Transcript of Episode 666: Anton LaVey Part I - Hail Satan New

There's no place to escape to.

This is the last hot ass on the left.

That's when the cannibalism started.

What was that?

Yes!

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...

With the horn that keeps falling off.

I do elated to cam not you audio slaves!

Celebrating our episode 666.

666! Duh duh duh de dee dee dee dee dee dee dee!

It's the number of the fucking beast and it's—

Is that what that means?

Yes. Oh okay.

See I never learned 666 we never talked about the devil.

You never got to that level of elementary school. No no no yes.

Very, very difficult for you.

Oh, blow the candles out, I get one satanic wish.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, Henry, you should do it.

Yeah, you should do it.

Oh, you don't get nothing.

Terrible radio.

Goddamn.

God, this couldn't be—

can't— how are these trick candles, or is he just—

they were not trick candles. 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 Parks. I'm here with resident Satanist Henry Zabrowski.

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'm here as the devil's lawyer. Yeah, that is my— literally his advocate.

That's nice.

Yes, that is the devil's advocate.

I—

that is what—

that is honestly, that's why Anton LaVey started this whole fucking thing, Eddie.

I saw the devil's advocate on my— 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 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.

You ever see Paterno?

Jerry! Jerry, you fucked those kids, Jerry! Who are you? What's this chair doing in here? Whoa, you got a— You can't tell me. Oh, you mean to tell me you had that kid where? Inside of what?

Jerry, you can't go around calling yourself the tickle monster.

Who are you?

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 Sándor 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, 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 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 3-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 cult cultural figures as well. See, while today any of you can go to a Last Podcast Live show and yell, "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 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.

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 got to burn a woman.

Witch trial? That trial. Bear 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, 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 fast, 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 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 5 Satanists what they think Satanism is, you'll get 5 different answers. And if you think your way is the only way, then again, for the— 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. Right?

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, you know, 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 It's him.

It's him.

It's like, it's an 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 reclarified, cause 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 reread the Satanic Bible, you see—

Reread? Yeah, it takes a couple times.

It's a really bold assumption you just made there with Edward.

If you really read it, he spe—

well, 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, LaVeyan Satanism, is all about making fun of the bastards.

Yeah, it's a, it's a lifestyle more than a religion.

Yes, a philosophy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's an asshole lifestyle.

Now you called him success—

was he successful? Like, did—

was he Did he have money?

Oh yeah, yeah, no, he, he had money. He lived a pretty good life throughout. And when I say successful, I mean more notorious.

Okay.

You know, 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 LaVey the most successful local character in the history of the world.

Okay.

Because that was his, 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. And he was—

that's weird.

Exactly. It's like Big Lebowski puts puts him in the running for weirdest guy in the world. Yeah, you know, 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, well, he's a little bit lazy, like, to the point where he's 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 got serious again, and it got unserious, and now we're back in a serious point, which is why we're covering it in the fucking 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 shining 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 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 gonna 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 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. And 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, that's just truth.

I guess 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! It's just so everyone has a full concept—

Old Louie!

Oh, 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 fuckin'... it was a... I would call it a big leap. Mm-hmm. 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 bat!" While most images of the devil throughout the second millennium often came from painters working on the behest of the church, the 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!" "Ahh!" Yeah, yeah, yeah. And 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. It was about 1,000 years old. But it seems like Satan is the goat. This is just my personal opinion.

Yeah.

Seems like Satan is the goat has made a big comeback again because of shifting media.

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.

That was fucking dope.

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? If you've seen Hexen, you know, 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 1,000 years.

Yeah, like, he kind of got retconned into the villain.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, because he hated heaven.

Well, there's many ways he— he's, again, he's a great foil to God.

Yeah, and we're— and actually, that thing, the whole about him hating heaven and all that, We'll get into that here in a second. Okay, there's a, there's a whole set, 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 say 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 positions Satan as people, 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, we'll also get into that because this, this whole thing is an evolution. It took— seriously, it took took thousands of years for it to get to this point.

To me.

Yeah. And 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 hideous green monster with unusable bat wings and a face on his butt. You know, he's trying to tempt Saint Augustine. He's got a book of vices and he's showing it to Saint Augustine going like, "You like that one? You like that one? You want that one?

You like that one?" "I might blow you with my ass!" "Hey!

