yes. Modern hot woman. Yeah. Sally Rand had gained fame in the 1920s and 30s for popularizing the fan dance, playing peekaboo with her audience while teasing them with massive fans, made from ostrich feathers. Starting in burlesque, Sally Rand became even more well-known when sound was added to film, which made her fan dancing act a national craze because, yeah, she could do the fan dance on film, but it's not as good unless you have the you had the music to go along with it. I want to move now, I want to hang out, I want to do anything for two. Butt-fucking was invented to that music. Think about that, like, this type of dirty sex was invited. You're like, I thought butt-fucking was invented in Greece. Yeah, it was. But Sally Rand was most famous for appearing nude in public to make a point. Six years before LaVey saw Sally Rand's nude ranch in San Francisco, Rand had made a splash at the opening day of the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago after she was hired to make an appearance as Lady Godiva at the Chicago Artist Ball Dinner. She's white. Hmm? Well, it had become a tradition at world's fairs to have Lady Godiva processions. Lady Godiva processions, of course, come from an 11th century legend in which a noble named Lady Godiva rides naked on a horse through the streets to protest the oppressive taxation levied by her own husband. And so Sally Rand was paid $25 to take part in the world's fair as Lady Godiva for the artist's dinner. But Sally took it upon herself to ride a white horse naked through the fairgrounds themselves on opening day. And this is an important lesson. Since she did it with so much confidence, the security guards just assumed that she'd gotten permission and they just let her do it. Yeah, that's how I got into plenty of places. How we just walked. We just walked into that con where we just said, we're talent. Walk right in. Yeah, Sally Rand made it all the way to the hotel where the dinner was supposed to be held. She even tried her luck one more time. She tried riding the horse into the building, but hotel staff refused to let her in on the horse. So she had four artists carry her inside, still nude, on a table lifted above their heads. Fantastic press. Huge spectacle made Rand even more famous. And while she was convicted of indecent exposure, she had the conviction overturned a year later on the grounds of free speech, which made her an early and important opponent to censorship. Wow. I hope she still got paid. She did. Actually, Sally Rand did really, she got even more famous after that. She started touring, I think, with like Bolero or something. She actually had a fantastic life and a great career. Hell yeah. Just being basically like an activist and an entertainer at the same time. I never heard of her before. But I looked her up when you said she was hot, and I definitely recognize her face. Yeah, sure. Yeah, we all see her face. Now, how is she a de facto Satanist? So, number one, Anton LaVey, despite what he would do to his wives and his daughter, worshipped women. Yeah. Loved women that weren't his wife and his daughter. And he saw it as truly, you know, Sally Rand is an example of what would be the satanic ideal of the woman's body. And I think largely, Anton LaVey even said this, if we read The Satanic Witch, you start to understand that Anton LaVey projected himself in his own mind outwards as a busty woman. Like, he viewed in his mind, like, you know what I'm saying, that big tit energy? Totally. Yeah, he was at a capon. Yeah, sure, right? But he viewed himself as, like, my powers as a man can only be harnessed if I imagine myself as a busty woman. And use the same wiles as a busty woman, but as a man. It's actually great advice. It's really great advice. It is. That's what The Satanic Witch is all about. And so, would he. When he first saw Sally Rand, I think it was the first time he saw how a woman's just presentation was so transgressive and so powerful. She had not to say anything, nothing political, nothing. The whole crowd snapped and watched. And watched this woman, totally free and nude, ride a big animal, which is also heavily into Satanism. Like, the idea of, like, we're all animals, we're no. Like, we are just literally primates. There is no real human part. Yeah, sometimes better. Better sometimes. Most of the time worse. Yeah. So, I feel like when he saw that, it's this idea of, like, he's looking at his mother. Yeah. She's not Sally fucking Rand. Like, the first time he sees her, he's like, that's the first time he saw. When's the first time you saw a woman? Like, you saw that woman that changed the thing inside your brain. That's how I view Sally Rand. And then it became, like, sort of this ideal for him of, like, look at the inherent power she just has. Yeah. Just living. Makes a great point. Like, if you. Like, the whole stupid, awful, like, alpha male shit. Like, you do go for that, the masculine thing. All you're going to attract are other awful men. Yeah. But with the. If you have, like, the big tit energy, feminine, you attract everyone. Yes. Yes. It's about making. So, essentially, Satanic Witch is a whole long thing about sort of. Well, don't do this to me. Sure. No, no, no. It's fine. I'll get there. I'll get there. It's fine. It is kind of fascinating. Do you think that when Sally Rand was on the horse, she had to change her name to Sally Ride? And then she blew up. And then she fucking exploded. That's Krista McCullough. That's the other woman. Yeah. Sally Ride. She made it? She made it. Yeah, she made it. She died recently. Yeah. Oh. Well, then she didn't make it. Well, she had suicide. Oh, well, I'm sorry. I guess. It's so small. She did commit suicide, didn't