I kissed my mother with that ass!" And Saint 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!" In the face, of course. 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.

But 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 a nazi and these other types of things that were like Loki, like this idea of, of chaos, of something coming that's like both, 'cause 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 men and all that shit. Like there's a lot of different characters came together. To kind of— and Loki, of course, I think is a good one too.

This made me think of 120 Days of Sodom. Let's read it together.

When did he learn the fiddle?

'73, 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 He 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 1,000 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.

'Cause 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 set devil. From what I've seen, from what I know, from my cursory research, they've never—

It's like the Golem was what I was always—

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. Golem is a homunculus.

Homunculus.

Yeah. I know, Like in Islam, like their devil is like shaitan.

Yeah, shaitan.

Which is more of a genie, like a jinn.

A white man.

Yeah.

White devil, white devil. White devil, 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 —thousand—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 points!

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 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 get hanged, you 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, like in Salem, for example. Like, I want that guy's land, he's not gonna 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 Interestingly about all this is that LaVeyan Satanism isn't really based on the biblical Satan, 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 in Scream, or like when they do that thing where they show the guy, like, in the, in the trailer, and they're all like, oh man, Benicio del Toro's gonna be amazing as Magneto's brother.

And then he 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 to 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. Then he sucked his thorny cock.

Well, that's in one of the lost chapters. Yeah.

And even in the Old Testament, it's just, yeah, him to, 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 in Sandman. You don't— you know, 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. Yes. Yes. I'm with you guys. You got it, man. You got it. It's coming along, man. Rise 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 Jon Taffer from Bar Rescue.

You can't rain in hell because then they'll put out all the fires.

Yeah, yeah, well, that also—

that sort of comes into the, you know, the movie The Devil's Reign, which is personally my— one of my favorite, uh, like, satanic exploitation movies. Anton LaVey was actually a, uh— I believe he was only— he was a consultant.

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 got scared by what 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 them.

I want to drink bourbon with them all night.

Well, Milton's version of Satan is so influential that lines like the rain 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 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 gotta know.

It starts wet, ends hot.

Yeah, this stuff isn't from the Bible. I mean, all this stuff about raining in hell, it comes from a blind Puritan dictating verses to his daughter Waters 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 libert— stay, which is very much in line with modern Satanism. This is what you'd call non-theistic 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 LaVeyan 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. Humanity and, 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 you're pets here, right? Yeah.

And so, 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 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 gotta go to work. Yes. Yeah. Tell me fucking about it. 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 like you're— 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, all right, so if hell exists and it's like a part of like humanity, does like if there's like another like planet with a bunch of aliens, do they have the same Satan or do they have a different Satan?

Oh my God, I don't know.

We're fully— and I don't know, and I've read all the side stuff. I've read all the books. I've read the Peter Hill book.

Honestly, they hit it. Wasn't that the plot of an episode of Pretty Face? Doesn't an alien go to hell? That is literally—

yes, because it gets abducted. We take the alien, it comes down to hell, and the alien gods come and pull it out.

Yeah, yeah, because he dies on Earth and he doesn't know what it It's just to anyone who dies on Earth who doesn't— yeah, it's great.

According to the early, early Christians, they apparently— there was a place that there— that this could have been. 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 Garden of 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 power. One of the central tenets 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 of theistic Satanists who believe in Satan just as fervently as a Christian fundamentalist believes 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! Yeah, I just called how they won.

Yeah, 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' 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 people in power, 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 gonna 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 and faith right up till 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. 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 said before. And we have to really think about this, because yes, there is evil theistic Satanists. We're not going to go into right now, Order of Nine Angles or 764 or these other things, that's 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 thousand years, Satan has been an 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 gonna lose to Satan, or do we—

God wins, we trigger Armageddon, and God kills everybody except for the super religious, and he turns them into ghosts. So we should, in that theory, kill God.

Satan's— yeah, we have to kill God. We need to get the lance of launch 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 gonna 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 so we could avoid such whoopsie-dos as the Salem Witch Trials. Of course, it had the exact opposite effect. Lavey recognized that the modern world required an evolution of religion because Christianity had become too brittle and restrictive to serve any actual purpose in 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 forties. Parties 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 Laveau 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 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.

Yeah, 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 It was a double entendre. He was a pretty funny brother. He was a very funny— it was a very funny brother joke. It was both little Marcus and little masturbator. Don't worry, he clarified.

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. 1966. That's part of what— it sounds like it's not true, but it is. Yeah. 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 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 he'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.

Yeah, if we art, from the beginning of thought, yeah, we could talk about it.

Yeah, I chose— I looked at it and I said no, you're right, we don't need it.

So Satanism is younger than Scientology?

Uh, Satanism is older than— or younger, yes, because Scientology is '50s, Satanism is '66.

You probably learned a lot from Scientology, to be frank. I know that he did go— he— well, we'll get— we'll get on to a lot of different— I don't know about him and L.

Ron. He got hubby-dubby? I actually don't think he—

to be honest, I don't think he ever met with, uh, L. Ron. I don't see any of that in there.

They would have been buddies.

No, honestly, Honestly, I don't think they would have.

They would— I think they— it would have been two opposing forces, like very— they would have hated each other.

I think they literally would have gotten into a physical fight.

Yeah, a good bitch slap fight.

Oh, hey, hey, hey, 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 Brode. 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 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 Sándor Lavey.

I just want to say, uh, Reggie Satanus, uh, 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 just like, you know, hey, where'd Jay Z down and say, you want to listen to the Clappy a little bit? Yeah, I know, it's just— this is called Clown's Lament. No one over here— 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, let me— nice to meet you. Let me guess, 195 pounds, right? Yeah, yeah, I'm good. That's amazing.

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 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. We're gonna get into that. Like, he is a fucking Carny.

Yeah, I know that Mr. LaVey does not sound as good in a song. No. Mr.

LaVey. Yeah, it doesn't work.

Well, a bit of self-mythology, it gives these guys, it gives their ideas 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. Americans love the chosen one. And so Anton LaVey was born Howard Stanton Levy on April 11th, 1930.

Now you never call me Howie. You never call me Howie, I damn you to hell. 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 to remove it, Anton LaVey 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 LaVey's parents were fairly normal middle-class people from Chicago named Gertrude and Michael. LaVey, however, claimed that his maternal grandmother, Luba Koltan, would regale him with tales concerning the mysteries of her Eastern European homeland. LaVey 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 was not from Transylvania. Um, also, it's close.

You can't— if you're gonna write a Bible, you can't put your grandma in it.

It's not really a Bible. That's another thing. We'll get all into it, Eddie.

I'll explain Yeah, well, Luba Colton's brother was known as Anton Sándor, 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 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'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. I like, hey, hello everybody. It's enough egg salad for everyone, but no, one bowl of it is poison.

I love that, that great comedic actor Eugene LeVay.

Oh, if his name was Eugene LeVay, he would've been eating too much pussy in order to be an actor. That's a problem.

Oh yeah. Gene LeVay. Yeah. Ooh. Hi, whoa, wait. Gene Lavey sounds like a man who invents a pussy-eating machine.

Okay, here we go. It's diesel. Same brain.

Since Anton Lavey 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 development of his sexual fetishes. Namely, Anton Lavey was a committed urophiliac, meaning his fetish was urination. He like it a peepee, man. He love it a peepee.

We are part of a urine nation. Hi, I'm Peepee Abdul. It's Janet.

Well, Anton claimed that when he was 5 years old, a little girl coaxed him into her bedroom at a birthday birthday party. But when the girl's mother caught them and scolded the girl, she peed her pants, which LaVey claimed set him down the, quote, fetishistic sexual path towards water sports. LaVey further wrote that he believed that men born in different eras would have different fixations. LaVey'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 a wall 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 the panties?

He would talk about it a lot.

Like if you look at him too, there are so many other romantic ways to write it. I know.

And he's just like, I know, I just like it too much. Who pissed the panties?

I know, who pissed the panties?

Translucent skin. It's a pee-pee in a pants.

It's not the only time either. He's like, and then when I was 11, I was collecting ball pearls 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 LaVey 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 thickest. I know that for a fact.

Yeah, that's actually what Malort is. Yes. "It is natty light piss." Despite all this, Anton LaVey 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, LaVey 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 his mother a flibbertigibbet. Oh yeah, flibbertigibbet. Yeah, I love that word. She was always rearranging furniture or making her family move house constantly, even though his father hated moving. LaVey, 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 he got anywhere near feel, just start kicking him. Get Charlie Brown, yeah. 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, LaVey 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. Yes! Specifically the Cub Scouts. Loved the Cub Scouts. He earned his bear badge. Always had fantastic things to say about scouts.