she? No! Oh, okay. How am I supposed to know? I don't know. I was like, what'd she see on the moon? Now, by the time of the San Francisco Fair attended by a young Anton LaVey, Sally Rand had been fighting censorship for years. In February 1939, she had already led hundreds of scantily clad women on horses in formation through downtown San Francisco. And her nude ranch had been somewhat of an extension of that performance. This, of course, is where Anton LaVey saw Sally Rand. And just seeing Sally Rand was amazing in itself. But that was not the so-called satanic awakening. LaVey saw Sally Rand, but he also saw his Sunday school teacher seeing Sally Rand at said nude ranch. LaVey later wrote that after seeing his Sunday school teacher enjoying topless cowgirls, despite this Sunday school teacher's oft-repeated claims of higher morality, LaVey saw the hypocrisy of Christianity, which was his first so-called satanic epiphany. I love his satanic epiphany came from some do-go. I mean, yeah, admittedly, this seems like incredibly basic stuff in 2026. It's the sort of thing that any of us could have pointed out when we were kids. And that makes it easy to dismiss. In fact, you could easily make the mistake of dismissing all of this as childish or a little too edgy for its own good. Yes. You have to realize that this was not a common way of thinking in 1939. Wasn't even really a common way of thinking in 1966, when LaVey actually founded the Church of Satan. It is basic, but it was people like Anton LaVey who laid the groundwork that birthed a more modern way of looking at the world. Basically, Anton LaVey is the duck soup of edginess. Here's what I mean. Duck soup. The Marx Brothers movie from 1933. It was so funny that everyone who came after copied everything about it. So what was once an entirely new way of doing comedy, it soon became the standard. So this thing that changed everything, it came to be seen as hack, even embarrassing, because it is seen as so obvious in the modern world in the wake of everything that came after it, such as the paradox of Satanism. The way I'd even put it, which will as we will cover this, Satanism is an introductory philosophy. It's the first thing that should. It's the first thing that should get you going. It's inherently for, even Anton LaVey even kind of says this. That's why the Satanic Bible is so simple. It's that he wrote it for 15-year-olds to read. It's super easy to, it is very, very easy to understand. It is such a quick read. But yeah, you're supposed to move on from it. You're supposed to expand. Yeah. Now, Sally Rand's Nude Ranch was not the only event at this fair that influenced Anton LaVey. Sorry, I didn't get that out. All right, now we can go. Another exhibit that LaVey said was. Full of Satanic undertones was the full display of babies in incubators on the midway. These were live, premature babies. Live, tonight, premature babies on the main stage. They don't goo-goo, they don't gaga, but you will seeing these live, premature babies. Oh my God, you can see that one grow an arm. When I went yesterday, I saw four die. Oh, yay! Wow, what a wonderful, preemie explosion. I mean, it sounds like a crazy thing, but these events, these exhibits existed because there weren't incubators in hospitals. Well, there were incubators in hospitals. This was to show off the new incubator technology. You know, this happened a lot. They would do, like guys in iron lungs, when they first put people on iron lungs, they would just treat that as a freak show. And people would pay money to go see the guy just sitting there in an iron lung. So fucking do something about it. Dude, just him being like, take me home. No, I'm sorry, you're the show. These were live, premature babies in incubators in a modern hospital setting, but it was housed in a whimsically themed building in the middle of what was basically a large entertainment complex. It's like putting a cancer ward in the middle of Tomorrowland at Disney. I'll go, though. Don't do it. I hate to have to get the lightning laying for it. It really is. Imagine walking into a room at Disney and it's just a bunch of people in chairs getting fucking chemotherapy treatments. Same shit. I mean, it would make sense, though, for Tomorrowland if it was an advancement. It's kind of like the Adventures of Interspace. Also, just know you just called what hospitals are going to be, by the way. Just so you know that. Yeah. You've just, we have just put into the zeitgeist what's going to happen. Yeah. And eventually people are going to be getting their chemo at Disneyland. Can you imagine Donald Duck giving you your chemo? Yes, I can. And it's the only way it's going to happen. Dude, character meet and greet chemo. How is that not a thing? Dude, write it down. Write it down. Spider-Man. Write it down. i'm writing it down chemo mailing it to myself dr strange brings you chemo copyright we should get 11 to do it since we're on netflix you know and it's great because she's got she's um um let's continue i want to get one of the guys from dark to do it that's my favorite netflix show dear zachary can we get that lady mel so that's why i chose tomorrowland instead of toontown yeah it's not going to make sense in tune no it doesn't make sense if you fucking tell me for a second that roger rabbit's my oncologist you ever played the dear zachary drinking game oh yeah yeah you just blow where you drink a beer and blow your brains out well as anton levay saw it beer zachary we have to do something with beer zachary just pouring fucking beers on a dead baby every time you get sad drink yeah you What I started drinking before as anton levay saw it this incubator baby display it made a mockery and