You know what I'll say about Satanists and LaVeyan 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 LaVey's life is like every scene where he learned it. Instead of, like, learning to be a part of society, it's like he saw it all and he saw all 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 wanna do.

He was a brilliant person. I mean, and that's, that is one of the things that you see throughout history, like especially in like cult leaders. I mean, Anton LaVey wasn't a cult leader. No. But you see like people who understand systems, like especially humanity's, those humanity's like just societal systems. Those are the people who change things, you know? Yeah. Or those are the people, they either change them, or they used those systems to get laid. Like Keith Raniere. Yeah. You know, he understood systems perfectly. Anton LaVey 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. With the CPP and panties.

He did like the PP and the panties. And he did get to touch Jayne Mansfield's boobies.

He did. He did.

That's a huge get.

Really? Pretty massive. Oh yeah.

We're gonna get into the whole Jayne— Yeah, he took credit, not credit, but 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 LaVey was comfortable being himself, he had no trouble making friends. His house was always full of kids whom LaVey 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, 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, a couple girls, we make these like monster clubs and we have like all these like mystery clubs. And it was always that, and I was always the evil president.

Yeah, this is so much better than, you know, being similar to the Toy Box Killer.

Yeah, except I wish I had a boat.

Well, basically throughout his childhood, Anton LaVey 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. It's just like, yeah, school, fuck school, I'm going to go do my own shit. I was just better at it.

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, real bad. I used to—

I actually did— 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 going to— 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 my father may have bribed one of my teachers. Oh yeah.

Oh, you are, I gotta say you are, your mother certainly cares about your schooling, young man. Yeah. I can just see your father fucking your teacher, you know, like giving your teacher sexual favors.

It was either that or everyone 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 fucking half your living.

I feel like I've learned more in the past 2 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 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 ZZ, Zacharias Basilius Zaharoff was a Turkish arms dealer who first showed up in history as a pimp at a Turkish brothel. Brothel in the 1860s.

Do you like her hairy or too hairy? Do you want to see face or not? No face. Hey, tricks on you. It is a bag of salt. All right. Yes, do anything you like. But at the end, free apricot. Help you bind. It bind your loose.

Well, at the same time as ZZ 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, so on. Yes, name sense, Ed.

Yes, yes, I'm fake at everything.

I'm bad at everything. By the 1880s, Z.Z. was an arms salesman trying to unload second-rate multi-barreled machine guns and steam-powered submarines.

It actually doesn't make sense. Yeah, hey, they kind of worked.

Yeah, yeah. No, the earliest submarine— a hole in the top— the earliest submarines were used in, uh, the Civil War. Yeah, the American Civil War.

Oh yeah, the Monitor and the Merrimack. Those are 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 it still had like a snorkel.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not going that deep. But when I say submersible, I mean it just like goes right underneath. Yeah. This isn't—

they aren't going against like the U-boats. No, 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 Z.Z. still managed to sell 6 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 idea has to— gotta have someone who did it first. There's always going 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 doesn't end 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— yeah, gun flag, you know. You say— you say—

you see, he did indeed sell weapons for 3 decades to every side of every conflict in Europe, Asia, and South in America from like 1890 up until like 1920. Like, Z.Z. 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 them, kill each other, and then go collect all the guns, sell them again.

Yeah, yeah. You got to put it all together.

In World War I alone, Z.Z. 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, Zézé is no different from the DuPonts. He just has a lot more fun with it. So, Henry, what is it about Zézé 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 how 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, a societal loophole. Like he sees this thing that is a loophole that no one else is kind of is 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 from 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.

Yeah.

Don't evangelize. Yeah, it's about you choose it, you know what I mean? 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, and, 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 that ZZ 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—

but he viewed the idea of someone who's 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 ZZ and I have $16 million. Yeah, so all he wants to do is be said that.

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 World's Fairs and exhibitions that his parents took him to see in his early years. Fairs and exhibitions were massive popular throughout the first half of the 20th century. I mean, the ruins of World's Fairs dot this entire country. Yeah, the Wigsphere in Knoxville. Oh yeah, you know, like the, the big globe in Queens.

Yeah, or the two things from the Men in Black movie.