a spectacle of the most delicate and vulnerable life forms on earth these were babies on the cusp of death you think preemies are bad now imagine a preemie in 1939 trying to survive at the fair yeah give him more lead yeah yeah this baby is weak he needs more lead injection not lead lithium you're right it's lithium that makes a baby grow i already gave him all the mercury we had i mean they basically made dying babies a freak show and anton levay absolutely loved the contrast for him this was satanism writ large and when anton levay hit puberty himself the freak show element he'd enjoyed as a child wasn't quite so funny when he realized that he would have to show his vestigal tail to the other young boys in gym class again not surprisingly anton levay hated gym class hey uh listen i don't do uh i don't do jumping jacks okay i'm inherently evil that is one of the most joyful single exercises i refuse to do it i'll hang a rope he also began developing a hatred towards jocks and this is a direct quote young men who found themselves unusually well endowed just a head stick i hate boys with large penises they do whatever they want they do whatever they want the rest of us are normal the rest of us have to think of other creative ways to use their penis make it longer make it appear longer mostly though anton was nervous about showing his tail to the other boys the tail had become even more of a problem when it became inflamed when levay was 12 years old he supposedly had to have it drained of fluids to relieve the pain this of course did not endear him to his fellow children in college my roommate had to get his tail drained and he had to he had to sleep on his stomach for a week and then i had to like give him bong hits from over the side of the bed it was kind of fun that's really that's a good friend yeah it's a real good friend that's great now anton levay was too old to be a boomer but too young to serve in world war ii he was only nine years old when the conflict began and he was 11 when america joined the war as a full participant by the time of the war's end though anton levay was 15 and one of his uncles had been hired to rebuild airstrips for the army in post-war germany since anton looked up to his uncle and since this was 1945 he actually joined his uncle in the war and he was the first one to join the army in the on the trip overseas like yeah fuck it go to germany and there levay was exposed to german expressionist films like the cabinet of dr caligari metropolis and nosferatu and that that'll change you it will no it very much will not especially going from here to there and seeing how different it is yeah and also just being in post-war germany just the devastation of it and the destruction of it it was a it was post-war germany was uh nightmarish in every way but these films they were masterpieces of ritualism and ritualism and ritualism and ritualism and ritualism and ritualism and occultism i mean you look at the like look at metropolis the rituals of metropolis the occultism nosferatu yeah that was the first sequel yeah nosferatu oh sure i hated nosferatu the jagged angles the harsh lighting the dark shadows all that stuff that typified german expressionist film those would become massive inspirations when anton levay began constructing his own satanic rituals and when he began pretty much putting together the aesthetic of the church of satan now besides his interest in film anton levay was also a fantastic musician he's almost musician first up yeah in terms of abilities yeah he learned brass woodwind strings and keyboards at a young age quite appropriately for a lord of hell he taught the accordion which had exploded in popularity in the 20th century it's and i as someone who has tried to learn the accordion like it's hellish for the person playing the accordion even i love accordion i love how it sounds but it is maddening oh yeah my father tried to teach me and i didn't take i wish i had done it i wish i had fucking learned yeah wasn't he one of those guys that could just like hear a song and then play it yeah yeah but since levay was such a natural talent he dropped out of his junior year of high school soon after his return from germany to play oboe full-time for the san francisco ballet orchestra that's awesome he also threw himself into the study of painting classical music philosophy and of course magic but lest you start bullying him you're not going to see him now what's there to bully yeah if there was a bully he wouldn't exist it's just perfectly normal healthy boy behavior levay yes playing second being second chair oboe in the san francisco ballet orchestra healthy growing boy well levay attempted to counterbalance his extreme nerdiness because he did have this idea very early on he knew that he had to counterbalance that like that he did have these very nerdy interests uh that one could see as weak he counterbalanced it with appearances you know that's also another important satanic thing well say satanism and appearances are one and one yeah that is the idea is that appearances are everything so it's like the fact that he even understood that like that's a huge that takes self-consciousness to understand you're a nerd it does see the satanist that started with the eyeliner yes probably probably yeah yeah i would say i would say so yeah unless the cathars had something like it well levay attempted to counterbalance his extreme nerdiness by letting his hair grow long he dressed in leather jackets he wore the infamous zoot suits of the time and with his new look anton levay intentionally sought out the reprobates of san francisco the gamblers the pimps the prostitutes who populated the bay area's pool halls and bars