Yeah, yeah, also in Queens. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that our country, the, the skeletons of these things are still everywhere. And Anton LaVey believed that basically he was in the right place at the 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! It's not the type of awakening you would think it—

I mean, yeah, sure, probably some kind of awakening.

But, 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.

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 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, a lot of times you look in the past at a person, 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 a moon out, I want a chance, I want a chance, I want a chance.

Buttfucking was invented to that music. Think about that. Like, this type of dirty sex She was invited to like—

I thought butt fucking was invented in Greece?

Yeah it was! Wham wham wham wham woom! That's what that song said!

But Sally Rand was most famous for appearing nude in public to make a point. 6 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.

Her boobs just went up! White! Hmm? Oh, it's chocolate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no.

Goddammit. That's Mrs. Godiva.

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 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, you just— that's how I got into plenty of places. Yeah.

How we just walked into that con where we just said, We're talent.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 4 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 turned 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— uh, she got even more famous after that. She started, uh, touring, I think, with like Bolero or something like— she actually had a fantastic life and a great career. Um, just being a 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, sure.

Yeah, we all see her face now. Now, how is she a de facto Satanist.

So number one, Anton LaVey, despite what he would do to his wives and his daughter, worshiped women. Yeah. Loved women that weren't his wife and his daughter. And he saw 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, big tit energy. Totally.

Yeah, yeah, he was at a cape on.

Yeah, sure, right, 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. And so it's actually great advice.

It's really great advice.

It is. That's what the Satanic Witch is all about. And so So what 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. No, 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 that we're all animals. We're no bet. We are like, we are just literally primates. There is no real, Yeah, sometimes better, sometimes—

most of the time worse.

Most of the time worse. 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 you see, he's like, that's the first time he saw— what'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 that episode, it became like sort of this ideal for him of like, look at the inherent power she 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 gonna 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, I, I'll, don't do this to me. Sure.

No, no, no. It's fun. I'll get there. I'll get there. I'll get there.

It's fun. It's just, it, it is kind of fascinating.

Do you think that when Sally Rand was on the horse, she had to change her into Sally Ride, and then she blew up, and then she fucking exploded.

That's the other one. Sally, Sally Ride. She made it. She made it. She died recently. Oh, well then she didn't make it.

Well, suicide.

Oh, well, I'm so sorry. I guess the Earth's so small. She did commit suicide. She— no. Okay, how am I supposed to know? I don't know. I was like, what'd she see on the moon? Live from your grave.

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'd already led hundreds of scantily clad women on horses in formation through downtown San Francisco, and her nude ranch had been somewhat of 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 cowgirl girls, 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 dude go, "Habana habana habana habana." "That's the greatest set of pantries I've seen since I left Michigan." 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.

But 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 is 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 get you going. It's inherently for even Anton LaVey, even kind of says it. That's why the Satanic Bible is so simple. Yeah. That he wrote it for 15-year-olds to read? It's super easy—

it is very, very easy to understand. It is such a quick read! But yeah you're supposed to move on from this... You're supposed to expand. Yeah now Sally Rand's Nude Ranch was not the only event at this fair that influenced Anton LaVey. Blblblblblll Alright we can go. Another exhibit that LaVey said was full of satanic undertones was the display of babies in incubators on the midway. These were called Baby Incubator Shows or baby shows. The idea behind these exhibits would be similar: they'd show off newborns being placed into an incinerating furnace 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 could see that one grow an arm.

When I went yesterday, I saw 4 die.

Oh yeah, wow, what a wonderful preemie explosion.

I mean, it sounds like a crazy thing, but they— these events, that 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, they— 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.

Do something about it. Just him being like, take me home.

No, I'm sorry.

You're the show.

But 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 Lane for it.

It really is like 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. So for Tomorrowland, if it was an advancement, it's kind of like The Adventures of Interspace.

Also, um, just know you, 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.

And eventually people are going to be getting their chemo at Disneyland. Can you imagine Donald Duck giving you your chemo?

Uh, yes, I can. That's the only way it's going to happen, dude.

Character meet and greet chemo. Is that not— how is that not a thing?

Dude, write it down. Write it down.

Spider-Man. Write it down. I'm writing it down. I'm mailing it to myself.

Doctor Strange brings you chemo. Copyright.

We should get Eleven 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. Yeah, super weird.

I want to get that one.

Dear Zachary, can we get that lady? So that's why I chose Tomorrowland instead of Toontown. Yeah, it's not going to make sense in Toontown. No, it doesn't make sense.

And then it goes boink.

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. Beer Zachary. Yeah. Beer Zachary, where you drink a beer and blow your brains out.

Well, as Anton LaVey 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. I started drinking before.

As Anton LaVey 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. 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, lithium. That makes the baby grow. I already gave him all the mercury we had.

I mean, they basically made dying babies a freak show, and Anton LaVey absolutely loved the contrast. For him, this was Satanism writ large. Now, when Anton LaVey 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 vestigial tail to the other young boys in gym class. Again, not surprisingly, Anton LaVey hated gym class.

Hey, hey, listen, no, I don't do, uh, I don't do jumping jacks, okay? 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 in and out. Just had to 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 the 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 Lavey 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 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 fun.

That's a good friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a real good friend. That's great. Now, Anton LaVey was too old to be a boomer, but too young to serve in World War II. He was only 9 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 LaVey 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 on the trip overseas. Like, yeah, fuck it, go to Germany. And there, LaVey was exposed to German Expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Nosferatu. And that'll change you. It will. No, it very much will. 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 nightmarish in every way. But these films, they were masterpieces of ritual 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.

Uh, the jagged angles, the harsh lighting, the dark shadows, all that stuff that typified German Expressionist film, those would become massive inspirations when Anton LaVey began constructing his own satanic rituals and when he began pretty much putting together the esthetic of the Church of Satan. Now besides his interest in film, Anton LaVey was also a fantastic musician. He's almost musician first up.

Yeah. In terms of abilities. Yeah.

He learned brass, woodwinds, 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'll— 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 now, what's there to bully?

Yeah, if there was a bully, he wouldn't exist.

No, I know. This is 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 that one could see as weak. He counterbalanced it with appearances. You know, that's also another important satanic thing.

Well, Satanism and appearances are one and one. 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.

Is he 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, LaVey attended He 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 LaVey 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 LaVey's uncle's crowd, his Uncle Bill. Although LaVey gave no details, which means he could be lying about all of this, LaVey supposedly traveled with his Uncle Bill 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 what Las Vegas is.

This is fantastic.

These criminals, LaVey claimed, taught him that everything is a racket, including the church. The crafty man, LaVey 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, makes a lot of sense.

Yep. And so instead of living the life of his father, his mother or even his criminal uncle Anton LaVey 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. Doot doot doodle loo dee tee—

Very good. Very good guys. Doop deet doop doo doo doo doo doo bap go hit me!

That song's 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 Zak Bagans Haunted Museum. Yeah, it was like in this like freak section. He 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 bit, 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 were 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 19th century, P.T. Barnum. Yeah. Barnum was, of course, another of LaVey's de facto Satanists. Born in Connecticut in 1819, P.T. 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 P.T. 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 P.T. Barnum could have had his own series.

Oh yeah. Like, honestly, he is—

he is— I actually wonder if he's worse than Anton LaVey as a person. You know, he's definitely got more deaths on his hands.

Yeah, he's got a fair amount of death on his— yeah. P.T. Barnum is a— yeah, there's a lot going on there. True American. Yeah. He really was. Now, P.T. 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 Joice Heth, who was supposedly 161 years old. Hmm. Barnum had been told that Joice Heth was George Washington's nursemaid, born in the 1670s. And Barnum figured that he could sell this lie, even though Joice Joyce was probably no more than 80 years old 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.

Oh yeah, totally.

You're a great 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 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 don't like my RAV4. Yeah.

Fuck off. Just had to get in a round—

had to get a round 4 joke in there.

Just 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. Then a few days later, Barnum removed all of her teeth under the guise of, "No, 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. Yeah. Hahaha.

Let's just say this storyline was not in The Greatest Showman. 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.

Funny. 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 so fucking battle-toed, 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 Joice Heath, claiming that she was raising money to purchase her 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 No, she's still working because she certainly has a great deal of great-grandchildren. So unfortunately, you're going to have to pull the night shift.

But instead of slowing it down, when Barnum realized that she was probably going to die, he announced a final death tour at an increased ticket price.

What did you say, P.T.?

Last chance! Last chance to see George Washington's nursemaid! What do you mean, last chance?