cool guys cool fun guys this was anton levay uncle's crowd his uncle bill although levay gave no details which means he could be lying about all of this levay supposedly traveled with his uncle bill to the newly established desert oasis that was las vegas when he was a teenager to see how him and uncle bill could make their way in sin city supposedly uncle bill had been a bootlegger in chicago for al capone during prohibition and uncle bill also allegedly had connections to the infamous vegas gangster bugsy siegel anton said that in las vegas he watched criminals exploit the natural foibles and vices of other men for fun and profit that's why it's great that's why las vegas is fantastic these criminals levay claimed taught him that everything is a racket including the church the crafty man levay wrote figured out how to work the rackets himself so he didn't wind up as a slave to the crooked politicians and the bosses of our modern world he wrote about this in the 60s still true today the crafty citizen refuses the routine of going to work where he stagnates at a deadly dull job having his lunch when he's told all to draw a wage that is barely enough to sustain this humdrum existence of factories and offices and commutes burn it to the ground i mean it makes a lot of sense and so instead of living the life of his father his mother or even his criminal uncle anton levay took a fourth route he took inspiration from one of those people he read about when he was a kid and he joined the circus very good very good guys a song called blazes and flames oh that's fucking awesome you know i actually just met a guy who ran away to the circus yeah at the zach bagans haunted museum yeah it was they forget this like freak section he was like i'm gonna go to the circus i'm gonna go to the circus i'm gonna go to the circus you literally was like he told his whole story he's like i was 16 i needed to get out of my fucking parents house and i left and i joined the circus in fucking 20 with like 30 years ago was he an exhibit or no yeah he was in it as an exhibit i thought he was just a guy hanging out no he was doing like the nail in the nose but he was like i was like man that's right you can still just fuck off and join the circus oh is he one of those jim rose guys yeah sure sure yeah probably i am i remember them now there are two men from the world of circuses sideshows and carnivals that are incredibly important to the development of satanism men who are both at the top and the bottom of this particular entertainment ladder so let's start with the man at the top the great showman of the 19th century pt barnum yeah barnum was of course another of lave's de facto satanists born in connecticut in 1819 pt barnum was the eventual co-founder of the barnum and bailey circus but that actually came near the end of his life barnum had a massively influential and fascinating career prior to that in which he had a hand in shaping america's image of itself but since pt barnum was a reflection of america that reflected itself right back his story is far darker than what you're probably expecting yeah i feel like pt barnum could have had his own series oh yeah like honestly he is he is uh i actually wonder if he's worse than anton levay that's a person you know he's definitely got more depths on his hands yeah he's got a fair amount of death honestly yeah pt barnum is uh yeah there's a lot going on there true american yeah he really was now pt barnum got into the sideshow business at the age of 25 and his first attraction was an elderly enslaved woman in 1835 long before the emancipation proclamation barnum was offered the purchase of a black woman named joyce heth who was supposedly 161 years old barnum had been told that joyce heth was george washington's nursemaid born in the 1670s and barnum figured that he could sell this lie even though joyce was probably no more than 80 years old you because joyce could actually tell a pretty convincing story when you got her in front of a crowd that was the whole that was the whole thing that was the crux of it is that joyce could sell it oh so she was like the first time an artist was got their art stolen from them record producer no he was a manager 100 no oh i mean the the people who managed attractions in the 1800s that's where the the fucking management for art for actors and musicians that's where it comes from yeah barnum was living in new york city at the time where purchasing a human being was illegal so he quote-unquote leased joyce heath from the man who had enslaved her for the price of 500 for one year joyce however would not survive that year-long lease i like my rav4 it's fucking awful just had to get in a rav had to get a rav4 joke in there has had to do it see barnum considered joyce to be too vigorous to convincingly play a 161 year old woman so he put her on a strict diet of eggs and whiskey until she appeared to be no more than muscle and bone barnum also decided that there's no way that a 161 year old woman would have any teeth left so he decided that joyce should have all of her teeth removed he convinced her to agree to having her teeth pulled while she was drunk on whiskey the only reason he was able to do that was because he had no teeth left so he decided to have her teeth removed but then a few days later barnum removed all of her teeth under the guise of no no but you said yes you were drunk but you said yes so we're pulling all your teeth out now let's have hugh jackman sing a song about that let's just say this storyline was not in the greatest show it wasn't it was not this is hugh jackman's part yeah and guess yeah he played pt it was a fucking life story of pt barnum yeah this i didn't even know that this was cut this was all cut that's so funny because if you even look at him he's a fucking battle toad you know what i mean like he's so gross he's so ugly that's so funny yeah and it gets worse from here oh yeah this is before he even took her out on the road like this is just getting her ready for the show with his attraction ready barnum flooded new england and new york with ads about joyce heath claiming that she was raising money to purchase her grocery store grocery store grocery store grocery store grocery store grocery store grocery store grocery great-grandchildren out of slavery he made her perform 14 hours a day for a never-ending stream of yokels which naturally caused her health to fail within just a few months because even if she's not 161 she's still probably about 80 85 and just know she's still working because she certainly has a great deal of great-grandchildren so unfortunately you're gonna have to pull the night shift but instead of slowing it down when barnum realized that she was probably gonna die he announced a final death tour at an increased ticket price what did you say pt last chance last chance to see george washington's what do you mean last chance i'm here why is it last what do you mean this is my final tour barnum at the same time that he was announcing the final death tour he also sent an anonymous letter to a boston newspaper claiming that joyce was an automaton made of whale bone springs and rubber this brought out even more people did you hear joyce you're an automaton no no i'm i'm joyce i'm joyce no no no you're a robot don't be confused you're a robot all right i'll come back and put some batteries in your ass when joyce of course died a few months later barnum charged 50 cents a ticket for joyce's public autopsy which was held in a manhattan bar where 50 cents a ticket was paid for joyce's public autopsy which was held in a manhattan bar where 50 100 new yorkers shuffled past to see if joyce really was an automaton and by the end of it barnum yeah when they find out um that she was a lady oh yeah skin and bone uh they found out not one person was in that line it's like listen it's it's just a lady spoilers no that was the fucking 18th 19th century version of spoilers hey buddy we're all online here okay i want to see that old black woman's viscera i know it's a lady obviously it's a lady now you still think it's a robot that's because you're hopeful old man and that's why we're doing this by the end of it barnum had made the modern equivalent of 1.5 million dollars off of joyce and this is when barnum was 25 that's this is how barnum this is how pt barnum got his start everything came from joyce heth now barnum never did say the phrase that is most often attributed to him that there's a sucker born every minute what he actually said was that the american people like to be humbugged which is to say that americans liked being tricked no barnum therefore made a lifelong career out of fucking with the american public he called himself the prince of humbugs where barnum really made a name for himself though was in manhattan where he opened his infamous american museum which was basically a collection of oddities freak shows and general entertainment it was not what you would consider a museum museum it's a ripley's yeah it's awesome yeah i mean yeah it wasn't stupid and boring it was fun and cool yeah yeah it is it is actually one of those like it's in my top five like you know they asked like if you could time travel to any time and see anything barnum's american museum is in my top five oh i'd be there i'd be in a fucking heartbeat yeah after tracking down oddities like a plaster copy of the cardiff giant a working replica of niagara falls and a monkey torso glued to a fish tail that he called the fiji mermaid god i love her barnum began advertising free rooftop concerts at the american museum to attract crowds he also hired the worst musicians to play these concerts which caused the crowds to spend money to get into the museum to escape the noise once inside a customer would see posted signs saying this way to the egress which and of course everyone wanted to see what the fuck the egress was the customer would then walk past all manner of exhibits to go through a doorway that finally promised to get in the way of the egress and of course everyone wanted to see what the fuck the egress which would of course lead them outside the museum because most americans had no idea that egress was simply the latin word for exit it is one of those things where it's like what a fucking asshole and that's hilarious see that's the thing after seeing the egress the customer was then forced to pay another entry fee to get back in and while you'd think this would really piss people off those who felt like they were going to barnum's for the first time that if you did nothing else at the american museum you had to see the egress it's just too fucking good he was right americans love that we do like being tricked we do we like we like it and the reason why he's a de facto satanist is because of that if you listen to pt barnum like a lot against a personal choice he didn't make it mandatory that you showed up at the 161th one-year-old like woman fucking tour right he just said i got one right and everybody showed up well i would say the american museum his later stuff is more the satanist stuff than the uh you know slavery the slave owning stuff well yeah that's not good yeah bad look that's what you mean yeah it's bad optics this trickery still happens i mean you go to the magic castle they trick you into eating a really expensive shitty meal it is a bad meal but the close-up magic otherwise is good they don't touch your wife