I'm here. Why is it last? What do you mean this is my final tour? Is that a tooth in the back of your mouth? No, no, no, it's a zin.

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 whalebone, springs, and rubber. This brought out even more people.

Did you hear, Joyce? You're an automaton. No, no, 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 her ass.

When Joyce, of course, died a few months later, Barnum charged $0.50 a ticket for Joyce's public autopsy, which was held in a Manhattan bar where 1,500 New Yorkers shuffled past to see if Joyce really was an automaton. And by the end of it, Barnum had made—

Yeah, what'd they find out?

That she was a lady. Oh, yes. Skin and bone. They found out—

Not one person was in that line is like, Listen, it's just a lady. I'm just buying the ticket. Oh, hey, 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. Nein, 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 off of Joyce Heath. And this is when Barnum was 25. That's— this is how Barnum— this is how P.T. 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 was a Ripley's.

Yeah, it was a Ripley's. It was awesome. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it wasn't stupid and boring.

It was fun! Fun and cool.

Yeah, it is. It is actually one of those, like, it's in my top 5 of, like, no, they ask, like, if you could time travel to any time and see anything, Barnum's American Museum is in my top 5.

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 fishtail that he called the Fiji Mermaid— gotta 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 "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.

Yeah, that's what you get, fuckers. You fucking idiots. I mean, it's as you fucking get. You fucking idiots.

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 fell for it would oftentimes tell friends who 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, we do like being tricked.

We do. We like it. And the reason why he's a de facto Satanist is because of that. If you listen to P.T. Barnum, like a lot, again, it's about personal choice. He didn't make it mandatory that you showed up at the 161-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, you know, slavery, the slave-owning stuff. Well, yeah. That's not good.

Yeah, it's a bad look. That's what you mean. Yeah.

That'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 need me if you guys all didn't like this stuff. Yeah, that's a P.T. Barnum point of view.

And he turned things around a little bit. He tried. Even though Americans might like to be humbugged, they really don't like it as much when people brag about it. And P.T. 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.

That must have been so much fun for him.

It really 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 LaVey learned that.

Yeah, just 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 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 I would like to think was trying to atone for his youthful evils.

Yeah, he could have doubled down.

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.

But I'll say honestly that it wasn't that popular of a view. Yeah, like it really was a gamble. Being an abolitionist was like, was still like an intense point of view. I think it's just P.T. 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 trying, like, at the very end of his life, which is the most you could say about most human beings.

It really is. He fought against the railroads.

He's a bad person either way you 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, 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 1891, having become personal friends with Mark Twain, Queen Victoria, who fucking loved freak shows. Queen Victoria loved them.

She was the naked one, right?

No, no, no. Victoria was the absolute opposite. She was the most buttoned-up, sexless monarch to ever exist.

Which one is the super horny one?

Sally Rand.

Super horny queen?

Wasn't there a super horny queen?

Not in England. I don't think in England.

Sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com. Send me a list of the corniest queens.

I think you're thinking of Catherine the Great. That's exactly what I'm thinking of. Freddie Mercury.

So she said, send me pictures. Sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com. Send me pictures of the horniest queens. Thank you.

Yeah, and also Abraham Lincoln, good friends.

Oh, say Abraham Lincoln, also a super horny queen, cannot be denied at all. You're a rail splitter.

Oh yeah, Catherine the Great, that's the horny one.

Yeah, okay, good for her. It says the AI is telling us that Queen Victoria was super horny.

It's because we asked about horniness 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 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 want to— if you read that, 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'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. Mm-hmm. 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 ended up translating into being a nerd. Yeah, I'm not sure. I think at one point geek was more of just a person who was unpleasant to look at.

Nerds were smart and geeks were just unpleasant people. 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.

It's interesting because it comes from an old term for just a clown, a German clown called a Gick, meaning a fool or simpleton. And then eventually it turned into the geek, which then became a term for an ugly person. Really, geek means ugly, pinheaded, eyes too close, fucking mouth too big, arms too long. Yeah. He was gross. Yeah. That's cool. But he stole this story from a strongman 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 Aleister Crowley's works, realize that he says there— it's not from out there, it's from in here.

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 is supposed to be about. Yeah. 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 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, you know, 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, uh, what do you call it, like, you know, cold reading is said to be, uh, very common amongst like the— what's that guy's name? John Crossing— John Edwards crossing up— crossing over.