it's actually really nice in there but these like he's a de facto satanist because in his mind i am providing only what people are asking for it's showmanship again it's big showmanship you wouldn't come you wouldn't need me if you guys all didn't like this stuff yeah that's a pt barnum point of view and he turned things around a little bit even though americans might like to be humbugged they really don't like it as much when people brag about it and pt barnum almost lost everything when he wrote an autobiography in the 1850s detailing exactly how he had tricked betrayed and swindled his audiences over the years god that must have been so much fun for him it really it was a lot of fun but when people read it they were very angry magicians shouldn't tell their secrets they really shouldn't and that was another i think anton levay learned that look at somebody you know you look at every time somebody breaks character as soon as they break character they're done but barnum knew that americans also loved money so he gave a secret to the magic castle and he gave a secret to the magic castle series of lectures called the art of money getting which turned his reputation around so hard that people convinced him to run for office. Barnum actually ran as a Republican in the lead-up to the Civil War and advocated for the citizenship of black men and women. And while one could cynically say that he was changing with the times, Barnum actually became a staunch abolitionist in his later years, who I would like to think was trying to atone for his youthful evils. Yeah, he could have doubled down. Because he was an evil, evil son of a bitch when he was a kid. I think he probably just saw the writing on the walls and he was just trying to stay in charge. And I'll say, honestly, that it wasn't that popular of a view. Like, it really wasn't. It was a gamble. Being an abolitionist was like, was still like an intense point of view. I think it's just Pete D. Barnum liked the thrill. I think he likes being on it. But I do genuinely, in my heart of hearts, I think that there was like, because he said this in a quote about like, if I could give anything back at the end of my life, I will. So he, he rebuilt Bridgeport, Connecticut. He did all these things. And so he kind of like did this thing being like, hey, I am. I'm trying. Like, it was like at the very end of his life, which is the most you could say about most human beings. It really is. He fought, he fought against the railroads. He's a bad person. He did what he could do. But then in the end, he tried to say, I'm sorry. And then he fucking died. And yeah, in the last, in the last 20 years of his life, he did try to turn things around. Which, yeah, which honestly is more than we can say for almost anyone we've ever talked about on this fucking show. People liked what Barnum was selling when he ran for office. And he served as both a member of the Connecticut legislature and the mayor of Bridgeport. He died in 1897. In 91, having become personal friends with Mark Twain, Queen Victoria, who fucking loved freak shows. Queen Victoria loved him. She was the naked one, right? No, no, no, no. Was she the sex crazed one? No, Queen Victoria was the absolute opposite. She was the most buttoned up, sexless monarch to ever exist. Which one was the super horny one? Sally Rand. The super horny queen? Wasn't there a super horny queen? Not in England. I don't think in England. Side story. Is there a PLT? Send me a list of the corniest queens. I think you're thinking of Catherine the Great out of Russia. That's exactly what I'm thinking of. Freddie Mercury. So send me pictures, sidestories, LPOTL, gmail.com, send me pictures of the horniest queens. Thank you. And also, Abraham Lincoln. Good friends. Oh, they just want to say horny queen. With P.T. Barnum. Yeah. Abraham Lincoln, also a super horny queen, cannot be denied at all. Oh, rail splitter. Oh, yeah. Catherine the Great. That's the horny one, yeah. Okay, good for her. It says, AI is telling us that Queen Victoria was super horny. It's because we asked about horniness and AI is going to lie to you. Yeah, it's going to lie to you. It's going to tell you what you want to hear. Yeah. Now, that's P.T. Barnum. That's the guy at the top that influenced Anton LaVey. On the complete opposite end of the carnival spectrum, Anton LaVey was also greatly influenced by a 1946 novel, which explored the dark side of show business as it was, in the mid-20th century. This novel, filled with carnies, femme fatales, and grifters, was known as Nightmare Alley. Also made into a movie a year later. Don't watch the Bradley Cooper one. Watch the black and white one. Yeah, the 1947. Yes. I did like the Bradley Cooper one. It's fine, but if you watch, if you read the, you got to read the, watch the old one and read the book. I'll watch it. Well, the author of the novel was a man named William Lindsay Gresham, who'd volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War in 1938. Very much an Ernest Hemingway type, looking for action. But after Gresham. After Gresham's fighting was done, he had a chance meeting while waiting to be sent back to America. He had drinks with a mysterious man who told Gresham about a very real and very disturbing carnival attraction called The Geek, the most disturbing attraction of all. Usually, and again, this is very real. Usually, The Geek was an alcoholic who had been driven so low that he was willing to be put in a pit, day after day, or a cage sometimes, usually a pit, where he would bite the heads off chickens and snakes, for the carnival-going public in exchange for booze. Usually, while dressed as some sort of wild man. Geeks were worryingly common amongst carnivals and sideshows across America for decades. They were very popular. Extremely popular, yeah. I wonder how that, like, ended up translating into being a nerd. Yeah, I'm not. I think at one point, like, geek was more of a, just a person who was unpleasant to look at. Yeah. Like, nerds were smart. And geeks were just, like, unpleasant people. Yeah. In the beginning, at least. But they soon became conflated. And I'm just talking out of my ass there. I might be totally wrong. This is interesting, because it comes from an old term for just a clown, a German clown, called a geek. Meaning a fool or simpleton. And then eventually it turned into the geek, which then became a term for an ugly person. Yeah. Really, geek means, like, ugly, pinheaded, eyes too close, fucking mouth too big, arms too long. Yeah. You're just gross. Yeah. That's cool. But he stole this story from a strong man that he had met, and he took the entire thing. Now, with about Nightmare Alley, it's not just about show business. Yeah. It's about the literal world of magic. Yes. Of actual ritual magic. Oh, God, yes. Which is the thing about Nightmare Alley that makes it really interesting, because what Anton LaVey realized, much like happens at the end of Alistair Crowley's works, you realize that he says, it's not from out there. Yeah. Yeah. It's from in here. Mm-hmm. Now, the story of the geek haunted Gresham after he returned from Spain, and this was in addition to everything he'd seen in the Spanish Civil War, which was pretty goddamn grisly all on its own. But when Gresham's inner demons couldn't be cured with psychoanalysis, he became obsessed with tarot cards, all while he worked as a writer, churning out true crime stories for pulp magazines. Put all this together, and you got the makings of Gresham's novel about carny life, Nightmare Alley. Now, Nightmare Alley captures the occultism of carny life. Specifically, the fortune-telling trade. As such, it became an obsession for many occultists. The magic of the carnival is, of course, the bait-and-switch, where talented tricksters use their gifts to part the vulnerable public from their hard-earned cash. But they also give them something in exchange, Marcus. They give them hope. And lessons, and entertainment, and have filled their hours. That's what the Nightmare Alley's supposed to be about, is that you get into this idea, but it's really, you have to make sure you don't start to believe. Exactly. That you are fully in charge. Really, like, the phrase, for entertainment purposes only, is very important to surviving the modern world. Very much so. And they also sold popcorn, I think. They did. They did. Well, just like the spiritualists of the 19th century, 20th century carny fortune-tellers offered hope, but they also offered a gamble. A fortune-teller might change your life for the better, they might make things worse, or they might leave you right back where you started. But? That was only if you said yes to what the carny was offering. And that's another satanic thing. You gotta say yes. You choose. Yeah. Now, Nightmare Alley blew the lid off what carnies were really up to. Because before this novel, there was very little literature about cold reading. Well, I mean, cold reading is pretty common knowledge nowadays. Yeah. It's when a fortune-teller appraises a person by their body language and their clothes to make a quick judgment on how to gain their trust and pull them further into the fortune-teller's game. A lot of the. What do you call it? Like, you know, cold reading is said to be very common amongst, like, the. What's that guy's name? John. Crossing. John Edwards. Crossing over. But cold reading is the heart of all occult. Yeah. Cold reading is. The heart of all occult ritual and enchantment is cold reading. And Nightmare Alley is all about cold reading. Yeah. Which is the. No one wants to. That's like what HPB did naturally. That's what Aleister Crowley did naturally. That's what LRH did naturally. Yeah, and that's why there's. That's why there's so much of it in Long Island, because they're all fucking judgy pricks. What do you mean? There's a lot of cold reading in the. What do you call it? Well, you're talking about the Long Island medium. Yeah, but there's. It's not just them. Well, yeah, that's just for. Rob, am I crazy? Yes. It's everywhere. It's for. You know who it's for, Eddie? It's people like my mother. Yeah, my mother. Former Catholic women that have become witches. Yeah. Well, in Nightmare Alley, the main character is a man named Stanton Carlisle, who learns cold reading, and passes himself off as the Great Stanton. He naturally charms the rubes out of dollar after dollar. When Anton LaVey read Nightmare Alley, he found himself spiritually connected to this character, not least because Anton's given middle name was Stanton. Furthermore, in the novel, Stanton Carlisle eventually becomes a religious figure, Reverend Stanton, pastor of the Church of the Heavenly Message. But also, what's important about Nightmare Alley is it begins with the geek, because Stanton looks at the geek, and he feels pity, revulsion, at the geek, and he watches, and he's an alcoholic himself, but then he meets this woman, and they go up, and he becomes this reverend, and all this kind of stuff, and guess where it ends? He's right back in the pit. Yeah. He's the geek. Yeah, I saw the movie. It was nominated for an Oscar. Yep, and the reason why, but that's the key here, is that what happened is that the wizard crossed the Rubicon, died in the Chapel of Mysteries, and then was left, because he wasn't prepared. He wasn't prepared to cross the Chapel of Mysteries. Mm-hmm. Well, Anton LaVey thought Nightmare Alley was fucking awesome. He