Look, 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— was— that's like what HPB did naturally. That's what Aleister probably did naturally. That's what LRH did naturally.

Yeah, 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, uh, in, in, uh, the— what do you call it?

Well, you're talking about the Long Island Medium.

Yeah, but there's a— it's not just them. Well, yeah, that's just 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, 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. 'Cause 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. He's the geek. He's the geek. Yeah, I saw the movie.

It was nominated for an Oscar.

Yep. But the reason why, but that's the key here, is that what happened is that the wizard crossed 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 Mysterious. 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.

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 as America's first Ghostbuster, and the development of the Church of Satan itself that we'll return next week for part 2 of our series on Anton LaVey.

Yeah, fuckers! Hail Satan! Sick, sick, sick! Yeah, yeah, fuck that head!

Fuckin' man, I'm gonna listen to this Oh, we gotta put fucking butthole surfers on.

Yeah, really? Satan, Satan, Satan! Yeah, man.

All right. 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 putting ourselves out there. As you said before, you're gonna call yourself a Satanist, you expect to get punched in the face. Yeah. Alright? And that's a part of what we're gonna do. We're here celebrating Satanism for a couple more weeks. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. We're gonna eat this cake Lady and the Tramp style that Rob has just brought back. Anally.

What plugs do we have? Go to patreon.com/lastpodcast on the left if you want ad-free episodes, uh, and if you want to watch the stream, Last Stream on the Left, every Tuesday at, uh, 5 PM PST. We moved it a little bit earlier, uh, and if you want to see video episodes of the show, you can watch it if you got a Netflix subscription.

We're all Netflix.

The stream ends up on YouTube every Thursday at 6 PM, and then directly after that is HGX2. That's right, that's right. We're in the Playoffs, baby!

Yeah, and I'm playing to win. Mhm. I'm playing to fucking win.

Other YouTube channels we got is Someplace Underneath LPN, Romantasy, 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 4 shows left of JK Ultra, um, the last of Next one's gonna be tonight in Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Music Hall of Oakland.

We're here having fun in Iron City, enjoying ourselves. We're gonna, we're gonna go down the Steelers, we're gonna go, you know, we'll see you out there, right?

Come on.

Saturday, June 27th, Grand Rapids, Michigan, the GLC Live at 21 Monroe. Friday, July 17th, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Cain's Ballroom. And Saturday, July 18th, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the Tower Theater. Go check those shows out, there's gonna be a lot of fun. And of course, Side Stories is gonna be in London, Ontario on June 28th. Ah, to Rio! That's gonna be a lot of fun. And then you wanna come see me do standup, just go to eddytunes.com and you could find all the dates there.

And we will be having more information about our Halloween sound effects album, Frank Jansen's Revolting Repository of Ghastly 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.

Yeah. And so there is way Great. Don't, don't, don't buy the secondary market on Discogs just yet. Don't just do it.

There's gonna be a news pressing soon and we're gonna 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 were.

Those incredible mysterious people, incredible songwriters and screamers.

You never know who those people are.

I screamed. It was fun. Yeah, it was great.

You're the lead singer. Well, Ash is the lead singer.

I play I assisted. I just wrote it. I'm part of the think tank.

Ash Gordon, of course.

Yes, of course. And Isaac Hanson. 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. Remember them? It's season 8. Yeah, it's a long—

that was a different person ago.

I'm rewatching it, you know, right now. We're— well, you know, we just started season 6. Holy shit. Well, funny, season 5 was the best season ever. Best season ever. Fantastic.

Well, we all know this.

Well, hell Satan everyone. Patreon.com.

Helgeen. Give me stuff. Hell Satan again.

Hell Satan for 666. And 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 with what I need to do with it. Okay.

All right. I want to, I want to eat this, a little chocolate thing. Go ahead, do it.

Hey, it's amazing. It's amazing what you could 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?

Really good. Um, the name's on the thing there.

Tous les jours. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

That's actually incredible. That's really good. That's okay.

It's like Satan made it himself. Oh no.

Oh, it's filled with shit. I was gonna go to heaven and now I'm not.

No, you're going to fucking hell, dude.

No one needs to see this. Bye.

Bye, fuckers. Leave us alone.

Leave us the fuck alone.