did. He did not see it as a warning in any way whatsoever. Well, because the warning's the very end. Yeah. Well, Anton LaVey, after reading Nightmare Alley, he quit high school, he joined the circus as a roustabout and a cage boy, supposedly, and began working with gigantic deadly cats, supposedly. And it's with LaVey's time in the circus, his supposed career as a crime scene photographer in San Francisco, his distinction is America's first Ghostbuster and the development of the church of Satan itself that will return next week for part two of our series on Anton LaVey. Yeah, fuckers! Hail Satan! Six, six, six. Yeah, yeah. Fucking, man, I'm going to listen to the, oh, we got to put fucking butthole surfers on. Yeah. Really? Satan, Satan, Satan. Yeah. Man. Honestly, great work, Marcus. Thank you. You as well. I think that. You comported yourself nicely. Didn't I? Yeah. I feel really good about me. Yeah, you've been excited for this for all of time. I was nervous. Yeah? Yeah, of course. Really? Because there's a lot of, because we're about to wade, you'll see, we're now, we're putting ourself out there. As you said before, you're going to call yourself a Satanist, you expect to get punched in the face. Yeah. All right? And that's a part of what we're going to do. We're here celebrating Satanism for a couple more weeks. We're going to eat this cake. Lady and the Tramp style that Rob has just brought back. Anally. What plugs do we have? Go to patreon.com slash last podcast on the left if you want ad-free episodes. And if you want to watch the stream, last stream on the left, every Tuesday at 5 p.m. PST. We moved it a little bit earlier. And if you want to see video episodes of the show, you can watch it if you get a Netflix subscription. We're all on Netflix right now. We're on Netflix. We got shot at Netflix. Netflix. That's disgusting. Also, the stream ends up on YouTube every Thursday at 6 p.m. And then directly after that is HGX2. That's right. Yes, that's right. We're in the playoffs, baby. Yeah. And I'm playing a win. I'm playing a fucking win. Other YouTube channels we got is someplace underneath LPN Romanticy, Who's the Bee, The Foreign Report, No Dogs in Space, LPN TV, and The Brighter Side LPN. Go check those out. Subscribe to that shit and we'll keep putting stuff there. And we are hitting the road. We only got four shows left of JK Ultra. The next one's going to be tonight in Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Music Hall of Oakland. We're here having fun in Iron City. Join ourselves. We're going to go down the Stillers. We're going to go, you know how the scenes out there? All right. Come on. Saturday, June 27th, Grand Rapids, Michigan, the GLC Live at 20 Monroe. Friday, July 17th, Tulsa, Oklahoma, McCain's Ballroom, and Saturday, July 18th, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, at the Tower Theater. Go check those shows out. It's going to be a lot of fun. And of course, Side Stories is going to be in London, Ontario, on June 28th. To Rio. That's going to be a lot of fun. And then you want to come see me do stand-up, just go to eddytunes.com and you can find all the dates there. And we will be having more information about our Halloween sound effects album, Frank Jansen's Revolting Repository, Avogadro Sounds Volume 1 and 2. The first printing sold out very quickly, but there is going to be, dare I say it, a second pressing. That's right. And so, just wait, don't buy the secondary market on Discogs just yet. Don't, just do it just yet. There's going to be a news pressing soon. And we're going to have announcements about that very soon. Hell yeah. Thank you all for selling it out. Yeah, thank you. And that incredible band, Masked for Trash, I wonder where they came from. Oh, yeah. I wonder who those people, I wonder who those incredible, mysterious people. Incredible songwriters and screamers. I don't know who those people are. I screamed. It was fun. Yeah, it was great. He's the lead singer. Him and Ash are the lead singers. Well, Ash is the lead singer. I assisted. I just wrote it. Well, we all wrote it. I'm part of the think tank. Ash Gordon, of course. Yes, of course. And Isaac Hansen. Ash Gordon, yeah. And I knew when Rob was Googling who was the horniest queen, definitely brought up a drag race story. Of course, they always do. Yeah, yeah. They always do. You know, and a lot of them are very rarely horny because of how much their penises hurt. I don't know. I don't know. I really don't remember them. Season 8, yeah, it's a long, that was a different person ago. I'm re-watching it, you know, right now. We just started season 6. Holy shit. Season 5. It was the best season ever. Best season ever. Fantastic. We all know this. Well, hail Satan, everyone. Patreon.com. Now again. Give me stuff. Hail Satan again. Hail Satan. Verse 666. You know what? In the name of Satan, give me your money. Give me your fucking families. I don't care. Just give it. Just give it to me. I'm going to take it. I'm going to do it with what I need to do with it. Okay? I want to eat at this a little chocolatey. Let's do it. Hey, it's amazing. It's amazing what you can do when you have a big piece of brown. That's what I like is a big piece of brown. That's delicious. Yeah? Don't you get it? That's really good. Um, the name's on the thing there. Two, two smajers. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, two smajers. That's actually incredible. It's really good. That's okay. It's like Satan made it himself. Oh, no. Oh, it's still good. I was, shit. I was going to go to heaven and now I'm not. No, you're going to fucking hell, dude. No one needs to see this. Bye. Bye. Bye, fuckers. Leave us alone. Leave us the fuck alone.